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We are
living in a sin-sick, morally degenerate, and
pleasure-mad world. Our society continually demands
entertainment, amusements, and pastimes at an
ever-increasing level.
What is the goal of
this "continual-entertainment" spirit? To keep
modern man happily busy...
The very words
themselves reveal this fact. The word amusement
comes originally from the French and literally means
"to stare at fixedly so as to prevent musing or
thinking." The word pastime speaks for itself. It
means to kill or use up time as a thing of little
value; to pass time away. The root of the word
entertainment means to divert. Thus it implies
something which takes us away or diverts us from the
normal, real world of everyday life.
In other words,
entertainment, amusements, pastimes are things which
keep us busy - busy avoiding the realities of life
and truth as they are set down in God's Holy Word.
They keep us busy avoiding thinking about eternity,
hell, heaven, sin, God, Christ, salvation, our own
selves, and especially our need for a new heart.
But if
entertainment succeeds in its first goal of making
man busy it fails miserably in its second: happily
busy. Never has there been so much restlessness,
dissatisfaction, and yes, unhappiness. Despite our
freedom from poverty... plus our continual drinking
in of entertainment - no age has been as unhappy as
modern man.
Entertainment can
never give enough - it always leaves an empty
feeling behind. The more it is practiced and relied
on, the emptier it becomes.
It has turned our
society into an object of pity, for we are victims
of our own system. Society goes full cycle, from
being pleasure-hungry to pleasure-mania to
pleasure-boredom.
But do you know
what is even worse? Not only the world, but also the
church has begun sliding down the slippery slope of
entertainment which can only end in sin, and
disastrous results... Step-by-step the
old-fashioned, plain gospel message with its
emphasis on the necessity of conversion, is being
increasingly de-emphasized. Less and less time is
being spent praying together as a family, reading
religious books together with children, talking
together in family circles about spiritual matters.
At the very heart
and centre of our modern entertainment spirit stands
TELEVISION. Our society has become TELE-HOLIC. On a
night when wives do not leave home, 95 out of 100
will spend it watching TV and 85% of their husbands
will do likewise. Among teenagers, 80% will follow
their parents' example, and 75% of children will
also spend their evening drinking in the sin shown
on TV.
A television owner
usually becomes addicted to TV with respect to (A)
TIME, (B) SIN, and (C) CONTROL.
(A) TIME. The
average TV viewer spends 5½ hours per day watching
TV. By the time an average American youth becomes
sixty-five years old, he will have spent fourteen
years of his life watching TV (compared to one year
spent in church, Sunday School, and catechism if he
comes faithfully to all). In the U.S.A. children
three to five years old spend fifty-four hours every
week watching TV, which is 64% of their time awake.
Every time an adult sits down to watch TV, he/she
averages 3½ hours of watching time before turning
the TV off. Children are glued to TV for an average
of 2½ hours per sitting. With the exception of
sleeping, the average American will spend more time
in his life watching TV than anything else - yes
even more than working. Do we not have a tele-holic
society with respect to our precious, God-given
time?
(B) SIN. TV is a
flood of sin. It numbs its watchers against all ten
commandments... TV applauds sin, approves of sin,
and forces its watchers to minimize sin through
countless repetitions. Over and over again the
traditional family life is despised as
old-fashioned: fatherhood is replaced with heroism
via pathways of sin; motherhood is rejected as
demeaning; obedience from children is laughed at as
being too boring to be entertaining.
TV has become a
catalogue of sin, and all studies reveal it is
getting worse. It has become the devil's classroom.
The devil is smart enough to throw in a little
religion too, and occasionally even a little
morality, to pacify consciences enough not to throw
it out. Does not TV make a tele-holic society with
respect to sin when it feeds lust, perverts morals,
presents impurity as love, pictures murder as
thrilling, exalts nakedness and indecency as beauty,
and seeks to legitimise all kinds of sin against
every command of God?
(C) CONTROL Here
the addiction becomes even more serious. Thousands
of family fights take place regularly because no
agreement can be reached on which show to indulge
in. In American homes 35% of mealtimes are spent in
front of the TV set. Nightly thousands of parents
realise the programs that will come on are
demoralising and harmful for their children but yet
are so hungry themselves to drink in the sin which
they contain that they often let their children
watch it too, having no power to control it.
Our natural hearts
love sin, our ears listen for sin, our eyes look for
sin. That is just the problem with TV. It is not the
box itself that is the problem, but it is our
hearts. TV shows what the heart of man wants to see.
You are wasting
precious God-given time for which you will have to
give an account one day. Would it not be far better
that you take the time spent watching TV to read
Scripture or good books, or listen to sermon tapes?
May it become the
prayer of all of us with David: "I will set no evil
thing before my eyes. Turn Thou my eyes from
beholding vanity." (Pilgrim's Gate;
Condensed)
By Dr J.R. Beeke
Also see:
books and
articles by David Neal |