Thou Shalt Not Watch SpongeBob

Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. Leviticus 20:2

Apparently, when my kids were quite young, my wife and I wouldn’t let them watch a certain cartoon on TV. We don’t really remember this, and we don’t remember why – I don’t think I’ve ever seen the show – but my kids remember it. To this day, they lament how all their friends still make cultural references to SpongeBob that they just don’t understand because they weren’t allowed to watch it. Like I said, I don’t remember the ban, but I assume my kids were at an age when we felt that show was inappropriate for them. As their parents, we desired to protect them from that which was harmful in the culture around them. So, for their own good, we made efforts not to conform to the world.

Don’t conform to the culture around you in a manner that is destructive to your children. That’s my paraphrase and today’s lesson for me from today’s passage. In it, God instructed his people not to offer their children as sacrifice to Molech, a Canaanite deity. This was apparently a custom of the culture around the Israelites, but, for obvious reasons, God forbid them from practicing it.

If this was only about literal child sacrifice, then my wife and I could breathe easy – we’ve never struggled with actually sacrificing our children to false gods. How though, have we conformed to the world in ways that have hurt our children? The smartphone springs to mind. We had no idea at the time, but I now believe that we got our children smartphones far too early. We simply had no idea of what we were exposing our kids to back then. There was no one terrible event that brought me to this conclusion. Rather, it’s simply the observation of the influence that social media and unlimited internet access has had on our children. Looking back, I can now see that we conformed to the world in a way that has been detrimental to all of us.

I’ve got nothing against SpongeBob and I don’t believe smartphones are inherently evil. I have a smartphone, which I find tremendously useful. I’m simply saying that as parents, it’s our job to protect our children, which will sometimes mean refusing to conform to the world. When my kids have kids, I bet they’ll be far more careful than we were regarding smartphone access, because they understand the potential destructive influence. As parents, it’s our job to protect our children, which will sometimes mean that we must shield them from the world around us.