‘Therefore, we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us and eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.’
                                                                                                     2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Few things make us more uneasy than the combination of religion, politics and violence, and with good reason. Be it Muslims, Christians, Jews or Hindus, all have had more than their fair share of dark moments in history, and so I understand the critics that take issue with a movie that portrays the salvation of the Christian Bible in the context of extreme and highly graphic bloodshed. I was honestly quite uncomfortable as I watch Denzel Washington fight his way through The Book of Eli.

But I was also captured by the obvious metaphors, especially as it relates to our message here at Knight Vision Ministries.  Without giving away too much of the movie, the story centers around a man on a mission; a mission that he had likely never even dreamt of and a mission that seems almost certainly doomed for failure.  Yet, he knows that this is exactly the road that God has placed him on; in his own words, he ‘walks by faith, not by sight’.   Along the path are dangers and choices that he is forced to deal with.  Some of those choices he makes are good ones, some are poor, and a few are just downright selfish; but as he listens to his God, he grows and matures into the man who can ultimately accomplish what is only for him to accomplish.  In the midst of a great, transcendent, even supernatural call on his life, it is really the journey that changes him.

Likewise, the portrayal of evil set against the very life that God calls to is vivid and unmistakable.  Its aggression, its randomness, its invitation to join with it is so evident and familiar, that you wonder how any man could succeed.

And that I believe is the key to the movie. No man could succeed.  While the movie never comes out and states this, you have to assume that Washington’s character had been changed, literally by God himself. 

It is our story.  We too have been commissioned with a with a unique path to follow, one that only we can walk, but also one that we have no hope of finishing unless the mystery of the Gospel is true, the mystery that states that it is no longer I who live, but Christ living in me, that we too have been changed. We will be opposed, fiercely, and it will take all that we have to stay in the fight, but it will also take more.  It will take walking by faith not by sight.

The Book of Eli is not the story of religious fanaticism, it is the story of of the evil that we are facing every day, and of the God who is more than able to see us through those evils.

Fight well my friends.

To the King,

David