Bonus Reading: Facing the Lions

Facing the Lions

Deep in the Sinai, Basim expressed his hatred for tigers because they may recklessly destroy dozens of animals yet take only one for food. You could almost forgive them for satisfying their hunger, but carnage seems their game. Other shepherds despise the panthers most or the hyenas. Many describe physical tangles with these beasts. They unassumingly accepted this as a vocational hazard. “It goes with being a shepherd,” Kamal told me with obvious pride. “I’ve been bitten, stung, and attacked by everything out there. I’m afraid of nothing, and nothing hurts me anymore.” He had not, however, faced the revered archetypal enemy of shepherds. The lion. 

Until recently many large and powerful predators lived in the lands of the Bible: lions, bears, tigers, panthers, hyenas, and leopards. Shepherds often faced these in hand-to-hand combat. Losing animals to dangerous desert carnivores was a begrudged expectation in the ancient world. Jacob reminded Laban that while he was guarding his uncle’s flocks, he bore many losses personally, whether they were taken by day or by night (Genesis 31:39). One might chase a raiding lion away only to find gruesome evidence of a missing animal. Hired shepherds who lost a sheep or goat to a wild animal were exempt from penalty so long as they could provide such remains as proof. 

Lions spend their lives engaged in two primary activities: sleeping after a meal and looking for a meal. They patiently prowl, often stalking their prey for hours. When they decide to pounce, the result is lethal. The Arabs have a saying, “The lion’s den is never without bones.”¹ The easiest animals to take down are sheep, which have no natural defenses. Unless a fearless and capable shepherd comes between them, a “lion will lie down with a lamb” only for dinner. 

When you think of shepherds and lions, a king-to-be from Bethlehem quickly comes into view. As a young man David faced threats in the wilderness of Judah with resolve and courage. His chutzpah to challenge Goliath came in part from personal history with menacing marauders in the wilderness: “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it” (1 Samuel 17:34–35). David’s response to the most intimidating natural threat in his world was to go after it. His weapons were simple, but his confidence was rock- solid. Goliath was just another arrogant lion to kill. 

Lion imagery in the ancient world was often used for royal leaders in their military role. Kings from Assyria and Babylon, for example, depicted themselves as shepherds of their own people but lions among the nations. Assyrian King Sennacherib—who almost destroyed Judah during the days of King Facing the Lions 129 Hezekiah—turned against a rival kingdom nearer home: “I raged like a lion and gave the order to march into Babylonia against him.”² 

Jeremiah laments that God’s people had become like a vulnerable flock before such impressive empires:

Like these ferocious historical empires, the Bible describes other lionlike enemies who assault God’s people. In alarm, the psalmist cries,

An enemy, without cause,

The ultimate spiritual predator is the devil, known by name as Satan, Lucifer, and Beelzebub, and by role as the accuser, adversary, father of lies, tempter, and prince of this world.³ The most graphic image of this figure is “a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). He relentlessly returns for God’s people with an unquenchable appetite and often “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). Human enemies may be unknowing instruments of the evil one, collaborating with an unseen diabolical force for the destruction of God’s people.⁴ Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” Facing the Lions 131 (Matthew 16:23). The same Satan entered Judas’s heart, compelling him to betray Jesus (John 13:2). 

But like the shepherd David, Jesus went after the enemy. With a holy vengeance he liberated vulnerable sheep from the clutching lion. Taking on a greater threat than Rome, he defeated legions of demons invisibly controlling people (Mark 5:1–20). At the foot of a pagan temple overlooking the “gates of hell,” Jesus declared war on this world’s reigning lion (Matthew 16:18).⁵ There he gave Peter the keys to his heavenly kingdom (v. 19), authorizing his followers to preach the good news and to free those in Satan’s grip. With the power of his word they would engage the enemy. Jesus’s prayer for them was “not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15). The one they were to go after. 

Paul knew that believers are engaged in this invisible war: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). The apostle stressed the importance of being protected by “the full armor of God” in this struggle, emphasizing that the only effective weapon is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (vv. 13, 17). 

Many of us find ourselves “bitten, stung, and attacked by everything out there.” Like Job, we have felt the hot breath of our sinister adversary. Some have buckled under the deadly force of his clasp. I have seen the devil’s “claw marks.” Missionary friends shot or raped. Ministries that crashed and burned. Families “dismembered” by the lion of hell. Accidents that “just happened.” Some only survive these encounters in pieces. 

Many are held captive to the devil more subtly through seductive addictions: to drugs, alcohol, pornography, work, television, music, or the internet. The enemy’s work is evident in the alarming rise of eating disorders and self-harm in the West. Others are falling prey through the occult. Some are possessed by demons or oppressed by them in crippling ways. Still others are just as trapped in seemingly harmless forms of pleasure or patriotism—or even in religious activity. As the demonic figure Screwtape says, “One of our great allies at present is the Church itself.”⁶ Could it be that we are doing the devil’s work by keeping people overly busy with good things that take us off mission? 

Are we fully cognizant of the spiritual battle that rages around us? Will we, like David, courageously rescue God’s captive people from the enemy’s jaws? Can we report, like David, “I went after it”? The “gates of hell” will not withstand the onslaught of Jesus’s followers. Ironically, we go with no other weapon than God’s powerful word. In our most intense encounters with the evil one, nothing else is of use.⁷ 

Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” registers his sober realism regarding the devil’s foul motives and formidable might: 

But a subsequent verse articulates the Reformer’s robust biblical optimism regarding our ancient adversary:

1. Dalal Khalil Safadi and Victoria Safadi Basha, A Thousand and One Arabic Proverbs (Beirut: American Press, 1954), 34. 
2. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, eds., The Context of Scripture, vol. 2, Monumental Inscriptions for the Biblical World (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1997), 301. 
3. See 1 Peter 5:8; Job 1:6–7; Isaiah 14:12; Matthew 12:24; John 8:44; 1 Thessalonians 3:5; John 12:31. 
4. C. S. Lewis’s fictitious demonic figure Screwtape discloses a common objective to his apprentice Wormwood: “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours.” C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1942, 1996), 38. 
5. The temple to the Greek god Pan at Caesarea Philippi was located in front of a huge rock face (covered with idol niches) and next to a cave where one of the sources of the Jordan River emerged. Considered an opening into Hades, human sacrifices were thrown into this cave. The “rock” on which Jesus promised to build his church (Matthew 16:18) may be what this temple site represented—the epitome of pagan worship. 
6. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 5.
7. Jesus wins the great war against Satan with a sword coming out of his mouth (Revelation 1:16; 2:16; 19:15, 21).

Taken from The Good Shepherd: Forty Biblical Insights on Leading and Being Led © 2024 by Timothy S. Laniak.  Used by permission of Our Daily Bread Publishing, Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.  All rights reserved.