Once and a while a friendship is forged that seems to surprise everyone but the two who are in it.  Zookeepers at Tokyo's Mutsugoro Okoku Zoo couldn't agree more.  Gohan and Aochan have been living side by side, at times even curling up next to one another as they sleep.  Such behavior is, perhaps, natural among creatures sharing habitats—except that Gohan and Aochan are naturally predator and prey.  Gohan is a three and a half inch dwarf hamster, and her companion, Aochan, is a rat snake.  The hamster, whose name actually means "meal" in Japanese, was originally given to Aochan as dinner after the snake refused to eat frozen mice.  But instead of dining, Aochan decided to make friends, and the two have shared a cage ever since.  "I've never seen anything like it," laughed the zookeeper.  "Gohan sometimes even climbs onto Aochan to take a nap on his back."

Such a relationship is one I find fascinating in its complexity (if not an accident waiting to happen).  Though the friend who sent me this story assures me that unusual bondings have occurred throughout the animal kingdom without bad endings, I still find myself leery of the snake's intentions.  Can a snake really surrender its natural instincts to hunt?  What happens when Gohan gets in his way or makes him mad, or when the zookeeper is running late feeding the reptiles?  Can the nature of a snake remain reversed because of a relationship?   

In a significant prophecy of the coming Messiah, literally, anointed one, and his ensuing reign, Isaiah describes a scene full of similarly unusual relationships:  "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.  The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.  The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.  They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:6-9).   

On many levels it is a scene that is unimaginable.  We would no sooner trust the cobra than we would trust the one who suggests we allow a child to play near it.  Yet the vision speaks of a dramatic change in nature throughout God's kingdom, where the aggressiveness and cruelty that are so much a part of our world will be forever changed.  We will look at the relationship of Gohan and Aochan and not fear the hamster's trust of the snake.  With good reason, we ascribe such a reality as something God promises in the future, in heaven, when nature as we know it has passed away.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain; the wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the goat, for the old order of things will have passed away.  I believe this is an image of things to come.  But is it not also something more? 

What if there is something about the knowledge of the LORD that causes things on earth to be turned upside-down—even now.  Isaiah depicts a world where lions and vipers will not kill; young lambs will rest peacefully beside predators, "for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:9).  It is unnatural for a wolf not to harm a defenseless lamb or a snake not to bite the hand that invades its nest.  Is it any more natural that you or I should be able to defy our human nature?  That we should claim the old has gone and left a new creation in its place?  That we should find ourselves born a second time from above?

Yet to bow before the person of Christ—in life, in prayer, in relationship, in community—is to lay our lives at the feet of the one who is both Lamb and Lion in a way that overturns our very notions of nature.  In his work Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton finds fault with the way this is often envisioned.  "It is constantly assured," he writes "...that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like.  But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.  That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.  The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity?"(1)  This, somehow, Christ achieves.  To know him is to cling to the fierce hope of transformation and the gentle assurance of new life—on earth and as it will one day be in heaven.  He alone can reverse the nature of the snake; he is both Lamb and Lion. 

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia. 

(1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 105.