Introduction
Welcome back! I’ve really been looking forward to this post because this is one of my favorite topics. That probably sounds a little funny considering that we’re going to discuss sin, and I’m not one who enjoys scary books or movies. But what I hope to prove to you today is that the presence of evil is necessary to a good story, that it’s a good thing for children to be scared of it, but that it’s also necessary for them to face it and overcome it.
Defining My Terms
I want to qualify some things right up front: First, do you recall our discussion on Rubbish back in post #3? Feel free to jump back and refresh your memory. We chucked anything into the rubbish bin that glorified sin and evil, and that we couldn’t watch for the sake of our conscience. So as we progress into this conversation, please remember that we’re not talking about anything that would fall into this category. I’m not justifying that.
Second, whenever we refer to “stories” from the Bible, we’re not referring to fairy tales. We’re talking about actual history that actually happened. We’re not minimizing these events in any way by referring to them as stories, but are imitating our Father by retelling these events to one another in such a way that reminds us of where we came from.
Now that we’re all on the same page
See what I did there?
We learned in an earlier post that we should read “temporary” books in light of the Eternal Book, so we’re going to use the Bible as our starting point. God’s Word is our history; it tells us where we came from. It starts out in a beautiful garden that God Himself has created, and everything is good. Adam and Eve are living happily ever after, until . . . cue ominous music . . . evil slithers in. Creation is wrecked; Adam and Eve are ashamed; they’re cursed; there’s bloodshed; Eden is lost to them, and the friendship they had with God is broken. In addition to that, sin has entered the world, and all humans born thereafter will be inherently sinful, rebellious against God, lovers of evil. There will be more bloodshed and more death. It all seems pretty grim.
My favorite words in the Bible are “. . . but God . . .” God is always the turning point, the hinge upon which the whole story turns. And the wonderful thing about Scripture is that it’s really one whole narrative made up of thousands of little stories. So as God is giving us one whole over-arching message about how He created and how He redeemed and how He defeated, He’s also telling us story after story after story of people trapped by sin who called out to God for rescue. God is the ultimate storyteller, and so it is He that we imitate whenever we tell stories.
Scripture has lots of scary bits, plenty of monsters, and tons of villains. Those things exist in Scripture because sin is a real thing in real life. When sin entered the world, people began murdering one another, they raped, they stole, they sacrificed their children to giant burning metal gods. After the Fall, the animals began devouring one another. There were dragons. There were giants. God’s world became an unsafe place to live.
Consider, then, all the little stories of God’s deliverance throughout Scripture; Noah’s salvation in the Ark amidst the destruction of the entire planet, the ram in the thicket right as Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and David slaying Goliath when King Saul was too scared to come out of his tent. There are so many little stories contained within God’s humongous story of His creation, the Fall, His salvation for His people, His anticipated return, His victory, and His eternal reign.
Our stories should reflect the pattern of God’s story. Because sin and evil are present in Scripture, they are present in our stories as well. This is a necessity, I believe. And they have to be present in believable ways, in believable amounts. Without real sin and evil, victories are hollow. Without real sin and evil, there is no sanctification and no one grows in nobility.
Unveiling Sin
Parents – good parents – take their jobs seriously and pay attention to how their kids are wired. Some children are more sensitive to scary images or ideas than others. But we can be unwise to indulge this sensitivity for too long. Remember that we are training up our children to engage with and stand firm in this world, and this world is full of evil. This world is governed by Satan, and the Lord has chosen our children to be born for this moment. Preparing them to respond courageously and to persevere when times are hard and the trials are insurmountable starts when they’re young and you’re reading together around the dinner table.
Some books have scary pictures. Brave Ollie Possum and The Wingfeather Saga are two such titles from our church library that would fall into this category. Young children would naturally find pictures of the Glortch and the Toothy Cows frightening. Their reaction might be to look away, and fair enough. But consider why these pictures are so scary. The Glortch is one seriously scary witch. She’s the one snatching up people in the town and turning them into bugs and animals and tucking them away in jars and crates. She’s sin, and therefore she’s ugly. I mean, really ugly. She’s huge and hunched over with bulbous eyes and a sunken nose, pointy ears, broken teeth, and gnarled, claw-like fingers. She’s supposed to be ugly, because sin is ugly. It’s a good thing if our children want to look away, and it’s a good thing if they find it unappealing. Sin is hideous, and it’s offensive to God. We want our children to be able to recognize sin and reject it. Reading these books with our children helps them to recognize sin for what it really is.
As we age and mature, we discover that not all sin is ugly. Well, at least it doesn’t appear ugly. Sin is always ugly, always rotten, the whole way down. But it can appear to us in lovely forms. In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the Redcross Knight deserts fair Una because he believes a lie about her, and follows false Duessa instead. He’s smitten with her, and misses all the obvious signs that should tip him off to what a monster she really is. But she’s stunning and Redcross basically turns into this worthless puppy dog just following her around, having forgotten who he really is. When he’s finally rescued, he sees Duessa punished; her life is spared, but she’s stripped bare before being sent out (keep in mind that The Faerie Queene has many layers of allegory, metaphor, and symbolism throughout). Then her true form is revealed to him – she’s ancient, wrinkled, bald, gnarled, crusty, hideous, false.
Such as she was, their eyes might her behold,
That her misshaped parts did them appall,
A loathly, wrinkled hag, ill-favored, old,
Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told.
-Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, canto VIII
You see, sin is always ugly, by its very nature, even when it’s dressed up. So anything that depicts sin will always be ugly also. Sin lies. It’s important that children understand and internalize this reality..
The Bait & Switch
In addition to being ugly, sin is always stalking and always killing. It always intends death. Sin will always promise us happiness while seeking our destruction. When we stand firm, sin will always retaliate. In Scripture, Satan promised Adam and Eve that they would be like God. What Satan really offered was death. When God allowed Satan to try Job, what did Satan bring to Job’s house? Death.
A good story requires the author to be honest about this reality. Who are the bad guys? Why are they bad? We’re only able to recognize the bad guys because God’s Word tells us what is good. When an author removes God and His law from the world they’re trying to create, there is no baseline upon which to measure good and evil. Everything gets squishy; the good guys are flawed and are therefore responsible to shoulder the blame for whatever happens to them, and the bad guys are “complex and nuanced,” getting a pass for their bad behavior because someone else wronged them in the past. By what standard are the good guys and bad guys measured? If you take the standard away – the only standard that exists – then you’re left with moral relativism, which is really nothing at all.
Truthful Storytelling
A good story, I’d argue, needs to reflect the fallen creation. There needs to be conflict, danger, and villainy. We need not shield our children from these things. But a good story also needs to reflect God’s story arc; that of a protagonist encountering a trial or temptation, recognizing their weaknesses, persevering against the darkness, and emerging from the other side as more than they were before. We need to see characters like Ollie, like Janner Igiby, like Edmund and Frodo and Aragorn.
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.
– Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers (movie)
Our job as parents is to train up our children in such a way that they’ll be prepared to encounter the scary parts in both literature and life. And not just to encounter the scariness and flee, but to encounter it and face it down, to be steadfast and courageous, to repel and destroy whatever darkness is threatening to overcome them and those they love. Christians, of course, know that this is only done with the help and presence of the Spirit – and that only makes it more wonderful. We have a hope the rest of the world doesn’t have. This hope isn’t an empty hope, it doesn’t promise our problems will all mysteriously vanish, it doesn’t promise there won’t be villains. It does, however, promise that we will grow into the likeness of our God and King when we stand fast and persevere through our trials.
