God brought Naomi from pleasantness to bitterness, from fullness to emptiness. Contrary to what she could see, God was not moving to destroy her. He was moving to save her and all mankind. God would give her a child through Ruth who would be the grandfather of King David, through whom the promised Christ would come. God didn’t reveal any of this to Naomi. She wanted sight, but she needed faith. The same is true for us.

Christians rejoice that God has called us out of our spiritual darkness into his marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9). We walk by faith in the Light of the world. Yet sometimes God calls us to walk at night, when his providence perplexes or pains us. Even then, God has given us his word to guide us, like “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns” (2 Pet. 1:19). One helpful guide is the story of Naomi, who was also called to walk through the spiritual dark of suffering. As we see God’s gracious work in Naomi’s life, we learn three lessons for enduring spiritual nights.
Lesson 1: Prepare for the Night
Naomi’s story starts with suffering. We find her widowed, bereaved, and hungry (Ruth 1:1–5).  It might surprise us to learn that this sort of hardship is not the exception, but the norm for the Christian. God may not call us to suffer as Naomi suffered, but even so, Peter tells Christians not to “be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Pet. 4:12). Jesus did not tell us to affirm ourselves and take up our comforts, but to deny ourselves and take up our crosses.
This should not make us pessimistic; it should make us prepared. Nighttime always comes. We are not surprised when the sun sets, and because we know it is coming, we are prepared. Night shouldn’t surprise us. Neither should suffering.
In Genesis 41, God warned Pharaoh in a dream that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven years of famine. He did this so Pharaoh would prepare for the days of famine by filling his storehouses with grain during the days of plenty. True, God has not told us when our spiritual nights and famines will come, or how long they will last, but he has told us they will come. So we mustn’t waste the days of plenty, but use them to prepare for whenever the night or famine arrives. We must soak up the rays of the gospel when it shines brightly in our hearts, and fill the storehouses of our souls with its grace. We must prepare for the night through the means of grace God has given us, because our faith won’t see as well when the sun sets.
To lack a biblical theology of suffering confuses and confounds. We may be tempted to doubt God’s promises. God may feel distant and silent. Our physical and spiritual strength may be diminished. This is when we need to be sustained by stored grace. Our preparation will not make suffering more enjoyable, but it will make it more endurable.
Lesson 2: Don’t Trust Your Sight
When we suffer, it’s not uncommon to feel like the darkness will never lift.
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The desire to treat nature as a playground that can be rearranged into any orientation, to treat human nature as malleable and deny its objective nature. To treat human beings like meat robots with parts that can be replaced, to treat biology as a cold and detached practice without any transcendent meaning. To deny that reality is typological, that it is given meaning by a Creator, and it cannot be made in our own image. This is the sin committed by doctors who tell children they can transform them into something they are not. It’s demonic in origin, and it can bring nothing but harm. By attempting to cut ourselves into a new shape, we are attempting to pull ourselves up to heaven, to attain the right to define our existence. We’re tampering with the demonic, and in the process, we will pull down deep heaven upon our heads. Those who would seek to seize control of gender will make contact with the gay gods, and will discover that these gods will not be as tolerant as they had hoped.

The Modern Fairy Tale of Science Disordered
Jurassic Park is one of Steven Spielberg’s great films. Not only was Jurassic Park a milestone achievement in both digital and practical effects, but it also remains a well-crafted story about mankind, and it explores vitally important themes in an engaging way. If you were to ask the average viewer, however, who the villain of the film is, most would probably tell you that it’s the terrifying and dangerous Tyrannosaurus Rex that acts as the primary threat for much of the movie. This answer would be wrong. The central villain of Jurassic Park is not the loose T-Rex, the velociraptors, or any of the other dinosaurs wreaking havoc throughout the film’s runtime – the dinosaurs, if anything, are victims too. The true villains of Jurassic Park are the modern scientists, who in their hubris believe that they could make the natural world their private plaything. The film (and Michael Crichton’s novel) is an example of the horrors unleashed when science is unmoored from a transcendent standard. The pursuit of “science” unhitched from an ordered cosmos, the pursuit of knowledge and domination unhitched from a moral guide, is a dangerous endeavor.
C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the third novel in his Ransom Trilogy, deals with the same themes, and in a more robustly Christian manner. The pivotal chapter thirteen in the book is aptly titled “They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads.” The title alludes to the scientists of the “National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments” (N.I.C.E. for short) who, much like the scientists in Jurassic Park, have endeavored to manipulate the natural world in a way unmoored from traditional guidelines. Lewis’s central thesis of the book (and of the Abolition of Man) is that the pursuit of knowledge without a moral framework is the sin of Babel, it’s an attempt to pull ourselves up to be gods.
That Hideous Strength displays in no uncertain terms that when we attempt to pull ourselves up to heaven, all we do is pull heaven down atop our own heads. We tamper with forces beyond our understanding – demons in the case of N.I.C.E. – and our hubris is our downfall. Tampering with forces beyond our reckoning is a common theme in horror literature, and horror seeks to warn us that when we play god and attempt to assemble the natural world according to our own desires, the results are disastrous.
Medieval cosmology understood the cosmos to be an ordered thing, one with a moral hierarchy and inherent meaning that should not and could not be ignored. The modernist understanding of the cosmos is not a cosmos at all, but a “universe,” a totality of natural phenomena detached from a creator. This kind of understanding is a dangerous one, and it’s one that the ancient principalities and powers of the air prefer us to believe. Demons in disguise are certainly more effective than ones that can be marked and avoided.
The N.I.C.E. in Lewis’s novel take orders from a severed human head, through which a being they describe as a “macrobe” issues commands. The goal of the Institute was to transcend human experience – they hated the messiness and uncleanness of biological life. They much preferred the moon to Earth, as it was clean, scrubbed of all growing things. They wanted to scrub the Earth clean in the same way, to create a sterile environment that could be detachedly and coldly ordered to their whim. Because the rational, modern scientists of the Institute didn’t believe in primitive superstitions like demons, they were perfectly willing to take orders from them as long as they called them “macrobes” – which of course, they are. Macro-natural is simply a polite and materialistic euphemism for supernatural. The N.I.C.E. pulled the gods down upon their heads by committing the same sin that occurred at Babel: trying to pull humanity up to heaven. Lewis sums this up beautifully through the words of Ransom when he says,
“The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes.  But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left… They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and have pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.”
This sin is of course central to humanity throughout the ages, but during the past few centuries of modernity, it has begun to manifest itself uniquely. The Enlightenment created a world in which science, knowledge, education, and society are seen as detached from any kind of transcendent character, it has created a disenchanted world. This is why so many of the great stories of modernity are about this very danger, why these stories explore how far is “too far” in scientific research – from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park. This is also why That Hideous Strength is the greatest dystopian novel of the twentieth century. It’s Lewis’s most potently prophetic and important work of fiction because it understands where science unmoored from morality inevitably leads. That Hideous Strength gets right at the heart of modernity and is a dire warning: scientific pursuit that denies an ordered cosmos is demonic, and leads us to our own destruction.
Demons and Devils
Christian theology in the twentieth century, especially in the West, is tainted by modern presuppositions. Most churches don’t speak about demonic activity often, and even traditions such as Roman Catholicism – until recently a stubborn resistor of all materialist assumptions – has begun to cave on many issues to cater to a disenchanted laity (for example, as of 2020, only 57% of Catholics in America believe in the existence of demons at all) and treat demonic forces as a thing of the past.
There is of course a delicate theological balance needed. Certain traditions like the more charismatic branches of Pentecostalism are prone to over-demonizing the world and attributing every sickness, affliction, or sin to Satan himself. Satan is certainly not behind every sin, or even most sins in any direct sense. We must remember that Satan is finite, not omnipresent, and has a limited influence. His efforts are probably best directed at the highest levels of government and society. While demons are certainly all around, and we do wrestle with them according to Paul, we must also remember that we are “dragged down by our own evil desires” and can’t blame every sin we commit on demonic power. Demons answer to the King of Kings like all creatures.
However, the problem of overattributing phenomena to demonic activity is a small one compared to the much more common issue of ignoring demonic activity entirely. Many worldly sins, conditions, and social trends are certainly demonic in nature, and this should be recognized. But demonic activity in the world almost certainly functions similarly to the way it does in Lewis’s novel – behind-the-scenes influence of the direction of institutions toward harmful ends, rather than through explicitly satanic rituals underneath Washington D.C. (though I’m not excluding the possibility). So now the question becomes: just what exactly can be said to be demonic in nature, and where are Satan’s efforts being directed?
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The crisis in the world over father-absence and mother-absence seems to be getting worse – certainly in the West. More and more wounded children simply grow up to become wounded, angry, dysfunctional and embittered adults. They desperately long to know and experience real love and acceptance. While most humans – including too many parents even – will let us down in this regard, God never will fail us. His love is indeed eternal. 

I should begin by stating that I do not have the television on all the time – although some of you might think so. But often an article of mine on this site will be inspired by some recent TV viewing. That is the case with this piece. Because the wheels in my head are always turning, and lateral thinking seems to predominate, I often find things in film or TV that I can write about, and even churn out devotional pieces on.
So let me mention just two things I recently saw – or at least parts of, and then tie them into a biblical message. The first involved seeing part of the 2019 film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood about the famous American children’s television presenter, TV presenter Fred Rogers (1928-2003).
I had actually seen this movie with my wife five years ago at the cinema when it first came out. I wrote up my impressions of the film back then: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2020/01/29/hollywood-christianity-and-mr-rogers/
In that piece I focussed more on the Christian faith of Rogers, and how the film downplayed that. But seeing it again just days ago, with my wife now gone, I have had a different and more emotional response to the film. In it, Lloyd, a cynical and jaded journalist, is sent to write a story about Rogers. He at first was going to do a hatchet job on him, but as he got to know him, all that changed.
Lloyd was estranged from his dad, who was unfaithful while his mother struggled with and died from cancer. His hatred of his dad consumed him and coloured his life. But in the film Rogers befriends Lloyd, and seeks to have him deal with the past, and offer some forgiveness, and so on.
In the end he does. But the point is, like millions of people worldwide, a bad or non-existent relationship with a father can have a lifelong negative impact on folks. Being unable to deal with that can lead to all sorts of problems, from drug abuse, gang involvement, to suicide. Rogers, the Presbyterian pastor, was able to point Lloyd in the right direction, and to help him deal with the hole in his soul.
The second thing I saw – just last night – was part of the 2018 documentary, “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind.” We all know about the American comedian and actor Robin Williams (1951-2014). He was married three times, dealt with drug and alcohol issues, and was quite depressed later in life. He took his own life at age 63.
One thing the doco often made clear was that while he was a very quiet person in his personal world, he came to life on stage, and seemed to live for the attention and applause of the audience. That was what drove him and energised him. Especially as a stand-up comic, he craved the approval and praise of the audience as they roared in laughter at his jokes, improvisation and high-octane performances.
On a side note, British comedian Eric Idle said of Williams in the doco, he had “a restless mind”. When I heard that I thought that seems to nicely describe my mind. It never seems to stop or slow down. Non-stop thoughts bounce around in my head which in part explains why I find it so hard to fall to sleep easily. Often there are one or two hours of tossing and turning – and hard-core thinking – before I finally fall asleep. But I digress.
So if Williams was so successful, so loved worldwide, and so wealthy, why did he take his own life? Like Lloyd, he had his own inner demons to deal with it seems. We ALL need and want the approval and affirmation of others. That is natural. But above all, we need the approval and love of God in order to really thrive and flourish.
Spiritual Takeout
The sad truth is, countless millions of people are starved of love and acceptance. That deep need is not being met, so all sorts of false routes are taken to fix it. For Lloyd, drink, anger and bitterness were ways in which he sought to cope. For Williams, it was feeling accepted and loved by the audience.
As I said, there is a place for human affirmation, acceptance and avowal. We all need that, and we should expect to find that in the home at the very least.
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