Actor Cole Hauser joined Morgan Freeman in making the film noir, “The Minute You Wake Up Dead” (2022). Critics mostly panned the movie, which is surprising given the star power of these two.
In one scene Hauser’s character says, “You know what I’ve never understood about religion? … Are we sinners because we sin, or do we sin because we’re born sinners? And if it’s the latter, then what right does God have to judge us?” The other person says, “If you ever figure it out, let me know.”
The question is an attempt at logic, but it’s a red herring. It distracts with a false conclusion and questions God’s character as flawed and unjust. Also, isn’t there something a trifle presumptuous about the creature questioning the Creator’s “rights”? The question fails to consider the whole story of the world. Just to let you know, we can “figure it out” by challenging the premise of the question: Whether sin or sinner comes first doesn’t change God’s justice and offer of mercy.
It helps to look at the grand arc of the Biblical narrative. You might think of the story as having chapters: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. Hauser’s question does not look beyond the Fall, which explains why the world suffers like it does. By the way, this may be the easiest chapter of the story to illustrate. Movies, like this one, portray greed, deception, and murder in wincing detail. The daily news tells of real crime, disasters, and death. We experience good and evil, right and wrong.
But God has not left you without hope. A personal solution has always existed. The same passage that says, “all have sinned” goes on to explain that we are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus… so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-26). That, friend, is good news! God is a just judge. In mercy, He offers to justify you by faith and render you blameless. In the divine courtroom, God the Son is your advocate. He carried out your sentence on the cross. This is the Redemption chapter of the story. The minute you wake up dead, you are absent from the body, at home with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8).
This movie is a foul story of mayhem and pain. I cannot recommend it. I do recommend the whole story as told in the Bible. “The true story of the world,” writes Chesterton, “must be told by somebody to somebody else… It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.” Do you believe it? If so, that makes it the story of you.