Book IV | Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 5 | “The Obstinate Toy Soldiers”
Question: Why did the Son of God become a man?
Answer: To enable us to become sons of God.
Q: What don’t we—or at least what doesn’t Lewis—know?
A: “How things would have worked if the human race had never rebelled against God and joined the enemy.” We don’t know how God’s life would have become part of our lives. Would it have been from birth or at some point later. The thing we need to pay attention to is things as they are now.
Q: What is “the present state of things”?
A: Our nature and God’s nature “are now not only different . . . but actually opposed.” What comes naturally is being self-centered. We want what we want, from the praise of others to taking advantage of them. We especially don’t want to be around anything “anything better or stronger or higher . . . anything that might make it small.” We will fight against a spiritual life because it will try to conquer our will.
Q: What illustration does Lewis use?
A: He asks us to imagine how as kids we might have thought about our toys coming to life and what that would have been like for them. For example, a tin soldier might not want to lose his tin nature and become regular flesh. Lewis doesn’t know what we would have done about that, but he knows what God has done about us.
The Son of God became a human being at a particular time and place and with particular characteristics. The Creator became a fetus and then a baby and then a man. And to imagine that we only have to imagine what it would be like for us “to become a slug or a crab.”
Q: What was the result of the Second Person of God becoming human?
A: We ended up with “one man who really was what all men were intended to be. . . . Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ.”
Our challenge is killing our natural life. Jesus “chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn—poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God.” It was like one toy “had come fully and splendidly alive.”
Q: Where does Lewis’ analogy break down?
A: If one of our toys came alive, “it would obviously make no difference to the rest” since “They are all separate. But human beings are not.” We look separate. But part of what makes us us is “that we can see only the present moment.” Looking backward we see how we are all connected. Every person was once part of their mother and father and grandparents. From God’s perspective we are not separate things, but “one single growing thing—rather like a very complicated tree.” We are all connected to each other and to God, who gives us life.
Q: What is the significance of this?
A: Christ becoming human affected all humans, both those before Him and after Him, just like putting a drop of food coloring in a glass of water. The work of natural life becoming spiritual life “has been done for us. “Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation.”
The good news is that the hard part has already been done for us. Spiritual life is not something we climb to achieve “by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race.” We simply need to open ourselves to the One who was fully Spiritual and fully human. Since one human has this “good infection,” any of us can catch it “if we get close to Him.”
Q: What are other ways we can say this?
A: “You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true.” The important thing is to embrace the expression that makes sense to you and not worry about those who think about this differently.
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