The Martian

Photo courtesy of www.pjmedia.com

I recently had the pleasure of taking in a very interesting movie starring Matt Damon--The Martian.  If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend it, and I even showed it to my children which made for some interesting discussions about science.

Briefly, it is a movie about a mission on Mars gone wrong--one of the crew members, Mark Watney, was thought to be dead and was inadvertently left behind when the mission was scrubbed and the crew had to quickly vacate the planet.  However, it turns out that Mark Watney had not died and was in fact alive and well.  Most of the movie chronicles his attempt to industriously keep himself alive until he could be rescued or given more supplies.  As a botanist, he discovered ways to grow food on Mars, make water from hydrogen and oxygen, and establish communication with NASA back on Earth.

Throughout the movie, you find yourself rooting for Mark, and by extension the human race, as he finds himself pitted against impossible odds of survival.  And yet, through each and every challenge, he lives a little longer such that by the movie's end, he intersects with his crew's spacecraft and makes it back to Earth safely with them.

In the closing scene, we see Mark as a professor to astronauts, teaching his students about the valor of mankind and science--how, in the face of certain death, he simply moved from one problem to the next, carefully applying science and math to figure out a way to survive.  He stood before them, and us, as a living testament to the power of human reason and sheer will.

In truth, however, there is no way we can breech the vast divide which exists between life and death, humanity and divinity--a divide much greater than the abyss of space.

We cannot reason our way out of our moral failings.

We cannot try harder or work smarter to successfully live longer.

We'd like to think that we can at least make it part way to the middle, flying our way up to God's rescue craft to intersect Him along the way.

But the truth is that mankind cannot survive on its own--no amount of science, will power, reason or logic can help us out of the desolation and death we find ourselves in as a result of sin.

We need to be rescued.

But, naturally, we don't like to hear this!

We'd much prefer to believe in the fiction such as The Martian where we can rescue ourselves, come what may, thank you very much.

But I am not ashamed to admit it...and neither should you, dear friend.   We are in dire need of a Savior, and can do NOTHING to earn His love or merit His forgiveness.  We can't meet Him halfway--we can only receive His grace and mercy and salvation with a grateful heart and a submissive spirit...and with a lot of what my dad calls, the "awe factor."

And that, ironically enough, is wherein lies the victory!