The Friendly Cheetah

Daniel 6:27
“He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.”

Today, we want to tell you more about the cheetah. From a human standpoint, Daniel would have been a whole lot safer if he had been thrown into a den of cheetahs rather than a den of lions.

The truth is, cheetahs are the least aggressive of the big cats and offer virtually no threat to man at all. In their native Africa, bushmen actually chase cheetahs away from their kills and steal the fruit of the cheetah’s hard-won labor. Man has been taming cheetahs and leading them on leashes for thousands of years.

Recently, a naturalist returned a hand-raised cheetah to the African wilds. The naturalist had to train the cheetah to hunt, just as its mother would have done. In the process, the cheetah repeatedly chased antelopes to its human friend, and waited to see what it was supposed to do with them.

The cheetah is a unique variation on the cat theme that shows how God’s creativity can take many forms. When we study His creation, we are wise if we remember that, compared to God, we have hardly any imagination. Therefore, we could never decide what could be and what could not be.

As we learn about the world God has created, we do best when we study what God has done, without letting our ideas of what is possible and impossible cloud our thinking.

Prayer:
Dear Father in heaven, help me to have a faith in Your working like Daniel had, a faith which is not limited by my own thinking of what You can do to help me. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Notes:
Photo: Close-up of cheetah cub. Courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim. Licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.