Saturday night I saw “The Other Boleyn Girl.” It is the story of a family: a father and mother and 2 daughters and 1 son. The father envisions great wealth and position for the family. The mother who descended from a family of power and chose to marry for love sees the virtue in having less in life. The sisters and brother have a closeknit kinship.
As the story progresses the family is literally torn apart by the choices they make in order to get ahead. Both sisters become impregnated with the king of england’s bastard children and towards the end of the film the brother George and sister Anne actually consider incest in order to cover up Anne’s miscarriage with the king’s child.
In the end both Anne and George are beheaded and the family is torn apart. The father dies in disgrace. Sister Mary moves on to her 2nd marriage and disconnects from her parents entirely. No one in the film is happy in the end. Everyone has been ravaged by sin, selfishness, lust, and greed.
The next morning I attended Easter services at church.
What a juxtaposition.
Saturday night I bore witness to evil in its sickest form. I saw lives ruined and disgraced because of sin. Leaving the theatre I felt overwhelmed. I felt like the world and its inhabitants were rather hopeless.
Sunday morning I was greeted with a message as opposite as any two messages.
Yes, we live in a world filled with hopelessness—that is, apart from the hope we have in Christ Jesus.
Only lives connected to His truth can make any sense, have any purpose, have any good in them.
What hope that though left to our own out of control whims and desires we literally destroy ourselves, but with the hope in Christ we can have not only abundant life daily on this earth but we can have assurance of everlasting hope and eternal life past the shores of Heaven.
I was reminded that the message of the Bible and the Cross is not “Get your lives fixed and then come to Christ. Get rid of your sin then you will be accepted into His kingdom.”
Far from it.
The message of Christ is that in no way are we capable on a human level in our own power to be good. We are selfish simple creatures. The joy and hope of Christ is that HE IS GOOD. So we are at a loss to try and scramble up a nice portrait of ourselves for Christ. The point of the cross is not to show Christ how we can be such “good Christians.” The message of the cross is to surrender daily to the love none of us truly deserve or have inherited because of our goodness. Praise God that there is hope. Praise God that He has the character that bestows such love and compassion on such dirty little selfish creatures as ourselves. Now I believe THAT is a hope to live for.
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