The Bible is a single, unified story that leads to Jesus. Every other story that we see in literature and the movies, whether true or fiction, shares elements with the biblical story. A profitable way to consume the stories in our culture is to compare and contrast them with the true story of the Bible.
Netflix has an ambitious goal of producing one new movie every week in 2022. One of those movies is “The Adam Project,” starring Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, and Zoe Saldana.
After accidentally crash-landing in 2022, time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed teams up with his 12-year-old self for a mission to save the future.
There’s nothing fancy about this plot. We’ve seen it a hundred times in the movies. There has been a huge crime in the past that has changed the future. This known world is corrupted. The heroes’ mission is to restore the timeline to the way it was supposed to be.
While time travel is fiction, this plot is nonetheless a handy way to think about the true history of the world and the story of the Bible. It is actually true that we live in a corrupted world where a great crime has happened in the past that affects us all. Our world actually is a dystopian future from the way the world ought to have been. It is actually true that a great hero from outside time came on a mission to set things back to the way they were supposed to be. Jesus is the human from that other timeline, the perfect human we were supposed to be but have failed to be.
When heroes travel into the past in these stories, they generally worry about doing something small that will radically change the future. They are worried about the “butterfly effect,” the idea that a tiny change in one place can have huge effects somewhere else. Meanwhile, the villains don’t care about that at all.
Yet you and I in the real world so often ignore the idea that we may do one small thing in our present to change the future. Instead, we look flippantly on the small choices we make in the present as if they have no enduring effect. We think of ourselves and our choices in isolation and are self-involved in looking after our own interests instead of the good of the future. While Jesus is the hero of the Bible, we most definitely are the villains.
In contrast to “The Adam Project,” our true hero hasn’t gone back in time to cancel the original crime from ever happening. Instead, he appeared “when the time had fully come” (Galatians 4:4) to deal with the consequences of that crime and die to set things right again. But in his resurrection he has changed the potential of the future and will return again to bring the “supposed-to-be-future” into reality.
Before Jesus returns, he helps us see the choices we make today do change the future, positively or negatively, every time. Every human being is an eternal creature, and every choice we make nudges them and ourselves a little more toward either heaven or hell. That is a huge responsibility, but Jesus has not retreated to the future to leave us to carry that burden alone. He remains interested in our present circumstances. He continues to be with us, to live in our hearts, and to help us in the all the small details of our lives that have huge effects.
When you watch time travel movies in the future, remember what Jesus has done for you in the past to restore the timeline, how he lives with you in the present to guard all your small choices, and how he will return to establish the future that was always meant to be.