It seems like there's a gentle giant in every great epic story, whether it's a book or movie or a video game or anything, if it's an epic story that has an ensemble cast of heroes who are they're all different and they're coming together to form an unlikely squad, it seems like you're pretty much definitely you're gonna get a gentle giant archetype in there. You also get the gentle giant in the type of storytelling that is the kid and the monster type of storytelling, like the iron giant fits that kind of thing. Pete's dragon fits that kind of thing. When I think gentle giant as a motif in storytelling, I think of someone who has incredible strength and stature and size, maybe even something that was built or trained or conditioned for violence and destruction, but for whatever reason, they have a heart of gold and they don't want to wreck things. They like puppies and innocence and beauty, and they've got this childlike gentleness to them. I mean, it's just one of my absolute favorite character types in storytelling. It always makes my heart soft. It always gets my guard down, even when I'm in the middle of navigating a very complex time in the history of everything, where stuff is pretty tense and people are kind of at each other. The gentle giant storytelling motif, it always does something to me. So, what do you got? For examples of gentle giants. Love to hear what immediately came to mind. Okay, I gave you two. We got the iron giant and we got Pete's Dragon. I think both of those are born out of that. Boy and his dog motif. You got uh John Coffey from oh, come on, Matthew, what is it? It's the uh the Green Mile, the Stephen King story. John Coffey was a gentle giant, Colossus from the X-Men. I mean, I've seen him like smash tanks and stuff like that. He has the capacity to be pretty rough, but he's a Russian metal-skinned giant superhero in the X-Men universe. I think Chewbacca probably counts as this. I mean, there's always the threat that he's gonna rip somebody's arms off, but does he ever? I don't know that I remember that. You got Hodor from the Game of Thrones song of Fire and Ice World. It's another H name. What's the what's the big he's got the beard from Harry Potter? He's the huge guy with the beard. He lives out in the shack. I'm gonna think of it later and I'm gonna come back to it. You're all yelling at right now. I don't know the Harry Potter books very well. The Ents in Lord of the Hagrid. It's Hagrid. You got the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, the big gentle tree giants. How about Baymax in Big Hero Six? Uh, you just forget that movie exists, right? But it's it's one of the best ones. I love that. The first one of these gentle giant kind of stories that I ever heard about was from some literature class. There was an Italian poet, starts with a P, don't remember his name, Luigi something or something. Luigi P. We're talking like Martin Luther era, 1500-ish. He wrote this giant epic poem, and it was about the knights of Charlemagne who went on a grand epic quest around Europe, and along the way, they met and converted to Christianity a giant named Morgante, who was menacing a church or an abbey or something like that. And then the giant Morgante became a gentle giant and he went along on their adventures. I'm sure that there's some sort of gentle giant motif from before that, but that's the first one I remember. But that kind of gets me to the question: why do we like this motif? And you do like this motif, right? This is moving to you. This makes your heart tender like it does mine. I've never met anybody who doesn't have that reaction. Everybody loves this thing. Why, though? Well, I think very simply it's because there's something very tenderizing about seeing someone with much more power and potential for destruction or chaos than I have, hold all of that back and instead choose gentleness, a lightness of touch. Maybe I like the gentle giant thing because I'm in love with the narrative of the Bible and the redemptive story. God kind of is a gentle giant. I mean, admittedly, sometimes the gentle giant is portrayed as being a little bit buffoonish and simple of mind because they're just not that bright. That obviously is not the case with God, who knows everything and is right in all of his judgments and is surprised by nothing in the Bible and in reality and in reason. But where we do get the similarity between all the gentle giants I mentioned and God in the Bible is the restraint. It's the understanding that I'm God. I can push any button I want, I can do anything I want, I can move things around, I can make the hearts of kings go this way or that way, like a water course. I could change time if I wanted to. I could wipe it all out with a snap of my fingers. Yet I am going to orchestrate this grand, complex, redemptive plan involving all of these fragile little beings who are made in my image, who are incredibly breakable, who don't live very long. A few seasons come and go, and their lifespan just turns over and they're gone. And then people grieve them, and then everybody forgets them. And but by then there's a whole new group of image-bearers who are out here, and I care for them. I mean, the amount of restraint that God shows and gentleness that God shows in the care and gentle giant touch as he interacts with this very fragile thing that is us and creation and the world, and frankly, even the laws of physics. If he even got sloppy with that or messed with it, he could break everything for us in an instant, but he doesn't. He's a gentle giant, and he's a brilliant gentle giant who knows exactly what he's doing. So I don't know which came first for me. My love for this motif that then I eventually realized, oh, it's kind of Bible-y, or my love for the story of the Bible that my parents showed me when I was a kid, that then somehow subconsciously translated to me loving this motif. I don't know. Either way, gentleness is on the list of the fruit of the spirit. Makes sense. I mean, how much have we talked about these fruit being something that it happens in God because of his character? But everything on this list is transferable from God to us. We don't become God when we get these things, but we mirror some of the one aspect of the beauty of who God is. So gentleness, I don't know, should we do the Bible run now or do we just save it for tomorrow? And when you're like, I thought we got Bible on this podcast, and all we got was your weird ranting about pop culture again. Let's just do one. I mean, I I read Galatians 5, that kind of counts, but let's just do one. Let's go with first Kings 19. Where do I start with this one? A little bit of context. This is in the heart of the stuff in the Old Testament that is about the fight between Elijah, a faithful prophet of God, and a wicked king and his wife in the wicked northern kingdom of Israel. This is Ahab and Jezebel, you've heard of them. They were very bad. So in first Kings nineteen three, Elijah's under duress and he's afraid, and he ran for his life until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. There he went into a cave and he spent the night, and the word of the Lord came to him. What are you doing here, Elijah? He replied, I've been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I'm the only one left, and now they're trying to kill me too. The Lord said, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountain apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord wasn't in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord wasn't in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord wasn't in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it and he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, What are you doing here, Elijah? He replied, I've been very zealous for the Lord Almighty, and he recites the same thing again, and ultimately God empowers him, and Elijah goes and does what he's supposed to do. But how about that gentle giant motif lined up against the story that you just saw here? God's trying to make a point about himself in all of this, all of this drama and hoopla and all of these other things, all of this power, but here's the gentleness of God on display in this tiny little whisper, this small voice that speaks to Elijah, that hears what Elijah says, and that gives Elijah comfort and courage. It's pretty impressive to think about any of the gentle giants on this list that we were talking about earlier, to think about their capacities, their size, their stature, their potential for destructive power. But then to also, I mean, the reason we love these characters is because they all reined it in. They all had something they liked more than just demonstrating their sheer destructive capacity. They're defined by a tender heart that's behind that. How much more so is that the case with the God of the Bible? How much more restraint is being demonstrated by him? And we'll look at how the example, the template of the gentleness of God plays out in the life of the person who walks by the Spirit next time around. That's good for now. I'm Matt is a 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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