Tag: Yellowstone

Digging in Deeper: Romans 5:1-5

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“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is the worth of hope? That’s a trickier question to answer than it might appear at first glance. As a follower of Jesus, I would argue that hope gives our lives purpose and meaning and even direction. Hope gives us something to live toward. It brings the promise of a future that will be better than the present. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be hope at all; it would be dread. Yet this understanding of the nature – and more, the worthwhileness – of hope requires a certain view of the world to make sense. Absent that view, hope can seem like little more than foolish wishful thinking that will only serve to distract a person from what is really real, or of doing the hard work necessary to make our future plans a reality on our own. Hope, you see, requires us to surrender ourselves to someone higher and more powerful than we are; someone who knows and controls the future in a way we cannot. At a little more than four episodes in, this grimmer view of hope lies at the heart of the second prequel series to the hit series, Yellowstone, and the follow-up to the immensely popular first prequel series, 1883, called 1923. Today, let’s talk about how the series has been at the halfway mark, and why its worldview isn’t one worth adopting for ourselves.

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Digging in Deeper: Genesis 1:28-31

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“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.’ God also said, ‘Look, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the surface of the entire earth and every tree whose fruit contains seed. This will be food for you, for all the wildlife of the earth, for every bird of the sky, and for every creature that crawls on the earth – everything having the breath of life in it – I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed. Evening came and then morning: the sixth day.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When you start watching a particular television series, it sometimes takes a few episodes for the worldview of the writers to come out. In the first few episodes they are spending all their time introducing and establishing the main characters. They are revealing which characters are the protagonists and which are the antagonists. They are clarifying the various problems the characters are going to be facing together. And while you might get glimpses of the writers’ worldview in the midst of all of that, it is often difficult to tell which is the worldview they are promoting, and which are the worldviews they are simply presenting. This is all especially true for a traditional series that will run for 23 episodes. But as our television culture continues to shift in the direction of limited series of 8-13 episodes with higher production values (consider, for example, every single Disney+ original series), questions of worldview are being clarified much earlier. And so, as I recently watched the third episode of 1883, a major piece of its worldview was revealed, and I can’t help but to comment on it. I know we talked about the series earlier this week, but let’s come back to the series again this morning in more detail.

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