By John Mark Hobbins
Enchanted is a feel good Disney movie about a Princess called Giselle. She lives in a perfect fairy tale cartoon world of magic and music where she is wondrously happy. When she meets the courageous and charming Prince Edward everything is complete. All that is needed is a wedding and everyone will live happily ever after.
But the evil Queen Narissa wants to destroy Giselle and casts her out of the story by throwing her down a magical well. Giselle lands in the frightening and unknown world of Manhattan, New York. With Giselle out of the way, Queen Narissa believes that she will now have her own ‘happily ever after’. Giselle, on the other hand, finds herself in a world where things don’t work on the ‘happily ever after’ basis that she had taken for granted.
It is a story of two worlds. The first is a make-believe world where fantasy rules. The second is our world – a world where fantasies are known to be no more than delusions. Giselle is forced to come down to the real earth with a bump.
Do you believe that there is another world out there? If so, is it better or worse than ours? Would you want to go there? So many movies talk about ‘another world’. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe probed the existence of another reality dominated by an evil witch and a good lion called Aslan. Another new release, The Golden Compass portrays a parallel universe controlled by an evil group called the Magisterium.
If our hopes for another and better world are merely delusional, we should just stop hoping and get on with our lives. If the ideas about God and heaven are imaginary fairy tales, we should grow up.
But there is something more to life than this world.
The Bible opens with the astonishing claim that God has created us in his own image. However, we decided to do things our own way. We hid from God and lost sight of him. As a result, we do not seek Him today. All that we see is this world with all its problems.
And when God looks down from heaven, he sees a human race that has turned away from him. He sees a human race that is in turmoil because it has forgotten him. But God’s design was to rescue the people he had created.
We ruined the real world he gave us and we were the ones who tried to construct the fantasy. God wanted to bring us back to reality – the real reality that he provided. Seeing our need, He sent His own Son from Heaven to rescue us from ourselves. He sent Jesus to face the reality of God’s judgement on our behalf so that we could live at peace with Him. The question we all need to face is: do I want this reality? Do I want to live in relationship with Him?
Psalms 14 & 53
|
