Wandering About in the Dark

In C.S Lewis’ The Screwtape letters, a young demon by the name of Wormwood is being schooled by his Uncle Screwtape on how to get his ‘Patient’ (a recently converted Christian) to fall away from the faith.

Dear Wormwood,

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.

You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.

You can keep him up late at night… staring at a dead fire in a cold room.

All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.

“Nothing” is very strong: Strong enough to steal away a man’s best years – not in sweet sins – but in a dreary flickering of the mind.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness.

But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing.

Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one: The gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape.

Echoing the wisdom of Solomon who observed that it was the little foxes who ruin the vineyard and prevent a fruitful harvest by destroying the young flowers that are just coming into bloom, Lewis highlights the fatal disease of idleness.

It’s easy for us to point out the large and glaring sins of the almost manic man in his restless quest to satisfy his lusts, his passions and prosperity. What we often overlook is the person who already has his prosperity and is now wandering aimlessly through life tapping those harder yet equally damnable sins of sloth, idleness and laziness.

Adultery gets you headlines because the destruction can be seen from a distance. But the consequences of spending three “harmless” hours a day flicking through YouTube videos, or mastering your nine iron, or binge watching Game of Thrones, or travelling the world over to collect Faberge eggs, are less easy to detect.

And so Paul,

The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. (1 Timothy 5:24).

As Screwtape points out to the young Wormwood, these things don’t even need to be considered sins. What matters is that they accumulate in the life of a young believer over time. What matters is that they keep us from fruitful and productive labour here and there until we finally fall away.

What matters is that they create the kind of brain fog that keeps us from the pursuit of fellowship with one another, godliness and charity in the pursuit of God, and communion with Jesus.

The remedy for these hidden suckers that drain the joy from life is the same for those glaring sins they make the papers.

First, come to God and ask Him to take inventory.

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalm 139:23-24)

Second, search yourself.

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realise this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! (2 Corinthians 13:5)

Nerve racking? Sure. Liberating? Absolutely.

We serve the living God. He knows our weakness and is well able to supply the power and the grace to knock the little foxes out, one by one.