The Ghost and The Darkness

In March 1898, the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. During the next nine months of construction, two maneless male lions stalked the campsite, dragging workers from their tents at night and devouring them. The two man-eating lions were credited with killing 135 people in less than a year before they were eventually killed by the project leader John Patterson.

As the attack intensified, hundreds of workers fled from Tsavo, halting construction on the bridge. Crews initially tried to scare off the lions by building campfires and bomas( thorn fences) around their camp for protection to keep the man-eaters out, but to no avail. The lions leaped over or crawled through the thorn fences. The lions were ruthless, attacking patients in the hospital tents, ambushing water carriers during the day. In his memoirs Patterson wrote: "(The lions') methods became so uncanny, and their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success, that the workmen firmly believed they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions' shape." .

In 1^st Peter 5:8 the Bible tells us, “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour”. The comparison is one we need to understand. The devil is an uncanny and patient hunter. He knows when to strike when we are most vulnerable. When we are alone, injured and hurting. He moves in the darkness as quite a ghost and when he attacks, he leaves carnage in his wake.

As dangerous as the Devil is, the Bible does tell us that he can be thwarted.
Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you

( James 4:7).

We need to respect the great danger that Satan is but that danger shouldn't keep us from our work. God has provided us the tools and protection we need to defeat the Devil. He is a dangerous but he can be overcome (1^st John 2:14-15). Don't flee from the work, stand firm and resist. Then the devil can be dealt with.

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Ecclesiastes 12:10

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