Ransom

Yesterday, I ran across this passage from C S Lewis' book, Perelandra. I sent to my email so I could just read it for myself. This beautiful Eve-like creature, has never yet made a decision to turn away from her Beloved's will for her. Lewis plays with the idea; what if there's a world where Eve chooses not to sin? The main character, a man from Earth named Ransom finds himself in the 'garden' showing the Beauty that she could choose to walk away from God's will by listening to the 'serpent.'

‘I have been so young till this moment that all my life now seems to have been a kind of sleep. I have thought that I was being carried, and behold, I was walking… What you have made me see is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before - that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished - if it were possible to wish - you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit insipid by thinking of the other… And this, O Piebald, is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it… I thought,’ she said, ‘that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent drew me into them; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming… It is a delight with terror in it! One’s own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths - but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.’”

We can choose.
Today, as I was helping serve burgers to dozens of high schoolers at our church's 'Buck Buffet', one guy asked me if they had pork in them. I assumed he was Jewish and talked to him a bit about Rosh Hashana coming up soon. Then I asked his name... Ransom.
"Oh!" I said, "C.S Lewis wrote a..."
"Yes, I'm named after that Ransom."

So I just couldn't help writing about Perelandra!

In Lewis', novel, the Lady chooses not to leave the Father's will.
Here on Earth, there's a different story,

Isa 53:6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

I think my new friend, Ransom would like this chapter in Isaiah. It's such a clear picture of Messiah, Yeshua, Jesus. I'm pretty sure Ransom is a Messianic Jew which means a Jew who believes that Jesus is the Messiah.

Here's what Jesus had to say about it.

Mat. 20:28 ... the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Unlike the Lady, we choose to go astray. No amount of fasting or alms-giving or sacrificing can make up for that fact. A ransom was paid, 'the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.'
Because of that ransom, we can choose to walk with Him, to live for Him, to abide in Him.

At the end of the book, they all join in the Great Dance, with the stars and the angels. No wonder I like it so much:)