Someone, somewhere, seems obsessed with zombies, which explains the spate of TV series about them, including the long-running The Walking Dead. And what else explains the slew of zombie flicks that have hit the silver screen? Such cinematic and artistic wonders as Abraham Lincoln v. the Zombies, American Zombie, I Was A Teenage Zombie, Zombie Apocalypse, Ninjas v. Zombies, Vampires v. Zombies, and Zombie Strippers.
And if zombies weren’t bad enough, the 2009 Norwegian film, Dead Snow had not just zombies—but Nazi zombies.
Nazi zombies?
The question of zombies, Nazi or not, is really indicative of something else: the human fear of death. Which is why we have zombies, the dead who, it seems, are resurrected back to life. In other words, they represent the human hope that death isn’t the utter end.
As humans, we share something in common with all other living things, even oysters. And that is, we die. The difference, however, is that, unlike oysters, we know it, and we hate it, too. More than one secular writer, and with pretty unassailable logic as well, has bemoaned the futility of a life that ends in death—eternal death.
Which is why, over and over in the New Testament, we are promised eternal life in Jesus. The phrase “eternal life” alone, not counting variants, appears in 32 verses (NKJV), while “everlasting life” appears about 13 times in the whole Bible, including Daniel 12:2—“And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt.
As human beings, we were originally born for eternal life; death was, and is, an intruder, an unwelcome invader at that. But, thanks to Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross, we have the promise of “everlasting life,” or “eternal life.” And, indeed, when we come back from the dead, whatever our new forms will be, we can be sure, and very grateful, too, that they wouldn’t be anything similar to those in Zombie Apocalypse, Zombie Strippers or the like.
