Chapter 4: Consuming All – Satan’s Anti-reality
April 28, 2021
An effective means of exposing deception is to follow the line of reasoning through a particular course of action to its logical conclusion. In other words, connect the dots. No one does this more resourcefully than C.S. Lewis in his brilliant satirical novel, The Screwtape Letters. Lewis masterfully constructs a twisted yet ingenious account of hell’s methodology to influence humans and use them in hell’s war against their Enemy (God). With clever wit, Lewis approaches the subject in a light yet serious manner.
Lewis states in the Preface: “I (Lewis) feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s own….
“In Hell.. I suggest, the stronger spirit… can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality.
“It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven. His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him and all that says “I” can say it only through him.”1
In Lewis’s novel, a leading devil named Screwtape informs a lesser devil, Wormwood, of the essential elements of the great cosmic battle affecting all of creation. The age-old conflict is unveiled for all to understand.
Screwtape explains:
“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.
“[God] 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 [devils] want cattle who can finally become food; [God] wants servants who 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 [Satan] has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy [God] wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”2
In most basic terms, the objective of the dark spiritual powers that govern the world systems of politics, culture and economics is to dominate and possess everyone and everything. Thus we discover the spiritual root of collectivism, whether it takes the form of socialism, communism or unrestrained corporate capitalism.
Key Points:
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God has imbued humans with a desire for community. But Satan has twisted the desire of voluntary association into a coercive quest for a counterfeit, authoritarian unity (collectivism) that suppresses individual personhood.
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Satan’s ultimate goal, by means of deception, is to impose an anti-reality that prepares the world for “the day when all shall be inside him and all that says ‘I’ can say it only through him.”3
Practical Application:
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Learn to recognize the forces attempting to radically transform American culture by advancing a counterfeit, coercive unity that is often deceptively disguised in the language of equity, compassion and the common good, yet contradicts God’s reality as revealed in the Scriptures.
