This postToday we have three quotes from C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, a fabulous book chock-full of thought-provoking hooks like these.
You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. (p. 111)
Mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eternal moment St Peter — he will forgive me if I am wrong — forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’ — and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. (pp. 54–55)
Hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity. (p. 129)
