Peter's Pride

Church commentary again! This week Prince Caspian was the catalyst, and if you're worried about spoilers, stop right here and come back once you've seen it. Otherwise, proceed!

With the adventures of Clan MacInnis becoming daily more extensive, paying attention to the Lord's leading is becoming daily more essential. Through the years I've grown from mostly remembering to ask Him about the “big” stuff to realizing I need His opinion on lots of little stuff too, the trouble with that being it's me who arbitrarily decides with what I need help. But Jesus had a very different habit: He asked the Father about everything. He did absolutely nothing He didn't see the Father doing. That's not just the “big stuff,” or the things He thought might be important to the Father, or the things that were important to Himself, or the things that seemed like they might be important to the over-all scheme of History. It was everything. Jesus contained His omniscience in human flesh for 33 years. It must have been like sudden blindness. He had to trust someone else to order His steps aright. He understood the life-or-death-ness of connection to the Father. If He got out of line just once, history would be without hope.

Heavy.

King Peter the Magnificent became our anti-example on Saturday. Dissatisfied with Aslan's “delay” in bringing them back to Narnia, chaffing at being young again, he arrives on the shore below Cair Paravel full of doubts about himself and about the Lion. Within the first hours he thoughtlessly turns his physical eyes away from an image of Aslan to an image of himself. And things begin to go wrong. In trying to regain the self he used to be, he refuses to follow Lucy's sighting of Aslan, and then proposes an ill-advised night raid on Mirazes castle. When the latter turns disastrous he waits too long to retreat, saying, “No, I can still do this!” Many Narnians die for his pride. All this with Lucy's warning ringing in his ears: “Have you forgotten who really defeated the White Witch, Peter?” We see how far the High King has fallen when he responds, “We've waited for him long enough.”

It bites because we've all done the same thing. Perhaps no one has died because of our pride, but then again maybe they have. If we behaved more like Jesus, and less like Peter (who, as it turns out, has something in common with his denying namesake), perhaps there wouldn't be a question.

I was reading in 2 Samuel this morning, asking the Lord to give me a tie in for this— because I knew there had to be one. Sure enough, right in the middle of the descriptions of David's mighty men I found Shammah in 23:12— “But he took his stand in the midst of the plot [of lentils], defended it and struck the Philistines; and the LORD brought about a great victory.” [emphasis mine]

It is ours to inquire after the next step, and obey. It is His to direct and give the victory. If we forget, or rebel, only He knows who will pay for it. It may be the innocent, it may be someone we love, but it will always be us, and it will always be Him. We must look for the Lion, and wait for Him if we cannot see Him.