A Terrifying Calm

The terror of a king is like the growling of a lion; he who provokes him to anger forfeits his own life.  Proverbs 20:2  NASB

Provokes – At 3AM I got out of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent door.  There was just enough moonlight to see around the campsite.  Everyone else in the other four tents was sleeping soundly.  As I stepped out of the tent, I looked across the open space to the left.  What did I see?  There, in the shadows, was a lion staring at me.  Not a particularly comforting sight when one is camping in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.  No fences, no barriers, no real protection – and a fully-grown lion less than twenty-five feet away.  Let me tell you that the green nylon of a tent wall doesn’t offer much assurance.  The only defense is s-l-o-w retreat and very gentle movements.  And a quick prayer, of course!

Camping through Botswana has incredible rewards.  You will see animals in their wild habitat that can’t be seen anywhere else on earth.  But you are an outsider here, and subject to the rules of prey – of life and death in Africa.  All of this should remind us of the King.  Not the king of beasts, whom I suggest to avoid in the middle of the night, but the King of the Universe, who, like a growling lion, must also be feared.  Only a fool demonstrating unwarranted arrogance would tread on the edicts of a king and only an even greater fool would ignore the will of the King of the Universe.  You might as well walk up to a lion in the middle of the night and poke him with a stick.

The Hebrew verb, hit’abber, “conveys the idea of human pride motivating a man to rash demonstration of overconfidence, folly, excessive anger and evil.”[1]  One must wonder how it is possible that the King of Kings doesn’t simply devour our insolence and arrogance with unquenchable fire.  We may recognize the danger of meeting a lion in the Botswana wilderness, but because we do not see God with teeth, we somehow ignore that fact that His wrath will far exceed anything we might experience in the Delta.  The truth is that we live in a terrifying calm.  The potential of destruction is held in check only by the unimaginable patience of the Lord, but it is nevertheless very real.  The Lion stares at our pride in amazement that we are so callous to His desires.

Because it is calm at the moment, at 3AM on a moonlit night, we convince ourselves that there is no danger.  But this kind of calm must be interpreted for what it truly is – terrifying!  It is terrifying for two reasons.  The first is simply the immediate danger for anyone who has eyes to see reality.  The second, however, is perhaps the more important.  This calm could put us to sleep, content in our disobedience because we are not being torn limb from limb, because we do not feel the jaws close around our necks, we do not smell our own spilled blood.  When the calm of the King is allowed to anesthetize us to His true power, we replace terror with arrogance.  Such creatures do not survive.

Topical Index:  lion, provoke, hit’abber, calm, Proverbs 20:2