Star Wars
Star Wars: “A New Hope,” or episode IV, came out in 1977. I didn’t even have my driver’s license yet. The last Star Wars movie, “The Rise of Skywalker” or episode IX, came out in 2019. I met some friends to go see that movie. As I recall, it was only a few months before Covid shut everything down. As we were leaving the movie, one of my friends asked, generally, if we all liked it. Turns out 2 of our group thought it was a great movie and two of us thought it was terrible. I was in the negative opinion category.
Let me explain.
In 1977, I was 15 and had been born again for about two years. I was still trying to get my head around concepts and really just letting the Holy Spirit work on my infant faith walk. In Star Wars, A New Hope, there was a line from Obi-Wan Kenobi, “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
In my infant mind, I thought this is what the Holy Spirit must be sort of like. Growing up in a rural area with only one television in our house (that my dad controlled), in wintertime, I read a lot of books. And true to my nerd manner, I developed a taste for the sci-fi and fantasy genre. So, in a lot of ways, I was trying to marry by infant faith walk to my love for the sci-fi and fantasy genre. So, seeing a movie like the first Star Wars and seeing George Lucas’ vision of what The Force was seemed to be consistent with what I knew about the Holy Spirit.
Like any series of movies, with each subsequent movie, they have to add something, and those things can ruin the original beauty of the first movie. Star Wars was no exception. By “The Empire Strikes Back,” episode V, they had to introduce some kind of afterlife concept and my ability to marry the movies to my faith walk was waning. After the third movie, The Return of the Jedi, episode VI, there was a big break of time (over 15 years) until George Lucas wrote episodes 1-3. Now, he ruined the movies even more by suggesting the force was caused by a symbiotic relationship with little creature that lived inside of us. All of a sudden, there was no connection with faith, it was all a biological process.
The last three movies written were more mystical in nature, but they went to the opposite ditch. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda, the Master Jedi, struggled to free Luke’s spaceship from the muck. In the very last movie in 2019, the main characters were using the force to control armies of spaceships coming to attack the planet. So, from my perspective, there wasn’t consistency in the premise of the movie - The Force.
In my own faith walk, I eventually did what most of us probably do and started thinking of the Trinity as 3 distinct persons and not one God in 3 persons. I believe this is natural as we all want to compartmentalize things that are difficult to understand. Since then, I’m slowly moving to try to understand the one God, three persons concept. And, significantly, I’m coming back to relating the Obi-Wan quote from the original Star Wars. The Holy Spirit or the helper is God and was given to us by God to help us to understand the depth of our sin and hopefully, encourage us to accept God as Jesus Christ as our savior to transfer our past, present and future sins to his magnificent sacrifice and input his holiness to us so that we can be heirs to God as the father in eternity.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe. I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.” - John 14:15-21, 25-31 ESV
I truly believe we were created with an instinctual understanding and need for God. We can, if we work at it, bury that understanding and need with our sinful nature. Praise God that the Holy Spirit also reaches out to us to convict us of our sins so that we can seek God. We just need to listen and to act on what the Holy Spirit tells us to do. To me that sounds a lot like what George Lucas was trying to imagine with The Force in that first Star Wars movie.
