Try to imagine a world in which the wolf and the lamb will share the same stall. The leopard and the baby goat will sleep together. A little child will put halters on a lion and a calf and lead them around. The lion will eat straw like the oxen. A little child will reach down into a cobra's den and not be harmed. That's what the world will be like one day, according to Isaiah the prophet. At some future time the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the oceans are with water; then no creature shall harm any other creature if all of God's earth.

This vision strains my imagination because for 13 years I owned a German Shepherd dog which was at least 50 percent wolf. Sometimes when there was a full moon, my dog would offer up such wolf-like howls that it sent shivers up and d…