Our Last Battle (17)

 Seventeen – “Here I Stand”

Chapter Ten of The Last Battle concludes with Tirian and his cohort coming to the defense of the Boar, for those faithful to Aslan cannot stand by and watch others slaughtered; Chapter Eleven opens with the “last battle of the last king of Narnia,” which continues into Chapter Twelve. 

As Tirian makes his appearance on Stable Hill in defense of the Boar and to defend Narnia he cries, “Here I stand, Tirian of Narnia, in Aslan’s name.”

The declaration, “Here I stand,” may transport the astute reader to both a Biblical exhortation and to a historic trenchant statement and is a critical element of Our Last Battle. 

In Ephesians 6:13-14 we read, “Take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm therefore…”

There is a sense in which all of the glories of Ephesians 1:1–6:9 lead to the Last Battle of Ephesians 6:10 –24. When we know what it is to sit with Christ in the heavens (2:6), and to walk with Him on earth (4:1), we are able to stand in Him in the evil day. We stand not only to resist evil, but we also stand to deliver others with the Good News of Jesus Christ (6:18 – 20). Our lives, just as Tirian’s, must not be about ourselves but about Jesus Christ and the salvation of others. 

On April 17, 1521, Martin Luther, standing before religious and Imperial authorities, placed his life in jeopardy by proclaiming, “I neither can nor will retract anything; for it cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

While Luther had faults, cowardice was not one of them. 

When Tirian declared, “Here I stand,” he knew full well that he and his friends would likely die within the next hour; but as Roonwit reminds us, “Noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.”

How is it that the church in America is centered on the self, on money, on power, on politics, on nationalism? How is it that we have abandoned the Christ of the Cross and the Cross of Christ? How is it that we have exported our narcissistic brand of “Christianity” to the peoples of the earth? How is it that we clothe ourselves in dead lion skins? How have we come to go along to get along? How is it that we have forged golden calf after golden calf, and have transformed Aslan into Tashlan into Tash?

We are called to die, to live cruciform lives, to lay down our lives for others, to allow death to work in us so that life may work in others – and if our congregations and our denominations and our institutions will not accept this message, then that tells us all we need to know – we have denied the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. 

If pastors and teachers and professors refuse to know only Jesus Christ, and Him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2), then can we not be honest enough to acknowledge that, whatever we have, it is not Biblical Christianity. C. S. Lewis did not have a problem with people not believing the Bible, but he did have a problem with people not believing the Bible and taking salaries from the church. 

As the last battle of the last King of Narnia swirls around the reader in chapters eleven and twelve, we see faithful dogs and horses killed while standing for Aslan, other Narnians running for their cowardly lives, and yet other Narnians fighting for Tash. We also see the perfidy of the Dwarfs, killing both Calormene and Narnian; their slaughter of the brave horses a shattering of hope. “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs” is a cry we hear too much in today’s professing church, and in society. 

Inch by inch Tirian’s faithful cohort is forced into the Stable, the Calormenes’ expectation is that they will be destroyed by Tash, but they have another destiny.

As the cohort find themselves in the true and eternal Narnia, they realize that the Stable seen from the outside and the Stable seen from the inside are “two different places.” The inside is bigger than the outside. 

This reminds us that we don’t look at what is “seen,” but rather at what is unseen, for what our natural eye sees is temporal, but what the eye of the Spirit sees is eternal (2 Cor. 4:18). How sad that the professing church has been “naturalized” by the present age, it is as if we’ve taken a course on worldly citizenship and taken an oath of allegiance to the world’s ways and thoughts. 

We now teach worldly exegesis, methods which do not need the Holy Spirit. We align ourselves with political, economic, and social agendas to promote our own pleasure and comfort. We rely on marketing and social “sciences” and we promote teachings that appeal to our self-centered interests, rather than modeling and teaching what it is to deny ourselves and take up the Cross of Christ. 

Why is it that many of our most popular teachers trade in the merchandise of “Biblical” prophecy, churning out teaching after teaching to keep their followers entertained, rather than making disciples of Jesus Christ? Is this not akin to reading the entrails of animals or tea leaves or…drum roll…horoscopes? 

The thought that we should know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified seems too small and impractical for us. Yet, as Queen Lucy says, “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” 

The professing church in the United States thinks that the stable is too small, too impractical; that Jesus is asking too much when He calls us to deny ourselves and follow Him. We dare not preach a Gospel of self-denial – what would happen to our offerings? Better to develop a theology and message of Tashlan, after all, we don’t really think that Jesus is alive, not really. We don’t really think that He will appear…or that He is appearing. Not really.

We can tailor our dead lion skins to fit any situation, we can make them look much better than they did on Puzzle the Donkey. 

Now, for those who disagree with me, you only need to do one thing. Show me a people who gather around Jesus, who speak of Jesus, who love Jesus, who follow Jesus, who tell others about Jesus. Show me a people who, when they speak with one another during the week, speak of Jesus; speak of how Jesus is revealing Himself to them, changing their lives, of how they love Him more with each passing day.

Show me a people who love others enough to share Jesus with them, at home, in their neighborhoods, at work, at play, in church, in denominational settings, at school, in seminary. Show me a people whose heartbeat is the Lamb of God.

Show me a people who are citizens of heaven, to whom the politics of this world are dung, who do not call themselves conservative or liberal or capitalist or socialist or by the name of any nation – but who desire to be known as the People of Jesus, the Bride of the Lamb, citizens of the New Jerusalem, disciples of Jesus Christ. Show me a people who declare, “Jesus is not only enough, Jesus is not only more than enough, Jesus Christ is everything.”

Jesus is at the heart of Our Last Battle. He is at the heart of everything.

Is He the heart of my heart?

Is He the heart of your heart?