It was an enjoyable joy-ride following Cruise as he transforms from a "I'm not a soldier" army-deserter to the ultimate hero ready to sacrifice his all for the world. Here was a reluctant soldier dragged into a war which would determine the course not only of his own future but the future of the world , for better or for worse, depending on the choices he made. If we think about it, life really isn't a walk in the park, much as we wish it were so. In fact, if we realized there is a very subtle 'war' going on for our very souls, we wouldn't be so laid-back about the choices we make every day. Because we don't get to 'come back', unlike the hero who, at each stage of another death, gets to re-live that day and decide on a different course of action to change the sequence so that he advances further. The objective was to somehow get to destroy Omega - the "brains" behind the aliens - to save the world from annihilation. It happens so often as Emily Blunt, the hot-shot female lead puts it, "..just re-set"...like a computer game that gets instant replay with a click of the mouse.
I wonder indeed if life has a re-set button, what would we do different? Deep down, I guess if it was possible, we all don't mind getting a 2nd/3rd/4th/ad infinitum chance to do or not do certain things, to choose how to decide certain issues all over again. But the reality is we only have 1 life on this earth, at least for Christians. We will have a next life, but it's not going to be a repeated re-living on this planet as it is - thank God for that. We won't have to wonder how many life-times we need to 'make good' enough to qualify for eternal sainthood. Heck, those who believe are already called living saints, though I know many of us don't quite live up to that honor and honestly don't deserve the accolade. But that's our fault, not God's.
Our heavenly Father doesn't wait for us to get our lives all perfect before He blesses, though He does call and empower us to do it along this road called life. I don't have to drag around baggages of my past wrongs and try to balance out my scales with another 10, 100, or 10000 good deeds. That would be a most miserable game because I know I could never win it; all the brownie points I 'earn' feeding the homeless for 1 Saturday would be nullified by my outbursts of temper with the kids, or harboring resentment and hiding prejudices in my heart against people I don't particularly like, or telling 'little' white-lies for my own convenience, or making excuses for this, that or the other thing which I should/shouldn't have done. Imagine, if everyday I just did 3 'little' wrongs or didn't do right, in 1 year I would have collected about 1000 'demerits'.
Besides how can one 'cancel' out what already has been done wrong by doing another right? I am sure getting 99 answers right in an exam can't erase or change the 1 wrong on record. So theoretically it doesn't matter how many lifetimes I come back - all that I can do in this current life-time can't possibly change what I have already done in my past. What's worse, all the wrong I do (and there is no doubt I will do them, fallible human that I am) in this current life-time is just going to be accumulated to the last page of my previous lives....man, that's a horrible thought....how many minus-es would I end up with eventually?? - I could never break free, going round and round in an endless circle of life-times.....
Like Tom Cruise keeps getting stuck every time he gets another shot at life. Until he realizes if you wanna change the ending, you gotta go back to the very beginning, the source of it all. If you wanna kill a tree, you don't waste time and energy chopping off branches or tearing up leaves - you pull out the roots. Come to think of it, that in a nutshell is what redemption is all about. God didn't waste time giving us a million lives to 'improve' ourselves; He knew we can never do it, because we are all infected with the 'sin' gene in our hearts, no thanks to Adam and Eve playing around in the garden and doing what they were told expressly not to do. No, it's not about sex (if that's what you have jumped to), not all sex is sin. And it's not about eating, though gluttony is a sin. It was about choosing to go their own way. In short it was about disobedience and rebellion, which not just they but all mankind is guilty of, right through the generations. Today, everyday we still choose to go our own way. And God, being the perfect gentleman, lets us....even though He knows it will lead to our ruin, eventually. We will reap what we sow. That's an unchangeable law. But in His great love and mercy for us, He provided an escape clause. Not by repealing the law but by fulfilling it, through another way.
Just like Tom Cruise finally wised up to a different way. God went straight for the heart of man; that's the root of our problem with God. He chose the way of love. A pure heart for diseased ones. A sinless life in exchange for sinful ones. And since there was no human that could ever meet those standards, He gave His very own Jesus Christ to bear the consequence of man's sin - death. As the hero in the movie lost his life to kill the (root)enemy, Jesus did what had to be done to deal with our problem once and for all. He hung on the cross to die for us, so we need not have to stay dead, physically and spiritually, condemned as we now already are by our sin. And just as the hero miraculously lived again in a totally new day, having averted the catastrophe of the future, Jesus resurrected from the grave to give mankind a certain hope for a safe tomorrow.
The only difference between the 2 being: one account is a Hollywood movie scripted by humans, the other is the most incredible and amazing master-plan inspired and executed by a divine Author intent on saving His precious creation at all costs, even unto death. The Hollywood version entertained my mind for 2 hours. The biblical version grabs my heart; turns my life upside down, inside out, forever.
"For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Me will find it" - Matthew 16:25
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