WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the TV series Ozark.  Do not read if you are planning to watch the show or have not finished the second half of the fourth season.

Now that Ozark is finally over, there are so many articles and opinions and blog posts about it that it would be a full-time job to read them all.  Like most people who stuck with the show through all its twists and turns, I look for headlines that interest me.

This morning I clicked on one that declared, "'Ozark's Ending Is Authentically Corrupt."  I was expecting some musings about the nature of evil and how worldly success can be corrupting.  To my surprise, the author fully embraced the idea that Marty and Wendy were successful because they had achieved wealth and power.  The author's charge of corruption stemmed from the fact that the Byrdes are white.  The author wrote

[T]he Byrde family ... were everything that their allies and foes weren't — white, American, economically stable, and in good standing with the law ... the Byrde family ended this series unscathed. Ozark ended with a rich, white family getting everything they ever wanted while everyone else pays the price for their greed. If that's not an American story, nothing is.

In other words, it's not thieving or killing that makes the Byrdes bad people.  It's their white skins.  As the author states, if that's not an American story, nothing is, at least America as it is today.  However, there is an older story, the story of God and His relationship with mankind.

The Bible teaches us in Mark 8:36 that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his soul.  Ozark is a story filled with characters who made it to the top of their world by forfeiting their souls, and their color had nothing to do with their choices.  Some of them were brown, some were white, but all of them had souls steeped in darkness.

Image: Ozark logo. Public domain.

As a Christian, I found it deeply ironic when Marty told his wife Wendy that, if he did decide to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel, their family would be good.  That was the word he used.  Good.  What he meant by "good" was that there would be plenty of money to buy whatever material goods they desired.  They had young children, and their idea of "good" was to provide whatever worldly things their children wanted.  There was no thought of what God had said about such values or where such a path might lead — only the worldly benefit that comes from having millions of dollars.

The final scene of Ozark epitomized that warped vision of good.  It was a scene that pitted Mel Sattem, a private detective, against the Byrdes when they were finally free of the drug cartel and about to resume their old life in Chicago.  Marty and Wendy had attempted to buy Mel off with an offer of reinstatement to his old job as a police officer in Chicago after his investigation began to threaten their freedom.

That final scene happened because Mel thought bringing Marty and Wendy to justice was more important than regaining his old life.  Unfortunately for Mel, the Byrde children were fully committed to their parents' criminal lifestyle.  Jonah Byrde had been furious with his mother for killing her brother, Ben, yet in the end, Jonah chose to kill Mel even though it was Ben's murder that the detective had solved.

From a worldly perspective, the Byrdes won.  They had everything that makes life worth living, with millions of dollars and major political power.  From a worldly perspective, Mel lost.  Like so many others, he died at the hands of the Byrdes.  No doubt he was disposed of in the Byrde crematorium, and he was nothing more than white ash on the winds of heaven as the Byrdes flew off to enjoy their ill-gotten gains.

From a Christian perspective, the opposite is true.  The Byrdes gained the world at the cost of their souls, and Mel lost his world because he chose to save his soul.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of The Pardon, a story of forgiveness based on the thief on the cross in the Bible.