How I Watch Movies
Movies are frequently taken at face value in our culture today. For those who watch many, it's one after the other, a constant flow of selfish entertainment. For others who don't indulge as often, they may see movies as a glorification of violence, profanity, and sex. Movies are both of those things, but they are also stories. And stories are powerful, powerful things; Jesus Himself used stories to get the point across about the Kingdom of God.
It's not just a movie's message (friendship conquers all; be unselfish; honor family), though they can be very powerful in a good way. It's the allegory. My relationship with Christ has been immeasurably strengthened by the movies I've watched.
It's one thing to know that Jesus shall return when things seem at their darkest. It's another to feel the hopelessness at Helm's Deep (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers), to experience that pit of dread in your stomach as any thought of survival disappears, and then to look up and see the white horse coming over the hill. It puts emotion to the facts. Same with the Aragorn's marriage to Arwen at the end of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. It tears away any vision of religion at the marriage supper of the Lamb and replaces it with the truth: it's a longed-for wedding, a joyous and romantic occasion.
It's one thing to know that Jesus came to save all; it's another to silently beg Bruce Wayne (Batman Begins) to contradict his enemy's statement that "No one can save Gotham," and then realize that our heart at that moment for a city gone awry is in line with the heart of God. It's one thing to know that an invisible enemy longs for our soul; it's another to see it appear out of nothing in The Spiderwick Chronicles.
I have more. The majority of the movies that I watch include me avidly searching for an allegory, for something that opens my eyes to the raw emotion that the Bible is. It's not dry facts. It's a romance. It's not words. It's heartbreaking sacrifice. It's not poetry. It's a celebratory triumph unequalled even in the final scene of The Phantom Menace.
Ever since the story of Cinderella has God's love for mankind been revealed in modern story. God's Word has always been truth. Movies - and stories in general - just bring the truth to life.
