who knows everything and who created the whole universe,
became not only a man
but (before that) a baby,
and before that a foetus inside a Woman’s body.
If you want to get the hang of it,
think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
The really tough work—
the bit we could not have done for ourselves—
has been done for us.
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ:
perfect because He was God,
surrender and humiliation because He was man.
Now the Christian belief is that
if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ
we shall also share in His conquest of death
and find a new life after we have died
and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures.
4
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.
You might say landed in disguise.
Why is He not landing in force, invading it?
Is it that He is not strong enough?
Well, Christians think He is going to land in force;
we do not know when.
But we can guess why He is delaying.
He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.
God is going to invade, all right:
but what is the good of saying you are on His side then,
when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream
and something else—
something it never entered your head to conceive—
comes crashing in;
something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others
that none of us will have any choice left?
For this time it will be God without disguise;
something so overwhelming that it will strike
either irresistible love or irresistible horror
into every creature.
It will be too late then to choose your side.
Ken Futch, who selected and arranged these quotations from “Mere Christianity” by C. S. Lewis, is professor of English at California Baptist College in Riverside. “Mere Christianity” was originally published by The Macmillan Company in 1943 (Reprinted with permission).
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