God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)
Now what was the sort of “hole” man had
got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he
belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect
creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.
Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you
have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from
the ground floor—that is the only way out of our “hole.” This process of
surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now
repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating
humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have
been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of
yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent.
And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person
can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you
can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and
he would not need it.
Remember, this repentance, this willing
submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of
you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it
is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to
take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without
going back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But
the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it
if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We
mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of
His reasoning powers and that is how we think: he puts a little of His love
into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing,
you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters
because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons
and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen, that would be all
plane sailing. But unfortunately we now need God’s help in order to do
something which God, in His own nature, never does at all—to surrender, to
suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process
at all. So that the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all
is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He
has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.
But supposing God became a man—suppose our
human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one
person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer
and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.
You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do
it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we
men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a
drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying
unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in
which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at
all.
(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 4)
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
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