The Lion's Roar, the Prophet's Word

"The lion has roared; who will not fear? 

The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?" 

-Amos 3:8

When I was 10, there was a lady who was killed by a mountain lion while she was out jogging just a couple of miles from our house.

It was already common knowledge that there were mountain lions in the area--there still are, in fact--and within a week of Barbara Schoener's fatal attack, our dog had been killed, along with several of our neighbors' goats, pigs, etc.

The game changed in an instant, though, when the reality that a jogger could be attacked and killed by one of those cats on a paved jogging trail struck our family and our community in all its undeniable certainty.

In the following days and weeks, our parents told us what we could do if we were to encounter a mountain lion, which consisted of standing up as high as you could, yelling and throwing rocks to try and scare it away. With that knowledge filed away, however, we entertained no false illusions of our invincibility in the face of God's majestic, territorial, predatory cat.

What I don't remember, however is my mom or dad sitting us boys down and telling us to be afraid of the lions. Who needed to be told that? Fear in that sense is the natural reaction to the light of reality.

In the years that followed, the nearby attack was always in the back of our minds. Whenever a wiffleball game went into extra innings and required a twilight walk up the long, gravel driveway, or a moonlit trip to take the out the garbage was interrupted by an unaccounted for rustling in the bushes, the thought of a lurking mountain lion rightly haunted us and reminded us to keep on the alert.

That fear wasn't paranoia, but a right reaction to the light of reality.

So it is when God speaks. The shepherd-turned-prophet Amos plays upon the universally understood lion-o-phobia in each of our hearts when he relates that fearful reaction to a person--in this case, a prophet--hearing the God of heaven speak.

The point is this: When a lion roars, we fear. And when God speaks, a Christian not only hears it, but we in turn speak it.

We Christians need a constant reminder of our innate duty to speak God's word to those around us. As natural as fearing a lion when he roars, that's how knee-jerky God's people should be when it comes to communicating his truth, his self-revelation in his Word.

It's not on us to decide whether or not a message will be well-received, it's on us to deliver the message.

It means when God speaks in his Word about issues pertaining to his glory, his Son, his authority, his creation, marriage, sexuality, sin, holiness, grace and wrath, we not only listen, but we prepare ourselves to then deliver his message to the world he has saved us out of and unto.

Friends, if you are a Christian, you are one of God's spokespersons. He has entrusted us--the church and all who dwell therein--with the ministry of reconciliation through the shed blood of Christ.

He has called us the ambassadors of heaven who beg others to be reconciled to God and taste of God's undeserved grace even as we have (2 Corinthians 5:16-21).

What hinders our witness, more often than not, is an off-kilter version of reality. That is, we fear man's opinion of us more than we fear the Lord of Glory. The lion roars and we don't fear. That's a foolish, deadly reaction to reality.

It's what happens when we blush and apologize at the time to speak for the King of Heaven, and it's deadly. Jesus says it is in Matthew 10:32-33 and Paul says it again in 2 Timothy 2:12.

Let's take God at his word and own up to the reality of his authority, expressed clearly through the pages of Scripture. It's there we find our marching orders, there alone we look reality in the face.

There alone, in the fear of the Lord, we find freedom from the fear of man.

The lion has roared, who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?