Pondering this lately and have been thinking that we do not hide out of fear of the other but we are, rather, cautious out of respect.

Ok … I have finally seen Batman Begins.

 

Wow.

 

This is a fantastic movie. The story is great and the themes are wonderful dealing realistically not just with black and white but with the gray areas of justice, vengeance, evil, social responsibility, calling, courage etc. Very well done and easily up there with Spider-man as far as superhero movies go. Certainly it ranks right up there with some of the better films made.

 

One of the things the movie does incredibly well is bring out the original tone of the comicbooks and later graphic novels. This is not a comedian Batman where you keep expecting the graphical overlay of POW and BIF and BAM with every punch. No, this is the true Dark Knight in all his depth and broken splendour. A very human character and the most believable of the superheros.

 

I was happy to see that the violence was suprisingly non-gory and realistic. Batman gets hurt. There are physical consequences to the violence. I could not detect any vulgarity, nudity or other objectionable content.

 

Some great lines in the film:

 

To Bruce Wayne – "Your compassion is something your enemies will not share."

Wayne in response – "That’s what makes it so important."

 

As a child when Bruce would get hurt his father would ask him –

 

"Why do we fall?"

 

He would tell Bruce – "So that we might better learn to pick ourselves up."

 

The Biblical allusions are wonderful and make the movie ideal to watch in a small group setting. At the end of the month I am going to show the movie to our Jr. & Sr. Youth and young adults on our monthly movie night. After the movie I will give away a Bible study written by Christianity Today about the movie. We’ll have a little discussion too.

 

I was in a cold medication-induced haze last night and thinking about the value of human life and life in general. The overall concensus is that the value of life is intrinsic to the creature – human or otherwise. Humanists, existentialists etc.  would likely agree with this statement and claim that the human creates his or her own value in the way they live their lives and how they impact the world etc.

 

Unfortunatly this offers no real benchmark for value aside from the individual – which means this approach boils down to a sort of Darwinian – strongest group or individual determines the value of a particular life or lives at the moment.

 

If this is the case value loses its value (so-to-speak) and depends solely on brute force. The implications of this are interesting but I will not try to delve into them now. Suffice to say I think this is likely the position the western world holds right now.

 

As I continued to think about this I began to formulate something of a position for myself on this area. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that very few people actually have anything like a defined position on anything (myself included), happy to go through life in a sort of vague "let’s see how things work out mode" working with a kind of cobbled together conglomerate of ideas built off of life experience.

 

So here’s what I think:

 

 

Of course those of you who know me well know where this is leading (where all my thoughts lead frankly). My first thought was that this idea unravels rather quickly when you notice that various people are loved to various degrees – i.e. the person who has no family or friends has no value because no one loves them. On the surface it seems like a very elistist idea that should be tossed.

 

But this idea depends upon the existance of a loving God – and that it does not matter if you have hundreds of people who love you deeply (Mother Theresa) or nobody at all – because a loving God loves all equally and God’s love trumps all others.

 

Of course the challenge of this idea is that not all people realize that God loves them or their awareness of God is bent or cracked by history, culture and the development of Gods made in their own image. Their lives and value are dependant upon the love of people around them. This is good but human love will fail and if your life’s value is built upon how much your peers love you than your sense of self-worth will fluctuate with the whims of the people around you.

 

God’s love is dependable and it is there even when everyone else has walked away.

 

Now this isn’t some elitist Christian perspective (it isn’t – really) that claims God only loves Christians and therefore only Christians have value – that’s not where this is going. As a follower of Christ I rely on my Bible as one of God’s primary revelations of His will to humanity, I say one of because I believe that God’s primary revelation is in Christ.

 

Now – this is the point where many have likely given up and filed my post in their "raving Christian" file. For the rest of you I need to say that the only way I can wrap up this perspective – that a life’s value is based upon how much it is loved – is to turn to Christ.

 

Christ is the expression of God’s love for humanity. Christ’s sacrifice is the expression of how much God loves humanity. God’s will is that "all would be saved" and receive the gift of eternal life in God’s presence. This is not a conditional love – God never said I love Christians more than Muslims, Hindus, agnostics, atheists and the blended crowd of humanity. His love is equal for all. The struggle that people have is in accepting the way in which God has expressed love – through Jesus.

 

When a person rejects Christ they reject the offer of unconditional love that God has made and God loves us enough to allow that rejection to happen. The offer remains despite the rejection. God loves the person the same, despite the rejection. It is our acceptance of God’s love in Christ that allows us to realize our true value, allows us to transcend the value we have tried unsuccessfully to give ourselves through money, relationships, etc. We need to be clear on this point – our acceptance of Christ does not give us value, it is a recognition of the value we already had and continue to have in God’s love for us.

 

So there it is.

 

For those followers of Christ out therre you should ask yourselves what this means when we have been called "the body of Christ" – what responsibility do we have in expressing the love of God? The ramifications are powerful.

For some reason I was thinking about Hell the other night and about the general lack of fear it seems to instill into people. There are many obvious reasons for this, the most likely being that people simply don’t believe in Hell.

 

I must admit that the idea of Hell rarely crosses my mind (thankfully) and so it maintains a simple abstract place deep in the undredged places. Still – there are many who seek to evangelize through instilling the fear of Hell into people.

 

Believe it or not there are only 13 usages of the word ‘Hell’ in my New American Standard (Updated) Bible. This seemed a little low given the historical preoccupation so I turned to the trusty King James version (KJV), because – if you are going to find references to Hell you’ll likely find it there. Sure enough the KJV has 54 mentions of the word.

 

Now I know it is too much to ask that people not get bent out of shape over this and immediately blame the translators of the NASB for translating the ‘Hell’ out of the Bible but the reason for the difference is that there are many different words used in Scripture that the KJV translators translated into ‘Hell’. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word Sheol was translated as Hell but it literally means ‘the world of the dead’.

 

It isn’t until the New Testament that we find the word ‘Gehenna’ which is of Hebrew origin and references a place of everlasting punishment. Gehenna referenced a valley not far from Jerusalem where the cities refuse was dumped and burned. It stank of the garbage of the day and fires burned there constantly. The other reference in the New Testament translated as Hell was the Greek word for Hades – place of the dead. Peter references Tartarus – being the deepest pit of Hades designed solely for incarceration.

 

Finally in Revelation we hear of the future when both death and Hell are cast into the lake of fire – the second death.

 

Wheww!!

 

All this to say the original languages lend a nuance to Hell that english doesn’t do well to capture.

 

Based on my reading the entirety of scripture points to a place where the dead go, an undesirable place away from God, a place of holding and punishment – a place, as bad as it is, that will ultimatly be cast into a worse place…

 

Words connected with Hell include mourning, death, sorrow, a place of punishment, a definite place, a place from which there is no return, place of darkness.

 

In Job 38:18 it specifically references God’s ability to prevent people’s lives from passing into Hell (Sheol).

 

Psalm 6:5 hints that God’s presence is not felt in Hell (Psalm 139:8 does say that even in Hell/Sheol one cannot escape God’s presence). Psalm 9 is more specific in it’s mention of Hell as a place of punishment where God sends the wicked. Psalm 16 specifically mentions God’s ability to prevent the soul from going to Hell. Psalm 49 spends time expanding on the fact that God punishes with Hell/Sheol and redeems others to Himself.

 

Proverbs 15:24 specifically states that the path of life leads upward for the wise, for the rest – Sheol.

 

Song of Songs 8:6 references Sheol as severe.

 

It should also be noted that of all the people in the Bible, Christ speaks more of Hell than anyone else and in His references we find the most specific details. Matt. 25:41 is the most clear when Christ says – "Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels."

 

Anyhow – you get the idea.

 

So with all that people generally still do not fear Hell, likely out of unbelief or ‘selective’ belief.

 

To me the issue of fear is irrelevant. The desire to know God should outweigh the fear of not knowing God. That is to say that one should not primarily come into relationship with God merely out of fear but rather out of desire. That is not to deny the many who do enter into relationship through fear – but I often wonder at the quality of their lives if it is motivated primarily out of fear and not love.

 

Many people believe the undesirable nature of Hell comes from its contrast to the present world. I think this is a fairly western idea. The idea that Hell sucks because I won’t have my house, car, TV, family etc. This is hardly a motivator for someone living in the Sudan whose current life must feel very much like Hell.

 

I suspect the real horror of Hell comes from the fact that ALL will stand in the presence of God one day. Those who are condemned and those who are not. That to stand in the presence of God is a bliss that overshadows all things – for those condemned to Hell, they will have eternity to contemplate that time in God’s presence and live in the torment of their eternal removal from it.

 

To come into the presence of God is the motivator. To come into the presence of God is to want nothing else. Our primary goal should be to lead people into the presence of God, rather than away from Hell – in so doing we will impact the quality of this life and not just the next. They will live lives motivated to draw nearer to God out of love and not simply running away from Hell out of fear.

 

So we lead people to Christ, God and mediator in one. The question we as followers of Christ must ask ourselves is – do we embody fear or love in our relations with others?

 

P.S. Having said all of that I must still concede that when all else fails God will still point to the consequences of not knowing Him – Hell – as a motivator.

 

 

I sometimes wonder if the mind is closer to the flesh than the soul.

 

It was something of a sad moment for me when I realized that apologetics will never save anyone. It was a happier time when I realized that it was still critical to bringing many to the threshold of belief. Nevertheless – faith was required to walk through the door.

 

It seems to me that some of us who were brought to the door by apologetics often linger a bit by the doorstop. We were so rigorous in our logic exercises when we were on the other side of the door that we forgot that faith is exercised on an ongoing basis & when we came into the room we got fat.

 

I think our lives must become a continual exercise in faith…a constant re-belieiving and a continual remembrance of that step into the arms of Christ – otherwise we despair and all seems lost.

 

We were saved, we are being saved, we will be saved.

Brooding dark

and sending the vibe

 

"get out of my way"

 

sitting in one place

                                        and

raging through the room

 

(all at once)

 

spreading darkness like

a cold wet cloak

 

miserable

 

till the orbs ascend

and see the trefoil blessing

in shadows of light

cast across my ceiling

 

there You are

created luminous

and dancing in the air

 

making it all ok again –

 

thanks.