It was dark when we came home and we were grateful to step into the shelter of our chalet, glad to be back in the familiar surroundings. We thought of looking out of our windows the next morning at the leaves turning such wonderful shades of bronze and copper and the autumn frosts turning the mountainsides and gardens into a short but breathtaking period of warm color mixed with the dark green pines and the greys and browns of rocks. Suddenly Franky burst in: “There is something I need to tell you about immediately,” he said. A tale poured forth of how he had just happened to walk into our garden before going for a picnic with his family to discover that the demolishing of the hotel next door to us had come to the state of an earth-moving process that was rapidly making a canyon immediately next to us. However, the enormous jaws of steel, with their jagged teeth biting into the earth, bringing up huge boulders, ripping into walls, were not staying on their own side of the wall, but had already bitten through our wall, demolished our pear tree and some pines, destroyed our strawberry bed, and were moving with a menacing efficiency to bite away more, with a white painted line on our grass indicating how far they expected to go into our territory. There was no picnic for Franky that day as he called a halt to the work, went into action with the police and other authorities, and outlined something of our “rights” that had been invaded.
As I sit here on this foggy day, brightened only by leaves and trees, there is so much missing, so much that out of my right eye is a picture of destruction where a muddy ragged yawning hole, large enough to build two apartment houses, has taken the place so quickly of trees that took years to grow, and a hotel that gave warmth and comfort for so long a time. How rapid destruction is. How quickly the jaws of steel can root up, cast down, demolish, destroy things that took years to build, or to grow. What a very vivid and traumatic illustration it has been, and is now to me of the need to understand something of what the “two sides of the wall” can mean in our own lives, and the lives of others.
Satan is the destroyer who comes to our minds so immediately. He has in a certain sense, with yawning jaws, bitten down on people from the time of Adam and Eve through the centuries. He has made places that were warm and growing, beautiful and full of song, of candlelight and firelight, into nothing but mudholes, in the way this mudhole at my right side is a contrast to the hotel formerly prepared for Christmas skiers. We could go through the books of Chronicles and refresh our memories of how bad kings built up false places of worship and false altars and tore down and destroyed the altars of God, allowing them to be destroyed. We could think of the strong words concerning false pastors who were ministers of Satan in Jeremiah 23:1: “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture; saith the LORD.” The tearing down of the hotel is a picture of the destruction of something that was in the territory of the owner to go ahead and destroy. Going just this far with the picture, Satan as the destroyer does destroy the lives of the people who are committed to him in a variety of ways, people that follow his “ways,” his “paths,” his “precepts,” his “goals,” his “false promises.” It is his own people Satan destroys thoroughly. “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; the enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.” The devil has knowingly and purposely sowed tares to the destruction of the people who are following him: “wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction” (Matt. 7:13b).
But the devil has not stayed on his own side of the wall, in his destructive biting away with his diverse sets of steel-like jaws. He bites into our lives, our time, our energy, our thoughts, our money, our possessions, our emotions, our strength. He tries to destroy the possibility of our having courage to go on, by trying to make us into ragged holes with much of the beauty of the growth we had bedraggled and cast down. Satan tries to destroy the beauty and continuity of Christians’ lives and work by turning them into a variety of ugliness and spoiledness with his many kinds of “jaws.” “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world” (1 Peter 5:8, 9). Help is promised us in resisting his “jaws,” here likened to the jaws of a lion. We are told that “the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus,” will make us perfect and establish us and strengthen us. As we have access to him at any moment, we may call out—not to the communal police, “help, my land is being invaded”—but to the Creator of all the universe; “help, my land which is your land also, is being invaded; help me to resist.” We may turn to the Bible, the sword of the Spirit, and use the full Word of God as our weapon against the “jaws” approaching us, frighteningly close time after time.
There is coming a day however when the destruction and the devouring will be in the other direction, and final. In Joel 2:1–3 we have a picture of blowing trumpets and the heralding of darkness and gloom as a fire devours and leaves behind a desolate wilderness, although ahead there is the garden of Eden, that which is described in Isaiah as the beauty that will come from ashes. The time is ahead of us for which Jesus paid the price. Jesus came to allow his body to be destroyed by death, to be spoiled by nails and hanging that he might come forth resurrected and ready to promise the same to each who will believe. The destruction in the time ahead is the destruction of the evil one, and all his power. Come to Hebrews 2:9, and 14b: “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.… that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” This is the end of “jaws,” the end of the danger of these “jaws.” The destructive jaws will be destroyed forever.
