Will the Lion Lay Down with the Lamb?

First, I want to know if there are verses in Scripture where lions and lambs are together. The first place actually is Isaiah 11:6. Wolves live with lambs, leopards lay down with goats, and the calf, the lion, and the fattened calf are together. There are several animals listed here, why would we pick out only the lion and the lamb for our collective memories?

The number of animals narrows down a bit in Isaiah 65:25,

Here the wolf and the lamb make another appearance together, and now the lion is right there on their heels, this time eating straw like an ox. Wolf, lamb, lion, ox, serpent. Knock off the edges, and we’ve got the lion and the lamb together.

In Revelation 5:5-6 we read of Jesus as both a lamb and lion. He is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah and the Lamb of God. These pictures merge into the one Christ. Christ being both the lion and the lamb give us powerful imagery. The wild and ferocious united in the person of Christ with the meek and mild slaughtered lamb.

The metaphor of the lion and the lamb won out, and implanted itself in our collective memories. The idea emerged of a future millennial kingdom where wild animals would peaceably lie down with tame animals. The lion and the lamb dominated that motif. And this was further linked in 1939 when Mahalia Jackson belted out “There’ll Be Peace in the Valley for Me.” When there is peace in the valley, this is the image:

And when Elvis Presley sang this song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, the lion seems to have permanently and peacefully laid down beside the lamb in our cultural conscious. Preachers picked up this metaphor and preached it as biblical imagery. Paintings, songs, book covers, and other memorabilia had the lion and the lamb together. And just like that, “the lion shall lay down with the lamb” becomes a Bible verse in our memory.

Back to the Mandela Effect for a moment. There are some who believe that this is part of a vast conspiracy where the CERN started messing with the multiverse, and it changed Bible verses and jumbled our memories. (Something like that). In this view, Isaiah 11:6 really once said, “lion and the lamb,” your memory is reality, but we now live in a false or alternative timeline—apparently one in which Curious George lost his tail and the Monopoly guy dropped his monocle. I suppose that could be, if you watch enough of The Flash on CW, you can start to believe anything. But it’s more likely that we preachers grab onto metaphors, we jumble up passages of Scripture, it enters into our music, and before you know it, we become convinced of a reality that isn’t actually real.

Things like this serve as reminders for us to be diligent in studying our Scripture. There are many things that we simply assume to be true, to be in the Bible, and we settle for “it’s in there somewhere” as an answer to our theological beliefs.

It’s important to know this about ourselves. Our brains are lazy. Our memories, sometimes, aren’t that trustworthy. We can tend to grab ahold of images and metaphors that are powerful—but not necessarily biblical. What is dangerous is that we ascribe the authority of Scriptural proclamation not to what God actually said, but to our false memory—or the false implications we’ve tied together—when, in reality, God never said what we are claiming He said.

Yes, the Mandela Effect (not the weird conspiracy aspects of it) can even impact your Bible reading.

Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/KristiLinton