Thus says the LORD:“Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the LORD. For he shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when good comes, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, In a salt land which is not inhabited. “ Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, and whose hope is the LORD. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit. “The heart is deceitful above all things,and desperately wicked; who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:5-9
Jeremiah was known as the weeping Prophet, because his heart ached for his countrymen for their surface only acknowledgement of God, while their everday actions conformed more and more to the world around them, and what the end result of this would be for them in their very near future, he prophesied during the final days of the Kingdom of Judah’s existence as a nation, his prophecies fit so well with what is going on in the American church today, The church has only a surface acknowledgement of God, but its everyday actions more and more reflect the world and culture around it, and hence the church as fallen into blindness and strong delusion, it trusts in man’s methods instead of trusting in God, and man’s methods are utilitarian based on fallen intellect and what appears to man to be successfull, and what is successful today? Shallow culturally based transient and fleeting entertainment.
You do not learn about God and learn to know God by being entertained. I taught VBS for three years, and each year I became more and more dissillusioned with the “packaged” entertainment based VBS program that our chruch at that time put on. It wasnt just the entertainment that was so bad, the VBS program also played into the destructive frenetic hyper activity that typifies secular child entertainment today:
Train [teach] a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it Proverbs 22:6
Today we teach our children that the world is about entertaining them, is it any wonder that adult life in America today is driven by entertainment, and is it any further surprise when those same children who were “trained” by their church via fallen secular entertainment methods then turn to that lifestyle when they reach adulthood and reject the idea of obedience to God on ideological grounds? As obedience to God on ideological grounds means you will not be entertained but frequenlty humbled.
Further when those same children reach adulthood they then seek to further integrate wordly entertainment into the church as it is all they know as “church”, and hence the cycle of the transformation of the Church from Obedience to God based on Ideological grounds to a man based fallen social institution continues and intensifies, until the Church is destroyed or cannot be differentiated from the world around it, just as Israel and Judah were destroyed for their increasing wordliness:
Internet Monk on our capitulation to entertainment within the church (as evidenced by VBS programs):
“Evangelicalism is passing through a period of intense self-doubt regarding the relevance of its message and truthfulness. This doesn’t manifest itself in open doubt, as in classical liberalism, but among children and youth ministries, in the replacement of the unique Christian message and content- the Bible and the Gospel- with entertainment.
Facing a culture that uses entertainment for cultural control, evangelicals have capitulated to the dominance of entertainment in worship and ministry. When faced with the question of how to ‘reach’ anyone, or how to ‘keep the interest’ of young people especially, the answer is predictable: find a way to use entertainment. Deemphasize the Bible and the Gospel, or at least reshape them into whatever entertaining version is workable. Actual engagement with Biblical texts will be tangential and minimal, but present enough to justify the use of entertainment.”
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