EVERYONE MUST READ! THE SON OF GOD MOVIE (Friday Church News Notes, April 11, 2014, wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from T.A. McMahon, “The Bible According to Hollywood 2,” The Berean Call, April 1, 2014: “Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, who is the image of the invisible God and the One in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead, is not someone who should be portrayed (counterfeited would be more accurate) by a fallen, finite being--Christian or otherwise. Any such attempt will result in another Jesus, a false Christ. ... Since a host of very influential evangelical leaders ... have been singing the praises of The Son of God and the History Channel’s Bible series that spawned it, it raises a very serious question regarding their view of the Bible. ... Evidently these leaders had no problem with the distortion of the Word in scene after scene. Did the wise men show up at the stable right after the birth of Jesus? Did Jesus entice Peter to follow him by filling his nets with fish? Did Jesus draw the fish into Peter’s net by swishing the water with his fingers? Was Mary Magdalene the lone woman among the small band of disciples (if not one of the apostles)? Did Nicodemus play the good Pharisee/bad Pharisee, even challenging Jesus about paying taxes? Was Pilate a brutal military leader who threatened to shut down the temple? Did Jesus have confrontational exchanges with Barabbas? Did Jesus tickle a little girl and playfully tell her that the temple would be utterly destroyed? At the Last Supper, did Jesus drink the wine that he had just called his own blood? Did the mother of Jesus wash his bloody body in preparation for his burial? Did Jesus unsymbolically appear to John on Patmos? The list of unbiblical and extra-biblical scenes goes on and on. ... One of the amazing characteristics of visual media is the power of imagery. Scenes that appear on the screen can remain with a viewer, popping into the mind occasionally over his or her lifetime. That can be spiritually devastating. I’ve heard that some believers who watched Mel Gibson’s ‘biblical’ movie, The Passion of the Christ, had great trouble dismissing the face of James Caviezel when their thoughts turned to Jesus, even while in prayer. ... as Dave Hunt and I left the theater after reviewing Mel’s movie, I remember Dave crying out to the Lord to remove the imagery of the counterfeit Christ that had just invaded his mind! The Bible doesn’t describe Jesus for us in any detail. ... The incredible power of the medium of film resides in its capacity to impact emotions through imagery, acting, dialogue, and music. Tears can flow even in animated movies. People can have artificial ‘life-changing’ experiences based upon what they see on the screen, but the Word of God declares: ‘the flesh profiteth nothing’ (John 6:63). ... Tragically, we are seeing in all of this the words of Peter fulfilled: ‘And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you’ (2 Peter 2:3).” ARONOFSKY’S GNOSTIC RENDITION OF NOAH (Friday Church News Notes, April 11, 2014, wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Sympathy for the Devil,” Brian Mattson’s review of the movie Noah starring Russell Crowe, April 2, 2014, drbrianmattson: “I discovered what Darren Aronofsky’s first feature film was: Pi. Want to know its subject matter? ... Kabbalah. ... The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe of ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ The ‘spiritual’ is good, and way, way, way ‘up there’ where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the ‘material’ is bad, and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. ... Kabbalah has a pantheon of angelic beings of its own all up and down the ladder of ‘divine being.’ And fallen angels are never totally fallen in this brand of mysticism. ... They redeem themselves, shed their outer material skin, and fly back to the heavens. ... What!? Demons are redeemed? Adolphe Franck explains the cosmology of Kabbalah: ‘Nothing is absolutely bad; nothing is accursed forever--not even the archangel of evil or the venomous beast, as he is sometimes called. There will come a time when he will recover his name and his angelic nature.’ .... when Gnostics speak about ‘The Creator’ they are not talking about God. ... the Creator of the material world is an ignorant, arrogant, jealous, exclusive, violent, low-level, bastard son of a low-level deity. He’s responsible for creating the ‘unspiritual’ world of flesh and matter, and he himself is so ignorant of the spiritual world he fancies himself the ‘only God’ and demands absolute obedience. They generally call him ‘Yahweh.’ ... This Creator tries to keep Adam and Eve from the true knowledge of the divine and, when they disobey, flies into a rage and boots them from the garden. In other words, in case you’re losing the plot here: The serpent was right all along. This ‘god,’ ‘The Creator,’ whom they are worshiping is withholding something from them that the serpent will provide: divinity itself. ... Let’s go back to the movie. The action opens when Lamech is about to bless his son, Noah. Lamech, rather strangely for a patriarch of a family that follows God, takes out a sacred relic, the skin of the serpent from the Garden of Eden. He wraps it around his arm, stretches out his hand to touch his son--except, just then, a band of marauders interrupts them and the ceremony isn’t completed. Lamech gets killed, and the ‘villain’ of the film, Tubal-Cain, steals the snakeskin. Noah, in other words, doesn’t get whatever benefit the serpent’s skin was to bestow. ... The rainbows don’t come at the end because God makes a covenant with Noah. The rainbows appear when Noah sobers up and embraces the serpent. He wraps the skin around his arm, and blesses his family. It is not God that commissions them to now multiply and fill the earth, but Noah, in the first person, ‘I,’ wearing the serpent talisman. ... The scandal is this: of all the Christian leaders who went to great lengths to endorse this movie (for whatever reasons: ‘it’s a conversation starter,’ ‘at least Hollywood is doing something on the Bible,’ etc.), and all of the Christian leaders who panned it for ‘not following the Bible.’ ... Not one of them could identify a blatantly Gnostic subversion of the biblical story when it was right in front of their faces. I believe Aronofsky did it as an experiment to make fools of us ... He’s having quite the laugh. And shame on everyone who bought it.”
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:31:51 +0000
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