Netflix's Stranger Things Inspires Spiritual Lesson about Eternity

(Spoiler Alert: Stranger Things, Season 1 details below)

On Netflix's hit series, Stranger Things, an over-eager middle school science professor, Mr. Clarke, explains to three of his young pupils about the nature of dimensional travel.

It's in the fifth episode ("The Flea and the Acrobat") that Mr. Clarke reveals that our current dimension is like a tight rope and mankind is like an acrobat carefully walking the line. Limited by our nature, we are only able to walk across the line in a single direction. But he reveals that a smaller creature, like a flea, might be able to walk along the line, moving freely, forward and backward, and even "upside down", where it would then enter a sub-dimension.

But, that's a flea? What about humans? Humans, according to Mr. Clarke, could only ever experience this "upside down" sub-dimension if there was some tremendous release of energy that opened a portal to this other world.

Hmm, that's interesting.

This morning while studying, I read Ephesians 2:6. It reveals that "God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus." This got me thinking.

In the beginning, God created us in a world of perfection; that we know as the Garden of Eden (or the top side of the tight rope). But when we fell, a tremendous amount of energy was released and we were forced through a portal into a lesser reality – a sub-natural existence, much like the upside down world of Stranger Things.

Sadly though, upside down begins to feel "right" after you've stayed that way for so long, so that now many who are still trapped in this upside down post-fall world are unaware that they aren't right side up. I'm confident that even for the believer, as we finally enter into the full reality of eternal life, that only then will we realize how very sub-natural we actually were.

Thankfully, according to Ephesians, we don't need to wait until we die to enter this world. For the believer, we are there now – seated with Him! Through the power of the resurrection, a new and living portal was reopened by which all who believe on the name of the Lord Jesus may pass freely from darkness into light.

What an awesome truth! (And a pretty cool comparison for all of the Stranger Things geeks out there like me.)