“When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.
Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted.
He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.
Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about ‘His glory’s diminution’?
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces.
It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature.
The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream.
George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, ‘You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.’
That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not.
To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response—to be miserable— these are the only three alternatives.
If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow— then we must starve eternally.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 1940/2001), 46-47.
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