God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
We are not encouraged to forsake our sin by having our senses amused or our preferences coddled. The Gospel is inherently and irreducibly confrontational. It cuts against our perceived righteousness and self-sufficiency, demanding that we forsake cherished sin and trust in someone else to justify us. Entertainment is therefore a problematic medium for communicating the Gospel, because it nearly always obscures the most difficult aspects of it – the cost of repentance, the cross of discipleship, the narrowness of the Way. Some will disagree, arguing that drama can give unbelievers a helpful visual image of the Gospel. But we have already been given such visual images. They are the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper and the transformed lives of our Christian brothers and sisters (Mark Dever and Paul Alexander).
Similar to the instructions we pass along to our children for their physical safety, our Father in heaven gives us His instruction for our spiritual safety. Yet like ignorant and carefree children, we at times ignore His teaching. We at times want to do things according to our own estimation apart from the Scriptures. And when we do this, God in His mercy allows us to feel pain. Guilt is a gift from God that makes us sensitive to sin. Another word for this that we commonly use is conviction.
