One of my favorite lighter moments in the otherwise gritty movie The Dark Knight is when Lucius Fox lets accountant Coleman Reese into his office to discuss Mr. Reese’s financial findings, during which Reese implies Bruce Wayne is Batman and tries to blackmail Lucius. The dialogue ended like this:
Lucius Fox: [to Reese] Let me get this straight, you think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person?
[Reese’s face falls and Fox smiles]
Lucius Fox: Good luck.
Of course Reese leaves rather pale and tight-lipped. As he should. His plan was pretty short-sighted. But, as naïve as he was, don’t we tend to do the same thing? Don’t we inflate our sense of knowledge and position in our relationship with God? It has often bothered me when I read discussions about whether the virgin birth or any of the miracles of the Bible could have actually happened. Not so much from unbelievers, whom I would expect to be skeptical, but from Christians. There are no ends to the attempts to find naturalistic rationales for them and that is well and good, but I think we’re losing sight of something. To borrow style from Mr. Lucius Fox:
“So, the God you’re debating about is the all-powerful Creator of the universe Who spoke into existence everything-enough atoms to form billions of galaxies; gravity, magnetism, all known and unknown forces; and time itself. He Whom even the angels that continuously give Him praise in His presence cannot look upon. And you wonder whether that God can cause a woman to give birth without the contribution of a man? Turn water to wine? Split the Red Sea? Destroy the earth with a flood and reshape it however He desires? Raise the dead?”
But it really isn’t just in issues that are common battlefields of apologetics. It’s in our daily lives. We doubt Him so often. “Surely He can’t heal this disease”, “Surely I can’t speak up at work or I’d lose my job”, “Surely I can’t be expected to give to others in need-how will I make it?”
Our view of Who God is often limits Him to the dimensions of what we can understand, what we perceive as achievable. Which is little wonder. We’re finite beings with inflated senses of who we are in the grand backdrop of existence. But God is bigger, much bigger in every sense than we have the ability to reason out. Christ said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” (Luke 17:6, ESV)
As a closing note, I have to mention, later in The Dark Knight, Coleman Reese was going to tell Bruce Wayne’s secret in hopes of stopping the Joker’s attacks. This put Reese in immediate mortal danger from the Joker who was just having too much “fun” to stop. Bruce Wayne ends up risking his life to save Reese. There’s a pretty powerful metaphor in that as well.
Brett Armstrong 
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