Waaaagh! Orkz!

Recently at Llandudno Youth for Christ at our ‘Redefine’, Sunday evening bible Study,

we had an ‘Ork Night‘.

As we had to keep on reminding people it was an ‘Ork‘ or ‘Orc‘ (depending upon your prefered spelling) night, not an ‘Awk‘ night.  We would be dressing up as members of the mythical creatures from and inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  It was not a night where we all shared embarassing stores; i.e. #awks.

The young people really enjoyed the every aspect of the night; from the fun games at the start, including a ‘Nerf Battle’, to eating the gruesomely titled, but tasty food and the main part of the night where we looked at the fall of man and subsequently the whole of creation, and how God set about fixing all that had been broken.

This was the whole reason for the theme; in his novels J.R.R. Tolkien described the creation of Orks in Middle Earth, as them being ‘Elves‘; beings of light, purity, perfection and life, who through deception and betrayal had been corrupted by evil and degraded to such an extent that they became depraved beings of death, corruption and decay. See the video here to hear the explanation.

The Orks epitomise us, humanity.

Fallen, depraved,decaying, dying, corrupted. See the apostle Paul’s description here.

Thankfully God’s response was not to write off His creation as a failure and leave us in our mess and sin.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” John 3:16-17.

We try to deal with our ‘orkishness‘, our sin problem by learning how to look and appear right, from the outside, but there’s no real change, a bit like an Ork in a suit.

God didn’t try to cover up the issue, He stepped in to deal with the heart of the problem.

The cross was God’s response to our ‘orkishness‘ or more accurately our sin problem.

At the cross a divine exchange took place and because Jesus took all of our sin, we can now receive by faith all of his righteousness (2Cor 5:21 ). To use the metaphor of the ‘Ork‘ night, we are transformed by God’s grace from creatures of wrath, death and darkness; into beings of light and life: ‘Elves‘.

Since we have a new nature in Christ, whenever we stumble back into our old ‘orkish‘ ways, they don’t fit us.  We chafe under their load for we are not ‘Orks‘ and therefore cannot live in that way anymore and feel any joy or fulfilment.

We will only feel truly alive, when we live lives that match up with who we truly are now.

As the believers in the church in Antioch became known as, we are Christians: Little Christ’s.

Here to shine the light of Christ into the darkness of this world.

So let’s go and let our light shine.