I took my "11-in-June" year old daughter, Adriana, to see Expelled: The Movie Thursday.
I wrote about this in
this post, but I just wanted to add a couple thoughts after having seen it for myself.
Even with high expectations, I was not disappointed. This movie was excellent! I wanted to stand up and clap when the closing credits rolled! Due to our 2:45 pm start-time, there were only three or four other humans in the theater, so I resisted making a scene so as not to embarrass Adriana.
What a fun Dad/Daughter time, though! Despite the fact that she was a little confused with the whole documentary format (she kept waiting for the commercial to get over and for the movie to start) ... she did enjoy the trip to Paris (which featured her beloved Eiffel Tower). I pray the jist of the film will leave a lasting impression on her, so that she will never be intimidated into thinking evolution/Darwinism is absolute truth.
This article, "
Ben Stein Vs. Sputtering Atheists", offers a balanced review of the movie. Bozell talks briefly about
my favorite part of the movie: when Ben Stein confronts the obnoxious atheistic scientists, pressing them to give their funny views on how life began. Before our eyes they become the "sputtering atheists that Bozell describes. Where did life come from? "On the backs of crystals", by a well-placed flash of lightning turning mud to a single-celled organism ... or as Dawkins himself proposes, life on earth was "seeded" by an intelligent life form from another planet. Aliens! I'm not kidding! They believe this stuff!
The climax of the film was the showdown with Dawkins, which I just referred to. He read from this excerpt from his blasphemous book,
The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
To this, Stein asked him what if he was wrong, and what would he say in his inevitable meeting with God after his death. Dawkins shrugged this off quoting Bertrand Russell, who when he was asked the same question said, "I would ask God why He had gone to such lengths to hide Himself."
If he continues in unbelief, of course, he will not get a chance to have a leisurely talk with the Almighty God when he stands before His holy throne. If he is not sent immediately to Hell, he will surely be flat on his face, undone, ruined (see
Isaiah 6:1-5) ... awaiting his eternal sentence to hell, a sentence secured by his rejection of the God of the Bible. He will not be able to blame God.
Anyone without Christ faces this prospect, even the lovable Ben Stein who I admire deeply for doing this movie. If, as a Jew, he continues to reject Jesus Christ as the Messiah, he is without the righteousness of Christ, which
alone can save him.
This sounds very harsh and judgmental, but I am simply saying what the Bible already says: "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. (John 3:36)" I am a saint and assured of salvation not because I'm better than anyone or because of anything I have done (Eph 2:8-9), but only because the Holy Spirit opened my eyes to the truth that Christ is my only hope!
As John Piper points out in "Let the Nations Be Glad",
"Eternal life, therefore, comes only to those who hear the voice of the Shepherd and follow him. 'My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life' (John 10:27-28). This hearing is through the messengers of the Shepherd. This is what Jesus means in John 14:6 when he says, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.' 'Through me' does not mean that people in other religions can get to God because Jesus died for them, though they don't know about it. The 'through me' must be defined in the context of John's Gospel as believing in Jesus through the word of his disciples (John 6:35; 7:38; 11:25; 12:46: 17:20)."
So while we pray for those who are lost without Christ, be sure to engage them in conversation about the big questions in life. Watch this movie! Talk about this movie. And in doing so look for opportunities to move the conversation to the fact that there is only one answer to this world's problems (caused by Sin), and that is for humans to get right with their Intelligent Designer.
And how does one do that?
It all starts with your view of Christ. Was He a bad man (liar), a madman (crazy) or the God Man? Read this article on how to discover the Christ of the Bible.
