Psycho

When Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho came out, it was a shocker! I was in college the first time I saw it, and I screamed! Anthony Perkins appears as his dead mother, “carrying out her wishes” to please her. But it was all in his head.

What kind of a sicko—or psycho—is this? Well, that is the point. He is a psycho. He’s “responding” to the wishes and desires of someone who’s long since dead. We are shocked because we see it for the sickness it is.

Similarly shocking are Paul’s words that when we are in Christ, our husband (the Law) is dead. He was saying something huge: we are no longer under the law. Not only that, but to try to appease the law is a sick thing. As sick as Anthony Perkins trying to appease his mother when she’s a skeleton in the corner. To try to please God by keeping the law makes us psycho.

Galatians 3:24 says: “Therefore, the law has become our schoolmaster, or our tutor, to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith.” Once we’ve come to faith, the law will only divert our attention.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ