Satan

The Savo River isn't much of a river. It's in Kenya. It's not very long. Maybe at the longest... from the beginning to the end, it's only about 80 miles long. And if you were in the Savo River, along the Savo River in the late 1800s, what you would have seen is stretching to the horizon just prairie. It was prairie. There would be some trees dotted every once in a while, some clumps of trees, and lots of thorn brush, these big bushes that were just big long thorns on them, and grass, and a few rock outcroppings that served as little hills. But there really wasn't much for as far as you could see. And the Savo River wasn't famous. There wasn't a big population around the Savo River at the time. But if you would have been there in 1898, you would have heard it, just tremendous sound. And the reason why is the British Empire was going to build a railroad across Kenya. And so across the prairie, the savannah, they're building a railroad. They have thousands of men involved in this. And they get to the Savo River, and they're going to build a bridge. It's not much of a bridge. I mean, it's not a bridge that anybody would remember. It's not a bridge that would be famous. It's just a bridge over this little river in the middle of nowhere. But the Savo River would become very famous because of what happened. Thousands of men were camped out. There were Europeans. There were a lot of Africans that they brought in and hired them. There were a lot of Indians, people from India, because of course India was controlled by the British Empire at the time. And they would export large numbers of workers out to do projects all over the world. So there's these thousands of men. And one night they're camping there before the river, beginning to build the bridge. And they're living in seven man tents. And one of the workers reported later that he was woke up by the snoring of the man who was actually the biggest man in the entire camp. He was this very tall, very broad, strong man from India. And Aungan Sin was snoring. And he woke this man up. And of course he realized, he says, I wasn't going to wake him up. You know, he's the toughest guy and he's the biggest guy. And he seems, just before he goes to sleep, he sees a shadow outside the tent. And then suddenly, before he can react, a lion, about 500 pound lion, came through that door, grabbed Aungan Sin and dragged him outside screaming.

Hundreds and hundreds of men woke up because they heard what was going on. And he dragged him out into the darkness. And he fought. It took him a long time to die. He fought and fought. And then another lion came up because they could hear all this. And they killed him. What started that night was a reign of terror that's unlike any animal story in the modern age.

Because what happened was two white male lions, weighing close to 500 pounds each, which is a big lion, two white male lions saw these about 3000 men as a herd of slow animals. And they began to stalk those men. They watched the herd and they didn't go after the weak ones. They first tried to pick out and go after all the struggles. As you know, then you take the weak ones whenever you want.

Night after night, these two lions would come into the camp, attack a sleeping man or one of the guards, because they started to post guards, and just drag them out and everybody could hear the screaming. Everybody could hear what was going on. So what the men did is they went out and they got all that thorn brush and they built around the camp a wall, multiple feet thick and too high for any animal to jump over.

Many of these people were from Africa. They knew how animals were. The man in charge actually was a big game hunter, the chief engineer. And so they built this wall around of big thorns and every night they would hear screaming. They would light fires and somehow the lions would get around the fires. They wouldn't see them. They would grab somebody and what they would find in the morning was a big chunk of that fence torn apart.

There'd be all kinds of fur on it and pieces of clothing from the man that they dragged through it. Or they literally at one point saw one of them grab a man and jump over the fence. Before it was over with, they killed at least, they're not sure exactly how many, at least a hundred of those men were killed. Being tracked down by two white lions. The workers finally started to go home. Fewer and fewer were left. Those who did say, of course, didn't sleep. So during the day they weren't getting work done, they were just all huddled together in fear.

The men with rifles could never get a clear shot. They made a movie about this. Some of you may have watched it back in, I think it was 1996, The Ghost in the Darkness. The Ghost in the Darkness isn't totally true. I have to tell you, the Michael Douglas character is made up. There was no American there.

Okay, but you got to put American in every movie, right? There was no, that a totally made up person. Patterson, the man who was hunting down these lions, is based on a true story. He wrote about it after all. He was the chief engineer who had done big game hunting, especially tigers, which are bigger than lions, especially tigers in India. He was shocked by what he experienced as he tried to hunt down these two lions.

They said, why am I giving you this story as a sermon? During the time of the life of the Apostle Peter, there were lions in the Middle East. Now, they weren't big, bigger lions, like the lions that just, you know, from Africa, Central Africa, probably more the size of the American mountain lion, maybe not even quite that big. You know, mountain lions don't get near as big as a African lion.

It can be eight to twelve feet long and stand about four feet high. That's a big animal. Now, most of them aren't that big, but they can get big. These two weighed, they figure close to 500 pounds each.

Peter was in an area where there were lions. You didn't see him much, just like you don't see the American mountain lion much. You know, when we were down in Texas, there were mountain lions, even in San Antonio, in the city where we lived. And at one time, my son was driving home and he said, hey, you know, dad, how they've been announcing in our neighborhood there's a mountain lion? I said, yeah, he says, I saw it. Because it was emaciated. He couldn't get enough to eat.

And he said it was out about one o'clock in the morning, wondering around, trying to eat garbage. But a good-sized mountain lion, American mountain lion, is a scary animal, too. So he knew, he lived in an area of the world where occasionally someone might see a lion. And if you were out in the desert, you would get attacked by a lion. You could get killed by a lion. Let's read what he says in 1 Peter 5-8. 1 Peter 5-8. Because I'm telling you the story. If you ever read, you get a chance to read Patterson or there's some other, Capstick is a big game hunter writer. And he wrote numerous books about the adventures of big game hunters. And his book on Patterson is very interesting. But 1 Peter 5.

Verse 8. Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. You know, we talk about Satan a lot. And we describe him as this being, this incredibly beautiful, intelligent being that became evil. And that he is acting now as the spirit that rules over this world until Christ returns. But I want to talk today about how Satan is like a lion. Why he would use that. Let's break this down into some real life experience. What is it like to deal with a lion and then understand what it is like to have Satan involved in our lives? We're going to look at four characteristics in which Satan is like a lion. And why Peter would use this example. The first one is lions are deceptively fascinating. I mean, they are fascinating. If I'm ever late at night, you know, switching the channels. And I always look at the Smithsonian to see what's on. And I stop. And there's lions that are hunting. I always stop. My wife always gets up and leaves. She says, some little animal is going to die. And she gets up and leaves. And I'm watching them. And how they work together is in what they do and how they hunt is fascinating. What's interesting about a lion is it's very fast for a very short distance. Its heart isn't very big. So it has a burst. It can take that weight certain distance and then it stops. You'll see them after an impala and they'll actually be gaining on it. And then they'll just stop. They just stop running. The heart won't let them run anymore. So they're very strong. They're very fast. But that speed is only for a short distance. When you see them when they're not hungry, they play a lot. And they sleep a lot. They look like a big house cat. Rolling around and playing with the kittens. And I mean, they're just fascinating. They're fun to watch. But that's all very deceptive. Very deceptive.

It's interesting. I had a friend who went on a safari, a picture safari, in Kenya's national park, the Kruger National Park. And he had a video. And they're standing on the back of this truck, this group of people, and there's a pride of lions not very far away. 20 yards, maybe. And there's some females and some cubs and they're playing and they're rolling around. And he's filming all this. And then he heard a noise. He turned around and probably three feet behind them, probably three feet behind them. This big male lion just walks by the truck, looks up at him, walks around the truck, and walks over and lays down. He said he realized it came up behind them. It was three feet away from all these people. He just wasn't hungry today.

They didn't even... the guide who has a gun didn't even see him. He just came up behind them. They're deceptive. They're fascinating. They're fun to watch. This is something that it's hard for many of the young people to understand. Why their parents or why in the church we're always saying, don't do this. It seems like, are we the church of don'ts? Don't do this. Don't do that. We don't understand, and they don't understand, how deceptively fascinating it is in the world. It is fascinating. Sometimes we forget, as we get older, how fascinating it is as a young person. He's absolutely fascinating. What is it like to do this? What is it like to do that? Isn't this fun? Just like standing there, my friend, watching all the lions, and the male was just standing behind them. He said he was a little... when he turned around, you can see his video. He turned around, there's that lion right there. He said it was a little unnerving, you know, and how he just walked around them, not even caring. It didn't matter there was eight of them. They were just another herd of slow-moving animals to him. He walked around. Now, lions do have a certain fear of human beings, because they know we're smart. Somehow we have a power that they don't. You know, we have weapons, but, you know, basically 101 is no contest. Let's look at a story in Genesis.

This is a story that young people need to remember, because this starts out so innocent, just like my friends standing there, innocently watching a pride of lions. They were fed, they were happy, they weren't feeling... they didn't feel threatened by this truck. You know, they saw trucks go down this road all the time, filled with people. They didn't feel threatened by it, but it was so deceptive how that could have gotten very dangerous, very deadly, just like that. Satan's way is so attractive. It is attractive to us. It pulls us with our desires. It pulls us with our curiosity. There's attractiveness to it. This is talking about what of Jacob's daughter. Now Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. Now chapter 34 is a fascinating story. Dinah here is not put in a negative light. This is Genesis 34. She's not a bad girl. She just looks at the nearby town and says, those girls know how to have fun. I wonder what it's like. You know, she was part of a nomadic tribe that moved around all the time. They did. They moved with their flocks and their herds. To look at this town, it's like, wow! At night, we all go to bed when the sun goes down. The fire burns a little bit, then we all go to bed. They have lights there. They have stuff going on in that place. Those girls, every time I see them, they smell so good and they have nice jewelry. Here I am, just a nomadic trash to them. It would be so exciting to go in and just see how they live. She's not wanting to sin. That's not the implication. She wants to go see how the other girls live. So she goes into town. Along the way, she comes in contact with the prince, the son of the king. This is a very big town. I don't know how many people there are. Hundreds. But she comes in contact with the king's son, the prince. Every young girl's dream to have a prince come along and save her. He ends up seducing her. Now, she's devastated by it. She goes home. She actually ends up staying there, going back to the town. And of course, Jacob and his sons find out about it. And they're furious. But Jacob doesn't do anything. I mean, she went into the town. There's consequences here. We don't end up in a war with these people. Remember, they're a king. This is a town. They're a nomadic tribe. They fight wars with each other all the time. But two of the sons, they think, well, maybe we should fix this. We should do something with this. This is wrong. Our sister has been violated by these terrible people. The young man who seduced her, he went to his dad. He said, I actually love this girl. He said, let's arrange a marriage. Arrange a marriage, and I can marry her. And then their tribe and our city will become friends, will live together, will work together, will become like one people. Think how big our army will be. Think how rich we'll become. We've got all the things a town has to offer, and they have all these flocks and herds, and they raise food. This is good. And he said, I really love her. He actually did. It says that he was knit to her, her soul. And the king says, if you love her that much, this is good. This is good for everybody. Our economy will... this is great. We won't have a war. We'll make these people into allies. So they go to Jacob's sons, and the sons say, fine, but for you to marry her, every man in your village has to be circumcised. Every grown man has to be circumcised. You have to love a woman an awful lot.

And your people have to trust you an awful lot, because they gave the order, and every man was circumcised. Every man became circumcised so that he could marry Leah, or I mean Dinah, the daughter of me. And what happened? Two of Jacob's sons went into town while the men were laid up, couldn't fight back, and killed every man in the town, and then enslaved all their wives and children. Jacob is horrified. He said, every town, every tribe are going to look on us as the worst people. We are now in the eyes of everybody, nothing but criminals and murderers. How could you do this? And his son said, hey, you don't mess with our sister.

It ends a very, very sad story, because Dinah is now without a husband, an outcast among her brothers, because they see her as violated, in a nomadic tribe that has to move on, because of the horrible sin that's been committed. The whole story starts with a young girl that has no idea she's walking into a lion's den, and she has no idea how evil her brothers can be. And she unwittingly, I mean, she's not the bad person in this story. She unwittingly sets off a series of actions that leads to the death of many, many men, and the abuse of the wife and children, because they became slaves. They made them into slaves. It doesn't say whether Jacob made them, released them or not. I probably couldn't. Those women and children could not survive on their own in that environment. They had to be protected. So they would have now taken them into the tribe to protect them. You can imagine the amount of hatred now that's inside Jacob's tribe, as he brings in all these people, and they had murdered their husbands. His murder was war. See, it's all deceptive. It looks so good, but it's not. See, we think we can play with sin. Oh, come on. I can handle my beer. It's amazing how many 18-year-olds say, I can handle my beer, right? And, of course, they can't.

But I don't know what it is. 18, 19, 20-year-olds all believe, oh yeah, I can drink. It does affect me.

Because I can handle it. I can play with the lights. I can handle it. You know, come on. We just made out. We didn't really go all the way.

But you're in the lion's den. You're in the lion's den. And it's so hard at any age, but especially when you're young. Because Satan's way, which is sin, is fascinating. It is. It's fascinating. There's something in us that's drawn towards it.

But if we aren't careful, we end up finding ourselves in the lion's den. Because they're so fascinating. The second, lions are camouflaged. You know, the lion isn't the animal of the jungle. There's always, you know, in movies, there's lions in the jungle. There's very few lions in the jungle. They're out on the plane, the parts of planes. That's why the color, that tawny color, they're hard to see.

Even animals don't see them at times. That's what's amazing when you watch the videos of lions attacking other animals. Sometimes they're very close before they see them. They'll hear them maybe, or maybe smell them, but they're very hard to see. Remember, Paul told the church that Satan can appear as an angel of light. We must understand Satan's way will appear good, and there's a deception to it. There's a deception to it. It wasn't that long ago that the transgender issue was, look, you have to accept these people, and then it went beyond acceptance to, you must honor these people. To now, we must look at each other and decide, oh really, you should be a transgender. My wife was reading a story to me yesterday that she was reading about a woman in Texas that has two sons. Twins. That's right, they're twins. She's deciding one of them is a girl. So, she's giving drugs to her seven-year-old son to change him into a girl.

And this is good.

And to say it's not good makes you either mentally ill or evil. Understand the definition of good and evil change. This is what Satan does. And so, those who believe that, actually believe, those of us who think transgenderism is the abuse of what a human being is, it's not what God designed. We are the evil ones, and they consider us evil. You're bad. You're bad because good people love other people. So, the fact that there are 72 different genders now. There's two in the Bible. I told my wife the other day she didn't think this was funny. I said, I decided I'm another gender. I'm a billy goat. I thought it was funny. She just shook her head and walked away. That's so stupid. I said, I don't know. Can I make up something? I mean, is that what people do? They just make it up. I am this. I am that. And if you don't accept it, you're evil. It's camouflaged so that it looks good. Do you not love people? Yes. Well, then, do you not love this person who's doing the sin? Love is not the question. Is the action right or wrong is the question. See how it becomes camouflaged. Well, yes, I love the person. It's still wrong. That's not the point. I really love myself. But sometimes, many, many times daily, I have to go to God and say, I was wrong. I am wrong. This isn't right. This isn't the way you want me to be. Love isn't the issue, but see how it gets camouflaged into something else. So we're intimidated by, well, you don't want to commit hate speech. Well, you just don't love people. Jesus loved people. Yeah. Read the writings. We read the gospels. Let's see how Jesus confronted people.

I've been reading about half of the cost of discipleship. He's a German who, during World War II, stood up against the Nazis. He said, this is the cost of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. He stood up in Germany, in Nazi Germany, against them. He had studied in the United States in 1939, and he wrote how shocked he was when he came to the United States and went to the seminaries because they were so secular. He said there was a secular element that he was shocked. And that's 1939! He said that they don't really delve deeply into the Scripture. It's all surface. Jesus loves you. That's it. And of course, von Hoffer... von... what is his name? Yeah. He is criticized today because he came up with the term, cheap grace. And we believe in cheap grace. We cheapen God's grace. And he's criticized for that because God's grace does everything. But in the book of Hebrews, it says we cheapen God's grace. That's where he got it from. He got it from the Bible. And he's criticized even today.

It's... it's camouflage, Ephesians 6. Here's the thing. You and I have to understand. We can't fight this being on our own. He's deceptively fascinating. And he is camouflaged. Ephesians 6.

Verse 10. Now, he's talking here about the honor of God. So he's using a soldier analogy. But let's think of this in terms of just fighting our enemy.

And then he goes on to talk about the honor of God. The point here is in verse 10, the first verse we read. Finally, my brother, be strong in the Lord and the power of his might. You and I are no match for Satan.

He's deceptive and he's camouflaged and he's strong. And for that short distance, he's really fast. But Satan is no match for God. There is no contest between Satan and God. None whatsoever. God rules him. He allows him to do things. And what we just went through was picturing a time when God says it's enough. You notice Satan doesn't have any resistance when God removes him? We talked about, Mr. Sengbiono talked about the last day, the eighth day, the last great day, that great white throne judgment. Satan was removed forever. He's removed forever. He doesn't have any power once God exerts his power. So we do have a champion that will protect us from Satan. But that means we have to stay close to that champion. You don't want to wander off by yourself.

The farther we get from God, the closer we get to the lions. Now, the third point.

Lions love darkness. A number of years ago, National Geographic did a study of lion hunts. And what they found out was only 5% of lion kills happened during the day. And 85% happened when the moon is less than half full. Less than half full. In other words, if it's a full moon and there's no clouds, they kill less. Remember, they are only good for a short distance. They got to get close. So they live in the darkness. So I thought it was interesting. The name of that movie was The Ghost in the Darkness. Because both the Indian and the African workers on the railroad decided that these lions weren't real. They were demons. They weren't real. Because they did things that didn't seem real that lions could do. When Lieutenant Colonel Henry Patterson, who was the chief engineer, he decided to hunt them down. And the first thing he does is he figures out sort of their pattern. Okay, they have a pattern. So he goes to what he thinks the next place they're going to strike. And he builds a little tree stand. And he's up in the tree stand, waiting for the lions to come. At some point, he would put out different animals. He tried this different times.

I mentioned Henry Hathaway Capstick. I'm sorry, Peter Hathaway Capstick, who wrote hunting stories. He wrote one about Patterson. And he says, after reading what Patterson wrote, here's what he wrote, if there's anything more courage draining than listening to a pair of man-eaters advertising as they close in on your position, it's the sudden stop of the roaring, leaving you no idea of their location. Although their silence means that they've begun to hunt. And Patterson would talk about how you could hear that he could hear them coming. They would let him know they'd be roaring, roaring, and then they'd split up and they're coming from two different directions. And then it would stop. And he had no idea where they were. He just knew he was being hunted. They knew where he was. Not only did they start hunting the bigger men, they started hunting the hunters, which surprised the hunters. He goes on, he says, minutes crawled into a half hour as Patterson stared with aching, unseeing eyes into the darkness, bodies screaming from the torture of the hard tree limb perch. He's a good writer. Silence. Not even a murmur came from the terrified men below in their closed tents. Sometimes he'd use the men. Just put them in their tents and say, well, I'll shoot him before they get to your tent. Then from a half a mile away, unearthly screams and shouts razored the night as the man-eaters broke into another tent in a different section of the railroad camp and dragged off a laborer. No matter what he did as he tried to play a game, he became a game to the light. And they outsmarted him all the time. We can't play games with Satan, and he loves the darkness. It's interesting in the Scripture that God's way is called the way of light, and Satan's way is called darkness. It's dark.

Let's look at John 3. John 3 16 is the most quoted verse in the entire Bible, probably. And I want to read not just John 3 16. I want to read what's after it, because very subtle do you hear quoted what is said next. John 3 16. These are the words of Jesus.

He says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God did not send his Son into the world who condemned the world, but the world through him might be saved. So that's what is usually read. But let's read the rest of it. So this is verse 18. He who believes in him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation. This is what God condemns people for. That the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. The more we are like Satan, the more we like the darkness, the more we want to hide who we really are.

For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come into the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth, and I find that very interesting, he doesn't say he who believes the truth. He who does the truth, who is actively involved in the truth, who lives the truth, comes to the light that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have it done in God. The more we are by our champion, our protector, our guide, the more we do not fear the light. We like the light. We want the light. The farther we get into the darkness, the more we want to hide because we are becoming the darkness. It's where Satan is. He lives in spiritual darkness and he wants us in spiritual darkness. I've always wanted to go to Kenya and go on a safari, but I tell you what, I'm not going out at night wandering off into the darkness, okay?

You want to stay where all the light is. You want to stay where the hunters are. You know, the men who can protect you. I think I told you last summer, I took our kids up to Pennsylvania to out in the country to go to a theme park that's out there that's one of the oldest in the country. And we stayed in a some cabins. I mean, out in the middle of nowhere, it's out in the mountains, but the cabins have attached to it a zoo, a really nice little zoo. But it was strange to wake up in the morning to the sound of lions roaring. I mean, there's nothing quiet about that. They were, it was time to be fed. They were letting everybody know it was time to be fed. That's where Satan is.

Our fourth point is, lions actually stalk their prey. Because they only have that short burst, they have to plan out how to attack their prey. There's a common misconception that lions only attack the weak and the sick or the young. The reason they get the weak and the sick and the young so many times is because they are only fast for a short burst. They're the ones they usually catch. If they can catch a bigger animal, they'll do it. Whole prides, an entire pride of lions have been known to attack a full-grown elephant. Maybe you lose two or three and get killed in the contest, but sometimes they bring down the elephant. Or a Cape buffalo. A cape buffalo weighs up to 1,200 pounds. What lions will do is simply jump on them until there's so much weight they fall down. Five or six of them will jump on them until the buffalo can't walk anymore and it collapses and then they kill them. So they'll kill anything and they stalk it. Satan stalks us. He knows your weaknesses. He hunts us. It's hard to believe that a brilliant spiritual being even knows you and me, right? We're not that important. He not only knows us, he stalks us. Now the closer we are to God, he flees. It says he flees. Satan flees. When we're close to God, he can't stalk us. But when you and I drift away from God, you come back from the Feast of Tabernacles and you're on the spiritual high. But as time goes on between now and the Passover, we just sort of drift away. It's easy to drift away over the next six months. And as we do, we get on the edges of the darkness and guess what happens? You're being stalked. You're being stalked. Of course, we don't know it. The prey doesn't know it any time, so it's too late. Let's go to 1 Peter 5. We started with this, and I want to wrap up and move back towards this here because I want to read the context in which Peter talks about Satan as a line. Let's go to verse 6.

Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon him, for he cares for you. So this is the thought that's leading into his description as Satan as a line. Stay close to God. Put your birds on him. He will care for you. He will get us through the difficulties. He will take care of us. That we must remember. When we are close to God, he is going to take care of us. He promises that. Be sober. So now he says, but be very, very careful. Be vigilant. In other words, you have to be a watch all the time. We have to watch that we don't drift out of the camp and end up being stalked because your adversary the devil walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may desire. Resist him steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same suffering you are experienced by your brotherhood in the world. In other words, what we're going through, every other Christian is going through. Sometimes we take a look at ourselves and say, wow, I'm suffering so much. The Christians in this world are always suffering a certain level of stress because we're not completely in the light. We sort of walk in and out on the fringes of the light. And when we do, we get stalked. And very bad things happen to us spiritually. But we move farther and farther away from the light. That's why there is no substitute for daily prayer, daily Bible study, daily thinking about God's way, fasting on a regular basis. There's no substitute for that. It keeps us drawn towards the light.

The idea of being vigilant.

You've probably heard of David Livingston. He's the famous Scottish doctor and missionary. He lived in Africa in the 1800s. Well, he lived among different tribes there trying to bring them into Christianity. And he would help them. He had a rifle, which most of them did not. And he would help them when animals would attack. And one time there was a lion that was stalking all their livestock. And they could not catch it with spears and kill it. So he went out hunting it. And he went out and started to track it. He figured out where it was. Its tracks were very obvious, where he dragged off the night's goat or cow or whatever he dragged off. And he went through the brush. He comes into a clearing. And there it is. The lion, big male lion, is laying there looking the other way, eating away happy. So he gets ready to shoot it. He wants to get a little closer and make sure the shot, you know, is true. And just before he raised up his rifle, the lion stood up and turned around and looked at him. The lion had been waiting for him.

He thought he was stalking the lion. And the lion, instead of stalking him, just waited for him to come. The lion hit him so hard it broke his shoulder. His shoulder was never the same. He was able to get off a shot and kill the lion. But he was lame for the rest of his life. Because that little short 30 yards or whatever it was, he covered it just like that because they're so fast for a short period. And David Livingston was lame the rest of his life in one of his arms because it covered that distance. And he shot it. Maybe before it died, it hit him. And he realized he thought he was stalking the lion. And the lion was waiting for him. Sometimes Satan doesn't have to stalk us. He just waits for us. We drift off into the darkness and he just waits for us. I always thought that was such a fascinating story because he said when he stood up, turned around, it dawned on him. He knew I was here all along. All along he knew. We could think that we're good Christians fighting the fight only to forget that through self-righteousness or just weakness or just drifting off into the fascination of the world. Because it's fascinating. We drift farther and farther away. We find that Satan, he doesn't have to stalk us. He's just waiting. He's waiting for us to show up in the darkness. Verse 9 here. We'll conclude with this. Verse 9. He talks about this same experience in your brotherhood in the world. Verse 10, but may the God of all grace who called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, established, strengthened, and settled you. This is what happens. We stay close to God and yes, Satan is going to come after us. But when we're in the light, when we're close to the champion, we face the lion. We resist the lion and the lion runs away. And in this experience, we are made perfect, established, strengthened, and settled. The lion's never going to give up, by the way. Not as long as you and I are physical. We're just a slow-moving herd. That's all we are. We can't run very fast.

But that champion drives away every time. It's no contest. Stay in the light. In the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, there's two stuffed white lions. And it's, you know, diorama. It's sort of interesting that it looks like the prairie or the savanna of Africa, Central Africa. And you look at those lions and you think, well, they're scary, but I mean, they're not overly large or, you know, you wouldn't want to meet them in the wild, but no more scarier than any other lions. And then you read the little plaque. They're the salvo lions. After Patterson shot him, everybody was there, took a chunk of them as a souvenir. So they picked up all the little pieces and made two regular-sized lions out of them.

Yeah, oh, they were big. These were big lions. But still, you look at them, you think, yeah, you know, they look like toys. They killed 100 people. They stalked some of the best hunters in the world. And they couldn't catch them for many, many for a long, long time. Patterson said the most frightening thing he ever did was they were driving, I think this is in the movie, they were driving them through the brush. He had natives with their spears and their shields driving these animals through the brush. He was on the other side. He was supposed to shoot them. And one of them comes up, I don't know, 20, 30 yards away, and they're standing there staring at each other. He pulls up his rifle and he pulls the trigger and it went, click! He describes it as he was so afraid he could not move. He just stood there staring into the eyes. He didn't try to put another shell in. He just stood there. And he said it took a couple steps towards him. And he said he knew that he said there's this understanding. We've been hunting each other, and I've just lost. And then it turned to look, he could hear all these He could hear all these vancomics through the brush and it turned around and just disappeared because it ran into the savannah, into the grass, and he just gone. He said that fear was unlike anything else he'd ever felt because he was like hypnotized. He was hypnotized as this lion was walking towards him. Just like the workers at Savo, the world is in a reign of terror.

How do you think of the evil in this world? We live in a reign of terror because there is a lion, a spiritual lion, that is stalking human beings. But you and I don't have to fear the ghost of the darkness. As long as we stay in the light, as long as we stay in the light, we don't have to fear, understand there is fear when we lose the light. We must remember that this battle isn't for us physically. It's for our hearts and our minds. But God promises to protect us. He promises to be with us. Remain spiritually vigilant. And Satan, who is like a roaring lion, according to the scripture, when we stay in the light, he will flee from us because of the power of God.