God's Love for the Rest of Us
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God's Love for the Rest of Us - Vince Antonucci
1
DEAD PEOPLE
T
HERE ARE DEAD PEOPLE
who are not fully dead. They’re kind of alive. They’re like walking dead people. And they’re everywhere. It seems like every day there are more people who walk around like they’re fully alive, but really they’re mostly dead.
I’m talking about real life. But this does also happen to be what’s going on in a movie called Warm Bodies.
Warm Bodies is set in a zombie apocalypse.[1] The main character is a zombie named R. He used to be human and alive, but now he’s a zombie and mostly dead, and all he can remember of his name is the letter R.
R finds himself wanting to eat humans, but not only for physical sustenance. When he eats people, he experiences their memories, and it makes him feel alive for a moment. Really what R wants is to feel alive.
One day R sees a group of humans, and he finds himself attracted to a girl named Julie.[2] Later, when Julie is distracted by something, R eats her boyfriend. (Which is . . . one way to do it. The girl you like has a guy already? Eat him.) R’s attraction to Julie grows, and soon he rescues her from the other zombies. To keep her safe, he takes her back to the abandoned airplane he lives in at an airport that is filled with hordes of zombies. And there are more of the undead
arriving there every day.
That’s how the movie begins, but I want to be clear: a few paragraphs ago I was talking about real life. There are people who walk around like they’re alive, but they’re mostly dead. They are walking, living, dead people. And there are more all the time.
Turns out it’s always been that way.
You Will Surely Die
The Bible says it started back in the Garden of Eden. Whether we take the story literally or figuratively, either way God is teaching us something foundational about the human condition. We’re told that God created two people, Adam and Eve, and he gave them Paradise to live in. He gave them only one rule. (Isn’t that interesting? When God had the world the way he wanted it, there was only one rule. God is not into rules.)
God told them not to eat the fruit of one particular tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they did, they would die.
You’ve probably heard the story. Adam and Eve were tempted. They screwed up and did the one thing they weren’t supposed to do.
God had said the penalty for that was death. If someone made a movie today out of the story of Adam and Eve, this would be the point where you might get excited, because you’re about to see two people die. You’d start to wonder, How does God kill people? And, I can’t wait to see what kind of special effects they’re going to use to show them dying! Maybe it will be like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the people kind of melt before our eyes. You’d be like, Dude, pass the popcorn; Adam and Eve are about to get toasted.
But if this were a movie, we’d be disappointed. Because it doesn’t look like anything happened to Adam and Eve. God reprimanded them for what they’d done, and that’s bad. They had to leave the garden paradise they’d been given, and that’s bad. But they