Dragons
When I was 3 years old, my father decided to show me The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I loved the creatures in the film. My favorite creature was the Dragon. I was heartbroken when it met its demise. To this day, I have a soft spot for dragons (even for King Ghidorah).
There are so many kinds of dragons. The legends that we will focus on here are from the Germanic interpretation of the creatures.
Fáfnir was a dwarf who, out of greed, murdered his father and took from him the ring and a horde of gold. Consumed by greed, he transforms slowly over time into a dragon. C.S Lewis has the character Eustace go through a similar transformation in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. So, too, does Rick Riordan with one of his characters in the Magnus Chase series. In Beowulf and The Hobbit, Earnanæs and Smaug go on rampages when one cup is stolen from their hordes. Dragon legends in Nordic and Germanic mythology serve as warnings about hoarding resources that could benefit everyone in the community.
In the book of Genesis, humans are made in God’s image in order to reflect God’s love to creation, but due to the fall, that image is distorted. In response, God made a covenant with Abraham, stating that through his descendants, all nations will be blessed. In Exodus, God makes a covenant with the nation of Israel and gives them the law so they can reflect God’s image to the nations.
One of the Ten Commandments is to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. God put limits on how much one could work. On the farm, it seems mind-boggling to take a day of rest. God wanted the people of Israel to trust him. God even commanded a year of rest every 7 years and at that time, if you took a year of rest, you would lose two years of crops. God wanted the people of Israel to trust him enough to believe that on the sixth day and in the sixth year, God would provide enough food for them to gather - that they would have their needs met in order to rest. God knows our propensity to overwork and out of his wisdom set boundaries on how much one should work and how much money one needs.
Leviticus 23:22 says “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the LORD your God.”
God doesn’t want people or companies to focus on making maximum profit.
Exodus 22:25-27 says “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest. If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, because that cloak is the only covering your neighbor has. What else can they sleep in? When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.”
Part of the seventh year instructions included a cancellation of debts, return of foreclosed property, and freedom for those who sold themselves as slaves.
In Luke 12, Jesus tells this parable:
The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God Luke 12:16-21
Again Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. - Matthew 6:25-34
When the people of Israel did not make decisions grounded in trusting God, they put security before doing God’s will. They said God approved of their injustice because he allowed them to be in power, so they used the Lord’s name in vain. They did not spend their resources to help their mother and father and were not content with what God blessed them with - they coveted what belonged to their neighbor, they gave false testimony about others, they stole, they committed adultery, and they murdered. They wanted the Promises of God without obeying God. They wanted to be “great” like Babylon, so God exiled them to Babylon. Like Smaug, their arrogance was their demise.
The citizens of the Kingdom of God are called not to make decisions based not on profit but on grace, justice, and mercy. How can one go against a culture that is ingrained since childhood? How can we live to our true potential and reflect God’s image? Like Eustace, we cannot shed the dragon’s skin ourselves but must humbly rely on the Lion of Judah, the Lamb that was slain, to give us a new identity shaped by the refining fire of the Holy Spirit.
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:17-18
