The Lion Subdued: Mastering Our Animal Nature

Isaiah 35:9 promises that in the redeemed highway, "no lion shall be there." The Victorians understood this mystically as humanity's struggle with our inherited animal passions. Joseph S. Exell's Biblical Illustrator offers three principles for this conquest.

First, animal desires are not inherently sinful. The Creator gives us passions as essential to human flourishing—as purposefully designed as every spring and cog in a watchmaker's mechanism. God wastes no material.

Second, corruption occurs through imbalance. When animal appetites are fed and strengthened at the expense of mental and spiritual faculties, base instincts multiply in countless destructive forms. The lion emerges not from having desires, but from starving the higher nature.

Third, we bear responsibility for transformation. The animal nature must not be crucified or exterminated, but subordinated—kept under the rule of mind and spirit. Some inherit greater struggles than others on this line. Yet through grace, what W. O. Thrall called the "first nature" (animal) can become the "second nature" (disciplined humanity). And if one becomes "a new creature in Christ Jesus" (2 Corinthians 5:17), such transformation necessarily follows.

The lion is subdued not through denial but through regeneration—the Holy Spirit reordering our entire being toward obedience.