The Wages of Sin

This brief note is based on three things. The first is those early years of my life during which my mind was marinated in the King James Version of the Bible. The second is my oddly analogical cast of mind. I see a lot of things by analogy with other things. It makes me an unpredictable movie companion, certainly. The third is my recent viewing of the fourth of the "Die Hard" series of movies, this one called "Live Free or Die Hard." I want to tell you about the first two minutes of the show. The only plot fragment you really need is that the bad guys in this movie are very sophisticated computer users and mean to take control of the U. S. To do this, they have put out a call for free lance hackers to devise and deliver to them an encryption algorithm. The hacker who figures most prominently in the movie is Matthew Farrell, but the one we actually see getting blown up is Ken Terry. On the master display screen in the villain's den, Ken Terry is listed as "assigned," meaning that he is one of the hackers who has been promised $50,000 for delivering the algorithm. When he delivers it, the panel next to his name changes to "delivered." Unfortunately, this does not refer to Mr. Terry. (The next hacker, Matthew Farrell, is shown being "delivered" by the principal good guy.) "What about my account?" the hacker asks the bad guys. "Delivery," says the principal bad guy. At that point, they upload a virus which will cause his computer to explode the next time he hits the Escape key. Ironies abound, you see. But the virus also causes the program to malfunction, so hitting the Escape key is pretty likely to happen and when it does, there is a huge explosion. Back at the lair, the panel next to Ken Terry's name changes to "Deactivated." If you wanted a tighter or more visually persuasive commentary on Romans 6:23a, I don't know where you would find it. Mr. Terry did the work and received the intended, not the promised, wage. That's really the whole post, but maybe I ought to take just another paragraph to say that I realize the producers and the director of the show did not have a commentary on this famous passage in Romans 6 in mind. I am describing how I heard and saw it, given the aforementioned marination in the King James and the aforementioned analogical mind.