from Rachel: Unholy Use of Holy Vessels

Please reread the portion of Scripture that held our primary attentions in session 5: Daniel 5:1-9. What part of it did God use to speak to you?

“Satan revels in using holy vessels to toast unholy things.”

Read 2 Timothy 2:20-21,26 and briefly describe the parallel.

“We are holy vessels, but if we surrender to all sorts of unholy, sullying corruptions, we won’t be ready when God has holy purposes for us.”

Subtlety is [Satan’s] specialty, so we’re often unaware at first that we are cooperating. Count me among those who obliged far too many times. 

First of all, are you able to fully accept the truth that you are a holy vessel? Do you see yourself as holy? “yes” Why or why not?

“I know, Jesus’ redemptive blood cleansed all my sins, past, present, and future at the moment of my salvation.”

Why do you more readily see [others] as holy?

Some seem to make fewer bad choices than others: [they] seem self-controlled and self-disciplined and more focused on pleasing God with every action and every choice.”

If you are willing – however generally – describe a way Satan tried to use you, a holy vessel, for an unholy cause.

“I frequently surrender to the allure of an intriguing horror film.”

On the following scale of 1 to 10, how much has this unholy use affected you through the years? Please be very honest. Circle your answer. “5”

What role has regret played in your life?

“It tries to make me more cautious, but I still override it.”

Beloved, please talk this over with God. Have courage enough to ask Him to give you godly sorrow over any conceivable way you made the enemy’s day. 

Dearest Rachel –

This isn’t the first time in this particular study that you’ve referenced your taste for horror films – in fact, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I went over such an entry, which to you would have been only a matter of days (which might have had you referencing the very same film you’d recently watched) – which makes me wonder what you’d watched so recently that affected you so.

I recall Mad Magazine, in its parody of The Exorcist, concluded with the devil himself offering to leave Regan alone in exchange for a six-movie deal: “Listen, I haven’t been this popular since the Inquisition!… if you think I’ve got cults and followers now, just wait until six more Devil Flicks hit the nabes!” The elder priest readily agrees, to the younger one’s consternation, to which his senior points out the boffo box office their movie did: “…why, I’d agree to sixty or seventy films!” leaving the junior priest to sigh “well, that’s show biz.”

But that doesn’t strike me as the sort of film that you were into, even as I could understand why this genre would be considered a literal guilty pleasure – it’s not just cinematic junk food, but it glorifies the exact opposite of Who we should be doing so to. Still, I always thought you were more into psychological horror, as opposed to the ones featuring demons or devils (be they ‘real’ – these are movies, after all – or personified in human form) or slasher flicks. Granted, I’ve no idea what you were watching while I was off at work and Daniel would be at school – oh, you’d give me a synopsis of this or that film you thought of as particularly good, but I’ve long since forgotten the details. Much as I’d like to think I wasn’t the stereotypical husband who doesn’t listen, after ten or fifteen years, I can’t be expected to remember the plot of a film that you even acknowledged at the time I wouldn’t be interested in (and thus, felt no compunctions about spoiling the story for me, since you knew I’d never watch it).

Then again, you were a devoted fan of the television series Supernatural, with its angels and demons and the like. Still, you would have make that distinction in your comments; you wouldn’t call it a ‘movie,’ you’d refer to it as a ‘TV series’ in that case, so I don’t think it fits the bill here (although it certainly does exaggerate the powers of Satan’s minions – if they were allowed to wreck that kind of havoc on humanity, I don’t doubt that they would).

Of course, I’ve strayed so far from the point of this study as to border on the ridiculous. The point is that the Babylonians were using the vessels specifically meant for use in the Temple of Yahweh to praise their own false gods – which, if Hollywood was to be believed, should have resulted in their faces being melted off. To be fair, by the end of the chapter, Belshazzar is dead, as is the empire, but that happens later in the story (which is an issue I have with God now and then; He knows how stupid we are – He compares us to sheep, which are pretty dumb animals – and yet, when we humans correct a pet, we do so immediately, since that’s the only way said animal is going to learn. Since we’re hardly any smarter than that, especially compared to Him, why doesn’t He correct us in a timelier fashion, so we’d know when we were screwing up?).

For now, the point is that we, too, are created for His use, just like those goblets – but we can just as easily be used in praise of our own little god, ourselves (and like Belshazzar, we don’t get our faces melted off for our insolence). Of course, as you observed, once we come to Him, the price paid by His Son takes care of the penalty of such worship – even if we should lapse into similar behavior in the future (although our conscience shouldn’t be letting us do that).

I don’t know which of my avocations I’ve spent my time on might be elbowing Him aside in my life (assuming any of them are, which, being human, is all too likely), but if you could keep an eye on me, in order to keep me on the straight and narrow, that would be appreciated. Oh, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.