The following thoughts were inspired by being read the 14th chapter of Matthew. It contains the episode where Jesus walks on water, then calls Peter to come to Him, and then Peter briefly walks on water as well.
This episode is so well-known that nearly everyone has heard of it, even if they have never read Matthew. There are paintings of it, songs about it, and so forth. It is so iconic that we tend to think of walking on water as one of Jesus’ characteristic moves. It’s as if He came to earth with a checklist, and on that list, a few items above “die and rise again,” was “walk on water.”
However, that is not the way it comes off if you read the entire chapter. Jesus has spent most of Matthew ch. 14 reacting to things.
First, He hears that His cousin and friend John was just executed by Herod, for the most arbitrary reason. He tries to “withdraw by boat to a solitary place,” presumably to do some praying and grieving over John. But when He gets there, a large crowd has followed Him. So He adjusts His plans and spends some time healing their sick. Then, it transpires that they are out in the middle of nowhere and there are families who haven’t brought anything to eat, so Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish in a very low-key way, again apparently in response to the need of the crowd.
Then, finally, He sends the disciples away in the boat and He goes and has a private prayer-and-grieving time until about 2 a.m. And then, his friends are out on the boat in the middle of the lake, and He needs to get to them. So for whatever reason, He decides to walk out to them on the water. Again, it seems more like a problem-solving move than a planned demonstration of His power.
When being read this chapter recently, for the very first time it occurred to me to wonder, “Why did He take it into His head to do that?” I mean, what a funny thing to do. Walk on water.
We don’t usually see Jesus using His divine powers just for fun. I mean, in theory, He could have flown if He’d wanted to. But we never see Him flying. We never see Him do any number of miracles that He could have done just to amuse Himself.
That’s what tickles me about His decision to walk on water. It comes off as unnecessary, creative, even playful. Jesus knew how to respond to changing circumstances and go with the flow.
Now, to be clear, Jesus was also capable of planning. I have mentioned before that, as the prototype human, I believe He perfectly embodied all the personality types. So while capable of responding creatively to contingencies, He also knew how to stay on-mission and work the plan. There are many examples of this. He knew that He would eventually be killed in Jerusalem, but we see Him saying “my time has not yet come” to go public. He says at one point, “I was sent to the lost sheep of Israel,” meaning that His primary teaching was for the Jews, though He was fully aware that the changes He would work in the world would soon encompass the Gentiles too.
Closer to our theme, some of Jesus’ miracles do seem to be done intentionally to make a point, either about who He is, or what His Father actually meant by the Law. He would sometimes intentionally heal people on the Sabbath, even in a synagogue, in order to open the discussion about what Sabbath regulations were actually legit. He delayed going to visit Lazarus until Lazarus had died, because He knew the time had come to a do a big, public resurrection right near Jerusalem. That was a case of “Look, everybody, I’m about to do a miracle.” But at the same time, He couldn’t be baited into “giving a sign” by people who were never going to accept any sign.
But others of His miracles–and these are my favorites–are a response to people and circumstances. He turned water into wine at Cana (again, in a really low-key way) because … well, because they had run out of wine. He healed the Canaanite woman’s demon-possessed daughter because she charmed Him with the way she asked. And I think this walking-on-water thing is in the same category. He needed to get to the boat, so He walked to the boat. Peter said, “If it’s really you, tell me to come to you on the water” … so Jesus told him to come. It was only later that this incident became super iconic and super spiritually symbolic and all that. At the time, it was just Jesus making a decision that this was the quickest and easiest way to get back to His friends. And I love Him for it.
Somewhere about the year A.D. 178 Celsus wrote one of the bitterest attacks upon Christianity that was ever written. It was precisely this appeal of Christianity to the common people that he ridiculed. He declared that the Christian point of view was, ‘Let no cultured person draw near, none wise, none sensible; for all that kind of thing we count evil; but if any man is ignorant, if any is wanting in sense and culture, if any is a fool let him come boldly.’
It was precisely this that was the glory of Christianity. In the [Roman] Empire there were sixty million slaves. In the eyes of the law a slave was a ‘living tool,’ a thing and not a person at all. A master could fling out an old slave as he could fling out an old spade or hoe. He could amuse himself by torturing his slaves; he could even kill them. For them there was no such thing as marriage; even their children belonged to the master, as the lambs of the fold belonged not to the sheep but to the shepherd. Christianity made people who were things into real men and women, more into sons and daughters of God; it gave those who had no respect, their self-respect; it gave those who had no life, life eternal; it told men that, even if they did not matter to other men, they still mattered intensely to God. It told men who, in the eyes of the world were worthless, that, in the eyes of God they were worth the death of His only Son. Christianity was, and still is, the most uplifting thing in the whole universe.
–from The Letters to the Corinthians, a commentary by William Barclay, pp. 21 – 22
I’m posting this review in the spooky month of October, a long time after the movie came out. People who are big Backrooms fans have already seen the movie, watched or listened to reviews, and written or uploaded their own reviews. This essay is not for them. It’s for readers of my blog, who, unless I miss my guess, are not familiar with Backrooms lore and perhaps have not seen the movie.
Teens, and Liminal Spaces
The Backrooms was an independent horror movie made by a young director, but the director did not originate the idea of the backrooms (which I will now stop capitalizing). I happen to know a little bit about where the backrooms originally arose as a mythology. The reason is that I am a mother of teenagers.
Well before the movie came out, my teens had acquainted me with backrooms images and lore. Apparently, the phenomenon began with Internet accounts such as Creepypasta posting images of liminal spaces.
Liminal spaces, which always figure big in mythology, are “in between” spaces. They may be the beach (neither sea nor land), the threshold of a doorway, the wilderness between the borders of kingdoms, or the like. There are also liminal times–dawn and dusk. Humans have long had the uneasy feeling that liminal spaces and times are where we are vulnerable to encountering entities that we do not meet in everyday life. It’s when you go over the moors in the mist that you meet the fairies.
The Internet liminal spaces were generally of two kinds. One, indoor spaces that are actually liminal, such as hallways and stairwells. They are part of a building, but only marginally. They are not the areas where people live or work, but rather passages to get to those areas. Often, their very design makes them disorienting, like a hotel hallway with low light and an endless succession of identical doors. Typically, these spaces do not have windows whereby the viewer might be able to tell the time of day or where the building is located.
The second kind of Internet liminal space is an indoor space, usually for public use, that has been abandoned. This includes empty malls, empty hospitals, empty parking garages, and the like.
After a number of these images had been posted, the young people of the Internet collectively decided that they constituted a realm or dimension of their own, dubbed “the backrooms.” Commenters began to make up their own lore about the backrooms. You could “no-clip” into them by accidentally falling into the backrooms dimension. (No-clipping is something that happens in a video game when your avatar falls out of the useable area of the game.) People began to make up stories about teams that would go into the backrooms with a backpack of snacks and try to film and map them. The backrooms developed different “levels,” each more unsettling than the last. One level was nothing but an endless succession of hotel pools.
The deeper a person went into the backrooms, the more dangerous they became. The realm became less and less picky about adhering to the laws of physics. Also, although ostensibly empty, explorers would begin to glimpse movements and shadows out of the corners of their eyes. Eventually, the lore developed elusive monsters that inhabit the backrooms.
Given all this, you can imagine that my sons, particularly my youngest, were pretty excited when they heard a Backrooms movie was coming out. There was enough lore by this time to having the makings of a paranormal mystery/thriller.
Not Everyone Can See The Backrooms
One day, my youngest and I were in nearby Big City with enough time and money on our hands that we could see a movie. I was a little bit interested in Disclosure Day, but I was flexible to watch something else too. We drove through the movie theater parking lot and glanced at the posters. There were three or four posters for current movies, including Disclosure Day, and one poster frame that was just filled with brown paper. So, Disclosure Day it was! We parked, and approached the theater.
Whereupon we found that the “brown paper” was actually a poster for The Backrooms. It was patterned like the dingy yellow wallpaper that features in many of the backrooms hallways. It did have the title and so forth, but everything was in such low contrast and we hadn’t been able to see it from afar.
Naturally, we changed our plans and watched The Backrooms instead.
Quick Spoilery Summary
The plot of the movie was not at all what my son expected based on the lore, nor was it what the first five or so minutes of the movie lead you to expect. However, it has been praised as being well-crafted and character-driven, and not without reason.
After an intro in which we see people in hazmat suits exploring the backrooms and coming to grief, we meet the man who is going to be the main character, Clark. You can see him in the image at the top of this post, wearing on his face the look that all people wear when they first get into the backrooms.
In an important early scene, Clark is sitting in the small office of his therapist, Mary. As you can see from the image above, Mary’s office–and in fact all the “real life” scenes in the movie–are decorated in a sort of late 70s/early 80s style that is heavy on fabrics and abstract patterns. People’s clothing is the same way, so that even the “normal” scenes in the movie are slightly suffocating.
Mary, who is a self-help guru, walks Clark through the last argument he had with his wife, right before his wife kicked him out of the house. They role-play, and soon Clark is fully re-living the fight, yelling at “his wife” that she is lazy, that he is working his butt off for her, and so forth.
Right in the middle of this, Mary says quietly, “What are you feeling right now?”
Clark, confused, says, “Are you being yourself — or –?”
“I’m asking you. What are you feeling?”
Clark is unable to give an answer — at least, an honest answer, because what he is feeling is selfish rage. Mary, for her part, though she has just uncovered an ugly, sinful attitude from Clark toward his wife, does not have any other tool in her toolbox than “You’ve got to feel your feelings.” She is not equipped, for example, to call him to repent or point him to Christ.
Clark, since his wife kicked him out (“of my house!”), is living in his place of work, which is a furniture warehouse. He sleeps on the showroom bed and watches the showroom TV. His whole life is in a liminal space.
To advertise his furniture, Clark has his two twentysomething employees film him in the character of a pirate with a peg leg. He hobbles around the furniture showroom, trips over something, and cusses them out as they film him.
The electricity in the furniture showroom keeps glitching. This necessitates Clark going down to the lower level of the furniture store, which is even more backrooms-like, to the fuse box. Eventually, on the blank wall next to the fuse box which should lead to nothing, he sees the lighted outline of a door. He steps through this “door” and finds himself in a large, featureless, yellow room with fluorescent lighting and a large pile of furniture that resembles his furniture in the middle of the floor, with some of it merging into the floor. He has found the backrooms.
The next time Clark goes back to Mary’s office, he tries to tell her about these rooms he has found. He shows her the map he has started drawing. He’s very excited, and somewhat incoherent, and Mary assumes he has been drinking again.
Clark then bribes his two part-time employees to go into the scary realm with him, bringing an old hand-held video camera. Things don’t go well, and he returns without them.
Weeks later, Mary notices that Clark has disappeared. She drives over to the furniture warehouse, where she finds mail piled up at the front door. She lets herself in. There is the furniture, there is a cardboard cutout of Pirate Clark, but the lights are low and the place seems abandoned. She wanders down into the basement and discovers the door to the backrooms.
In the backrooms, she finds a large, disturbing graffito on the wall that shows a pirate monster eating people. She wanders on, gets herself into a dead end, and hears the approach of something large. Just when she is starting to panic, Clark appears. He says that he will save her. Instead, he chokes her until she passes out.
Mary wakes up in a small, dark backrooms facsimile of a kitchen, tied to a chair. Clark is sitting across the table from her. Also in the room are three other entities. They are human-looking figures similar to mannequins, but with their faces distorted as if from a blurred photograph. One of them is a facsimile of Clark’s wife.
Clark is eager to tell Mary all that he has discovered about the backrooms. His theory is that the realm produces imperfect copies of things that exist in real life, both places and people. He says he prefers the mannequins to real people, and demonstrates that he can stab one with a kitchen knife and there are no bad consequences. He says he likes the backrooms better than the outside world, feels that he belongs here, and intends to stay.
“That’s fine,” says Mary, “but could you please let me out?”
She asks what he wants. He says he wants to hear her say that he was right.
“Oh, you were so right, Clark, about this realm existing. I was so wrong! I didn’t believe you.”
“No, not like this,” says Clark. “I want to do the role-play.”
Clark takes the wig off wife-mannequin’s head and puts it on Mary. Now he wants to re-enact the fight scene, with Mary saying what he wishes his wife had said.
Mary tries, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Eventually, she starts telling Clark what she really thinks.
“You know why your wife left you? It wasn’t the drinking. It wasn’t the fighting. It was the whining! It was the self-pity!”
“I don’t want to change,” says Clark.
“Then don’t!” says Mary. At this point, she has given up on helping Clark through therapy and has admitted, despite her best-selling book and seminars, “I can’t help anybody.”
“I want to stay here.”
“Then stay! Just let me go home … please?”
Clark unties one of Mary’s wrists. Then a sound is heard approaching that causes the mannequins to startle in fear. The wife-mannequin runs to an acute corner of the kitchen and seems to be trying to climb out.
In through the narrow door squeezes a monster. It’s an 8-foot version of Pirate Clark, with a real peg leg and a distorted face with big teeth.
Clark greets the pirate. “This is my therapist,” he says. “She says we don’t have to change!” The pirate picks up Clark and takes a big, gory bite of his neck.
While the pirate is killing Clark, Mary has untied her other wrist. She squeezes past the horror, through the very narrow passage, and out into the rest of the backrooms. Soon, the pirate is following her, dragging the body of Clark behind him.
Mary runs and runs, totally lost. At one point, she thinks she has escaped into Clark’s furniture showroom, but it’s just the backrooms version. The pirate catches her and is about to maul her, but Mary spots on the floor an item that represents what might be her only happy childhood memory. It’s a chunk of cement into which she and her mother once pressed their handprints. Mary picks up the memory and bludgeons the pirate’s face with it until he is temporarily incapacitated.
My Son’s Worldview Analysis of the Movie
The drive home from Big City was forty-five minutes, and it was not enough time for my son and me to settle all of our questions about The Backrooms. For example, we agreed in a general way that Clark’s mind and the backrooms got into a sort of feedback loop where it manifested his thoughts and desires. But there were hints of Pirate Clark earlier in the sequence of events, before Clark moved into the backrooms. What is the relationship between Captain Clark and the other monsters of backrooms lore? The jury is still out. I couldn’t quite follow some of the metaphysical distinctions my son was making.
What we did agree on was this. The role the backrooms play in Clark’s life are a picture of the progression of sin. At first, he’s scared to go in. He’s very cautious. Then, he tries to bring some other people into it (the employees), which results in their destruction. But eventually, he realizes the backrooms offer him a way to live however he wants, be in control of things, and escape consequences. When he finally admits to someone else that he doesn’t want to repent, and they give him “permission” not to, that’s when the sin shows up in full strength and eats him. After that, there is no Clark left, only his big, ugly sin.
My son came to these insights so quickly that I was really proud of him. It appears that several years of training in theology, literature, and worldview analysis from his classical Christian school have not been wasted.
The Lingering Effects of The Backrooms
The end of the movie is ambiguous about whether Mary ever gets out. She is “rescued’ by a team of people in hazmat suits. This is the team from the original lore. A man interviews her in a room that looks like a police interrogation room. It becomes obvious in a few minutes of conversation that he doesn’t know much about the backrooms either, and in fact he’s rather incoherent when he tries to explain to Mary what his organization even wants. The implication in the interview is that the “rescuers” are never going to let Mary go back to the real world, because she has seen too much. It’s also not clear whether their facility is located inside of, or outside of, the backrooms. It’s like when we “wake up” from a dream only to find ourselves in a second dream about waking up.
Though my son was somewhat disappointed by The Backrooms, he says that in the weeks since we’ve seen it, it has been growing on him. It was actually kind of a powerful story, and “it generates a lot of good memes.”
Would You Go?
Now that I have spoiled the major parts, would you see this movie? I did leave out a lot of important, tense, and horrifying details, so you could still get good and scared if you wanted to.
Under the category of “encroaching chaos,” I have now noticed aliens starting to appear in advertisements.
The strange thing is that the ad copy never makes an explicit connection or offers an explanation for why the alien is there. At least, not as far as I can tell. These are, of course, ads of the “intrusive unwanted video” type, so I am not finishing watching them.
I’ve seen two.
Women (played by a real actress) says: “I used to XYZ. Then everything changed.”
Then, up behind her pops an AI alien with disturbingly sexy biceps. He leers at the camera for a second.
Then, the scene changes and it’s someone talking about the product. The alien is never mentioned.
Second one:
We get a line about the presenting problem that the product is supposed to solve. This is illustrated by an AI alien (female this time — I think) waking up with a gasp in bed, wearing a nightgown.
Then, the scene changes and it’s a normal actor talking about the product. Again no explanation of the alien is given.
So I just have one question.
What the hell is going on here?
There is no conceivable way that sticking a random AI alien into an ad would make the viewer more likely to buy the product. The alien is not in there as a joke or as part of a clever bit of writing. It bears no relation to the product, and in fact strikes a jarring note.
There is not even any way the presence of a random alien would make the viewer want to finish the ad. It is so visually and narratively repellant that it makes the viewer regret they could not skip the ad sooner, before their eyeballs were assaulted in this way.
And keep in mind, this is coming from a person who’s not averse to watching fiction or documentaries about aliens. As long as it’s well-made. As long as it MAKES SOME KIND OF SENSE.
It’s not the alien itself I object to. It’s the intentional irrelevance of the alien. Plus, of course, the leering.
I really do suspect a deep dark conspiracy here. This is an intentional assault on the mind of the public. The purpose is to normalize … something. Least bad case scenario, these ads are seeking to normalize the sight of aliens being subbed in for humans in otherwise normal ads; appearing in human situations; and (I shudder to write it) leering at humans.
Even worse case scenario, the ads are seeking to normalize things not making sense. When something makes this little sense, and goes by so quickly, the mind’s tendency is to skip over it, forget it, and certainly not make a big fuss or push back.
Or, on the third level of hell, these ads are not merely trying to normalize things “not” making sense, but instead, they represent a species of aggressive, expansionist nonsense. They are out to level the cities in the viewer’s brain, a little bit more with every viewing of what can only be called anti-sense.
It’s similar to the scene in That Hideous Strength, where Mark’s sometime mentor, now jailor, Frost, puts Mark in “The Objectivity Room.” This room is a brainwashing tool that is supposed to remove all “bias” from Mark and allow him to see the world “objectively.”
The room is an example of subtle, but aggressive, nonsense. The Gothic point over the door is not quite centered. The corners of the room are not quite square. The dots on the ceiling almost make a pattern — but they don’t. The paintings on the walls are absurdist. The room is anti-comfort, anti-human, anti-stuff-created-by-God.
To complete the training, Frost shows up every day and asks Mark to do a random task that is obviously arbitrary.
When Mark finally resists him, Frost can’t think of anything to say. It’s not that he cannot choose what to say from several possible alternatives; he cannot think of any words. He has given his mind to the Nonsense for so long that it is now taken over by … nothing. And that’s scary.
What do you guys think? Have you noticed these alien ads? Do you have any tips for dealing with them?
Benson was not an unintelligent man, but he was a simple man. [His son] Ace was much quicker, and more widely read, and Benson had been aware of that gap for about five years now. Whenever he began his cautions against intellectualism, he knew how lame it sounded. He didn’t like it, but didn’t know what else to do, or say.
After their conversations, Ace would be unsettled too, but for different reasons. He would work through the arguments again in his mind, and could not see any alternatives to the way he had gone. And he was constantly mystified by the things his father would say and then go and do. The arguments were watertight, and his father’s thinking was not watertight.
And yet, now … an irrational desire to be irrational went over his head like a wave. He knew he had no moves. If he just surrendered, all would be well. If he continued to struggle, there would be nothing but … well, nothing but struggle. Struggle in every direction. A world of struggle.
–Ride, Sally, Ride, by Douglas Wilson, pp. 85 – 86
The call of Abraham was more than just a call to go to a strange, unknown land. This call had spiritual implications, perhaps akin to a declaration of war. Spiritual warfare is fundamentally about obedience.
The Unseen Realm is a scholarly book about the concept of the divine council in Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, especially in Ugarit, which was a near neighbor of Israel both geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Heiser finds this concept of the divine council assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures, similar to how the heliocentric model of the solar system is assumed in anything you see written since Copernicus. That is, it’s never stated or described directly, but it is referenced in many stories, phrases, and figures of speech, and is openly the setting for certain passages, such as Psalm 82.
The idea behind “the divine council” is that there is a Most High God (the Creator) who rules the earth with the help of a sort of committee of divine beings (elohim). This committee is traditionally conceived of as meeting on a high mountain, in a garden setting, often a place that is the source of rivers. Or as Ps. 82 calls it, “the great assembly.”
Heiser spends most of his book establishing that this view is present in Scripture.
After reading Heiser, I heard a podcast interview with Joel Muddamalle. Muddamalle is the academic protege of Heiser (who has now gone to his reward). He is carrying on with researching this idea of the elohim as an active presence in redemption history, and also with popularizing it in the Christian world. And I heard that he had written a book, The Unseen Battle, which might be viewed as a sequel to Heiser’s book. So naturally, I had to get it.
I expected TUB to be all the same material as TUR, just with Muddamalle’s own personal style. It was not. The first few chapters do recap Heiser’s cosmology, but they don’t spend a lot of time establishing it, as Heiser did. Muddamalle then moves on to the nature of the battle, which Heiser touched on but did not major on.
The nature of the battle is that God wants to get the nations back from the gods.
The way this is done, in the church age, is through evangelism, missions, and building healthy churches and families. In short, obedience. It’s not primarily through a lot of fancy, spooky ghost-hunting or exorcism stuff.
This exegesis, naturally, warmed my little Reformed heart.
Now, it does mean that, if you are attempting to be faithful to your spouse and/or raise your kids; work hard and honestly at a lawful calling; worship the Lord on Sunday and support His people; or do any other forms of healthy, faithful culture-building, you have stepped into the battle. The dethroned powers do not like this sort of behavior. This may, perhaps, explain why just trying to mind your own business and live a quiet, peaceable life can occasion so much resistance: everything from health problems, to Murphy’s Law and attacks of depression and discouragement; to actual hate and legal resistance from human beings who do not like what you are doing. (Per Muddamalle, Scripture makes it clear that the “hosts” on both sides of this battle are mixed, consisting of human beings and of spiritual beings.)
Particularly if you are contributing in any way (including by prayer) to the disciplining of not-yet-Christianized nations, you present a threat to the old gods, who do not want to be cast out as they have been cast out of so many other nations in the last 2000 years. This is why foreign missionaries and native pastors in unreached or partially unreached countries undergo so many hardships: poverty, evil bureaucracy, and all kinds of health and mental problems.
The church itself, existing as an entity comprised of people from many nations, is a rebuke to the powers.
The multiethnic and diverse nature of the family of God, the church, can be seen through Paul’s use of polupoikilos. This term is a combination of two adjectives meaning “much” (polus) and “various kinds, diversified, manifold” (poikilos). The word polupoikilos can also mean “of many colors” or “polychrome.” Classical Greek writers used this word to reference cloth or flowers to convey a sense of intricate beauty. The word poikilos is used in the Septuagint to refer to Joseph’s coat of many colors (Gen. 17:3, 23). As Timothy Gombis observes, “The powers have ordered the present evil age in such a way as to exacerbate the divisions within humanity. God confounds them by creating in Christ one unified, multiracial body consisting of formerly divided groups of people.”
ibid, pp. 169 – 170
How about that. The Rainbow of Diversity, which we have been taught to hate, is actually God’s goal as well. The reason that we have been taught to hate it, is because of the way they have pursued it … trying to force it down by means of human power and moralism, by defining righteous and unrighteous groups and viciously suppressing those deemed to be foes of the rainbow. They have made “inclusion” mean “we exclude you.” This is what happens any time people try to make the world look like the restored heavens and earth, without Christ. They end up bringing about the opposite. True harmony among the ethnic groups is not an easy thing. It can only be obtained by means of the New Birth.
Though this is a scholarly-for-the-layperson work, Muddamalle’s lighter personality shines in it. He has many call-out boxes sprinkled throughout the book, devoting a page or two to questions such as, “Are There Aliens in This World?” and “What About Demonic Exorcisms?”.
That’s it. Just I promised: a short review.
Oh! What are the “three rebellions”?
Adam and Eve’s rebellion at the Tree
The rebellion of the “sons of God,” when they chose to come down and take human wives (Genesis 6)
Humankind’s post-Flood rebellion at Babel (Genesis 11). It was at this point that God divided up humankind among the elohim, giving each people group extant at the time its patron god.
Anyway … back to the battle! God be w ye this weekend!
The Church is built on the fact and not on a theory. The theories that we meet in the New Testament and in later doctrines are attempts to explain the fact. The fact is not an invention to suit the theories.
-T.W. Manson, quoted by Ronald H. Nash in Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 270
