A Problem of Perspective
Copyright 2005 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
"The sweet poison of a false infinite"
-C.S. Lewis
The "false infinites" Lewis speaks of are things, other than God, which human beings look to for ultimate fulfillment. They might be money, sex; power or any number of additional modern day idols fallen men and women lust after. Throughout our history there have been square pegs that we have tried to fit into a round hole, more specifically the "God-shaped hole" Blaise Pascal spoke of. But perhaps never have there been so many pegs, at least in the Western world. Why do we keep falling for false infinites? Why do even Christians fall into this fruitless searching after the wind?
Perhaps part of the answer to this question lies in the glossy enticements of contemporary society. We are the world’s first mass consumer culture. In our broadcast and print media and on the Internet Westerners are bombarded with commercials designed to incite insatiable lusts of one kind or another. By age 18 every child in Western Europe and America has seen tens of thousands of TV images of everything from expensive cars to perfectly flawless models that beckon us to some kind of earthly transcendence (an oxymoron, by the way.) Whether it is the new Mustang or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition we are encouraged to believe that if we just owned this car or possessed that woman our lives would somehow be made complete. This is, of course, a deception, but it certainly looks good.
For most of the centuries we have been on the planet just a small minority of individuals have had access to the earthly trappings of riches and power. In the Bible, for instance, only kings and a handful of wealthy landowners had instant access to riches and other worldly pleasures. Historically the vast majority of people had to make do with the basic necessities of life, and some with less than that. Today, in the so-called "First World", it is different. Millions of us can afford to pay others to do our bidding, giving us a sense of personal power beyond the means of the generations that have gone before us. We can acquire a cornucopia of consumer goods that would seem absolutely fantastic to the ancient. Since the unfortunate "Sexual Revolution" we can also freely indulge our physical appetites, whether in the form of pornography or real flesh. Our vast middle class lives in a style achievable by only a few potentates of antiquity. False infinites abound and many of us can obtain them.
Sadly, believers are not immune to the enticements of our age. The presence of myriad addictions in our churches is mute testimony to that fact. Far too many of us live a sort of "double-life" with one foot in Zion and the other in Las Vegas. We claim to seek the sacred but our lives are full of the profane. We, too, have bought into "the sweet poison".
It is not that material things are bad in and of themselves. Power and sexuality are not intrinsically evil either. It is when these become ends in themselves that we are in danger. All turn out to be toxic when they are sought above relationship with God. The Scripture tells us that in seeking the Kingdom of Heaven such things will be, to different degrees, added on to us. Lewis also wrote that if we shot for Heaven we would get the Earth thrown in, but if we shot for Earth alone we’d get neither.
The only One with infinite value is our Lord. No one and nothing else is infinite. Therefore anyone or anything other than God can be truly poisonous to our souls when given value only He deserves. Like so many things in life it is a problem of perspective. May God help us to see all in the light of Who He is.