Matthew's Personal Blog

If Mr. Beeler were to see this list, he would surely assign multiple-​​page essays in response to them.

I recently watched the fol­low­ing two movies and found them quite intriguing:

• The Last Sin Eater
• Know­ing
• Hidalgo

Both movies are extremely good sto­ries that describe human­ity and its ten­den­cies to stray from what God orig­i­nally intended for Cre­ation and his plans to make good come from the evil that we have twisted. I do not wish to give an in-​​depth analy­sis on the four lay­ers of mean­ing (lit­eral, fig­u­ra­tive, tropo­log­i­cal, and ana­gog­i­cal), but they are easy to inter­pret for one’s self.

I must warn you that Know­ing offers a very skewed, but thought-​​provoking, view of the eschaton/​apocalypse as fore­seen by a young girl in 1959. Recall that Jesus tells us to, “stay awake, for [we] know nei­ther the day nor the hour” (Mt 25:13, NAB). In the movie, a few cho­sen chil­dren are removed from the earth before it is destroyed and are taken to a dif­fer­ent planet. This act of “res­cue” from the tribu­la­tion is com­monly referred to as the Rap­ture. How­ever, the Rap­ture is never men­tioned any­where in the Bible, nor is it alluded to by any of the prophets, by Jesus, or in the Pauline epis­tles. The answer to why there will not be a Rap­ture can be found in rea­son: Human suf­fer­ing is redemp­tive by nature if united with the suf­fer­ings of Christ as an offer­ing. This is why euthana­sia is wrong: it pro­vides an “easy death” (from the Greek eu + thanatos) with­out any suf­fer­ing and no chance at redemp­tion. To suf­fer through the tribu­la­tion would be the ulti­mate sac­ri­fice and the ulti­mate redemp­tion. Would God really deprive us of that oppor­tu­nity by tak­ing us from it? The only human per­son who did not need redemp­tion is Jesus: He came to be our redemp­tion through is life, pas­sion, death, res­ur­rec­tion, and ascen­sion and estab­lished His King­dom on earth to guard the seed of faith and pass it down to all gen­er­a­tions. Jesus’ dually human and divine nature (hypo­sta­tic union) explains that He was, in fact, God. His name lit­er­ally means “God saves” and thus he is our sav­ior; he does not need to be saved.

I believe I have writ­ten enough to pro­vide plenty of fuel for thought: it seems that I have writ­ten an essay while try­ing to avoid writ­ing an essay. Watch for how grace is at work in the movies, and I hope you will get as much out of them as I did.