Lucy and the Beaver

from Lesson 8 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charles Clough

Those of you who are young parents (or about to become parents) may I suggest a book series for your children that is exquisite, delightful, and you’ll have hours of fun─C.S. Lewis’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia. You’ll see Christian doctrine embedded in these stories. C.S. Lewis was a master at doing this, and when asked why he did this, he had a very simple answer as to why he wrote children’s stories. He says because adults are too defensive, I write in the children’s story to come around and hit with what looks like an entertaining story. I find that adults love them because they look upon them as children’s stories so they let their defenses down and they suck it up, and once they’ve sucked it up, all of a sudden they realize, whoops, there’s some heavy Christian doctrine in these things. The God figure, the Christ figure of all of The Chronicles of Narnia is a great lion, called Aslan. He has these neat conversations and this is one of my favorite ones from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

A little girl, Lucy, hears from the animals in Narnia that there’s this big powerful lion coming. And the lion is going to change the land because the land is a land of winter without Christmas, the land has been cursed by a witch. And the only hope the people have in this land is a visit from Aslan. So Aslan is going to come and make things better. But the more she hears about all these animals looking forward to the coming of Aslan, the more spooky she gets because of the way they talk about Him. So that’s why I say when Lucy became aware she might meet the Christ figure, she worriedly asked Mr. Beaver whether he was safe [the Faun in Disney’s version]. This is a classic C.S. Lewis-ism. “Safe?,” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? Of course He isn’t safe. But He’s Good—and He’s the King.”

In those three sentences Lewis did a phenomenal thing. Let’s diagram what he’s doing, just so we catch it. Lewis is dealing with exactly what we’re dealing with. What he is trying to do is to say that you cannot have a situation of God, man, in this case Aslan, and Mr. Beaver and Lucy, you can’t have them sharing some understanding so that once man understands this, whatever it is, it boxes God in and we’ve got God under control. God is never brought under our control, never! That’s what Lewis is protecting. Aslan is not safe. What would Lucy mean by safe? It means that he’s on a leash, I can kind of walk up to him and just in case he bites, there’s a restraint on Aslan, and what the Beaver is saying is no, sorry Lucy, there are no restraints on God, so he is not safe. All idols are safe, but the God of the Scripture is never “safe” because we have no control over His power, we have no way to contravene His sovereign decrees, and we have no higher court of appeal of right and wrong other than His character. He is not a safe God. So our security rests not in a safety net that we construct.

Your security as a believer doesn’t depend on some great knowledge that we have that prevents God from doing something unpredictable. What does your security depend on in a relationship with God? It depends upon His Goodness, His graciousness and His love, and His omnipotence, all rolled together but it certainly does not depend upon His fitting into a little box that we have created so that we can heave a sigh of relief and know that at least here we’re protected. There is no place that we’re ever protected from God. The protection comes because of who and what He is. The protection does not come because of some external constraint upon God. So, that’s the point. Aslan is not safe, but he is Good.