all heaven and earth. Let the devils deny, let all men under control of the devils deny and disbelieve it, yet Jehovah the Most High God stands revealed and proved as “the God of truth.” What do we care whether the overwhelming majority of this world are unbelievers. We believe and accept God’s Word for its own truthfulness. We also respect the unbreakable binding power of God’s oath that he swore by the greatest and highest one in all existence. Therefore we declare unequivocally that our position is the same as that taken by the Christian apostle Paul when he wrote: “Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar.”—Rom. 3:4.

Do Bible Principles Govern Your Choice of Entertainment?

EXCITEMENT, conflict, violence, passion and beauty are prominent in the entertainment of modern times. They can grip your attention, fire your imagination, stir you emotionally and make you forget for a time your personal cares of life, but such should not be the sole factors in choosing a type of entertainment. The good principles that govern a Christian’s daily living should be taken into consideration.

In the first century of this Common Era, for example, forms of entertainment that were popular with the Romans conflicted with Bible principles. For that reason Christians did not join the thousands of people that crowded into the amphitheaters. That the entertainment there was bad is revealed by the following description of it in The Historian’s History of the World by Henry Williams:

“The amphitheatre brought the greatest possible number of spectators within easy distance of the dead and dying, and fostered the passion for the sight of blood, which continued for centuries to vie in interest with the harmless excitement of the race. . . . It was when man strove with man . . . that the transport of their sanguinary enthusiasm was at its height. . . . The audience became frantic with excitement; they rose from their seats; they yelled; they shouted their applause, as one blow more ghastly than another was dealt by lance, or sword, or dagger, and the lifeblood spouted forth. ‘Hoc habet’—’he has it, he has it!’—was the cry which burst from ten thousand throats, and was reechoed, not only by a debased and brutalised populace, but by the lips of royalty, by purple-clad senators and knights, by noble matrons, and even by those consecrated maids whose presence elsewhere saved the criminal from his fate, but whose function here it was to consign the suppliant to his doom by reversing the thumb upon his appeal for mercy. . . . And we must remember that these things were not done casually, or under the influence of some strange fit of popular frenzy. They were done purposely, systematically, and calmly; they formed the staple amusement.”

The effect of this frightful entertainment upon the people was morally degrading. It stamped out the noble qualities of human compassion, mercy, kindness and fellow feeling. It destroyed the sympathy for suffering that contributes toward making man superior to brute beasts. How, then, could a person that had embraced the good, uplifting and humane principles of Christianity choose such violent exhibitions for pleasurable entertainment?

THE CHRISTIAN POSITION

Would not a Christian be out of place among the multitudes in a Roman amphitheater? How could he shout along with the others when a gladiator ‘had it’? How could he find murder entertaining when God’s law forbade him to murder? How could he find amusement in human suffering when Christian principles moved him to show love for others? How could he find pleasure in the sight of bloody violence when God’s Word had taught him to be gentle, kind and peaceful? Guided by Bible principles, he would have had to eliminate the Roman arena as one of his sources of entertainment.

Even Roman stage productions were unattractive to Christians because such entertainment violated Bible principles. The shows put on for the amusement of the public dredged up the corruption in the moral sewer of Roman life and displayed it for public amusement. Since Scriptural principles require Christians to live morally clean lives, how could they view those degrading shows as entertaining, as something enjoyable that was worth their time and attention? How could they find pleasure in seeing and hearing what was evil?

Pointing out the Christian’s position toward Roman entertainment, the Christian writer Tertullian of the second century of the Common Era wrote: “Are we not, in like manner, enjoined to put away from us all immodesty? On this ground, again, we are excluded from the theater, which is immodesty’s own peculiar abode, where nothing is in repute but what elsewhere is disreputable. . . . The very harlots, too, victims of the public lust, are brought upon the stage. . . . They are paraded publicly before every age and every rank—their abode, their gains, their praises, are set forth, and that even in the hearing of those who should not hear such things. . . .

“For all licentiousness of speech, nay, every idle word, is condemned by God. Why, in the same way, is it right to look on what it is disgraceful to do? How is it that the things which defile a man in going out of his mouth, are not regarded as doing so when they go in at his eyes and ears—when eyes and ears are the immediate attendants of the spirit—and that can never be pure whose servants-in-waiting are impure? . . . If tragedies and comedies are the bloody and wanton, the impious and licentious inventors of crimes and lusts, it is not good even that there should be any calling to remembrance the atrocious or the vile. What you reject in deed, you are not to bid welcome to in word.”

Why would a person that had escaped from the immoral cesspool of the world and transformed his life by the application of Scriptural principles choose as entertainment that which dramatized the worst aspects of the world—the very things he had rejected on becoming a Christian? Filling one’s mind with such corrupting thoughts would indicate that one did not