Truth Unites - What Les Mis Shows About the Gospel

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

This video explores what we can learn about the human heart and the grace of God from the characters Valjean and Javert in Les Mis. Zac Hicks Before We Gather: https://www.amazon.com/Before-We-Gather-Devotions-Worship/dp/0310145074 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

I love the story of Les Mizz. I've watched this play many times. Taylor Dirks, if you watch this, you were my favorite Javert ever. He did a great job. I have not read the original book. It's on my to do list. I want to get to it. It's hard to find the time. I have definitely gone fishing in it for sermon illustrations. Every preacher knows about that, you know. You haven't read the full book, which you find a great illustration. So if you've read the full book and if you know more about this story, you may have more insights than I do. So let me know in the comments. But after watching this story many times, I began to notice that the characters, Jean Valjean, the protagonist and Inspector Javert, the primary villain,

though they are in some respects opposites, also have a kind of parallelism in the story because they go through a very similar experience and then it has opposite results for them. And in this video, I want to kind of explore the psychology of each character and then reflect upon what that teaches us about the human heart and how it gives us a wind into the greatest mystery and secret and beauty of the whole universe, and that is the grace of God. So this will be a different kind of video. If you're a regular viewer of my channel, do me a favor, and let me know in the comments if you think a video of this kind has value, or if you think it's too far afield from my normal content.

If you're new to my channel, basically I do things like general apologetics, Protestant apologetics, theology and theological triage, ranking different doctrines, church history, devotional content, occasionally things about culture, like cultural apologetics especially. But the purpose behind it all for Truth Unites is to go deeper into theology for the sake of assurance in the gospel. This is why Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. So if you want to stay in touch, you can subscribe and hit the bell and all that fun stuff. two quick things before I dive in. Thanks for asking about how we're doing after the hurricane and

earthquake. Crazy day yesterday. I'm filming this on August 21st. It'll come out on Tuesday, August 22nd. Yesterday, there was an earthquake right here in Ohio. We're fine. Our church is fine. The people in our church appear to be fine. Pray for people that may have been affected that we don't know about yet. You know, you were still kind of assessing. But man, it was pretty crazy. I mean, it was a long. It was the intense earthquake I've experienced, pictures falling off the walls, that kind of thing. Thankfully, no major damage. Our kids were a little scared and it was hard for everybody to fall asleep because all the aftershocks kept rumbling on. I mean, there were like six or seven strong aftershocks throughout the evening. So they're trying to fall asleep. And then there's

the hurricane. So there's crazy rainstorm in the middle of August, which never happens here. and then our power kept turning off and coming back on or going like half off. So it was like the spookiest night. It was like our house was haunted. It was crazy. But anyway, we're fine. Thanks for praying for us. Pray for anybody else who may have more serious damage that we don't know about.

The other thing, before I dive in, I want to give a book recommendation because I think this is the kind of book viewers of my channel might be interested in. It's a really cool book. It's called Before We Gather, Devotions for Worship Leaders and Teams by Zaz. Hicks and it's just a cool resource. You know, one of the things I've talked about a lot is how an evangelical context, a lot of us have grown up in church services where we have like, the service kind of feels like four songs and a sermon with a little bit of announcements sprinkled in there sometime. It's kind of bare bones. And a lot of us who are, a lot of people

on my YouTube channel are the people who are like trying to get more historical depth and they're interested in liturgy and that kind of stuff. So we want to be more intentional with our worship services. We're looking for ways to do that. This book is a compendium of devotionals designed for the pre-service prayer time. So it's very simple. There's a scripture, a devotional, and a prayer in each little devotional. And there's 52 of them, so you can use it one per week over a calendar year. They're also indexed at the end, according to scripture, according to theme, and according to the church calendar. So if you're in Advent or if it's Mondi Thursday or if you're in the Easter season, you know, you can organize it like that too. So it's a really cool resource. You know,

just that getting mindful and intentional about how you pray going into the worship service actually makes a huge difference. My worship, my associate pastor and I pray every Sunday before the service and that is actually a really important time for the whole experience. So anyway, it's a great gift for your worship pastor, great gift for your senior pastor, great personal resource. I just wanted to recommend that. There's a link in the description. Check it out. Okay. As I dive in, let me make this introductory remark, okay, about Les Mis. I've watched this story over and over. Suddenly, after maybe six or seven times of watching it, either the 2012 movie or more commonly one of the plays I've seen live, it suddenly occurs to me that

the, you know, you're watching these different stories of Valjean and Javert. Jean Valjean is this hardened convict who becomes a good person throughout the story in inspector Javert, police inspector, this merciless, legalistic man, one of my favorite characters in all of fiction, because you can learn so much as we will about human psychology from him, you're seeing these kind of two parallel pathways. Finally, what should have been obvious suddenly struck me, and that's the two defining songs for each of these characters have a parallelism to them. Javert's suicide towards the end of the story is instrumentally a reprise of Valjean's soliloquy, early on in the story. And at the crucial moment,

they're even lyrically similar. Now, I won't, I'll try to stay out of copyright issues by not showing you clips from the 2012 movie or any of the other plays. But here are the lyrics I'll put up and I'll emboldened the lyrics that are the same. And it's so interesting to reflect upon this. Both of them are struggling at the core of their being because of an experience of unmerited grace. and it's pure agony for both of them. And they both say the same thing. I shall escape from the world of Jean Valjean. But for one of them, it means life.

Another story must begin. And for the other, it means death. There is no way to move on. And so what I want to do is walk through the psychology of each character and ask, why does that experience of grace go in the opposite direction? Life for one, death for the other. Let's start with Javert. To understand Javert, you have to know the song Stars, which is at the beginning, because his suicide at the end picks up on the themes from this early song.

And you can see something of kind of the arc of his journey from strength to despair by comparing these two songs, stars and then his suicide. And in both of them, there's this motif of stars. So in the first song, he's seen walking on the rooftops, calmly and assuredly balancing on the edge while he's looking up at the stars and he's referring to them as filling the darkness with order and light. He refers to stars as the sentinels. Stars represent the moral order of the universe for Javert. They're like the guardians that are making sure everything's okay. Their constant light is like a symbol of the meaning of life. that justice will be served, this inflexible principle that the stars continually remind him of,

that law-breaking will be punished, it must be punished. He says at one point, and so it must be, for so it is written on the doorway to paradise, that those who falter and those who fall must pay the price. Don't worry, I won't sing any of this, and I won't show clips for copyright issues. And there will be general spoilers, by the way, but not real detailed spoilers. Well, as the story progresses, this is Javert's whole identity in his life, is to hunt down Valjean specifically, but it's about the execution of justice, and he vows to find Valjean and says, This I swear by the stars.

Well, toward the end of the film, Valjean has a chance to kill Javert, but instead sets him free. And so Javert experiences grace, and he simply cannot understand it. At first, he's simply angry. And he says, damned if I live in the dead of a thief, I'll spit his pity right back in his face. But as the song continues, this experience of grace just unravels his legalistic view of the world. Peace by piece. You can just see him getting sort of unmade psychologically. He says, my thoughts fly apart.

He says, can this man be believed? He asks at one point, what sort of devil is he? it's like he just cannot come to terms with grace. This act of kindness to him doesn't fit with his vision of the universe and he starts to ask questions he's never asked before in his life. And must I now begin to doubt who never doubted all these years? My heart is stone and still it trembles. The world I have known is lost in shadow.

All his old strength and certainty and confidence is gone and now it's replaced with questions. He's tormented by this act of grace. And he's like, how do I go on? And at the crucial moment, he sings, I'm reaching, but I fall, and the stars are black and cold. So that those sentinels, you know, this reminder of the moral order of the universe is now gone. And he cannot face that, and he just cannot, he cannot live anymore. And so the question that's interesting is, you know, you wonder, what is he feeling while he sings this? Why is it that grace and unearned kindness is so brutal for him that he can't even face a universe like that?

Why does it lead him all the way to suicide? And it can't just be that Valjean has defeated him because actually Valjean hasn't defeated him yet, you know? But it's that this act of grace threatens what he's based his whole life on. It undermines his whole identity. It's like there's these two different ways of living, Valjean or Javert. And that's what he says at one point in the song. It's either Valjean or Javert, grace or law. And he can't face the world of grace.

One of the most poignant moments is when he sings, is he from heaven or from hell? And he's wondering, you know, is this good or evil? And it reminds me in Dickens' Christmas Carol, when at one point when one of the ghosts is visiting him, he says to him, why are you torturing me? It's like, what it does for me is it reminds me of how painful grace is to the legalist and how much it just raises your identity to the ground. And that's what grace does for him. It makes life unthinkable. It extinguishes the stars in his universe. But here's what's interesting. Grace is also agony for Chauvin, for Valjean. So toward the beginning of the story, he experienced.

his grace through an act of kindness done to him by the priest. You'll know the details of that, if you're familiar with this story. And afterwards, he sings this song about it. And for the vast majority of his soliloquy, he's profoundly disturbed. He's veering back and forth. He's uncertain of what is happening to him. At first, he's thinking it's too late to change. He's suffered a lot in those 19 years. He's talking about the cry of my hate, the cries in the dark that nobody hears you get a sense of how what that kind of agony he's in and what he's been suffering in his life and the hardness of his heart from that. You know, it's, he is not, his, his process of experiencing grace is not light and easy either. But in the midst of his kind of fuming, the, the thought interrupts

him of what happens from this priest's kindness. And he says, yet why did I allow this man to touch my soul and teach me love? He treated me like any other. He gave me his trust. He called me brother. My life he claims for God above, can such things be? Ah, this is what the gospel is like. It's like, when you start having thoughts like, can it be true? You know, it's like entering into a new universe? This is what the gospel does in our lives. Grace introduces a whole new world for Valjean, just like it did for Javert. It kind of unravels one way of thinking and opens up a door to a new universe. But it's not easy. It's painful when he's considering what the priest did for him. At one point, he says, I feel my shame inside me like a knife.

And then at the crucial moment, there's these same lyrics that Javert was singing. I am reaching, but I fall, and the night is closing in as I stare into the void. Now, here's where, interestingly, the lyrics are identical as well as the music, except for a few little exceptions. And I'll put up where, again, the slide, and you can see where there's one of the differences, and that is Valjean is aware of his sin. and at the crucial moment, he is able to make this sudden decisive turn out of the world of Valjean, out of the world of death, into the world of life. And the parallelism is amazing. Valjean exits the world of Jean Valjean and its life.

Javert enters the world of Jean Valjean and it is death. And so the question is, what makes the difference between these two? And this is where I think this particular story has a lot of depth to it and it opens up something about the psychology of grace and how legalism and self-righteousness can be a more difficult barrier than mere sin or licentiousness. Because for both Javert and Valjean, they have this agony, you know, I feel my shame inside me like a knife. Valjean is weeping. My thoughts fly apart. You know, they're both sort of unmade by the act of, by the experience of grace. It sort of resets their whole identity.

But here's the difference, or at least one of the differences, as best as I can tell, Javert sees this as nothing but a threat because of his self-righteousness, whereas Valjean sees hope in it and a new beginning in it, because he knows his sin and desperation and brokenness. What I would draw from this is to say this, that for all of us, the experience of grace is a kind of death. I've often thought about the logical link between justification and regeneration, forgiveness of sins and new life. And they go together.

Because grace interrupts our lives and brings low every high place. It makes us start over. It raises a question mark against our former certainties. It removes our pride and our distinction. It pierces into our identity. It humbles us, you know. It means starting over. And you think of in the Bible when Christ is called the stumbling stone or the cornerstone,

right after he's called in 1st Peter 2, quoting from various Old Testament passages, the cornerstone chosen and precious, he's also called the stone of stumbling, right? And, you know, so in other words, the difference between Valjean and Javert seems to be, are we fundamentally self-presuming or self-despairing? are we able to receive that undermining of our self-identity and humble ourselves to receive grace? Are we like the self-sufficient Pharisee in Luke 18 who says, well, thank God I'm not like others, or are we like the tax collector who stays at a distance, won't even look to heaven, is beating his breast and saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

For both, grace is not comfortable. but when your identity is not in your own righteousness, you're able to pass through the eye of the needle. You're able to humble yourself down that low because you know you need that grace. And it's not a threat, it's a liberation. So a simple question to ask, in my core of my being, am I more like Valjean or am I more like Chavere. Powerful question to consider because it brings us to those places of deep honesty inside. Anyway, those are my thoughts.

What do you think? Do you think? I think you can see a lot about the human heart and a lot about the nature of grace through this story. Curious what you guys think, if you think that's on the money, and if that's similar to the conclusion you would draw about this book. And if you've read the book, let me know, especially I'm kind of curious for those who are more experts on this story than I am, what you think about it, how it goes.

This was kind of a fun video. I've got about the next four videos planned out. They'll be releasing soon after this one. So hopefully those will be of use to you and you can keep your eyes peeled. Thanks for watching, everybody.