UNSAFE!

I had been expecting to hear it. Eagerly awaiting the first installment of The Chronicles of Narnia on celluloid, I’d been keenly anticipating hearing one of my most favorite lines in the entire seven-volume saga.

As I saw the movie yesterday with dear friends, the Morgan family, I waited, with bated breath, for Mr. Beaver’s classic line in reply to Lucy’s question as to whether Aslan, the Lion, was safe.

Here it is as C. S. Lewis tells it …

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. … “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

It wasn’t there! That line wasn't in the screenplay (unless you count Mr. Tumnus' somewhat truncated comment, towards the end of the film, that Aslan was no tame animal). Though I thoroughly enjoyed the movie—cinematography, computer graphics, great acting by the children, the queen, the professor—I was disappointed in the absence of what I consider one of the most significantly theological affirmations creation can ever make of the Creator.

As the prophet Malachi asked rhetorically (and as Handel affirmed so powerfully), “But who may abide the day of His coming? And who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner’s fire …” (Malachi 3:2).

God is not safe. But He is good!

Lewis comments later in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children [Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy Pevensie] had ever thought so, they were cured of it now.”

Have we ever been in Narnia? Do we know a God who is “unsafe,” “terrifying,” … and good? God’s goodness we are eager to make capital out of. But may we, at the same time, never forget that this is the God of whom the writer of Hebrews labeled “a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29, quoting Deuteronomy 4:24 and 9:3).

How is it possible, one wonders, to love a God who is not only good, but also one whose wrath is renowned for its incendiary nature, directed against sin, and Satan and his hordes, the final end of which unholy alliance will be consummation in a ceaseless conflagration?

It is a strange dialectical tension, indeed, paradoxical and enigmatic, but believers are called both to love and to fear God. Deuteronomy 6 makes that clear:

You shall love the LORD
your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Deuteronomy 6:5

And not many verses thence ….

You shall fear the LORD your God ….

Deuteronomy 6:13

Good and unsafe! Gracious and jealous! Loving and wrathful!

We welcome the first and wince at the second, don’t we? But the biblical balance must be maintained, the dynamic respected, the contraries equipoised. We must see with Narnian eyes that a thing can be “good and terrible at the same time.” We must love God, and we must fear God—reverentially, respectfully, with awe, with adoration.

He is Father. He is also almighty God, the supreme Creator, the self-existent Sovereign, infinitely Holy! As Mr. Beaver proclaimed, He is the King!

May we learn daily to love and to fear Him. Good, but not safe!