Careful What You Wish For

“Happy is what happens when all your dreams come true. Well, isn’t it?”

Wicked (2003)

Last time I wrote a blog post about Wolfblood – CBBC’s award-winning drama featuring a bunch of teenagers with the ability to turn into wolves, and a few other superpowers to boot – I expressed my suspicions that the programme’s then-upcoming fifth series would entail a major decrease in its quality, on account of it having thoroughly demolished its original premise – the need to keep the wolfblood identity secret – in the dramatic final scene of Series Four.¹ Well, all ten episodes of that latest series have now been broadcast,² and I’m pleased to be able to say that my suspicions were not vindicated. Certainly the programme is no longer the same one it was when it launched, but it’s still very entertaining viewing. Indeed, much as I normally complain when TV programmes massively and superfluously expand the scale and scope of their plot complications (*ahem* Moffat’s Doctor Who *ahem*), in Wolfblood’s case, such expansion really worked – and, as an extra bonus, avoided locating the better part of the drama in interpersonal deceit and betrayal, which was what had made Series Two just ever so slightly tedious compared to the others.³

 

How nice to have a good excuse to adorn my blog with such a pretty picture of a wolf.

The tenth episode wasn’t my favourite one of Series Five, but it certainly incorporated such elements as one would hope to encounter in a series finale: the revelation of a startling truth behind a mystery hinted at in earlier episodes; more than one intense confrontation between protagonist and antagonist; heroes reunited; dastardly plots foiled; villains given their due comeuppance. One such villain – and here I’ll place a spoiler warning – was Madoc, a wild wolfblood who had been revealed in the previous episode to have been conspiring with the series’ primary (human) bad guy, Alex Hartington, to destroy any possibility of integration between humans and wolfbloods. Hartington’s plan was to offer wolfbloods a choice: be made human, or go and live in the wild, in a specially fenced-off chunk of countryside which he dryly codenamed Blydissiad after a legendary wolfblood paradise. Madoc, believing separation from humans to represent the best course of action for his pack, agreed to lead them to Hartington’s Blydissiad on the false premise that he had seen the real thing in a vision, but it didn’t take long after arriving there for his treachery to be revealed. He had lied to his pack, broken codes to which he had expected them to adhere, usurped their rightful alpha, and led them to a cage instead of the paradise he had promised, all because he was so set on achieving their separation from human society. And so the first matter on the agenda in the series finale was to settle on a suitable punishment for him.

The punishment settled on is indeed eminently suitable: Madoc is left alone in his false paradise while the entire rest of the pack heads off to save the day. The parting words of TJ, Madoc’s replacement as alpha, are as follows: “You wanted to live in Blydissiad? It’s all yours.” Madoc’s punishment was to get exactly what he had striven to get.

Which is a bit weird, really, isn’t it? Surely giving people exactly what they have been trying to get ought to represent a reward, not a punishment? But then again, what could confirm someone’s status as villain rather than hero more poignantly than the revelation that the thing he or she had been desiring and seeking after all this time was actually bad and wrong and undesirable enough that it really was a punishment rather than a reward? The punishment is to have to put up with the thing one was so wrong ever to want, and, in this way, the extent of one’s guilt is laid bare even as it is penalised: no sentence could be more apt.

We see God dispensing justice in this kind of way all over the Bible. A few examples at random (by which I mean, a few examples I could most easily think of and find):⁴

And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness!” … And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me. Say to them, ‘As I live, declares the Lord, what you have said in my hearing I will do to you: your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upwards, who have grumbled against me, not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun.’” – from Numbers 14

Oholah [that is, a female personification of the northern kingdom of Israel] played the whore while she was mine, and she lusted after her lovers the Assyrians … She bestowed her whoring upon them, the choicest men of Assyria all of them, and she defiled herself with all the idols of everyone after whom she lusted … Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, into the hands of the Assyrians, after whom she lusted. These uncovered her nakedness; they seized her sons and her daughters; and as for her, they killed her with the sword; and she became a byword among women, when judgement had been executed on her. – from Ezekiel 23

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. – Romans 1:28

Often, then, God’s judgement on those who rebel against him isn’t so much to jump in and do some targeted smiting as simply to let the rebels have exactly what they want. You wanted to die in the desert? Wish granted. You wanted to subject yourselves to the Assyrians? Go right ahead. You wanted to live your life without knowing God? Be my guest. But a word of warning: you’re not going to like where you end up as a result. Thus the evil and the stupidity of rebelling against God are made blatant even as justice is served. And what justice it is – the punishment is, can only be, perfectly proportional to the offence, because it is entirely determined by it.

And so justice is done.

Really, I could tap out a short doxology on the perfection of God’s justice and end the post there. People getting their just deserts is praiseworthy enough all by itself. But there’s actually even more going on than that. Let’s briefly scoot back to Wolfblood and Madoc sitting alone in Blydissiad. Interestingly, he’s not actually trapped there: there’s a perfectly good hole under the fence through which the rest of the pack are able to leave. As they do so, one of them raises the question as to whether they ought to seal Madoc in behind them, but TJ says there’s no need. Madoc will stay where he is of his own accord: he was banking everything on living in Blydissiad and he now has nowhere else to go, however disappointing it has turned out to be. Still, the option to leave is left open, and later in the episode, we find out that he actually took it, and, having relinquished his false paradise, even helped to foil the latest twist in Hartington’s dastardly plans. The punishment Madoc brought on himself does more than cause him appropriate suffering: it offers him the chance to recognise that he was wrong to want this, and to change his mind and do something about it.

And when God passes totally apt judgement on people by letting them have the very thing they were rebelling against him by seeking, he is similarly offering them a chance to recognise that they were wrong to want this, and to change their minds and do something about it – the process known in Christianese as repentance. Take another look at the Ezekiel chapter I mentioned above: many more details are given of the punishment that Israel and Judah will receive for their spiritual infidelity, but the end of the chapter is quite startling: And they shall return your lewdness upon you, and you shall bear the penalty for your sinful idolatry, and you shall know that I am the Lord God. This, then, is the key consequence of the perfectly apt punishment – that the people will come to acknowledge who God is, instead of putting him aside in order to chase after idols. Being disappointed by everything they were banking on will provide them with the vital reality check that God is their only hope.

And so, in punishing people by letting them have exactly what they’re trying to get, God displays not only his perfect justice but his abundant mercy. The punished get the chance to recognise that the effects of seeking after wrong things are distinctly bad, to see their own depravity in wanting to seek those things, and so to turn to God for rescue from the slavery of that depravity. And this is happening now. The verse from Romans that I quoted above refers to all people. Humanity has declared its desire to live outside God’s rule, and God has passed judgement on that rebellion by letting us have what we want. But the paradise we have tried to build on our own terms has turned out to be nothing more than a cage, our very own false Blydissiad – and in Christ God offers us a way out of it and into the true freedom of relationship with him, if we are prepared to take it. Still, that opportunity is not going to be around forever. The end of the age is coming, when everyone will ultimately get what he or she wants – either to live under Christ’s perfect, everlasting kingship, or to remain outside it.

Getting what you want is a reward only if what you want lines up with what God, in his perfect wisdom and perfect love, wants; under any other circumstances, it’s a highly appropriate punishment. So God be praised that, if we are trusting in Jesus, he will not leave us in our wrong desires, but will teach us to want better things – and then, what’s more, will freely and graciously give us the better things we have learned to want.

Footnotes

¹ The post in question is ‘Marks of Honour’, under ‘2016’, then ‘November’ in the box on the right.

² And indeed, all ten are currently available on iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b03b5gpv.

³ Although, on a totally different note, the theme tune of the first three series was undoubtedly superior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RKO18ZVJOg.

⁴ Do check this stuff out, otherwise you don’t know whether the ellipsis I’ve included in my chosen extracts conceals stuff with major implications for their meaning. Here’s the Numbers, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+14&version=ESVUK, the Ezekiel (which you might want to keep open), https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+23&version=ESVUK, and the Romans, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+1&version=ESVUK.