“I will praise you because I have been remarkably and wondrously made. Your works are wondrous, and I know this very well.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Modern streaming services are not where one would naturally think to go in order to find content with messages that affirm and support the basic assumptions of the Christian worldview. Now, this doesn’t mean I’m abandoning my argument that the Gospel lies at the heart of all of the stories we tell. But most of the streaming content available these days, though perhaps Gospel-driven at some level, is usually much more conscious about advancing a narrative that is much more progressive in its worldview outlook. Given the passion with which the current cultural left embraces the pro-abortion position and opposes the pro-life position, you are even less likely to find something that celebrates the value of children and especially babies. Imagine my surprise, then, when I finally sat down to watch Netflix’s version of the celebrated stage show, Matilda, the Musical, and the opening song was about as profoundly pro-life in its tone as anything I’ve seen on a screen in a long time. This morning, let’s talk about Matilda, the Musical, and its wonderful reminder of just how much children matter.
I had heard of the musical version of the classic children’s book by Roald Dahl, Matilda, before I watched the Netflix version, but I didn’t know anything about it. Admittedly, knowing this was a modern adaptation of a classic from a generation ago, I didn’t expect much. I didn’t expect much because Dahl’s original work was just so good. Growing up, I read nearly every single one of his major novels. He wrote with such incredible imagination, warmth, and joy. His stories absolutely draw you into the world he created; a world where the possibilities were endless and where adventure was lying around every corner. It was a world where children were always the heroes, and adults who committed the cardinal sin of not liking children always got their just desserts in the end. He painted worlds where goodness and kindness always won the day. The imaginative world of his stories naturally lent itself to film productions, and sure enough, all of his major novels have been treated to film adaptations over the years, several of them more than once. Some of these have been true classics (Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, for instance), while others didn’t quite live up to the glory of the original (the 2020 version of Witches). The fact that his stories are just so tellable, though, will guarantee they’ll keep being told over and over and over.
Matilda is the story of a remarkable young girl with extraordinary intelligence who lives in horrible circumstances. Her father is a crooked used car salesman. Her mother is a lazy, entitled housewife. Neither of them had any interest in ever having children and resent Matilda greatly for messing up their perfect life. After some initial reluctance, which Matilda overcomes with the help of some clever pranks, her parents finally enroll her in a local school. The school’s Headmistress is a tyrant named Agatha Trunchbull who terrorizes the children whom she resents and hates. Matilda’s teacher, Miss Honey, is good and kind and loves her students fiercely. She and Matilda immediately form a strong bond. The rest of the story is about how Matilda navigates the travails of living with her crooked, no-good parents, rescues the school from Trunchbull’s tyranny, and restores a family fortune to Miss Honey who winds up adopting her to give her the home she always wanted.
The Netflix version of the musical mostly sticks to that script. In fact, it sticks a bit closer to the script than the 1996 film version did. What made the musical stand out so much to me was two things. First, it is a visual feast. The movie wonderfully captures the imaginative whimsy of Dahl’s storytelling worlds. The settings are all over the top. Matilda’s school looks like a prison inside and out. Her house captures all the smarmy cheeriness creating a thin veil over a more sinister snarkiness Dahl wrote into the original novel. Miss Honey’s house is small but homey. And the various dream sequences turn all of this wild imagery up to eleven.
Second, and even more importantly is the music. The songs are simply fantastic. The performances are terrific. The lyrics are clever and fun. “The School Song,” for instance, has a whole sequence where a series of lines start with successive letters (or at least the letter sounds) of the alphabet from A to Z, each one hitting right as the letter is shown above a different classroom door. The choreography for each song is outstanding as well. The whole thing is simply a delight.
What excited me the most, though, is how true the film stays to Dahl’s pro-children and pro-life vision of the world. Dahl loved children. This came out so clearly in all of his writings. That love is carried completely into this film such that it echoes loudly in every single scene. No scene captures this more clearly, though, than the opening number, “Miracle.” The song is the very first thing you see and provides the vehicle for the opening credits to roll. It opens with a series of adorable babies voiced by young singers who are singing about how their mommies and daddies think they are wonderful in various ways. This gives way to a sequence of parents (all of whom, it was not lost on me, are moms and dads as couples; there is not even a hint of a pro-LGBT undertone in this film) who are all mooning over their newborns, crowing about how amazing they are.
The next part of the song takes us to the office of an obstetrician who is having a conversation with what turns out to be Matilda’s mother. She refuses to believe she’s pregnant in spite of the fact that she is very obviously pregnant, and continues doubting the doctor’s insistence that she is right up to the point that her contractions start and she has to be helped onto a delivery table. The doctor, then, goes on to sing about how every life is a miracle and should be celebrated accordingly.
It’s hard to imagine a song that flies more in the face of the culture of death that is advancing in this nation and in spite of the Supreme Court’s welcome overturning of Roe v Wade last June. This past election day saw voters from one state preserve an abortion law that allows the terrible practice to occur all the way up until the moments before a mother gives birth. Voters from another state rejected a law that would have mandated that children who are born alive after an abortion attempt must receive medical care to preserve their life rather than being left to die as is the documented case in more than one abortion clinic around the country. In too many places today life is treated as something inconvenient at best. We make ourselves the ones who determine which lives are worth keeping and which are not. Those we decide are not – a group that includes the unborn, the elderly, the infirm, and as is disturbingly the case in Canada, anyone who is simply inconvenient for the state or even an individual family to care for whether for reasons of physical suffering, emotional pain, or even poverty – are disposable. Life and the people living it are too often treated as problems to be solved rather than the miracles they truly are. In the face of all this celebration of death, “Miracle” offers a wonderful and needed counterpoint.
If you are looking for something to watch this weekend, Netflix’s Matilda the Musical is most definitely worth your time. And, just for fun, and because it is just so good, here’s “Miracle” for you to enjoy. Happy Friday.
The Nexus 
The god of the Bible wrote a prescription for priests to terminate the pregnancy of a woman who’s husband suspected her of infidelity. Your god was the first abortion doctor.
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Thanks for taking the time to read and engage with the post. The charge you make is indeed a serious one and one worth taking seriously. The challenges it faces are multiple. First, it lacks any other support in the Scriptures. Making a broad characterization of God like this on the basis of a single passage (which isn’t well-understood…more on that in a moment) without any other passages in any other document to support it, and with several passages (like the one cited in this post) that would seem to explicitly refute it weakens the strength of the charge considerably. Second, the passage to which you are referring from Numbers 5 is not well-understood by scholars. The language and euphemisms are tricky to ferret out exactly what’s going on and what is being described. Most scholars, though, would take the position that the water mixed with dust from the floor of the tabernacle (hardly a “prescription”) is described as potentially causing a stillbirth or a miscarriage, but only in a woman who was in fact guilty of adultery and then only if she happened to be pregnant in the first place. Medically speaking, this water mixed with dust wouldn’t do anything. Third, but related to the second, the purpose of the ritual described in Numbers 5 has to be taken on its own terms and not viewed through a modern cultural lens. When we explore the culture in which it was first written down, we begin to understand that this was a giant leap forward in terms of protection for and justice for the accused women that was not found in the broader culture. It seems the whole purpose was to use something the jealous man would accept to prove her innocence. Because we don’t see any evidence of this ritual ever being used, and because no reference to it is made again in the Scriptures, this was almost certainly something that was timestamped in terms of its window of application and use for God’s people. Fourth, in the bigger picture, I am firmly of the belief that modern followers of Jesus are not beholden to the Old Testament law. Jesus gave us a new command: Love one another as I have loved you. That’s our only operating instructions. Everything else we do is merely an application of that one thing. Commands in the Old Testament were part of the covenant God made with Israel, not us. If we come across the occasional spot that seems to present the character of God in a way the rest of the Scriptures don’t support, my assumption is that I’m missing something, not that this one thing somehow completely refutes the rest of how He is presented in the Scriptures. In this case, and to finally get to my direct response, I don’t believe this passage presents God as condoning, let alone giving a prescription for abortion at all. Thanks again for taking the time to engage with this post. I really do appreciate your doing that.
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Do you have those same doubts, enough for several paragraphs, about the veracity of any other scripture? No doubt the scriptures you agree with need not be viewed through a “cultural lens” or are subject to such scrutiny. It is very clear what this scripture describes. It jives perfectly with the mentality of the times. There is no ambiguity. And of course it didn’t work. Neither does the blood of a pigeon cure leprosy. The god of the Bible was a poor doctor all around. Really good at killing, very bad at making people well.
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I didn’t intend to communicate any doubt, but rather interpretive humility. I think the bigger issue here is that you seem to be coming at the matter here with an anti-supernatural worldview lens. If I am in error on that, I apologize in advance. If I am not, however, that worldview lens will force you to draw conclusions about the Scriptures that diverge rather wildly from those I draw owning to my rather paradigmatically opposing worldview lens.
I don’t suspect (although I certainly hope) either of us will convince the other of the worthwhileness and truth of the perspective we bring to the matter. When you go to the text from a position of committed unbelief, looking for reasons to justify your skepticism, you will indeed be able to find many. And while we could forever debate the minutiae of a thousand different passages, absent a worldview shift on either of our parts, I suspect we will find very little interpretive common ground.
Ultimately, the debate that matters most is whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. If He did, then He is worth following regardless of whether or not you understand or even agree with isolated passages scattered across the Old Testament. While I am rather firmly of the belief that there is much more reason for faith and acceptance than doubt and rejection, nothing you’ll find to potentially criticize or question in the Old Testament has any bearing on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. Focus your efforts there and you’ll find more fruit coming from your labors. To put that another way, answer the question of who Jesus is first, and the rest can come later.
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I think you’re way too smart to insult both of our intellects like that. It isn’t like atheists have different definitions for words or don’t understand world events, cultures, timelines, or paradigms. Believe me, we get it.
Jesus is neither here nor there. What you must contend with is the absolute fact that your god put in his holy word a prescription for a priest to administer to a pregnant female with the intent to terminate a pregnancy. And with that knowledge have no choice to admit that your pro life stance is non biblical.
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I appreciate the compliment and mean no insult at all. Jesus and the resurrection are actually right at the center of understanding here. Paul called Him the image of the invisible God. In other words, we can learn about God’s character by looking at Jesus. This is only true, though, if He rose from the dead. And from Jesus’ revealing God’s character, we understand that God is good and righteous and just and holy. Abortion is none of those things. It is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. Therefore, if something in an otherwise obscure part of the Old Testament that receives literally no other mention in the rest of the Scriptures seems to paint God’s character in another way, we lean into what Jesus revealed about God’s character and operate on the assumption that we’re not understanding something as fully as we could such that things appear at first glance other than they are.
Coming back to this passage yet again, though, when you go back to the original Hebrew and spend some time reading through what guys who have spent their lives studying the language have to say, they’re all pretty uniform on the fact that understanding exactly what is meant by the text here isn’t as clear as perhaps you would like it to be.
On what you continue to refer to as a “prescription,” we have already agreed that, medically speaking, drinking this water wouldn’t have done anything. The whole point of this ritual was to take the judgment of this woman out of the hands of her likely unjustifiably jealous husband and out of the hands of the priests, and to put it instead in the hands of God. The intent of this act was not to end a pregnancy, but using mechanisms that would have made sense in the culture when this was first written, but which seem horrible now after some 3,000 years of culture change, put this woman in the hands of the God who is good and righteous and just and holy. The outcome in this case was going to be just with an eye toward mercy as is always the case when He acts. In other words, what you call an “absolute fact” isn’t really that at all. Thus, I am not locked into the position you hold at all.
As for your final statement, given the position of the various guys who contributed to the Scriptures as a whole on the matter of life, one passage whose intent and outcome are open to interpretation does not at all undercut the pro-life position.
It really does come down to perspective. When you come at the Scriptures from a standpoint of unbelief, even though you are using the same words and can bring the same understanding to world events, cultures, timelines, paradigms, and etc., you are going to see different things and come to different conclusions than the person who is coming at them from the standpoint of faith. It is not for no reason the apostle Paul wrote that “the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.” That does not by any means suggest Christians are somehow better than non-Christians, but rather that they bring a different perspective to things thanks to the help of God’s Spirit. To come back to my point one last time: perspective really does make a difference in what you see here and everywhere else in the Scriptures.
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How about the perspective of the likely tens of women who drank this cruel joke and surprise! had a miscarriage and were then stoned to death.
I’ve read the Old Testament. I know the nature of its god. Capricious, evil, misogynistic, and genocidal. A lot like the men that created him.
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Like a great many of the laws of the Pentateuch, we don’t have any evidence it was ever practiced. Israel tended to be pretty weak on actually keeping the Law. And, if for some reason they were in a mood to follow the Law to the letter, if the woman was guilty of adultery, and if she had become pregnant, and if God decided that the appropriate punishment for her sin was the loss of her child (which is the only way acting like a miscarriage could have happened; also children have always had to pay the price for foolish things their parents have done; I suspect we can agree on that whether we attribute it to God or not), then in that case she wouldn’t be stoned to death at all (if they were following the Law carefully) because that could only happen if the man who was equally guilty with her was known. Without his being known, she couldn’t be stoned to death per the Law. It was both of them or neither of them.
More significantly, though, if that is the perspective you’ve come away with from reading the Old Testament, then you haven’t really understood it at all. That actually proves the point I’ve been making the whole time. You can’t to it with a skeptical eye from the start and found evidence to justify the perspective you already had.
While there are certainly some passages that are hard for us to grapple with, and the justice and judgment of a holy and righteous God are often hard for us to understand, the evidence for a God who is just and loving and kind and compassionate and merciful and good is pretty overwhelming. I’m genuinely sorry you can’t see it. But perspective really makes all the difference.
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My strong encouragement is as it has been this whole conversation: go back and start with Jesus. If He wasn’t resurrected, continue in your unbelief and pity me for continuing in my belief. If He was raised from the dead, though, follow Him whether or not you have the Old Testament figured out. He’ll take care of the rest.
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