Watching

A sister in Christ, whose anonymity I will respect, wrote me today,

Two comments two different Christian people remarked to me today: “Surely the Lord is coming soon!” and, “Our country is being judged.” Short of joining the Conservative Mennonites as I did for six years, how will our grandchildren survive while being lulled to sleep, brain washed? We can’t serve the Lord and fill our eyes and minds with blasphemy as so many ‘Christians’ are doing today, Bibles and religious literature all over the house, but watching Desperate Housewives. “God is not mocked...” I can’t help but cry out, “Maranatha, even so Lord Jesus, come quickly!”

It was her observation ‘…Bibles and religious literature all over the house, but watching Desperate Housewives,’ that really caught my attention. Why? Because this is what I have seen all around me in almost every Christian community I have either lived in or visited, from conservative Baptist to Eastern Orthodox.

As humans, this is not what we were made for, and as Christians, this is not what we are called to be. The Message in all its fullness, that is what we were made for, what we are called to. This is nothing doctrinaire, this is not a political statement, though it’s true that we were made for the polis, that ancient Greek idea of living together.

We were made for unity in freedom, yet we find ourselves divided in slavery. The slogans of Ingsoc (English Socialism) as described in the negative utopian (at the time) futuristic fairy tale 1984 by George Orwell—“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”—have practically become the ethos of our ‘post-modern’ world, not articulated in words, but fulfilled in acts.

The other well-known futurist negative utopia, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, also comes close to portraying another side of our current reality—complete, unabated abandonment to self-gratification. Their slogans? Well, I blush to quote them— “Promiscuity is a citizen's duty. Everyone belongs to everyone else.”

A third negative utopian novel whose title, Fahrenheit 451, was recently hijacked by Michael Moore as the title for his negative anti-American film Fahrenheit 9/11, brings up another feature of our contemporary society that comes close to fulfilling its soul-distorting prophecies.

In the world of Fahreheit 451, the role of the fire department had changed. Rather than put out fires, they started them, specifically, they burned books, and when they found a house too full of them to be emptied and burned in the street, they burned down the house with its literary content (and sometimes its owner, as above).

In that world it was a crime to read books. The substitute? Twenty-four hour seven-days a week non-stop interactive big screen TV. The content of their programming? Literally wall-to-wall soap operas.

Well, maybe we haven’t gotten that bad yet. It isn’t a crime to read books. It’s just that people act as though it were. But the aspect of 24/7 entertainment at the expense of real life has certainly nearly taken us over. The misguided efforts of ‘Christian TV’ programming to ‘cover the earth with God’s Word’ seem to have had some rather sad side effects as well.

I know of many people whose entire spiritual focus is watching ‘Christian’ TV shows. As one of my sons has observed, they appear to be ‘worshiping the television set.’ This deviation has spread from the living room to the bed room to the kitchen and even into the bathroom, and from there, it has invaded the houses of worship of many denominations, to where you can’t be in the presence of God anymore. The ‘worship’ is just too flashy and loud, and fun.

‘Bibles and religious literature all over the house, but watching…’

Yes, watching what? Is it as the Word of God tells us, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41), and “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

But while we have this precious Word of God in our midst, rather than build our lives upon it as our foundation, we dismiss it casually, and join the romp to glorify our flesh as we can no longer ‘distinguish the stale from the fresh.’ We subsist on what is not even fit to be fed to hogs, when the feast of faith has been laid out before us ‘in the presence of our enemies.’

Lord Jesus Christ, living Son of living God and Word of Life,
have mercy upon us!