Thursday, September 20, 2007

Where's the love, with all that violence - The Passion of the Christ Reviews

I myself am a stoic and not a terribly emotional person, and am rarely if ever moved emotionally by movie-violence at the level of Braveheart, Terminator, Last Samurai etc. The violence in The Passion, however, hit me at a level I'm unused to--at the heart level. I felt my body rise and ebb and cry, bypassing any thoughts at the mind-level. As many reviewers have said, The Passion is experienced, rather than watched. Now, I see a trend in the professional reviews questioning, "Where's the love of the Christian message?" These reviewers miss the point of the Gospel. There are two parts to the Christian message--the secular reviewers are mixing up the first and the second points of the two-part Christian message. The first part of the Christian message is that mankind is intrinsically sinful i.e. hate, selfish, greedy, wars, immoral, lying, conceited, prejudice, and most of all, self-righteous etc. Because all of us sin, we all deserve eternal separation from God. The brutality of The Passion is a graphic display of our own sin. All the sin of mankind was concentrated on the body of the innocent Christ as a "sacrificial lamb". My guess is that all those professional movie reviewers who say "Where's the love" in all that violence, haven't come to terms with their own sinfulness. As I see it, here's the take home message to the professional movie reviewers who couldn't see where the love is in the movie: - God's love is shown in that, if a person accepts Jesus as Saviour, then that person is saved from having to go through the same suffering for eternity. Consider this: if the Christian message is correct (and there's a good chance that it is), then, if one does not accept Christ's sacrifice, then the sort of suffering in the movie will be your destiny for eternity. i.e. if you don't accept Christ taking it for you, then you receive it by default. Some readers might say that's a load of hogwash, but if there is a 50-50 chance that the Gospel is right, it might pay you to take 1 hour, sometime in your lifetime, to read the Gospels and New Testament and decide for yourself. Imagine dismissing the Gospel without reading it, as many have criticised The Passion without seeing it first. The second part of the Gospel is that, Father God loves you so much, that He does not want YOU to go through that kind of suffering for eternity, so He put it on Jesus. (John 3:16). That's where the love is.

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