MWUTT 59: What Halloween Gets Wrong About Death

On Halloween night, 425 people walked through the church doors. A toddler came as a bee with mom and dad dressed as beekeepers. One family came as Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang, and one kid came as a plague doctor from the Black Death. So should Christians celebrate Halloween? The answer isn't a simple yes or no. Today, we're gonna give you three tests. Reject what is sinful, receive what is good, and redeem what can be used to God's glory. The world puts death on display this time of year, but we have a savior who has already defeated it. Welcome to Men Who Understood the Times. Uh, welcome to our special Halloween episode of Men Who Understood the Times. I'm Pastor Michael Zarling. We have Tom Barthel, who serves at Rock of Ages in Payson, Arizona, and Pastor Joel Steeves, who serves at St. Peter's in Mishicot, Wisconsin. Thanks for filling in for us, guys. We're gonna be talking about three specific things when it comes to Halloween. This is our outline of reject what is sinful, receive what is good, and redeem what can be used for God's glory. And when we're using those three criteria that we're gonna build on later on, I think it's important that we can use them for other, uh, areas, too, besides Halloween. We can use them for if we're gonna watch horror movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, or Child's Play. We can use these criteria when it's talking about reading books and watching movies, whether it's Harry Potter, The Nightmare Before Christmas, or Hocus Pocus. And then does it mean that if we can't celebrate Halloween because there's witches and magic and death, that Christian authors shouldn't use those kinds of things, uh, like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in their works of fiction? And then even can we apply these to cartoons and movies? Like, almost all of the Disney cartoons from Snow White to Cinderella to Little Mermaid and so forth all employ magic, as, as well as... I know I'm old enough, I grew up on Smurfs, and then the Looney Tunes cartoons, and they had magic in them. So Tom, we're gonna talk about rejecting what is sinful. Believers should actively avoid and decline those practices that are inconsistent with their faith or explicitly glorifies what scripture condemns, even if those practices are widely accepted or popularized by the culture. So applying rejecting what is sinful to Halloween, what would you say to that?