The Ghost and The Darkness

We were having prayer at the church tonight. We were repenting from the slackness in our lives and in the life of the church in America. Something came to my mind while praying and felt that somehow the Lord was communicating something to me.

I began to think about the movie "The Ghost and the Darkness", a true story that took place in the late 1800’s in southern Kenya. In March 1898 the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in East Africa. Over the next nine months, two large male lions killed and ate nearly 140 railway workers. Crews tried to scare off the lions and built campfires and thorn fences for protection, but to no avail. Hundreds of workers fled Tsavo, halting construction on the bridge.

Before work could resume, chief engineer Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson (1865-1947) had to eliminate the lions and their threat. After many near misses, he finally shot the first lion on December 9, 1898, and three weeks later killed the second. The first lion was nine feet, eight inches from nose to tip of the tail. It took eight men to carry the carcass back to camp.

The construction crew returned and completed the bridge in February 1899.

"Tsavo" means "place of slaughter" - the lions there are abnormally large, have maneless males, and are historically known as man-eaters.
Why did the Tsavo lions become man-eaters. Two factors may have contributed to their unusual diet. In the 1890s, an outbreak of rinderpest disease killed millions of zebras, gazelles and other African wildlife. Lions had to look elsewhere for food, and attacks on humans increased across the continent.Poor burial practices may have also contributed to the Tsavo tragedy. Railroad workers who died of injury or disease were often poorly buried, or not buried at all. A scavenging lion coming across this easy meal might start going after live humans.

The question for me is, "Why did this story come to my mind in the middle of a prayer time?" I haven’t seen the movie in years. I had to go on the internet to find the name of the movie.

I began thinking about the one who goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour - the devil. That takes care of one of the lions. But, what about the other? I had been prompted to pray for forgiveness for operating at times out of the spirit of fear. It seemed that the Lord was saying to me that the second lion is the spirit of fear which can also be represented by insecurity, intimidation, paranoia etc... These two lions work together in creating a "Tsavo" or "slaughter" in our lives.

The spirit of fear is very seldom recognized as the root problem for many of our sinful, (what I’d like to call) “white collar crimes”. There are the sins of the flesh that are glaring, but then there are the sins of unbelief and fear that cause us to live a life that is void of hope.

This horrendous lion of fear causes us to take matters into our own hands even in ministry. Sometimes our own way of doing things lead us to the temporary success of security, prosperity and comfort, and in ministry, possibly even blessing people and finding that people are being saved by our efforts. But, the work of the Holy Spirit gets derailed. The spirit of fear will cause us to focus on self-preservation, often at the cost of peace with others. The spirit of fear will cause us to settle for less than what God has intended for our lives. The end result will be a mixed bag of spirit and flesh which will often be a disappointment. We yield to this spirit of fear and don’t even recognize it as sin. It is like a “Ghost” .

It is a devastating lion though, just as “Darkness” (satan) is, when we yield to it. And just as the these two real lions in Kenya were able to stop a railroad project in 1898, even so, the Lord’s project on our lives will slow and come to a stop if we don’t kill these two lions in our life.

The Bible says that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love and a sound mind. God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we could ask or think. His promises are true. Hope must arise in us so that faith can be the mode of our life. Jesus Christ desires that we know him powerfully. His desire is to live through us. Fear cannot live where faith flourishes. We must be overcomers in this area of our lives.