This message appears as a chapter in The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis.

Last night we heard from Randy Alcorn that we will eat and drink in the new earth. He quoted C.S. Lewis that this is not unspiritual but designed by God. Here’s the longer quote:

There is no good trying to more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather rude and unspiritual. God does not: he invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. (Mere Christianity)

That’s true. And my point in this message is that we don’t have to wait for the new earth — we dare not wait for the new earth — to begin eating and drinking to the glory of God. I invite you to turn to 1 Timothy 4:1–5.

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy (sanctified) by the word of God and prayer.

Verses 1–3a describe the apostasy of people who are buying into demonic teachings about the evils of sex and food. Then in the middle of verse 3, Paul begins his response to these teachings, and gives his positive alternative for the right use of creation — in particular, the right use of food, and by implication sex in marriage, and all other pleasures that come from this material world.

So let’s look briefly at the demonic teachings of verses 1–3a, and then focus most of our time on Paul’s positive alternative, with C.S. Lewis giving insights along the way.

The Magnitude of This Issue

But first make sure you feel the magnitude of what we are dealing with here. The issue is: How are we to experience the material creation (which, of course, includes our bodies, and everything we encounter with our five senses) in such a way that God is worshiped, honored, loved, supremely treasured in our experience of material creation?

You can feel the magnitude of this issue in two ways. First, as far as your daily experience goes, there is no more pervasive issue than this. And second, as far as God’s original purpose in creating the world goes, this issue is essential to that purpose.

Unlike many issues, this issue meets you every minute of your day — at least your waking day. In your waking hours, you are always seeing or hearing or smelling or tasting or touching some part of creation that is giving you some pleasure or pain, or something in between. And therefore, the question of how this becomes part your continual worship of God is pervasive.

And when God contemplated the creation of conscious human souls in addition to angels, he faced the question of whether these souls should be embodied, and whether they should live in a material universe, and how those bodies and that material world would accomplish his purposes to glorify himself in creation — because the Bible is unmistakably clear that the communication and exaltation of the glory of God is why God created the universe (Isaiah 43:7, Colossians 1:16 ; Ephesians 1:6)?

So I hope you feel some measure of the magnitude of the issue we are dealing with here in these verses in 1 Timothy. The devil certainly feels the magnitude of what we are dealing with here, and he is behind the apostasy in the churches, especially in the last days, Paul says. Christians are leaving the faith, Paul says in verse 1 (“some will depart from the faith”). But they probably don’t know they are leaving the faith. They think they are the truly faithful. We’ll see this in a moment.

The Roots of the Apostasy

So let’s look at the roots of this apostasy and see where it’s coming from. The first source Paul mentions is “deceitful spirits.” Verse 1: “Some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to (or giving heed to, believing in ) deceitful spirits.” So the devil and his demons are at work in the church to bring about this deception.

The apostle John calls Satan, in Revelation 12:9, “the deceiver of the whole world.” And when John tackled the heresy of denying the physical incarnation of the Son of God, he said in 2 John 1:7, “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist.” So all along the way, leading to the last day, the deceiver is at work in the church.

Demonic Teachings

The second source of this apostasy is that these deceitful spirits produce teachings. They don’t just work subconsciously in the mind or in the heart. They produce teachings in the church. Verse 1 at the end: “devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.” So there are teachings circulating in the churches to the effect that true godliness, or superior godliness, involves renouncing marriage and certain foods (verse 3).

Evidently the teaching of demons was that physical appetite for sex and physical appetite for food as defective. They are inferior to a kind of asceticism that sees in the physical world not God’s ideal for us, but something second-class, something for the weak, who don’t have the wherewithal to renounce sex and foods. This was not just a deceitful spirit, but an actual teaching in the church that came, Paul said, from hell. It was demonic.

Coming Through Real People

The third source of this apostasy was real people. Not just a spirit, and not just teachings, but people who were filled with this spirit and who advocated these teachings. Verse 1b–2: People were giving heed to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons “through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.”

The word “insincerity” is “hypocrisy” (Greek hypocrisei). In other words, these are professing Christians who presented themselves as teaching a higher godliness, but they were, Paul says, “false speakers” (“liars”). They may or may not have known they were speaking falsely. All we know is that they were teaching the teachings of demons and not the teachings of God. They were hypocrites. They presented themselves as one thing, when in fact they were another thing, whether they knew it or not. Their consciences had been cauterized. Which may mean they were too callous to know they were speaking falsehood, or so callous they didn’t care.

Satan’s Deadly Subtlety

It seems to me, the most pressing question here is: Why would Satan seek to spread this kind of asceticism among the churches? At first glance, it seems odd to us. Isn’t Satan’s specialty, when it comes to sex to entice people to want more, not less? Isn’t pornography the issue today, not celibacy?

Isn’t his specialty, when it comes to food, to entice people toward the destructive forces of gluttony and obesity, not toward moderation and abstinence? Doesn’t Ephesians 2:1–3 describe our spiritual deadness in sin as “following the prince of the power of the air. . . carrying out the desires of the body . . . and by nature children of wrath”?

Oh the subtlety of our great adversary! Of course, he wants you to do pornography and fornication and adultery and gluttony. But do you think he only has one strategy for using food and sex to bring about rebellion against the true God?

Whispers of the Fall

Compare his strategy in 1 Timothy 4 with his strategy in Genesis 3. His very first question to humankind was about food. It went like this: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1).

What had God said about eating from the trees of Eden? Genesis 2:16 –17: “The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.””

So what was God saying? He was saying: “I have given you life, and I have given you a world full of pleasures — pleasures of taste and sight and sound and smell and feel and nourishment. Only one tree is forbidden to you. And the point of that prohibition is to preserve the pleasures of the world. If you eat of that one, you will be saying to me: ‘Your will is less authoritative than mine, your wisdom less wise than mine, your goodness less generous than mine, and your Fatherhood less caring than mine.’ So don’t eat from that tree. Keep on submitting to my will, and affirming my wisdom, and being thankful for my generosity, and trusting joyfully in my fatherly care. There are 10,000 trees with every imaginable fruit for pleasure and nourishment within a two-hour walk of where we stand. They are all good — very good — and they are all yours. Go, eat, enjoy, be thankful.”

And what does Satan make of that? He made of it a tightfisted God. He took the prohibition of one suicidal tree and treated it as a prohibition of all: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1). Now, we could linger long here to see how this seed of distrust in God’s generosity took root in Eve. But that’s not the point here. The point here is Satan’s strategy and how it compares to 1 Timothy 4.

His strategy was to portray God as stingy, withholding something good of his creation from Adam and Eve. And in Genesis 3, Satan wanted Eve to believe that God is a withholder of good, and he wanted her to rebel. And that’s what happened.

The Deceiver Uses Gluttony and Asceticism

Now, in 1 Timothy 4, Satan again wants us to see God has a withholder. For those who want to know him best, and rise to the level of the really spiritual, they should realize God prefers if they not experience sexual pleasures in marriage, and he prefers that they not experience the pleasurabl