Escape from New York

Centuries ago, a theory called "Deism" argued that God had created the world, wound it up like a watch, then abandoned it to tick away on its own. Deism got it wrong.

I just got back from a 3 day trip to New York City:

View from my hotel room

It reminded me of the 1981 John Carpenter movie Escape from New York, in which the Big Apple has been transformed into one massive prison, with all the bridges mined with explosives. No one can get off, and everyone has to live with the consequences of being in that environment.

It's the message of the Bible that the first humans made a choice which every one of us has ratified, to live independently from God. God made a paradise, we chose the New York of John Carpenter's film. That may seem too harsh. After all, you may consider yourself a God-seeker and all round good person. But the fact is that, while we may want to make contact with God (who doesn't?) we really don't want him to rule us. We still want to carve out our own destiny.

Thus we create big lies for ourselves: We're messed up because God abandoned us; we're actually pretty much OK but people just have to start treating each other better; if our good deeds outweigh our bad ones, God will have to accept us in heaven when we die (something that a character in a cop show I saw described as "The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse), and so on.

But what if we're broken? What if the reason why we feel sometimes like we're in John Carpenter's New York, abandoned, hurting one another, struggling with every aspect of life, is that we've made a choice that has flawed us to the core? What if the prison we find ourselves is the prison we chose ourselves? What if life as it is right now is the best we can do without God?

Then the only way to escape would be to find our way back to the One we abandoned.