Childhood is a divinely protected season of life. That is what Jesus declared when He said,
“…But
whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it
would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his
neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mark 9:42, ESV; see also Matthew 18:6 and Luke 17:2).
The Evil One will be thrown into the lake of fire, drowned in the
depth of the sea of eternal flames, because of his direct attack on
children. Satan masquerades in our culture as one who would help
children, but we must be careful. There is not a devil under every bush,
but there is a devil behind every attempt to kidnap childhood.
I used to require all of my assistant pastors to read Neil Postman‘s The Disappearance of Childhood.[1][2] The late professor of communications at the University of New York used common grace, for he was not a believer,[3] to see that childhood was, in essence, created by Jesus Christ
with these very words, reclaimed, I would say, from the Fall, and
subjected to re-entry into darkness when a man or woman or a community
rejects the light they were given in God’s Word.
Thus, Postman felt that while the Reformation, with its emphasis upon
the Word, reclaimed childhood, postmodernity and the new “image based”
society seeks to steal it. The picture of the little cover photograph of
a little girl, she looks to be eleven or so, with twenty-year-old make
up, is a shocking image in itself pointing to the professor’s thesis.
These words do not do the book justice. Read it for yourself. Yet it is
enough to say that our society, by rejecting God
and His Word, by rejecting the commandment of God to have no other
images, for images provoke the idol factory of the mind and the idols
must be then be fed. The image gods are fed with immodesty at the first
and then, finally, by utter moral failure and corruption until finally
the child is consumed. Continue at Reformed Theological Seminary
