What Is God? The Super Mario ANALOGY

Part 1 of 3

I’ve been a Christian for nearly 9 years, yet I still have a difficult time explaining why I believe in God, specifically the Christian God that I identify thru in Jesus Christ.

I don’t have a hard time understanding my own belief; I’ve lived this life for the last 9 years, so it makes sense to me. Where I struggle, though, is in explaining it to others. And explaining it so they might have their own Jesus experience.

I feel like I’m playing a game of Spiritual Charades, and I’m not very good at getting my point across.

Oh, you KNOW I am a Christian because its pretty much all I talk about, but too often I feel like I’ve missed something in my sharing. It’s as if I know where a winning lottery ticket is, but I can’t convince someone to go get it.

So, I’m going to try a different tact.

Analogy.

I love using analogies! As you may have noticed, I’ve used two analogies already in this post. Analogies are my default mechanism for explaining things which I’m certain any friend of mine will attest to.

Yet strangely, I haven’t taken the most meaningful experience of my life, my Jesus experience, and formulated a refined and detailed analogy for it.

But now I have. In fact, I’ve come up with three.

In this first of three posts, I am going to explain “what is God?” to me using “Super Mario” as the analogy. In my second and third posts, I will be using “Blackjack” and “gym” as my analogies.

So, let’s get started with Super Mario.

In the Spring of 1989, I spent a semester at a junior college in St. Louis where I didn’t learn much academically, but I did become fluent in Super Mario Bros., the arcade game. I invested more than a few pockets of quarters to learn how to navigate the levels of the game to save the Princess.

My memory of that Spring is a bit fuzzy, but I remember the trick to navigating all the obstacles and dangers in the game is “powering up”.

See Mario just can’t run thru all the levels and expect to save the Princess and win the game. He could do that, but he’s never going to score well or navigate past just a few levels without powering up.

So how does Mario power up?

They didn’t have too many different power ups in this early game in the Super Mario franchise. The most common one was the Super Mushroom that doubled Mario’s size and allowed you not to die if he got hit by an enemy. Less common was the Fire Flower which allowed Mario to throw fireballs. And the rarest was the Super Star that made Mario invulnerable to nearly everything.

Now that I’ve given you a short dissertation on Super Mario Bros., you may be wondering, how in the name of everything holy does this relate to God?

Good question so let me walk you thru my Jesus experience to explain.

As I detailed in an earlier post, I did not come to Christ based on any logic. I didn’t pick up a Bible and it miraculously made sense to me. I didn’t stumble into a church and was blown away by a sermon. Nor was I convinced by a Christian apologetic book like “The Case for Christ”.

I’m fairly certain that there was no line of reasoning that could have convinced me there was a God, especially the Christian God.

What it took for me was to experience the presence of Jesus Christ.

I was a non-believer who had run out of options which led me to try something completely out of character, a plea to God. And this wasn’t a phony plea. I meant it with every fiber of my being. God, if you are real, I surrender to you and ask you to fix me.

Lo and behold, I then experienced the presence of Jesus Christ. I’m going to save the explanation for how I knew it was Jesus for my next post, but what was just as powerful was how His presence made me feel.

I felt alive. I felt high. I felt an energy boost.

I felt powered up.

And all this for me was pre-Bible, pre-church, pre-anything Christianity. But I suspected that if the Bible, church, and Christianity were an outgrowth of Jesus then I should be able to find this power up concept within them.

Sadly, my early experience with church and Christianity led me to find this power up idea as the exception rather than the rule although those exceptions were powerful and reaffirming so I treasure them to this day.

The Bible, however, was where I found a bountiful harvest of the concept of being powered up. No, I don’t have a Super Mario Bros. translation of our Holy Scriptures, but the concept is all throughout the New Testament, primarily in the Gospel of John and in the letters of Saint Paul, if you know what to look for.

In Super Mario Bros, you consume a mushroom, flower, or star, and then Mario is transformed into Super Mario which is Mario’s best self. This transformation is temporary until Mario again triggers the release of one of these items which starts the transformation all over again.

In John 3:3, Jesus explains to Nicodemus the Pharisee that “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God”. This stumps Nicodemus because how can a person be born again? Its just not physically possible.

But, of course, Jesus is speaking in figurative language.

Jesus is telling him that he must have a spiritual birth. To be new creation based on the belief in the Son of God.

But the word “belief” means something much richer in Greek than how we use the word as an acceptance of something being true. According to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, the Greek “pisteuó” in relation to the New Testament means “the conviction and trust to which a man is impelled by a certain inner and higher prerogative and law of his soul”.

We are impelled by Christ when we turn towards Him (when we repent) and we accept Him into our heart much like our arcade character is transformed when he triggers the transformational item and consumes it.

For years, I was like Mario running and failing at Level 1 until I was shown how my surrender unlocked the spiritual fullness of who I am in Christ.

Now before I finish up with Saint Paul, I should address the issue of whether works creates faith. Or in plainer language, does something I do create my own faith?

The answer is unequivocally no.

Neither Mario or I create our transformation. We do have to initiate it. Mario by hitting a brick or me by leaning into Jesus. But neither of us creates our transformation. Mario can’t take credit for the mushroom nor I for Jesus.

Now let’s move onto Saint Paul who is the poster child for transformation in the New Testament. Acts 9, the conversion of Saul, is the arcade equivalent of Mario eating his first mushroom.

He is a man changed by the presence of Jesus. More so, he has been indwelled by Jesus and his Letters speak to that. He writes time and time again about being “in Christ” or of “Christ in you”.

Regrettably, I think many people read that to mean they are a part of this Christian thing of ours. They’ve been dunked, learned the slogans, and have the secret handshake so now they can claim they are in the club.

But I don’t think Paul means that at all.

Read these passages and interpret them to mean the spirit of Christ acting within you.

(Colossians 1:27): “the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”

(Romans 8:9): “You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

(1 Corinthians 6:19): “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?”

(Ephesians 3:17): “So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith”

(2 Corinthians 5:17): “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.”

Saint Paul isn’t talking about being part of a movement or a denomination. He is talking about being reborn from the inside out by the most loving Presence in the universe. And he is talking about it from a position of firsthand experience.

Alas, that’s where I find myself: trying to explain my own rebirth in Christ. To explain so you’ll go deeper into yours or so you’ll experience it for the first time.

Perhaps I should cut myself some slack. Saint Paul is acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of all time and certainly one of the wisest Christians to have ever lived. Yet even he went out into the sands of Arabia for 3 years to figure it out.

So, let’s see how my Mario analogy sinks in with you.

I write, I cajole, I interrupt, and now I’m telling analogies because I want you to feel what its like to power up. It will change your life and you’ll be addicted to putting your proverbial quarters in the Christ game and questing on His behalf.

I guarantee that with every fiber of my being.

God bless you and remember…

Jesus loves you.

Screenshot credit: https://supermarioplay.com/