00:14:39.600Often their depiction of, like, atheists is pretty, like, offensive to atheists to the point where I don't know that it would really encourage them to think well of Christianity at all.
00:14:48.880And so there's lots I could say about God's Not Dead.
00:14:52.820But, yes, that's an example of something that I don't think is done super well.
00:14:57.940And I just think our media could be a lot more compelling.
00:15:00.700So I went into this, like, wanting to be a critic of it like you did, wanting to find the parts that could have been improved.
00:15:08.760And I will say I've softened a lot to it over the past, like, week since I've seen it.
00:15:14.720Like, most of my issues are artistic with it and, like, the story I thought could have been better.
00:15:22.500Not the story of Jesus, but how they told the story.
00:15:25.820But I thought so many parts of it were really beautiful.
00:15:28.720I thought some of the animation was, like, beautiful.
00:16:29.600But things like that, I'm like, I maybe would have tweaked.
00:16:33.240But I appreciate, I always appreciate when in the question of sin, someone goes back to the beginning and someone goes back to Adam and Eve.
00:16:44.420I think that's really important and tells me, okay, even if we would have conveyed it differently, that indicates to me, I'm like, okay, you get it.
00:16:55.380And I think that because of Adam, we have all died and Jesus is the second Adam.
00:16:59.800And I think just like with any art, they can't tell you everything.
00:17:05.220There's so much that we have to see and draw from it.
00:17:08.800And I kind of want to watch it again because I think there's probably a lot of things that I missed that I didn't really see before.
00:17:14.840And I really do commend them for that.
00:17:18.320Any criticism that says it wasn't the full gospel, I just, you didn't say that, but anyone out there, like, I just don't know if I would agree with that.
00:17:28.180I think that they did the best they could to get the full gospel in there.
00:17:32.840But if anyone out there disagrees, I would love, there could be something I'm missing.
00:17:36.340I'm not thinking about if any commenter is like, no, you know, they said this wrong or did this wrong.
00:17:40.780I'd be interested to hear that, but yeah, I thought that they also, I know some people had issues with some creative liberties that Jesus said.
00:17:51.880Like they added some things to his quotes or they changed words slightly.
00:17:56.760Yeah, there's a couple examples like when Jesus is in the temple, when he is younger and Luke, he says, did you not know that I must be in my father's house?
00:18:07.480And movie Jesus says, I felt like I needed to be here.
00:18:11.000So it's like much more modernized language.
00:18:35.380And I think that's why some people had issues with it.
00:18:40.340When he is multiplying the loaves and fish, he says the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
00:18:49.560And then movie Jesus says he came to give his life for the benefit of the multitudes.
00:18:54.320So plugged in notes in their review of it that removing the word ransom from that describes, removes the true purpose of Jesus's death.
00:19:07.580So that's some people are having issues with that, with the modernization of those phrases.
00:19:13.560Yeah, I would be interested to know why they chose benefit if they just thought that that was a more modern way to say ransom, because ransom has to be explained.
00:19:25.260But if we're going to change it, I probably would have said salvation, or I would have said to save many, to save those who believe.
00:19:38.840I probably would have said something like that instead of benefit, because benefit is just as vague as ransom.
00:19:45.080Also, the multitudes, I feel like if you're replacing words, I don't know that I would have chosen that either.
00:19:52.660Yeah, there were a couple things like that.
00:19:57.600It's funny, because we just talked with Sean McDowell last week about John 9, and that was one of the scenes that was depicted when the disciples are looking at the blind man, and they're like, who sinned?
00:21:26.220And I think it's fair to interpret him character wise as that.
00:21:30.160I didn't particularly think Oscar Isaac was that compelling as the character like the other actors were.
00:21:36.160But but, yeah, all that to say, I don't know that there were a lot of like emotional moments from like Jesus's perspective.
00:21:42.880One thing that I did have an issue with, actually, was the resurrection, the depiction of the resurrection, because I legitimately thought that they cut a scene out of it.
00:21:53.260It's like Jesus is is dead and then it fades to black.
00:21:56.760And then they're like, oh, but he also just rose from the dead.
00:22:38.860They could have brought it full circle, because when you think about the Christmas Carol, it's not a gospel movie or story.
00:22:45.160It is kind of a universalist, moralistic story of you just need to be a good person and you need to be generous.
00:22:51.600But if they were going to rewrite kind of the life of Charles Dickens, they could have rewritten the Christmas story as if he was the Christian they depicted him as and showed a new end of the Christmas Carol of Ebenezer Scrooge, like actually bowing down before the cross and like accepting Jesus and then showing like, no, that's really what the end of the Christmas Carol should be is realizing that Christmas is about Christ.
00:24:55.640I thought if there was one moment where this little boy is watching this all unfold and there's one moment maybe right before the cross or something where Jesus makes eye contact with the little boy.
00:25:07.200And all of a sudden it's like, oh, this is personal.
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00:26:56.860I thought that the child's questions and interactions with the story were pretty accurate as a representation of how a child asks questions about Jesus and about the Bible.
00:27:12.660Like, I saw a lot of what my children say and think and ask in that child, and I thought that that was really sweet.
00:27:20.940And I also thought that he was a representation of having faith like a child because he just understood so well.
00:27:28.140It seemed like that it was sad that Jesus was dying, that it was wrong for the people to choose him to die over Barabbas.
00:27:37.980He saw how amazing and loving Jesus was.
00:27:41.220And I just, I see so much of what Jesus meant when he says you have to have faith like a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
00:27:49.220One beautiful benefit of motherhood is that you relearn the Bible and the gospel through your children, and they just understand it so clearly.
00:28:48.560But some of it was just, like, flagrant disobedience when his dad is working on something really hard, trying to perform the Christmas carol in front of people.
00:29:16.820Then when the dad gets home from the play, the son, Walter, gets to stay up late while the other children who did obey get to have to go to bed.
00:29:24.880And so the child gets rewarded for this disobedience by getting to stay up.
00:29:31.360And the mom is basically, like, telling the dad, the mom's supposed to be sweet.
00:29:36.100But the mom is like, to make up for you getting frustrated with him, you have to tell him this story.
00:29:41.040Now, obviously, it is a great benefit for the dad to tell the story of the gospel.
00:29:46.440We should all be doing that for our kids.
00:29:48.040But, again, I think another missed opportunity, or maybe you think this was there, was maybe the child seeing, oh, like, in my own way, like, I contributed to Jesus' death on the cross.
00:30:10.600And there could have been some, like, contriteness there to show.
00:30:15.420But that is one reason why I don't know that I would allow my kids to see it, not because of necessarily the, like, other parts of it, the story of Jesus, but because you see bad behavior completely undisciplined by the parents and, like, very weak parents who don't take that behavior seriously at all.
00:31:25.920The bumbling dad and the wise mom that has to come in and, like, bring order to the chaos.
00:31:32.760And maybe you could say, well, no, he's just an artist and he needed a more type A person to, like, keep him on track.
00:31:39.740But we were also talking about how it's strange that, okay, if Charles Dickens, the fictional Charles Dickens, really believed in the gospel and, like, cared about this so much that he had been writing this for his children.
00:31:53.180Well, as Walter, the son, is listening to it, he's never heard this stuff before.
00:32:15.580So, yeah, that was kind of a weird choice in my opinion.
00:32:19.980Now, maybe you could say that this fictional Charles Dickens was becoming a Christian during this time, and it was new, and he was writing all of this as he was learning it and believing it, and he was presenting it for the first time.
00:32:33.660So, you could say that, and, like, from the completion of it, that's when he was like, okay, I understand this, and I want to present it to my kids.
00:32:40.660I'm completely adding on to the movie and giving it a very charitable reading, but maybe someone could say.
00:32:47.980Now, no kid, by the way, if you're going to allow your kids to watch that, which is totally up to you, and maybe you can have a conversation with them about the behavioral stuff in the beginning, but no kid is going to catch on to that.
00:32:58.440I don't think that they're going to, like, a five-year-old is going to have an issue with that.
00:33:02.440Okay, so there are some critics out there.
00:33:05.220Gabriel Hughes on Acts said, he said, while the film does get some things right, there's a lot it doesn't.
00:33:12.160Jesus is often misquoted in subtle ways.
00:33:14.760He points out, we already talked about this, Luke 2, 49, when Jesus says, did you not know I must be in my father's house?
00:33:22.500Movie, Jesus says, I felt like I needed to be here.
00:33:25.640Loaves and Fish, that scene, the Bible says, Mark 10, 45, the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
00:33:37.060Movie, Jesus says, to give his life for the benefit of the multitudes.
00:33:41.380Gabriel also says that they make Jesus sound like a guy from HR rather than the king of kings.
00:33:46.620I personally don't agree with that assessment in general.
00:33:50.840The film tells us our sin makes God sad, but there's no mention of hell, of the judgment of God, which Jesus talked about.
00:34:06.980I also, though, was just kind of wondering how, I mean, I don't make children's media, but I do wonder, like, what the best way to communicate that to a child is.
00:35:43.380And, yeah, an excess amount of time is spent showing him bantering back and forth with his son, a subplot with zero dramatic attention or relevant to Christ's life, for that matter.
00:35:58.640The beginning part, in addition to the just like the like precocious kids and all that stuff, I just thought it was stressful and it went on too long.
00:36:10.760There's really that's not part of the plot, especially if they never bring it back to the child seeking forgiveness and seeing his own sin.
00:40:03.920We did not finish Prince of Egypt because when they show the babies being thrown into the river and eaten by the alligators, I was like, okay, yeah, this is tough.
00:41:33.280So as I already said, this weekend, CR grilled for our family and he grilled some chicken, some non-pre-marinated chicken breast on the grill.