Confessions of a Seminarian

Is Christian Music always Christian?

Don’t hear what I am not saying.

There are plenty of Christian artists out there who are great people and excellent musicians. But I happened across this video last week, and I had to laugh because I realized that sometimes the “Christian Music Industry” creates bands who exist for the sake of profit, just like the “Regular Music Industry” does. These are ridiculous distinctions, I realize that, but it’s the best I can do to make sense of reality.

Take a look at the video. Does it reflect any truth at all? Do some people lie for the sake of keeping up appearances? Is the Christian music industry really to blame? Are all of us to some degree just like the artists portrayed here? How can we battle against this tendency in “evangelical culture?”

Where is the Hope?

I despise news documentaries.

All the 20/20’s and Dateline’s of television “infotainment” get on my nerves.  Give me a sitcom and I can forget about reality for 30 minutes (20 minutes after commercials). But with a documentary, I am forced to think about the real world.

My wife and I were watching one of those shows a few weeks ago, and I learned an amazing truth that I never knew.  Somewhere in southern California, there is a facility that could freeze and store my body after I die until science discovers a way to bring me back from the dead.  The cost for this process is about $75,000.

Now I recognize this might be a medical advance to defeat “premature” death.  Isn’t death life’s greatest enemy?  Death will claim us all, and we are correct to resist it as much as possible.  On the other hand we forget that it has already been defeated.

During the program, they interviewed a particular family.  This family of five had already paid so that they could all be frozen at death.  Their children were all interviewed; the 12-year-old girl said that being frozen and preserved was “better than no hope at all“.

Please understand that nothing was wrong with this little girl.  She does not have some other tragic illness.  She just knows that one day she will become sick and die, and the hope of being brought back to life by a medical professional is the only hope she has.

I was horrified to hear this.

Even if this little girl gets cancer in her mid-forties and 70 years later is thawed out and cured, will she not then face Alzheimer’s or heart disease?  No, this is a tragic viewpoint that fails to recognize that no advance in medicine will ever make this world right again.

Death is a result of sin.

Thank God for the resurrection of Jesus! Death will be with us until the day we follow Jesus in his resurrection.  In 1 Corinthians 15:19 Paul wrote that if Christ did not rise from the dead we (Christians) are to be pitied above all others.   One version says “we are a pretty sorry lot”

Maybe you read that and you pity me because you do not believe in the historicity of the resurrection.  Maybe you read that and you think I am insane.  Maybe you have neither of those reactions.  But the reality is that death will take you.  If you freeze yourself, death might delay, but it will take you.  We all have no hope of defeating death.

Those who believe in the resurrection know specifically that there is more life to be had than here on earth.  At the very end of the Bible we are told that one day God will make things right.  There will be no more pain, death, or tears.

This is the hope of a Christian.  We trust in a future when death will die and things will once again be the way we always knew they should be.