OPINION:
“What if there is a God?” Skillet frontman John Cooper uttered this proclamation from an Indiana stage on July 23 as a packed audience clung to every one of his indispensable words.
At a time when celebrities, pop stars and actors routinely unleash political mantras aimed at targeting temporal woes, Mr. Cooper was doing something quite different. He was exposing the spiritual crises before us to offer an eternal path forward.
“It’s survival of the fittest or it’s evolution. There is no transcendent being; there is no reason to be alive,” Mr. Cooper said of perilous beliefs in modern culture. “There is no … absolute morality. There’s no such thing as good and bad. There’s no such thing as truth.”
The Christian rock star, who increasingly has been speaking about faith and contemporary issues, was taking a moment to sermonize and decry society’s push away from God — and the bizarre yet growing belief that humans are somehow the result of a “cosmic accident.”
“What if there’s a different story?” Mr. Cooper then proclaimed.
Rather than the current narrative of selfish desire and hopelessness, he painted a portrait infused with the eternal, predicated on a loving God and pointing humans to a lasting relationship with the Creator.
“What if you do matter? What if there is a God?” Mr. Cooper continued. “What if there is a Creator that created an entire universe, an entire world — and what if he created every single person here in his own image? What would that mean?”
At that moment, cheers understandably rang out as the rocker rhetorically pondered these sentiments. Mr. Cooper carefully brought the audience along for an essential ride, pivoting from cultural calamity to personal victory.
“What if the God of the universe says, ’Don’t you know how many times I’ve thought about you. It would outnumber all the sands and all the seashores,’” he added. “What if that was true about a Creator? What if it was true that he loved you so much that he sent his son Jesus to die on a cross? What would that even mean if that was true?”
This alternative story — one that was once pervasive in culture but has been crowded out by the rampant and fruitless gospel of the self — is the very antidote to our individual and collective woes. It’s the everlasting truth underpinning our reality, and one Mr. Cooper was intent to share.
He proceeded to answer his oratorical line of questioning by explaining exactly what this alternative story would mean for a lost and confused era.
“If it were true, then we would have a generation of young people who understand that their lives matter because there is a God,” he said. “Because I’m just going to tell you, whether you believe in God or not, I hope you think your life matters.”
And it was that line about one’s life mattering that truly brought Mr. Cooper’s transcendental message full circle: We were made for something more than our selfish whims.
Like a balloon slowly losing air, America’s reverence for God and truth has gradually evaporated, leaving behind a mass of people struggling to comprehend basic realities.
Public schools sell kids the lie humans evolved from a primordial nothingness. The culture treats sex like a meaningless act tied to mere jollification, and we’re told we can find “our” truth within ourselves. Each of these lies – and many others — chip away at our identities, leading us to believe mistaken things not only about our own individual lives but also our world.
“Evolution doesn’t lead to your life mattering, the sexual revolution does not lead you to your life mattering,” Mr. Cooper said. “Hollywood has no idea. They have all the money and the prettiest people in the entire planet, and they’re absolutely lonely without a reason to live.”
Mr. Cooper continued, offering a crescendo of sorts that should rattle us all to our core, explaining why many of those in Hollywood and other arenas struggle so profoundly. He said they’re “trying to find meaning in themselves, and it just ain’t gonna work.”
Sometimes it takes a rock star to truly help us see the light. This is one of those moments.
• Billy Hallowell is a digital TV host and interviewer for Faithwire and CBN News and the co-host of CBN’s “Quick Start Podcast.” Hallowell is the author of four books.
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