Escaping Our Shrunken Worlds
The Truman Show and Ephesians 1
A few weeks ago, my family took our annual beach vacation. One of the things I appreciate most about vacation is the perspective change. When you’re a creature of routine as I am, it’s easy to get locked into a world that’s much smaller than the actual world. I wake up at the same time every day and go to the same places to do the same things. Such routine is good in that it provides structure for my life, but, as with most things, there’s also danger involved. It’s possible to get so locked into the machinery of your routine that you lose sight of everything outside of it. Vacation always helps by interrupting my routine and reminding me that there’s a whole big world out there beyond the reach of my daily existence.
For an extreme example of this dynamic, consider the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey, The Truman Show. The movie centers on Truman Burbank, a man who unknowingly lives his entire life on the set of a 24/7 reality TV show. Everyone in his life—all his co-workers, friends, and family as well as the “extras” that pass him on the street—are actors. He’s the only person in his world unaware that it’s all fake. Truman Burbank lives his life in a shrunken world of human design.
The Truman Show comes to my mind every time I read Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesians 1:17–23. He prays that God would give the church “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him,” and that the eyes “of their heart may be enlightened.” He prays that they would live with awareness of God’s “immeasurable greatness” by which he raised Christ from the dead and sat him “in the heavens—far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come.”
Paul seems to be suggesting that we are all living our own version of The Truman Show. Before Christ “makes us alive” through the gospel, we live “according to the ways of this world” in obedience to the “ruler of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2). Dead in our sin, we pass our days pursuing our “fleshly desires” (Eph 2:3). As a result, we live within a shrunken reality. We have reduced the world to the confines of our daily routine and limited reality to only what our eyes can see. Like a child that’s never gone outside, we strategize ways to find fulfillment in the paltry things our eyes behold because we mistakenly believe that’s all there is.
Paul believes that salvation in Christ effectually rips the canopy of our shrunken world. When God “makes us alive with Christ” (Eph 2:4), he opens the skylight to a new reality that formerly wasn’t available to us. Christ leads his people out of the limited confines of a shrunken world. He wants us to live in the new reality of his triumph over every rival power. He wants us to realize that there is always more going on than what our physical eyes can process. He wants us to learn to interpret every experience through the lens of Christ’s victory and present reign.
Paul understands that such a perspective is not automatic. That’s why he fervently prays that the church would gain it. Satan’s work is to shrink, to deceive, to divide, and to blind, and he’s really good at what he does. He’s got centuries of practice. He’s mastered the art of tricking humans into believing that reality is only what they can see and touch. He’s even given it fancy names like “empiricism” and “the scientific understanding.” Lately, he’s even found a way to ensure that humans spend more than a fourth of their conscious day staring into the shrunken world of their iPhone screens.
You will not thrive as a Christian in a shrunken world. We must learn to “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). How do we pull this off? Imagine every engagement with Scripture, every Sunday of worshiping with the church, every prayer, and every spiritual conversation with a Christian friend as opening new windows out of the shrunken world and into the reality of Christ. Does that motivate you toward these practices more? I pray that it does.