A newspaper report several years ago focused on “the Christian hard rock and metal scene”. The reporter identifies himself as “a teenager growing up in the evangelical subculture [who] was a huge fan of Christian hard rock and metal in the early 2000s.” He says the music helped him “feel adventurous and unique.” It was an important way for him “to craft an identity.”
A veteran hard rock festival goer recalled the days when he couldn’t wear his “Slayer T-shirt” in church. The implication is that those bad old days are gone! For the uninformed, Slayer is a heavy metal “punk thrash” band that glories in violence, anarchy, and death. Then there was a transgender teen who says he “came to Christ in a mosh pit [at a music festival] in 2015 and came out as transgender in 2016.”
These young people and others like them respond to a sugary gospel that presents Love as God. It’s a strange contemporary version of Christianity promising salvation with no repentance, no regrets and lots of exciting “music”. Sound Bible teaching is traded for a premium on entertainment. The pastors are frauds, preaching shallow sermonettes that distort God’s love and ignore God’s law, never plowing the stony ground of human conscience to produce the repentance necessary to receive the seed of God’s Word. Their “seeker-friendly” message about the guaranteed good life that follows when Jesus becomes our best friend, toting a goodie-bag of forgiveness, love, joy, peace, plenty, and no problems fails to acknowledge that God does not love everything, and we are not the only thing He loves.
The uncomfortable truth for those comfortable with Christianity-lite is that God equally loves His Law, His Justice, and His Holiness, and we should never make the mistake of expecting Him to choose between us and the other things He loves!