Room 23: God Loves You

Before I begin dissection of the 'God loves you as He loved Jacob' slogan I'd like to take a second considering its origination. Curiously, the video in Room 23 (that features the slogan) appears to be a Dharma Initiative product. It's got that crazy 70s vibe! Even if The Others did somehow edit the video themselves then we have other empirical evidence linking Dharma to Jacob. The Orchid Orientation film also features a brief 'subliminal' flash of the 'God loves you as He loved Jacob' slogan. So Dharma were aware of, and appeared to have some form of reverence for, 'Jacob'.

Maybe it's just me, but that's a pretty striking notion.

I mean, The Others - comprised of 'hostiles', Dharma defectors and new arrivals - have continued a link with Dharma. Post-Purge, having desecrated all that Dharma stood for, The Others have retained this belief in Jacob. Personally, I take the interpretation that The Others (notably 'the hostiles') reclaimed Jacob from Dharma. That makes more sense than The Others taking the Jacob ideology as a hand-me-down from Dharma.

Let me concentrate solely on the 'God loves you as He loved Jacob' slogan. What is the message here? "God loves you" is the bottom line. For all the semantics regarding Jacob, the actual message of the slogan is simply this: God loves you. That's the take-home message. The extra information concerning Jacob is actually peripheral to the meaning. Excess baggage, if you will.

So God loves you, in the same way that He (note the capital - we're definitely still talking about God here) loved Jacob. Curious use of the past tense. There's two interpretations to the "as He loved Jacob" phrase. Either God stopped loving Jacob, or Jacob is considered gone and unable to be loved. And I deliberately chose the word "gone" rather than 'dead'. Death, after all, should be no limit for God's love. Death should be the beginning of when God's love really kicks in, right!?

And pardon me if my Bible-knowledge is rusty but doesn't God's love embrace all? I mean, isn't the idea that no matter what you do, no matter what sin you commit, so long as you embrace God He will love you? Isn't that how it works? And yet "He loved Jacob"! Either Jacob was a very bad man that rejected God outright and even after death, forever into eternity, refused acknowledgement. . . Or Jacob is in such a spot that, even if he did embrace God, God can't love him.

At this juncture I draw your attention to that memorable remark Ben once made to Locke. "God doesn't know how long we've been here, John. He can't see this island any better than the rest of the world can."

If someone were to remark that the Island is a 'God-forsaken place' they may be more right than they realise. And it is in this where I find my conclusion (and it is mine - I feel this is a very subjective argument). Take the slogan 'God loves you as He Loved Jacob' and re-word it to 'God loves you as He Loved the Island' and I start to scratch out meaning. Simply put: Dharma believed in God and the video and the slogan existed to affirm as much.

Think of it like you're walking through the gates of hell, demons everywhere. If you were devout you would clutch your cross, close your eyes, and pray. Keep the demons away. Remember your God. If Dharma, as believers, found themselves on this 'God-forsaken Island' - perhaps plagued by visions of dead people demanding they "Confess!" - then they created this brain-washing Room 23, and the 'God loves you as He loved Jacob' slogan to reinforce God on a Godless Island in people that may be losing their way.

The notion of scientists believing in God is something of an anachronism, perhaps (though hardly unprecedented). Yet Dharma were scientists interested in an end-of-the-world prophecy (The Valenzetti Equation) and involved in a Black Smoke of judgement (the Cerberus System - Cerberus being the name of the guardian of hell!). Even Dharma itself is proclaimed to mean "the one true way". Perhaps Dharma considered themselves a divination of science and faith. It's certainly a concept that sits pretty sweetly in Lost. In such context, a belief in God doesn't appear too ill-fitting.

Jacob, then, becomes a bogeyman. A scare story. A failure to remember God's love may cast you into the damnation of being lost like Jacob; trapped in a bizarre zone where few can see or hear you, where your cries of "Help me" will mostly go unheard. 'God loves you as He loved Jacob'. And don't you ever forget it. Not whilst you're on the Island.