Eugene on John

As a follow up to my post about "The Road", I thought I'd pass along this little quote I read recently from Eugene Peterson in the book "Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination". In short: he agrees with me.

"The pastor is the person who specializes in accompanying persons of faith 'in the middle,' facing the ugly details, the meaningless routines, the mocking wickedness and all the time doggedly insisting that this unaccountably unlovely middle is connected to a splendid beginning and a glorious ending.... When we read a novel we have a analogous experience. We begin the first chapter knowing that there is a last chapter. One of the satisfying things about just picking up a book is the sure knowledge that it will end. In the course of reading we are often puzzled, sometimes in suspense, usually wrong in our expectations, frequently mistaken in our assessment of character. But when we don't understand or agree or feel satisfied, we don't ordinarily quit. We assume meaning and connection and design even when we don't experience it. The last chapter, we are confident, will demonstrate the meaning that was continuous through the novel. We believe that the story will satisfyingly end, not arbitrarily stop."

Endings

The most important part of the story is the ending.

I just finished reading "The Road"
by Cormack McCarthy (with NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! emblazoned on the cover) and had some thoughts I felt like I'd share.

First, this book is a tense read. Life (that is, human life, see later) is excruciatingly fragile and you never know whether some horror lurks around the corner for our two protagonists, a boy and his father (simply called "the man" and "the boy"). It's set in a dystopian future that is complete in its grey, bleak depiction of a hellish landscape devoid of any life (and I mean any, no plants, no animals, everything is dead but a handful of men roaming the earth, eating each other or the leftovers of anything they can find) caused by a unnamed apocalypse that has scorched the earth leaving only ashes and death in its wake. The man and his boy are making their way south to the coast. They have no idea what awaits them there, only some nameless hope that perhaps it may not be so cold, or so dead. So that's the premise.

Set in this theater, I was struck by one scene where the man is described as coming upon an abandoned library. He leafs through a soggy book and looks at overturned and ransacked shelves and thinks to himself that the library is a joke, simply because it was built on the premise that generations would survive to reap its treasures. Stop and think about that idea for a moment. We build things because we presume that life will go on. If we knew that the future is only bleak existence, or no existence at all, what would we do? We live life on premise!

This why I'm always astonished at the resilience of atheists in the face of hopelessness. They live their lives, faithfully maintaining that there is no meaning beyond living and dying, and yet seemingly going about their business as usual, some fruitfully so, as though it had meaning.

In a sense, McCarthy's portrayal in The Road reflects this. The man and the boy push on to something, anything, past horrors unspeakable, the man speaking to his boy of "carrying the fire" and "being the good guys", all the while everything they see and experience is shouting to them that "all is vanity and a striving after the wind".

But of course, that's how we're built. Those who succumb to the idea that existence is meaningless, that the end is a sharp pain perhaps, then nothing, either become like animals or simply commit suicide, or, through cognitive dissonance, convince themselves that there's some purpose despite things. Otherwise, most of us live life expecting life to continue, expecting life to have some purpose ultimately.

And that's why I love the book of Revelation. Sure, it can be confusing, but one thing it tells us is that, in the end, it'll all be set right. We finally meet God face to face, unencumbered by everything that is nasty about us and about the world. Wrongs will be made right and right will be rewarded. And somehow, though we can scarcely imagine it, it will eclipse any darkness we've every known like a million suns over an ink stain. Like the summit on a tall mountain, this gives us something to fix our eyes on as we trek along. And if we believe this is how things will go, that changes how we live our story now.

Revelation Chapters 19-22

I finished my series on the book of Revelation last night, not without some bit of sadness. Certainly I feel the accomplishment of having made it through such a challenging study, but I also feel like my involvement with The House ministry is wrapping up too. In any case, I've enjoyed preparing for these studies and I've learned a TON. I feel like my knowledge of scripture and of God's plan has been profoundly affected by the book of Revelation.

So, what did I talk about? Well, it's the end of the book so John is wrapping up loose strings. We see a progressive defeat of God's enemies (the harlot, the beast, Satan, and finally death), the millennium in the midst of that, and then the New Earth and New Heavens. There is a lot in the text to point out that it's not meant as a verbatim account of what will come, but as a spiritual guide of what to expect. So, for instance, we shouldn't expect New Jerusalem to literally come as a ginormous cube out of the sky, but we should understand it as a symbol of who and what the church is, in shadow now and in fullness then.

Mainly, what I wanted to express was that catching a glimpse of God's plan, of His mercy and His love for us, can create hope in us. I believe that hope can really change the way a person lives. Furthermore, what a person hopes for matters too. As Christians, if we understand that anything this world has to offer us pales in comparison to the promise of God's presence, how can we not live differently in that light? That, I believe, may be the entire point of the book of Revelation. I'm hopeful I got that point across.

Survey my notes here.

Revelation Chapters 14-18

My friend Jason Leonard gave me a break last week and led the discussion on Revelation 14-16 on the topic of judgement, which is so clearly a theme of Revelation. I think our knee-jerk reaction to the judgements described in the Bible is to put ourselves in the place of the people being judged and thinking, how unfair! The reality is that God is fair, and that judgement is delayed as long as possible so that people may come to repentance (see 2 Peter 3:9). The question for us is whether we trust and believe God to be "just and true" as the angels in Revelation put it. You can see Jason's notes here.

This week I jumped back in the fray with a discussion on Babylon in Revelation, from chapters 17 & 18, and a little bit of 19. What it boils down to is that Babylon is the anti-church; it is a culture and a people that are the opposite of what the Church is and will be. This is why God calls His people out of Babylon in Revelation 18:4-5, and why He continues to call us out of it even today. We are called to live in the tension between witness and purity, speaking God's life to a dead world. I ended the talk thinking about Hebrews 11:13-16, thinking about how we are "exiles and strangers" who desire a better world. Really, I don't think we should fear and shun our culture as much as we should desire and live towards a better place, on God has planned for us. I think hope in God's promises will make a much more profound effect on how we live life than shunning our culture will. You can see my notes from this talk here.

The Mist of Despair

Just watched a movie called The Mist last night, and aside from what I've said earlier about how Hollywood characterizes Christians (since there's a crazy Christian in this movie) I have some thoughts about the movie. Be forewarned, that my thoughts mostly concern the ending of the movie so I will be dishing out *spoilers*, though I don't necessarily recommend the movie for viewing.

The premise of the movie is that scientists have opened up a portal to another dimension, unleashing blood-thirsty creatures that hide in a spooky mist on an unwitting town in Maine. The story follows the plight of a group of people holed up in a grocery store as they fight the creatures off, as well as deal with conflicts among themselves (mostly caused by the aforementioned crazy Christian). In the end, the hero and a few others decide to make a break for it and manage to get in a car and drive as far south as they can to try and make it out of the mist. They eventually run out of gas and, surrounded by the sounds of foul beasts in the mist, the contemplate suicide instead of the inevitable fate of being ripped apart, as had been the fate of so many of their friends. The protagonist, equipped with a gun with only four bullets (when there are five people in the car) does the "noble" thing and shoots them all, including his own son. In despair, since he can't end his own life after such a horrific act, he steps outside the vehicle into the mist and dares the creatures to kill him. As he stands, waiting for the creatures to become visible, instead a tank laden with soldiers rumbles through the mist. Astonished, he stands watching as the army rolls by. The movie ends with him, a broken man on his knees as the mist recedes and survivors proceed past him to safety.

What a horrible ending! I could deal with the sight of disgusting monsters attacking people, because that's all make-believe. But the hopelessness that pushed him to such a horrific act was all too real.

I have lately been studying Revelation, and it's clear to me as a Christian that hope in the goodness and justice of our ultimate end is one of the main themes John deals with in that book. Not only that, but hope is described in 1 Corinthians 13 as a pillar of our spiritual walk, along with faith and love. I have to believe, that if the hero of that story had been a solid Christian (not a crazy one), he would have understood that God is good, and held out for deliverance one way or another. Instead, devoid of any thought for the sovereignty of God or His goodness despite the difficult circumstances, he gave into despair and made the worst possible decision. That, unfortunately, is an all too real situation for far too many people.