More Problems and Questions
In CS Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, he imagines a senior demon reveling in consuming great sinners’ souls. He complains that humanity is becoming commoditized, that while there is a vast bulk of souls to consume, the delightful flavor of a Nimrod is no longer available.
CS Lewis misses the point: Satan is not a connoisseur of souls. Heroic or spectacular evil is not a major element in what he does. This is part of the Western fallacy that Satan is somehow still in revolt against God. No, Satan serves God’s ultimate plans, and he knows it.
Humans are born captives of Satan. He already holds the bulk of humanity; he doesn’t have to do anything at all to gain souls. Nobody sells their soul to the Devil; he owns them already from birth. What few comments in the Bible we get about this indicates that when the Last Judgment comes, he will still hold that majority in thrall. The battle here is not over that majority of lost souls. This is the major flaw in Western reasoning that seeks to hold God accountable to Western morals. It doesn’t matter whether God would prefer to save every human soul; He says outright that it won’t happen. Our reckoning of Spiritual Warfare must include this factor as a given. We must embrace the certainty that relatively few will turn to Him.
Whatever strategic thinking we engage on serving the Lord must assume that there is no hope for that majority. Rather, our hope is to help the few, those who are somehow gifted by God with the ability to respond to our message. We do not adjust our message to capture a bigger portion; we must retain a strict expectation of high entrance costs in moral terms.
At the same time, we must push aside the reasoning that focuses on spiritual birth as the thing we expect to gain for others. Get used to the idea that, while spiritual birth is what happens on the Eternal level, there is no hope on our level of being able to even discuss it very much, never mind having no means to making it happen. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — we can do on our level about that. It is entirely a miracle of God. All we have to work with is the apparent awareness of other humans to the heart-led way of faith, once God makes their faith possible. Keep in mind that there are three things there: (1) it’s the heart-led way, (2) it’s the business of human awareness and (3) we have only the appearance, the perception that someone is part of our family of God.
Thus, the thing we deal with is a heart-led sense that someone is able to focus on matters of faith. That’s all we have to work with. It is part of our mission to more or less assume those folks are also spiritually born, because it’s absolutely impossible for us to know. They can know for themselves, but nobody knows the eternal destiny of another. All we know is what we can perceive with our hearts; it’s a matter of conviction alone, first and foremost.
Standing on that rock, we then recognize that the big issue is not winning the world, but helping a precious few to start manifesting the appearance of heart-led living in faith. And this is precisely what Satan is trying to defeat. He can do nothing at all about whether souls get reborn in Christ; he is limited to defeating those souls from seizing the whole of their divine inheritance while they are in this world. By corollary, our greatest efforts are aimed at helping presumably reborn souls to gain access to that inheritance.
Satan is not concerned about losing the mass of souls already in his thrall. He is worried about you and I finding our inheritance. He uses those enslaved souls to inflict distraction on us and draw us off track. We should have no illusions about saving that majority of souls he owns. We are commissioned by God to build a powerful individual testimony that witnesses to the whole world, so that our witness captures those precious few whom God intends to touch through us. Those are the folks who warrant an investment in energy and resources. But you cannot restrict the effects of your witness by choice; the restriction is in who is able to receive it.
The way to have a witness is through tribal covenant communities. A jillion varied and unique little communities that act like extended family households is the single strongest testimony we have against the current trends in the human race. The biggest victory of Satan is getting folks to dream of uniformity in all the wrong ways, and the persistent notion that all churches should somehow, someday all be joined in one denominational organization. I’m telling you: Satan loves that lie.
Thus, we should celebrate that there are so very many different ways to do religion. But we should do so not in the cosmopolitan sense of multi-cultural idiocy. Rather, we should celebrate that God is speaking to His unique children about being faithful to Him in ways none of us would expect. We should celebrate that it makes no sense at all to outsiders. Faith is inherently unreasonable on the human level.
Instead of heroic evil leaders, Satan revels in AI leadership that regards all of humanity equally as trash. This is critical to understanding John’s Revelation, in that John regarded the dehumanizing aspect of Roman rule as the single greatest evil, calling such dehumanizing rule “the Beast.” Satan doesn’t want a human ruling the world; the Antichrist is not a single person but an influence from Hell. The less human the rulers are, the better it is for Satan and his agenda of deceiving us about what really matters.
The vast majority of Christian organizations are far closer to the Beast than to the Good Shepherd. Clinging to some objective standard, versus the interpersonal relationship that is fundamental to Creation itself, is the Mark of the Beast. To depersonalize is to dehumanize. Churches are meant to be private families, not public facilities with corporate rules for association and membership.
Satan dreads having to deal with a strong covenant community with potent moral ties and strong convictions. This is why such communities are seldom recognized by secular governments, and often flatly illegal.
