Do you recognize these two insistent and interrelated lies?
I get to create my own identity.
If there’s more of God in my life, there’s less of the real me.
They hook me way too often. Whenever I am eager to assert my own choices as necessary to my true self, I rarely think about where me-centered living actually leads. But the same author who deeply inspired C.S. Lewis can redemptively reveal the trajectory of considering myself as sovereign.
“Me as my own” and “God as a threat” sound like such contemporary concerns. That’s why I was surprised to see them clearly, convictingly exposed in Lilith, George MacDonald’s 1895 fantasy novel. In medieval Hebrew legends, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She left Eden for an independent life, refusing even the angels who came to bring her home. MacDonald portrays her as an emblem for all persistent refusal to submit our wills to the God who made us. In the novel, Lilith lives in defiant misery, inflicting great evil through the centuries. But Mara, one of Adam and Eve’s daughters, is sent to urge her toward repentance and, therefore, renewal.
Their dialogue could have been a Facebook exchange this week! More personally, I’m shocked at how much my internal conversations can sound like these mythical women from an old, rather bizarre novel. Indeed, in my worst moments, I can hear Lilith’s voice inside of me, resisting the Holy Spirit’s call to yield my will to God.
Let’s follow four excerpts from their talk in chapter 39, reflect on our own tendency to take Lilith’s lying part, and see what truth Mara brings to light.
1. ‘I am my own.’
Mara: Will you turn away from the wicked things you have been doing so long?
Lilith: I will not. I will be myself and not another!
Mara: Alas, you are another now and not yourself! Will you not be your real self?
Lilith: I will be what I mean myself now. . . . I will do what I will do. . . . I am not another’s; I am my own. . . . I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!
Mara’s opening questions threaten my sense of personal sovereignty. How dare she suggest that “myself” is not glorious, that I should be and do something other than what I choose! Worse yet, she claims that choosing what feels authentic to me may not actually reflect my real self, as if I have been living a delusion. I resist this absurdity that there is a true self that comes from before, or beyond, my own choices. No, I declare that I am my own — first, last, and always. I will never be under the thrall of another, not even God!
Mara knows otherwise. I am not my own, and I never will be the true me until I yield to God.
2. ‘I am what I choose.’
Mara: You are not the Self you imagine.
Lilith: I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought of myself is me. . . . Another shall not make me!
How often have I embraced this lie: How I choose to think of myself makes me who I really am. Thus, I get to compose my identity. I will not endure being questioned about such choices. The suggestion that God has a will of his own for me sounds like only diminishment. God’s idea of me threatens what I think is my real self. I must keep this “Other” away. No one but I will make me what I am.
But Mara bursts that imaginary bubble. I am not the “I” I imagine myself to be.
3. ‘I am all I need.’
Mara: But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have satisfaction in the thought of yourself. . . .
Lilith: No one ever made me. I defy that Power to unmake me from a free woman! . . . You shall not compel me to anything against my will!
There it is — the full delusion that I am a self-created person. In my scheming to compose my life my way, I forget that I could not possibly have initiated my own being. I ignore my dependence on Another just to survive. I suppress the fact that I need God even for my next breath. Isaiah reveals just how audacious such a pretense of personal sovereignty is:
Now therefore hear this, you lover of pleasures,
who sit securely,
who say in your heart,
“I am, and there is no one besides me.” (Isaiah 47:8)
The prophet exposes my tendency to imagine, ridiculous as it is, that I am self-generated. Because I have agency to make choices, especially as a consumer of goods and experiences, I behave as if I determine my whole being from beginning to end. I dare to take the name “I Am” for myself.
But I am not “I Am,” nor am I all I need. Another made me — and can remake me.
4. ‘I cannot be remade.’
Mara: There is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another’s — not the Shadow’s. Into the created can pour the creating will, and so redeem it!
Lilith: The light shall not enter me: I hate it!
Mara: Had he not made you, you could not even hate him. But he did not make you such. You have made yourself what you are — Be of better cheer: he can remake you.
Mara acknowledges the power of my self-centered choices to shape me. In that limited sense, “You have made yourself what you are.” And the consequence of my self-creation? I am small, shallow, dim, mean, myopic, and angry. But still defiant. Isaiah reveals me again: “You were wearied with the length of your way, but you did not say, ‘It is hopeless’” (Isaiah 57:10).
Mara knows that a Creator stands behind my life and fierce little will. He can pour a “creating will” into my lost heart so that I can choose God and so choose to be most myself, as he designed me. But that divine will demands that I submit my self-will to him.
Lies to Truth
In the novel, Lilith’s resistance to Another’s sovereignty is so great that, ultimately, she requires a fiery revelation of living death, the persistent nothingness that comes from holding herself at the center. In the end, she repents only when she sees the horror of what she chose to be standing next to the beautiful image of what God created her to be.
Personally, I’d like to turn from my little self-storms and defiant fits long before that searing vision is required. I’d rather live in the light of Psalm 100:
Know that the Lord, He is God;
It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves;
We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. (Psalm 100:3 NKJV)
So, which of Lilith’s lies have you been harboring? Let the Spirit reveal the truth. More of God in your life does indeed mean less of yourself at the center. But that’s the very path of having more, of being more, of participating in the authentic creation God in Christ has prepared for you to be.
Desiring God