Clash of Cultures

I Kings 18:27 "And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till blood gushed out upon them." KJV

I have always been wary of any type of culture projected by the world and its systems. What surprises me is the fact that most Christians are not. In fact, Christians are the most enthusiastic adopters of new things the world brings in, forgetting that they are not of this world. The Bible says we are not to love the world or the things in the world but a lot of Christians don't seem to understand that.

I have always wondered what people see in tattoos. Before people think that I'm an elderly person who doesn't understand young people's fads, let me say that I am an adult male in my thirties. My wariness and lack of understanding has to with the fact that in the process of obtaining a tattoo, blood is spilt. The Bible says that the life of a person is in the blood. Hence any procedure that means my blood is going to be spilt or dealt with any way is something I don't want to go through. Especially when the procedure is not one that is necessary or life saving. A point I have made before which I will continue to make is that I have looked at my Bible and I see nothing about conservative or liberal there. The only definition I see from the Bible is that of Christian. And that is what I am. A Christian who believes wholly in the Bible as the infallible word of God.

The story is told in I Kings 18 about the prophet Elijah's contest with the prophets of the Canaanite god of fertility, rain and harvest, Baal. Elijah had previously prayed to God and no rain had fallen for the past three and a half years. He had disappeared out of sight and God has used raven and a widow to feed him while the whole land was experiencing a famine. At the three and a half years, Elijah showed up in Israel and challenged the prophets of Baal to contest to see whose god would answer the cries of his prophet. When the prophets of Baal prayed and he did not answer, Elijah taunted them by asking them to pray harder as perhaps Baal was sleeping or had gone on a journey. Now agitated, the Bible says "And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till blood gushed out upon them."

For me, the whole tattoo thing looks too much like what the prophets of Baal did, cutting themselves deliberately. It even seems worse to me when I think of what it’s supposed to be all about. A tattoo is supposed to be cool, hip and all about aesthetics. In short, it’s all about vanity. Which makes it even worse. People are cutting themselves to a new god, the god of cool. The god of vanity.

The Bible says we should test all spirits whether they are of God. Spirits not only exist in people, they exist as the force behind movements and waves and cultural phenomenon. Most of what is taken as culturally normal today does not align with the Bible. Yet we adopt them unthinkingly. As a result, Christian culture is being subsumed in secular culture and its getting hard to know who is a Christian and who is not because we are all so alike. And that is sad.


JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBow Press (www.westbowpress.com), a division of Thomas Nelson Publishers.