Over the course of my time in college, I have watched a number of zombie movies - some good ones and bad ones - thanks in large part to the diverse cinematic tastes of my good friend and former roommate Chris Cassidy. I imagine that many in my reading audience may not have enjoyed this genre yet, but perhaps some of my musings may nevertheless prove stimulating for your thoughts.
Zombies are generally outside of the norm for the sort of thing my wife enjoys watching. However, she has recently discovered a great interest in the television show "The Walking Dead". I was invited by one of my fellow teachers who lives in our apartment complex to begin watching the show as a social thing with old friends one night each week; the show is off until February. But as Nicole and I were looking through our Netflix options one evening, we saw the first season of the show. I suggested we watch it to just check it out with the expectation that it would be too gross-sounding for her to want to watch. However, we watched the first episode, and she was hooked. We both enjoyed it enough that we watched all of the existing episodes, up to about halfway through the second season.
Mild spoiler alert to anyone watching or wanting to watch... The show's main character is a cop who went into a coma for some amount of time and woke up in a post-apocalytic world in which nearly everyone had been killed or turned into zombies by a virus. The world looks rough. Real live people are few and far between who have actually survived, and over the course of the show, you see them fighting and sometimes making difficult and morally challenging choices to stay alive. Keep a gun and be prepared to shoot; no mercy for the dead...
The cop, whose name is Rick, wakes up, and he journeys to Atlanta where he eventually finds his family alive with a small group of survivors. During the second season, his wife, Lori, discovers that she is pregnant. This introduces a moral dilemma for Lori, one that did not exactly endear her to us. She tries to decide whether or not to have an abortion. She begins to ponder... what kind of world will this child be brought into? What kind of horrors will he face? How long will he even be able to live? Will he be eaten by a zombie before he makes it to his first birthday? And even if he lives to old age, what will be his quality of life in such a world as this? In pondering whether to have an abortion, she wallows in hopelessness. You will have to actually watch to figure out what happens, but this dilemma caused me to think... (It is not my purpose with this blog entry to make a comprehensive case for life, but that is certainly the only position I believe is warranted by Scripture.)
Many of the questions she is wrestling with are the same sorts of questions that women face today. I hear it from pro-choice advocates who talk about how horrible the kid's life would be if he were born into poverty. How horrible to bring a child into such a hopeless situation. The fetus is the result of rape, so it is unfair to the mother to make her have the child, and given the circumstances, the child wouldn't have a life worth living anyway... goes the reasoning.
(An aside: Though you often hear this reasoning, I am sure pro-choice advocates would actually like to keep the argument far away from thinking about the potential life of the child altogether because it is easier to kill something you don't think is a person. It's a fetus, not a person. Within the context of the show, that is how the characters must come to think of the zombies. Though the zombies used to be their family members, the virus turns them into something else... something that can be killed. The Holocaust could only occur because most of the Nazis did not believe the Jews were real people. Brainwashing.)
I believe that every pregnant couple or mother should feel the weight of this dilemma and decide joyfully in favor of life and hope. But aside from just thinking about whether to bring a child into the world once you're pregnant, it might be instructive to consider when couples are deciding whether to try to bring children into the world period.
The world portrayed in this post-apocalyptic vision is bleak and horrible; however, the world as we know it today is also bleak if we look it straight in the eye. Consider that every person suffers. Every person born will someday die; some will die painfully, and some will die alone. Every person bleeds, and no one can go through this warzone of a world without physical and emotional scars. When we come into this world, we attach to people around us that we will necessarily have to say goodbye to at some point, whether through a move or through the inevitability of death on our part or theirs. And not everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; sadly, for many the horrors of this present world are a mere precursor to an eternity of judgment separated from Christ. There is no guarantee that our children will find God, though we do everything in our means to help them; there is, however, there is a guarantee of suffering.
Yes, in zombieland death seems imminent, but that is merely sped-up zoomed-in version of our own world. In their world, the zombies are flesh-and-blood, and they can be shot in the head. Simple, right? In our world, we do face dangers that threaten physical death, like earthquakes, tornadoes, great white sharks, and cancer, but we do not need to fear those who can only do things to the body... we also face the essentially invisible, yet formidable three-headed monster of Satan, the spirit of the world, and our own flesh that pulls us into sin. Oh my! Worse than zombies, and like zombies, we basically don't believe these things exist. No one is free from this warfare. In the land of zombies, the people think more clearly about their own mortality than we do. Indeed, let us seek the truth that will set us free and think soberly, rightly for the sake of our prayers and for the sake of the Gospel.
Why bring anyone into this world?
The answer the show gives is perhaps close to a legitimate answer you and I also could give. It holds up, rather emotionally, the idea that there is still beauty in the world, and there is enough good in the world to outweigh the bad and make it worth it. Most of the time, most of us in this world would say the good outweighs the bad. But we don't always feel this way, and some of those who lose hope that the world could ever be good enough to outweigh the bad commit suicide and end their misery. Several people in the show "opt out" as hopelessness overtakes them. The good outweighing the bad is a compelling answer to some, but it is not the deepest answer. (We are not always adept at judging good and bad in light of eternity.)
As Christians we believe that God is good. We believe that God is all-powerful. We believe that he knows everything. We believe that he is eternal. We believe that he has a plan for everything and that he is bringing his plan to pass. Romans 8:28.
Why did God create the world? Let me state at the outset, that we cannot give a sure, clean, neat answer to this question. But let us think about the problem of this question. The problem of this question runs to the heart of the atheism of many people. How could a God who is altogether good and altogether powerful create a world where there is so much suffering? Can God and suffering co-exist? If God knew what would happen with Adam and Eve, and if God knew that many would reject his Son and spend an eternity in Hell, why did he choose to create?
Let me run down an answer that I know will leave many unsatisfied, but which I believe is profound. Our God is in the heavens and he does all that he pleases. Therefore, it pleased him to create the world, a pleasure that was not at odds with his attributes - love, grace, justice, holiness... It pleased the Father to crush the Son. The cross was at the center of God's plans all along, not as an afterthought to the Fall. The cross is the center of the universe, the center of history because it elevates God's love and grace. Christ's grace is magnified and glorified in his suffering for sinners. God's glory and our good are not at odds but find their deepest intersection on that bloody tree two thousand years ago. Therefore, God was pleased to create a world in which Jesus was crucified so that his love and grace might be displayed to completely undeserving sinners like us. Christ is glorified in this way. Though I don't understand it, I believe that God's glory - the apex of which is found in the cross - is at the center of God's purposes for this world he created.
We do not see into the mind of God, into his essence, beyond what he lets us in on in his revelation. We know some things for sure - God is passionate for his glory and he loves sinners, and he hates sin, and he hates suffering, and he suffered for us... but in the end, there is so much that we do not know. Nevertheless, we know that God loves us, that God knows everything, and that he did indeed decide to create, in spite of the suffering in the world.
In the end, God decided to create.
I think, therefore I am. Or rather, I think, therefore I AM created me.
Should life be brought into this world? There is so much suffering. Should I play God and choose to end a life that has already been started? I think that the most profound answer to this question posed in the context of a zombie show, yet relevant to real life, is that we should trust the God who was pleased to bring life into this world. Most certainly we don't see the whole picture. And if our position is one of humble trust, we are relieved of the burden of playing God. The miracle of life and birth is something of a pointer, a parable, a picture by us - who are in God's image - of his own creativity. To bring a baby into this world in spite of it's dangers and difficulties is a powerful declaration of trust in the God who calls us to himself - the Way, the Truth, and the LIFE.
And all the pain I have described in this blog, roll it all up and see it on the bleeding back of Christ on the cross, enduring the righteous wrath of millions of hells in the stead of those who are found in him by faith, all for the joy that was set before him. We look to the cross to see God's great love; we look to his resurrection to see his power. And his resurrection gives us resurrection hope to take the next steps and pursue the joy that is set before us, even when the world seems so monstrous and zombie-ridden.
We choose life because the one who gave us life did. (The end.)
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