The Number 23

So I just got done watching the Number 23, the movie starring Jim Carrey. I had borrowed it from a friend, and he told me it was a dark movie. I always thought it seemed interesting, which is why I wanted to watch it.

Oddly enough, my thoughts from last night match up with something I realized was within the movie that might or might not have been meant to be symbolized.

Last night I was thinking to myself in the car about how terrible we are to God. We sin and we sin and we sin and there is no end to our sinning. Some of us tell lies, some of us steal, some of us kill. Either way, a sin is a sin, and sin is death. And as I was thinking of this I felt so unworthy of His sacrifice, of Jesus Christ and the blood He shed for me. And it clicked in my head right there. That is what makes this love so incredible. The fact that Jesus knew we would sin all throughout our lives, but still He would forget our past, clean our slate, get rid of all our shame and guilt, and tell us that we are different now. That is who we were, but this is who we are now : set free from our past sins.

Onto the connection with the movie.


SPOILER****

The story is about Walter Sparrow, Jim Carrey, who is an animal control worker. On his birthday he is late to pick up his wife because he was trying to catch a dog right before his shift was over, who ended up biting his arm. By the time he went to pick up his wife, she had gone into a book store. She was reading a book that caught her eye, The Number 23, written by Topsy Kretts.(Top Secrets) After reading it she decided to buy it for her husband. So he goes on reading this book, and becomes obsessed with the number 23, he sees it everywhere. Eventually as he continues to read into the story he realizes that he needs to find the author so he can get some answers about the number 23, the book stopped abruptly at chapter 22.

Throughout the film the dog that bit him continues to pop up. Eventually he chases him down to a cemetery and shoots him with a tranquilizer gun. A priest from a nearby church comes over to see what happened, along with the dog's owner who happens to be the groundskeeper for the cemetery. Walter is obsessed with this dog; N=14 E=5 D=4 14+5+4=23. He asks the groundskeeper why he named the dog Ned. He replies it is the overseer of the dead. Whenever Ned is in the graveyard he always watches over one specific grave, Laura Hollins.(I think that's the last name) Laura Hollins was killed on her 23rd birthday according to the tombstone, and Walter starts to panic. But the priest tells him that her body was never found.




So Walter begins to investigate the murder and is trying to find out who the killer is. He is led to the man who is imprisoned and he believes that man wrote the book. But the man claims to be innocent. Walter's son found a P.O. Box number hidden within the pages. The family tracks the man down, but the man slits his throat before they can get any answers. Agatha, Walter's wife, tells him to go home with his son and that she will take care of it. The man, with his last breath, tells Agatha to go to this mental institute. She goes there and finally receives the answer to who wrote the book, Walter Sparrow.

Eventually, he finds out that it was him who murdered Laura, and realizes that after he murdered her he ran to a hotel, went into room 23, started to write a suicide note, and ended up writing the book. After trying to commit suicide he winds up in that mental institute that Agatha had gone to. He regains all mobility, but never regains his memory of his past.

Here is where the connection is made.

In this very emotional scene with Walter and Agatha, they are in the hotel room, number 23. Walter is contemplating suicide once again, and Agatha comes in. He continues to dwell on his past as a killer, and Agatha grabs a knife and hands it to him telling him to kill her. It is there where she says the line that really set off the epiphany that I had. She tells him that this book is about who he was, but now he is a different man, a loving father and husband, not a killer. He was sick back then because of his families mental instability.

He was born into the world a mentally unstable being, just as we were born into this world a sinful being. But what's in the past is in the past. We are different now, it doesn't matter if we were a killer. Jesus says that is old news. He has redeemed us from our past. That book was just the guilt and the obsession of past sins. But Jesus wants us to put that book down, and move on with our life and make things right.

So that is how my morning began, at 7:30 AM waking up to a phone call from my good friend Ray Kim at Boston College. An interesting way for me to see God's glory. I definitely suggest this movie to you, it is very interesting at the least.

Praise God!