How It's Done: Wilson vs. Hitchens

Last year Bill Maher, in collaboration with Larry Charles, released the film Religulous. The subject: document Maher's interactions with various religious peoples and organizations in order to "examine" and "evaluate" their claims. The result? Well, at best, Maher's observations and criticisms are fantastic grounds for discourse. Bill Maher is a divisive personality, so it's no surprise that most of the people he talked to were relatively irritated or repulsed by his questions. There were many instances where his questions were legitimate and important. However, at worst, Religulous reveals itself to be less about the search for true religion and more about the defamation of all religion. It becomes regularly apparent (unless I'm totally ignorant) that Maher's quest is not one of enlightenment or genuine searching but is actually designed to make religious people look stupid. Fortunately for Maher, many of them are. Unfortunately for Maher, he never really talked to any Christians who actually seemed to know what they were talking about, when I know for a fact there are plenty that do. I will go out on a limb and say that if Maher's search was birthed from an authentic search for the truth, he could not come to conclusions such as these,

"The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions, is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble and that is what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting s*** dead wrong."

What's funny about Maher's call to "humility"? What's funny is that it's not humble at all. If Maher was being consistent here then he must admit the humble thing to do, at the very least, would be to doubt his doubt. Why is his atheism (i.e., religion) exempt from his own standard of doubt? But I digress. The real reason for this post is to point you to a film that actually knows how to present an even handed, unbiased presentation of, essentially, the same debate.

Collision: Hitchens vs. Wilson, is a fantastically interesting Documentary that chronicles the book/debate tour between prominent Anti-Theist, Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson over the question, "Is Christianity Good for the World?"

I cannot recommend viewing this film highly enough.

What is so great about Collision?

Several things:
1. Both Wilson and Hitchens are very intelligent men who argue their points quite clearly and accessibly. Rarely, does this film fly over the audience's capacity to follow the arguments.
2. Both Wilson and Hitchens like each other. They get along and it's fun to watch the two men demonstrate the possibility of civil disagreement.
3. Hitchens rarely, if ever, demonstrates apathy for hearing and trying to understand Wilson's Christian position, in fact he's downright inquisitive and even impressed with Wilson quite frequently.
4. Wilson is the sort of Christian you wish Bill Maher had tried to interview. He's loving (even jolly), intelligent, articulate, and uniquely Christian in his responses to Hitchens. Which is to say, he does not attempt to prove Christianity through reason but rather presupposes the revelation of God through Christ and the Bible thereby rightly subjecting reason itself to the revelation of God. Few apologists see that, when they try to prove Christianity by appealing to reason, they are in fact assuming reason is the objective standard by which we determine something is true. Wilson realizes that if he does this, he's implying that God's revelation is not a sufficient authority. Hitchens sees this problem too and obviously respects Wilson for not playing into it.

It's 80 minutes long and is just plain fun to watch. Watch it!

Batman & Halloween

If there is a holiday that lends itself to a Batman movie marathon it would be Halloween. A movie about a man that dresses up as a bat-man to frighten criminals into submission certainly lends itself to the opportunistic senses of basic cable programming. This year’s winner: ABC Family. Yes folks, it’s Halloween, so why not round up the family, plop down in front of the TV and watch your favorite costumed avenger battle a homicidal clown, a perverted penguin monster thingy, and…wait for it…Jim Carrey! Muuuwaaahahahahahaaa!
This year’s marathon (of course) consists of Tim Burton’s Batman, Batman Returns and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever rather than the vastly superior Batman Begins or The (too soon for TV) Dark Knight. If it were not Halloween it almost wouldn’t seem right to watch any of these movies. As a lifelong fan of the Batman mythos it’s not hard to criticize most of the artistic choices in each of these films. At the heart of each film are two severely irresponsible interpretations of the character.

1. Multiple Personality Disorder Batman?

To Tim Burton and screenwriter Warren Skaaren, Batman was a hero only in the sense that his emotional, psychological needs happened to line up with Gotham City’s greatest good. To them, Batman was a split personality who terrorized the criminals of Gotham City to exercise his own psychotic need for revenge. In both Burton’s and Schumacher’s films we see Bruce/Batman struggle to choose which personality will dominate. The best comic material in Batman’s history rarely toys with these notions. There’s been a consistent understanding that Bruce Wayne is a man who wears masks and neither the public mask of Bruce Wayne nor the iconic mask of the Batman cause the boy who tragically lost his parents to forget who he is. Burton and Schumacher obviously thought mild psychosis was far more interesting territory.


2. Batman’s quest for Revenge

As of 1989’s Batman, the cinematic Dark Knight was no longer a selfless hero. Batman’s battle was no longer characterized by a drive to nightly protect others from the sort of tragedy that he himself suffered as a child. Under the guidance of Burton’s macabre sensibilities the Batman was transformed into a psychologically damaged revenge freak, not the pursuer of justice that characterizes the bulk of Batman’s comic career. What the comics have long portrayed, and what Christopher Nolan’s new films understand, is that Bruce Wayne/Batman is not out for revenge. He does not serve himself nor his unsatisfied desire for revenge. Rather, he is a servant to the citizens of Gotham and a force for justice in the city he loves.


These things have nearly always been central to Batman’s character and it seems odd that multi-million dollar productions would overlook them. Thankfully, Christopher Nolan and David Goyer knew exactly what had long been ignored in Batman’s cinematic history and brought us something that resembled something true to the real spirit of the character.

All that said, it seems to me that Halloween is the one day of the year that watching these older Batman films is permissible. On Halloween films like these can be treated as products of an alternate, non-canonical Batman universe – a set of tales we all know fail at their core to tell a REAL Batman story, but are tolerated as juvenile experiments with the Batman mythology. In this way (and I would humbly submit it's the only way) can these films truly be enjoyed.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to return to viewing the guilty pleasure silliness of rubber nipple bat-suits, a 30-year-old Robin, and a 5’6” Batman.

*Sound off in the comments with your favorite quirk from the Pre-Nolan Batman catalogue but remember, Adam West and George Clooney are awfully easy targets.

Chocolate Paradise

What's your idea of Heaven? There are a variety of opinions. I was watching Scrubs today and Zach Braff's character thinks there will be milk shake swimming pools...which sounds ok, I guess. I also heard Miley Cyrus on the radio one time say that she's sure there will be music in Heaven. Thanks, Miley.
C.S. Lewis once said something to the effect of trying to imagine Heaven would be like trying to explain to a small child that there was something better than chocolate. It's difficult to imagine what Heaven will be like because, well, we've never been there. However, we have experienced significant pleasures and there are, in this life, things that serve as shadows of the paradise to come.
I think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory circles this concept. I can remember being a child and watching the first cinematic adaptation of Dahl's classic, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and being swept up in the utopian feeling of Wonka's fantastical factory. Certainly if you were to ask a child what their idea of Heaven would be, Wonka's factory would qualify. I don't know whether or not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory intentionally tries to symbolize some spiritual realities but if it doesn't, it certainly seems to stumble across them.

The Children
Take the children as one example. All of them (except Charlie) exhibit several of Catholicism's 7 deadly sins.

You've got...

Augustus Gloop the Glutton

Violet Beauregarde the Prideful

Veruca Salt the Greedy

and Mike Teavee full of Wrath

There seems to be some clear symbolism going on here with the children and what they receive for their character. For instance, Veruca is sent down the garbage chute, which leads to the incinerator. Does it get more obvious than that? It seems like they're saying, at the very least, that there should be justice in the world and that evil deserves to be punished.

The Factory
Then there is the factory itself. I think Wonka’s factory, in a way, symbolizes something of a Biblical Paradise. Think about it…at first, things are good in the factory and the world around it. People are prosperous and happy to be working in it until spies and villains are sent in and begin to corrupt it. At that point, everyone is cast out, resulting in the poverty and suffering of it’s former workers.

Then, suddenly, without warning the factory opens up again and people spend their lives wishing they could get back in to see what’s going on. I'm just saying, it's not totally unlike Adam and Eve being expelled for giving into the temptation of Satan and humanity's ongoing expectation for God to restore paradise.

It's relatively complementary to the Christian idea that we have a creator, we have a design, we are wired in a certain way and that, as humans, a part of us will always be looking for what Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden. We want that peace. We want a paradise to live in. We want the suffering to end, the labor to end, the broken relationships to end, the oppressive weight of sin and injustice to end. The problem with us is that we try to make these things happen in all the wrong ways. We’re sinful and corrupted. None of us are Charlie. At our core, we’re Augustus, or Veruca, or Violet or Mike Teavee (Ephesians 2:1-3).

To put it in the terms of the movie, if we were invited to Wonka’s factory we would either not have the sense to go, or we would be cast out as the wicked children we are. We haven’t grown out of what Adam and Eve did and in and of ourselves it doesn’t seem there’s much hope for us to be anywhere near as virtuous or honest as Charlie is.
However, the message of Christianity is that there is someone who IS innocent. There is someone who IS sinless and by putting our faith in him we might finally have what we we’ve been aimlessly looking for all or lives.

2 Corinthians 5 says it this way,
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

To me, the frightening thing about God is that when I look into my own heart and life, if I’m being honest, I’m not good enough to stand in his presence and I’ve got no tricks up my sleeve or means at my disposal to make myself worthy, much less make me into a person that God is actually going to want to spend eternity with.
That is why Christians love Jesus Christ so much. It’s because the message of Christianity is that when some one turns from their sin because they love Jesus, they surrender to Jesus and they want to serve and honor Jesus – God doesn’t look at their guilt – He looks at Christ, whose blood was spilled on the cross as a punishment for our evil and whose life guarantees our eternal peace with God.

In the end, what I like best about this movie is that, despite the fact that there’s some obvious Paradise symbolism when it comes to the factory, the film actually admits that Wonka’s factory can’t do anything for Charlie or fulfill his most precious dreams. In the end, the Factory is no paradise at all without his family. I think that’s a very big indictment of man’s efforts to create paradise. Whatever we do to make life better, safer, cleaner, happier is always going to fall short of what mankind needs the most. Of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory holds that thing up as family, i.e., "paradise wouldn’t be paradise without a family." In a sense, I’m ok with spiritualizing that message but I think if we’re going to point to ultimate reality and be as accurate and truthful as possible, it’s better to say paradise wouldn’t be paradise without Jesus.

So here's the question again, "What's your idea of heaven?" Answering that question is a good way to assess what you love more than God and probably what needs to be trashed in order to inherit eternal life.

The Golden Ticket
The greatest line in the movie, I think, is when Charlie tells his family that he’s going to sell the Golden Ticket in order to provide for them and his Grandfather tells him, “Charlie, this isn’t an opportunity you get just everyday. Only a dummy would throw it away for something as common as money.”
So, what is common in our lives that’s going to cost us an eternal paradise in the presence of Jesus Christ, who made us to experience the unending pleasure of knowing and worshipping him forever?
In Matthew 13:44 Jesus tells his followers, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

Funny. Doesn't Make Much Sense Though.

Ricky Gervais is probably the funniest atheist working today. That’s why it comes as no surprise that The Invention of Lying, co-written and directed by Gervais, would have a uniquely humorous premise: “A world where everyone tells the absolute truth no matter what.” And, as a matter of fact, the first 45 minutes or so are pretty hysterical. The best moments in this universe are the ones that wouldn’t immediately come to mind, like, “what would commercials be like?”

“Hi. I’m Bob and I work for Coke. I’m here to ask you to not stop buying Coke. It’s a little sweet and can make you fat no matter how carefully you diet. Coke. It’s very famous.”

Then, there’s Pepsi, “For when they don’t have Coke.”

Gervais plays Mark Bellison a self described, “Chubby loser” whose bad luck turns for the better when he becomes the only man in the entire world who can lie. What begins with the tone of a modern, comedic fable becomes an explicit commentary on religion and atheism. It would be easy to say that this film is an atheistic playground. In fact I’ve already heard people refer to it as an “Atheist Manifesto.” However, I don’t think Gervais does any ultimate credit to the atheistic camp.

The shift in tone occurs when Bellison’s mother is lying on her deathbed, confiding her fears about death to her son, as if an eternal dark nothingness is a foregone conclusion. Bellison, being the only man capable of lying, tells her that when she dies there won’t be nothingness. In fact she’ll regain her youth, go to a mansion in the sky and enjoy it forever with all her best friends. The only thing sadder at this point in the movie than realizing that you’re watching a film more atheistic than Happy Feet is that Bellison’s description of Heaven is not remotely Christian and yet many Christians will probably feel personally assaulted.

From here, word gets out that Mark Bellison knows exactly what happens after you die and, in order to appease the curiosity of the woman he loves, he tells the world that there’s a "Man in the Sky" who controls everything, good and bad, and if you do bad things you won’t get to live with him in the sky when you die. And there it is...

Religion would not exist in a world where people could only tell the truth.

What I’m not sure Gervais realizes is that the world of “truth” he’s created sucks just as much as the real world. In fact, it’s a world that seems to be desperate for meaning outside of it’s own existence and no one should see this more clearly than Bellison, who can’t be with the woman he loves because he’s not a good genetic match. Even Gervais seems to see the absurdity in the logical implications that atheism has for personal, romantic relationships…otherwise people in that world wouldn’t recite wedding vows like these,
“Do you Brad, agree to stay married to Anna as long as you want to and protect your offspring as long as you can?”

When the atheistic writer of the film seems to see the foolishness in such bio-centric, emotionally detached relationships he winds up undermining his entire premise doesn't he? After all, if you’re going to go ahead and admit that love is more than biology, then you’ve pretty much filmed your way into a philosophical, theological corner and done nothing more than make this Theist laugh at the folly of Atheism.

What About Bob: The Ego Maniac and the Orphan

"What About Bob?" tells the story of Bob Wiley, his psychiatrist, Leo Marvin and the series of events and relationships that help Bob overcome the phobias that plague his life.

If you've seen the movie you might be wondering, "what on earth is he going to get out of this movie that is remotely useful or profound?" I would have thought the same thing after seeing it the first time. The first time I watched "What About Bob?" I did not like it. Thoroughly disliked it actually. I don't know why I ever gave it a second chance but it was enough to convince me that this was actually a very funny, very insightful movie with a lot to say to those of us that are not quite as concerned as we should be for other people.

At it's basic core are two character types:
1. The Ego-maniac
2. The Spiritual Orphan

Leo Marvin is the Ego-maniac, a successful, published psychiatrist on the verge of becoming a media darling for his new book, "Baby Steps." Bob, is a multi-phobic, clingy, socially naive, basket case who thinks Leo is the answer to all his problems. Of course on the surface that makes sense, after all, Leo seemingly has everything Bob wants. He has a successful career, loving wife, children and family and nothing really seems to bother him. He's a picture of health and confidence - the complete opposite of Bob.

But, he's not as put together as Bob thinks. In fact, he's totally obsessed with himself and his own success. Even on vacation he has little time for his family, primarily due to his obsession with an imminent interview on Good Morning America. He's so obsessed with himself that after spending 3 minutes with Bob in their first session he's decided that the best treatment for Bob is to read "Baby Steps." He's not at all interested in caring for Bob in a way that meets his needs. He simply offers his packaged, programmed steps to psychiatric health. Leo is an evident ego maniac because, despite choosing a career that is designed to help people the only "help" he offers Bob either requires no effort on his part (gives him a book) or further distances Bob from what he needs (he tells him to take a vacation from his problems so that he can get back to his own vacation).

I think Leo's hypocrisy can warn us all. We can be brilliant diagnosticians. We can accurately and insightfully see what people's needs are but we can, like Leo, do nothing to help those people, build those people up, love those people and meet their needs. Many times, when the Bob Wileys come into our lives we're naturally prone to belittle them, mock them and do everything we can to distance ourselves and distinguish ourselves from them. Even Leo's most (seemingly) effective advice is designed to remove Bob from his life and his family's life (something Bob needs).

If Leo were in my church I'd want him to read James 1
"14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? 17 So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead."

I read a lot of reviews of "What About Bob?" and in many of them there was a confession that each of us has probably had their own Bob Wiley in their life. I think if we were to attempt to put Bob into a biblical typology we'd have to say he's something of an orphan. Of course, this is not literally so, but is rather a spiritual condition. He has no one pouring God's love into him, no one caring for him, no one caring for him in his distress.

Consider James again,
"27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

God's compassion for orphans is evident in Deuteronomy 10,
"17 For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. 18 He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing."

God is a God that cares for those who no one else cares about and God’s children, Christians, are called to have a heart for these people. Bob is an orphan in the sense that no one else cares about him and no is really trying to meet his most basic needs. As Christians we believe mankind's most basic need is to know and worship Jesus Christ and to be a part of his church – be in relationship to Him and the church that he died for, in order to be at peace with God and daily experience the happiness of knowing him and having deep, significant relationships with other people in the church.

I imagine that, at times, many of us were orphans – we didn’t have anybody who was concerned about whether or not we had a relationship with Jesus Christ. I imagine that, at times, many of us are ego maniacs when it comes to our lifestyles, Christian or not – and we don’t care about people enough to get right down to their most basic need.
I wonder if that’s where a lot of us who grew up in church are at. We have an uncanny sin radar and can detect doctrinal fallacy miles away...we just have no desire to do anything about it. So the question is, "Will we persist in our ego-mania, acting like our faith is just for us or are we going to reach out and care for people by sharing with them the best news that they will ever hear?" I can promise you, that should you step outside of your comfort zone to care for the spiritual orphan, introduce them to Jesus Christ, bring them into the fellowship of his Church, you will be blessing and serving someone much like Bob was served and blessed by being connected to a family that cared for and loved him.

As cheesy as it sounds, the love of a family changed Bob’s life. I would suggest to you that these stories exist because God wants to give us a shadow and picture of how transforming his love can be.

"By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and truth."

I John 3:16-18

District 9 Makes Star Trek Feel Like an Even Bigger Waste of Time

Finally! Seriously. Finally, the summer has given us a movie actually worth thinking and talking about. Despite many, many reviews to the contrary, District 9 isn't doing anything new. At the core it is a message film about racism, intolerance, poverty, greed, and good ol' fashioned human evil. Star Trek and the Twilight Zone were preaching social messages in Sci-fi packaging long before District 9 was ever conceived. This time around, the message is packaged like Cloverfield (documentary style footage) but it becomes so much more than Cloverfield ever managed to be and is way, way smarter.
The premise, in case you're unfamiliar, is that 20 years ago a massive alien space ship broke down over Johannesburg, South Africa and now hovers near the city. The government, uncertain about what to do with a malnourished, leaderless, worker bee society of aliens places them in a strip of land outside Johannesburg labeled District 9. What was meant to be a rescue/relief effort turns into a South African alien slum and the inhabitants, once the simple victims of human aid, are now the victims of, among other things, sinister capitalism, bigotry, racism, and intolerance. As one South African states, "It would be different if they were just from another country, but they're from another planet...so...they need to just go away." Of course, we all know it wouldn't be different if they weren't aliens. We know this because there's enough human history behind us to realize that we're often far more inclined to act in a way that preserves our comfort, improves our status or permits our cowardice.
At first, you might be inclined to sympathize with the "main" character, Wikus Van De Merwe, a corporate lackey tasked with serving eviction notices to the aliens, derogatorily referred to as 'Prawns', in order to move them to a new location with that "new concentration camp smell." He's a sympathetic character at first, despite the apparent pleasure he takes in his wretched job, not because he's particularly heroic, but because he's kind of a loser. You feel for the guy and you want him to wake up and change from an ignorant, judgmental loser to a sympathetic one.
I suppose you could say this happens, but it happens in the least polished, least Hollywood way. What the audience is treated to, other than the sci-fi trappings of humans exploding from alien laser blasts, is a man who is judged with the same measurement and standard with which he has judged others. How this happens, well, I'll leave that for you to discover...let's just say he moves well beyond sympathy into full on empathy and it's a riveting thing to behold.

Escapism

As a general rule I don't think entertainment should be pure escapism. When most people want to minimize the absurdity of a film, or especially the poor quality of a film (Hi, Star Trek! You still kinda suck) their defense for enjoying what is undeniably awful is that it is just simple 'entertainment'. In other words, "I don't go to think. I go to be entertained." Fine. But what's the definition of entertainment? Well, I'm so glad I asked.
Here it is according to Merriam-Webster...

en·ter·tain a: to keep, hold, or maintain in the mind

Because film is so often, if not always, intentionally communicating something, and because we are prone to hold in the mind the things which entertain us, I find it far more rewarding (even in poor films) to think about and analyze what I'm watching so that I'm not prone to indulge in careless banality. All that said, however, it has occurred to me that there can be a virtue in treating certain films as escapist entertainment.

I think doing so can be illustrative of a human need to escape and a human hope for a final escape from the pain, conflict, fears, and decay of our present world. Take the trailer for the upcoming film, Where The Wild Things Are. I saw this in front of the new Harry Potter film and it's a shame really, but this 2 minute trailer was more enthralling and heart tugging than the 2 hour slog fest that was Harry Potter.

Apparently, the film is based on a children's picture book (one I have yet to read) about a boy who is sent to his room before dinner for talking back to his mother. In his room he escapes into his own imagination in order to disassociate himself from the fear of punishment and the anger he feels for being scolded. In his imagination is a whole new world filled with mystical creatures and wild adventures too wonderful to be contained in the real world. The concept of escaping this world, filled with antagonism, fractured families, painful tears and seemingly impossible conflicts for a new world - a redeemed world is certainly something I can applaud and by which be entertained. Now, am I certain that my initial assessment of this project is going to be accurate? Well, no. But it's certainly more interesting than the banal escapism of Michael Bay's transforming robots.

"3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3-4).

I highly recommend checking out the trailer!

From Where Do True Love Stories Come? Part 2

* First, a disclaimer: The origin of this post was actually a youth group lesson designed to challenge the students concept of dating and whether or not they were glorifying God in their "romantic" choices. I decided not to edit it (because I'm lazy). Enjoy.

Ah..."wuv...twoo wuv". Certainly the Messianic undertones of Westley's character, shadowed though they may by, are never more clear than by viewing Buttercup's reactions to Westley. I often find myself forgetting that Westley and Buttercup weren't always in love. The theme of "true love" is so painted across the entire canvas of this film that it's easy to forget that Buttercup was kind of a self-righteous wench who cared to do nothing but torment Westley.
The story tells us that her greatest pleasure was selfishly ordering Westley around with menial, labor-intensive chores. Yet, Westley was always very gracious with her. What’s surprising is that one day, Buttercup doesn’t even really see Wesley. One day he’s there to simply make her life easier and the next when she realizes what Wesley is saying ("As you wish") and who he is and what he’s like it changes her.
Many of us might treat Christ in the way that Buttercup treats Westley in the beginning of the film. Christ is there to make my life easier. When things go wrong I blame him and when I want something for myself I pray to him, but I’m not terribly concerned about whether he might expect something from me. That’s the funny thing about how many people treat Jesus. They recognize that he was a wise, loving person – they never consider that maybe, just maybe he’s the God of the universe who has very clear statements on what he expects from us.
But there’s something almost supernatural that happens to Buttercup when she really sees Westley for the first time. It’s similar to how Paul describes the conversion of the Christian in II Corinthians 4, “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."
One day, life was normal and Christ was not important. The next, something supernatural happens to us and we see him for who he really is and how much he deserves our worship and our obedience and our trust and we, for lack of a better term, fall in love with him spending the rest of lives thinking about how we can please him. We find ourselves tasting the first fruits of what Adam and Eve knew in the Garden of Eden – the beginnings of a relationship with God that is designed to bring us lasting happiness.
There is something frightfully significant in the idea that intimate, romantic relationships are designed to reflect Christ’s Love of his Bride, his rescuing of his bride, and his redeeming of his bride (Ephesians 5).
It means that romantic relationships are designed 1. To Lead to Marriage and 2. Draw the two people closer to Christ, which is to say that such a relationship is supposed to create worship. If it doesn’t it’s not a loving relationship. It’s not a loving relationship because it’s not meeting a person's greatest need – the need to know and worship God. So the question you have to ask yourself in a dating relationship or before you start a dating relationship is “Will this bring both of us closer to Christ and will it glorify Christ - will it create worship?”
If not…I would submit to you that you’re sinning and that you need to do something about that. I would submit to you that the most important need in your life is to worship God and that you cast off the things that hinder you in such a cause. If that’s your boyfriend or your girlfriend or if it’s simply the fantasy of a boyfriend or a girlfriend, whatever it is – throw it overboard and devote your energy to worshiping God – because that’s the best thing for both of you and will make you better husbands and wives someday.
I would submit to you also, and finally that Christ will not disappoint you. We see Westley, and an assortment of characters do and say incredibly powerful, significant things for love and justice in this movie. Westley is a heroic force to be reckoned with but the reality is that he’s nothing but a shadow of the security we have in Christ and the power of Christ to rescue us from sin, redeem us from our sin, and to keep us holy and righteous.
Westley fails several times in this movie to be the hero he should be. One, he leaves Buttercup in the beginning of the film, allowing her to think he’s dead and two, he looses her after the fire swamp. But we see Christ being a wholly different kind of hero. Not only does he rescue his bride he can’t lose her.
In John 6 Jesus says,
"37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Simply put, Christ keeps, what Christ saves. He is perfect. And he is ultimately deserving of your worship because he’s Holy, perfect, just, good and loving and every other place you run for pleasure will only put you in an eternal hole. Why settle for something less?