Echoes in Eternity

"Our call to war, to love the captive soul,
But to rage against the captor..."

- from the hymn "O Church Arise"

On the recommendation of N.D. Wilson, my wife, nearly six-year-old daughter, and I went to see the new film "How to Train Your Dragon." It is great! The graphics are absurdly good, the story engaging and enjoyable, and it has a great message as well [be warned, I could include a couple little spoilers below]. As Wilson said in his review, the main message of the story stunned him. And as I looked back at his post, I noticed something that I hadn't quite caught during the movie.

Why did [the dragons] do these evil things? Well, because they served The Dragon. The big one. The huge, ancient, evil one. And the story progresses not with one small boy (Hiccup) successfully communicating to his father (Stoick) that dragons were misunderstood, but with that boy crushing The Dragon’s head and . . . losing his foot in the process. {emphasis added}

The Christian parallels to Genesis 3:15 are unmistakable. Furthermore, as Christians we should recognize that just as these dragons were not inherently evil themselves but served a master who was, the unbelieving lost in this world are not inherently bad or lost, but rather are enslaved to a master who has blinded them to the love of God. It's our job to free them from their chains and to open their eyes. Ephesians 6:12