When Aslan Peeled the Dragon Away

In C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the selfish boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes to discover he has become a dragon himself. His greed has literally reshaped him. Desperate to change back, Eustace tries scratching off his dragon skin. He peels away one layer, then another, then a third — but each time, there is yet another layer of scales underneath. He cannot go deep enough.

Then Aslan appears and tells Eustace that he will have to let the lion undress him. When Aslan's claws tear into the dragon hide, the cut goes far deeper than anything Eustace could manage on his own. It hurts terribly. But beneath all those layers of scales, the real Eustace — the boy he was meant to be — is finally uncovered.

Lewis understood something about transformation that we often forget: we cannot renovate ourselves. We can modify behaviors, adopt new habits, sand down our roughest edges — but the deep change, the kind that reaches into the core of who we are, requires a hand stronger than our own.

The Apostle Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here" (2 Corinthians 5:17). That word "new" doesn't mean improved. It means something that did not exist before.

Like Eustace, we must stop scratching at our own scales and let the Living God do what only He can — make us new from the inside out.