Isaiah 11:6-7 – 6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
Grizzly bear along the trail to Iceberg Lake. Glacier National Park, Montana.
(Not my best photography, I’ll admit, but when you are thirty yards from a grizzly bear in the wild, you tend to forget about swapping lenses and adjusting camera settings)
Today’s passage from Isaiah sounds rather absurd to anyone who has hiked in grizzly country, even to those who have not, for that matter. I suspect that a fear of large predators keeps many people from venturing very far into the wilderness of places like Glacier National Park. This fear is not totally irrational, just read some of the precautions that hikers and backcountry campers are told to follow.
As beautiful as God’s creation and creatures are, most people understand that there are risks in the outdoors. And, whether or not a person is aware of the Judeo-Christian concept of the fall, I think everyone will at least acknowledge there are dangers, suffering, and even death in our world. We live in a fallen world, where everything is corrupted by sin. As Romans 8:22 tells us, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
Faced with an understanding of the effects of the fall, the scenario described by Isaiah seems strange to us in two ways. First, there is the very unusual behavior of the animals, not something you typically see on nature programs. And, second there is this seemingly odd notion that “a little child shall lead them.” Even for Christians it all sounds rather foreign, because we, too, know well the realities of life here on earth. But, as Christians we are blessed to know who this little child is. It is the same child, the predicted Messiah, written about in yesterday’s passage from Isaiah 9.
It is the Messiah whose coming we celebrate on Christmas, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It is only through his birth, perfect life, and undeserved death on the cross that these impossible sounding things become possible. It is only through his innocent blood shed on the cross that we will some-day be able to experience what we read about in Revelation 21:4, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Read more about my “God is Revealed…“ category of posts
© Todd D. Nystrom and Todd the Hiker, 2013.
Todd the Hiker 