As I started to write this, it was because my recollection that the Word said, “the lamb shall lay down in peace with the lion,” but I was wrong. In the New KJV version of the Bible it says:
Isaiah 11: 6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard shall lie down with the young goat, The calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them.
Isaiah 65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, The lion shall eat straw like the ox, And dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,” Says the LORD.
Before reading the Scripture, my thoughts about the “lamb laying with the lion,” were that it was representative of the ongoing battle in each human being, the ever existing war between the Spirit and the flesh. To paraphrase Scritpure we are reminded that as human beings, even though we know to do differently, desire to be obedient and do the thing that we know will please the Father’s heart, yet we fail miserably:
“The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,”
Matt 26:4 “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”
Mark 14:38 Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”
and, Paul himself confessed that even though he desired, he wanted to do the things of YHWH, the good things, yet he failed:
Romans 7:15 For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.
Romans 7:18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.
Romans 7:19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.
In other words, even though I say yes to YHWH and mean it with all of my heart and soul, invariably something comes up, in and of the world: be it personal or professional/work pressures, that cause me to act other than what my heart of hearts desires to do. Indeed, the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, that is the flesh fails. On the other hand, because the flesh always seems to triumph, then in worldly terms, would that not make the flesh the stronger of the two; for it always triumphs, succeeds, defeats the Spirit?
Now let’s take a look at the actual Scripture as written, “the wolf will live with the lamb,” and that “the calf and the lion and the yearling together,” and that, “a little child will lead them,”
Starting with the business of the wolf living with the lamb, the Scripture comes to mind of the “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” that “leads them (the people) astray. And with that there is plenty of reference to the lamb, the most notable of course being that Yahshua himself is the “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world:”
John 1:29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!
In the New KJV version of the Bible there are fifteen references to the Lamb, starting in the beginning, in Genesis, through to the last book, Revelation. All of these are amazingly interconnected and for me speak of Yahshua. Remarkable, as always, in those books we call the Torah, we are told of Abraham’s obedience to sacrified his only son, Isaac, and how he brought him and laid him down and was prepared to go through with what was being asked of him. In prophetic words, Abraham spoke,
Genesis 22:8 And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.”
Indeed, God did provide for Himself, the lamb for a burnt offering – Yahshua, the first born of many, the son of God.
Yahshua, we are told, was as fully human as you and I. He had the same fleshly struggles as you and I. He often went off to be alone, to pray to the Father and I see him, feel him struggling as you and I struggle; as those words of Paul self-admittedly speak – Yahshua wanted to do what the Father was asking of him, but there was a war going on within him: flesh and Spirit battled it out.
If Yahshua had to come running to the Father, and at times I truly imagine him screaming out to the Father, “Help me. I can’t. I am afraid. I don’t want to die.” In those words self-admittedly saying, “Father I really want to do this for you, to show you how much I love you, but I’m scared to death. I can’t stand pain and the thought of no longer being amongst those whom I love.”
Even before Yahshua was told what would happen to him, the revelation of what was going to happen around the next bend of his journey on the road of humanity, he struggled as you and I. Of this I have no doubt. Think about it. How often are we told that he was alone, by himself, or conversely he was being swamped by the demands and pressures of the job; people coming at him from all angles; demanding his time, his intervention. Do you think he ever said, as certainly I have said, “But – what about me? What about my needs? When is someone going to do something for me?”
Having concluded that the lamb is symbolic of Yahshua, the Word in flesh, then what is the symbolic meaning of the wolf?
In the books of the Bible called the New Testament we read,
John 10:12 But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them.
When I think of a wolf all kinds of sayings come to mind, most of which refer to being deceptive, e.g. a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It just dawned on me, in reflecting on something that I recently wrote about us being spiritual beings, clothed in flesh – that the clothing that YHWH clothed Adam and Eve with on that fatal day when they blew it in the Garden of Eden, was indeed flesh – skin, bones and blood; could this then be the answer to this puzzling question of the meaning of the Word, “wolf shall dwell with the lamb?”
Our skin deceives us, really deceives us into believing that we are what we see; flesh and blood. Goodness gracious, look at the world around us that inundates us with all kinds of means and ways of taking care of the flesh; blinded and deceived, kept from looking in and finding our essence, we have sorely neglected – and not out of deliberance but out of deceipt – our true essence. The skin – flesh and blood – is the wolf skin we wear over the sheep (lamb) Yahshua, who is the Spirit as we are Spirit.
Does this wolf lying at peace with the lamb mean that the war, the battle of flesh against spirit, will finally be over; that the division that we have created will be no more? I do not have a definitive answer to this, but can tell you from a personal level, my journey has indeed been one where my deceptive wolf’s clothing has deceived me into believing that it is what is real, it is what rules (and I have allowed it to rule), whereas in fact, the mirror opposite is true.
Were it not for the living Spirit within me, that amazingly causes the physical to function, I would really be no more than an empty wine skin, lying on the floor, with no ability to function.
Now you tell me where is the power? And if that be the power, and that power is Love…where love abides, evil cannot: neither hate, nor anger, nor lust, nor greed. Indeed the war will be finished and as Yahshua said on the cross when he released his Spirit, giving it back over to the Father, we too can say, “It is finished.” The war is over.
