The lyrics are:  I have a hope/I have a future/I have a destiny that is yet awaiting me/My life’s not over, a new beginning’s just begun/I have a hope/I have this hope”

The chorus then begins, “I will yet praise him/My great redeemer/I will yet stand up/And give him glory with my life/He takes my darkness and he turns it into light/I will yet praise him, my Lord my God.”

Every time I hear that song it revives my heart from any feelings of anxiety or hopelessness.  Sometimes it comes to mind in the shower or when I am working on school.  Often it comes to mind when I am feeling alone or without direction.  It is a song of joyful declaration that hope is always there as long as God is.  God will be with us for eternity — therefore hope will be as well!

I have hopes for a lot of things.  As I have been working through my devotional, Discerning the Voice of God, I realize how many dreams and goals I tell the Lord about.  I have so much that burdens my heart, that I want to see accomplished or to accomplish myself.  Sometimes my faith fails me and I begin to wonder when my hopes will be fulfilled… if ever.

Priscilla Shirer said in my book that while the righteous woman trusts God to fulfill his word, the proud woman  (self-reliant) depends on herself to bring things to pass.  She ends up distressed, hurt, wondering, and confused.  I realize now how often I have submitted a dream to God and then rather than simply pursue the duties he has placed before me today, I have tried to manipulate my dream into existence prematurely.  I have been self-reliant rather than walking by faith.

The verse she referenced was Habakkuk 2:3, a new favorite that I had never read before:

The vision is yet for the appointed time; it hastens toward the goal, and it will not fail.  Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come; it will not delay.

That is hope.  That is a future!  We have a destiny awaiting us that no one can take away except ourselves. Only we can shorthand God by refusing to let him work.  Only we can keep him from leading us on by stubbornly pulling against his goodwill.  I don’t know about you, but I want a future and a hope, and I am not going to try to run my own life if it means forfeiting that future.

                    ~ Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

Last night I went to see The Dark Knight at our local theater with two of my friends.  As is usual, I am the last person to see a movie when it comes out — it has been 2 weeks since the movie premiered.  Nevertheless, I was excited to finally see what everyone is talking about.  I thought I was pretty fortunate, as on one side my friend Margaret was as unprepared as I for what was to come, and on the other was Chris, who had seen the film before.  Thus, with one I could share the surprises, and with the other I could prevent myself from being surprised. 

The movie started out with a bang, and proved to be a series of successive ‘bangs’ after that.  The action was constant and fast-moving –sometimes hard to follow.  Your emotions never had a rest from suspense as the plot twisted every conceivable direction with each character.  Unpredictability was the recurring theme throughout the duration of the film.  And there were altogether too many explosions.

Yet there were other, deeper themes interwoven in The Dark Knight.  Though you may attend the movie simply for the sake of an adrenaline rush, you can’t help but leave with a need to think about what you have seen.  At first glance, it’s hard to grasp what the film makers are trying to say; but ultimately, the plot of The Dark Knight comes down to a question of morality.

Without giving away any spoilers for those who may be even further behind me in viewing this film (which I doubt is even possible), there are several points that were made by The Dark Knight.  These are culminated in one question:  does everyone have the same capacity for evil, simply waiting to be instigated to action by some outside source?

In many ways, each character in The Dark Knight is one of complexity.  There is no straightforward “hero” that we can whole-heartedly throw our heart into, rooting for him to beat the “bad guys” and carry the girl into the sunset.  This, perhaps, is the entire point of the movie.  Each person has his own darkness — his own point of failure which keeps him from being the “White Knight” we want to respect and admire.  Interestingly, the character who assumes this role through the first half of the movie ultimately digresses to the level of the conscienceless criminal.  This one person we want to place our hope in — the character we think we can trust — becomes the very evil he had been fighting at the flip of a coin.  He slipped from being a standard of goodness to a vengeful villain as soon as adversity met him head on.  It was all too easy.

The culmination of evil, the very “magnum opus” of wickedness, is accurately portrayed in the character of the Joker.  His person is so faceted, so diverse, that it is hard to put a finger on what exactly he is, and on a higher level, what motivates him.  The Joker is the purest form of evil, if those two words can be used in conjunction with each other.  He does not wreak his havoc for the sake of wealth or any material possession.  His is a violence enacted for the sake of violence; an evil bred for the simple reason that it is immoral and wrong.  “What the world needs,” he says, “is a higher class of criminal.” 

The fact that the Joker possesses no material motivation to his actions enables him to operate on a level far beyond that of the typical “bad guys” in the film.  He is immovably immoral, glibly killing without a qualm.  It is this conscienceless character that the Joker believes lives within everyone.  Each person has the potential to be the heartless murderer he has become.  There is a line in the movie:  “You make your own luck.”  The Joker’s mentality is that “you make your own morality.”  When you cease to make it, you turn to the evil that inevitably resides within you. 

Is everyone indeed on the brink of evil, ready to be pushed over by circumstance or pressure?  Is the quest for morality a worthless pursuit?  To some extent, the Joker is correct:  left to ourselves, our instincts are to serve ourselves, even if this is wrong.  We are born with an inclination to sin.  In a society based upon man’s natural “morality”, then, a degradation into the Joker’s nonchalant approach to sin should come as no surprise.  But where The Dark Knight left us without a hope for goodness — without a hero or an ultimate morality — we have access to a truth. 

 “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object…”                                  ~  The Joker

In the case of the Joker, and all the “bad guys” in the film, the “immovable object” was their own deranged and demented selves.  Their wickedness was so thorough it was insurmountable.  But apply this thought to one standard of morality: it is indeed an “immovable object”, and all the “unstoppable forces” of the world could not change it.  The only morality in a cruel world is not chance — chance in itself is nothing.  In a cruel world, the standard of morality must come from without or it will be inherently corrupt.  The standard must lie with a perfect God.  This morality transcends that of man in a pointy black suit huskily pronouncing the hopelessness of human decency.  This is immovable; this is unchangable.  This is morality.

With the exception of the violence of the movie, I would definitely recommend it for an interesting look into the mindset of some members of our society.  It is the inverse of the typical “everyone has some good in them” worldview that is popular today.  Everyone can strive for good, but ultimately, good is found in the Lord:

“And Jesus said to them, “Why do you call me good?  No one is good except God alone.”  Mark 10:18

And with God, morality is our guide.  Then we can do as Batman was advised:

“Endure, Master Wayne.  Take it.  They’ll hate you for it.  But that’s the point of Batman, he can be the outcast.  He can make the choice that no one else can make… the right choice.”