Your World is Upside-Down

I had a couple of interesting experiences this weekend. I watched two really bad movies and got some great revelations afterward.

Revelation is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s something you already know or could have figured out had someone asked you, yet somehow, after God points it out to you, it becomes part of you in a new way.

The first movie I watched was Lucy. This is a film about a girl who overdoses on a miracle drug and suddenly develops the ability to use more of the brain than the rest of us.

There is a persistent myth that people only use 5% or 10% of their brains. That may be true in certain parts of California, but people with common sense realize it’s a made-up “fact.” The brain sucks up a lot of energy, and it’s bulky to carry around. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to equip people with a big expensive organ that doesn’t do much.

In Lucy, Scarlett Johannson is drafted as a drug mule. A mean Taiwanese drug kingpin sews a bag into her belly so she can smuggle it to another country. The bag contains a chemical pregnant women produce to make their embryos develop. It breaks, and she starts developing super powers.

At 20%, she has the ability to understand Chinese instantly. I wish I had that ability while trying to get new Chinese tools to work. I would be able to download manuals I could actually understand.

The movie is awful, but I needed something to kill time while the birds were out of their cages, so I sat through it. Any fourth-grader who gets Bs in science will realize the fake science in the movie is stupid even by movie standards, and the plot is also crazy.

Lately, God has been showing me how important it is to quit getting new things and to make the most of what I already have. Sometimes your problem is that you need new stuff, but how can you be sure if you haven’t given your old stuff a chance? Covetousness is all about abandoning what you have in favor of something new, and it’s not just bad because it puts you in debt or causes friction with the people who already have what you want. It’s bad because it prevents you from developing. The most important part of the old stuff you need to make the most of is you, yourself.

In the movie, Lucy got really smart. She figured out the secrets of quantum mechanics and so on. She became so smart everything was easy for her. She shot all sorts of bad guys. She outwitted everyone she encountered. You can probably guess. But she didn’t get new stuff. She didn’t build new tools. She didn’t need to, because there was so much new power in her.

When the movie was over, I got a sudden revelation: people fixate on fixing the world around them when they should be working on themselves.

Obvious, but I felt it take root in me, and that was new.

As the movie unfolded, this fictional character was in the process of filling a flash drive with knowledge that would help humanity with its technical problems, but she, herself, proved that what she was doing was a waste of time. Because she had been improved, she didn’t need more tools. The rest of humanity didn’t need her flash drive and the new knowledge. They needed a way to become like her.

Technology exists largely to help us with problems caused by our inner shortcomings. If we were truly connected to God and living in faith and submission, we wouldn’t need gadgets and cures. We wouldn’t have most of the problems those things are intended to fix.

When Jesus met people who had diseases, he didn’t hold telethons to raise money for research. He told them to be healed, and that was it. He didn’t need microscopes, centrifuges, imaging machines, drugs…not even an exam table. That’s what life is supposed to be like. We have to come up with complicated solutions to our problems because we lost contact with the simple solution.

That may not sound deep, but it’s very important. The more you work on yourself, the better your life will be. It’s easy to take away your toys and money. It’s very hard to take away the inner qualities and assets that make you powerful and successful. They will save you no matter what happens in the world around you.

Last night, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I can’t help it. I like the Wolverine. And nothing else was on. Believe me, I looked.

The X-Men movies center on a paranoid fantasy: humanity’s war on mutants.

In the X-Men world, genetic mutations are giving rise to a race of beings with magical powers. They can do all sorts of impossible things. Some can shoot fire out of their bodies. Some have unlimited healing power, so you can’t kill them. There was one that was able to disappear in one place and instantly appear in another, yards away. Just silly stuff. The Marvel people don’t even try to make it sound reasonable.

The humans in the movies are scared of the mutants, probably because this is Marvel’s way of lecturing the world about our evil deeds, such as making a responsible effort to watch our borders and refusing to bake cakes for gays. I’m not sure. Anyway, the idea is that the mutants have so much power, we can’t hope to fight them once they get it together, so mean humans decide the smart thing is to round them up and kill them. Or “cure” them of their mutations.

In last night’s movie, a midget named Trask manufactured evil robots called…you won’t believe this…”sentinels.” Yes, I know. This is the same name the Matrix people used for evil robots that killed rebels. The X-Men sentinels had qualities that came from research done on a murdered mutant. Trask took her DNA and used it to give the robots all sorts of mutant powers. So when they attacked mutants, the mutants were totally outgunned. Any given robot could duplicate any mutant power, and that’s bad if you’re a mutant and all you can do is turn everything you touch into pudding.

In the movie, some of the mutants hid their powers. A couple took a serum to suppress them. They were willing to stunt themselves in order to fit in and avoid trouble. What the mutants really needed to do was to get together, organize, make the most of their powers, and fight. The head good mutant, Dr. Xavier, had a special school dedicated to teaching mutant kids how to use their powers and survive.

Again, as if I need to repeat it, the movie was stupid. Even by Marvel standards. It was not good. But I watched it, because almost any movie with superheroes and explosions in it is at least mildly entertaining.

Afterward, I got the revelation. It was so strong, I stopped walking, stood in a doorframe, held on, and stamped my foot.

In this natural world, a developed Christian is a real-life superhero. A person who has built himself up in the Holy Spirit and aligned himself with God’s will can do absolutely anything God tells him to do. Jesus walked on water and turned water into wine. Those are things a comic book superhero might do. It sounds like a silly comparison, but it’s true. He cured diseases. He ran supernatural beings off just by talking to them. We are supposed to do greater things than he did, but we don’t.

Working to develop your power is well worth it, and you don’t have to part the Red Sea in order to accomplish amazing, helpful feats. Long before you find yourself walking on water and doing similarly spectacular things, you will find that you can defeat people and situations simply by praying or by speaking certain words in faith. Those are wonderful abilities no unaided human being has.

We are supposed to be a powerful family of invincible beings, but we’re not, because we are too busy focusing on fitting in and getting God to give us external blessings like money. To God, those things are like prosthetics. We are like cripples who turn down healing because we prefer Air Jordan wheelchairs.

The prosperity gospel has never worked. It’s a total waste of time and money. But it’s worse than that. It succeeds at the thing it was actually designed to do: it keeps us powerless. Meanwhile, the spirits around us, and the carnal people who serve them, walk all over us. We should be ruling over them, but they do with us as they please, because we don’t know who we are. And we are few in number because we don’t try.

It’s an odd way to look at Christianity, but it’s completely consistent with the Bible.

Satan created a race of superhuman beings called the nephilim; the giants. From a natural standpoint, they were better than we are. They were bigger and stronger. They were dominant. But God killed them off because while they were big in the natural world, they were spiritual midgets. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit. They had no love or compassion. They were not submitted to God. They killed his people day after day.

We are supposed to be supernatural giants. Instead, we focus on natural stilts like wealth and power, to make us look like giants in this corrupt world. Then we die, and we lose those things. All we have left then is what we have made of ourselves.

So we have nephilim hearts and human bodies. That’s a horrible combination. No wonder everyone pushes us around. We have the worst of both races.

We need to be building ourselves up in the Spirit. If we were doing that, we would be strong, and we would multiply. We would be dominant, as the Hebrews were dominant when they took over Israel. As it is, we now run from gays and illegal aliens. We even run from animals. We are reintroducing large predators into areas our ancestors had the good sense to run them out of, and we can get in big trouble for bothering them when they come into our yards, where our children play. It’s funny; one of the plagues of Egypt was a flood of wild animals that terrorized people.

This blog post will sound nutty to people, but if you’re a Christian, you already believe the first human being was made from mud, and you believe God made the sun stand still so Joshua could fight. It’s not a question of whether you believe strange things. It’s a question of which strange things you’re willing to believe.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep asking God for correction and humility. Keep listening. Keep admitting you can’t help yourself. Confess everything to God. Confess your negative feelings about him. He already knows about them, he knows you want to get rid of them, and he wants to help.

The future is assured, but if you want your place in it, you’re going to have to submit. Not just on Sunday, but all day, every day. Your whole life has to belong to God. I’m not saying you can’t survive without making mistakes. I’m saying you have to side with God against everyone, including yourself, all the time.

This will help you, if you can hear it. Time is getting short and patience is running dry, so get on board while you can.