A Supposal: Wedding Wine and Universes

Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.

— John 2:6-11a (ESV)

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them…

— Exodus 20:11a

Throwing this idea out there into the ring of arguments over the creation of the world, evolution, creationism, etc… What is one more voice? But I haven’t heard this idea anywhere else that I can remember, and I don’t really even know how to search for it. The connection between the two thoughts is one Google doesn’t seem to know how to make. So, I’ll just walk through the argument, and if it is ridiculous I’m sure I’ll be told by someone someday.

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Here is the thought, typed down in my phone notes as it came to me:

If Jesus can make in an instant by miracle wine that is indistinguishable from that which has been aged many years, then I have no argument against the notion that He, God, could create in six days a universe that would be indistinguishable from a universe that on its own would need billions of years to become what it is now….

(Yes – the ellipsis was part of the original note.)

So says the wedding master: “You have kept the good wine until now!” But the servants who brought it from the ritual purifying jars knew the secret: this wine, indistinguishable from wine made the long way – the grapes plucked, crushed, the juice fermented, kept in jars or casks for years to age to taste, as all good wine is – hadn’t existed until a few minutes ago.

On the seventh day God rested from His work, having spent just six days creating the heavens and the earth.

Now, I believe it was Augustine or Aquinas, or maybe both (or maybe someone else I am misremembering) who asked, “Why six days? Why not one? Why not in an instant?” (Regardless who asked, they are still good questions so I’m not going to hunt for the quote.) Some say the numbers are important not for their chronology and the passage of time, but for the significance of numerology, etc… — the number seven is the number of completion, therefore of course God completed His work in seven days. No other number would do for the ancient Hebrews. Any other number would maybe have cast doubt in their minds – they would have been the ones asking, “Why wouldn’t God have done it in seven days? That’s the number of completion!”

But this is not what I’m getting at here. I’m here concerned with the process of how a universe comes to be.

I believe science gives us a good idea of the key ingredients and time-processes of how a universe can form “the long way” (provided you already have the ingredients and them in proper relation to each other at the right level of activity – a question materialist scientists cannot answer is, “Where did matter come from?” except to insist that matter simply is, and has always been – but there are significant problems with that assertion, not my concern here). I’ve read, as a layman and amateur – not formally instructed in cosmology, but as a lover of reading and of thinking about such topics – Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, together with other sources, books, videos, and can see the basic observations and conclusions mostly make sense. If you have a Big Bang as evidenced by the Cosmic Microwave Background, and out of its radiation and hyperactive photons eventually congeal the first stars, and if those first stars live out their billions-years lives and in their turn go nova, and out of those primordial supernovae the second generation of stars are born together with the first generation of planets – whose elements (as evidenced by light bands and colors through spectrometers) were forged in the hearts of those first stars and then launched out into physical space – and if given time enough and gravity those planets and stars form into solar systems following the laws of physics…. My point is, I can see it. I can grasp it. The processes make sense on the astronomic level.

What of the biologic level? No satisfactory answer to how non-living matter becomes living matter has yet been found. Tyson himself says this. No experiment has ever yet shown it to be possible. Materialists are left with a Frankenstein-like random chance lightning strike or radiation burst, plus whatever billionth-billionth chance configuration of minerals and chemicals so happened to be struck to create (the word is inescapable) proteins, and then those proteins to create RNA, and then that RNA to create DNA, and that DNA to create single-celled organisms, and those to branch off into animal and plant strains, and so on and so forth…. As for theists: here the proponents of Intelligent Design and Creationism insert miracle, while those over at BioLogos insist that the universe is a closed system – the entire system is the miracle – and they have faith that a naturalistic answer will be found, someday, but differ from naturalists in insisting God is the one who created the whole system – “Theistic Creative Evolution” might be a term for this view. (Neither are such theists only reactionary against Darwin and Big Bang cosmology: Aquinas imagined a universe that could at the command of God (“Let there be…!”) put itself together (a thousand years before Darwin!) – as a ship whose planks were imbued with the power to assemble themselves into the ship-shape. All these ideas and all these debates are much older than the twentieth century.)

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An Aside on Human Evolution, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Body

Cartesian Dualism has seriously limited our thinking on the connection between material and immaterial – soul and body. I think collectively we should drop it as quick as we can – especially we Christians.

Christians ought to know better that our bodies as well as our souls matter. We are told in no uncertain terms in Genesis 2 that “life,” “soul,” and “breath” are inextricably connected – it is not until God breathed into Adam that Adam became a “living soul” or “creature” (Genesis 2:7). It is not having a soul or spirit, but being alive that counts.

Furthermore we know that what we do with our bodies matters on a spiritual level, and therefore we can conclude that spirit and body are not as separate as we tend to think they are. Paul makes this plain in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 – “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? … he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him…. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:15, 17, 19-20).

Glory is a spiritual thing – yet here we are told to do a spiritual thing with our bodies!

If retained, Cartesian Dualism makes Theistic Evolution impossible – a complete human as we are now cannot arise out of only material sources. Where did the soul and spirit come from? But what if matter and spirit are not so separate as Cartesian Dualism makes us think they are?

An illustration from science: light is both a particle and a wave. We know that it is thus because we have observed light as particle – photon – and as a wave. Light is not simply particle, nor simply wave, but both, at the same time, and you cannot have one without the other – where the photon is, there also is the wave – and yet they are totally separate things. Why not say the same of body and soul? A human is both body and soul as light is both particle and wave.

Or else another illustration: the human body is to a video game figure on the screen as the human soul is to the computer code defining that video game figure amidst all the other codes that define the entire game. That is to say: the character we see on the screen (body) really is the string of numbers and symbols we see if we open up the video game’s code file (soul). They are totally separate things, but we cannot have one without the other – it is the medium through which the code is expressed that makes the difference. The medium of the body is the physical world, while the medium of the soul is the spiritual – but the thing in each medium is one and the same human.

There is no “ghost in the machine.” The ghost and the machine are one.

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Back to the Wine and the Universe

Now comes my titular Supposal (which is not a word WordPress spellcheck recognizes, but should, since we can make the same shift from “propose” to “proposal” just fine…):

Suppose our science really has gotten everything right. Suppose we really have discovered the real processes by which our universe came to be? We’re still foggy on some key details – what event sparked the Big Bang and how non-living matter becomes living being the most glaring – but we have the gist. We have our billions of years, and we have our chance occurrences, and the eons of physical activity that have led to the galaxies, solar systems, and Earth we know and love now, with all our continents and oceans, our mixture of atmospheric gasses, our ecosystems, our animals, plants, food-chains, and our human bodies and minds.

Now suppose God comes to us, and takes us to some faraway place where we can observe the universe in its entirety. He puts His arm around our shoulders and stands side by side with us, staring out at His universe – sort of like Luke and Leia standing at the window of the medical frigate at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, gazing out at the blazing galaxy. We have been well instructed. We know the science, and all of that cosmology is in our minds as we stand there admiring the universe.

And then God says to us: “See that? I did it in six days.”

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Having My Cake and Eating It

How could you tell the difference? We could not. As the master of the wedding feast could not tell the difference between the delicious, miraculous, instantaneous wine and the good wine gotten “the long way,” neither could our science tell the difference between a miraculous, six-day universe and a universe gotten “the long way.”

So, if my Supposal has any truth to it: does a universe take billions of years to form? Yes. Did God do it in six days? Yes. Miracle does not abrogate the process – it only lifts the process into a different time frame. I will have my cake and eat it, too.

I will have my Big Bang and also my “Let there be light!”

I will have my dinosaurs, I will have my cavemen, and I will have Adam, Eve, and Eden.

How could you tell?

Our winery proprietors tell us it takes years to get a good wine – but Jesus made the best wine in an instant by miracle. Our science has told us it would need billions of years to get our universe – but our God did it in six days.

This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.

— John 2:11a (ESV)

The heavens declare the glory of God…

— Psalm 19:1a

Aging and Pain in the Light of Eternity

In my thoughts on Death I wrote of how when I was in elementary school, then in middle, then high school, then college, I had this silly hope that Time, Time imagined as a kind of substance, Time the Invincible Fact, would just “sort of stretch out” and never actually arrive at whichever of life’s milestones I did not particularly care to reach, a “desire, often unconscious or only half formulated … for a particular time in life never to end.” George MacDonald wrote in Cross Purposes (a story of his I don’t remember if I have read or not, but which I know C.S. Lewis published in his collection of MacDonald quotes): “[M]any things we never could believe, have only to happen, and then there is nothing strange about them.”

I turned 30 this month. To prove it to me, on the very day, I woke up and rose up on my elbows, and in the rising seem to have crunched a nerve in my upper back between two vertebra at the level of my shoulder blades. Moderate pain throughout the day twinged if I twisted wrong, catching my breath short. My “wind” was “knocked out” from the sudden seizing of the muscles around my ribs and lungs as they tightened to protect the nerve – the same feeling I often felt as a kid when climbing and then landing hard on my chest when falling out of the low-branched apple trees on our farm. In addition to my rebel back, my knees, for a few years now, have been practicing their hobby of imitating the sound of damp gravel being stepped on, whenever they bend, be it while doing squats or simply going up stairs – wet dirt and pebbles on the surface make that unique sound when they squish against the drier gravel in the lower layers. My family have also likened the audio of my knees to creaking wooden floorboards. “Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). I imagine St. Paul had more in mind than his sinful “flesh” when he wrote those words.

I have very kindly received birthday wishes from many, saying things like, “30 is a wonderful time of life! Your 30s are a great decade, so much better than your 20s! I remember when I thought 30 was old!” Kind words, and I’m grateful for all of them. They promise much, and there is substance to them, I know … but I also know they are mostly empty, like a Russian Doll without any subsequently smaller dolls stacked inside. You’ve got the outermost shell and that counts for something, but its weight is off. It “feels” too light. No one wants to be 30. No one has ever earnestly, with all one’s heart, yearned or longed or desired to become 30. No one, that is, who is not already past 30. I wonder if anyone ever really wants to age past 25, or even 21? The name of that store – you know it, ubiquitous in every mall that exists – comes to mind.

Though not yet old, I am aging. Deep into these thoughts one day, and into the accompanying regrets of everything I had wanted to do – or worse, everything I only now am coming to realize I had wanted to do – but never achieved in my 20s, I suddenly found my mind recalling this quote:

It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Well and well. This (mostly) cured me of my regrets (there is always some lingering residue, I find, even when regret is shown to be the waste of time that it is). There are, or will be – I have faith, may God make it so – as many of my birthday well-wishers said in different words – “new horizons … appearing and new doors opening” at this age, and at every age. Amen.

Still, it is not the mere number of our age – what’s in a number? – but rather the lost youth that vexes. And it is not even exactly what Lewis means by “lost youth” here in his critique of middle-aged “maundering” – meaning the thrills of life when you are young, the opportunities that have gone by. It is this: I wouldn’t care if I was 300, let alone 30, if only I could retain the health and strength and speed and vitality that I have known in my teens and 20s and, thankfully, largely still know now at 30. If I could have bodily youth, strength, and health forever, then would I not forever have opportunity for striding over “new horizons”? I could take life at my leisure, and let even decades go by without doing anything, if I wanted, and yet retain the ability to go on through the “new doors” – if only my body was not subject to the erosion of Time.

Except, were it so, I would even still be a sinner.

Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” — therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

— Genesis 3:22-24

I think it is true – at least it was for me – that when we first read these verses, we grow somewhat indignant. At the least, we are confused: Why would God do that? I think I had assumed infinite life would have made Adam and Eve, and all the rest of mankind, less sinful. Wouldn’t that have solved the problem? I had assumed that the fruit of life would have restored the goodness we knew prior to the first sin, as if the fruit of the tree of life was the antidote to the fruit of the tree of good and evil. But what right have we to assume that?

I hadn’t read those verses closely enough: Because mankind had learned not only the good but also evil, and that by committing evil — therefore God cut off our access to infinite life and bodily youth. Infinite life as fallen beings who knew both good and evil, that is, as sinners, would not have been good for us. Think of what we in fact, in reality, not hypothetically, do with our youth, strength, health, vitality: Do we not already waste them, short-lived as they are? Do we not squander them on drunkenness, and drugs, and all manner of immorality that only leads to disease and depression and hatred of others? It need not even be such “spectacular” or “big” sins, either. It could be laziness, apathy, satisfaction with small things, little finite pleasures, a desire, strange as it sounds, for a life of meaninglessness, of no responsibility, of inconsequential centuries drifting from bodily pleasure to pleasure – yes, until even these little things we seem able to enjoy in endless quantity lost their draw, and we found ourselves condemned to continue on – I will not say “live” – forever with nothing to look forward to, no fantastic ecstasies nor the little homely comforts. In fact, such a world and state of being would have been the beginning of Hell, not of Redemptive History – living Hell, because sin gives birth to death, and Hell is eternal death.

And yet, even so, even though I can see all this to be true, and affirm it with all parts of my mind I am able to bend to the task of affirmation – even so, I find in my soul some rotten thing that would actually prefer this state of infinite-yet-sinful youth, even though in time, eventually, at some point, I know, but perhaps do not believe, all such pleasure will have become dull and boring to me. I have all the evidence I need that this is what part of me – I do not know, but shudder to think of, how big a part – actually wants this. I know full well that I could get many years, decades, centuries, maybe even many millennia, of contented pleasure out of sleep, food, sex, drink, video games, movies, travel, reading, parties – finite thrills, without God, if only I never aged, never felt pain, and never had to reckon with death or the end of Time or the final judgment of God. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

So thank God He limited our lives and let the curse of Time and aging fall on us, and on all the world!

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

— Romans 8:19-23

Subjected in hope.

If we never aged – never saw those wrinkles at the eyes and mouth, never heard our knees crackle or woke up with muscle aches for seemingly no reason, never did a double-take in the mirror at the glimpse of a gray hair – we would never have to reckon with the inevitable meeting with God toward which we all are headed. If we never felt the boredom and pain of age, we might never turn to God. And that says nothing about the Physician, but everything about us, His patients – the condition of our souls is so wretched that the medicine required to get us to surrender our selves to God is pain, and age, and decay, and futility. If He could do it another way, He would – and sometimes does. Sometimes a revelation in our souls of God’s goodness and beauty and the infinite pleasures “at His right hand” (Psalms 16:11) work in us a cure. But His strongest medicine is pain.

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. … And pain is not only immediately recognisable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

God gives purpose to the pains of our life, however much we might wish them away. That is good news!

But! In a moment of what I can only think of as J.R.R. Tolkien’s term, coined eucatastrophe, “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears,” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien), the Bible also goes beyond even this unexpected good, and reveals that our pains and sufferings are doing more for us than just serving as God’s megaphone:

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs — heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

— Romans 8:16-18

For all things are yours: whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to come — all are yours. And you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.

— I Corinthians 3:21-23

For all things are for your sakes, that grace, having spread through the many, may cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God. Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory…

— II Corinthians 4:15-17

Paul is not talking only of religious persecution and spiritual or emotional suffering, the loss of loved ones, the plans that never came together, the good desires unfulfilled – though these surely are a more noble kind of suffering, “provided we suffer with Him” – but he also states unequivocally: “even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23). It is not wrong to want to be healed, then, or to want to have new bodies not subject to the futility and suffering of this present creation. This is beyond good! How can my back pain be of such consequence? What will the creaking ache of my knees become for me in my “exceeding and eternal weight of glory”? What could it possibly mean that “all things” are mine, even the world, life, and death? How shall I own death, and how shall it work for me?

He ended; and thus Adam last repli’d:
“How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest,
Measur’d this transient World, the Race of time,
Till time stand fixt: beyond all is abyss,
Eternity, whose end no eye can reach.
Greatly instructed I shall hence depart,
Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill
Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain;
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,
Merciful over all his works, with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deem’d weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek; that suffering for Truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life;
Taught this by his example whom I now
Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.”

— Paradise Lost, Book XII.552-573

For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

— Philippians 1:21

“O Death, where is your victory?
O Death, where is your sting?”

— I Corinthians 15:55

“Suffering for Truth’s sake …”

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in His steps.

— I Peter 2:19-21

Provided we suffer with Him …

Suddenly I am stopped cold. I remember several paragraphs up my confession that there is a part of me that would rather have eternal youth and health without God. But the requirement is I must suffer with Him. 

Am I? How can I know?

John Piper’s sermon “A Spectacular and Scary Promise” has the answer: We can know we are suffering with Christ and have the Holy Spirit in us if we are living according to the Spirit and by the Spirit are actively, sincerely, putting to death our sins.

For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are children of God.

— Romans 8:13-14

This is not “salvation by works,” but works coming out of our salvation – the Spirit is already in us, therefore we are putting to death the deeds of the body. So, if I find in myself a sincere desire to kill my sin, and I am having success – not perfect success, because sanctification is not complete until death, “Death the Gate of Life” – then I can know, for certain, that that desire is in me because the Spirit is already leading me to it! Amen.

Closer, but this is still not quite the full answer. I must ask, Why do I want to “put to death the deeds” of my body? Is it only practical? Do I merely no longer want to suffer pain, regret, and shame because of my sins? If this is all I am after, then I am not fulfilling the greatest commandment:

“Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.”

— Matthew 22:36-38

I see that I must love God – but I don’t love God anywhere near like I ought to. Not with all my heart, and all my soul, and all my mind, and all my strength. I know I love a lot of other things and don’t often care if God is involved or not. I have found in me the desire that I might go on with my small pleasures and sins indefinitely … And yet at times, I have been pierced with the desire to see God, and really to know Him. How do I keep tottering back and forth? How can I be so divided? Would I really give up all my sins in order to gain eternal life with Christ? What if I don’t really love God, but only think I do? “Wretched man that I am? Who will save me from this body of death?”

And now I come to the greatest passage of writing I have found in recent memory, a quote that has given me life and joy since the moment I first read it:

Augustine uses a little thought-experiment … in his sermon “On the Pure Love of God”. He says: Imagine God appeared to you and said he would make a deal with you, that he would give you everything you wished, everything your heart desired, except one. You could have anything you imagine, nothing would be impossible for you, and nothing would be sinful or forbidden. “But,” God concluded, “you shall never see my face.” Why, Augustine asks, did a terrible chill creep over your heart at those last words unless there is in your heart the love of God, the desire for God? In fact, if you wouldn’t accept that deal, you really love God above all things, for look what you just did: you gave up the whole world, and more, for God.

— Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing

In that confession paragraph above, I also said that I knew I eventually would get bored of eternal-yet-sinful youth. Why? Because I knew I would not, in the end, be satisfied with this “deal.” Answering Augustine’s thought experiment truthfully, I say No. Never. Never. Only seeing God’s face is eternally satisfying.

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

— John 17:3

Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.

— I John 3:2-3

Part of the purifying process is aging, growing old, suffering pains, feeling regrets, and looking through all these things forward into that “eternal weight of glory” awaiting us in Christ. Not one year of life, or twinge of the pains of age, is meaningless. It is only the first step into eternity with God, made righteous, with no more sin, shame, or pain, or sorrow, or regret any more, with Him for Whom we really do “give up the whole world, and more,” that we may be with Him face to face.

Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done. I restore the years that the locusts and worms have eaten. I restore the years which you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheelchair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen and the freedom lost to you through plunder and the identity lost to you because of calumny and the failure of justice. And I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of. And I bring to you the love of which all other loves speak, the love which is joy and beauty, and which you have sought in a thousand streets, and for which you have wept and clawed your pillow.

— Thomas Howard, Christ the Tiger, (quoted from Peter Kreeft, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven)

But as it is written:
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

— I Corinthians 2:9

And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”
Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And He said to me, “Write, for these words are true and faithful.”

— Revelation 21:3-5

Proper Rewards: Hell or Heaven – Being Sin or Becoming Righteousness

Meditations on Easter Which Began with II Corinthians 5:21

There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love. That is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover … The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
— Genesis 2:24

“And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.”
— John 3:19-20

… “Just as they have chosen their own ways,
And their soul delights in their abominations,
So I will choose their delusions,
And bring their fears on them;
Because, when I called, no one answered,
When I spoke they did not hear;
But they did evil before My eyes,
And chose that in which I do not delight.”
— Isaiah 66:3-4

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.
— C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

So the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”
— Genesis 4:6-7

… not as Cain who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his works were evil and his brother’s righteous.
— I John 3:12

But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.
— James 1:14-15

“For whoever has, to him more will be given….”
— Mark 4:25

… lawlessness leading to more lawlessness … For the end of those things is death.
— Romans 6:19, 21

Then He said to the disciples, “It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come!”
— Luke 17:1

He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.
— I John 3:8

“His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
— Matthew 3:12

“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ …”
— Matthew 25:41

“For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it; for how should My name be profaned? And I will not give My glory to another.”
— Isaiah 48:11

“And they shall go forth and look
Upon the corpses of the men
Who have transgressed against Me.
For their worm does not die,
And their fire is not quenched.
They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”
— Isaiah 66:24

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses; to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you see it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship; or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

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… behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
— Matthew 1:20-21

… John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
— John 1:29

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
— II Peter 3:9

“Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked,” declares the Lord God, “and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?”
— Ezekiel 18:23

Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men…. For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again…. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new…. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
— II Corinthians 5:11, 14-15, 17, 21

The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or — if they think there is not — at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us …
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“… that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and you in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”
— John 17:21-23

Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
— John 3:3

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
— I John 3:1-3

Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
— Revelation 21:2

“And behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to give to everyone according to his work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.”
— Revelation 22:12-13

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“To Be Sin”

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us….
— II Corinthians 5:21

God made Christ to be sin for us. Jesus became sin on our behalf. This is strong language. It is a metaphor, not a simile. It goes beyond the idea I think I have held for most of my Christian life — namely, that substitutionary atonement is a kind of legal fiction God the Judge plays with Christ the Advocate, as if Jesus had been the one who had committed all the sins of the world. That is true, that is how part of the atonement seems to work. But II Corinthians 5:21 seems to take things a step further. Not only did Christ agree to be tried and executed on our behalf as if He were the sinner and we the pure, righteous, perfect Son of God (simile); but even more than that, Jesus somehow was made to be sin for us (metaphor).

I have looked around a bit on the Internet and discovered that this is kind of a point of Christological contention. Some people say that when Jesus was made “to be sin for us,” it means something about His essential nature changed, that somehow, literally, as if sin is a substance that one can absorb and make a part of one’s body, Jesus became sin. Some others seem to say that this is heretical, that the eternal Son of God of the Trinity could never have His essential nature compromised by sin in any way. Rather, these theologians want to say that it was Christ’s human nature that absorbed and literally became sin, and that His divine nature was unscathed. I think this second option is the safest way to think about this — but none of this is really what I want to write about.

What I want to write about is: What was the alternative?

God “made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” If Jesus had to not only die in our place, and not only bear the guilt of our sin, but had to become sin, our sin — why was that necessary? Why is “becoming sin” the necessary action our Substitute had to undertake in order to save us?

Surely, because we were becoming, or had already become, sin. That is the meaning of substitution, is it not? We, in some way, are sin, and therefore need a Substitute to be sin for us. Our situation is not that we are neutral human beings tilting either towards God or towards sin, but that we are becoming or have already become so sinful as to be lumped together and identified — we, ourselves, our personalities, our existence — as being one with sin.

And that thought scared the hell out of me, because I know that God hates sin with a holy, perfect, righteous, justified, and infinite wrath.

I think I understand Hell now.

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The “Proper Reward” of Sin is Hell

[M]arriage is the proper reward for a real lover … The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
— Genesis 2:24

… and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
— John 3:19

“And their soul delights in their abominations…”
— Isaiah 66:3

“… if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you …”
— Genesis 4:6-7

… when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.
— James 1:14-15

“They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”
— Isaiah 66:24

… a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I know the objections: “How can a loving God send people to Hell? In fact, doesn’t the Bible say that ‘God is love’? How can God be loving if He wants people to suffer consciously for eternity? People don’t deserve to be infinitely tormented for finite sins committed while they were alive. We didn’t ask to be born! It’s unfair!”

The answer is: Yes, of course God loves people (John 3:16). But what makes you think you will still be a person once you are in Hell?

Hell is not a place, primarily. Hell is a state of being. It is what you become when you “become sin.” Hell is being sin.

If marriage is the proper reward of a lover, and if we love darkness, sin, instead of the light of God, and if marriage means becoming “one flesh” with the object of our love, then that means we lovers of darkness and sin become one with that sin. And the only thing that sin can do is die. Death is the natural activity of sin, just as the natural progression of conception is to lead to birth (James 1:14-15). It is not arbitrary, it is not a “reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it.” Death is the “activity” of sin “in consummation.”

This horribly warps the snobby, ubiquitous, childhood jeer, “If you love it so much why don’t you marry it?”

If you love sin you marry sin, whether you realize it or not, and when you marry your sin you become “one flesh” with sin.

You have become sin. God hates sin. You have married sin and become one with it. You “exchanged the truth of God for the lie” (Romans 1:25). You loved darkness rather than the light. You have chosen to do the “works of the devil,” and you “have delighted in your own abominations,” and you do them so much that you become one with them — you have become sin.

And God hates sin.

God — the infinitely powerful Creator of the universe — hates sin.

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God Hates Sin

Then He said to the disciples, “It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come!”
— Luke 17:1

He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.
— I John 3:8

“His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
— Matthew 3:12

“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'”
— Matthew 25:41

And for “this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” And it is a little thing for Him to “thoroughly clean out His threshing floor,” His creation, for Jesus is the Creator (John 1:1-3). And it will be no more work to Him to destroy sin forever than it is for a farmer to throw away and burn the useless straw and chaff of his wheat field. He esteems sin no more than a farmer values chaff. Even the sinful rulers of the world are “less than nothing” to Him (Isaiah 40:17).

Did you think you would get a free pass just because you are the hero of your own story, of your own inner monologue? Or because of your family, or friends, or worldly achievements? Or that God would “let you into Heaven” just because you love yourself and think yourself to be “not so bad”? If you sin, and you love your sin, then you are sin. You are no longer a person. You no longer bear God’s image (Genesis 1:26) because Jesus “knew no sin” (II Cor. 5:21). There is nothing left about you that is able to be loved. Only a person can be loved, and if you are sin, you are no longer a person.

It is not a question of otherwise neutral human beings “being let in” to one place or the other. It is not what you do that condemns you, but what you love and what you are — that is why Hell is eternal, because it is not your actions but rather your own nature, you yourself, that is the problem. Your actions are the result of the problem, not the cause; but the more you act out of your own nature, the more those actions confirm your nature, just as “Cain who was of the wicked one (nature) and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his works were evil (actions)…” (I John 3:12). It doesn’t matter that your life and sins on Earth were finite. What you love and what you are, your very nature, is the problem, and that nature, if you love sin, has become sin. And all sin can do is die. There is no other possible destiny for sin.

Worse. It is worse than that. For you have become sin. And “woe to him through whom [offenses] come!” “To him who has” sin, “more will be given,” “lawlessness leading to lawlessness.” You have become sin, and sin’s “desire is for you” and for those souls around you, it “crouches at the door.” You become “the works of the devil,” and part of those works is to tempt and cause others to fall into offense, you “who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such [sinful] things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). You have become the sin through which offenses come to others, causing others to stumble and become sin.

And the only thing sin can do is die. Sin “gives birth to death.” You become something other than what you were, you become part of the works of the devil, you are “of the devil.” And there is an “everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” You will be the goats, not the sheep; the chaff, not the wheat; the demons, not the saints; and not for some arbitrary law that God could have made differently if He had wanted to, not because God is cruel or sadistic and overreacting with Hell, but because you are now sin, and the “proper reward” for sin, the “activity” of sin “in consummation” is to die, and Hell is eternal death.

Put out of your mind any popular imagery you may have of Hell — forget The Simpsons, forget Family Guy, forget even C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, Dante’s Inferno, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. There is no hierarchy of powers in Hell, no whimsical winged and horned figures with pitchforks, no throne for Satan to sit on; Hell is “prepared for the devil and his angels” (I John 3:8). It is the place where the demons, too, reap the death of their full-grown sins, not where they reign; the place where human sinners aligned with them reap the death they have sown. There is no pleasure in Hell, no joy, no happiness, no laughter, not one moment of relief or even of neutrality in feeling and mental conception other than horror and torment in your own sin. I doubt if there is even light. I doubt even if there will be the company of others, for that might give some comfort. “Misery loves company” — but Hell is the place where you are no longer a person, where you are utterly cut off from God, who is the source of all good gifts, of every pleasure you’ve ever experienced: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). There will be not one moment of pleasure in Hell for all eternity, because there will be none of God’s good gifts in Hell. Not one. It is eternal solitary confinement to and with yourself which has become sin, an abomination, an eternally dying corpse, a horror and a corruption which you will only be able to hate.

“And they shall go forth and look
Upon the corpses of the men
Who have transgressed against Me.
For their worm does not die,
And their fire is not quenched.
They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”
— Isaiah 66:24

Corpses forever, forever an abhorrence.

It is not a question of God hating some of His human creations and loving some others. It is a question of God loving His creation, all of it, and the humans who bear His image, with an infinite, holy love, and because of that love utterly, wrathfully hating the sin which destroys His beloved and dishonors His glory. God hates sin. Hell exists because God is love. How do you react when something or someone hurts someone you love? Hell is God’s love for His creation and for His own glory expressed as wrath against that which leads to the death of His beloved people and the belittling of His glory.

And you have become sin! You have become that less-than-human thing which God can only hate, which can only die. Can you feel it? Can you feel the light finding you, and revealing you to not be a person, but to rather be sin? To know that you have chosen to marry the darkness, and to “be united” in “one flesh” with your beloved sin? To imagine looking at the face of God and seeing only wrath? To know that God no longer sees you as a person, because you are no longer a person? There is nothing left that is lovable in you. Your very being, your entire existence, is sin now, and all sin can do is die. You will have become a torment to yourself and to all who are around you, and you will have caused others to stumble, “a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”

And sin begets more sin. You are sin forever. And the more you sin, the more you become sin. It is not like Hell is a place where you no longer incur guilt, where you stop existing, where you cease to do anything at all. Sin begets sin. “To him who has, more will be given,” “lawlessness leading to lawlessness,” forever. Sin is in you, and you are in sin, in a horrible reversal of John 17:21. There is no stopgap. Hell is the state of being where you continue to sin and to become more united to sin and you will be sin for eternity. There is not even a tragic melancholy of memory or sympathy available to you, for you have become sin, a monster, a work of the devil, no longer a person, no longer lovable, not even to yourself. You will hate your own existence. That is Hell.

And all God has to do, in the utmost height of justice and fairness, is give you over to your own sinful desires, which naturally “give birth to sin” and once full grown beget death, and let you “reap what you have sown” (Galatians 6:7). “Therefore God also gave them up … For this reason God gave them up … And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over …” (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). You will get what you want. You will have what you love, and you will be what you love. And you will hate it forever, because there is no lovable thing in sin, and you will have become sin. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.”

“But they did evil before My eyes,
And chose that in which I do not delight.”
— Isaiah 66:4

For God must defend His honor and glory, or else He is not righteous. All sin, down to the last atom in the last bullet that kills the last martyr, must be destroyed. God’s righteousness blasts all sin away. His wrath leaves no sin standing. His Name is at stake. If any sin is left over, then He is not perfectly just. His creation will be perfect, as He is perfect (Matthew 5:48).

For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it; for how should My name be profaned? And I will not give My glory to another.
— Isaiah 48:11

God loves His righteousness that much.

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He Made Him Who Knew No Sin to be Sin for Us, that We Might Become the Righteousness of God in Him

… “and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
— Matthew 1:21

The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
— II Peter 3:9

“Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked,” declares the Lord God, “and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?”
— Ezekiel 18:23

“… that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and you in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”
— John 17:21-23

… the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us….
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
— II Corinthians 5:21

God loves His righteousness that much.

And this is the Gospel, that God Himself has made a way for us to “become the righteousness of God,” which He loves with an infinite love — He is called “Jesus” because He saves us from our sins, which means He will save us from our selves which have become sin.

Jesus, who knew no sin, was made “to be sin for us,” which is as much to say He was “made one of us,” with the difference that He never loved sin. His works were never like ours, the “works of the devil.” He “knew no sin.” His love was always perfectly for His Father, and so therefore He is one with His Father, for love unites, and perfect love unites perfectly. In this eternal love, Jesus has had eternal glory, eternal righteousness, given Him by the Father from forever. And He is willing, ecstatically willing, to share that glory and righteousness with us — “and the glory which You gave Me I have given them” — so much that we become the righteousness of God which God loves — “that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and you in Me” (John 17:22).

This is not a contradiction of Isaiah 48:11, either. It may seem like it, because God says, “For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it; for how should My name be profaned? And I will not give My glory to another.” But He is not giving His glory to another, for when Jesus says “the glory which You gave Me I have given them” He also says that we will be and are one just as Jesus and the Father are one: “I in them, and you in Me.” He is infinitely gracious to us to count us as one with Himself, so that His glory is not given to another when it is given to us. For Jesus was made “to be sin for us” so that we might become the righteousness of God, like He is. That is the Great Exchange of II Corinthians 5:21. He has held nothing back from us, He has and is making us one with the Father — there is nothing greater — just as He is.

For He “who knew no sin was made to be sin for us.” He, in His death, took sin, perhaps Sin with a capital “S,” Sin Itself, into His human nature and suffered and was tormented with sin and died from sin, letting it become full-grown, “giving birth to death,” experiencing the “activity” of sin “in consummation” for us. He did it, He drained sin, and God’s wrath against sin, down to the last dregs. He let sin do its utmost worst to Him. Everything, all those horrible things of the first half of this post and the first half of the quotes with which I began, Jesus took on Himself. He became sin, became what we were becoming, that “abhorrence” of Isaiah 66:24, the “horror and corruption” which we do not hardly meet “even in a nightmare” (C.S. Lewis The Weight of Glory). He suffered the holy, righteous, justified wrath of God against the sin that He had become, for our sake! For He is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” and turn from our wicked ways and live! (II Peter 3:9; Ezekiel 18:23)

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He Died for All, Him, Who Died and Rose Again

For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.
— II Corinthians 5:14-15

For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin.
— Romans 6:5-7

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.
— Hebrews 2:9

The story of Him who was made to be sin for us doesn’t end there, for “he who has died has been freed from sin” (Romans 6:7). After death, there is nothing more for sin to do, nothing more it can do. Death is sin full-grown. Death is sin utterly consumed with itself. There is no next stage of growth, no worse power of sin than death.

… knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
— Romans 6:9

Sin did everything it possibly could to Jesus. Therefore, He died. Then, He rose again. And now there is nothing that is impossible for Him, for He has been freed from sin and death forever.

This seems like good news, gospel, for Jesus. But what about for us? What good is it for us if Jesus dies and rises again?

There doesn’t seem to be a natural, experiential, “proper reward” link between us and the fact of Jesus’ body dying and rising again, no “proper reward” for us based on Jesus’ death and resurrection. We didn’t have anything to do with it. That is to say, if the natural progression of sinful lust or desire is to lead to sin, and then sin full-grown to death (James 1:14-15), what is the mirror of that, what is the natural progression of Jesus’ death and resurrection leading to our deaths and resurrections? Why ought we “reckon [ourselves] to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord”? Or why is it true “that if One died for all, then all died”? And how did Jesus “taste death” for us all?

How does Jesus save us?

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By Grace You Have Been Saved

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God …
— Ephesians 2:4-8

The answer, it seems to me, is that there is no link, no natural progression, no “activity” of Christ’s death and resurrection that leads to “consummation” in our salvation.

So how are we saved?

Grace.

Pure grace, and mercy, and kindness of God, given to us in Jesus. “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.” Our reward of dying with Christ and therefore being raised with Him is, in fact, “tacked on” to us. We did nothing to merit it. Our actions were not leading to a proper reward of salvation. It is an unutterably free gift.

There is no sense trying to work for it. You were already sin, already aligned with the devil, already dead – and even then, God loved you enough to die for you. What could you possibly add?

The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would not have been divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is Love.
— C.S. Lewis, Membership

For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
— Romans 5:6-9

God’s wrath against sin was totally and fully displayed and satisfied against Jesus, who became sin for us, on the cross. From that act, and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, God graciously puts us in Jesus’ place, and calls us His children, “born again.” He takes our sin, and gives us His righteousness, out of sheer grace.

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You Must Be Born Again Into The New Creation

Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
— John 3:3

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
— I Peter 1:3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
— John 1:1-3

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation …
— II Corinthians 5:17

… the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him …
— Galatians 3:10

… the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
— Ephesians 4:24

… that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
— II Corinthians 5:21

And that grace is given us by divine fiat — that is, through the Creator’s creating anew. God is always the Creator, and all of His attributes are always at work in whatever He does, because He is perfect, and none of His attributes work against each other or are left on the shelf when God is working. God’s infinite creativity is always at work in His love and in His justice and in everything He is and does.

That is how we become “born again.” Our being born again is an act of the Creator, the Word, through His death and resurrection. The first creation was by His Word alone. This new creation is through His death and resurrection, and seems to be mediated in us (at least partially) through knowing Christ (Gal. 3:10) and through the righteousness and holiness that is given to us in Christ (Eph. 4:24). We had nothing at all to do with the first creation, but in the new creation we do seem to have a small part — we do the work which God has prepared for us to do (Eph. 2:10), we “work out our own salvation” that God is, at the same time, working into us, “both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13). And we could not work at all if God did not work first in us: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

And this new creation begins where the first creation ended — with us, with humans, the Image of God restored. This new creation works in the opposite direction from Genesis 1. In Genesis it is the very last work of God to create human beings; in the death and resurrection of Jesus it is the first work to create redeemed human beings for the new creation, and then from us, somehow, the new creation will spread to the rest of the universe:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. 
— Romans 8:18-23

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The “Proper Reward” Given to Jesus is the Bride of Christ

But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover … The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
— Genesis 2:24

Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
— Revelation 21:2

And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
So shall your God rejoice over you.
…
Indeed the LORD has proclaimed
To the end of the world:
“Say to the daughter of Zion,
‘Surely your salvation is coming;
Behold, His reward is with Him,
And His work before Him.'”
And they shall call them The Holy People,
The Redeemed of the LORD;
And you shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken.
— Isaiah 62:5, 11-12

I wrote above that I could not see any “link, no natural progression, no ‘activity’ of Christ’s death and resurrection that leads to ‘consummation’ in our salvation.” I wrote that because I was thinking along the line of our nature and activity going Godward, and could not see, rightly, how any of it would properly result in our salvation as our own activity in consummation. I had been thinking only of our nature and actions.

But in this analogy who is the lover, and who is the beloved? Who is the actor who, in C.S. Lewis’ words, is rewarded with the “activity itself in consummation”?

Jesus is.

So what do Jesus’ nature and actions merit?

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain
To receive power and riches and wisdom,
And strength and honor and glory and blessing!”
— Revelation 5:12

… Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
— Hebrews 12:2

And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
— Ephesians 1:22

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
— I John 5:14

“Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” 
— John 17:24-26

Jesus, in becoming like us, incarnate as a man, being made “to be sin,” then condemning sin in His body (Romans 8:3), and dying, then rising again — all this “activity” leads to the “proper reward” of “power and riches and wisdom, and strength and honor and glory and blessing,” for He has done what only He could do, all according to the Father’s will, and therefore in full confidence He asks for His full reward.

And that full reward, that “proper reward,” includes the church, His bride. Us. His actions merit us. He wins us, and asks for us: “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am.”

The link between the action and the proper reward is not in us, but in Him. The reason we are saved is because we are Jesus’ proper reward for His love, part of the “joy set before Him.”

There is no greater love than this.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?
— Romans 8:31-32

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!
— I John 3:1

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
— II Corinthians 5:21

---

What Must I Do To Be Saved, And How Can I Be Sure I Am?

Simply put, after 7,000 words:

Pray, surrender, and ask God to save you from your sin and make you new in Christ Jesus (II Corinthians 5:17); every day, fight against sin with the power of the Holy Spirit given to you (Romans 8:13-14), knowing that if you hate your sin and make war on it in this way that is a sign of your new birth which cannot be taken from you; believe that God is able and willing to do everything He has promised to do for you (James 2:23); love others as you love yourself; and set your aim to know and to love Jesus your Savior with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength (Matthew 22:37).

 

The Implication of Muskets

In the Second Amendment, the word “musket” appears zero times. It says “arms.” Weapons. There is no one specific kind of weapon that the Second Amendment guarantees to citizens.

THE SECOND AMENDMENT

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Still, the argument that muskets must have been what the Founding Fathers had in mind persists, and that is because it does have a certain kind of logic to it — the kinds of “arms” the Founding Fathers knew personally included muskets and whatever kinds of pistols, sabers, knives, etc… were extant at the time of ratification of the Bill of Rights: December 15, 1791.

But follow the implications! If it is true that the Founding Fathers had muskets in mind when writing the Second Amendment, then that means that they were envisioning non-military citizens, “the people,” as having the right to own — and obviously use — precisely the same kinds of weapons that soldiers in the military used at the time.

The Second Amendment gave the first-ever citizens of the United States the right to own the same kinds of weapons that U.S. military of their day had used in the Revolutionary War. The Founders knew very well the destructive capability of muskets — almost all of them fought in the Revolution, and almost all of them must have, at at least one time in their lives, fired a musket at an enemy, or seen what happened to their fellow Revolutionaries when a musket ball would hit a human body. Muskets were, in fact, weapons of war. “Military-grade weapons,” to use a favorite phrase of the media.

Surely the opening phrase, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” implicates this? What good is a militia, an army of citizens, against a government-backed invading army — the only real thing that could threaten a state — or, and this is far more likely, their own government turned totalitarian (the Revolution was against their own government, after all) if they are not allowed to defend the “security of [their] free state” with the same kinds of weapons that an enemy army would be using to threaten that security?

That is the truth of insisting that “muskets” are what is meant by “arms” in the Second Amendment — the Founding Fathers wanted American citizens to be able to defend themselves with weapons that were useful in wartime. The application of this, then, is that American citizens have the right to a fighting chance if it ever comes to an invasion by an enemy military — and that means that citizens must have the right to weapons that can reliably defend the “security of a free state,” and, by extension, them being a part of the free state, their own individual lives.

usconstitutionfacts-danielledelatorre.weebly.com

Star Wars: Who Snoke Is Should Have Been Important (And Could Have Been Epic)

Continuing in the spirit of my “Re-imagining Star Wars” series of posts, I put forth here a few ideas I think would have been great concerning Supreme Leader Snoke and the entire premise for the conflict in Episodes VII, VIII, and IX.

(Spoilers Ahead)

From Comicbooknews.com

Canon Snoke: A Terrible, Half-Assed Character Creation

Snoke was a dividing factor in the New Trilogy right from the beginning, but now that The Last Jedi has happened, he’s truly fallen by the throne-side.

It no longer matters who he was, which means it really doesn’t mean all that much to us that Kylo Ren defeated him, does it? Sure, yes, the way Kylo killed him was clever (at least I personally thought), playing on Snoke’s pride in thinking that he knew every thought of his apprentice. But did it really have the same gravity as did Emperor Palpatine’s death? Shouldn’t it have had? All we were allowed to learn about Snoke was he was just a really powerful, highly influential leader of the bad guys who looked physically gross and that he opposed the not-gross-looking Daisy Rey Ridley and our plucky, underdog “Resistance” heroes. His physical appearance and his manner of speech were almost the primary reasons we knew we were supposed hate him. Oh yes, we see him in his giant hologram in The Force Awakens, and we know that, as the leader of the First Order he has blood on his hands. But that’s all.

That may be acceptable villain-creation for something like Transformers: Beast Wars, where the Predacons are scary-looking dinosaurs  who fight the nice, friendly Maximals featuring, among other furry creatures, a gorilla and a cheetah… But not for Star Wars.

Star Wars has its own internal, consistent history which J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson should have had to take into account while writing their scripts and creating their new characters — and I am not thinking of the Expanded Universe books. I can show from just the movies, the Accepted Disney Canon, that Snoke is an awful character.

The reason we needed a backstory to Snoke, emphatically contrary to what Johnson said in an interview here, is that Star Wars fans already knew that the Sith were defeated in The Return of the Jedi, and we knew what Yoda said in The Phantom Menace, “only two there are, no more, no less; a Master, and an Apprentice.” It doesn’t matter if you think, “Phantom sucked!” It was part of the lore, “The Rule of Two.” You don’t mess with the lore established in the movies themselves. Disney can get rid of all the novels. Fine. But you undermine your own in-universe history and break your own rules when you go against the movies which you kept in your canon. It breaks the immersion.

We knew that Darth Sidious and Darth Vader were the Last Sith Lords. That was movie canon fact. So, where in the galaxy did Supreme Leader Snoke come from? Given the Rule of Two, Snoke’s story is not peripheral. It is interesting. It is intriguing. It should have been central. How do you not follow that line of story and try to at least give some thought to revealing this mysterious character’s background? The point of a mystery is that it gets revealed, eventually, much to the audience’s delight, right?

Johnson’s answer in that interview is that “fans of the original trilogy also knew next to nothing about the history of Emperor Palpatine.”

Except we did know!

We knew from the Prequels. The Prequels happened. You can’t just pretend you never saw them or that the events that happened in them don’t matter. The Original Trilogy no longer exists en medias res. In fact, it never did. George Lucas wrote Episodes I, II, and III at the same time or even before he wrote IV, V, and VI. We have had Palpatine’s backstory now for almost 20 years, and it was a good backstory: Palpatine was the titular “Phantom Menace,” hiding in the shadows, manipulating the galactic government, biding his time, exuding patience and strategy, playing two galaxy-spanning armies against the middle until the Clone Wars’ only possible outcome was to leave him last man standing, no matter if the Republic or the Separatists won, with him ruling the galaxy and having corrupted the most powerful Jedi ever, Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi of Prophecy, to the Dark Side. It was good!

It doesn’t matter if you hated them. The Prequels happened. They are canon. And your job was to work with the material that they gave you, Mr. Johnson. What a cop out! How lazy can you get in creating a character? J.J. Abrams shares a lot of the blame, but honestly, do you have no imagination? Could you not at least have tried?

The interview goes on: “Telling it [Snoke’s backstory] himself in The Last Jedi would have felt like he [Johnson] was shoehorning information on the audience that would have become a distraction. ‘It would have stopped any of these scenes dead cold if he [Snoke] had stopped and given a 30-second speech about how he’s Darth Plagueis,’ Johnson said. ‘It doesn’t matter to Rey. If he had done that, Rey would have blinked and said, ‘Who?’ And the scene would have gone on. And I’m not saying he’s Darth Plagueis!”

No. The distraction is the lack of information. Given what we thought we knew about the state of the conflict between the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force, the Jedi vs. the Sith, we needed to know where Snoke fit in, beyond just him being powerful in the Force. We needed to know how he related to Palpatine, Vader, and the history of the Sith and the Dark Side. That is a huge source of historical, in-universe, dramatic conflict and intrigue, sir, and you and Disney blew it.

There were so many chances, too! J.J. Abrams could have hinted at it in any number of moments in The Force Awakens. What about the dialogue between Han and Leia, where they literally talk us through the backstory of their son and how it was Snoke who lured Ben to the Dark Side? If you can’t reveal the backstory more creatively, then fine, have characters tell it. But you can’t just have two of the main characters talk about the New Bad Guy as if they themselves aren’t curious about him! Did Han and Leia not wonder? Did Luke not know anything? Or scrap all that! Why not have Ben Solo himself tell the audience why he follows Snoke? Would he not, when he was first becoming Kylo Ren, have asked Snoke something about who he was, where he was from, how he became so powerful? Or in The Last Jedi, why not have Luke tell Rey about Snoke in one of those many unnecessary island scenes, if Johnson was so concerned about not stopping “any of these scenes dead cold” with Rey and Snoke and Kylo together in Snoke’s throne room?

Suppose Gandalf had never given Frodo the run-down on who Sauron is, and suppose no other hints of Sauron’s history were ever given during the trilogy, movies or books, and the events that take place in them: Doesn’t Sauron’s backstory lend gravitas to his menace? And wouldn’t LotR feel less important without a villain who has historical depth in Middle-Earth?

That’s all I’m after here. I want to be able to like Snoke as a villain character. I want to be able to like the New Trilogy. But as it stands I just can’t, and the lack of explanation for Snoke is one of the primary reasons why.

So, below is how Snoke should have been handled, in my opinion. I do not say “in my humble opinion,” because I’ve “lived” in the Star Wars universe ever since I began to love reading, and I don’t think I can quite achieve humility on this point. The first books I ever remember reading just for the pleasure of reading were the Jedi Apprentice books, featuring a teenage Obi-Wan and his early adventures with Master Qui-Gon. I must have been in sixth grade. And from that time on, up to the point where I entered college, I must have watched the movies multiple times a year and had read at least one Star Wars book series a year, every year, until my literary interests broadened in college. I skipped reading Harry Potter when they first came out and were popular almost for the sole reason that they were not Star Wars. At one point in time I owned over 100 books (I counted many times) from the Star Wars Expanded Universe (an achievement for which I was sort of famous, or infamous, or for which I was laughed at in high school). I treated it as “history.” I wanted to learn the “history” of the Star Wars universe, so I read chronologically from Obi-Wan’s time up through the furthest timeline of events in the universe involving Luke, Han, Leia, and their children, up through what I consider to be the greatest series of all, The New Jedi Order.

Part of My Personal Jedi Archive (Erased from Memory by Disney)

I’ve grown up with the video games, too. I know and love the “feel” of the Star Wars universe, in my own unique perspective of course, and everything below comes out that.

***

The Theme of Star Wars

The theme, or “the point,” the “what-the-story-is-about,” of the Star Wars Saga is vast, reaching to mythic levels of Good vs. Evil. The Primary Drama is Good vs. Evil, the Light vs. the Dark. To go any lower in dramatic import than this most basic of dynamics is to not live up to what Star Wars has already achieved. “Want vs. Need,” “Love vs. Duty,” or any other such worthy literary theme, is not on its own good enough for Star Wars.

But! You cannot write a story about Good vs. Evil as such. The drama of Light vs. Dark must be “incarnated” into Characters. That is true in any good story: The Story Theme must be “incarnated” into Story Characters. So, George Lucas, in his young, earnest, 1970s genius, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (which I wrote about here), “incarnates,” or “translates,” or “scales down,” the struggle between the Dark and Light from its mythic, abstract dynamic into the individual personalities and actions of one family of Characters, the Skywalkers, and the lives of other characters that the Skywalkers touch throughout their history. Even their name, Skywalker, is important: “Walkers of the Sky.” They are the “demigods” in the classical sense, standing in relation to the Star Wars universe where Hercules and Aeneas stand in relation to Greco-Roman mythology, or where the Volsungs stand in relation to Odin in Norse mythology. Everyone who strives with or against the Skywalkers strives with or against the “gods.” In terms of the Theme, neither the Republic, nor the Empire, nor the Sith, nor the Rebels, nor the Jedi, are as important as the Skywalkers. Every other element of the Star Wars universe, even the Force itself, serves to help George Lucas show the Theme of Good vs. Evil and solve the Problem of how Good can triumph over Evil through who the Skywalkers are and the actions that they take.

This is how the Theme plays out over the course of the first six movies:

Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Much of the above mythic elements of Star Wars are buried deeply in the story structure of Episodes I through VI, but where they come closest to the surface of audience awareness is in the Prophecy of the Chosen One. We learn about this in Episode I through Qui-Gon and the Jedi Council. There is an ancient prophecy that says that one day, the Jedi will find, or be found by, the Chosen One, a “vergence in the Force” who will “bring balance to the Force.” In Episode III, Obi-Wan indicates that the Jedi belief was that the Chosen One was supposed to “destroy the Sith, not join them!” Yoda warns the Prophecy “misread, may have been,” because all it said was that the Chosen One would “bring balance.”

(If you are a Prequel-hater, and if the religious idea of “prophecy” seems to you out of place in Star Wars, let me submit that you are forgetting that Luke “foresaw” through the Force Han and Leia’s future plight on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. Why not have some ancient Force user be able to “foresee” the Skywalkers and write down the vision in the form of a prophecy? And let me also submit that the Jedi were clearly thought of as a “religion,” as Han says in A New Hope, “hokey religions …” and that in Rogue One we literally have a monk who is not a Jedi, but is clearly connected with the Jedi in a religious sense.)

So, in Episode I, succinctly: Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One, begins his Hero’s Journey, and the question of whether or not the Light Side or the Dark will win is still in the air.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones

The Chosen One, Anakin Skywalker, begins to fall to the Dark Side, and it begins to look like the Dark will win the battle against the Light, Evil against the Good.

Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith

Anakin becomes Darth Vader, abandoning the Light. It seems the Dark, Evil, has won, except for the glimmer of a New Hope in the bloodline of the Skywalkers continuing in the Children of the Chosen One (who therefore are part of the prophecy themselves), Luke and Leia.

Episode IV: A New Hope

Luke Skywalker, Son of the Chosen One, begins to learn how to use the Light Side of the Force.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Luke learns the truth about his father. The drama of Light vs. Dark, Good vs. Evil, becomes “incarnated” fully into Luke vs. Anakin.

Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi

Luke confronts his father for the final time, and it is the love of a son for his father that gives the Light Side the edge and then, ultimately, the reawakened love of Anakin, the father, for his son, which finally defeats the Dark.

***

Where can someone like Snoke fit into all of the above? What area of the Theme has yet to be explored? The answer is: Very little. Which is why I was always skeptical of any possible Episodes VII, VIII, or IX. Oh yes, I would have loved to have seen some of the great Expanded Universe books on the silver screen, but the Theme was complete. We saw how the Light triumphed over the Dark. Any other story worth telling in the Star Wars universe was never going to be able to show anything substantially different than the Resolution of The Return of the Jedi. I think this is why George Lucas never did the sequel trilogy himself. He knew he had accomplished in I through VI everything he needed to accomplish to show the Theme of Good triumphing over Evil inside the fictional universe he created.

Finis.

The New Trilogy and Snoke, Re-Imagined

The only loose end from Episodes I through VI that I can see is this: Who made the Prophecy in the first place? This is where Snoke should have come in. Let’s tie the End to the Beginning.

But first: Do you remember the movie trailers for VII and VIII? They were good! I honestly enjoy them much more than the actual movies. I still get chills watching them. The music is the best!

These trailers, especially from The Force Awakens, gave me all of these visions and impressions and hopes running in my head before I saw the actual movie. I wrote about some of them in this post from Christmas 2015: “Star Wars, Episode VII: The Return of Myth?” The actual movies did not live up to the emotion that I got from the trailers. Not even close. The trailers are like refined poetry; the movies themselves are clunky, long-winded prose by comparison.

So, here is my proposed re-imagined premise for the New Trilogy and Snoke’s backstory, tied in with the already established lore from the canonical movies, with as little or none of the original and far superior Expanded Universe as my imagination can manage. I’ll do my best to work with what Disney has given us.

The State of the Galaxy After The Return of the Jedi

• After the Second Death Star’s destruction and Palpatine’s death, the Rebels gain even more support from Imperial defectors and other planets around the galaxy, and the shipyard industry of Mon Calamari (Admiral Akbar’s homeworld) in particular gains new resources to make bigger and better battleships. In the EU their answer to Star Destroyers were the Mon Calamari Star Defenders (they were awesome).
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• Within about 2 years the Rebels reform the Senate and retake Coruscant, creating the New Republic. Either Rebel Leaders Mon Mothma, a former senator from the Old Republic, or Leia Organa, (adopted) daughter of former senator Bail Organa, are the obvious candidates to become the New Supreme Chancellor – or maybe the New Republic will eschew the old, aristocratic-sounding titles in favor of “President” or “Prime Minister.” By the time of The Force Awakens, within that 30-year time period, there may have been 3 or 4 New Republic Prime Ministers.
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• The Galactic Civil War is declared officially over. However, guerrilla forces of die-hard Imperials still exist in the Outer Rim, perhaps even with Super Star Destroyers controlled by the Imperial Moffs (like Grand Moff Tarkin). The New Republic would have poured resources into building their own Super Star Destroyer-class ships to combat them. I’m thinking of the United States vs. the U.S.S.R. in the Cold War. It would be a galactic arms race, but one the Imperials knew they would lose since their resources and power had so greatly been diminished, especially after the Battle of Jakku. So, by the time the chronology of events reaches the first days of the new war with the First Order, the New Republic would have many, many warships and new and better starfighters, and they would probably have re-purposed Imperial Star Destroyers, even a Super Star Destroyer or two, in their fleet. You don’t get rid of enemy ships you capture, you re-purpose them, make them your own.
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• Luke Skywalker would have taken Master Yoda’s “great commission” to heart, to pass on what he has learned, and begun training a New Jedi Order coinciding with the creation of the New Republic. (One of the things Abrams and Johnson got right.)
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• It would probably have taken Luke several years to test Force-sensitive candidates and gotten together a large class of students. I don’t think he would have waited the 15 or so years for his nephew Ben to have come of training age to begin. There should have been Luke’s “First Class,” already trained and active in the Galaxy, and Leia should have been one of them, at least nominally – half-Jedi, half-politician in the New Republic. Ben Solo would have been part of the Second Class.
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• And the New Jedi Temple should have been on Yavin IV. The New Republic would have given Luke an entire planet for his own in order to rebuild the Jedi, surely? And it would have been great fan service – why not bring back Yavin IV?

All told, just before the First Order appears on the scene, this is the state of the Galaxy: A strong, thriving New Republic controls the majority of the Galaxy, and Luke’s New Jedi Order is slowly but surely putting the Jedi back to work keeping the peace and administering justice. The most powerful, most exciting, most celebrated of the New Jedi is the up-and-coming Ben Solo, son of the Rebellion Hero Han Solo and the New Republic celebrity politician Leia Organa Solo, and nephew to the legend himself, Luke Skywalker.

The Premise of the New Trilogy and How Snoke Fits into the Skywalker Saga

So, what happened? What did we miss? What did our heroes miss? They thought they had won. The Empire was defeated. Luke knew that Palpatine and Vader were the last of the Sith. Things were going so well! Where did the First Order suddenly come from, and who in the galaxy is Supreme Leader Snoke?

Let us say that Ben Solo has had visions, or dreams, all his life. A voice in his head sometimes, subtle, not often remembered. A sense of someone reaching out to him through the Force from a vast distance. Perhaps Luke misinterprets this, thinking it is the Force itself reaching out to Ben. Let us say that Yoda and Obi-Wan, Force ghosts, told Luke about the Prophecy of the Chosen One, and so Luke has this in mind, thinking that Ben is now the vessel for that Prophecy’s fulfillment, the shining pupil who will be the true return of the Jedi.

Ben, however, is convinced that the voice is the voice of his Grandfather, Anakin, whose Force ghost has not been seen either by himself or by Luke since Endor, and they don’t know why.

Let’s keep the motif of Han Solo being an absent father. Not necessarily a bad father, but an absent father due to his duties in the New Republic. Let’s not make Han go back to being a smuggler. That was stupid. That was just pure nostalgia driving narrative choices. It’s like Finn says in TFA, “The Rebellion General?” then Rey gasps and says “No the smuggler!” That was dumb. Han has just as much right to be remembered — no, MORE right to be remembered for what he did in the Rebellion. His smuggling days were under the radar, hidden, secretive. Not widely known, surely?

So, Han is an absent father, and Ben Solo, in typical angsty teenage fashion, latches on to the voice in his head and the idea of his powerful, famous Grandfather. “Show me again, Grandfather, the power of the Dark Side.” The voice in his head slowly would turn Ben’s thoughts to the Dark Side, slowly convince him that his legacy as a member of the Skywalker bloodline is to rule the Galaxy as the most powerful Force user, not “Jedi,” and that Luke is holding him back.

(Yes, this is Anakin’s complaint against Obi-Wan in Episode II, “he’s holding me back!,” but if J.J. Abrams can get away with repainting A New Hope and Rian Johnson can get away with repainting a hodgepodge of Empire and Return of the Jedi, then I’m going to allow myself to get away with repainting this particular bit of character motivation stolen from Anakin and Obi-Wan and transferred to Ben and Luke.)

Luke would be trying everything he can to stop Ben from falling to the Dark Side, offering warning after warning, “stifling” teenage Ben Solo, and fueling the fire of the voice in Ben’s head, luring him to the Dark Side. This is how Luke should have had a hand in Ben Solo’s downfall. Not the bullshit Rian Johnson came up with in VIII. Apart from anything else, Luke’s solution in VIII is way too predictable and easy. It wasn’t worthy of Luke’s character. Luke, the Hero, should have tried everything right. In this re-imagining, he did get everything right, and still failed.

It doesn’t take long until Ben goes AWOL from Yavin IV and the New Jedi Temple, following the voice he thinks is his Grandfather’s, and instead finds himself confronted by Snoke and the First Order. By this time, the Dark Side and Snoke’s whispers have so gotten hold of his mind that Ben’s embrace of the Dark Side is swift and (maybe) total.

Luke follows Ben, however, and for the first time learns about Snoke’s existence and must confront him. An epic Force battle ensues, but Ben turns on Luke in the fight, and Luke fails. His only option is to close off his own Force presence (like he does in TLJ, as Rey says she can sense nothing from him) so that Snoke cannot track him. Luke escapes, leaving Ben in Snoke’s hands.

Luke cannot help, however, feeling echoes in the Force, as Obi-Wan felt the deaths of everyone on Alderaan, when his other Jedi pupils are systematically slaughtered by Snoke and Ben. Despair takes hold of him, and he does indeed begin to wonder if the Jedi shouldn’t just disappear, since they always seem to create students who inevitably fall to the Dark Side through the failure of their teachers. That’s not a bad story. However, Luke Skywalker is Luke Skywalker, and even though he blames himself and cannot face Han and Leia for the loss of their son, he does not fully retreat from the Galaxy, because he learned something about Snoke in that confrontation which prompted his search for the First Jedi Temple.

So, just who is Snoke? Snoke should have been an ancient Jedi, in fact the Jedi Master who saw and recorded the Prophecy of the Chosen One in the first place. He should have been alive when one of the history books among the ancient Jedi texts in Luke’s tree-temple on his island was written, and from that Jedi history text Luke should have learned the first part of Snoke’s backstory: How in the Last Great War between the Jedi and the Sith, after he saw his Prophecy, Snoke fell to the Dark Side, but before the War’s end he disappeared from all records. The Jedi text would conclude this section of history by announcing that this was the beginning of the Great Peace, the time of the “over a thousand generations” when the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic, as Obi-Wan says they were in Episode IV, the “over a  millennia” of time during which the Sith have not been seen, as Jedi Master Ki Adi Mundi says in Episode I.

Throughout the history of the Galactic Republic, Snoke had been trapped in the Unknown Regions, the uncharted, unexplored quadrant of the galaxy on the edge of which Starkiller Base is located. Snoke had fallen to the Dark Side, joined the Sith, and gone on an expedition into the Unknown Regions when the Sith realized they were about to lose the war against the Jedi. Snoke is either so powerful in the Force that he can prolong his life indefinitely, or else he is of an alien race like Maz Kanata or Yoda, who seem able to live for about 1,000 years or more.

Once inside the Unknown Regions, the only safe space lanes behind Snoke become blocked by black holes or supernovae (there are hyperspace charts for a reason in the Star Wars universe — Han says as much to Luke in IV, “bounce too close to a supernova and that will end your trip real quick”). For 1,000 years or more, Snoke is trapped inside the Unknown Regions. Making the most of his time, he and the Sith soldiers who went with him create the First Order. They rule many planets in the Region throughout this millennium. All the while, Snoke hones his powers in the Dark Side. He becomes so powerful that he can see across vast distances of space, and he is aware, when the time comes, of Palpatine’s rise to power. However, Palpatine’s Empire lasts only about 25 years. Paltry! Snoke has ruled the First Order for a millennia. Snoke is enraged by how feebly the Sith have been led by Palpatine, and vows to return to Charted Space to restore the glory of the ancient Sith.

Then, after Palpatine and Vader die, the remnant of the Empire retreats into its last strongholds, hidden on the edges of the Unknown Regions. In an attempt to regain power, some clever Imperial scientist invents the technology that allows them to drain whole stars for energy. Their first test is to siphon off the last remnant energy of a supernova, thought to be a safe bet because the star has already gone nova and has been slowly burning out for 1,000 years. When they clear it, the ancient space lane opens up again.

In no time at all, Snoke and his First Order fleet appear out of hyperspace. “The true Sith have returned!” This would have been a real chance to have gone somewhat in a “new direction” (as every Last Jedi apologist insists that movie is). A chance to have invented brand new starship designs and capabilities, not merely Star Destroyers with slightly different geometry. The remnants of Palpatine’s Empire quickly join with the First Order (the appearance of which would have seemed like providence to the Imperial true-believers), and they perfect the Starkiller technology with genius scientists from the Unknown Regions.

However, technological supremacy is not enough for Snoke. No, he has been mulling over his own Prophecy of the Chosen One for 1,000 years. It drove him almost insane to have to watch as Anakin’s life came and went, and Snoke himself was not there to see to it that the most powerful, Force-sensitive being to ever live was the ushering in of a “balance” to the Force that put the Dark Side in power and the Sith in charge. Thankfully, the Bloodline of the Chosen One survived. Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa Skywalker Solo may prove incorruptible, but the Child of Leia, the Grandson of Anakin Skywalker, with all his raw and as yet unfocused, practically untrained ability, would do just as well. Maybe even better, “something truly special” as his bit of dialogue states in one of the above movie trailers.

Now for another awesome new direction: The stage is set for some truly epic space battles. Think: Hundreds of capital ships in dozens of fleets around the entire galaxy, whose flagships would have been the Super Star Destroyers and MC Star Defenders of the New Republic Fleet, clashing with the awesome firepower and alien technology of the First Order from the Unknown Regions. The size of the War between the First Order and the New Republic would have dwarfed the Clone Wars, and then, Episode VII could have culminated with the First Order’s completion of the Starkiller Base and the destruction of Coruscant itself (not the “Hosnian System,” or whatever meaningless planetary system is actually destroyed in TFA). Throughout the New Trilogy then, this War would have been one strain of the plot, and the New Republic would fail over and over again, unable to get even close to the Starkiller until the very end, in Episode IX. Why not have a superweapon survive for longer than one movie? That would have been a “new direction.”

Rey and the Destiny of the Light

The other, more personal, character-driven strain of the plot of the New Trilogy, then, would have followed Rey and her search for Luke and her burgeoning connection to and power in the Force. Which brings up the question of who, exactly, Rey is and where she fits into the Saga of the Skywalkers.

Let’s keep the canon movie story that she is truly no one. Her parentage and bloodline have nothing to do with the Skywalkers, Kenobis, or Palpatines, or any Jedi or Sith. She is truly a new Force anomaly, the same way Anakin was. A “new direction.” That is the point of Rey. She is the “awakening” of The Force Awakens, obviously, and that awakening is the signal that the Skywalker prominence in the Force is coming to an end.

Now, here is another enormous point of idiocy on Rian Johnson’s part — what in the world was the point of showing us the ancient Jedi texts, and what in the galaxy was the reason for Luke to search out the First Jedi Temple, if Luke’s only aim was to hide? Wouldn’t any remote, unnoticed, unremarkable planet have done? Why did it have to be the First Jedi Temple? If Luke was disillusioned with the Jedi, why would it be the First Jedi Temple? There should have been a point to the setting. Character and Setting — two of the main components of a story.

So, in this re-imagining, we have to redeem the setting of planet Ahch-To and the significance of the First Jedi Temple, too.

Let us say that when Luke finds the Temple on planet Ahch-To, he experiences a vision of his own — a new Force prophecy to combat Snoke’s ancient prophecy. Luke is shown that he will be found by someone very strong in the Force, maybe stronger than he is himself, that he “will not be the last Jedi,” and that he must wait in the Temple until he is found. That doesn’t mean he can’t give some help, however, so he creates a star chart map that will lead to Ahch-To.

But! He cannot risk the chart falling into the hands of the First Order and Snoke, so he takes two ancient Jedi holocrons from the Temple which can only be accessed by the Light Side of the Force. One holocron he leaves with whoever it was who initiated the events that led to the holocron-data drive being in the possession of Lor San Tek (the old man who gives the map to Poe in VII). The other holocron is what he sends out with R2-D2 in his X-Wing, truly stranding himself on the island. R2 will erase his own memory once he gets back to New Republic space and into the company of Leia and C-3P0 once again, letting them know the plan, giving them hope even while they, too, must wait and watch as the First Order and the New Republic cause death on a massive scale the size of which the Galaxy has never known. Leia can open R2’s holocron. Then, seeing the incomplete map, she forms the “Resistance” as a separate, special forces branch of the New Republic military for the purpose of seeking out the other half of the map to Luke. Only she wouldn’t call it the Resistance, because that never made sense, unless it is a misdirection or code name to keep the First Order from finding out the true purpose of the Resistance.

Now, if the Force is “an energy field that surrounds us, penetrates us, binds the galaxy together,” as Obi-Wan says, and if the Force is literally in every living thing, and even in rocks and X-Wings, as Yoda tells Luke on Dagobah, how will the Force react when Snoke, the Dark Side, and Starkiller begin extinguishing life and causing destruction and pain on an unprecedented scale across the cosmos?

Let us say, the Force will “awake.” And Rey, a nobody from nowhere, is chosen by the Force itself to help the Skywalker Prophecy’s fulfillment and finally bring the balance to the Force that the Prophecy promised, and she will become the new focus for the Light Side of Force’s action in the universe. Events conspire to bring Rey into contact with Leia and her “Resistance” in the midst of the greater War between the New Republic and the First Order, and Leia, having had at least some training in the Force, recognizes Rey’s potential and gives her all the aid she can to help find and open the holocron at last.

Snoke and Kylo Ren, however, are aware of Rey through the Force, “there has been an awakening. Have you felt it?” And so, through their Force knowledge and intelligence gathering done by the First Order, Snoke and Ben learn about the existence of the map, and then the race is on to find it first — Rey vs. Ben. Like in The Force Awakens, Rey is the victor, getting the holocron, using her (not yet fully developed for Pete’s sake!) Force sensitivity to open the holocron and reveal the star chart to Ahch-To. Then, when she finally arrives on the island and meets Luke for the first time, its significance is that much greater, to both Luke and to us, the audience.

From that point on, Rey should have been in training with Luke. She should have learned about the deep history of the Jedi, about Snoke’s origins, and about the Prophecy, and about Luke’s conviction that the Jedi, as the institution that they were, needed to end, but afterwards be reformed. They need to start again, and do what they can to learn from the Jedi’s failures to prevent future falls to the Dark Side, and Rey is the blank slate of that new beginning.

I think that new beginning with Rey is something like what Rian Johnson was going for, but with his blast shield down he couldn’t see, and the Disney training droid of time constraints and profit-margins got the best of him.

***

Conclusion

So, in this re-imagined premise for the New Trilogy, Episode VII ends with the First Order’s Starkiller Base destroying Coruscant and sending the New Republic reeling, but not yet defeated, on the one hand; on the other hand, we have seen how Rey awakens to her Force powers, links up with Leia, and finds and uses the holocron star chart to find Luke and the First Jedi Temple.

Rey would have in this Episode VII not yet confronted Kylo Ren. At least not successfully. If she had, she certainly would not have been able to best him in lightsaber combat or a battle with the Force. Instead, let us say that Han Solo gets in the way before Kylo can capture or confront Rey, and as he does Ben hesitates, as he really does seem to do in TFA, but Snoke’s influence is still too strong in his mind, and that is why and how Han dies, a sacrifice to save Rey, which could have easily coincided with his fatherly attempt to reconnect with his son and bring Ben home again to the Light Side.

Given this set-up, how would Episode VIII have gone? That’s a question for another blog post. This one is already just about 6,500 words long. But it all came out of just one idea — that Supreme Leader Snoke’s identity should have meant something. Great villains create great stories and great heroes.

Maybe we will get some kind of Snoke backstory yet. But if he really truly is dead, it still won’t matter. And if he isn’t dead, then we have descended out of epic myth into soap opera territory. As Snoke’s character actually is, just the generic, gross-looking, powerful bad guy who appears out of nowhere with no anchor in the historical lore of the universe, he brings down the characters of Rey and Ben Solo with him. They all could have been so much more.