It is a good idea to watch the video THEN comment. I liked the video! It was good, it had some good theology in it. The singer/rapper seems like a good young man with good ideas. Before we look at the word religion, lets look at another word. Sex. (Wow, did he write that on a Christian website?!) You see the people in the church at Coninth told Paul that because there was so much sexual immorality around that christians should not have sex. But Paul said no, sex was from God and it was to be enjoyed by a husband & wife. The problem was not sex, it was bad, sinful sex. So what is the problem with word religion? Religion is not a bad word, but the problem is bad religion! People more concerned with a bunch of rules first, instead of teaching about Gods grace to sinners. People teaching about false gods is bad religion. But the maker of the video says some good things about what the religion of christianity teaches. I hope he soon realizes that. I hope he takes a stand for good sound doctrine that is taught in the Bible by Moses, Jesus and Paul as well as others. Oh no! I used the word doctrine! Stay tuned for all the comments about the word "doctrine"!

Perhaps that was the young man's intent. But to many who say similar things seem to mean,"I want to feel good but I don't want to pay for it."

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I.e., in the same way a “true doctor” will seek to work himself out of a job. A doctor becomes mercenary if he balks at cures due to it throwing him out of work. Even so when religion becomes self-important, self-conscious, self-perpetuating – institutionalized, perfunctory - it becomes antichrist.

The proper view of what we call “religion” is not to see it as categorically “good”, but as “good under the circumstances” (in the same way amputation of a gangrenous leg is “good” to save a life).

If we fall in love with religion, we leave our First Love, which is to be Christ alone: “For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” (2 Cor 11:2-3)

As long as we are in these bodies even the good things in life – in this case, religion – is at best merely among “the patterns of things in the heavens”, “which are the figures of the true”, and not “heaven itself” (Hebrews 9:23-24). Religion heals, but it is not health.

What this young man is opposing, then, is all that darkens, obscures, leads away, works against the true, vital, intimate relationship with God through Christ; which even good things – in this case, that religion we call Christianity with the props and fixtures that God has given us to point to, to foreshadow and prefigure the substance -- can supplant. It is the supplanting, the wrong use of the doctor’s temporary office, that he opposes, that he is calling “religion”; it is the substitution of the form for the substance, the figure employed for the thing intended; the shadow for the body; the letter for the spirit; the temporal for the eternal; the stop-gap for the solution; the video game simulation for real life; in short, worshiping the creature instead of the Creator; or in a single word: idolatry.

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Think about it.


I think this young man “knows what spirit he is of”. But, of course, as Ms. Turner points out, we need to clearly and comprehensively define what is meant – or at least what is intuitively understood by so many folks – as “religion”.