Pete Garcia
The world we live in is full of the walking dead. Oh, you know them, because you work with them. They sit next to you in your classrooms, walk the halls where you work or frequent, and live in the houses surrounding yours. You hang out with them at lunch breaks, get-togethers, or you might even be dating one.
Although these zombies aren’t staggering around, half-rotted, searching for the next warm brain sandwich to munch on, these undead are after the same goal as the ones on the movie screen…satisfying the flesh.
Every few years, a new zombie movie will come out and more or less succeed in scaring the wits out of their audiences. And every one of them since the 1960’s have become more realistic and more graphic. There is even a popular TV show based on a world over-run with the undead, and how the survivors have to band together to find some elusive place of tranquility, free from the ever-present cannibalistic hordes. For some strange reason, it’s always some kind of radiation spill, pandemic disease, or passing comet that cause the dead to walk again. They rise from their graves and limp slowly toward the nearest town. The towns-people are always quite oblivious of the danger until they get cornered and come face to face with one (or more), and see the horror staring back at them.
Ironically, if Hollywood could only see the spiritual reality behind their fiendish movie plots, they probably wouldn’t make anymore zombie movies. For all the seemingly logical reasons why it ‘could’ happen, they neglect the biblical reality that it has already been happening now for the better part of 6,000 years. Instead of radiation or some astronomical event, the cause of death and decay is sin, and it has infected every living person on this planet, save one.
“And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses.” (Colossians 2:13)
Before one is a born-again Christian, he/she is already dead spiritually. You were cut off spiritually from your Creator when you reached that age of understanding and did nothing about it.
To rephrase that another way, you were dead in your sins before you turned to Jesus Christ. The Bible says that a person is made in three parts; body, soul, and spirit (Hebrews 4:12, 1 Thessalonians 5:23). When God made you in your mother’s womb, He made you in His image. By that I mean, He made you to be eternal. And inside of every man, woman, and child, is a God-shaped hole that only He can fill.
Mankind has tried all sorts of work-arounds to revive that inner-person. Man turns to sex, power, money, sports, drugs, pleasure, moral righteousness, and every other conceivable act within imagination, to go back to that place where he has that inner peace. Not only is it unattainable by our own efforts, it’s unsustainable.
The happiness in said event, thing, or belief only brings a temporary reprise from insatiable hunger that drives man to search for that elusive peace. It is like a mirage in the desert that you see off in the distance and crawl too, hoping to get a cool drink of water, only to find out that there is only more sand. There is only one way to re-connect with God and get back to that place where you can have peace and tranquility, and that is through Jesus Christ:
“Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)
See, there is no act, thought, or belief that any person can perform or trust in, aside from placing their faith and trust in the finished work of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection that can bring everlasting life. You can’t party enough, be rich enough, tithe enough, go to church enough, or own the most things to qualify on your own good merits to appease a holy and righteous God.
The Apostle Paul, who had been a ‘pharisee of the pharisees’ (ie…an extremely religious dude), would have been in his day, a man above reproach. He spoke about being alive as a child, but dying (spiritually) when he came to understand the ramifications of violating the law.
“But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me.” (Romans 7:8-11)
So sin causes death. But what is sin you might ask? Imagine you’re an archer, and you can hit the bullseye on the target every time. You can even split your own arrow which is smack dab in the middle of the bullseye of your target, you’re that good…
The only problem is, you keep shooting at the wrong target.
Sin is missing the mark. And you only have to miss it once, to be unacceptable by God’s standard. Truth be told, we miss the mark a lot more than just once. Which is why Jesus came down from heaven to be a man among mankind, living a perfect and sinless life to be that perfect sacrifice that God’s law demanded. Once He did that, He rose from the dead on the third day, and currently sits at the right hand of God the Father, interceding for those who place their faith and trust in Him.
So when a holy and righteous God looks down at me, He doesn’t see Pete, with all my faults and flaws, He sees’ the Pete covered in the righteous, atoning, sanctifying, blood of His only Son (Jesus).
I’m covered, not because I’m a good man, but because Jesus was a perfect man. When you become born again, you don’t automatically become Mr. Perfect in the flesh either. You still carry around that ‘old man’ which is your flesh. So, becoming a born again believer, you in effect have two natures. You have your newly revived (once dead) spiritual person, and you have that second part of your tri-partite nature, the soul. Your soul is your “psyche’ which is fed by the flesh: imagination, conscience, memory, reason, and affections is fed by what you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. So when Paul said he died when he came to understand the law, this isn’t what died. His spiritual man died.
When your born again, that spiritual man (or woman) is revived through the power in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
When a person, comes to the knowledge of this understanding, yet reject the free offer of salvation, they in effect default to zombie mode. They’re walking, talking, living and breathing, but their dead on the inside spiritually. Jesus didn’t mince words when He called the ‘religious leaders’ of His day “white washed tombs”. Pretty on the outside, but full of death and decay on the inside.
Worse yet, the unsaved can sense their dead spiritually, and they try and fill that gaping hole with anything and everything that can to take their mind off of it. I’m not sure of the connection, but for those of you who have never watched a zombie movie, they have quite the insatiable affinity for human brains. Kinda ironic if you ask me. But, the good news is, that terminal case of zombification is only terminal until you are born again.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)
If one rejects the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ, and they die that way, they in affect commit spiritual suicide. By rejecting Jesus, they’ve condemned their eternal self (the spirit) to eternal death in hell, separated from God forever. The more they reject that Holy Spirit’s drawing them to Christ, the more calloused they become toward the Gospel message and the Spirit’s drawing. Thats not to say, you get one chance and if you’ve rejected it, that’s it. God has brought many a lost case back from heading the wrong direction and done a miracle in their life.
You see, Jesus didn’t come down to earth and live a perfect life to make bad people good. He came down and sacrificed Himself to give dead people life. You and I were dead in our sins before we accepted Christ into our lives. Zombie movies shouldn’t scare you.
Spending an eternity in hell separated from your Creator should.
“Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)
What do you believe?
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