I love movies. Our entertainment options are very limited in Haiti. We only have a few restaurants (all of which we have been to dozens of times after 7 years in Haiti), no shopping malls to visit, no Barnes and Nobel book browsing, and definitely no Starbucks for a quiet coffee and a book. This means that we watch a lot of movies.
Have you noticed that fate is becoming a strong trend in movies lately? Normally, I wouldn’t think of my home culture (North American) as being fatalistic in its thinking because of its strong entrepeneurer and colonialist history. However fatalism is sewn deep into the fabric of Hollywoods blockbusters.
Fatalism, while resurgent in our media, is far from a biblical worldview. The Bible places heavy emphasis on human responsibility. The Bible, over and over again, communicates to its readers that life circumstances are the result of human decisions. It has to be this way. It has to be this way because God formed humanity from the dust as the cap-stone of creation. Humanity is the climax of creation. Humanity alone bears the image of God. This means that humanity’s decisions are powerful. Your decisions are powerful. There is no power of fate or destiny that hangs over you no matter what decisions you may or may not make. You have a say in the matter!
There’s another dimension, however, at which the Bible rejects fatalism. Fatalism cannot be true because it would mean that even God’s destiny is left to fate. The God of the Christian and Jewish Bibles is by no means vulnerable to fate. God is absolutely in control of his destiny. Because humanity is made in the image of God, this dynamic carries over into human existence. Humans are in control of their destiny. To believe that our hands are tied and there is nothing that we can do to make things either better or worse for ourselves or the people around is to be deceived.
Don’t be deceived.
God has created you with will, with freedom, with power in your decisions. God has honored you by bestowing upon you his very image which carries with it a great deal of responsibility in your decision making.
Do you know what’s striking in the midst of this?—that we have all made wrong decisions. The greatest wrong decision that we’ve made is deciding for ourselves that we are number one—we all have decided that we are the most important person to walk this green earth. This results in the penalty of death. When we put ourselves at odds with others upon whom we depend for life and we end up where we are today—dead. Everyone faces death. There is not one who will dodge it.
Jesus, to the contrary, made a different decision. Jesus decided that everyone else was more important than himself. He turned our choice on its head! The powerful, selfless choice of Jesus has liberated us to make another choice. Jesus, while not needing to, faced death on our behalf and walked out of the grave after three days. God vindicated his choice to life a selfless life!
Let’s be like Jesus. Let’s chose wisely this time. Let us chose to live for others, and we will live.
