Recently our family sat down to watch the movie, The Cabin In The Woods.  As a rule I don’t like slasher movies.  Generally they are all fear, blood and gore and absolutely no point.  However, this movie received good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (5 1/2 out of 6 stars).  It was described as, “… an astonishing meta-feat, capable of being funny, strange, and scary — frequently all at the same time.” Okay,  I was game.

As we sat and watched I was close to leaving several times.  The fear, blood and gore were all there like in any slasher movie.  And there was way too much sexually explicit content (the fast-forward button was our friend…) for me to ever watch the movie again or recommend it to someone else. But there was substance to this movie.  The movie was heading somewhere, and by the end I was surprised where it landed.

(SPOILER STARTS HERE)

It is obvious that the people are all doomed.  There seems to be no escape.  But they also seem to be choosing how they die.  There was an intelligence behind their deaths.  The premise of the movie is  the “myth” of human sacrifice is no myth at all.  Human sacrifice is required to keep the “gods” from destroying the earth.  The practice had been going on for thousands of years.  It reaches a point where all of our technology is used to carry out the executions, but in the end it is the same as it had always been; only human blood satisfied the gods. By the end the two characters still alive decide that the human race just isn’t worth it.  We (the human race) had our chance.  We haven’t done very well.  It is time to give some other life form a chance.

The movie ends with one of the gods breaking out from beneath the earth bent on destruction.  There is one veiled reference to Heaven (the reference was to something coming from “upstairs”) and the implication is that it is Heaven making sure that the sacrifice doesn’t complete successfully this time.  The human race was measured, and found lacking.  It is time to start over.

We all have a world view, and at the center of our belief system is what we think about God.  We have beliefs about His character, His ways and how He relates to us.  Even if we don’t consciously form these opinions, they are there.  Back in 2006 and 2008 telephone interviews were carried out and discovered that American’s have four general views of God.  They are

• The Authoritative God – Get right with Him or lose his favor.
• The Benevolent God – God is engaged in our world and loves and supports us.
• The Critical God – God keeps an eye on this world and delivers justice in the next.
• The Distant God – God “booted up” humanity and the rest is up to us.

In The Cabin In The Woods the view is clearly that of the Authoritative God.  The world has gone haywire and it is time to pay up.  His favor is gone and mankind is to be destroyed.

What do you believe about God?  How does He relate to you?  More importantly, how does your belief of how He views you change how you relate to Him?

Greg