Special features commentary

I wonder what it would have been like if you could watch creation. Everything starts off with darkness, and then there is light. Then after the light appears, the blur starts to separate, shapes and forms, sky, water and earth. Then from this barren earth, out from the very mud plants emerge, and not just one plant but many different species. The sky is shaped, the stars of the sky, the moon the sun. Then fish start swimming in the sea, and then the birds and then the animals on the land and then mankind.

Imagine if you were to watch it unfold on a DVD and you could see it all happening, it would be wonderful. It's great, but we may want to know what the Director had in mind, how did they achieve this wonder? Then you would go to the menu, click on special features and the Director's commentary and we would hear those familiar words from Genesis, "In the beginning..."

And we realise that the film of life has a Director, and that He is interested in the plot and suddenly it all means so much more. We understand, but then we continue to watch.

The action changes from the good world without death, without a shade a pain, things start to go wrong. There is the fall, there is murder, there is death, and without the commentary you are lost. Why has all this happened? What has gone wrong?

You watch the tape, but you do not understand, and because you do not understand you do not see it coming.

It is interesting in the Sixties, people said they wanted free love, none of the restraints of society they wanted love without restraint.

The seventies was the decade of consent, what did it matter so long as there was consent. What went on between consenting adults was no one else's business. So long as no one was hurt.

By 1984 Tina Turner was proclaiming, "What's love got to do with it?"

It was about me and my pleasure.

By 1998 it was not ice creams and deck chairs, but "Sex on the beach."

We live in a selfish generation where it is no longer so long as no one gets hurt, we know that people get hurt but heh it's a tough world. Consent is debatable, so long as the other does not object too strongly. The family breaks down and we ask the question where is love.

It is like we are playing the film in reverse. We have switched off the commentary and ignored the warnings.

Paul in Ephesians 4v19 comments,

Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.

Or as the Rolling Stones put it in 1965 "I can't get no satisfaction."

We can make our world without God but it is formless and dark, but as John comments at the start of his gospel, writing perhaps in prison in an occupied country far from home,

"The light shines in the darkness."

If we turn from God we soon find ourselves far from God, there is a certain inescapable inevitability about the decline of culture without God. The problem with British society is not essentially drink, drugs, family breakdown - the essential problem is that we are fallen human beings and that without God's help we quickly collapse, and that affects the whole of our lives and our culture.

However God is a God of redemption and victory. In the 18th Century following the realisation of what it all meant, either John or Charles Wesley wrote a rather different song

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
fast bound in sin and nature's night;
thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

Jesus comes into our lives, and there is light!