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Deep Thoughts, With Fall Out Boy



"They say the captain goes down with the ship So, when the world ends Will God go down with it?"

--Fall Out Boy, "What A Catch, Donnie," (2008) "Folie a Deux" LP.


--

It's a solid question, actually. The answer is surprising: yes. God did, in a sense, go down with the ship. We could see the world as we know it after the fall of mankind as in a certain way dominated by evil. God had of course promised to redeem, right from the beginning, but until the death of Christ, the great blow against evil had not been struck.

From one angle, the crucifixion of Jesus is the high point of the work of evil in the world. That's why his glorious resurrection is so important: if evil can't win there, evil can't win. Jesus consented to let the powers of evil do their worst to him. In the new world created by his resurrection, we want and expect good to take the place of evil. I won't sit here and say that it's going to continue to get better until the end, but the Cross (which implies the resurrection) tells us that we are winning, and have won.

Seen in another way, the world has ended multiple times. The people of God must have thought the world was ending when the Temple was desecrated and destroyed. The flood recorded in Genesis 6-9 sure looks like the end of the world, for those who experienced it. When the rebuilt Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. it must have seemed like the end of the world again.

We can read the so-called "Olivet discourse" in Matthew 24, to see specific language that sounds like the end of the world. Yet somehow Jesus knew that what he would do at the Cross would set things right, because he said, "Behold, I am making all things new!"

Honestly, I don't think even churchgoers really understand how radical Christianity is. A pastor friend of mine was talking the other day about how Christians, if they understand the story that God is telling correctly, they don't have to be afraid of the end of the world. Jesus redeemed us so that we were not afraid of the end of the world, but we could welcome it. The only way that it's truly going to work is if we are spiritually awake and alert, because we don't want to be ashamed, when he comes to find us.

Regular readers by now are becoming accustomed to my familiarity and affection for popular music. Really, I just do it to make Bryan Cross think that he might be missing out on something. Perhaps he is, at that. I would like to think that even my leisure time of listening to music can be taken captive to true reality, and these lyrics caught my attention. It was worth a note.

For the simple sake of enjoyment, I can say that I really enjoy the singing of Patrick Stump, the lead singer of Fall Out Boy. They sound like a soul singer started a hard rock band. You can definitely do worse. Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates sang with him. He certainly didn't do too bad, covering their songs.                                                   

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