Jurassic Dualism

Found at imdb.com

Sunday I finally got to see Jurassic World. I very much enjoyed watching the dinosaurs chase everyone. I did not like the lack of characters from the original but I do think that they paid homage to it and it was nice to see a another Jurassic movie back at the main island instead of the backup site.

What struck me was how many characters showed the true polarism of humanity. We have such a huge tendency for both good and evil. For our purposes we will look at one of those characters: Zach.

Zach comes to the island with his brother and is not exactly doing great at it. He pulls his brother away from their escort to go see things without her, is sometimes very mean to his brother, and then even takes his brother through a crashed gate into a restricted area and ends up putting them both in danger. This along with checking out girls while he does have a girlfriend back home.

As the movie progresses, he starts protecting his brother. Not with the action soldier ways, but in significant ways. He never leaves his brother's side in all he craziness and does keep him from harm in a couple of occasions.

This is just like us humans, right? We have so many low points as well as high points. Every religion and many other philosophies recognize that we have such a great capacity for both sin and goodness. Paul talks about this fight within us in Romans 7. He mentions that he himself has to constantly fight because he finds himself doing what he doesn't want to do. In all the Bible, only Jesus and Daniel are never reported of in a bad light by the Bible itself. All our heroes like David, Abraham, Peter make some really bad choices as well as really good ones.

In Romans 8 Paul comes out and admits that only Jesus can help him with his sin issues. He later talks about being "more than a conqueror" through Jesus. You see, the thing that separates Christianity from other religions is not our view of man. That tends to stay the same because we have a pretty realistic view of ourselves because we have to put up with each other every day. What is different is our view of God.

In religion life is all about working really hard in hopes of impressing a deity or earning some sort of rewards. Jesus called Himself the "way the truth and the life" and Paul speaks of salvation as a gift:

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not by works, so that no one can boast." Ephesians 2:8-9

Some preachers have focused so much on our depravity as human beings that they have missed out on the uniqueness and amazing qualities of what God created in us. We do have great propensity for kindness, grace and love. You may feel like you have way more bad than good, but Jesus can help you with that; both in how you see yourself and in your habits and choices.  You see Jesus would rather get in the dirt with you and help you to move in faith toward your better qualities than leave you to try to change alone. If you want to get more into dealing with sin on a daily basis, go see my video "Changing Lanterns".