Tuesday, 07 July 2009
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How real is our enemy's war?
How is it that a Christian girl, raised in a Christian home and educated in a Christian school, has never read The Pilgrim's Progress?
I ignorantly believed before starting Bunyan's work that the majority of the it dealt with Christian's road to conversion. Not so; Christian comes to the "Wicket-gate" and Jesus' salvation early; then, and following the Bible's lead, Bunyan falls onto metaphor to illustrate the trials we Believers will face. J.R.R. Tolkein did this also with books I have already read, his The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy, and Lewis with his Chronicles.
These I've mentioned and certainly many other works of "fiction" provide graphic, illustrative battles and circumstances for their heroes: actual Valley's of the Shadow of Death, true armies of Orcs, cold, evil rulers. Real arrows and darts are thrown; swords really clash. I get that all these are the metaphors of the Christian life, but they seem so graphic, so obvious. As I said, even the Bible gets in on it:
Where is the Lord that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt? Jeremiah 2:6, KJV
Real Christian life isn't like that. Though this verse in Jeremiah speaks of a true history, we Believers have been using in metaphorically every since. Most of us, anyway...and fortunately. We don't slog through actual Slough's of Despair or are faced with a tangible Caracas, nor do we really find refuges reminiscent of Bunyan's palace Beautiful. So is all this metaphor truly accurate, or is it overkill? And if it isn't overkill, is the evil more deadly because of it's elegantly crafted subtlety?
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Comments (4)
Great book!
Hello so you love Jesus and plants? same here I write poetry about Jesus and about nature
While I do understand that not many people do go through the things that I did, parents running away from war and living as refugees in a new country, growing up ungrounded to either culture and confused about cultural identity, dealing internal conflicting values of East and West, trying to "reach" the American dream and going personal bankrupt (literally and in the courts), gettin up my feet again and putting myself through school, having bouts of hypomania and depression, and through all that I can say that the illustrations and metaphors have been most helpful. They may be overkill for many of us, but they were helpful for me and many others similar to me, I would think. God can use them to bring people to Him and that is all that matters in the end, me thinks.
Randy Alcorn - Fire of Heaven Trilogy; Ted Dekker - The Circle Trilogy; Frank Peretti - This Present Darkness Series all touch on similar spiritual battle allegories. Have thoroughly enjoyed each one. I love to read fiction in summer; with the exception of this one... Need a different diet--So I'm reading What Southern Women Know about Faith - Rhonda Rich Author. Very excellent stuff too--but it has a comfort to it that I need right now more than my favorite summer fiction reading...........