The Incorruptible Gospel

I have just watched a Star Trek: Voyager episode and discovered a theme I had never seen before; a theme influenced by our western culture of which the writers would certainly be unaware.  It is a theme the writers may openly deny yet are unwittingly influenced by, a theme forgotten by those who should know it best.  This literary theme has been lost to those it was intended for but none the less been made manifest, as if the rocks were crying it out.  The two-part episode entitled “The Year of Hell” begins with Captain Annorax, the commander of a ship that can alter history by annihilating entire civilizations; a power used to restore the glory of an empire lost.  The ship and crew of Voyager are ravaged by the effects of this ship that has restored 98% of its empire.  Yet 98% is not enough for its captain who has lost his wife as a result of his incursions into the rewriting of history.  He is a desperate and obsessed man who believes if he can calculate precisely enough he can restore his wife and his empire.  In the end, the captain of Voyager sacrifices herself as she tells her forces to lower the shields of their ships that protect them from the time-altering weapon of Annorax’ ship.  They cry out that they will be defenseless, but she responds that if the ship that began the year of hell and has warped history is destroyed, so will the altered universe be destroyed-- restoring the original state.

How is it that the writers of Star Trek, who clearly subscribe to a macro-evolutionary interpretation of origins, can create an insight into the archetype of the Gospel of Surrender?  The power that Annorax employed was the power that kept him from his wife and brought destruction to his sector of the galaxy.  The destruction of the power to control time and space, combined with the vulnerable state of the allied ships, restored them to their original state while the corrupted universe was annihilated.  The episode ends where it began, with the critical alteration that Annorax was reunited with his wife; his plans for the ship that would corrupt the fabric of space unfinished. 

The Star Trek writers would deny it but they are influenced by a theme that is innately embedded in our western minds, unless we purposefully purge it by our efforts to be good.  It is the theme of the Gospel of Surrender.  Satan who presumed to make the universe better, brought upon it corruption.  By his asserted will Satan deceived man to think by a free will he too could control his destiny and sustain his life.  We have bought into the lie that God made us with free and independent wills, but Christ revealed the original state of the universe as beings surrendered to His will.  In sovereignty there is death, but in surrender there is life; the mystery of the stumbling stone of contradiction that can only be revealed by Grace.  Given to the rocks to cry out, and they don’t even know it.