One of my favorite experiences as a father was reading C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” to my children. (One of the few times I could hold my twin boys’ attention for more than 10 minutes!) In the fourth book in the series, “The Silver Chair”, a young girl named Jill is very, very thirsty. To her delight she comes upon a stream. But she is immediately horrified by seeing a huge lion by the stream. She is perplexed. She is thirsty, but she is also scared to go near the stream. And when the lion speaks to her and invites her to drink, it only adds to her confusion.
“Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.
“I make no promise,” said the Lion.
“Do you eat girls?” she said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.[i]
Like the person who fears flying and is thus hindered from seeing some amazing parts of the world, fear can keep us from seeing—and experiencing—some wonderful things about God. If we believe God caused our parent to die prematurely, or if we believe he indifferently watched as we got laid off from work, or if we believe he will ruin our lives if we follow his sexual restrictions, then we will miss out on much love from him. We will decide to explore alternative streams. Instead of running into the arms of the Lion (Christ), we often learn the hard way—in actuality “there are no other streams.”
Substitute Glories
Alternative streams are downright foolish. Tantalizing, but foolish.
“Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the LORD. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jeremiah 2:1113)
God tells his people that he had given them glory. They had been given greatness because they had been given his love, his salvation, his law, his prophets, his mercy, his presence. But let the heavens shudder with great horror at this thought: They had traded it in for the idols of the nations around them! What foolishness! What nonsense! How could they possibly have done such a thing?
I first encountered this passage with full force when reading Larry Crabb’s book “Inside Out.” It was one of those milestone books in my life. I realized that my heart was far worse off than I had imagined—and that God’s love was far greater than I had dreamed.
It has been a sobering process, occupying many years of my life, to face the ways I have exchanged God’s glory for my own. Few were obvious and intentional. Most people didn’t even see them. But they were there. The pivotal question was, “Where did I go to quench my soul’s thirst?” Was it to my quick mind and my sharp analysis (even if flawed)? Was it to my biblical knowledge and strong convictions? Or maybe it was to my loving and accepting family? Even in the “Lord’s work” we can find substitute religious glories. They’re often the hardest ones to detect.
Israel’s foolishness—their sin—was thus twofold: They gave up what could have satisfied them, and they chose what didn’t satisfy them (their cisterns were “broken”). We don’t often use cisterns anymore, but in the days before deep wells and city water, they were invaluable. Cisterns were usually constructed out of limestone and formed into a basin designed to collect rainwater for later use. Since these cisterns are broken, they offer no water. No satisfaction. So the people are doubly foolish—no God, and no satisfaction.
The sooner we recognize this, the better. God’s ways are always better. They’re not just right, they’re good. They’re satisfying. But unfortunately, this lesson doesn’t come quickly to us. We’ve been taught from our childhood days to find glory in ourselves (and we too often pass on the same instruction to our children). As children we crave compliments about our cuteness, our intelligence, our athletic ability, and our work of “art” pinned on the refrigerator.
It’s not that these are bad in themselves, but if they form the center of our worth, and if they cause self-glory without appropriate gratitude and humility before God, they can easily become substitutes for the glory he is due.
God spoke some further relevant words through the prophet Jeremiah:
“Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight” (Jeremiah 9:2324).
God isn’t saying that we can’t take joy in these human attributes. What he is saying is that they pale in comparison to knowing God. His kindness, his justice and his righteousness are what we should take our greatest delight in. It’s all about priorities. It’s all about “one thing.” And it’s usually not the way we have lived our lives up until now.
Indeed, it’s a dramatic reorientation. To have lived years and years promoting our self-esteem through how we look, what (and how) we drive, how much we earn, how well we perform—and then to say that none of this really matters unless God is glorified in it—this is a shift of epic proportions!
Jesus once said,
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Everything you and I run to for greatness, for glory, is of no ultimate value if our first nourishment does not come from the Vine.
I love my wife. And I love my three children, all of whom have now “grown up.” They all make me very proud to be related to them. But, if I ever seek to make them my primary glory, I will have robbed God. And I will be a fool. If I set them up as idols in my heart—looking to them for my “spring of living water”—I will have denied the glory I was made for (and I will be ultimately disappointed along the way).
I met Lynn when his 32 year old son (who was also his best friend) died unexpectedly. Through the grief and the funeral, Lynn came face to face with his own emptiness, which caused him to reconsider the God of his youth whom he had strayed so far from. He came to my office thirsty for purpose in his life, suspecting it had something to do with God. We chatted for some time and finally I asked him if he was a reader. He said he was, so I suggested that he read John Piper’s “Desiring God”.
I saw him several months later and asked him how it was going. He said, “I wish someone had told me before that my purpose in life was to glorify God. It would have saved me a lot of heartache.” Here are some words he wrote to a troubled friend a few years later:
“Like many men I spent many years of my life chasing what I thought—or what I told myself—was expected of me. I had always been taught that I had to succeed. The only problem was, nobody ever told me what succeeding meant.
When Chris died, I realized that everything I thought was important to me was really meaningless compared to what I then realized was really important. One day I woke up and realized that my family wasn’t counting on my being president of the company, or living in a big house, or having a net worth of a million dollars and retiring at age 40. It was me, myself that thought all those things were necessary. It was MY ego that needed to be fulfilled.
I realized that the most important thing in the world is my relationship with God, then my family and my relationship with others. Sometimes we don’t know what we have because we’re looking in the wrong place. The happiness we really wanted is right there.
I tell you these things because I don’t want you to fall into the same trap I did.
Your loving friend, Lynn.”
Life is like an “all you can eat buffet”, filled with all sorts of temptations for substitute glories. Every culture has them. And America offers them in supreme abundance! I can look to my athletic performance to define my worth. I can look to my political and national freedom as my greatest value. I can look to my clever wit to give me praise, or my ability to avoid conflict to give me peace. I can even look to my church as a substitute glory (a common temptation for us pastors: “See how important I am—my church is growing and my people like me!”)
But the foundational truth remains that we have been designed by our Maker to glorify God. It is his love for us and our love for him that makes us truly “great.” Everything else is, at best, a glimmer of the real thing.
[i] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Collier Books, 1970), p. 17