Dear children, keep away from anything
that might take God’s place in your hearts.
1 John 5:21

Read: Hebrews 6:1-12, 1 John 5:11-21
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 2 Part 11

Relate: The Interpreter leads Christian into a dark room, and in that room is a man sitting inside a cage made of iron. The man is the picture of despair, hollow-eyed, unable to speak of hope, unreachable by his own will or effort. He tells Christian that he was once a vibrant believer, a man who made profession of faith, who thought well of himself and his spiritual condition. But he let the world in. He let lust and greed and the pleasures of the City he should have left behind creep back into his heart, and he quenched the Spirit. He sinned against the light he had been given, and now he cannot find his way back. He is in a cage of his own making, forged from his own choices, and he cannot get out.

Bunyan was not playing when he put this scene in the Interpreter’s house. He was issuing a warning, delivered with the seriousness of a man who had thought very hard about the cost of spiritual carelessness. The man in the cage is not a monster. He is not someone who went looking for ruin. He is someone who, after the initial fire of conviction, slowly relaxed his vigilance, slowly allowed what he knew to be wrong back through doors he should have kept closed, slowly chose comfort over faithfulness, until the cage had formed around him and he could no longer remember the feel of open air. He is not in the cage because God put him there. He is in a cage he built for himself, one choice at a time.

React: We need to be careful here, because this picture can easily be misused. It can weaponized against people in seasons of depression or genuine spiritual dryness. It can be seen by those in danger of “deconstructing” to suggest that their genuine questions and doubts are evidence of apostasy. The man in the iron cage is not suffering from depression. He is not wrestling with doubt. St John of the Cross popularized the idea of “a dark night of the soul.” This is not that. It is possible to struggle or doubt while still remaining fundamentally oriented toward God. The man in the cage is someone who, by his own account, has made a series of deliberate choices in full knowledge of what he was doing. Now he finds himself cut off from the repentance that once came easily. The warning is real and should be taken seriously. But it is a warning against deliberate, eyes-open, willful abandonment. It is not a sentence pronounced on anyone who has cried out in the night, “God, where are You?” There is a difference. The Interpreter knows it. So should we.

Respond:

Dear God,
Help me to understand how my wrong desires can build cages. It is not that You are leaving me. It is not that we are drifting apart. My distractions. My wrong choices. My sins… They are the material for the creation of a cage of my own making. I am locking myself away from You. But break down that cage. tear apart and take away the chains I place on my heart. It is only You. More than anything else in this life, I want to be with You.
Amen