Walking with Edmund

Walking with Edmund
Even before he steps through the wardrobe, the youngest brother is itching to be king of his own life, free from everyone else. He's not about to submit to the authority of his older siblings, much less to the mysteriously absent lord of Narnia. But soon he finds himself a prisoner of his own rebellion. What happens when the price of freedom is higher than we can possibly pay?

Seeing Is Not Believing
Let's say your small watercraft has just sunk and you're in need of rescue. Desperately. Floating into your vision comes a lifeboat. The problem is, not only is the boat captained by your annoying older brother but you know that once you're brought on board, you'll have to help row at some point. So you refuse to acknowledge that the lifeboat is even there. You won't swim toward it or let anyone from the lifeboat help you out of the water.
Instead, you start swimming away as fast as your failing arms will take you.
Basically, being able to see the boat means virtually nothing if you don't act upon what you see. You're going down, whether the lifeboat is there or not.
That's exactly the choice Edmund makes as his Narnia adventure gets underway. He steps through the wardrobe on the heels of Lucy but refuses to acknowledge to Peter and Susan that he has actually seen the magical world with his own eyes. He's not willing to admit that he was wrong. And then later, after they've all gotten in together, he doesn't even apologize. Instead, he distances himself even more from all that is good and noble in Narnia, eventually making the break from his siblings altogether.
Edmund refuses to submit to the truth of what he sees.
He uses one excuse after another to justify why he's betraying his family to the Witch. But even as Edmund makes these excuses, it's clear he knows the facts about the Witch's character. He has witnessed her wickedness and cruelty for himself, but he won't admit it. He refuses to believe.
A spiritual principle is at work in this kind of attitude.
Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have had to say, over and over again in the midst of his teachings, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Mark 4:9, NIV). It's an odd statement at first. If you're not deaf, then of course you're able to hear what's being said. And yet we know exactly what he's talking about. We've all experienced times when our words to friends go in one ear and out the other or when they insist you said something you honestly never said. They had ears, but they didn't truly listen. Hearing something is not the same as accepting it as truth.
The Old Testament prophets dealt with this same problem when they were trying to get across what God was saying to his stubborn, rebellious people. The prophet Isaiah quoted God, saying that the people "listen carefully, but do not understand" and "watch closely, but learn nothing" (Isaiah 6:9). Centuries later, the early wherever they went (see Acts 7:51-60). Frustrated, they often quoted those Old Testament prophets as proof that, if a person's heart is already closed to spiritual things, then it doesn't matter what kinds of miracles that person sees or what truths that person hears. He or she will refuse to submit.
The people of Jesus' own day were the same way, especially the religious leaders. Despite seeing Jesus perform amazing miracles and hearing the truths of the Kingdom from his own lips, they rejected it all. In fact, several of them even grasped the truth but didn't dare acknowledge it (see John 12:42). They were determined to stay spiritually blind and deaf.
So hearing or even seeing something isn't the same as acknowledging that it's true for your own life. There's a difference between seeing and believing. There are also different kinds of seeing for different levels of belief. Take, for example, the disciple Thomas, affectionately known as the Doubter. According to John 20:24-29, he wanted to see the resurrected Christ for himself before he would be willing to accept what the other disciples claimed to have seen. He wanted proof. He wanted to scientifically verify that the Resurrection actually happened, using his five senses. For him, seeing was believing.
But for others, seeing isn't even close to believing. Lewis wrote about this in an essay entitled "Miracles," in which he described meeting a woman who claimed to have seen a ghost. Apparently, she believed she'd been hallucinating.
Without getting into whether or not ghosts could possibly exist, Lewis uses the example to make an important point: We won't accept supernatural events" as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.”
In other words, whatever we have seen can be explained away if we don't choose to believe it. That's why, when someone recovers from an illness after a bunch of people have been praying, other people will say things like, "It wasn't really a miracle; it was just that the cells in her body started to fight the disease." So why, you might ask, did the cells start fighting when they hadn't been before? But of course the person's presupposition is that supernatural miracles don't happen, so your question isn't really “heard.”
And then there are people like Edmund. They don't even fall into the category of those who refuse to believe what they see. They fall into the category of those who aren't willing to admit they know the truth, deep down. Pride keeps them from acknowledging openly what they don't want to believe is actually real. Why? Because if it turns out to be true, an uncomfortable spiritual reality will have a claim on their lives. It will mean they're no longer masters of their own destinies. It means there's something or Someone out there who is more in charge than they are.
Some of us-or our friends-may fall into the category of seers but not believers. "Do you believe in Jesus?" you ask, and they say, "Yes!" Careful now. Don't let it drop there. Ask, "What do you mean by belief in Jesus?" Because simply believing in the existence of Jesus as a historical figure isn't enough. As one youth worker has said, "Believing in God is not the issue; believing God matters is the issue." We must believe that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection actually have a divine purpose.
Right. But believing he died for our sins isn't enough either, though it may sound scandalous to say so. Think about it: Sometimes when you probe, you find out your friend merely believes that there once was a historical figure named Jesus who only thought he was dying to save us from our sins. Whether your friend thinks Jesus' death actually accomplished our salvation is a different matter. Yikes!
Okay, so probe a little further. Does your friend believe Jesus is the Son of God, the King of the universe? Yes? All well and good. So do the demons, though they refuse to submit to his authority (see James 2: I 9). Yikes again! No, to be painfully blunt, none of our friends' statements of belief really matter unless they can say, in so many words, "Yes, and Jesus is my King too. I've surrendered my life to him. I'm on his side and want to do his will." Until they can say this, there's reason to question if they've really accepted the truth.
Walking with Edmund forces us to consider how honest we are about what our spiritual eyes have seen and our spiritual ears have heard. Have you asked yourself the tough questions lately?
It's not enough to merely acknowledge that the King exists. How will you act on the truth of what you've seen?

We live by believing and not by seeing.
2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

Further In
• Why do some people say they need proof of God's existence before they'll believe in him?
• How easy or difficult is it to explain away things like miracles? Why isn't scientific proof enough to guarantee faith?
• How tempting is it for you to ignore the truths you’ll see in the Bible and not act on them?

The Word on Spiritual Sight
Take some time to read one or more of the following
Bible passages:
DEUTERONOMY 29:2-9; MATTHEW 13:10-17; JOHN
9:35-41; 12:35-43; ACTS 28:23-28; 2 PETER 1:16-19;
1 JOHN 1:1-3

Walking with Susan (Second half)

Safety First?
We all have friends like this: the ones who won’t touch the locker room door handle with their bare hands or sip from our straws. "But I don't have a cold!" you protest, even as your clean-freak friend jumps up to get a drink of her own. Her backpack is full of hand sanitizers and
wipes and antiseptic spray. "Don't touch that," she warns about the daddy longlegs making its way across the biology lab windowsill. You roll your eyes. Is anything safe?
Enter Susan Pevensie. She's usually the first among her siblings to express any kind of fear or hesitation in this Narnia adventure, and it's more than just her need to act according to practical common sense. This caution is born out of her desire to avoid getting hurt. "Is he quite safe?" she asks, upon learning that Aslan is a lion.
For Susan-as with many of us, if we're really honest- "Safety first" is the motto.
Our human nature is prone to such fear and distrust. We start out feeling secure in the arms of our parents or guardians, and then one day (perhaps the first day of kindergarten?) we look out at the world and realize things are not as safe as we supposed. There are bullies on the playground. Our bikes crash. We're even taught not to speak to strangers. Life is not safe, so we learn to be cautious when walking out the front door. And-for those of us whose homes are the troubled places where pain and trauma happen-we learn to be cautious walking in the front door too.
And we treat faith the same way. We want God to be "safe." We want him to place us where there will be no risks, where our comfort and security are givens, where there are guarantees about surviving our experiences unscathed. We want to be able to give to those in need without having to wait on buying that MP3 player for ourselves (to give an example). We want to have all the adventures of a mission trip in a third world country without the possibility of getting lost, injured, or assaulted. We don't want this faith stuff to hurt.
But God makes no such promises. He does promise that he is good (see Psalm 136) and that he has our best interests in mind (see Jeremiah 29:11). But he never said anything about being safe.
C. S. Lewis himself admitted, "I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as 'Careful! This might lead you to suffering:" When it -comes to loving God and doing what he says, our fears of feeling pain and losing control often keep us from committing entirely to him. We especially don't want God to start digging around in our business in case he finds something unholy that he needs to remove. We kind of like our unholy things, our private sins and fears. Getting rid of them would be painful. So rather than step into the sacred adventure God has for us, we retreat.
There's a story told in Matthew 14:22-33 about a time the disciples were out on a boat in a storm, on the brink of sinking. Suddenly, they saw Jesus walking toward them over the waves, in the midst of the wind, rising up and down with each crest. The disciple Peter, ever the bold and brash one, called out and asked to be able to walk out to him. And Jesus said to come. So Peter gave it a try. But then he focused on the wind and the waves and lost his nerve. This whole walking-on water stuff suddenly didn't look so safe after all. And sure enough, he started to sink-pretty quickly, we can imagine. But Jesus reached out his hand.
Jesus never promises that following in his footsteps will be safe, that we will never come to any harm if we obey God the way he did. Jesus' own footsteps led him to suffering and even death. In fact (and we don't really like to think about this), he promises that suffering will be part of our journey: "Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows" (John 16:33). But then he adds, "But take heart, because I have overcome the world." As Mr. Beaver says about Aslan, "'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."
People who've gone through a difficult loss or trauma often say that their faith is shaken. This may be true of you at some point or another. You lose a loved one or are the victim of violence, and you feel knocked out of the safety of God's protective arms. You question his goodness. The spiritual foundation that you thought was so solid seems more like thin ice. But as Jesus said, "Take heart." Just because your faith is shaken doesn't mean the faith is shaken. The eternal truths of the Kingdom aren't altered or affected by the experience that shook your beliefs.
That's because God's holy character is fixed, immovable. As it says in Hebrews 13:8, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." What you're experiencing is what happens to a sapling when it's blown in a mighty wind. Your faith is shaken because your branches are tossed in some storm of life, not because your roots are torn and pulled up by an earthquake. If you stay put, if you cling with all your might to the good foundation of God's holy character, the storm will pass.
Susan eventually becomes Queen Susan the Gentle, no longer concerned for her own safety but full of compassion for the well-being of others. As a grown woman, chasing down the White Stag in the woods with her brothers and sister, she does express caution when one of them makes the suggestion that they follow wherever this lamp-post leads. But after some discussion, she agrees to go wherever the adventure takes them.
What a contrast between this Susan and the one we see at the beginning of the story! She's now willing to take the next step in faith rather than fear. Not only has she learned to trust her siblings but she puts her trust in Aslan, the one who has led them on all their adventures so far. She's willing to go beyond the comfortable world she knows because she has faith in her king.

We must take each step in this Kingdom with
faith, not fear. Do you trust your King?
God has not given us a spirit if fear and timidity, but if power,
love, and self-discipline.
2 TIMOTHY 1:7

Further In
• When is "safety first" an appropriate attitude toward the dangers of life?
• Why is it not always the appropriate attitude toward following Jesus?
• What are the "unsafe" things Jesus sometimes asks us to do? Why does he ask us to do them?
• How will you trust in God's unshakable character when things aren’t going so well.
• What are you going to do about it?

The Word on Safety
Take some time to read one or more of the following Bible passages:
PROVERBS 3:21-26; LUKE 12:6-7; 12:32; 2 CORI TTHIANS
1:6-7; HEBREWS 10:35-36; 1 JOHN 4:16-18