The Decision of the Door

The Twilight Zone has never been one to shy away from the concept of the Devil in the world, or at least his influence. Few times have they actually shown him, but one did they did have the William Shatner square off against a fortune-machine with the Devil's head on it. It seems his influences pump the fuel and the conflict of several episodes. Yet in each one of these episodes, it is quite the expected or typical situation. A man strikes luck and after making a deal with the Devil everything seems to go his way, only to come out on the bottom in the end thanks to the trickery of the Devil.

That's why the episode "The Howling Man" came as quite a shock to me. It starts with a man in a room talking to the camera about a visit to an old castle in Central Europe just after the Great War ended. At first, the episode seems to start off in a flashback-typical Twilight Zone episode, with a regular man arriving at an old place with people who look nothing but sketchy. The folks in the episode seem ancient, almost out-of-time in a way. Before the man, Ellington, passes out from his long journey to find shelter, we hear the faint howling of something off-screen, almost like an injured wolf.

When Ellington comes to, he finds himself alone in the castle and winds up heading to the source of the howling, to a man trapped in a cell. The man is ragged and claims he was wrongfully placed in the castle by the castle ruler, Jerome. He begins to convince Ellington that Jerome is truly psychotic, that the man needs to escape before it is too late. Jerome tries to talk to Ellington all while Ellington refuses to believe his story. Jerome does seem like the true evil at first. He even explains that the man in the cell is the Devil, and that since his capture the world has enjoyed some peace, since there is no longer war. Jerome is apparently part of a brotherhood that has been seeking the Devil for quite some time.

Ellington pretends to listen to the story, but when all the guards are asleep, he manages to slip away back to the cell, meeting back up with the howling man, who still acts frail and afraid. However, as he removes the staff from the door, the man in the cell easily pins him down with mystical power and as he leaves transforms indeed into the Devil, leaving. Ellington's voiceover restarts, claiming that since he release, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the continued development of nuclear weapons has only but continued. As it turns out, Ellington was telling this all to a wary housekeeper, as he has finally managed to capture the Devil using the same staff Jerome had used. When Ellington departs to get Jerome, the howling begins again and the housekeeper removes the staff and opens the door, once more unleashing the Devil. Rod Serling's final narration explains an old legend that one could capture the Devil, but could never keep him.

While Serling's narration is certainly one of the points of the episode, I believe there is far more to that still. the character Jerome is depicted remarkably like one would envision God in drawings or paintings, so I think it's safe to say Jerome is meant to represent God in this episode. Thus we can extract our first message from the episode, an episode that first seems like it won't be too deep: We fear God and we help the Devil. We often forget that the Devil is so powerful that he pretty much singlehandedly ruined humanity with a mere few words. We see God as this being of magnificent power that often overwhelms us, and when we get overwhelmed, we become afraid, like Ellington was.

Our fear of God, thus, pushes up toward something that seems weak and frail, something masking its true self. Yet at the same time it is actually someone who typically holds a greater influence over us than we think God does. I think what this episode shared through the dialogue between Jerome and Ellington perfectly exemplified how afraid and confused we can be of God's plans. Jerome had a set plan and had even captured the Devil, symbolizing that there was a conquering of sin if but only for a moment.

Another interesting thing about Jerome is that at first he was shady, if not scary. I believe that's how God can seem to us at times. Demanding, commanding, terrifying and overwhelming in his might, expecting so much of us that we lose faith in ourselves and even forget that we were created in his perfect image. It's times like these where we can turn to the stories of the Bible to see what those who were afraid of God did and how they responded to his commands. Moses feared God and his power but listened and believed in himself and parted a sea! Jeremiah the Prophet doubted his strength at a time he believed himself unfit for the job yet God had faith in him and Jeremiah did indeed do as told.

It's our fear of God that gives us more strength we can ever imagine. If you think about, if we're afraid of God's power, then that in turn means we understand it and how awesome it is. His is a power almighty and one that is absolute, one that has a plan for all of us. If we fear God, does that mean we fear our plan? We should place our fears of that aside, because if we follow God's plan, we will live a greater eternal life than we've ever known in the Kingdom of Heaven and be with him. Fearing him gets us nowhere, but listening to him and living our lives bravely will.

This episode also showed us the difficult decision of opening a door not really knowing what is on the inside but not entirely trusting something we don't know about. It's a decision we all struggle with constantly. In the case of this episode, curiosity killed the cat. the door unleashed an evil once more that managed to crack the world and ruin perfection. How can we trust something we don't entirely understand, and how can we know something we can't see?

The decision of opening or closing the door becomes even harder when the Devil masks himself at first as someone innocent, even desperate. When we see someone like that, we think to ourselves that no harm can possibly come, thus, why fear him?

The Devil does not have to come only in the form of another person, though, it can come in the form of our thoughts and desires. Sin is a thought. You can't kill someone without thinking about it, you can't unconsciously lie about something. Sin takes thought, it takes effort. We use effort to allow the Devil into our hearts, we waste energy on such a being. Really? I mean, really? How dumb does that sound now? It takes not effort to say something nice, to be a Christ-like person, and yet all the time we find people complaining about aiding the community. Instead they would rather worship their smartphone for a few hours, busting one of the Ten Commandments.

Ellington did have a choice, and what it came down to was trust. As I just mentioned, sin is indeed a thought, an idea. Ellington had to choose whether to trust this man, who explained so desperately that the Devil was inside that room, or his own thoughts and curiosity.

I'm not saying that all our thoughts are bad. In fact, on the surface, it seems like an impossible decision. The man on the other side of that door was desperate and hungry. Any good person would fling that door open and help him out.

Then he turns around and reveals himself as the greatest evil humanity and God has ever faced.

Proverbs 3:5-6 states: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him and He will make your path straight." This episode can be summarized so well in that one verse.

Trust in the Lord, don't listen to what you think you know. You don't know everything, but God does. We should trust in him when we are faced with the decision of opening the door, because he knows that the innocent man on the other side is the Devil and that he will bring sin upon us all, he will infect our mind with the idea of sin as he did right after the beginning. We may think that man is innocent and we may think we understand innocence, but, we don't know. God knows.

If we submit ourselves to God and hand our trust to him, he will indeed lead us free of sin and bring us into the eternal happiness that is the Kingdom of Heaven. Every choice relies on trust, trust of our own understanding versus the trust of God. Now I'm not saying to pray over every decision you'll ever make, but I am saying to be as Christ-like as you can. In doing so, you won't remove the staff from the door and bring sin unto your world. You'll keep God in your world.