A comment by a fellow Christian about a fictional novel we have both read has made me look deeply at some of the literatures my daughter has been reading. Some of her oldest books were a set of fairytales, some of which were made into famous movies by Walt Disney. To name a few, Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel And Gretel and The Gingerbread Man. We see questionable values, spiritual and moral, in some of the adult reading materials on the bookstands today. But have we ever looked closely, if at all, at the seemingly innocuous nursery books we give our children? Snow White is a plot of a premeditated murder because of one person’s extreme vanity. Hansel and Gretel of irresponsible parenthood. Beauty and the Beast of a crime committed by the father and paid for by the daughter. I could name a lot more, most of them tackling the subject of greed, envy, vanity, murder, betrayal, etc., etc.
But in all of these, there is something good also. Love, sacrifice, the strength of human spirit, compassion. So we see a struggle of good and evil in mostly everything we read. And we see the same happening in real life. It is a theme that is as old as Adam and Eve. So who is imitating whom? Life imitating fiction? Or fiction imitating reality?
Take the movies- The Lord of the Rings, all three episodes was darkness versus light, temptation every step of the way, betrayal, hunger for power, but good triumphed in the end. The same thing for Starwars.
Even newspapers are interspersing their reports with fiction. A sex maniac of a congressman appears sparklingly clean in the newspapers, when everyone knows he has raped a couple of young girls. But he has paid a lot of money for good press, so there you are. It’s a mean world out there. The bottom line is only God’s Word is infallible. It is the truth, it doesn’t change, it’s reliable, and it has withstood the test of time. In everything we read, everything we see, we have to display a great amount of discernment in separating the chaff from the wheat. Not so, with God’s Word. We can count on it to be what it claims to be: THE WORD OF GOD.
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