Podcast Special Edition: God in Firefly and Serenity

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“I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done.”
-Isaiah 46:9-10

We’re doing something special today. We’re going to talk about Firefly. The reason for this is to mark the release of my new book, One Power in the ’Verse: Finding God in Firefly and Serenity. It is available now, if you go through my website, www.paullytle.com. We should have it on Amazon.com in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for it.

This book looks at Joss Whedon’s science fiction series Firefly and its sequel Serenity from a Christian point of view. Which some may find very strange, since Joss Whedon isn’t a Christian. To which I would reply, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll try to explain why.

There’s a scene in Serenity where River, a young woman who has been conditioned and trained by the government, is in a bar. While there, she sees a commercial with an embedded hypnotic suggestion. She flips out and beats everyone up. And I mean everyone – men, women, she’s just wailing on the whole crowd. Her brother Simon comes in, and he speaks a certain phrase that causes her to sleep, obviously another hypnotic suggestion.

I’m not going to tell you the whole story, because I’d rather you see the movie if you have not already. But this scene is critic to the telling of the tale.

I like movies for many reasons, but one of the reasons I like movies is because the filmmakers arrange things so that we can see the whole story in one sitting. This never happens in life. In life, we see pieces usually, not the whole thing. We only rarely get to see something through. Most of the time, stories pass us by unresolved.

With movies, we get the whole thing. In a way, I think this is how God sees things. He knows what’s going on with all of the players, their entrances and exits, and He knows how it all ends.

I know how Serenity ends. I’ve seen it. Several times, in fact. So I know what that scene in the bar really signifies. The people in the bar probably never knew. Can you imagine those people telling their grandkids about the time a 90-pound girl wigged out in a bar and beat everyone up? “Why did she do that, gramps?” “Booze, kids. I stopped drinking that day. I’ll never pick up the bottle again!” Whatever they would tell their grandkids, if they said anything at all, it would undoubtedly miss the point. They could not know.

We can’t really know exactly what is going on in our lives either. Not ultimately. Not fully. Not in this life. But God does, and He doesn’t always move in the ways we think He will.

When He sent His Son, everyone kind of expected that Son to conquer the world. Instead, He was crucified. He died. The disciples were rather confused, and they hide themselves. How could this have happened?

It happened because that’s what we needed to be saved. Jesus could have taken over the world. But if He did, we’d still have the problem of sin. We’re all sinners, every one of us. We’ve sinned in lust, pride, arrogance, undue anger, ambition, and selfishness. And the rightful punishment for a sinner is death. Sound harsh? Imagine if we all brought our sins into heaven. We’d make the place just like earth, and we’ve made earth pretty rotten.

But God loved us so much that He sent His Son, not to take over politically, but to die. In that death, Jesus took the punishment we were supposed to have. Now if we repent and believe in Him, we will be forgiven, and we will be given His Spirit so we do not need to sin again. Then He rose again.

Most people thought it was a strange way of going about things, for God to have sent His Son to die. If I were in that bar when River flipped out, I would think it pretty strange too, but it was important.

In the end, God can use a show like Firefly too, even if its creator doesn’t know it. God works like that. That’s what the book is about. I hope you’ll check it out.