The Ear and Eye Gate

Scripture:  “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes…It shall not cling to me.”  Psalm 101:3 NKJV

Just before bedtime one evening, I allowed a commercial depicting a game saturated with
gratuitous violence to be the last object of my focus!  (The commercial preceded the nightly news—the watching of which was another bad idea)!  Though some of us may recall some campaigns about thirty years ago that sought to stifle the marketing of such violent video games to younger people,  like a great life-extinguishing tsunami, corporate greed rushed in to stoke the insatiable desire of a violence-loving public, and those efforts largely died out!  You might say, ‘Yeah, but haven’t we always had violence-saturated movies, novels, and other such “entertainment” throughout the generations?’ Aren’t parts of the Bible, even, filled with historical narratives of violent encounters?  Yes—undeniably—but the God-ordained violence always had His divinely spoken decree as its basis; it was about holy righteousness ordaining the execution of evil, rather than the promotion of  graphic violence for violence’s sake!  There’s a difference.

Today, we’re seeing the escalation of video game violence, coupled with a monthly escalation of real-life violence all over the world.  It brings to mind scripture verses like Matthew 24:12, which mentions that “..because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.”  It makes you wonder, are the “games” reflecting the culture, or is it more the other way around?!  Better still, aren’t they both “feeding” into one another?  So what, you might say?  What can anyone who hates this escalating stream of violence in our world do about it?  We can determine to change our own focus, by discouraging the young people (and older ones, too) in our lives from indiscriminately embracing “entertainment” that glorifies gratuitous violence!  We can do our small part by decidedly changing our own viewing and purchasing preferences in favor of movies or television programs that are more REDEMPTIVE in their content.  It is NOT too late to do some “disinfecting” of our ear and eye gates, saints!

Prayer:  Heavenly Father, if we as Your Kingdom people, desire to be faithful to You in this life, remind us of the sensibility and notable witness of not embracing every medium that our culture promotes under the guise of “entertainment.”  Remind us of the need to choose that which is best.  In Jesus’ name, amen!

(by Denise Diggs)