The Sleeper Has Awakened!!

Revelation 22:17 -- "Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely."

Hot, orange sands blow up into clouds that resemble twisters as the winds buffet them around worms that stand taller than the empire state building. From these giant worms, flowering mouths with millions of teeth open and seem to produce song - but instead, offer up a kind of moaning/growling noise that we [the audience] can feel through the floors thanks to the audio magic of the sub-woofer. The blue within blue eyes of our hero face heavenward and our Shai-Hulud shouts into the desert with a booming, victorious voice: the sleeper has awakened!.

Watch out Arrakis [that's the planet we are on], our hero is about to bust some heads.

Deep within this desert planet that smells like cinnamon, one of my all time favorite authors, Frank Herbert, has artfully created a nomadic group of people that eek out a meager but thriving existence because they know how to reclaim water. However, there is a water that not one of them can drink before it's been magically filtered through a "holy person". Once this holy person drinks, gets terribly ill and spews forth what is now the acceptable "water of life" [ew, gross] all of the nomadic people may partake of it free of the fear that the toxins that formerly laced this frothy libation will kill them. [again, ew, gross].

a deadly drink turned pure

Only when this stuff is filtered through the one person with the right set of qualifications can John-Q-Nomad drink of it safely. And trust me, a purely desert group of people NEED all the water they can get.

....and..... so do we.

Not unlike the nomadic desert dwellers of Dune [also known as Arrakis] not just any water will work for us. Sipping from spiritual water stores willy-nilly will NOT get us to the thirst-quenching bliss for which our souls so deeply hunger. There is only ONE man with the right set of qualifications to filter the otherwise spiritually damaging mumbo-jumbo so richly abundant on our own planet. And by God's amazing grace - Jesus has already done all the filtering.

We no longer have to wade through religious ceremony and bloody spiritual cleansing to reach out and take the water we so desperately need. The REAL water of life. In Revelation 22:17, we are reminded that the water is now "good to go". Any soul that needs it [and we all do] can drink of it freely.

Listening to some absolutely beautiful music as the end-credits roll and we discover all that went into the making of this sci-fi classic, I am drawn to the correlation between Dune's Shai-Hulud - and our very real hero, Jesus Christ.  I hopefully and joyfully await the day the "Sleeper" awakens, when our Lord Jesus returns to this planet to take us all home. In the mean time, I'll enjoy his life-giving water and cherish the precious encouragement in God's Word.