This world is not your friend.

With a heightened awareness of child abuse we are now more careful than ever to alert our children to stranger danger.
But are we alerting them to stranger-world danger?
The culture in which we live and move is not neutral; it is anti-God.

One vehicle by which the culture around us subtly, or not so subtly, loves to convey its anti-God message is through the arts.

The arts themselves are neutral; they are not inherently good or evil.
They can be, should be, and are being, used by believers to glorify God.
But we must not attribute any inherent virtue to them, the way you frequently hear an unbeliever speak (eg. “My music saved me”, “I live for my art” etc.)

Further, the arts can be, and are regularly being, conscripted by our culture to convey its anti-God message.
From the beginning this has been so. This fallen world has always, not only embraced the arts, but excelled in its use of them.
The founders of the arts themselves, the first great artists and artisans, were Jabal, Jubal and Tubal-Cain: they were all from the godless line of Cain.
Their father (the first recorded polygamist) composed the first recorded human literature, a poem glorifying sin and self. (Gen 4:19-24)

Our children need to be taught to appreciate the arts; but not to believe in them as in some way “saving” them or be sucked into believing the message the world conveys through them, glorifying sin and self.

Sometimes that message is blatantly anti-God: even as I write this the city where I am, is hosting the annual “Gay Mardi Gras” which, by its “art”, promulgates in-your-face perversion.
But mostly it is more subtle. MGM may still roar at us in the opening frames of movies that it is all about: Ars Gratia Artis (“Art for Art’s Sake”) but we are fools if we believe that is all it is, and ignore that there is a message that is surreptitiously lodging itself in your brain.
It particularly concerns me that some Christians are oblivious to this, ignoring (or even excusing) the anti-God messages of the culture because they are conveyed through art.

This is something which I have observed among some associated with the New Calvinism.  As much as I appreciate some of the positives of that movement I have also noticed a disturbing tendency among some to be foolishly naïve when it comes to recognising the anti-God message that is being conveyed through some movies and TV shows.
(I intend to critique the New Calvinism in more depth in a later blog.)

I don’t mean to imply that all those involved in that movement are so misled; I appreciate there are some who are more discerning. In fact, it was two of their number who spoke out against the popular TV series “Game of Thrones”. John Piper posted Twelve Questions to Ask Before Watching Game of Thrones; and Tim Challies, Television’s Rape Epidemic. Both posts were well-reasoned and thoughtful.
But I was dismayed when another, a founding director of a prominent church planting body here in Australia, chose to Push back against their concerns, dismissing many of their arguments and using pejoratives to suggest that some who object may just be being “prudish” or “fearful”.

Jeremy Walker, in The New Calvinism Considered, draws attention to the way 1 Cor 9:22 gets misapplied to justify this naïve approach to culture, i.e. those who say:

“We are conquering culture for King Jesus, therefore nothing is out of bounds. We can take anything this world produces and we can Christianize it.”
Paul’s statement that ‘I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some’ (1  Corinthians 9:22) is taken out of context and becomes a corporate slogan opening the door to all manner of activity, rather than the legitimate accommodation of the individual believer to the consciences of those around him.

This is not to condemn everything our culture does, or require us to dissociate from everything in it; common grace keeps our culture doing many good things. Nor does it mean a Christian should never watch a movie produced by an unbeliever.

Obviously there are some movies a Christian ought not to watch (see above); and there are some cultural practices a Christian should reject outright – even though (in some cases) others might misguidedly embrace them on the purported grounds that thereby they may “become all things to all men, that [they] might by all means save some”.
Eg. the early Anglican missionaries to India, seeking to be sensitive to the culture and thereby “by all means save some”, retained recognition of caste in the church. Carey on the other hand shockingly bucked the culture and refused: for him progress was slower, but at least was sure. Peter (at one stage) would’ve made a good Anglican; Paul would have backed Carey (Gal 2:11-14).

But even where a Christian can go along with what the culture does, he needs to be constantly aware of, and on guard against, the culture’s underlying agenda as shaped by its anti-God world view (Psa 14:1-3, Rom 3:9-12).
Eg. I watched Salmon Fishing in Yemen (see a previous post), a likeable enough movie. But I was also conscious that I could easily be sucked in to accepting a subliminal anti-God message.

This world is not your friend.
Our children need to be taught this. They need to be taught to appreciate the arts; but not to be sucked into believing the world’s message conveyed through the arts that glorifies sin and self.

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:15-17)

I commend to you the following comments, posted by Melissa Edgington this past week, in which she highlights the need for our children “to be armed with the truth, both the truth of what the culture surrounding them really is and the truth of what the Bible really is.”

Why I See Bright Hope in Our Children’s Generation

by Melissa Edgington

This weekend I spoke at a retreat for preteen girls.
We didn’t talk about modesty or boys or makeup tips. We didn’t discuss friendship or time management.
Instead we spent the day dwelling on the absolute, perfect truth of God’s word. We talked about the Bible as the authority for all of life and Jesus as the answer to our very real and very present sin problem.

In the afternoon I had a meeting with mothers, and we sat together and faced the realities of this world that we are trying to raise disciples in.
My fourteen year old Adelade sat on the front row and listened to us discuss everything from pornography to YouTube to sex education, and as our time came to an end, she quietly asked if she could say something.
Then, in her level-headed, calm way, she encouraged the mothers to talk with their children early and often about sexuality, since so many of her own eighth grade classmates are struggling to understand where on the growing spectrum of sexuality that they fall.

When I was a preteen, a girls’ retreat would be focused on more superficial things.
We would hear that we are doing great and that God finds us beautiful and that if we want friends we have to be friends. We would have been told that Christian girls don’t wear skirts that are too short and we may have even had a makeup demonstration.
Nothing is wrong with these things, but those things aren’t what we really needed to hear. We were living in a culture that didn’t often demand more from our churches.

But, our kids are growing up in a completely different world. It isn’t going to be enough to urge them to change their behavior. It isn’t going to be enough to tell them Bible stories as morality lessons or to equip them with self-help advice.
The culture of their youth is awakening churches to rediscover the true gospel, to re-establish in the hearts of the people the reality that God’s word is the ultimate authority in our lives, to show us just how far we are from a holy God, to wave His standards of holiness like a banner, to throw His grace and mercy to a dying world like the life-and-soul-preservers that they are.

For our children, repentance will be the theme of their growing up, perseverance in the face of a culture gone cold to the ways of God.
They will have to grow a true, faith-fueled, God-honoring relationship with the Lord to survive the world in which they will come of age. No half-baked religious play time will be enough to sustain these boys and girls.
They will have to rise as men and women of great faith, of total conviction, of solid doctrine, of sound theology. They will have to know and love God’s word, and they will have to know and love God.

Otherwise, in this age of anything goes but Jesus, they will crumble and fall away from the superficial religion that we tried to bubble wrap them in.
Our kids don’t need to be hidden away. They don’t need for us to pretend the biggest issue they’re going to face is whether girls should call boys. Not in a world where preteens are sending naked pictures to each other.
They need to be armed with the truth, both the truth of what the culture surrounding them really is and the truth of what the Bible really is.

I see this happening more and more. I see a generation that is being taught a biblical worldview, that is learning like no other American generation has had to before what kind of faith that it takes to stand up to lies, distortions, persecution, and hatred.
It see it in my own daughter–she needs more to cling to than clichés and Christian t-shirts. She needs a true, solid, unshakable faith that informs her every thought as she analyzes the world around her. She needs a worldview that is rooted in scripture. She needs the eyes and mind of Christ.
No nominal faith will be enough for her–not in this world that wants to devour her heart and soul.

I believe we will soon see a generation that may be fewer in number but more firm in faith than any we have seen for a long time.
These kids are growing up with extreme pressure from outside forces, a pressure that I believe will press them even more firmly into the shape of Jesus Christ as we guide them according to the very words of God.
I have a bright hope for the kind of bold, God-fearing disciples we will see rise from the ashes of their generation.

May God bless them as they glorify His name, blinding lights in an otherwise dark and depressing world.
I believe He will do it.