Lessons from Porn

Here is a really good post that I read at another blog. It takes a recent development within the porn industry and makes some intriguing (and I think appropriate) comments about our society as a whole. Here is the link to the blog:

http://qideas.org/blog/meet-roxxxy.aspx

To a Magic Foreign Land

"Christ is risen from the dead,
and he's standing on my bed
Come away, come away to a magic foreign land."

This chorus was made up by one of my friends before he was able to figure out the words to Matt Maher's song, "Christ is Risen." The actual words go as follows:

"Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling over death by death
Come awake, come awake,
come and rise up from the grave."

Just a little different from my friend's chorus. However, as I was thinking about it, the revised version seems to echo what many American Christians believe. I don't want to imply that this is necessarily what my friend believes (he was just putting forth nonsense words), but sadly many Christians do believe this way. Instead of realizing the implications of Jesus' resurrection as the first-fruits of out resurrection, many Christians prefer to believe in a gnostic view of the afterlife. They choose to believe that, after death, all that happens is we fly away to heaven and live with God forever. But this is not what the Bible teaches.

The Bible firmly teaches a life after life after death. That's the whole point of the resurrection. We will not exist as disembodied spirits. In the end, when God restores all things, our bodies will be physically raised. This is the hope of Easter--or do we not believe that Jesus was actually raised? As NT Wright puts it in his book, Surprised By Hope, to only hope for a spiritual existence in a world far from earth means that death is victorious. Death still reigns because it has defeated creation and our physical bodies. But the Resurrection of Christ promises that God will redeem His creation. The physical world that He created in the beginning will not be abandoned to death and decay while we rest in some "magic foreign land."

Instead, as Maher's song beautifully points out, the Christ's Resurrection was God's was of trampling over death. Death does not reign, so let us come awake to this fact and live appropriately while we await that glorious day of recreation.