Alright, so we are moving into our mere Christianity. chapters four, five, and six right now. If you're just tuning in, today is March 25th, 2020. It's been about six years since I read chapters one through three in C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. It by far has more downloads and streaming, listening to, on our sermon audio than anything else. I think it's high time that I get back to reading through these chapters of Mere Christianity. So, if you've missed out on chapters 1 through 3, you can listen to those on sermon audio through House of Grace. I'm going to go ahead and move into chapters 4, 5, and 6 pretty quickly. I did want to briefly share a little bit about the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It was a series of talks given during and I think a little bit after World War II on the radio by C.S. Lewis, and I think it's pretty incredible that I'm standing here right now speaking into a microphone for sermon audio and speaking into a phone on Facebook because of the COVID-19 outbreak and we are kind of quarantined but We're looking past that and we're just enjoying our fellowship together, but kind of over the radio waves as C.S. Lewis did. So without further ado, chapter one was around the law of human nature, an expectation of fair play and morality, those kinds of things. Talked about human quarreling and how it indicates that all people carry this law. Chapter 2, there were some objections to some of the things that C.S. Lewis had said, that the moral law is not just herd instinct. Morality will compel people to do what is not for their best interest. Morality will compel people to choose a weaker instinct over a stronger one or suppress an instinctive response altogether. And then chapter 3 talks about how the law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them. But the law of human nature tells you what human beings ought to do and not ought to do. And so the conclusion is that we can't escape or explain away the law of human nature. And so that's a very, very concise and maybe not all that great summary of chapters 1 through 3. So, C.S. Lewis actually gives us, in chapter 4, a little bit of a summary, and so I'll go ahead and start reading chapter 4 right now. The chapter is titled, What Lies Behind the Law? Let us sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and trees and things of that sort, What we call the laws of nature may not be anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is governed by certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in a certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything real, anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in the case of man, we saw that this will not do. The law of human nature, or of right and wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else, a real law, which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey. I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist and always have existed. Nobody knows why, and that the matter behaving in certain fixed ways has just happened by sort of a fluke. to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. But one chance in a thousand something hitting our sun and made it produce the planets and another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life and the right temperature occurred on one of these planets and so some of the matter on this earth came alive and then by a very long series of chances the living creatures developed into things like us. The other view is the religious view, and he'll talk a little bit more about this at the end of this chapter. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes and prefers one thing to another. And on this view, it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself. I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Whenever there have been thinking men or women, both views turn up. And note this, too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2.20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so. Or, I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such and such a temperature and it did so-and-so. Do not think I am saying anything against science. I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more, I believe, he would agree with me that this is the job of science, and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes, something of a different kind, this is not a scientific question. If there is something behind, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing and the statement that there is no such thing are neither of them statements that science can make, and real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe? Is it not plain that the questions, why is there a universe? Or why does it go on as it does? Has it any meaning? Would remain just as they were. Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing and only one in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case, we have, so to speak, inside information. We are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying man from the outside, as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language, and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? For his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or beyond the observed facts, in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it. The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason, or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts, but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely, our own case. And in that one case, we find there is. Or, put it another way round, if there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe, no more than the architect of a home could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions. In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be yes. I love that. And in the other cases, where you do not get an answer, you see why you do not. Suppose someone asked me, when I see a man in blue uniform going down the street leaving little paper packages at each house, why, I suppose, that they contain letters. I should reply, because whenever he leaves a similar little package for me, I find it does contain a letter. And if he then objected, but you've never seen all these letters, which you think the other people are getting, I should say, of course not, and I shouldn't expect to, because they're not addressed to me. I'm explaining the packets I'm not allowed to open by the ones I'm allowed to open? It is the same about this question. The only packet I'm allowed to open is man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law, and that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way. I do not, of course, think that if I could get inside a stone or a tree, I should find exactly the same thing, just as I do not think all the other people in the street get the exact same letters as I do. I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity, that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human nature, he compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters, in both cases, a power behind the facts, a director, a guide. Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got is a something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know, because after all, the only other thing we know is matter, and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But, of course, it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person. In the next chapter, we shall see if we can find out anything more about it. But one word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all that out. And that technically ends the chapter, but he has a note here which I had mentioned earlier on the religious view, the other view being the religious view. He says, in order to keep this section short enough when it was given on the air, I mentioned only the materialist view and the religious view. But, to be complete, I ought to mention the in-between view called life-force philosophy, or creative evolution, or emergent evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet evolved from the lowest forms to man were not due to chance, but to the striving or purposiveness of a life force. When people say this, we must ask them whether by life force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection is really a god, and their view is thus identical with the religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind strives or has purposes? This seems to be fatal to their view. One reason why many people find creative evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the life force being only a blind force with no morals and no mind will never interfere with you like the troublesome god we learned about when we were children. The life force is a sort of tame god. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the life force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has seen yet? All right, so ends chapter four. And in keeping with our Bible study, I'm gonna take a drink of water. Excuse me. That is not in keeping with our Bible study, but in keeping with our Bible study, I'm going to go ahead and read to you Romans 1.20. As I was reading through chapter four, I was thinking about how he talked about observable facts and a power behind those facts. And so Romans 1.20 says, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Hmm, good stuff. All right, so now we will carry on with chapter five here. And I believe this ends book one. And chapter two, excuse me, book two, we'll start off with chapter six in a minute. Chapter five is pretty short. Chapter five is called We Have Cause to Be Uneasy. I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the moral law, somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And I expect when I reached that point, some of you felt a certain annoyance. You may even have thought that I had played a trick on you, that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy, what turns out to be one more religious jaw. You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say, but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that, and you cannot put the clock back. If anyone is feeling that way, I should like to say three things to him. First, as to putting the clock back, would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back and that if the clock is wrong, it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road. And in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake, and I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road, and if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on. Then secondly, this has not yet turned exactly into a religious jaw. We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less the God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only got as far as a somebody or something behind the moral law. We are not talking, excuse me, we are not taking anything from the Bible or the churches. We are trying to see what we can find out about this somebody on our own steam. And I want to make it quite clear that what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock. We have two bits of evidence about the somebody. One is the universe he has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that he was a great artist, for the universe is a very beautiful place, but also that he is quite merciless and no friend to man, for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place. The other bit of evidence is that moral law which he has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other because it is inside information. You find out about, excuse me, you find out more about God from the moral law than from the universe in general, just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built. Now, from this second bit of evidence, we conclude that the being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct, in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty, and truthfulness. In that sense, we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions that God is good. But do not let us go too fast here. The moral law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is good in the sense of being indulgent or soft or sympathetic. There is nothing indulgent about the moral law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing, and it does not seem to care how painful or dangerous or difficult it is to do. If God is like the moral law, then he is not soft. It is no use at this stage saying that what you mean by a good God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a person can forgive, and we have not yet got as far as a personal God, only as far as a power behind the moral law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else. But it may still be very unlike a person. If it is pure, impersonal mind. There may be no sense in asking it to make allowances for you or let you off, just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off when you do your sums wrong. You are bound to get the wrong answer, and it is no use either saying that if there is a god of that sort, an impersonal absolute goodness, then you do not like him and are not going to bother about him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on his side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time, but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior, then he cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness, it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow. And so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it. and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort. He's the only supreme terror, the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves his enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger, according to the way you react to it, and we have reacted the wrong way. Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing, as far as I know, to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of, and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real moral law, and a power behind the law, and that you have broken that law, and put yourself wrong with that power, it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate, you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the moral law and yet also a person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. It's an old story, and if you want to go into it, you will no doubt consult people who have more authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts, to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer, and they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable, but I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort, but it does not begin in comfort. It begins in the dismay I have been describing. and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth. Only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion. That ends chapter five. So as I was thinking about chapter five, I was thinking about the words God, good, and comfort. And I mentioned this earlier during our time of prayer. God, good, and comfort, as C.S. Lewis talks about. I'll read to you from 2 Corinthians 1, three through five. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. And I really like this, I mean, Paul may have overused comfort, except maybe you can never overuse comfort. I really like that he ties in in verse 4 that we've gone through these tribulations, God comforts us, and it's so that we can offer comfort to others, right? But C.S. Lewis is making a good point here that Technically, God is the God of comfort, but we haven't reached that yet as he's walking us through these different things. A good God is going to be able to comfort, but there's got to be a bridge there, right? It can't just be this moral lawgiver kind of situation. I love that Paul, in what we just read, 2 Corinthians 1, and in verse five, he says, our consolation abounds through Christ. So it must be Christ that we find in order to receive that comfort. As C.S. Lewis had just finished telling us, if you look for comfort, you're gonna end up in despair. Right. But if we look for truth, we may find comfort. Ah, that's very, very interesting. The Bible does say that Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And in Jesus, we find the truth, and therefore, we find the comfort. All right. On to book two. Book two is called What Christians Believe. And so actually this is chapter one of book two, but I'm going to call it chapter six because it's a book and it goes all the way through and six comes after five. And this chapter is called The Rival Conceptions of God. I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe. And I'm going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If you are a Christian, you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist, you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world, of the whole world, is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist, I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most. When I became a Christian, I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic, there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong. But, some of the wrong answers are much nearer to being right than others. The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of god or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority. Lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, et cetera, those would be Muslims, against the modern Western European materialists. Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very different ideas on this subject. One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad, but according to some people, that is merely our human point of view. These people would say that the wiser you become, the less you would want to call anything good or bad, and the more clearly you would see that everything is good in one way and bad in another, and in that nothing could have been different. Consequently, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view, the distinction would have disappeared altogether. We call a cancer bad, they would say because it kills a man. But you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely good or righteous, a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views, the one that thinks God beyond good and evil, is called pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel, and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans, which are Muslims, and Christians. And with this big difference between pantheism and the Christian idea of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body. That the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist, He would not exist either. and anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is quite different. They think God invented and made the universe, like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, he's put a lot of himself into it, but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head or even in his hands. I expect you see how this difference between pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to his will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum, the pantheists can say, if you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God. The Christian replies, don't talk damned nonsense. And then there's a footnote. C.S. Lewis says, one listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing. But I mean exactly what I say. Nonsense that is damned is under God's curse and will, apart from God's grace, lead those who believe it to eternal death. And then we continue on. For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world, that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes and all the animals and vegetables are things that God made up out of his head. as a man makes up a story, but it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists and insists very loudly on our putting them right again. And of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world, why has it gone wrong? And for many years, I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling whatever you say and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by an intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious? But then that threw me back into another difficulty. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has seen some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad, and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal. A fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too. For the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist, in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless, I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality, namely my idea of justice, was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning, just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning. And that is the end of chapter six, the end of our reading tonight. I do considering the theory of pantheism, I want to talk a little bit about Acts 17 24. I was also thinking about, you know, the idea of pantheism and God being in everything. And if everything was God, excuse me, if everything was gone, then God would be gone too, right? As C.S. Lewis mentioned. And it reminded me of when Paul was talking to, in Athens, And he was speaking about the unknown God, right? And he was like, I've got your unknown God. I know who he is. I can tell you. And so Acts 17, 24 says, God who made the world and everything in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands." And maybe that's not some, you know, I don't know, sexy scripture that really grabs your attention and that you love, but it's kind of simplistically exactly, I believe, what we need. Paul is saying God who made the world and everything in it is not saying that God is part of that creation. He's not saying that if that creation were to fall apart, then God would be gone. He's actually talking about a God who's outside of the world, who created the world and everything in it. That's pretty incredible to me. And since he is Lord of heaven and earth, and if you remember my little analogy here of having Jesus being the Lord of our hearts, right? So therefore the Lord of all, the Lord of heaven and earth and the Lord of our hearts, he does not dwell in temples made with hands. a temple can burn. We read about brothers and sisters in different persecuted countries, and the people who are persecuting them will come and burn down a temple, right? And yet God is not in that temple. He cannot be burned down. God continues to exist and exists in our hearts. And so Paul was kind of getting at that. You know, God doesn't dwell in a temple made with hands. God can be there. God was certainly in the temple in the Old Testament, but now we're the temple. Now God has given that to us, and we are living testimonies to God. And so if we have friends or family members or anybody who talks to us and says, hey, you know, I just believe that God's in everything. I love the idea that C.S. Lewis gave about, yeah, but I mean a painter isn't in his painting. If the painting you know, is destroyed, the painter is not destroyed, right? It's more complex than that. But I really like this from Acts 17. And then also, of course, reading through C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapters four, through six. So let me close in prayer. Lord, thank you for this time tonight. We thank you for us being able to read through mere Christianity. I pray God that we'd be able to listen to it over and over and to really understand what C.S. Lewis was saying. Thank you for giving me the resolve again to start recording these and I look forward to recording the rest of the chapters and for people to be able to listen to them. Thank you for helping us gain from C.S. Lewis and his brilliant mind and being an atheist and becoming a Christian, but also thank you for letting us read through Romans 1 and 2 Corinthians 1 and Acts 17. And so we thank you for all of this and the ability to study mere Christianity tonight. In Jesus name, amen.