"You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore." (Psalm 16:11)

"But there is no hope in the end of getting where you want to go except by going God’s way." (C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, 1933)

July 13, 2026

Dear friends,

Sometimes when we wrestle with temptation, or when we are confessing our sin, we think that our desires, say for pleasure or personal happiness, are directly (and completely) opposite of God's will for us. We might believe that the doctrine of total depravity means that all of our aspirations for joy or pleasure are fundamentally wrong and need to be forsaken. Yet Scripture speaks of the presence of the Lord in terms of joy, pleasure, and beauty (Psalms 16:11; 27:4). What do we make of this?

I've been reading through the letters of C. S. Lewis, and in 1933, just two years into his Christian life, he writes to his friend Arthur Greeves, sharing some of his thoughts about God and evil, and how God looks upon and deals with sin within us. Here are a few excerpts from that letter...

Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he can't do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the same thing -- namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: tho' in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.

Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an evil: and he might go on to ask whether you understand and 'contained' his evil. If he did you could only reply 'My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use -- why I understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don't understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathise with your real wish -- that is, the wish to get on -- the less can I sympathise (in the sense of 'share' or 'agree with') your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.'

God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil -- the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach. With these therefore He cannot sympathise or 'agree': His sympathy with my real will makes that impossible. (He may pity my misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.) The practical results seem to be two.

1. I may always feel looking back on any past sin that in the very heart of my evil passion there was something that God approves and wants me to feel not less but more. Take a sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture was good and even divine: it has not got to be unsaid (so to speak) and recanted. But it will never be quenched as I tried to quench it. If I refrain -- if I submit to the collar and come round the right side of the lamppost -- God will be guiding me as quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the time. It will not be very like what I now think I want: but it will be more like it than some suppose. In any case it will be the real thing, not a consolation prize or substitute.

2. On the other hand, when we are thinking of a sin in the future, i.e. when we are tempted, we must remember that just because God wants for us what we really want and knows the only way to get it, therefore He must, in a sense, be quite ruthless towards sin. He is not like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you back from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads where you want to go. Hence [George] Macdonald's words 'The all-punishing, all-pardoning Father'. You may go the wrong way again, and again He may forgive you: as the dog's master may extricate the dog after he has tied the whole lead round the lamp-post. But there is no hope in the end of getting where you want to go except by going God's way.

The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite -- an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.

Thus you may well feel that God understands our temptations -- understands them a great deal more than we do. But don't forget Macdonald again -- 'Only God understands evil and hates it.' [Lilith, ch 39] Only the dog's master knows how useless it is to try to get on with the lead knotted round the lamp-post. This is why we must be prepared to find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us very small and trivial things. But He knows whether they are really small and trivial.

-- C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, Sept. 12, 1933, in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Harper, 2005).

One can see here, early in Lewis's Christian life, themes which will take mature shape in his later writings. This image of the master walking his dog, and the leash wrapped around the lamp-post, is such a simple and relatable picture of our relation with the Lord. (Especially for those of us who have walked dogs!) He is not against us. He approves and works toward our happiness and joy and pleasure, our "walk" with him, our eternal happiness and imperishable joy and pleasure. But we must walk with him on the right side of the lamp-post!

When we get on the wrong side, when we get tangled up and snarled in sin, we must back up, confess, get untangled -- all of which is humbling and painful, but this is not designed fundamentally for our unhappiness but for our eternal happiness.

May you and I always walk on his side of the lamp-post!

Sandy

Afterwords is an occasional newsletter on topics of interest to me (Sandy Young) since my retirement from full-time pastoral ministry. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.