“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’ These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go witht he multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” (Psalm 42:1-5)
The longing, thirsting, downcast, empty, ridiculed psalmist ranks among the most powerful men. In his brokenness, he poses more danger to the enemy’s kingdom than the joyful, full, praised, and satisfied saint ever did. The gates of hell shake in terror with every movement of this weak and broken man’s shuffling feet. He feels himself to be in an arid land, but rivers of living water lie just before him. How does one thirsting and panting for God effect so much trouble for Satan?
Chief demon Wormwood explains:
To decide what the best use of [the Christian’s spiritual dryness and dullness] is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself–creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. but you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble ideas is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Be He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at lest from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs–to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
From C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HarperCollins), pp. 39-40.
Screwtape, the demon, wishes very much that the Christian’s troughs and droughts would appear terminal and futile. He wishes very much that the Christian would lose sight of the Savior’s use of such periods. He desires that we should forget that some of the Lord’s favorite subjects have endured the longest seasons without rain and sunshine. But he knows what all demons know. The Christian in His slump stands are more upright than the self-assured fully erect and shoulders back. In that slumping, longing posture near despondency, there exists a spiritually dangerous man who may at any moment strike a blow against Satan’s devouring cause.
Even in our feelings of spiritual desertion, we may still obey the Savior. Such obedience meets with joyful reward. Jesus promised: “If you love me, you will obey what I command. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him. If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” (John 14:15, 21, 23; and 15:10)
