Letters from Below

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 PETER 5:8

In the summer of 1940, sitting in church, Lewis had an idea for a book. It would be a series of letters from a senior devil to a junior one, giving him advice on how to win a human soul. It appeared, first as a weekly series in an Anglican newspaper and then as a book in 1942, under the title The Screwtape Letters. It made Lewis famous on both sides of the Atlantic, and it has never been out of print.

What the book is

The book is a correspondence in one direction only. Screwtape, an experienced official in the bureaucracy of hell, writes to his nephew Wormwood, a beginner assigned to tempt a young Englishman during the Second World War. Everything is turned upside down: God is the enemy, the devil is the father, and every Christian virtue is a danger to be avoided. The effect is that the reader sees his own life from an unexpected angle, and recognises, often with a shock, the small and ordinary ways in which he is drawn away from God. Lewis said that writing the book was a strain, because he had to keep thinking his way into a point of view he loathed.

Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices. 2 CORINTHIANS 2:11

Two errors

In his preface, Lewis warned against two opposite mistakes about devils. The first is to disbelieve in them altogether, and so to be defenceless against an enemy one has decided does not exist. The second is to take an excessive and unhealthy interest in them, and so to give them an attention they do not deserve. He himself believed, as the church has always believed, that there are fallen angels who, in their pride, rebelled against God and now seek the ruin of human beings. He did not believe that the devil is God’s equal opposite; he is a creature, and a defeated one. But he is real.

And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. JUDE 6

What the book teaches

The Screwtape Letters is full of shrewd observation, and a few of its lessons stand out.

The first is that the road to destruction is usually gradual. Temptation rarely asks for dramatic sins. It is content with small compromises, minor neglects, and a slow drift away from God that never seems to be heading anywhere in particular. In the book’s logic, ruin is reached far more often by drift than by any single leap.

The second is that distraction is often more useful to the tempter than argument. A person is much more likely to be led away from God by a stream of trivial occupations, idle curiosity and vague worry than by a well-reasoned case against Christianity. Keep a man busy, keep his mind on the next thing, and he will never have time to think about what matters most.

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful. LUKE 10:41–42

The third is that the tempter loves to work on disappointment. A new Christian, full of enthusiasm, goes to church and finds there the ordinary people of his neighbourhood, with their bad singing and their odd clothes, and is tempted to conclude that the whole thing cannot be true. Lewis saw that the church as it appears to an outsider is easy to despise, and that one of the devil’s chief weapons is to keep believers from seeing the church as it truly is, in Christ.

The fourth is that the tempter would rather we lived anywhere than in the present. He wants us full of anxiety about the future or regret about the past, because it is only in the present moment that we can obey God, receive His grace and love our neighbour. The future, in particular, is the place where fear and greed both breed.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. MATTHEW 6:34

The fifth is that pleasure, in itself, belongs to God. The devils in the book have made nothing good; every real pleasure is God’s invention. All they can do is persuade people to take God’s gifts at the wrong times, in the wrong ways or in the wrong amounts, until what was a gift becomes a compulsion that no longer even delights.

The sixth is that the believer’s low seasons are part of God’s plan. The Christian life, Lewis observed, moves in rhythms of high and low, and the low times, when prayer is dry and God seems absent, are not signs of failure. They are often the times when God is teaching His child to walk by faith and to obey without the support of feeling. The tempter wants us to treat these times as proof that our faith was an illusion; God wants us to learn to keep going.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

Resisting the enemy

The book is not a manual of spiritual warfare, and it does not offer techniques for fighting the devil. Its counsel is rather the old and plain counsel of Scripture: watch, pray, stay humble, stay in the fellowship of believers, live in the present, and keep turning back to God. Lewis believed that the devil has no power over a person who keeps turning to God, however often he falls.

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. JAMES 4:7

Weighing it

The Screwtape Letters is one of the most useful books on temptation written in the last century, and there is little in it that an evangelical reader need set aside. Its understanding of sin, of the devil and of the believer’s inner life is broadly biblical, and its wit makes its lessons memorable.

One caution may be added. Because the book shows the devil working so cleverly, a reader can come away more impressed by the tempter than by the Saviour. The New Testament never leaves the devil without mentioning his defeat. The believer who reads Screwtape should also read Colossians 2 and Revelation 12, where the enemy is seen disarmed and cast down.

And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it. COLOSSIANS 2:15

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where has a gentle slope of small compromises been leading you away from God? Name it and turn back.

2. Look at how you spend a typical day. Where does distraction crowd out time with God?

3. Have you been disappointed with your church? Pray for the people who disappoint you, and ask God to show you the church as He sees it.

4. Notice this week when your mind runs to future fears or past regrets. Bring it back to the present, and to God.

5. Read Ephesians 6:10–18 and Colossians 2:13–15, and give thanks for Christ’s victory over the enemy.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have an adversary who is real and cunning, and I am often unaware of his devices.

Guard me from the small compromises, the endless distractions and the quiet disappointments that would draw me from You.

Keep me in the present, where I can obey You, and keep me humble, so that I do not fall.

Thank You that the enemy is a defeated foe, disarmed at the cross. Let me stand in Christ’s victory today. Amen.