I'm going to ask you to hang in here as we work through The Last Battle. I've been deferring this for a few years. Do we have the courage to face The Last Battle? Do we have the courage to face anything?
The Pilgrim Church, by E.H. Broadbent, (forward by F. F. Bruce) provides a nice historical background.
My goal is to do one posting a week on the Last Battle, and continue to focus on the Upper Room.
Love,
Bob
Two – By Caldron Pool
In Chapter One we meet the ape Shift and the donkey Puzzle. They say that they are friends. When Puzzle says it he means it. When Shift says it he says it to manipulate Puzzle, for Puzzle’s desire for friendship blinds him to the fact that Shift has only one interest in him, to use him and to abuse him. Shift is always reminding Puzzle how he knows better than Puzzle and only wants the best for Puzzle. Shift also plays off Puzzle’s emotions, making Puzzle feel guilty and sorry for the way he treats Shift when we fails to do Shift’s bidding.
One morning, as Puzzle and Shift walk alongside the Caldron Pool, the Ape spots something yellow floating in the water. After manipulating Puzzle to retrieve the object, they both realize that it is a lion’s skin. As Puzzle frets about the former occupant of the skin, Shift’s bent soul is at work, devising a plan to benefit from this sudden find. Here is a contrast between Puzzle’s sympathy and Shift’s narcissism, between Puzzle’s simplicity and Shift’s subterfuge.
Puzzle wants to give the lion skin proper burial, for even if it is not the skin of a talking lion of Narnia, out of respect for Aslan Puzzle honors all lions. However, Shift reminds Puzzle that he isn’t good at thinking and then announces that they will turn the lion skin into a nice coat for Puzzle. How thoughtful and kind of Shift, always thinking of others. Then Shift has an even better idea, for since Puzzle will look like a lion when wearing the skin, he might as well pretend to be Aslan and speak to others as if he is Aslan.
The balance of the chapter portrays the back and forth between Shift and Puzzle, Puzzle feeling uncomfortable with wearing the lion’s skin and pretending to be Aslan, and Shift insisting that this is Aslan’s plan and that they will be able to do much good for others. As Shift reminds Puzzle again and again, donkeys are not very good at thinking and he really should leave the thinking to Shift.
The narrator reminds us that if you had seen a real lion that you would not have been taken in by Puzzle, but that if you had never seen a real lion, and if you only saw Puzzle at a distance, and if you couldn’t clearly seen him, and if he didn’t make donkey noises, that it is possible that you could be deceived into thinking that he was an actual lion.
Puzzle’s instincts told him one thing, but he was so intimidated by Shift and was so convinced that he was stupid, and that Shift knew best, that he allowed himself to be led into a tragedy. Was it that Puzzle so wanted to have a friend that he kept accepting Shift’s deprecating evaluation of him? Had Puzzle become so brow beaten that even when his instinct for truth was strong, that he didn’t have the courage to break away from the malicious Ape?
When the dead lion’s skin, after being tailored for Puzzle by Shift, was fitted on Puzzle, things were even worse, for Puzzle had become a captive to the skin of a dead lion and the Ape had even more control over him.
I wonder how we might be manipulated to wear the skin of a dead lion. How might we be induced to wear a Christianity that has no living relationship to the life of Jesus and the Gospel portrayed in Scripture? If, after all, we don’t have an intimate relationship with Jesus, if we don’t know Him as our Friend and Brother, if living with Him is not our daily Way of Life; then is it not possible that we can be manipulated into accepting an image of Jesus that is not that of Scripture, that is not really the Word made Flesh?
Since we are donkeys and not wise apes, this could be possible. But would we know it?
In John Chapter 9 Jesus heals a man born blind. The Pharisees are angry about it for it was the Sabbath, and as we all know, God does not like it when people heal other people on the Sabbath (well, that is what the Pharisees taught about God, of course that isn’t the truth). After an extended back and forth between the Pharisees, the man’s parents, and the man who was healed; and after the man refused to denounce Jesus, the Pharisees said to the man, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?”
Then the religious leaders did the man a favor by putting him out of the synagogue.
Just as Shift belittled Puzzle, so the Pharisees belittled the man born blind. Unlike Puzzle, the man born blind had to wherewithal to say, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
The manipulators of life, including in the religious world, exalt themselves and belittle others to maintain their power and deception. They may do this with smoke and mirrors – with prophetic utterances, with ever unfolding interpretations of events, with creating bogey men to evoke fear, with raw emotionalism; or they may be subtle and sophisticated, making pronouncements from the heights of exalted learning, or by convincing us that we need therapeutic ways of thinking and self – analysis.
Then there are those who promise health and wealth and success and affluence. There are yet others who so browbeat their people and burden them with guilt that the people become prisoners of a sick relationship. Whatever the case, no matter the genre, they are smart apes and we are dumb donkeys; we were born in our sins and we cannot possibly teach them anything. We ought to be quiet and to accept whatever dead lion’s skin they fashion for us.
Jesus said that you can’t put new wine in old wineskins. Do we believe that? Wouldn’t we rather change the chemistry of the new wine to make it compatible with the old wine skin? Don’t we really want the Holy Spirit to work within our status quo?
C. S. Lewis wrote about inner circles, about closed groups who desire to control others. He had an aversion to these groups. He portrays such a group in That Hideous Strength. Lewis saw such groups as a schoolboy. He saw such groups in the world of scholarship.
Do we see such groups today?
Are others trying to fit us with dead lion skins?
Would we know it if we were wearing dead lion skins?
Are we trying to induce others to wear the skins of dead lions?
The best protection against being duped by dead lion skins is to know the real and true Aslan.
