What They Feed Me I Will Swallow
An article from the 3/8/17 Weekly Update by Tim Keller
On a cold and blustery winter day your next-door neighbor stops at your house and drops off a container of vegetable soup. Warmed by the thought of such a kind gesture you profusely thank your neighbor and proceed directly to your kitchen. You pour some of the soup into a bowl and pop it into the microwave for a few minutes to get it hot and ready for immediate consumption.
While the final seconds tick down on the microwave you grab a spoon, a napkin and some saltine crackers. You think you yourself, “This is going to be such a nice meal!”
When you pull the soup out of the microwave and gently stir it with your spoon you notice something that catches your eye. Floating around with the potatoes and carrots are several plastic Legos. You pause and try to process what your eyes are seeing. How did they get in there? Is my neighbor losing it? Have I done something to offend her?
The one thought that you aren’t having trouble processing is that something is terribly wrong. Eating the soup in its current condition would be unacceptable. You may go through and pick out the ingredients that don’t belong there or you may just choose to pour the entire container down the garbage disposal, but eating it without thought is not going to happen. To do so would be dangerous and even potentially deadly.
One of the best-selling Christian books in the past 50 years has been turned into a movie and it was released this past weekend. It isn’t my place to review movies for my church family and give them a “Siskel and Ebert” thumbs up or thumbs down. I have no desire to be the “movie police” that church members need to consult with before buying a ticket.
No movies, even those that portend to do so, perfectly communicate God’s Truth. There’s something in every movie that doesn’t match biblical theology. There are also some movies that offer a lot of redeeming values. My concern is that precious few Christian movie attenders are in a position to be able to spot the Lego in the vegetable soup.
Theological errors exist in every feature playing in the theatre. The solution is to pick through each one and find the dangerous flaw or dump the movie watching experience down the garbage disposal and never go to the theatre. I respect both approaches.
What I don’t respect is the Christian who attends without a filter of a Christian world-view; the one who doesn’t spot the subtle lie in the storyline and the one who doesn’t catch the statement that absolutely contradicts what the Bible teaches. This is the danger of gulping down the soup without knowing that Legos don’t belong in vegetable soup.
“I didn’t see anything wrong with it” is a common response to the challenge of drinking in entertainment without a filter of Truth. However, when the ER doctor is doing emergency surgery on you to remove the Lego that is stuck in your throat, the response, “I didn’t see anything wrong with it” won’t hold up.
I urge you to determine your approach to the culture of entertainment and either dump your television in the trash or learn how to watch with a discerning eye. Your choice will have a profound effect on your spiritual life.
