Jim Carrey, the rubber-faced comic actor whose roles often defy taste and intelligence, may now add to his resume a depiction of man’s relationship with God that’s many cuts above the standard Hollywood fare — in a lot of ways, actually biblical.

Yes, I’m dumbstruck, too, but Bruce Almighty really is a spiritually edifying movie — once you get past the slapstick (which I enjoyed) and the occasional moral lapses (which I didn’t). When I saw the preview, I assumed it would be a movie that mocked God. Carrey (playing news reporter Bruce Nolan), endowed with the powers of God, uses them to do things like teach his dog to use a toilet and cause a gust of wind to blow up the skirt of a passing woman. Oh great, I groaned.

But that wasn’t the vision of director/producer Tom Shadyac, a devout Catholic who says that when making Bruce he seriously considered the messages the movie would send about God’s character and His relationship with man. Shadyac, who teamed with Carrey to make the slapstick comedies Ace Ventura, Pet Detective and Liar, Liar, said he wanted to create a modern-day parable, like the stories Jesus used to tell to draw parallels to the Kingdom of God. The results made me an instant, albeit surprised, fan of Bruce Almighty. I didn’t expect to get so many laughs from its gut-busting humor, much less to discover an admirably thoughtful portrayal of God.

The premise of the movie is that Bruce blames God for his seemingly miserable life, to which God responds by giving him the ability to do something about it. Try as he might, Bruce has been professionally typecast as a news reporter who’s stuck doing cheesy human-interest stories when he desperately wants to become a respected anchorman. After a day of hilarious mishaps that he sees as a recurring pattern of the misery in his life, Bruce begs for a showdown with God. “God is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass and I’m the ant!” he shouts to his girlfriend, Grace (Jennifer Aniston). “He could fix my life in five minutes if He wanted to.”

It’s uncomfortable to see a guy seethe in rage at God, but it’s also real. In the Bible, Job is a person whose incredible suffering caused him to question God: “I cry out to you, oh God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me. You turn on me ruthlessly; with the might of your hand you attack me.” Many of us can relate to Job’s experience, as we can relate to Bruce’s feeling that God has abandoned him. But the reality when considering any person’s standing before God is clear in Job, as it is in Bruce. God isn’t confused or intimidated by our small-minded and mortal criticisms and He responds with grace and love.

After expressing his anger to God, Bruce is confronted by the Almighty (played by Morgan Freeman), who offers him a week’s opportunity to be endowed with all his powers and take over the job. God needed a vacation, apparently, and now Bruce will get his shot to do better. The only rules are that Bruce can’t tell anyone he’s God, and he can’t mess with anyone’s free will.

In a series of hilarious scenes, Bruce demonstrates what a totally self-centered person (someone like us, perhaps?) might do if he had God’s power. He shamelessly creates chaotic news events, so he can become “Mr. Exclusive,” catching the hot scoops on tape and delivering them on the nightly news. Then, in a series of scenes that are classic Carrey, he triumphs over his rivals. The humor is crude and sometimes tests the boundaries of taste, but it’s also so funny that people in the theater (myself included) were wiping tears from their eyes.

In one scene, Bruce causes his rival newscaster to speak in gibberish while attempting to anchor a broadcast. The scene is relentlessly funny. The humor isn’t just fun, it’s vital to earn an audience’s trust, which opens the door to bring the story’s theological themes to light. This isn’t a movie where the spiritual message gets in the way of entertainment, and that’s a plus. Too often, movies with positive spiritual messages – including many Christian movies – forget to be entertaining, resulting in audiences that are so bored they don’t care about any of the films’ more thoughtful elements.

The results of Bruce misusing God’s power are devastating. When he uses the moon to romance Grace – by lassoing it and pulling it closer to earth – he causes a tsunami in Japan. Bruce almost loses his mind when he begins to receive millions of prayers – so he settles on the simple conclusion of saying, “yes” to every request. This results in 400,000 people winning the New York lottery, causing them to riot in the streets, because they each won just $17.

“I just gave them everything they wanted!” Bruce exclaims in a conversation with God.

“Since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?” God responds.

In addition to causing calamity for strangers, Bruce’s relationship with Grace falls apart, too. Grace leaves him because he’s a jerk, and he tries every supernatural trick he can to bring her back. None of them work. Bruce can’t control Grace’s free will, so he can’t make her love him, something that causes him incredible frustration.

“How do you get someone to love you without affecting free will?” Bruce asks God.

“Welcome to my world, son,” God replies.

Bruce’s misery combined with his newfound respect for God, causes him to confront his frailty and give up the supposed control he had over his life. Arms lifted to heaven, he falls on his knees and cries out to God: “I want you to decide what’s right for me! I surrender to your will!”

Bruce took the first step toward discipleship and experienced a transformation. The result is an understanding that, as God tells him, “You have the divine ability to bring joy to the world. I know. I created you.” Bruce begins praying for Grace, but instead of praying that they’ll get back together, he asks God to help him learn to love her through His eyes.

It’s this God-centered perspective that separates Bruce from the countless other “inspirational” and feel-good Hollywood movies, even those that marketers have hyped to Christian audiences. If this were like all those other tearjerkers, Bruce would have been inspired to change by finding the “good that’s deep within himself,” or the “goodness” another character exudes. These human-motivated changes ring hollow in light of Christian theology. By contrast, Bruce is clearly selfish and unable to do any good on his own. And his transformation is only possible when he surrenders to God.

While its message is consistent with the Bible, Bruce never pretends to be a Christian movie. The concepts of sin and redemption through Jesus Christ aren’t in the picture. But foul language and sexual aspects are, including the fact that Bruce and Grace are living together — certainly not God’s design for relationships. And we never really get a clear sense of why that's wrong, though it's evident Grace does want to get married.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for a movie that shows millions of people some truths about God’s character while being entertaining at the same time. Bruce shows that God is infinitely larger than our finite and self-focused perspective. He’s compassionate, loving, and He’ll change our lives if we’ll surrender to Him.