Click here to get this post in PDF

The Matrix – Chosen by Someone from Outside your World

The Matrix posits an entire world in which people think they’re living in reality but are really living in a dreamworld created by a super-intelligence. In this world, some people realize something is wrong “like a splinter in your mind,” as Morpheus tells Neo. The Matrix is all around; you can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church. “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.” The truth that everyone is a “slave, born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or feel or taste, a prison for your mind.”

That world is the reality that people live in, but that reality is merely their perception. They’re missing something extremely important – the prison.  In this world, there are certain persons with extraordinary powers to do wonders and understand things beyond what normal humans understand.  Morpheus is one of those people.  Like Christ, it is those who come from somewhere else, not from the dreamworld, who understand.

A person can escape the dreamworld, but it involves a form of dying to the slavery of the dreamworld and being “born again” into reality.  For such a person to escape the delusion of the dreamworld, they must be chosen, then called out; they do not save themselves. The person is instructed to count the cost – red pill or blue pill – and that the only promise is that as a result of taking the “red pill,” they’ll know “the truth.”  The individual has a choice, but in many ways the person, like Neo, is led to the truth irresistibly, as if by an irresistible grace.

Then there’s “the One,” the person who knew how to recreate reality according to his will and who could show the way to freedom to the others. But in order to achieve that status of power, he must die and rise again. Like Christ, he’s betrayed by a member of his own group, leading to his sacrifice and resurrection from the dead.

That is an outline of the movie, not a picking of a random scene or event or sentence here and there which matches the Christian worldview. That is the theme of the movie, and it matches Christianity so closely that it’s hard to miss it.  I’ve pointed out some of the more obvious Christian messages.  What about individual scenes, statements, and characters from the movie?

To be cont’d.