Children who never grow up never grow, never go anywhere, never know what opportunities await them.
Peter Pan did the same things every year. He played the same games, fought the same enemy, Captain Hook. One wonders what Peter Pan would have done for fun when Captain Hook was put away once and for all. Life would have had no reason, no purpose.
In a way, Captain Hook represents the Law, the same code of requirements which acted as a schoolmaster to keep the Israelites under guardianship (Galatians 3: 24) until the fullness of time with Christ and the age of grace through faith to come.
In the presence of rules, people either rebel or obey, yet either way there is no life. Peter Pan rebelled, with not much to show for his life of fighting. Most people try to obey the law, and they find themselves both defeated and depressed, a sense within us that we must meet the standard, yet we never can:
"But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was
glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of
Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away:" (2 Corinthians 3: 7)
and
"The sting of
death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law." (1 Corinthians 15: 56)
The Law is the "ABC's", the weak and beggarly elements of anything:
"But now, after that
ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and
beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?" (Galatians 4: 9)
The Law is "Weak and beggarly", it makes people sick and weak. Jesus came that we might have life and that more abundantly (John 10: 10).
The Law is for little kids:
"But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which
should afterwards be revealed. 24Wherefore the law
was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified
by faith." (Galatians 3: 23-24)
The life of faith in the grace of God, that is for adults:
"25But after that
faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. 26For ye are all the
children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3: 25-26)
We are called to be children of God by faith, but that does not cause us to regress into sin, but to progress into the fulness of life, and liberty:
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be
not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." (Galatians 5:1)
To grow up means to enter into liberty. To remain a child will bring one under law, and into bondage once again.
The hope for those who still struggle to get on their feet, to step out on their own, is not to shame them into rugged individualism, but rather to demonstrate that the real freedom which everyone of us can have in Christ starts and ends with faith in Christ Jesus:
"1Wherefore seeing we
also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside
every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run
with patience the race that is set before us, 2Looking unto Jesus
the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before
him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of
the throne of God." (Hebrews 12: 1-2)
A life of faith is the greatest life of ease. It means yielding our bodies as a living sacrifice to the Holy Spirit, renewing our minds to the truth of who we are in Christ, yet this life is greater than the endless games and the boring talk that comes with childhood, in which young people, full of fears and cares and looking to themselves, rely on the empty leading of others or falling to empty rule-keeping which makes no one safe.