The Lion Isn't Trying to Kill the Dragon

I have the audacity to believe Jesus will eventually save everyone.

I hold this belief for two reasons. First, I have a high view of God. I don't think the creator of all of the beauty I see around me is also a designer who will end up writing off a majority of that creation as a loss for all eternity. Second, I believe God looks like Jesus. This causes me to categorically reject many of the popular ways we imagine hell.

Therefore, my conclusion in God's ultimate redemption for all is the consistent theological choice for me. And yes, it is a choice any Christian can make, as there are multiple historic views Christians have held over the centuries (see episode 43 of Cabernet and Pray for an explanation of three of them).

This does not mean I downplay the consequences of sin or that I naively believe everyone is good. There is far too much evil in this world for that. I do not believe every person dies and is immediately met with bliss. The love of God brings inherent justice as well. Indeed, Jesus talked about judgment, often using the vivid imagery of His day. Anyone who defends my view has to acknowledge these words rather than wish them away.

Yet any sense of the justice of God must be restorative, not punitive. The love of God requires it. This is the mistake far too many Christians make. So rather than attempt to convince you of why I suspect Jesus will save everyone, I'd like to offer an explanation for why I don't think justice negates the chance of it.

I suspect many a person will have an unpleasant experience with God when they die. They will likely be forced to grapple with the realities of their choices upon creation. I'm reminded of the phantoms Scrooge sees when Marley's ghost confronts him: "The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever."

But we do not cease to be made in the image of God just because we made bad choices. Unless, of course, the image of God is merely a fickle passing resemblance rather than something of substance.

One of the pushbacks I sometimes get on my view is that it does not adequately address the need for justice for the evils committed on earth. How can this story be good if the bad guys win? Or, at a minimum, how can this story be good if the bad guys are not held accountable?

Our imagination often seems to be limited by our need for punishment. While someone might argue for a life sentence for sufficient crimes committed, it would be quite a step further to argue that someone could deserve an eternal life sentence, especially for crimes done in a temporal window of existence.

I resonate with the theologian David Bentley Hart, who observes:

Nothing in our existence is so clear and obvious and undeniable that any of us can ever possess the lucidity of mind it would require to make the kind of choice that, supposedly, one can be damned eternally for making or for failing to make.

When we view the scope of an eternal consequence, the application starts to feel a bit lazy. Is there no other nuanced option available?

C.S. Lewis is helpful here, albeit reluctantly. He did not hold my view on eternity, and even wrote The Great Divorce to suggest that hell was locked from the inside. I remember embracing the views in that book on my way to where I ultimately landed.

I'd like to invite one of Lewis' famous scenes into a more aggressive application than he made of it.

In my favorite of the Narnia series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we witness the journey of a boy named Eustace. He's not a pleasant character when we meet him. In fact, Lewis starts the book with perhaps the greatest literary sentence ever to open a novel: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

In that story, the boy Eustace falls asleep on a dragon's collection of treasure, thinking greedy thoughts. He wakes up to discover that he himself has now become a dragon, and one of the gold bands he had put on his arm is now far too tight in his dragon form. He suffers from the nagging pain of it.

He longs for relief, but he's become an unrecognizable monster.

Then one day, Eustace the dragon has a profound experience. As he later tells it, "I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me." If you're familiar with this series, you likely know that Jesus is represented as a lion named Aslan.

"I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn't that kind of fear. I wasn't afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it."

We have an interesting scene created here. It appears to be a standoff between two ferocious animals. We respect the lion as an apex predator. But a mythical dragon is even scarier. Despite that, this scene is not an epic battle. Notice that the fear Eustace feels toward the lion isn't one of attack or destruction. The lion's goal is not to kill the dragon. That's when things get beautifully bizarre.

He then says the lion "led me a long way into the mountains... there was a garden—trees and fruit and everything. In the middle of it there was a well... The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first."

That may strike you as a strange sentence, but remember that Eustace is not a boy at this point. So he must figure out how to do this as a dragon.

So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place... But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before... Then the lion said—but I don't know if it spoke—'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.

Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again.

I'm not sure how you react when you read that, but I'm not interested in going through it myself. It doesn't sound all that enjoyable. It reminds me of an unpleasant medical visit. Despite knowing it is necessary, you cannot help but wish you could have avoided it in the first place.

Aslan does not seek to destroy the dragon; he seeks to remake it.

Even when Eustace is convinced the lion is trying to hurt him, the pain is redemptive in nature. But the redemptive process is often a painful one. This is a profound lesson we learn from the cross. 

We are caught up in a grand story of redemption. Which means a story of punitive consequences is a lesser story the world tells us. It looks for people to blame. It offers no healing, only a momentary promise of relief.

Don't settle for that story, especially if you think God looks like Jesus. God will eventually descale all of creation and remind us of the beauty inside.

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Photo by K Wills on Unsplash