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If life is a story, who's the bad guy?

by James Barringer  
12/19/2009 / Bible Studies


A good story only needs a few things to make it really click. It needs a good guy, a larger-than-life good guy who you can root for. It needs a bad guy, someone really sinister, who hates everything the good guy stands for. And it needs a conflict between the two of them. You can add other, more complicated elements if you want to, but if you write a story with just those three things, it will be a good story. Don't you think it's really strange that all people, everywhere, respond this way to a good story? Isn't it odd that those elements of story are universal across cultures, languages, and media?

We cheer on the good guy. We feel anger for the bad guy. We are moved to tears by the conflict and its resolution. Isn't it odd that we could be so affected by fictional characters and fictional stories? Maybe it's not. Many authors smarter than me have suggested that stories resonate with us because we're in one. This story called life has all the things that we respond to. It has a really good Good Guy, a strong and loving Guy who has done amazing things all throughout history. It has a really nasty bad guy who does vile things. And there is a conflict between them, spanning thousands of years and with consequences that will last for eternity. That's an incredible story, something really epic.

The question is, in this crazy story called life, who is the bad guy?

The standard answer among Christians seems to be "Satan." C.S. Lewis observes that Christians seem to have promoted Satan to demi-god status, crediting him with almost everything that goes wrong with the world, suggesting that he has the power to really give God a run for his money. Some people use this idea of spiritual battle as their whole paradigm for viewing Christianity, as if God and Satan are actually locked in a struggle, as if Satan is strong enough to stop God's plan in its tracks. The obvious problem is: what does this do to God's omnipotence? Scripture refers to him as "the Almighty," but can he really be almighty if he's not mighty enough to snap Satan in half like a twig?

Biblically speaking, there is very little about Satan to support the idea of him as the "big bad" within the Christian story. He's mentioned basically twice in the Old Testament, once in Genesis where he tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, and again in Job, where he has to ask God for permission to do anything at all. Most people believe those are the two earliest books written in the Bible. After them, Satan basically takes a two thousand year hiatus, only popping up again a few times in the gospels, a few times in Paul, and once apiece in letters by Peter and James. The Bible spends more time describing the decorations in Solomon's temple (1 Kings 7) than it does on the machinations of Satan. Nobody in the Bible is running around terrified of him. Almost nobody in the Bible even mentions him. He can't possibly be the antagonist. So who is?

It's us. You and me. We're the enemies of God. Or rather, we were.

It says so right in Romans 5:10. "For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life?" Paul says it plainly. The enemy was us. The bad guys, the antagonists, the people who broke God's rules and incurred his wrath and spread sin and chaos throughout his perfect creation...were us.

Satan may have tempted Eve, but he didn't cause the fall of humanity; Adam and Eve did that when they ate the fruit. Anything you could say about Satan is equally true of me. Rebelled against God? Got other people to disobey God? Blasphemed, sowed hatred and conflict, undermined peace? I'm guilty of all those things. Satan may or may not have played a part in getting me to do them, but they were all my conscious choice. And that made me, prior to about age 21, the enemy of God. I was the bad guy.

This is really the opposite of the way we view stories most of the time. We like rooting for the good guy and we like hating the bad guy. If we imagine ourselves in the story, we're usually the good guy; we wish we could be the ones who get the glory by beating the bad guy, or scoring the winning goal against the Russians, or saving the townspeople from whoever's oppressing them. That's the role we want to assume in the story. What a shock to realize that all along we have been the oppressor, the person who - maybe without even realizing it - has been undermining everything the Good Guy has been trying to accomplish.

Why else do so many people insist on referring to themselves as "good people"? I read recently that 64% of Americans believe they're going to heaven, while 0.07% believe they're going to hell. We want to be the good guy. We can't stomach the idea that we are the problem, we are what's wrong with the world. I think this is why a lot of people have a hard time accepting the Christian message. No one would dispute that they have done things wrong, because the good guy is sometimes imperfect. But for some reason they reject the idea that they need forgiveness for their sins. Why? We don't want to be the bad guy. We want to believe we've been doing it right all along. We want to be the hero of our own stories. We don't want to believe that we're the villain of the world's story, and that it's the real Hero's job to destroy us.

But what a perplexing destruction it is, because the way the Hero destroys the villain is by loving him. Elsewhere in Romans, Paul says, "God showed his love for us in that while we were yet sinners [enemies], Christ died for us." Even though we were ignoring him and rebelling against him, God still loved us enough to pursue us. See, he didn't just want to kill us. He wanted to kill the part of us that made us the villain, so that we can be the heroes we've wanted to be all along. That's why Paul also says, in 2 Corinthians 5, "Whoever is in Christ is a new creation; the old is gone, the new has come." The old self, the sinful enemy self, is dead. God killed it and resurrected us as people who hate sin and love doing what is good, "giving us the desire and power to do what pleases him," as Philippians 2 says. See, we were the enemy. But by God's love and salvation, we have come over to the good guy's side after all. We're not living for ourselves anymore, sowing pride and greed and hatred. Now we're living for God, as best we can, trying to sow love and peace and patience and kindness and joy.

Have you ever read or seen a story where the bad guy comes over to the good guy's side in the end? There's something incredible when a villain rejects all the things he used to stand for and comes to believe in beauty and love. Why do our hearts respond to that idea? I think it's because we see shades of ourselves in the villain, and we want - we need - for him to be redeemed, for beauty and love to win.

In closing, I want to say that you can tell a lot about the good guy by the way he sees the villain. An ordinary good guy will oppose the villain, seeking to kill him or stop him. God, the ultimate Good Guy, takes no pleasure in destroying wicked people, and says so very explicitly in Ezekiel 19. He could destroy us, but he would rather love us. He would rather let us become heroes along with him, to fulfill these dreams we've always had about ourselves, to play the role for real that we play in our heads when we daydream. That's what makes him the real Good Guy. While we were still his enemies, he loved us so much that he sent Jesus to die for our sins so that we could become good guys too. That's the story we live. You can see traces of it in every other story that's ever touched your soul, and now you know why you respond to it. It's the story that God is inviting us to. It's a story as big and raw and real as humanity itself, and it's the story our souls crave for. And it's time to put your hand in the Good Guy's hand and let him tell you what being a good guy is all about.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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