I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) yesterday afternoon. As I tweeted, my life can now resume. There is something about those books that makes doing anything else (cleaning, writing, blogging, sleeping) nearly impossible. What happens? How’s it end?

Then we went to church, the first time we’ve been to Sunday night church in at least 4 years I think- and the sermon was on Revelations 21 and how it’s not just a peachy “happily ever after” that was thrown in the Bible to make us all feel better. It didn’t really have any day-to-day applicability.

Except that it does- the day-to-day applicability is that we have hope in knowing that one day we will be able to say “the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” He is not going to “fix” this world, he is going to bring a “new heaven and a new earth.”

If you haven’t read the last of the Harry Potter series and intend to, read the rest of this later.

I couldn’t help but consider, while I was sitting there in church, how much the character of Harry Potter is a Jesus figure in the story. He doesn’t create a new heaven and a new earth, but he does defeat evil once and for all by dying and rising again, and he makes his home with his people, living among them.

Now, Harry never claims to be a diety or anything, and it’s just a story, I personally don’t beleive it’s blaphemous. The Christian college I used to attend taught classes to the Elementary Ed majors about the series and how it could or could not be used without contradicting Christianity. There are a series of books available on Amazon debating whether it’s all witchcraft and therefore evil or if there is something we could learn.

I say, if you know someone who cannot grasp who Jesus is and what He did, it seems that using the Harry Potter example would be a way to speak on their level. We just need to be careful not to replace Jesus with Harry Potter.

The gospel seems to be a hot storyline these days in general: between the Chronicals of Narnia series that Disney is working through, The Lord of the Rings, Lost, Harry Potter… the tools for using relevant media are abundant right now. As Christians, I hope we are using them and not fighting them.