Resources/Articles
Movie Lava
A few summers ago I sat in a darkened movie theater, eating popcorn, watching a popcorn flick. You know the kind - movies that aren’t meant to be taken too seriously. On screen, the hero awakens from being tranquilized. He is woozy and unable to move. He looks around to discover he is surrounded by a steadily advancing flow of LAVA! The muscle-bound hero struggles to regain control of his faculties. He manages to roll just inches ahead of the fiery glow. He crawls up onto a LOG where he is temporarily safe from the liquid rock! I guffawed a little too loudly at this in the theater.
Folks, Hollywood has lied to us about the dangers of lava. This movie I was watching is only the latest example of many. Lava is portrayed in the movies according the rules of the childhood game “The Floor Is Lava.” Movie lava possesses the properties of, say, hot cooking oil or even boiling water. Somebody gets a foot in or a little bit gets onto a character’s arm - Ouch! That smarts! And they shake it off. Otherwise, so long as you don’t touch it, you can jump over it, lay right next to it, or have a lightsaber battle while hovering a few feet above the surface of a lava lake at the rolling foot of a cascading lava-fall. As long as you don’t fall into it, you’re safe.
The reality of danger and death by lava magnitudes worse. Lava flows at temperatures between 1,292º and 2,192ºF. Imagine the radiant heat from such temperatures in comparison to what you feel when you put your face near the open door of an oven set at 400º. Volcanologists have been flying in helicopters 1,000 feet over lava vents and felt the radiant heat through the windows! The horrible truth is, if you were on the wrong end of a lava flow, before the lava even got to you, the blast of superheated air and poisonous gases would kill you first by cooking your lungs and searing off all the nerve endings on your skin. In reality, you need to stay far away from lava. No playing, fighting, surfing, or couch-jumping anywhere near it - flee for your life! The very air surrounding it can hurt you.
Now that I think of it, lava is not the only deadly thing that Hollywood is good at pretending is far less dangerous than it is. The far worse examples are what they do with sex and violence. Even as the entertainment industry is eating itself alive in one sexual harassment and abuse scandal after another, they continue to flaunt their exposed bodies as a form of empowerment and portray sex as fun and consequence-free. This attitude is on display in the previews of every new sex romp comedy: Why, you can dance right up next to the line of fleshly corruption and then jump right on in! What could go wrong? What? The screenwriter of the vulgar yuck-fest, who is already on his third marriage and has a neglected teenage kid who’s already in rehab, was just accused of making unwanted advances toward the actresses he works with and has been summarily fired from every project he was working on? Nothing to see here, folks. That tragic mess is rated “R” for REAL.
The actual dangers of sexual immorality and casual violence are very plainly addressed in the pages of the Bible. The results are never pretty. “…Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two will become one flesh’” (1 Corinthians 6.16). “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality…things like these” (Galatians 5.19,21). (Impurity and sensuality are the “hot air” around the blazing full-contact hazard.) “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6.18). And if you thought the real-world facts of coming into contact with lava were gruesome - well, the consequences of premarital sex in Proverbs 5.8-11 aren't much prettier: “…At the end of your life you groan, when your flesh and body are consumed” (v. 11).
The same goes for movie violence. You can’t just shake off lava and you can’t just punch your way out of your problems. Getting smashed in the face doesn’t just result in a dab of blood at the corner of your mouth that’s gone in the next moment. Violence follows you. Try losing your temper, throwing that chair, smashing that picture, and see how quickly an officer will cart you off in cuffs to sign you up for state-sanctioned anger management. All someone has to do is call it in. “Do not envy a man of violence and do not choose any of his ways” (Proverbs 3.31-32). “The violence of the wicked will sweep them away, because they refuse to do what is just” (Proverbs 21.7). “These men lie in wait for their own blood; they set an ambush for their own lives” (Proverbs 1.18).
Sin is serious business, and we dare not let our impressions of it be formed by show business. After all, they cannot even get lava right.
“Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on” (Proverbs 4.14-15).
