Gary discusses art and worldview with Pastor Doug Giles and his several series of art to help change Christians’ perception of biblical persons and events.
Interest in the occult emerges when the prevailing Christian worldview fails to impact people’s lives in concrete, life-transforming ways. When the Christian message becomes defeatist, retreatist, and exclusively otherworldly, the door is opened wide to the occult. When the Church embraces a watered-down Christian message and raises the white flag of cultural surrender, you can expect the devil to march in where he once feared to tread and give the impression that he has the power.[1] Os Guinness describes it this way:
Early hunters on safari in Africa used to build their fires high at night in order to keep away the animals in the bush. But when the fires burned low in the early hours of the morning, they would see all around them the approaching outlined shapes of animals and a ring of encircling eyes in the darkness. When the fire was high they were far off, but when the fire was low they approached again.[2]
We see the encircling eyes of the occult because the Church has allowed the fires of a vibrant Christian faith to burn low. The Christian message has been diluted: The Bible has answers in death but little to say about life in the here and now. Those looking for answers to problems that confront them daily will try any option, including the occult, if they believe they might get some answers.
Paganism, which supposedly has received a “bum rap” from Christianity and the scientific community (for different reasons), is now seen as a viable worldview option. Witchcraft thrives in a relativistic world where Christianity is only one religious alternative among many. Once the Bible is dismissed as authoritative or is dismissed because of its inability to deal with “modern” issues, we are left with a free-for- all when it comes to a choice of worldviews. The worldview of relativism makes all other worldviews possible and permissible, even the fraudulent worldview of occult practices.
The man-centered worldview of rationalism and the diminished worldview of Christianity produced a new worldview which is now being identified as the New Age movement, higher consciousness, holistic healing, psychic healing, astrology, eastern mysticism, life readings, and outright Satanism. Actually, there is nothing new about anything we are seeing today. Such fraudulent practices have been with us since the beginning of time. Truth is, God has no competitors.
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme ‘There Was a Crooked Man’ is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy NowGary discusses art and worldview with Pastor Doug Giles. Doug has been working on several series of art to help change Christians’ perception of biblical persons and events. How we think about the Bible and the men and women mentioned are often informed and influenced by false visual representations in popular paintings and other works of art.[3]
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[1] Gary DeMar and Peter J. Leithart, The Reduction of Christianity: A Biblical Response to Dave Hunt (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1988).
[2] Os Guinness, The Dust of Death: A Critique of the Establishment and the Counter Cul- ture—and a Proposal for a Third Way (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 277.
[3] Check out Doug Giles’ art here: https://www.douggiles.art/