Way back in A.D. 2002, my wife took us all to the $1.75 movie for our son’s birthday. (This may give you some insight into the financial status and social sophistication of our family!) "Bruce Almighty" was playing and that was the consensus choice. Like all Jim Carey movies, it was very funny. But it was also very stimulating. It brought up interesting questions about the nature of God. If God exists, what could be more important than knowing what He is like?

Sometimes people talk about "the Almighty" when referring to God. That is very accurate, according to the Bible. There are 345 cases in the NIV where God is called "almighty." The Book of Revelation mentions four "living creatures" whose apparent sole function is to say this all the time: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come." (Rev 4:8)

Now here is something curious. At one point in the movie God told Bruce that Bruce would have God’s power. It raises some interesting questions.

If you are "almighty" are you not also all-knowing? In the movie, the recently-empowered Bruce wants something spectacular to cover for the news, so he brings an asteroid down near town. Later, when the many ill-effects of that event are seen, Bruce seems surprised. But if he were almighty, Bruce would know the effects of such things even before they occurred.

Can two beings be "almighty"? Two beings could be "semi-mighty" but two could not be all-mighty, simply given the meaning of "almighty."

So if God gave His power to Bruce, God wouldn’t be God any more! In the movie God continues to be God, and he even mentions to Bruce that Bruce is only trying to handle one city. So it is clear that in the movie plot, Bruce never was almighty at all! On the "God" scale Bruce only received some relatively minor powers. He couldn’t even "hear" the prayers of one city all at once! Clearly, he was never "almighty."

In the plot of the movie, Bruce, who had a string a misfortunes partly brought on by his own behavior, thought he could do a better job than God was doing. But he never even really had the chance, because he wasn’t "almighty" - but for another reason also.

Now and then when the Apostle Paul is saying something about God in his letters, he breaks into a "doxology." One place he does this is 1 Tim 6:15-16 where he says "God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."

The phrase "Who alone is immortal" is an important key to understanding who God is.

The word for "immortal" is athanasian which is literally "without death." Remember our passage about God Almighty? It puts with "almighty" the words, "who was, and is, and is to come." In the scheme of scripture, God is not just the One who always did and always will exist, He is also the One who, by His very nature, could not not exist. (Wrap your mind around that for a moment!)

So here is something else about Bruce and God: God could not make Bruce God anymore than He could stop being God.

Being "almighty" doesn’t mean the ability to do anything, because some things are logically impossible. For example, given that I am a human being, God could not put me entirely inside this room and entirely outside this room at the same time. For a Biblical example James 1:13 says that God cannot be tempted by evil.

For that same kind of reason God could not make Bruce God. He could give Bruce power, but He could not give Bruce all power - He could not make Bruce God.

All this mind-boggling stuff . . . probably reflects the way we don’t think carefully about Who and What God really is.

In the Bible, God is seen as the reason for everything else that exists. Everything that exists does so because God wants it to exist. God exists just because He exists.

This is part of the significance of God revealing Himself to Moses as "I AM WHO I AM." There is a lot of practical importance here. When you realize Who God is, it makes sense to trust Him. It makes sense to depend on Him Who is almighty.

Without going into detail here, but there have been philosophers and theologians who, for various reasons, thought of God as "limited god." A limited God is no God at all.

Some cultures have, and do, talk about "the gods." The Greeks and Romans had the pantheon. Classical Hinduism has thousands of "gods." But if there is an "almighty" there can be but one.

An Anglican fellow named J. B. Phillips wrote a book several years ago titled Your God Is Too Small. It is still around and worth reading. In that book Phillips points out that very many people have a very truncated view of God. Some of these inadequate views include: resident policeman, parental hangover, meek-and-mild, and pale Galilean.

The one that "Bruce Almighty" seems to reflect is "grand old man." In the movie God was even portrayed by a distinguished-looking older gentleman. God isn’t an old man in the sky - or even in a warehouse, as in the movie.

Being limited minds, we are never going to understand God completely - our finite minds are not capable of that. But God has revealed enough about Himself to help us detect when our view of Him is "too small." I’m not just "picking" at this movie. A movie is, after all, primarily for entertainment. But it does show how easy it is to think of God in too limited a way. We can’t forget that God is "the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."

Like her television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, actress Sarah Michelle Gellar's personal spirituality borrows from a hodgepodge of religions. "I consider myself a spiritual person," she told Scotland's Daily Record. "I believe in an idea of God, although it's my own personal ideal. I find most religions interesting, and I've been to every kind of denomination: Catholic, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist. I've taken bits from everything and customized it."

I hate to tell Sarah this, but "Jewish" and "Buddhist" are not "denominations"! But what she says reflects a trend of people's willingness to draw from a variety of conflicting theological sources. A 2002 study found a plurality of adults (44%) contend that, "the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon are all different expressions of the same spiritual truths." Just 38% of Americans reject that idea.

Long ago, in the dark ages now called "The Seventies" - when at one time Richard Nixon was president and later Jimmy Carter was president, there was a movie called Oh, God.

The late George Burns played the role of God - which was a little bit funny in itself. He was an old man even back then, so he fit the "God as old man" image the movies seem to like. The other star of the show was none other than John Denver. You know, "Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong . . ." - that guy. He is also "the late" John Denver even though he was a very young fellow back then. He died prematurely in some weird ultra-light aircraft crash.

In the course of Oh, God we learn that God is ecumenical across religions. As he chomps on his cigar (George Burns always had a cigar) "God" lets it slip that, while he likes all religions, he probably prefers some kind of Hinduism.

That rather fits the Sarah Michelle Gellar and 2002 poll views I mentioned before. That’s the way it often is, of course. Movies are "ahead" of popular views. So to see where popular beliefs might be going, consider the approach in Bruce Almighty. Here we have God and praying people, but absolutely no direct reference to any religion whatsoever. There are a couple of indirect references, but nothing overt at all.

You tend to overlook this as you watch the movie, but the absence is very striking when you think about it. Not only is there no overt mention of religion, but as Bruce strolls around Buffalo, New York, there is not a glimpse of anything that even hints of a church building, or any other religion-related structure.

There is a certain logic in this development. If you can mix and match elements of religion, there really is no reason to bother with religions at all. The mixing approach implies that religions are just irrelevant - so why not just give them up? Why not, indeed?

Why not mix and match thoughts about God - or just not bother thinking about God at all? At some point you must decide a question along these lines: if God exists, how important would that be?

The really strange thing is this - people seem to think God is very important, but when they start to formulate their ideas about God, they seem to just "slop" things together. When you "slop" things together, you just get a mess.

Remember having paints when you were young. At some point you learn that if you mix yellow and blue, you get green. Intriguing! You learn all different kinds of colors that combine to make other colors. Then at some point you get the idea "What if we just mixed ALL the colors together?" When you do that you just get a big, ugly, grayish blob of hideousness.

So what makes so many people in our culture want to take the Sarah Michelle Gellar approach and do that with ideas about God? Or even beyond that, what makes people want to take the Bruce Almighty approach and just not have any ideas about God? (It’s as though, having seen the mess made by mixing all the colors, we decided never to deal with colors again and make all of our pictures blank pieces of paper!)

One thing historic Christianity has is some definite ideas about God.

One phrase that is often used in the NT is "the faith." In Christianity, "faith" is not just your attitude - it is that, but more. It is also a body of truths to be understood and accepted. In fact, Jude uses the phrase "the faith which once and for all God has given to his people." He is not saying that God gave people belief - rather, he is saying that God revealed a body of truths for His people.

Another key point of the Christian faith was that the founder, Jesus known as the Christ, was NOT a proponent of mix-and-match views of God or the no-view-at-all of God. Some of the famous - and significant - statements of Jesus on this point are:

John 14:6 - "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." The Greek word for "way" here can also mean a road or a path. So if you were to ask Jesus, "Are there many paths to God?" you can see that He would answer with a straight-up "No."

John 4:24 - "God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." For Jesus, there is no mixing and matching. There is truth about God that you can know. While it is up to you whether to take it to heart or not, its there, unchanging.

Matt 22:29 - "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God." According to Jesus, not just anything someone thinks about God is true. You can be "in error" and one reason that can happen is because you do not know what is stated in "the Scriptures."

So, to recap this, according to Jesus, just slapping together ideas about God will not do. There are right ideas about God and wrong ideas about God. And if you want right ideas about God, you must find them in the Scriptures.

In Bruce Almighty we see the logical outcome of an "all paths to God are equal" approach. If they are all equal, why not just dump all this "paths" business completely?

A recent announcement at the university where I work said, "A new student organization is forming for those following a Pagan (e.g. Wicca, Druidism, Asatru, Shamanism, etc.) and/or syncretic (mixed) spiritual path and those who support others in their spiritual journey. An interest meeting for the Pagan Student Association will be held Friday, September 12, 2003 1-3PM in UC 303. Students, faculty, and staff of all spiritual paths are welcome to be involved. All attendance is private."

If you are going to "mix" paths and pick your "spiritual journey" rather at random, why bother at all?

When Jesus spoke of "God" He was drawing on a collection of ideas from Judaism, and He added some very definite ideas of His own. So when people asked Jesus a question about God, He had very definite answers.

In fact, in an upcoming movie entitled "Sarah Michelle Gellar Meets Jesus" we will have a scene in which Sarah tells Jesus that, to arrive at her view of God, "I've taken bits from everything and customized it." Jesus will reply - in a way very in keeping with His words in the gospels - "Sarah, my dear, you are an air-head. But fear not! If you will listen to Me I can help straighten you out." And if Sarah pays careful attention to Jesus she will come to know what we can of the Creator and Redeemer of the Universe.

But it will not be a hodge-podge of views, it will not be the Bruce Almighty, avoidance of views, and it will not be "customized" to fit you. Jesus doesn’t change His views to fit you - you are required to change your views to fit Him!

In Bruce Almighty God is portrayed not only as religion-less, but also as history-less. There were a couple of indirect references to events from the Bible - though that connection was assumed, never stated.

When Bruce first gets his "powers" he goes to a restaurant. He orders soup, which turns out to be red soup - I’m guessing and hoping it was tomato! In any case, after a few gyrations, we have "the parting of the red soup" right there in the bowl.

In another scene, God and Bruce walk on top of a lake - a little joint "walking on water." You are just supposed to know what that means, as most of us do.

Mostly though, there was no reference to history in Bruce Almighty. It was just God and praying people in the here and now.

The American Clergy Leadership Conference - a group founded by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon - announced recently that it wanted to promote reconciliation among Christians, Jews and Muslims, in part by examining how Christian traditions are understood by members of other religions. One of the group's leaders - Archbishop George Augustus Stallings Jr., a former Roman Catholic priest who left the church in 1989 to found the African-American Catholic Congregation - said, "We have realized that, as expressions of faith, there are certain symbols that have stood in the way . . . The cross has served as a barrier in bringing about a true spirit of reconciliation between Jews and . . . Muslims and Christians, and thus we have sought to remove the cross from our Christian churches across America as a sign of our willingness to remove any barrier that stands in the way of us coming together as people of faith."

This probably sounds a little silly to those who know much about Christianity. Why? Because the cross represents an event in history that is indispensable to the Christian faith. There are many events in history that are indispensable to the Christian faith - things minus which you would no longer have the Christian faith.

This is not true of most religions.

Other than Judaism and Christianity, religions have little direct connection to events in history. Islam might be a partial exception, but it is not rooted in events the way the Christian faith is. Hinduism and its offspring, Buddhism, simply are not directly tied to acts of God in human history.

The Old Testament is full of "remember"s. People are told to remember all sorts of events in the history of God dealing with His people. Some of "biggies" here include:

The Exodus from Egypt: Ex 12:17 - Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt.

Coming into the Promised Land: Josh 4:23-24 - For the LORD your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The LORD your God did to the Jordan just what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over.

A nice summary of this is 1 Chron 16:12-13 - Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced, O descendants of Israel his servant, O sons of Jacob, his chosen ones.

When God identified Himself to Moses, He said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." Those names are event-related name. They amount to ways of summarizing things that God did in making and keeping His covenant in what we call the Old Testament.

Christianity, like its parent Judaism, is wrapped up in events to be remembered. The two most important of these are the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In fact, one of the main events of Christian worship is the Lord’s Supper, sometimes called communion.

1 Cor 11:23-26 - The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me." For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Christianity is about actions of God in history. You have perhaps heard of debates about whether or not some of the events of the Bible "really happened." People have even attempted to construct versions of the Christian faith in the which the resurrection did not happen in history, but rather, only "in the hearts" of those who believe.

While you can try that maneuver, it guts the Christian faith. What is strange is that this is an approach that some Christians have adopted! There is almost no end of skepticism today about the events - not just the details, but the great events - in scripture.

There are astounding events mentioned in the Bible - some of which we just reviewed. But it is the usual practice today to dismiss these as mythological - meaning that they didn’t really happen, but that we can draw some kind of inner strength from a kind of "shared image" of God acting - when, in fact, God did NOT act.

What always happens when you take this route is that, eventually, you must decide how much of the Biblical account is not really true. You get a kind of progression through levels of denial:

First, all that stuff before Abraham is "pre-historic" since there is nothing about it from other sources, so it must be just myth.

Second, well, even though the places mentioned with Abraham are mentioned elsewhere, Abraham himself is not, so he is probably just some kind of symbolic name as are all the patriarchs like Isaac, Jacob, and so forth.

Third, all that Moses and the exodus stuff is difficult to find recounted in any detail elsewhere - and it sounds a little fantastic anyway - so it must just be some kind of Jewish national myth.

So it goes until you come to John the Baptist and Jesus. And while it is tough to deny that Jesus of Nazareth existed since references to Him do turn up in a few other sources, all the trappings of what He supposedly said and did are probably just the inventions of His followers. I mean, resurrection - really now!

So people have ended up saying that all that stuff Jesus supposedly said and did probably isn’t true, He does somehow inspire you to pursue your individual quest for some kind of union with that great force that permeates the universe.

At this point you have to ask a question: if the events of God dealing with people recounted in the Bible are false, why buy the idea that there is a God at all? Why not, if that’s all there is, just break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all, there is?

While it might seem very neat and tidy to rip history away from God and God away from history, you get a God whom you can’t really know. The God of Bruce Almighty just shows up one day in a warehouse in Buffalo, New York. Who or what is He - we don’t know - we can’t really know.

The God of the Christian faith is - The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - the Word who became a human being and lived among us - the God who raised Jesus from the Dead - the God who appeared to Paul on the Road to Damascus and sent him to preach to the Gentiles - this is the God who has a long history with us. It is from that long history that we can know Him as more than just a mysterious man in a white suit in a warehouse somewhere.

In Bruce Almighty there is really no reference to wrong-doing. While Bruce does have some bad attitudes that God corrects, there really isn’t an idea of wrong-doing at all. At one point there is a riot because of some not-well-thought-out supernatural actions by Bruce, but the people burning down Buffalo are not portrayed as doing anything wrong. They just seem to be "doing what comes naturally" in the situation.

Perhaps I can better illustrate this by going back in history a bit to another movie, one you have probably all seen so many times you could perform the parts in a pinch. I talking about "Ghost." Think of how right, wrong, "heaven" and hell were portrayed there. Think of the rules of Ghost, if you will.

Remember that if you murdered someone, or did something "really bad" then, when you died, those horrible screaming black blobs came and hauled your terrified spirit off to - presumably - some kind of hell.

But if you were "in love" then you could do anything with impunity. A little sexual impurity? Not a problem - black things can’t get you for that. A little petty swindling in fake seances? Don’t worry - you still seem to be off-limits to the screaming black things.

If you are really mean, sinister, and do something completely underhanded, then get ready for those black beasties.

So while I don’t want to push this too far, it would seem that in pop culture at least as revealed in movies, something changed between 1990 and 2003. We went from a few things we really don’t like being "sins" to nothing being a "sin."

I think there is a part of us all that would like to pull off a slick little maneuver regarding right, wrong, and sin. We would like to make all the things we don’t like "sins" of sorts. These things would carry at least some little "slap on the hand" penalty. And I think most of us still have a few categories of deeds for which we would like to see the black things come and haul away the perpetrator. But we probably wouldn’t put many deeds in this category.

But there is a general tendency to want to get rid of the category of "sin." In doing this, we think we free ourselves from the need to make moral judgments, because - as we all supposedly "know" - you cannot and should not make moral judgments.

Then - we think - people can just "do their own thing" and, if that thing doesn’t really hurt anyone else very much, we don’t have to be bothered trying to decide what is right and what is wrong. In one sweeping mental stroke, we can just get rid of sin. And then, we hope, we can just adopt a "take it or leave it" attitude toward things like drunkenness, abortion, homosexual activity, and a whole list of very popular past-times today.

There are a lot of problems with this kind of approach.

For one thing, why should we even worry about what hurts someone else? If, morally speaking, it is OK to do anything you want, what possible justification is there for adding the idea, "just so you don’t hurt someone else"? If it makes you happy to hurt someone else, why not? If you have the power to hurt people, why should you be so restrained? Why indeed?

But there is another, bigger, problem here.

If there really is a God Almighty then there is something that follows from this.

If everything that exists is here by God’s doing, then He is rightly in charge of it all. It’s not so much that "He makes the rules" as " He is the rules."

You can try to formulate moral borderlines with things like "as long as you don’t hurt someone else" but they end up being flimsy wisps of fog unless there is Someone with authority standing behind them.

Ps 24:1-2 reads "The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters."

That’s a poetic way of saying that everything that exists belongs to God - including us - because He made it all. Respect is something a lot of people are a little short on today. But if you think of what you would owe to your Creator, you might begin to get the picture here.

People tend to think of any moral restraints placed upon them as horrible, repressive things. Nothing could be further from the truth. A God Almighty, because He made us, would know us better than we know ourselves. The very fact that He made us shows that he does not hate us. He wants us to exist.

So how surprising could it be that God would give us good directions for life? You can see this kind of approach in Ps 119:41-48:

May your unfailing love come to me, O LORD, your salvation according to your promise;
then I will answer the one who taunts me, for I trust in your word.
Do not snatch the word of truth from my mouth, for I have put my hope in your laws.
I will always obey your law, for ever and ever.
I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.
I will speak of your statutes before kings and will not be put to shame,
for I delight in your commands because I love them.
I lift up my hands to your commands, which I love, and I meditate on your decrees.
 

In other words, when the One who made us tells us what we should and should not do, that is not oppression. It is a kind of ultimate insight that liberates us.

Finally - and this is a point worth more time but I want to mention it here - when you don’t understand the seriousness of defying God Almighty, you can’t really understand the Christian faith.

I think many people today do not understand the whole idea of God’s grace just because they have no idea of sin. We live more and more in a Bruce Almighty world which just does not have even a concept of sin.

When you even say the word "salvation" it can sound a little strange to people because they have no idea that there is anything from which we need to be "saved."

Christianity teaches that the God who was almighty to make us is also almighty to rescue us from the moral messes we make of our lives. Those messes are a lot more serious than most people think, which makes the rescue a lot more amazing than most people can even imagine!

Christianity is all about the Christ. The word "Christ" just means "the anointed one." In those days people were put into office by a ceremony of pouring a little oil on them. Now this wasn’t 10W-30! The thing Jesus was "anointed" to was the role of the one who would save us from sin.

So when the idea of sin is gone, Christianity no longer makes sense. There simply is no need for it. The movies give us a strong hint that our culture has very little understanding of God. There are a lot of assumptions that must be cleared away before we can even begin to get a clear picture of Who God is.