Sowing Seeds Of Contempt

Day 246 in my "Year In My Life Through Pictures" blog series.

We had planned to go to the Metropolis Comic Book Show today and I just knew that my post today would include that somehow. Wrong. We did attend the show and I did take some pictures. I even captured on of the guy that played Jason in the first Friday the 13th movie. Not the big hulking guy with the hockey mask, the young guy that jumped out of the water at the end. Seems he is still making a living off of that role 30 years after the movie was released.

My picture today comes from the local Lifeway Christian book store. On the heels of removing the warnings to books like "Blue Like Jazz", "The Shack" and "Velvet Elvis" comes this fine specimen of less than God honoring trinketry. It is a small shovel with a small paper cloth with seeds embedded in it. The verse that is included on the card is part of the parable of the soil types in Luke 8. Verse 8 in particular, "But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty", even though I am not sure which translation they quoted from on the card. I looked through all of the ones at Bible Gateway and found not a translation that said, "But sown on good ground are those who hear the Word...". I did find the manufacturers website (CTA Inc.), but they do not have these exact seed cross packages pictured.

These are the types of products that do not show the reverence required of the gospel, of Christ, His people and of the cross of Calvary. It is a lame tempt of marketing to invoke the cross that Jesus bore our sins on as a seed holder, then use the words of Christ in the parable of the soil types to vindicate selling seeds in a Christian store. Using scripture out of context as a marketing tool is just plain wrong, whether it is on a seed packet or on a t-shirt. It is twisting scripture to mean something not intended, which is not a very good thing to do.

I'd just like to know when this kind of junk became considered acceptable in the Christian community. I'm sure many will say, "Lighten up Jeff, it's just a seed packet". That it may be, but then why use something as Holy as the cross and the Words of Christ to pander your goods? It is an attempt to use the things of God as a marketing tool.

I am sure there are some well intentioned folks doing this too. I don't think they have meeting coming up with blatantly blasphemous items. I think it is not a proper understanding of who God is and what God expects. People just seem to not have any discernment these days in so many areas of life. "Christian" companies market their wares and the public gobbles them up. So many of the t-shirts and other products today really border on heresy or just downright bad taste. I wrote a blog post a few years ago about some of the heretical shirt designs on the market then. Guess what. They have not gotten any better and are actually slipping further down the slope.

Those that are truly children of God need to take note and take a stand against these things. We need to stand firm and call these trinkets, shirts, necklaces, hats, bumper stickers, seed packets and everything else what they are - Blasphemy. Sure, I may ruffle some feathers and I'm sure some will say, "Stop living in the 50's Jeff". But, believe it or not, I do own some tasteful t-shirts and have a sticker on my car that do not blaspheme God or His Word.

Just seriously think about something before you buy it. Just because it's in Lifeway doesn't mean it is a good product to buy. I refer back to the books I mentioned that the warning were removed from. Lifeway deemed the warnings to be un-needed instead of removing the books from their shelves. Anything that is questionable definitely does not need to be in a Christian book store. But, then again, Lifeway is a business, just as the traders were in the Temple when Jesus did a little house cleaning.