Sin is Never Barren

One of lesser known works of C.S. Lewis is one of my favourites, titled The Pilgrim's Regress.  While Pilgrim in John Bunyan's original classic starts his quest for the Celestial City in the right direction, John in The Pilgrim's Regress begins his trek longing for and seeking what he knows not.  He looks for something to satisfy, a beautiful sight, a pleasurable feeling, anything to make life worth living.

For me a most memorable and insightful scene occurs when John went into the wood hoping to catch a glimpse of a beautiful island.  One day in the wood when he was thinking about what actual benefit the island or sweet music that came from it did him, he was surprised to hear a sweet voice speaking to him.  What is described next is nothing less than masterful genius of how sin (especially in the sexual realm) seduces and ensnares unsuspecting people without guilty victims realising the awful consequences.

"...Just as he was opening his eyes he heard a voice speaking to him.  It was quite close at hand, and very sweet, and not at all like the old voice of the wood.  When he looked round he saw what he had never expected, yet he was not surprised.  There in the grass beside him sat a laughing brown girl of about his own age, and she had no clothes on.  "It was me you wanted,' said the brown girl.  'I am better than your silly islands." And John rose and caught her, all in haste, and committed fornication with her in the wood.

After that John was always going to the wood.  He did not always have his pleasure of her in the body, though it often ended that way:  sometimes he would talk to her about himself, telling her lies about his courage and his cleverness.  All that he told her she remembered, so that on other days she could tell it over to him again.  Sometimes, even, he would go with her through the wood looking for the sea and the Island, but not often.  Meanwhile the year went on and the leaves began to fall in the wood and the skies were more often grey:  until now, as I dreamed, John had slept in the wood, and he woke up in the wood.  The sun was low and a blustering wind was stripping the leaves from the branches.  The girl was still there and the appearance of her was hateful to John:  and he saw that she knew this, and the more she knew it the more she stared at him, smiling.  He looked round and saw how small the wood was after all--a beggarly strip of trees between the road and a field that he knew well.  Nowhere in sight was there anything that he liked at all.

'I shall not come back here, ' said John.  'What I wanted is not here.  It wasn't you I wanted, you know.'

'Wasn't it?' said the brown girl.  'Then be off.  But you must take your family with you.'

With that she put up her hands to her mouth and called.  Instantly from behind every tree there slipped out a brown girl:  each of them was just like herself:  the little wood was full of them.

'What are these?'

'Our daughters,' said she.  'Did you not know you were a father?  Did you think I was barren, you fool?  And now, children,' she added, turning to the mob, 'go with your father.'

Suddenly John became very much afraid and leaped over the wall into the road.  There he ran home as fast as he could."  (The Pilgrim's Regress, by C. S. Lewis, Fount Paperbacks, 1990, pp. 40–41. )

John ran but could not hide from the little brown girls who haunted his every step; at every turn they were there.  He tried in vain to comfort himself over time because of the "rules" he had broken, but "when he crept away to bed, tired to death and raw in his soul, always he would be sure to find a brown girl waiting for him there:  and on such a night he had no spirit to resist her blandishments." (ibid. pg. 43)  Is this not an inspired description of one trapped in the futile pleasure/guilt cycle of sin with fearful, haunting consequences?  It is only by Jesus Christ and the Gospel wretched sinners are saved from the snare and condemnation of sin, and in God find the freedom, forgiveness and rest we truly long for.  Our sin is never barren but always produces death.  For those trapped in the wood, life becomes a living hell.  Oh, what joy to have fellowship with God freely offered us despite ourselves with the sure promise of heaven!