Reading Is Fun

I recently just started reading Ted Dekker's Circle Trilogy. I know I'm a bit behind everyone else but better late than never. The trilogy consists of three (duh) books, Black, Red, and White and obviously, I started with Black. Circle tells the story of Thomas Hunter. When Thomas falls asleep in one world, he wakes in the next and vice versa. One world is basically the world we live in today where Thomas Hunter finds himself in a conflict to stop a terrorist bio-weapon and the other world is a place much different. This place consists of two forests all created by this higher being called Elyon. I'll try to not give too much away but one forest is a forest for the humans and these white bats called Roush. This forest is a beautiful place without limits and is a place where Elyon fellowships with the people in such a way that you just have to read for yourself. The other forest is called the black forest. It's a forest full of death and is inhabited by black bats called the Shataiki and their leader, Teeleh. The Shataiki aren't allowed to leave the black forest and the only way they could leave and basically attack the colored forest is if a human commits the only thing that is forbidden of them and that is to drink the water of the black forest. Thomas can't really identify which world is a dream and which one is not, or even if any of them are dreams.

If you couldn't really tell by my general description of Elyon's world, the trilogy is an allegorical representation of the story of salvation. Kind of like Narnia but a little more direct. It's a great series and I'd recommend it to anyone. Much of Black is telling what happens in the colored forest prior to man's disobedience and you really get to see this wonderful utopian world where people live in love and live with this great and intimate relationship with their creator and then obviously Dekker goes on to describe the fall and uses such imagery of what happens as a result of it that I honestly felt convicted. I felt convicted of how I view sin. How God really desires the type of relationship he had with humans before original sin back in the Garden of Eden. How He wants to take us to places that we now could never dream of going, and how he still wants that kind of relationship with us now, but it's that sin that gets in the way of it. When we sin, we often look at it like when a parent is disappointed in us for doing something stupid like breaking a lamp, but we forget about how much it actually hurts our creator because we push ourselves away from Him. If we were really to look at it constantly from that perspective, we would be more ardent in our pursuit to have the same kind of fellowship with God that the humans in the colored forest had with Elyon and we wouldn't play games with sin or simply just respond with a half-sincere "sorry." Instead, we would submit ourselves, the good and the bad, so we can have that real and intimate relationship with our Father that he desired so much when He first even thought of us.

I'm pretty excited to read on and see how Dekker portrays salvation through this story.

Fun fact: I just found out today that Elyon is actually a Hebrew word that means "Most High."