Divine Plagiarism

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose or forfeit his very soul?” - Jesus.

Jim Elliot said, ‘it is no fool who trades what he cannot keep for what he cannot lose.’ The converse holds true, I believe. It is a fool who trades what he cannot lose for what he cannot keep. It is a greater fool who sells himself into slavery to purchase things he could only use as a free man. So this is the Fall: we traded something of greater value for the lesser, but that does not capture the depth of it. In the name of dominion, we gave away our identity as kings and queens. In the most foolish of all moves, the successors to the throne threw away their crowns to become usurpers. Even if they were to gain the entirety of the kingdom, they would never be able to claim the legitimacy that was once their own. The best they could do was to steal all the things that were already rightly theirs.

Consider the essence of man. We were made in the image of God. Our essence is a reflection of His, and we are made to be in relationship with Him. Without Him, we are nothing. And this is the essence of sin’s trap. What is a branch without the tree? What is a mirror without something to reflect? The mirror just gets dirtier and more scratched, and it begins to consider its imperfections its identity. After a while, the mirror is so corroded and filthy that it cannot reflect anything at all. It must then either be entirely remade or discarded, for it has become of no value at all.

This is the nature of sin: it is not a thing, but a lack; not a thought but an error. Sin cannot create, but it can twist and warp good things into monstrosities. G. K. Chesterton tells us that the problem with this world is Christian virtues run amok. Actions are designed to exist in context. Take them out of context and they become evil. Half-digested food is a good thing in the context of a stomach. It is a bad thing in the context of a helmet bag. (Long story. You don’t want to know. It wasn‘t me.) The enemy takes good things and puts them in the wrong order. He breaks actions out of their proper context and lets them run rampant.

Consider cancer. It is a good thing for cells to reproduce. Cellular reproduction is designed to exist in a controlled context in a healthy organism. It is a good under the higher good of the health of the whole body. A tumor is a group of cells that decided that their reproduction is the most important thing in their whole world, even more important than the life of the whole organism. When cellular reproduction gets out of order, death results. Now consider Lucifer. He is created as a magnificent and beautiful angel of light. He is a good thing, created in the context of the service of God. But he takes that good thing out of context; he takes a good thing, himself, and places it above God, who is the Best Thing. And he becomes evil and cancerous.

Lucifer talks Adam and Eve into a fool’s bargain. He convinces man to trade his relationship with God for everything else in the whole universe. Even if the enemy had followed through on his part of the deal, we would be destroyed in accepting it. We break the order of things, we take good things out of context, we try to place ourselves alongside God. We become cancerous. Cancer requires the life of the body to live, for it is made in the image of the body. Yet the cancer’s one desire is independence, for it takes no part in the life of the body. In that independence, the tumor finds only death, for nothing remains to sustain it. We require the life of God to live, for we are made in His image. Yet our one expressed desire is independence. But like the cancer, in that desire we find only death.

In ‘The Magician’s Nephew,’ two children stumble across a frozen world. Jadis, the White Witch, destroyed her world in an attempt to maintain her rule. Blot out the sun to conquer your enemies, and conquer your enemies you will. You will also conquer yourself. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, the classic tells us. But it is incomplete. There are no rulers of dead worlds. We would have killed our world to rule it. And in our last battle, so we shall. But we will not be kings. King Nothing. It is a contradiction in terms. A king rules something. If there is nothing to rule, there are no kings.

The problem, in a way, is our own goodness. That is, our goodness run amok. It is the magnificence of Lucifer’s original creation that makes him so horrific in his fallen form. Likewise, it is our power and majesty as reflections of the image of God that make us such a hazard to ourselves in our rebellion. It is the magnificence of the cell that makes cancer the monstrosity it is. So we have chemotherapy. In order to save the body, we interfere with the reproduction of the cancerous cell. We break part of the magnificence of the body’s power of regeneration in order to save the whole. Anyone who has seen a loved one go through chemo knows the painful side effects of the therapy. Still, in breaking the majesty and perfection of the body, sometimes we save a life.

So the curse is chemo. Our error, our sin, was to take the good of the self and take it out of context, letting it run rampant. So the curse breaks the perfection of the good of the self. I’ve heard that it is remarkably easy for gifted people to hide in their gifts. Imagine a world of immortal people immune to pain and suffering, capable of thought unfettered by miscommunication. We would get so lost in ourselves that we would never come back out. There would be nothing at all to pull us outside ourselves, nothing to draw us back to God. We would suffocate as we buried ourselves in the depths of our gifts. So God breaks our gifts.

In Faust, it is the very powers for which Doctor Faustus traded his soul that end up destroying Him. It would have been a merciful man to restrain his hand, a merciful parent who does not grant their child’s angry demand to send them out on their own. Jesus, hanging from the cross, pleads with the father, ‘Forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing!’ He is right. We have no idea what we’re asking for. John Lennon asked us to imagine. He didn’t do the math all the way through. Imagine a world without rules, without restraints, without a Landlord. Now imagine as that world tears itself apart when nothing remains to hold back the darkness of the heart of man, the book Sphere a hundred million times over. We have no idea what we are asking for.

God frustrates Saul’s war against Him so that the man from Tarsus can be saved. In the same way, He frustrates humanity’s war against His Throne so that we can be saved. So we are interrupted, in the garden, at Babel, we are interrupted all the way to the end times. We are thwarted from reaching the deadly goals we pursue. We are asking for the same deal as Doctor Faustus. Thank God that He keeps interrupting the transaction.

The first Adam took a fool’s bargain. We gave ourselves away for nothing. The second Adam was offered the same deal. Lucifer offered Him all the kingdoms of the world, all the nothing that He could ever ask for. But Christ is the deal-breaker. His body was broken for us, and with it the deadly deal we made. Our accounts were paid in full and closed, our transaction cancelled. He offers us a better bargain. He asks us to give ourselves away for everything. May we all enter into His transaction.