Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts. Today happens to be October 31st. And rather than ask the question, should Christians celebrate Halloween? Or why have we forgotten that this marks the day of the beginning of the Reformation? What we're gonna talk about today has to do with a phenomenon that has taken place in America, where you take a distinctly religious Christian holiday, think Christmas, and turn it into elves and nutcrackers. Or Thanksgiving, which were a group of people who had come to this country to thank God for his providential care. And we've turned it into just focusing on turkeys. Or Easter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the new life made possible by his death and then rising from the dead. And we turn it into bunnies and Easter eggs and things like that. If you look back at the roots of All Hallows' Day, you will find Christian underpinnings, but like so many other things I've just mentioned, they have become secular. But what is true about how the practice of Halloween and celebrating it, and I'll put that in quotes, is very different from when I was growing up. It has now turned into a theme of horror and gruesome images that you can see in retail establishments, in front yards, in movie and television offerings. And where I live, there's this big tent in a mall outside in the parking lot called the House of Horrors, and it's inviting families to bring their children. And how we decided to talk about this today because Charles shared with me a video of a display in a suburban neighborhood near where he lives. And when he had described it, I thought maybe he was exaggerating. But then when I saw the video, I said, no, he is not exaggerating at all. As a matter of fact, he might be underestimating how awful and grotesque this display is. And so I'll start off by letting Charles, in detail, describe what this display is. And then the question that we're going to talk about today is this. Can a society maintain Christian ideals if, in fact, they have abandoned Christian faith? So Charles, take it away. I began to notice in the area where I live near Greenville, South Carolina, there was a house that I would pass by working my way through a neighborhood to get to a larger intersection. Usually around the first of October, this guy would start to put these rather gruesome, not just like a witch hanging from a thread on a broom or a Casper the Ghost kind of character, but really gruesome, blood-curdling things. As we got closer to Halloween, he would include more and more. Well, one day I decided to just go around the block and I saw another house that was trying to outdo that guy. I thought this is really getting ridiculous like you. I remember going trick-or-treating when I was a kid and I never saw anything quite like this. Well, the capstone of this whole thing, I just happened to go through a neighborhood in a little different part of that area. I wasn't looking for these things, I'm looking for shortcuts. Holy cow, there's this yard that's twice the size of the yard I first described. This guy, he's on a corner of two streets and the perimeter along one edge of the street and around to the other part of the street of his property is completely lined with lifelike, I would say six or seven foot tall vampires, chainsaw killers, people with their heads cut off, And then as you go beyond that into this guy's yard, there are these 40, 50 foot tall gruesome skeletons and clown killers and just everything out of your nightmares and everything vomited up by Hollywood in the past 15 or 20 years to scare the daylights out of people and make them disgusted. And I just decided, I started doing this with the other yard I described and putting it on my Facebook page and quoting Proverbs 8.36. I just put the picture up and I just said, you know, all those that hate me are in love with death, Proverbs 8, 36. So when this other one showed up, I thought I've got to get a video of this, which I did. And I posted that with the same quote. And I just said, imagine living in this neighborhood. And I said, this is not far from where I live. The video doesn't even come close like you suggested. Somebody commented, they said, well, is that all one property? I had to go back over there and look, yeah, it's all one property. But as I did that, I realized the video I took with a very good smartphone camera, it doesn't come close to the, it's like you go see the Grand Canyon and you take a picture and it doesn't even come close to capturing what I saw. That's what got me to thinking about this in more detail. We're confronted by this, of course, as you indicated, every Halloween. I think that it's a gauge, it's a barometer of how far down the path our culture has slid toward hell in rejecting God's law and the biblical foundations on which our states were founded. Exactly. There have been some recent political candidates who, because they got on the ballot, were able to have commercials that had to be played in the FCC doctrine of fairness. And there were pictures of aborted children. And there was an outrage. As a matter of fact, there was an apology from a lot of the news stations or television stations that had to air it. And they apologized to their audience saying, We are so sorry that you have to watch this, but it's the law, we have to show it. And I'm not new to the pictures of what an aborted child looks like. It's gruesome for sure. But in comparison to what our society tolerates, not unlike what you just described in the neighborhoods near where you live and the movies and such, This really is a wake-up call for the degeneration of our culture because if it's unacceptable and I don't, I mean you hear people saying when they were interviewed, I think it's inappropriate to put this up that children might see what these aborted children look like but they don't seem to have problems with the slash and cutting and all this stuff. I mean, I went to the movies not too long ago to see a film I wanted to see and bombarded with previews of such satanic and killing and gruesome and horror and scaring you that I actually put my eyes down. It's like just the sound of it isn't pleasant, but the visuals are really something that are hard to get rid of. So this discussion is more like, we have people who say oh America is free we love America without recognizing that you can't have the we're all Americans and make America great again when in actual fact what's tolerated is anything other than the antithesis of what this nation was founded on. Yes and You know, death is a fact. It is something that everyone is familiar with from their earliest years, whether a beloved parent or grandparent passes away when you're a kid or your pet, cat or dog or whatever. There's something that we are confronted with very early in human life. And this is not new to our culture, going back thousands of years. Human cultures have had to confront death, and pagan cultures, those founded on something other than biblical truth, they have to come up with their own elaborate explanations as to what is death, what happens after death, if anything, what am I going to do about it. And you and I were discussing before we started a book that I think both of us are reading, and we weren't sure, but the one I'm reading, in the early part, he has a section called The Resurgence of Paganism. Yes, it's the same book, we're reading the same book. And what's striking about that is, I'm not going to get all the details, but he describes a number of different cultures from African, South American, Mid-American, I don't remember if there are any Asian cultures he mentions, I think there were, but how the preponderance of human sacrifice, of killing people to appease gods or the forces of the gods of the trees and the rocks and all this, You know, these are examples of culture that, in some way, they don't know how to cope with death. And in a manner of speaking, as the proverb indicates, they are in love with death. And Dr. Rastuni, in more than a few of his writings and articles, you know, talked about this proverb and its profound implications. I have to say, I mean, not that I was any big Bible scholar before I was reading Rastuni, but through four, seven, eight, 10 years of theological training in three different seminaries. I never heard anybody expound much of anything about Proverbs 8.36. And it was Dr. Rastuni who brought it to my attention in his writings and the profound implications of, well, of course, you know, people say this dismissive, oh, who's in love with death? Well, that's the point. If you reject God's way of life, God's standard of living and justice and truth, and this is how you flourish, you pursue life according to God's standards, If you're not interested in that, if you deny those standards, then whether you like it or not, whether you think of it or not, you are pursuing a course of death. And as Rustini points out, suicide. It's a suicidal path. And in reference to that book, The Paganization of America, I don't remember the author. Maybe you have the author that we can supply it later. He points out that the current view of paganism is filtered through a Christian lens because people who were born in our time are used to things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and he points out that paganism at its root is a power religion. who has the most weapons, who is the most powerful, gets to decide who lives and who dies. And so when people are embracing the idea, well, this is not anything to be concerned about. This is just harmless fun. What came to my mind is one of the verses in the hymn, A Mighty Fortress. Martin Luther said, and though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us. The Prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for Him. His rage we can endure, for lo, His doom is sure. One little word shall fell Him. So there's an acknowledgement of the evil of the Prince of Darkness, of Satan, of demons, and yet it gets dismissed by, oh, this is just harmless fun, or this is like you're being too extreme. But to quote Dr. Rushduni in his section on the theological nature of sin, there's a section he has on desecration, and he speaks a lot about Satanism. And he points out that Satanists thrive on man's despair of life and any hope in good or righteousness. And that a sentence attributed to Satan in a book he was referencing is, think so much that you have no time to pray. And also, I go where everybody's afraid. Well, when you see these horrific images and They're meant to, quote unquote, entertain children. Don't you think, Charles, this brings to bear in their mind images that make them afraid? I mean, we laugh about it being spooky and, oh, scary, but it makes somewhat of an indelible mark, don't you think? Yes, and there's been all sorts of humanistic, psychological explanations or theories and excuses. You know, people, this is something in us that we, according to this way of thinking, that we enjoy being scared. You know, there's an entertainment factor in it. And so it's dismissed as sort of innocent fun, quote unquote. But the fact is, anybody who's ever told you or been involved in something where they had a a brush with death. Most people don't come back from that and say, oh, it was scary, but I enjoyed it. I look forward to it again next year. This idea of making this into something that is a culturally accepted thing is a part of a culture, as the book you're referring to, and I do have the author's name mentioned at the end, this paganization. this decaying of what had been a biblical foundation in many of our states to something that is purely humanistic, and in the end, it's suicidal. In the three-volume set, An Informed Faith, The Position Papers of R.J. Rastuni, he has two chapters that are directly related to what we're talking about, and we definitely want to encourage our listeners to avail themselves of this. One chapter is called the eschatology of death, and he wrote this in 1979, and the subsequent chapter is called the love of death, which he gets into this proverb and talks about a little bit in December of 1982. And what is so helpful is, and this is one of the things that drew me to Rustin in the very beginning of my theological journey, so to speak, is that he took what the Bible said and he applied it in a very powerful and obvious way, not just to my personal life, but to every area of life, which is what the Bible claims to have authority over. And so he gets into this how, The love of death, the rejection of godly wisdom is in fact a dead end. And he talks about how that shows up in economics, how the inflating of money is a suicidal thing. In a whole lot of other areas, he describes how this shows up. And you would think he wrote it just last week. I mentioned some time ago, I think I've mentioned this at least one other time, I recall when the video rental stores, you can go and rent a VHS cassette tape of your favorite movie and put it in your VHS video player. There was a whole series of movies, I think it was called The Faces of Death. And these were some of the most popularly rented video cassettes in just about any video store. And what this was is that this was police and coroner footage of car accidents, murder scenes, all sorts of things you'd never see, at least not yet, on the evening news of dismembered bodies and all kinds of things like that, and uncentered. And people would rent these things and pay money as if they were among the most popular. So there's been this fascination with this, but it's not a healthy one, and it's not one based on pursuing God's truth and a life dedicated to how he says we should live. Yes. You know, many believers today attend churches that have a statement of faith written on their website and subscribe to it. And they claim that they believe that the Bible is God's word and that it's true. Well, just for yucks, I did a search for passages in scripture that had to do with horror or had to do with the things that we're talking about. And if these same, and most of these come from the New Testament, although some of them don't, but if the same New Testament Christians were to take their faith seriously, here are some of the things that they would believe, and by believe, not say, oh yeah, that's in the Bible, but act upon. So Philippians 4, eight through 10 says, finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, Whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. So picture the house of horrors. Picture the scary movies. Picture the images of decapitated people. Does that fulfill Philippians 4, 8 through 10? I'll go on. Ephesians 4, 27 says, give no opportunity to the devil. First Peter says, be sober minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Ephesians 6.12 says, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places. First Thessalonians 5.22, abstain from every form of evil. Ephesians 5.11, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. And then 1 Corinthians 10, you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. And I could go on, there were like a hundred of them, but those specifically, when you match that up, with what a lot of people, Christian or otherwise, say this is harmless, the Bible certainly doesn't indicate that this is harmless. No, absolutely not. And as I said a moment ago, this seemingly relentless pursuit of this sort of fascination with things, it's a turning away from what you just read in God's Word And our earliest Christian ancestors dealt with this in some places. I mean, the Christians in Rome, the spectacle of the Colosseum was a celebration of death. I think there's been some maybe distortion about how often gladiators killed each other in these things. I remember reading something somewhere that You know, these were like prize fighters who were owned by people who made money off of people watching them. I don't know all the details, but the basic thing was these were not free agents who would go into the Coliseum and fight to the death. And if they wanted, you know, be lauded and all that. These guys were owned in a stable of gladiator. training schools and the owners benefit to make sure they didn't die. So it wasn't often always it was just, but there was the slaughter of animals, exotic animals that we brought into the farther reaches of the empire. The whole purpose is not just so people could see them, but so men could go out and kill them in the Coliseum. It was a culture fascinating with death, and as I described earlier, pagan cultures, pre-biblical cultures, that was their fascination. And Satan's project has always been to cause man to go off the rails and in this fruitless, downright stupid pursuit to try to be God. And that itself is a suicidal path. And that is why, in his earliest attempts to destroy humanity and God's plan, that was what he says. Did God really say that? You can make up your own mind about this. You won't surely die. That statement is probably one of the most misunderstood and least appreciated statements in all of scripture. Satan telling Adam and Eve, you won't die, when just the opposite was going to be the truth. So we sort of have this double-minded thing that we could have all the virtues and all the rights. In this same book, he pointed out there is no such thing as human rights as if everybody always agreed upon this. There are Christian values that produce these rights, or the things that we say are endowed by God, not by man. And so If you look at what paganism was in the various cultures, whether it's the Aztecs or the Romans or the Greeks, it was very much, as I said, a power religion. And so homosexuality was a practice, not so much of two men loving each other, it was one who had a position of power dominating others against their will. we're now debating pedophilia, that was a common practice in paganism. So if you don't realize that when you start to see the shift away from what is pure, what is good, what is honest and say, this is no big deal, what you're doing is you're inviting more of the same. Now, for those Charles who think, well, we're gonna get out of here raptured or whatever, or we live in this two kingdom and so let the other kingdom do what it wants. That's not what we were told to do prior to Jesus' ascension. And so how do you fight back against demons and devils? Well, Martin Luther's hymn tells us it's our faith in Jesus Christ and living according to his tenets that says, no, we will stand up to evil and call it what it is and count on the fact that we will be blessed for our faithfulness. Yeah, I think you can trace this decline and this fascination with death In modern times, I think Gary North in his book, Unholy Spirits, traces the modern fascination with this to the Kennedy assassination. And he goes into a lot of elaborate explanation as to why he's thinking that. Certainly in terms of the sorts of things we talked about with paganism that's much older, but in terms of the society in which we live and where it stands right now, and to get back to what we were saying at the very beginning, uh... there was an earlier time when people observed all hallows eve and uh... you know over time it became quote halloween but even in the full-blown you know american version of halloween in the nineteen fifties and sixties you might have kids you know dress up with lipstick on their face and fake eyebrows and more clownish looking things now occasionally that be somebody maybe like a witch or something but nobody ever took that seriously that like that was something you would really want to uh... to highlight and in popular culture at the time in Hollywood for example the movies like the Wizard of Oz well there was a good witch and a bad witch but you know even there this sort of thing was being promoted at that time and then we move forward into something like the movie Rosemary's Baby where a woman gives birth to Satan's child and people become you know desensitized and people go see these things and have seen them and they're, oh, this is terrible, you know, that kind of thing. But then gradually, it begins to replace the worldview and the standards that people at once held that was looking forward to hopeful life based on God's terms. The essay I referred to earlier in the volume on the informed faith, that's why I think that the way that was ordered, well, sequentially and chronologically, but the essay on the eschatology of death, that's the point Dr. Rustini makes is that in terms of evangelical Protestants, a majority have this view of eschatology of the way things progressed toward an endpoint where everything is a failure and there is mass death. And he asked the question, I mean, somewhat sarcastically, but with a powerful point. Why is it considered an unbiblical thing to believe what the Lord says, that the kingdoms of this world are now the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever, and that the mountain of the Lord's house will displace all others? This is an eschatology of victory, as he coined that phrase, and why people would not want to at least find out more about that and embrace it if, in fact, it's a biblical view. It only shows how far down the path some people have gone and embracing a culture of death. You know, you were mentioning The Wizard of Oz. Well, the newest offering is Wicked. The name of the show, the name of the movie is Wicked, and the main character is what we would have called in The Wizard of Oz, the Bad Witch. But you know, the Bible says, do not suffer a witch to live. So why would we dress our little girls up as witches? Well, first of all, you would have to know that the Bible said it. And then what have we done? We will highlight the Salem witch trials and look at the atrocity of the Salem witch trials. Well, regardless of whether people went overboard or not, whether the reported deaths are exaggerated or not, it at least shows that there were people concerned that witches weren't a good thing. Now, we don't have that connotation because as you pointed out, we've become desensitized. There's many times where you can say to someone, have you seen this? Yeah, yeah, that's been around for a while. They have lost the outrage of someone or some people or some ideas that stand against the Word of God, it's like, yeah, that's the way it is. You're not telling me anything new. And that's the sad part, because if we want to know how did we get here, It's that the salt has lost its savor. We stopped saying, no, this is wrong. Yes, you want to have a costume party and people dress up, that's fine. But when we start magnifying and saying, oh, yes, the scarier, the gorier, the better. What we're doing is we're manifesting our real belief. Rush Dooney calls it in other places that people become practical Satanists because they actually think the devil is as strong as God. And it's like this battle between the force and, you know, in Star Wars, it's not that way at all. The Bible clearly says that God is sovereign over everything. But we've bought into this idea of Democratic thinking, well, if this is what somebody wants to do, who am I to say they shouldn't do it? Well, if we're going to say, thus saith the Lord, and we're ambassadors for Jesus Christ, we have every responsibility to say it. Yeah, one of the interesting methods or approaches that people who practice these types of paganism and want to promote it is to change terminology. You don't often hear the term witch mentioned anymore. At one point, they had switched to using, I mean, they collectively, you know, people who are into this sort of thing, to the term Wicca, which I won't go into the details about where that comes from. But the popular phrase nowadays is earth-based religion. Well, I practice earth-based religion. Well, how innocent is that? I mean, that sounds okay, right? Well, if you want to get a good flavor of earth-based religion, Do a little bit of research in history on the Druids in pre-Christian Europe and the things that they did, or at the circumstances in ancient Aztec culture. These societies that practiced, in some cases, the most horrifically brutal forms of human sacrifice, or any form of it, frankly. This man died, so we got to slaughter everybody, all of his household to go with him through the next world, this kind of thing. They were all earth-based religions. They were all religions based on a worldview that this is all there is, and our duty is to try to get power over it. You were referring to that earlier. And it is a futile, useless pursuit. Until people come to realize this, it's going to be too late for some folks to recognize that this is not a path of life that you want to pursue. And just in case people think human sacrifice is no longer with us, reframe what you consider abortion to be in terms of just that. It's human sacrifice. The person who has the power, the woman who is carrying the child, now has the power of life and death over that child. Go back into antiquity and look at how powerful men could dispose of their wives that way, their children that way. They could use their servants any way they wanted because you see, they weren't really persons from their point of view. A person was someone like them who had power and had the ability to do whatever he wanted. to actually, in his mind anyway, live out determining for himself right and wrong. So just in case people think that those were the old days or that was the days before now, do they even ask the question, how did now come into existence? You see, what's true about Satan and demons is that they can't create, they can only destroy. And if you make a people fearful, and you make people despair, it's much easier to dominate them and control them and turn them into slaves, which is what paganism of the past depended on, a slave class that you could do whatever you wanted to do to them. Yeah, your statement about if you think this is something of a bygone era or something in the past, it made me think of something that I was recently working with in a study that I'm doing in the book of Daniel. And in the very first chapter, most people, I think, are generally familiar with the story. The Kingdom of Judah have been brought under God's sanctions and judgment because of their idolatry. And Jerusalem is destroyed by the Babylonians and King Nebuchadnezzar and the people who survived the slaughter were carried off as slaves to Babylon. And it's interesting when you read about Daniel and his three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, those are the Babylonian names they were given, Nebuchadnezzar was a very clever guy. He wasn't going to make the mistake the pharaoh did. is you know the pharaoh they have enslaved the israeli people and made life totally miserable for them and that eventually led to a massive slave revolt i mean just in terms of practical terms that's what happened we know god's plan was working behind it but so what he it would be another connoisseur has done he takes the the the children the did you know it's israelites And he educates them in his schools. He feeds them his food. Instead of being called Daniel, which is a Hebrew term, or Azariah, or Hananiah, those are the Hebrew names that his friends had before they were renamed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Babylonian names. See, it's a displacement of identity. And so I began to think about this, especially on this topic that we're talking about. And I thought, you know what? It's interesting. You can see the more conservative evangelical-type churches still in many areas who speak out against the observance of Halloween. You know, this is a devil's celebration, it's demonic and all that sort of thing, which is okay, that's true enough. But these same people, many of them, They march their kids off to government schools, Monday through Friday, every week, as if they don't make a connection between these things. So it's not enough to be against somebody filling their front yard with gigantic demons and ghouls and people with severed heads. It's not enough to oppose a demonically inspired modern version of an ancient holiday. You have to realize where Satan's influence is much more hard to discern, perhaps, or maybe has a veneer of acceptability to it. Right. The whole idea of public education was so that nobody would be denied an education. Well, at the time it was introduced in our country, nobody was denied an education. It was a problem that didn't exist that people were going to solve. But people tend to, if they're offered responsibility on one plate and irresponsibility on another plate, will often go for, well, what's in it for me, right? So anybody who homeschools their children knows firsthand that it's an enormous task, and it's one that, although fulfilling, involves a day-to-day encounter with the sins of the children and the sins of the parent and how we establish a Christian consensus in terms of what we're supposed to do and what's right and wrong. But tell somebody, well, just drop them off. And yeah, you can go in and help them occasionally. You can be the house parent or the class parent that will come and help distribute the cupcakes or whatever it is. And it's all okay. This is a blindness that we have to say is judgment from God. And I know a lot of people who listen to our podcast, Charles, who sometimes feel like they're the only people in their communities or even their churches who see the reality of things. And that's not always a comfortable place to be. I think of the prophet Jeremiah. He certainly was in that kind of circumstance, but we're called to be faithful, not comfortable. And by the time people listen to this discussion, Halloween of 2024 will have come and gone. But the real challenge, I would say, is to, as you read your Bible, look at the various passages or the things you're reading and saying, do I apply this? Am I living this way or have I compromised with evil and therefore left myself open to, well, you denied me before men, I will deny you before your Father in heaven. Yeah, and to wrap up my part of this discussion, I just want to read a sentence from Dr. Rustuni's essay on the love of death. He says, the path of life and the love of life means a God-ordained way in every area of life and thought. The essence of the modern perspective is that man claims to be autonomous and to seek his freedom from the triune God. All too many churchmen profess an adherence to the Lord of life while affirming an autonomous way in most things. And this is antinomianism. It is also the love of death. And, well, I lied. I'm going to say one more thing. I'm going to quote one more thing. Deuteronomy chapter 30, verse 19. Moses declares, I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life that both you and your descendants may live. I hope people take it to heart, because even those who understood a lot of what we were saying today, how often do they stand in challenge to neighbors, families, friends? We have to be salt and light. Otherwise, we will be trodden underfoot. If we're looking for a resurgent, if you really want to see America restored, it has to be on God's terms. Otherwise, if it's on someone else's terms, then you kind of see now you got what you asked for, you got what you allowed. And so I hope it challenges people to rethink it and to be vocal about what our requirements are. We don't just have to be against things, we are for things. We don't just pull weeds, we have to plant seeds. And so I'm hoping our discussion and highlighting the aspects of scripture will in fact get people to consider Am I Living Faithfully? Yes, and the book that we were referring to several times during our conversation is written by John Daniel Davidson, D-A-V-I-D-S-O-N, and the title is Pagan America, the Decline of Christianity, and the Dark Age to Come. Out of the Question podcast at gmail.com is how you reach us, and I look forward to you joining us next time. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit calcedon.edu.