On Boys and Lions and Christianity

Knowing When and Why and How to Fight

It was a fairly ordinary car journey a couple of years go when my then-7-year-old son piped up from his usual seat in the boot of the car. He announced that he’d memorised something, and asked if we wanted to hear it.

My wife and I gave each other a slightly bemused smirk and asked him to fire away. He then proceeded to recite word-for-word the entire opening sequence of a Christian Heroes biography on the famous 19th-century missionary, David Livingstone:

Something moved in the undergrowth. David Livingstone stopped in his tracks. Suddenly he saw the flick of a tail, a tan-coloured tail with a tuft at the end. As he looked closer he could make out the shape of a lion hidden among the bushes. Not a small lion, but one that must have weighed at least four hundred pounds, and now it was no more than ten feet away. Without taking his eyes off the huge animal for one second, David reached over his shoulder for his rifle. He put the stock of the gun to his shoulder and lined up the sights with the lion’s eyes. Smoothly he squeezed the trigger. Boom! The mouth of the rifle exploded in a flash of burning gunpowder. The lead bullet found its mark, slamming into the lion’s neck.

But instead of falling over dead, the lion stood roaring in agony. David watched in amazement as it crouched back on its haunches and then leapt forward. The rifle flew from David Livingstone’s hand. Pain raced through David’s body as the lion’s claws clamped down hard on his left arm, each of the lion’s razor-sharp teeth cutting into his flesh. Before David knew what was happening, the beast had lifted him into the air and was shaking him like a cat shaking a mouse. Then it dropped him and pounced again, tightening its vicelike grip on his arm.

David felt the lion’s hot breath against his body and its saliva seeping through his torn jacket. The animal rested its paw on David’s head, and David could feel the point of each claw poised to rip his skull open. Through the searing pain in his body, David could feel his heart thumping wildly in his chest.

He didn’t have the book with him. This 7-year old boy had learned all of that by heart, of his own accord, and without even telling us he was doing it. I don’t know how long it took him. It just came out, as though he only chose to share it with us because he happened to think about it whilst he was sitting there.

The Thing About Boys

Why did he feel the need to memorise that? Why did this scene motivate him to an almost absurd commitment to learning something which no schoolteacher could ever have incited him to do as “homework”?

Young boys seem to know—with an unerring consistency—that the heart of the best stories is the adventure, the challenge, the fight. Much of contemporary society does its utmost to teach this instinct out of them, believing it will lead to inevitably “toxic” behaviour.

This is why, in many school classrooms, boys are often treated like defective girls, and why for many years now, people have been noticing the way boys struggle at school in general. Nowadays boys get the fight kicked out of them less by bullies in the playground than by bullies in the administrator’s office, perturbed that boys do not comply with what the latest gender studies textbook theories told them.

Put simply: boys tend to respond to danger, risk, and boundaries rather differently to girls. This tendency to glorious thrill-seeking certainly causes an awful lot of the wrong kinds of trouble, for sure. (Prisons are overwhelmingly full of men, not women). But that desire for thrill and adventure is not a defect in their manufacturing. It’s built-in. It’s what they were made for.

And safe to say, in the imaginations of virtually all boys who’ve ever walked the earth, there’s always been something unusually thrilling about lions.

The Thing About Lions

It’s probably no coincidence that lions are mentioned over a hundred times in the Bible. In the ancient world, the lion was the classic symbol of the unpredictable danger of wild nature. The lion stood for all that might threaten to overpower and undo the efforts of man.

In the British Museum you can glimpse the remarkable sight of the famous ancient relief sculptures of Assyrian Lion Hunts from 645BC. The point of these fascinating works of art seems to have been that the Assyrian kings felt the need to showcase their greatness by conquering and subduing these feared beasts. Lions have almost always been depicted throughout history as bold, aggressive, and dangerous. And for good reason.

This is also how we’re meant to understand the Devil’s attacks upon us as Christians:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8)

It’s worth remembering that to “be watchful” should not be confused with that abominably insipid platitude we had drilled into us during a certain pandemic a few years ago: “stay safe”.

Hunting Lions

When we contemplate the nature of this prowling, roaring lion who seeks to devour us, we must be careful, alert, and wise—but not fearful. We should remember that God enables us to triumph over our enemies too because we have been commissioned by the One under whose feet the Father “put all things” (Eph. 1:22).

Remember when God’s Spirit rushes upon Samson, enabling him to tear apart a lion with his bare hands (Judges 14:5-6)? (As a sidenote: why don’t we tend to hear about that kind of “move of the Spirit” at charismatic conferences? Perhaps it’s because the idea of “moves of the Spirit” has become divorced from action, mission, and the fight of faith—the very things that make most boys tick.)

Those who see their enemy in light of faith gravitate towards courage over cowardice. We see this in mighty men like Benaiah, who – as far as I can tell – we only really remember for things like this:

And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was a valiant man of Kabzeel, a doer of great deeds. He struck down two heroes of Moab. He also went down and struck down a lion in a pit on a day when snow had fallen.
(1 Chronicles 11:22)

There’s something wonderful about the fact that a verse like that is in the Bible. If most boys read that on someone’s gravestone, they’d have to conclude that such a person had lived a full and worthy life - a “life to the full”. Everyone wants the “abundant life” Jesus promises (John 10:10). What we often fail to realise is that life to the full probably has less to do with securing emotional and material comfort and more to do with fighting lions in pits on cold days.

True, we’re not all meant to be Benaiahs, Samsons, or even David Livingstones. If you’re a Christian in the west it’s highly unlikely you’ll face any trouble with actual wild animals as long as you live. But whether you meet one in the Congo, on social media, in the staff room, or in the bathroom, there is a lion out there. That lion is lying in wait for you, and he’s not as metaphorical as you think.

Hiding Lions

The Devil may be a roaring lion, but he knows how to “prowl” too. Our enemies don’t always make it easy for us, and evil has a devilish tendency to employ selective subtlety and nuance. In the psalms we hear about “wicked men” who hide like lions waiting to ambush their prey, whose very hiding conceals their wickedness:

His mouth is filled with cursing
and deceit and oppression; under
his tongue are mischief and iniquity.
He sits in ambush in the villages;
  in hiding places he murders
the innocent. His eyes stealthily
watch for the helpless; he lurks in
ambush like a lion in his thicket
(Psalm 10:7-9)

I’m loath to cite the name of Disney in these times, but that memorable scene in The Lion King comes to mind here. Scar—the heirless and embittered brother of Mustafa, the king—lies in wait to trap Mustafa, allowing him to be trampled to death by wildebeest. He does not attack Mustafa directly but indirectly, framing Simba - the son and true heir to the kingdom—that he might surreptitiously snatch the kingdom for himself.

Lions are dangerous because they know how to bide their time in the thicket, and strike when their prey are least aware, when they seem most helpless. There are many enemies of the kingdom of God today who are doing this very thing, quietly pulling bureaucratic levers to undermine and destroy people without even needing to raise their voices, let alone their hands.

The Unsafe Lion

But lest we forget, there is another fairly important depiction of a lion in the Bible: the Son Himself; Christ, the all-conquering lion of Judah (Revelation 5:5). In light of everything else the Bible has to say about lions this is especially worth thinking about. It means that, on some level, we’re supposed to know that Jesus is meant to be—to some extent—“dangerous”.

There’s a much-quoted moment in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lucy asks if Aslan is “safe”, to which Beaver replies unequivocally: “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” Sometimes we’re just as keen to avoid Jesus the Lion as we are to avoid Satan the Lion!

In fact, if you look at the persecuted church throughout history, you could argue that it’s Jesus who seems to lead people into trouble. That’s why many Christians often do their best to avoid Jesus if they can. It’s easy to be a disciple until he asks you to follow him somewhere you don’t want to go. It’s easy to take up your cross until it means saying something that might get you in trouble or yield that most forbidden fruit of the modern evangelical: “controversy”.

When we think about the purpose of our life, we know there must be more than perpetual risk-aversion. We’re made for more than safety. In fact, living a life in perpetual safety is a far “riskier” idea than we might realise. Risk-aversion often leads to faith-aversion. And a life increasingly deficient in faith can be a surprisingly perilous one. We must become averse to risk-averse Christianity.

The Strength of Men

As much as Samson remains a sporadically good example, I suspect we’re not all supposed to go and tear apart lions with our bare hands. Clearly, Samson was something of a one-off, in many respects! And even Samson only did so by the power of the Spirit. We mustn’t think that our own autonomous strength will prevail against lions, metaphorical or otherwise.

Yes, contrary to the functional gnosticism of much modern evangelicalism, the strength of men is not irrelevant to the kinds of protective (and appropriately “offensive”) responsibilities men are given by God to pursue. Our physical bodies, as well as our inclinations, are a good clue to what it means to “act like men” (1Cor. 16:13), even if it may look different in different contexts and situations.

Yet we also know that God does not call us to trust in our strength alone but to trust in him. This does not mean pretending we have no strength, as if we should self-emasculate, as though our physical maleness is entirely irrelevant to our “spirituality”. Rather, we are called to submit our physical strength to the Lord in holy reverence, that it might be used by Him to further His kingdom and His glory:

“His delight is not in the strength of the horse,
    nor his pleasure in the legs of a man,
but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,
    in those who hope in his steadfast love.”
(Psalm 147:10-11)

The Lion Who Rescues Men…from Lions

However strong God has made us, one of the fundamental elements of Christianity is that our strength alone is not sufficient, that only in submission to Christ can we become truly strong (cf. 2Cor. 12:10). We need the help of that unsafe Lion. The who is dangerous to those who oppose his kingdom, but rescues those He loves.

Indeed, the Lion has a habit of rescuing His people from lions specifically. In his second letter to Timothy, Paul recounts the severe persecution he’d suffered for Jesus’ name, before adding:

“But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me…So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth.” (2 Timothy 4:17).

Paul no doubt had the heroic Daniel in mind when he said this. He was bold enough to see himself (as all believers should) in the same slipstream of Daniel’s centuries-old faith. It was such faith that could declare:

“My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me, because I was found blameless before him” (Daniel 6:22).

Like Daniel, God rescues us not so we can stay hidden, but so we can grow bolder in our faith in Him. Where some wicked men lie in wait to attack, other wicked men run away at the first sight of danger: “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” (Proverbs 28:1). Too few men in the Church today have understood the full applicability of this proverb. It has instead been deemed more convenient to flee from it.

God’s people (“the righteous”) are meant to be a people who stand up to tyrants, even if it costs us dearly. We are not meant to duck away when faced by evil and wickedness. God rescued us by grace for this very purpose, to embody his kingdom here on earth, emboldened to face ever greater lions. To not do this is to throw our hat in with the wicked.

For David—from whose royal line the true lion-king would one day come—one especially emboldening day came when he faced a terrifying giant. It’s worth remembering that Goliath was so terrifying that his name has since become a common noun. Today we might literally describe Goliath as “a goliath of a man”!

When all the men of Israel (even the king) cowered before Goliath’s power, David was remarkably clear in what he believed: “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.” (1 Samuel 17:37). The righteous indeed are as bold as a lion.

I often wonder if the reason the western church seems to lack guts when it matters is because, unlike David, most of us have never had to learn how to trust God against lions or bears first. When goliaths do come along, it’s no wonder that we so often lose heart. This is because we’ve too often spent more time calculating how to avoid trouble than learning how to trust God in trouble.

When Sluggards Cry “Lion!”

In contrast to the lionhearted boldness of David, the proverbial “sluggard” moans that the impending danger is good reason to stay inside, out of harm’s way: “There is a lion outside. I will be killed in the streets!” (Proverbs 22:13). The sluggard (or, the coward) uses the fear of danger—real or imagined—to do nothing about anything. He ponders from his couch or keyboard all that might go wrong if he ever did get up and do something worthwhile out there, beyond the screen of his cushioned existence.

The respectable evangelical sluggard does the same today when he stays out of fights he knows he shouldn’t. Fear of PR damage, loss of reputation, loss of career or ministry prospects, and the gleeful quoting of the coward’s favourite pillow-verse: “so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18).

With the call to live “peaceably with all”, Paul rightly seeks to avoid rabble-rousing or distractive controversies which bear no fruit. He does not mean to live peaceably with lions—metaphorical or otherwise! In contrast to the confrontational boldness of the Apostle, the sluggard pretends any fight would not be worthwhile, and he has no shortage of “biblical” excuses at the ready as he lulls himself back to sleep.

But the sluggard is not just a coward. He is also a fool. He fails to recognise that the bad lion is already inside the house, devouring him while he sleeps. That’s the thing about lions. Most of the time they’re prowling, not roaring. And before the Christian sluggard can launch an anonymous complaint about “inappropriate tone”, the drift towards faithlessness will already have begun.

So, whatever your lions look like, sober up and keep your fight going. Because, as David Livingstone found out, lions rarely go down without a fight. But because our Lion is greater, and because our Lion is good, our Lion will prevail.