Death to the Protagonist: Why 'Main Character Energy' is Killing Your Faith

We live in the age of the protagonist. Whether it’s the invincible hero in an anime, the legend in a blockbuster movie, or the carefully curated highlight reel on social media, we are obsessed with "Main Character Energy." We crave the plot armor that guarantees we’ll always survive, the impossible wins, and the feeling that the world is a stage built specifically for our journey.

But when we bring that same mindset to our faith, we create a dangerous distortion. We start treating God not as the Sovereign Creator, but as the supporting actor—the life coach, the cosmic concierge, or the sidekick whose sole purpose is to help us reach our full potential.

Death to the Protagonist is a direct challenge to the "me-centered" theology that is quietly hollow-out the modern church.

In this episode, we’re stripping away the illusion. We’ll expose the trap of "eisegesis"—where we read the Bible to find ourselves in the story—and return to the discipline of "exegesis," where we step back to let God be the hero. Because the truth is, when you are the main character, you are destined to be the center of your own frustration. But when you realize you aren't the hero, you are finally free to participate in the real, eternal story that God has been writing from the beginning.

It’s time to stop looking for yourself in the Bible and start looking for Him. If you’re tired of the performance and ready to surrender your own "plot armor," join us as we shift the spotlight back to the only Hero who truly matters.

Transcript

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All right, this is the Bereen Podcast where we ask questions, examine scriptures, and seek truth. Acts 17, 11 is our foundation scripture. I am your host, Andre Franklin, and I want to welcome you to another episode of the Bereen Podcast. So today's episode might hit where it hurts, but we got to talk about it. All right. So the question is: do you have main character energy? Do you have main character energy? So so many Christians nowadays have main character energy, and it's simply not biblical. So to define uh what this is, it's the modern tendency to view the world or the Bible as the stage where we are the protagonist and God is our supporting actor or life coach. If we look at John Wick, Neo, uh Goku or Naruto, for all the anime fans out there, uh, the main character usually has plot armor. And this means they don't die, they get out of impossible situations in impossible ways, and they are ultimately the ones standing at the end when everyone else falls. These guys are heroes, but they're not real. They're written characters, it's fantasy. So in this life, in this world that we live, we are not the hero. We are not the main character. When we believe that we are the hero, we read the Bible to find ourselves in the story rather than finding God in it. So we're gonna learn the difference between exegesis, which is uh letting God speak, and eisegesis, which is making the Bible speak for us. So we're gonna break down these words. So exegesis from ex out of, and hegestii to lead and guide. Greek word. It means to lead the meaning out of the text. It is the humble act of letting the author speak for himself. Isegesis is from ice into hegestii. It means to lead meaning into the text. It is the prideful act of using our own ideas as a container and pouring them into the scripture until it looks like what we want it to look like. The other word is hermeneutics, and this is a way of interpreting the Bible. It is derived from the Greek god Hermes, who was the messenger of the gods. In mythology, um, Hermes was responsible for interpreting and translating messages from the divine realm so that the mortals could understand them. Hermeneutics is the science and art of interpreting, it is uh the set of rules or the GPS we use to arrive at the truth of the text. Now, you might hear the word hermeneutics and notice it shares a root with the Greek god Hermes, who was the messenger of the gods, but I want to be clear and I want to clear the air on that immediately. We aren't engaging mythology here. We're simply using a term that in the Greek language specifically describes the role of a messenger who explains and clarifies a message so that it is understood as intended. Think of it like this words belong to language, not just to history. So just as we use the names of the days of the week, which also have pagan origins, without bowing to those idols, we use the term hermeneutics because it is the most accurate technical word we have for the science and art of biblical interpretation. So try not to get hung up on the history of the word itself, but focus on the function of the tool. So our goal isn't to study a Greek God, our goal is to become masters of the science and art of digging into God's word so that we can accurately handle the word of truth and not just project our own ideas onto the page. Besides, we know that Greek gods don't exist anyway. So we don't have to worry about doing anything uh weird. Okay. Just wanted to clear that up because I know, you know, sometimes with words you're like, oh, I don't know. I don't like how that sounds, but it's okay. Um, so now we're gonna get into three really popular and classic examples of eegesis. This is probably across the board in the church of uh the body of Christ. Okay, so the first, the first and probably most famous one is Jeremiah 29, 11. And it says, For I know the plans I have for you. Right? Now, the echetical reading of that is that many treat this as a divine promise that they themselves will be successful, that they themselves will be wealthy or happy in their own personal lives. You hear it when people create businesses or they want a promotion or they are uh looking to do something with a degree, and they use this, and they use that as the foundation of why they're going to be successful. But the exegetical reality is that this was a specific prophecy to the exiles in Babylon. God wasn't promising individual career success. He was promising that the nation of Israel would survive the Babylonian captivity and eventually return to their land. It is a promise that God's faithfulness to his covenant people, not a promise that you'll get that promotion when you want it. We want to make sure that we are reading the word and taking out of the scriptures what it actually is saying. The second one is Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ. It's often used as a superpower for uh sports or for business or for uh lifting weights or for doing anything that is hard for the natural man to do, will say, Oh, I can do all things through Christ. But the exegetical reality of that verse is we look at these verses immediately preceding it, verses 10 through 12, Paul is talking about contentment and suffering. He says he has learned to be content whether he is hungry or full, whether he has plenty or he's in need. He isn't saying he can do anything like jump over a building. He's saying he can endure any situation because it's Christ that gives him strength. So we have to realize that it is again when tradition has taught us a certain way of believing things, then we're going to continue to to uh view it in that way. And then we're gonna pass it down to the next generation, and it's just gonna keep going and going and going as it has. That's why exegesis is important. The other one is Proverbs 29, 18, and that says, where there is no vision, the people perish. So this is frequently used in corporate or church settings to justify having a um uh leadership vision statement or business plan for growth. But in the Hebrew, vision, which is hajon, almost always refers to divine revelation or prophecy. The second half of the verse, but he that keepeth the law, happy is he, confirms this. It's not about your business plan. It's saying that when a people stop listening to the word of God, they fall into moral chaos and destruction. If you read a verse and it seems to perfectly support your own political, social, or personal agenda, it is our duty to check it twice. Because it's much easier to be honest with the text than to try to fix it later after you've built your whole theology on a misunderstanding. I'm gonna say that again. It's much easier to be honest with the text than to try to fix it after you've built your whole theology on a misunderstanding. There are dangers of why we misread the text and we can fall into these traps that cause us to view God in an incorrect way, view the word in an incorrect way, even view our own salvation in an incorrect way. So we have to, so we're gonna break down. So we have what's called the hobby horse trap or the idolatry of agenda. The danger is that when we hold specific political or denominational views so tightly that we subconsciously demand the Bible to support it. And we we see this all the time. If you've grown up in the church and you know whatever church you were part of when you grew up, they have a certain standard or practice or tradition that they all followed. And if you view those traditions so highly that when you go to the Bible and you see that the Bible contradicts it, you will not twist or you will not question your tradition. You'll just twist the Bible to make sure that your tradition stays intact. This isn't just a mistake. Unfortunately, it is a form of idolatry. We aren't worshiping the God of the Bible, we are worshiping our own opinion and using the Bible as a propaganda tool to validate it. If your theology is never challenged, you aren't reading the Bible, you're just reading a mirror. That is the hobby horse trap. The next one is the verse extraction trap. This is the sin of fragmentation. So the danger of this is the text message approach to scripture. We pick a verse, we strip it of its surrounding chapter, and make it a slogan or a bumper sticker or a self-help mantra. God's word is a tapestry. When you cut a single thread out to hang it on your wall, you ruin the design of the whole piece. Context is the guardrail of truth. Ignoring context isn't just lazy. It's dangerous because it allows someone to prove almost anything, even heresy, by just picking the right out-of-context verse. Now I want to be clear: true context is the guardrail of truth. There is a lot of false believing people out there who will use the word context because they don't want to see the truth of the scriptures. Well, you got to read that in context. You got to go to the Greek, you got to go to the Hebrew. You don't know Greek or Hebrew, you don't even speak those languages. The context, true context is the guardrail of truth. And the true context will tell us everything that we need to know. The next is the cultural lens trap, the chronological arrogance. So the danger here is we assume that the people of the Bible thought, lived, and viewed the world exactly like we do in the 21st century. This is chronological arrogance. We act as if God waited 2,000 years to finally be understood by us. When we don't account for the original culture and who the original message was for, we force the apostles and the prophets to speak like modern Westerners. We strip the text of its depth and we replace it with our own comfort. The final one is, and probably the biggest one. This is the biggest one, is the God as servant trap. This is the ultimate consequence. The danger is that we interpret every promise through the lens of how does this make my life easier, better, or more prosperous? This is the core of the main character energy. We end up with the God as our servant theology and not the God as our creator and Lord. We turn the creator of the universe into a cosmic errand boy whose sole purpose is to make our personal lives work out. It fundamentally changes the gospel from a call to repentance and surrender into a roadmap for personal fulfillment. So, after hearing all of that, how do we read like a Berean? How do we make sure that we don't fall into the traps of viewing the scriptures, viewing this whole story as if we are Neo or John Wick or Goku or Naruto? How do we view all of this the way it's supposed to be viewed? Step one is observation. What does it say? The genre, the grammar, the audience, who is it talking to? What is the language that it's is it Hebrew? Is it Greek? Step two is the context. Who was this written to, and what was there situation at the time? Step three is interpretation. Now, based on the above, between exegesis and eisegesis, we need to exegete the text. We need to pull out of the text what the author is speaking. We need to pull out of the text the message and the theme of what the original purpose of it was. We do, we do not isegete. We cannot isegete. Because that's how we fall into all of these traps. That's how we fall into all of these uh weird viewpoints and unbiblical doctrines. And then the last step is application. How does this truth call me to align with God's character rather than how I want Him to align with mine? So if we observe, we take the context of the scripture, we interpret the Scripture, not isegete, but exegete, then we will have a good hermeneutic. And then we apply it to our lives. And then we see how we can how it will uh correlate with the true message. As we close out today's episode, I want to take a moment to pull back and bring this right into your room, your car, or your headphones. We talk a lot about different concepts and truths and ideas, but everything we discuss lands at the feet of one ultimate reality, and that is your relationship with the create the creator of the universe. Baseline of human reality is that left to our own devices, we are carrying a weight we were never meant to bear. We try to build our own ladders of good works, self-improvement, moral effort, but we just leave exhausted and falling short of a holy God. The scriptural reality tells us that sin separates us from him, and the trajectory of that separation is spiritual death and judgment. But here's the good news. Here is the good news. While we were completely stuck in our brokenness, God climbed down the letter to get us. Jesus stepped into our reality, took the death sentence that we owed, died in our place, and rose from the grave to conquer the curse once and for all. Jesus died for you and for me. But you cannot hear the truth of Jesus and remain neutral. Repentance isn't just saying I'm sorry because you got caught. It's a U-turn. It is looking at your self-effort, your sin, and your rebellion, and saying, I am walking away from that. I am done trying to be my own savior. Faith isn't just intellectual belief that Jesus existed, it's trust. It's casting the entire weight of your eternity onto his finished work. It's saying, Lord, I'm letting go of my own strength and I'm trusting completely in your rescue. Right now, wherever you are, right where you are, you can cry out to him. Repent and put your total trust in the King who died and rose again for you. The Bible promises that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Romans 10 9 says that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. If you have questions or comments about anything, you can email the podcast at the Bereanpodcast at Outlook.com. And if you don't have a church home, connect with Creation Church Dallas. Go to their website, www.creationchurch.online, and you will be blessed. Until next time, family, the battle is won. The king is on the throne, and that is the good news. Less opinions, more scripture, let the Bible speak. This is the Bereen Podcast.