Obedience- Paradise Lost

I studied books 1 and 2 of Paradise Lost by John Milton for A-level English, and have always loved them, however rarely I read them. They are very visual descriptions of Satan and his cohorts awaking in Hell, having been thrown out of Heaven for rebelling against God. I think it is the picture they bring to my mind that attracts me. Years ago, I read the rest of the book, and did not like it as much. Recently, I decided to give it another try; again I really appreciated books 1 and 2, but this time I found myself enjoying the rest of the books as well, although not necessarily agreeing with all of it. I was not convinced by how Milton described the relationship between God the father and God the son, for instance, although I am not sure how you can adequately write about that in this type of literature. I was also not impressed by the way the relationship between Adam and Eve was pictured, particularly once we get to the fall, although I appreciate that Milton was writing in a patriarchal age.

But this is not a literary or theological criticism of Paradise Lost, for neither of which I am qualified and both of which can be found elsewhere, I imagine. What I want to share with you is what I did take from the book. Milton describes well the obedience we owe to God, and that desire to become gods which draw us away in rebellion. It is this aspect that I want to focus on, although not as it appears in Paradise Lost, which is my jumping off point, the place which prompted me to think about it. But Milton does have Satan desiring to become God, to take over God’s throne; the serpent tempts Eve to eat the apple for a similar reason: not to become God, but to become like God. How much do we do the same? How much of our falling away is due to our aspiring to become gods, however little we would phrase it like that? Do we truly recognise what we owe to God?

Obedience is not a popular word in our culture, which is far more about choice and self-expression, while not always acknowledging that both of these can be limited for a variety of reasons. That inevitably affects our religious culture as well. Yet we do owe obedience to God; it is tempting to assume that we can pick and choose what we do; to assume that we have a choice about faith, about whether to believe and how much, and where that faith takes us. I’m not sure it is helpful. Of course, we can take obedience too far as well, and it is easy for it to become obedience to human vision, obedience to one person’s domination, and for it to become about control, rather than love. Obedience has become a word which implies ‘you do as I say’, yet that is not so. Obedience is about listening – the root comes from the Latin for listen – and is not an easy concept, which may be why it is not a popular one. There is no doubt that is does infringe on our ability to choose what we do and when we do it. Yet we still do owe obedience to God, and it is an essential part of our faith that we pray, and part of our prayer involves listening to God. Truly practised, obedience does not so much limit our choice and freedom of expression as allow us to become who we are meant to be; it can be life-giving, not life-limiting – or, maybe, life-giving because it limits us.

I was reading an excerpt from Nosce Te Ipsum by John Davies in which he talks about God creating us, and then becoming man once we had fallen. He suggests that God has twice fashioned our souls, and that makes us doubly God’s. While reading this, it struck me that we do not have a choice as to whether we follow God, or believe in God, or whether we are God’s. We belong to God, and the choice is in whether we accept this or not; that lack of acceptance may take many forms, and not believing in God is one of them, but they will also include many ways in which we do believe and practise faith, while still holding back from that final choice or acceptance: that we are God’s own, and that all we can do is increasingly acknowledge that, until we become fully God’s.

So the questions which we can ask ourselves are: do I accept God as God, or are there any ways in which I strive to become God’s equal, or to become like God? What are the elements of my life that I keep back from God, or that keep me from truly following? Do I accept that I belong to God, and that I owe God obedience? Do I listen to God? Can I spend any time in opening myself to God’s leading? How can I go from this moment to allow myself to become more and more God’s? To enable my life to become more and more centred around God?

Questions which we can always come back to, as we will always have further to go. What strikes me in all of this is how much we may try to become like God, when we are already made in God’s image, as it says in Genesis 1. We are striving for something which we actually have and are. It is only by giving the proper place to God in our lives, in our world, that we can truly become who we were created to be, which is what our fallen nature searches for elsewhere. I leave you with the image of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26: 36 – 46 and parallels). While praying that the cup may pass from him, he still finishes with ‘your will be done’. He had a choice, but that choice was to give himself totally to his Father. Can we pray the same prayer, the same ‘your will be done’, however tough we might find it, and however limited our ability to follow through?