[Source: Epic by John Eldredge]
1. Life the Story
While in the middle of their journey to destroy the ring of power in the second Lord of the Rings books, Sam, Frodo’s good companion says, “I wonder what kind of story we’ve fallen into?” You and I don’t mind, on rare occasions, picking up in the middle of a movie on television and trying to figure out what’s going on. But we hate being late to a movie at the theater—we feel lost and don’t want to be spending good money for a story we’ll never make sense of.
Life is a story too. One we live all the time. But we fail to see it because you and I have been born into a movie that’s already started—thousands of years ago. Check out these clips:
Star Wars IV – First film was episode 4?
Opening of LOTR
Even in the movies we realize that the story has been going on before hand. When the first Star Wars movie came out it was called “episode four.” There was a whole story behind it. The Lord of the Rings takes place in mythical world invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for which Tolkien wrote a long history covering thousands of years. When we enter Middle Earth to see the story of the ring, we enter a place that’s been going on already for a very long time. Because our story’s been going on so long we sometimes feel lost in it, like Neo in the Matrix Reloaded when he says, “I only wish I knew what I’m supposed to do.”
How can we find our way? How can we learn the story of life? Believe it or not, we can start with the movies. Think about your favorite movies. The films you love most—Pride and Prejudice, Titanic, The Sound of Music, Casa Blanca, True Grit, Sleepless in Seattle, Young Guns, You’ve Got Mail, Gone with the Wind, Braveheart, Gladiator, Rocky, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Narnia, Saving Private Ryan, Blackhawk Down, Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean—all the films you love are telling you something very important, something essential to your heart.
Most of us haven’t stopped to ask ourselves why we enjoy such stories. It never occurs to us that perhaps we’ve been given our longings for love and adventure, as a kind of clue, a treasure map to the meaning of life itself. Have you ever noticed that all the great stories pretty much follow the same plot?
1. Things were once good,
2. then something awful happened,
3. and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken.
4. At just the right moment, when all hope seems lost, and in the nick of time, a hero comes and sets things right,
5. and life is found again.
The reason every story shares the same essential structure is because every story we tell borrows its power from a Larger Story, a story woven into our hearts. A psychologist named Karl Jung called the archetype. A scholar named Joseph Campbell called it the monomyth. All stories borrow from the one story, the story of Life, of Reality. It is the story we keep telling in our own stories, not just because it is the story we live, but because it is written on our very hearts by God. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God “has planted eternity in the human heart.”
Think about it this way: Hunger doesn’t prove that a person will eat, but it does prove the existence of food somewhere in the world. If we gained energy for our bodies by some means other than food (like plants do from sunlight), we’d never feel hungry for food, right? In the same way, our hunger for love, adventure, meaning, and heroism prove that these are things we were meant for—that the “food” that satisfies them is somewhere to be found. What if it’s really true? What if all the great stories that have ever moved you, brought you joy or tears, made you want to run out and buy the DVD or the book, made you want to go on line and check out behind-the-scenes or go to Walmart and buy all the action figures and posters and soundtracks—what if those stories are telling you something about the true Story in which we have found ourselves?
When you were born, you were born into an Epic that has already been under way for a very long time. It is a Story of beauty and intimacy and adventure, a Story of danger and loss and heroism and betrayal. It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. Yet it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel of Christ with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales: that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. Let’s look at the story of life.
2. Act One - How It All Began
It all begins “once upon a time.”
Shrek opening
Princess Bride opening
“A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away…”
The great stories look back to some mythic, magical past, and that’s because our story does too. It begins even before the “In the beginning…” of Genesis 1:1. Because before anything was created, the uncreated God was already there. You see something of that beginning in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” It all begins with a God who loved in a magical, mysterious relationship we call the Trinity. God was not alone but lived a dynamic fellowship—one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s not a relationship we can understand, save perhaps by that great conclusion drawn by Mr. Bean when, answering the question in a single word, he smiles and says, “Magic.” This magical, dynamic loving relationship called the Trinity became the model for everything God made.
What’s important to understand is that God did not make us because He was lonely or because He needed us. He made us out of the sheer Joy of making, out of the pure love He had for us before we were ever made. Ephesians 2:10 says that we were created to be God’s workmanship. That word, “workmanship” is the Greek word “poiema.” We get our word “poem” from it. We were created by God to be His poetry.
God loved making the magical world called Earth with its secret garden in it, because it was a pleasure, because it was wonderful, because it was beautiful. And he made it and us for relationship and fellowship—the same kind of wonderful love He enjoyed before He made anything. The good news out of this is that we don’t have to figure out what our own lives are for because He has already done it for us. He made us to be poetry.
3. Act Two - The Dark Enemy
Every story has a villain because ours does. Most people don’t live like it, but all the great stories are telling us this truth: there is a dark enemy in the world:
Darth Maul, Legend, Sauron, Orcs, the White Witch kills the butterfly (last shot is a still of Darth Maul)
Something happened before our moment on the stage, before we were created. Before us came angels. Look at how Daniel reacts to seeing an angel: He says, “I, Daniel, was the only one who saw the vision; the men with me did not see it, but such terror overwhelmed them that they fled and hid themselves…I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless” (Daniel 10:7-8). This happens in the Bible over and over again. Angels are powerful. In 2 Chronicles 32:21, God sends an angel to destroy an entire army. In Revelation 9:15 God sends four angels to destroy one third of the human population of the entire world! These beings are awesome, powerful, and deadly. And if something were to go wrong among them, terrible things would happen. Well it did.
One of the angels fell and he dragged a third of the other angels with him. His story is told in Ezekel 28:12-17: “You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God….You were anointed as a guardian cherub….You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you. I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, O guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor.”
Satan betrayed God, became His enemy, and became ours. It’s amazing how naïve people are regarding evil. They don’t take it seriously. They don’t live as though the story of life has a villain. Not the devil prancing about in red tights, carrying a pitchfork, but the incarnation of the very worst of every enemy you’ve met in every other story: the one who reveled in the Holocaust, who revels now in child pornography, and the trafficking of women from third world countries to America for enslavement in prostitution. This is the enemy who delights in terrorist bombings, serial killers, and genocidal governments. Life is very confusing if you do not take into account that there is a villain, that you have an enemy who wants you dead, your soul sucked dry. We do not live in safety. This is a universe at war.
4. Act Three – Paradise, Fall, and The Hero’s Call
Act Three begins in darkness. Genesis 1:2: “Darkness over the deep, and God’s breath hovering over the waters.” Then God begins creation. He makes a fantastic and beautiful world, a world of love and being in love. Have you ever noticed that honeymooners don’t go to ugly places to celebrate their marriage, but beautiful places like Hawaii or the Bahamas. Why? Because when God began the story it wasn’t yet an Epic, but pure Romance. This becomes obvious in Genesis when He makes the lovers. It’s something we keep putting in all our stories too.
The Bible – Adam and Eve
Braveheart – Riding through the woods
Romeo & Juliet – He sees her for the first time
Princess Bride – In Love
While “guys” might not be so interested in love stories, God is. He begins our part of the story by placing two lovers naked in paradise. Lovers still long for Eden (and each other) even today. Couples take walks in the park, marriages happen in the spring and summer when the world is most like Eden. Adam looked at Eve and said, “Wo-man!” and that’s how she got her name (explain the Hebrew). Husbands have been doing the same thing ever since. We hear a lot about the sin of Adam and Eve, but we seldom concentrate on the glory of God’s creation before that—it is far deeper in our nature than sin is. We were crowned with glory and honor. We were made in God’s image, miniature statues of the likeness of God.
God also gave of us one of His greatest gifts at that time: the ability to love. He gave us a heart like His. All of the happiness we have ever known and all of the happiness we hope to find is unreachable without a heart. You could not live or love or laugh or cry had God not given you a heart. But with that heart He gave us something else: the freedom to reject Him.
Bruce Almighty – “How do you get people to love you without affecting free will?”
God gives to each of us a will of our own. Now why would he do that when he knew that Satan would fall and that he’d tempt Adam and Eve in to falling as well? The answer is simple and amazing: if you want a world where love is real, you must allow each person the freedom to choose. Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love…In a concentration camp, the guards possess almost unlimited power. By applying force, they can make you renounce your God, curse your family, kill and then bury your closest friend or even your own mother. All this is within their power. Only one thing is not: they cannot force you to love them. What God most wanted to make was beings who were like Him, who had a heart capable of loving. Any parent or lover knows that love is chosen. You cannot, in the end, force anyone to love you. So God took a risk. Apparently, He thought it a risk worth taking.
Unfortunately, we chose not to love God, not completely. That’s why all the great stories usually include a betrayal.
Braveheart – Robert the Bruce and Wallace both betrayed
Matrix – Cypher betrays Neo
LOTR – Boromir betrays Frodo
LOTR – Saruman betrays Gandalf
As in these stories, so in the Bible: In Genesis 3:1-6, Adam and Eve betray God. We’ve been doing it ever since. The result is that our glory has faded to a pale glimmer of what it once was. The Romance that was has become an Epic struggle. And even the earth itself has fallen into chaos and corruption.
The whole cosmos has fallen and now we live in the captive world of the dark enemy. I John 5:19 says, “The whole world is under the control of the evil one.” And the stories we tell show that very truth:
Star Wars III – Jedi Temple destroyed
Never Ending Story – The Nothing
Matrix – Neo: “What is the Matrix?”
But there is a promise—the coming of the One:
Never Ending Story – “…the one who can save us all…”
Matrix – Neo
Narnia – “Aslan is on the move”
LOTR – Aragorn
In all the great stories, a hero arises to save us. He comes in the nick of time, at the absolute last minute, in our most desperate hour:
Star Wars IV – “This is our most desperate hour…”
Star Wars IV – Han Solo saves Luke at the last minute
Narnia – Aslan saves Peter at the last minute
LOTR – Salvation of Helm’s Deep
The hero comes to rescue us. But the rescue usually involves the greatest sacrifice of all: the hero dies to save us:
Death of Neo, Aslan, Harry in Armageddon, William Wallace, Tom Hanks in Private Ryan, Christ-The Passion.
In the great stories we tell, the hero often dies to save us because we’re copying the one story, the story of all Reality. In it, says Matthew 20:28, Christ came “to give his life as a ransom for many.” God’s difficulty is even greater than most heroes in that He longs to save us when most of us don’t even know that we’re in trouble and need saving. But God is so much in love with us that He’s willing to do whatever it takes.
In love with us? God? Yes, God loves us like a father but is also in love with us like a husband with his wife. Imagine there was a king who loved a humble maiden. This king was like no other king. Every statesman trembled before his power. He had the strength to crush all opponents. And yet this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maiden. How could he declare his love for her? In an odd sort of way, his kingliness tied his hands. If he brought her to the palace and crowned her head with jewels and clothed her body in royal robes, she would surely not resist—no one dared resist him. But would she love him? She would say she loved him, of course, but would she truly? He did not want a cringing subject. He wanted a lover. So the mighty king disguised himself as a beggar and went alone to the maiden’s door in the wood to win her heart. This is exactly what Jesus did. Philippians 2:7 says that He emptied Himself of all His glory and took on the form of a servant in order, not only to love us, but to make it possible for us to love Him. It’s hard for us to think about God in a romantic way. But if you look at Ephesians 5:22-3 you realize that the description there of Christ as the groom and the church as His bride is more than just symbolic: Christ has a strong, passionate, undying, romantic love for us. And He gave up everything so that we could become His bride. Why was Titanic the greatest box office money maker of all time? Because it’s a story about a man who loves a woman so much that he gave up everything to save her life and give her abundant life ever after.
Right now we are in the midst of Act three. Jesus has already saved us, done what it took. Now we wait for the destruction of evil. It will surely come as the entire book of Revelation teaches us. But it’s not only in the Bible. It’s in us—part of the stories we all tell:
Destruction of Sauron’s tower, Agent Smith, Satan in Legend, and the Death Star.
5. Act Four - How it Will End
In all the stories, as in our own, it ends in resurrection:
Resurrection of Wesley in Princess Bride, Aslan in Narnia, Neo in the Matrix, Gandalf in Two Towers and Jesus in the Passion of the Christ.
I Corinthians 15:20: “The fact is that Christ has been raised from the dead. He has become the first of a great harvest of those who will be raised to life again.”
You’ve heard this phrase: “And they lived happily ever after.” Stop for just a moment, and let that be true. Why does the ending of a great story leave us with a lump in our throats and an ache in our hearts? Because God has set eternity—that is, the ending—in our hearts. Every story we tell is our attempt to put into words and images what God has written on our hearts. Think of the stories that you love. Remember how they end. Look at this wonderful description of the ending:
LOTR – Gandalf’s description of the Far West to Pippin and the restoration of Gondor
Satan hates us so he tries to do two things: make us believe there is no heaven and/or make us believe heaven is a dull, boring place where we sit around on clouds, plucking harps and singing songs. DON’T BELIEVE IT!! The coming of the kingdom of God restores the glory of the world He originally made (and them some). God gives us a glimpse of this every time winter turns into spring and summer. The very seasons themselves show the gospel of death, resurrection, and wonderful restoration.
In Revelation 21:5 God says, “Behold, I make all things new.” We prophesy this truth in the stories we tell:
Legend – ending
Narnia – ending
Matrix Revolutions – ending
All things made new. And we’ll get to be a part of it. The resurrection of Jesus was the first of many, the forerunner of our own. John 3:16, right? He came to give us “eternal life,” and, according to John 10:10, “have it to the full.” There is no simpler or more beautiful way to say it than this: Act four is the restoration of life as it was always meant to be. It is the return of the beauty, the intimacy, and the adventure we were created to enjoy and have longed for every day of our lives. But it’s even better than that because it is immortal. God created the world in six days. But Matthew 25:34 says, that He is going to give us a “kingdom prepared for [us] since the creation of the world.” If the earth took six days, and the new heaven and earth have been under construction for six thousand years—well this is like living in a garbage can compared to that place.
But not only will the place be fantastic, but the fellowship will too, as we run to embrace all whom we have ever loved:
Willow – reunion with his wife
Princess Bride – the kiss at the end
We don’t merely run into the embrace of our family, friends and lovers, we run into the embrace of our One truest love. The reason lovers kiss at the end of the great stories is because they are versions of how the real story ends: Revelation 19:7 says, “…give the glory to Him for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.” And in 21:9-10, John says, “And one of the seven angels…spoke with me saying, ‘Come here, I shall show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb…’ And [he] showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”
6. What Must We Do?
We live in a far more dramatic, far more dangerous Story than we ever imagined. The reason we love The Chronicles of Narnia, The Matrix, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or Titanic is because they are telling us something about our lives that we never get anywhere else. They are reminding us of the Epic we were created for. Something has been calling to you all the days of your life.
You’ve heard it on the wind and in the music you love, in laughter and in tears, in watching your children take their first steps, go to their first proms, and leave home to become men and women of their own; you’ve seen it hiking or hunting or fishing in forests and rivers and lakes, when the wind is calm and the sunlight is strobed in the shadows of the trees or sparkles in its dancing on the lake; you’ve felt it in the greatest of come-from-behind wins in football, basketball and baseball, in the sappiest of love stories that made you cry at the happy ending or those moments in life when you’ve been so in love you could hardly eat, or sleep, or get the paper written that’s due tomorrow; and most especially you’ve encountered it in the greatest of stories that have ever captured your heart. There is a secret written on your heart:
A valiant Hero-Lover and His Beloved.
An evil one and a great battle to fight.
A journey and a quest, more dangerous and more thrilling than you could imagine.
A little fellowship of believers to see you through.
This is the gospel; this is Christianity.
And you have a crucial role to play. Here is the last eternal truth spoken by every great story—God is not calling you to be merely good and loving. He’s calling you to be heroes. Frodo underestimated who he was. As did Neo. As did Wallace in Braveheart. As did the apostles, Peter, James and John. As do we: every time you and I make the choice to live for God and against Satan, we’re participating in the battle. Do you understand what I’m saying? Everything we do has cosmic consequences. This is our most desperate hour, and we have to act.
In the Matrix it’s Neo’s choice to take the red pill; in Star Wars it’s Luke’s choice to join Ben Kenobi. In the Never Ending Story, for salvation to come to a world a name must be called out. In our story for salvation to come to us, we must call on the name that brought salvation to the world. The Bible says that those who call upon the name of Jesus will be saved (Romans 10:9). After that, we make choices to follow Him, to play our part in the story. In Narnia it’s Peter’s choice to stay and fight; in the Lord of the Rings it’s Aragorn’s choice to become king and Frodo’s choice to take the ring to Mount Doom. Frodo takes up the ring. Let us take up the cross and follow Jesus into glory.
By the way, the name of the book is Epic: The Story God is Telling and the Role That is Yours to Play, by John Eldredge. I have borrowed from Eldredge heavily because this book is everything I’ve been teaching for the last fifteen years of my life—he just wrote it before I did. And probably better than I ever could.
