14 Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,
15 and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.
16 For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham.
17 Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
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We have made it - it's now the first day of December, time to begin this year's Advent series, "25: A Christmas Advent-ure" with Faith Radio. Our Advent Guide is available for free from our website and in our latest Ministry Magazine. This year's guide features a series of Scriptures that point to who Jesus is and the prophecies written throughout the Old Testament that He fulfilled. So, I invite you to join me on this year's Timeline to Transformation.
Day 1 is found in book 1 of the Bible, the book of Genesis, shortly after the sin in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis chapter 3, we can read:14 So the Lord God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you shall go, And you shall eat dust All the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel."
16 To the woman He said: "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you."
17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat of it': "Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return."
So there are three pronouncements here - one to the serpent, or Satan; another to Eve, and a third to Adam. The ultimate defeat of Satan by Jesus is prophesied in verse 15 which says, "He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel…"
On this Day 1 in our 25-day series, we see that Satan will be crushed. That's good news for us today, because even though fallen humanity was separated by sin from God, nevertheless God promised there would be a Redeemer, a Messiah, whom He would send.
The late C.S. Lewis, who was born in 1898, 123 years ago this past Monday, wrote extensively on our Savior and dealt with issues surrounding spiritual warfare. His spiritual journey was brilliantly portrayed in the film presentation, The Most Reluctant Convert, which just completed a remarkable run in theatres. It did not come to the Faith Radio listening area, but Beth and I were able to see it when we were out of town last week.
From the C.S. Lewis Institute website, here is an excerpt from Lewis' landmark book, Mere Christianity:
… I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.Just this week, William Federer devoted a piece on his American Minute website to the spiritual journey of C.S. Lewis, who, as it was portrayed by Max McLean in the film, assisted by younger actors who portrayed Lewis earlier in life, went from atheism, to theism, to Christianity. Federer writes:
Lewis described how he resisted believing, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape," as he wrote in Surprised by Joy, 1955.
Finally, in 1929, he came to believe in God:
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen (College, Oxford) night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.
... That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.
In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
But, the journey was incomplete - there is a difference between believing in God and committing to Christ. Federer writes:
In 1931, after a late-night discussion with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson about faith in Jesus Christ, C.S. Lewis described his deepening spiritual journey in Surprised by Joy:
"I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken.
I was driven to Whipsnade zoo one sunny morning.
When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached to zoo I did.
Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought.
Nor in great emotion. 'Emotional' is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events.
It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.
Lewis had truly made the progression from death to life, new life in Jesus Christ - and he dealt with issues related to spiritual warfare throughout his writings. Max McLean related in a CBN.com story:
Lewis really captured my imagination. He became my spiritual guide. He really understands the spiritual warfare that attracted me to 'The Screwtape Letters' and it also attracted me to 'The Great Divorce.'
Both of those are very personal in that they're, fictionalized versions of his unexperienced emotional experiences – psychological experience of what kept him from moving forward in Christ. You know, with Screwtape he was talking about spiritual warfare from the demon’s point of view and, and how temptation keeps us from moving forward and in 'The Great Divorce,' he's talking about it from a sort of heavenly point of view, how we resist the holy spirit and kind of just stay put. Both of those made me want to go back to his own conversion story. And that led me to Surprised by Joy, which became the basis for the play we wrote that ran in New York for 15 weeks and toured around the country for a long time, and then ultimately became this movie.
A piece on the Kentucky Today website featured director Norman Stone, who has now done four films related to C.S. Lewis. The article states:
Stone said he has been drawn to Lewis because his voice remains as relevant now as much as ever because of the presence of COVID-19 when family and friends are dying on a regular basis. It reminded Stone of the days when Lewis would give weekly Christian talks in England.
“Really, with COVID and other disasters, people are ready to listen to him more now than it’s ever been,” he said. “Death is no stranger. Just as they listened in London during the Blitz to give his Christian talks when Germany was bombing us to bits. Those broadcasts were so successful, Pub owners were saying ‘Quiet everybody, Mr Lewis is on’ … They’d all tune in. He talked in a way that they all understood, explaining his faith in the context of hardship and the war. Like then, this should stir people’s own thinking and I believe it does. It’s probably why Lewis is selling more books than ever and may go to this film more now than they may have done 10 years ago.”
Back to today's text now - from the fall itself, as documented in Genesis, God provided hope. The God who keeps His promises issued His intent to provide redemption, and that promise was kept when He sent His Son to be our Redeemer. He was certainly more than just a good teacher; He was God in the flesh, the embodiment of the Word of God, the One who said He is the way. And, we discover that way to true spiritual victory when we surrender our lives.
The Bible tells us that we are complete in Him. Lewis' spiritual journey became complete not when he rejected atheism and professed to believe in God, it was for him, and for us, that moment when we accepted Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our lives, it's when we became a new creation, when we became born again. But, we are not instantaneously perfect, even though we have a new heart - there is the work of sanctification that begin, when we war daily against the flesh and appropriate the victory that Jesus has won for us. He has defeated the power of sin and death and made that available to us. Praise His Holy Name!
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