God’s Not Dead, The Movie is Doing Something Right
I recently got the opportunity to have a rare date night with my wife and we chose to watch “God’s Not Dead” and I am glad we did. I am not going to spend a long amount of time discussing the movie because there are plenty of sites that offer reviews. What I can tell you, in short, is that if you believe in God as I do then you are likely to enjoy the movie but if you do not believe in God, you are likely to think the movie is dumb and pointless. What I wanted to mention is a salient point that I think is due some consideration. The movie was made by a Christian company and backed by many Christian supporters including the Duck Dynasty gang.
It doesn’t take long when looking on the Internet to find that the movie has a very polarizing effect on its audience. If one were to check the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, you would see that it received a score of 20% which is pretty low as there are only 10 reviews. However, if you look deeper into the reviews, you will find that the majority of the people who DISLIKE the movie, are people who either publicly are not Christians or who indicate with their public persona that they are not believers. The ones that seem to like it are either Christians in some form or fashion or people who appear to have no real bias against Christianity. This is awfully curious, is it not? Yet when you see the reviews of ‘Noah’ scored it at a whopping 78% but it is surprisingly less Christian than any movie based off a character in the Bible should ever be. The director himself states that he believes in ‘something’ but not necessarily the Christian God. Noah was a sci-fi, falshy movie that tried to bring a ‘new spin’ on an ‘old story’. Many of the believers I have spoke to about the movie feel that it is not very Christian in its message – yet it was vastly more popular than God’s Not Dead… hmm…
What I submit to you is this… there is no doubt that Christianity is one of the most unpopular things one can do with their lives nowadays. When the Duck Dynasty patriarch openly spoke against homosexuality, he was removed from the show and many of the anti-Christian media denounced him as a dumb hillbilly. When Tim Teebow spoke about praying before his games and how God helped him, he was regarded as a fool who had been brainwashed. Why is that? Simply because these people were doing something right. Despite what some churches teach, the so-called Drugstore Gospel that says that as long as you love God everything will be fine, being a Christian is NOT easy, it is one of the hardest decisions you will ever make. I lost friends, I lost family (in ways), and I lost some of my ‘youth’ when I decided to follow Christ with true devotion. Would I take it back? No way! I gave up a few things in my life, yes. Maybe I don’t get to stay up late and do stuff with my buddies on a Saturday because I ‘have to go to church’. I have been ribbed plenty of times by my friends, most of which consider themselves intellectuals, and like to hurl such insults as ‘why haven’t you joined the Enlightenment like the rest of us?’ These things sting pretty strongly but when ever my friends are in trouble… who do they seek out for spiritual advice? The guy who is not ‘Enlightened’ like they are. Guess what… I am an intellectual. I am perfectly capable of thinking for myself. I hold three degrees – one of which is a Masters – and I have a ‘knowledge worker’ job instead of busting my tail in the factory and just barely getting by. I have been given a beautiful life and I can experience the things that only love can offer… laughter of my children, the smell of the rain because God made a new day, etc. But it was NOT without a price. When you do something ‘right’ as a Christian, you are going to be challenged… ‘For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children. 17 And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering’ (Romans 8:16-17). Or perhaps this: ‘Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body’ (Romans 8:23). The truth is, being a Christian can really be unhappy at times.
I honestly think that the fact that “God’s Not Dead” seems to be so polarizing proves that it is doing something right. Sure, I could go on and on about the plot holes in the movie, I could bemoan the fact that something was done or not done in the way I would have wanted it done but who am I to judge? What I want to make clear is this… when you are serving God, life is NOT going to be easy. When you make a movie that does its best to illustrate a spiritual point and you are lambasted by negative reviews and bad press… that may not be a bad thing. God’s Not Dead and this movie reminded me of that fact quite strongly. The movie wasn’t a perfect movie but Christians are not perfect people either. I hope that my believing friends will go see this movie and I even hope that some of my non-believing friends will go see it because both groups will get something out of it. You won’t feel warm and fuzzy inside when the movie is over but you will feel a deeper feeling that will make you think more about your situation and less about what you like and dislike.