Posted: 02/12/07

Anna Nicole Smith: If Only...

The body of former stripper and porn star Anna Nicole Smith was hardly cold before reporters were thrusting microphones in front of the person on the street to get reactions to her untimely death.

''She was a real inspiration for me,'' said one Texas mother, clutching her young daughter. ''She came from nowhere and made something of herself.''

What exactly Smith made of herself didn't seem to bother this young mother who apparently views nude dancing and starring in porno movies to be a significant personal achievement. Upon word of her death, accolades poured in from around the world. A German newspaper featured a Marilyn Monroe-style shot of Smith as its entire front page and one American news outlet claimed that Ms. Smith had ''charmed'' the American public. Smith was, of course, a creation of the American media. Her claim to fame was based on her ability to draw  international attention to her train wreck of a life. And America couldn't get enough of her.

The fact that a woman with the morals of a prostitute-three separate men are now arguing paternity of her 6-month-old daughter-is being treated in death as some sort of cultural  icon says much about our nation. She is, in fact, an icon-the very image of what has gone wrong with America. Not too many years ago, the slightest whiff of moral scandal was enough to sink the career of a Hollywood celebrity. The bed hopping in Hollywood happened anyway, but the public flaunting of it was a fast way to be blacklisted by the motion picture industry. Why? Because it wouldn't play well in Peoria. In Peoria, they still went to church, believed in God and wanted their daughters to save themselves sexually for marriage. Purity was still viewed as an asset and not a liability. Fornication was not thought of as a necessary right of passage for young people-it was looked down on. That was then. This is now.

In today's America, childhood is gone. Despite decades of feminism that supposedly fought for the contrary, little girls are taught by nearly every voice in our culture that their value is based on their ability to sexually arouse men. Unspeakable filth is the sum and substance of popular music, movies, and Internet sites. Sexual abuse perpetrators are getting younger and younger, as demonstrated by the 12-year-old who repeatedly sodomized children as young as six in a Pennsylvania public school recently. We are a nation in rebellion against God and the consequences of this are all around us. Anna Nicole Smith's unrepentant lifestyle of moral rebellion against God is simply a high profile case-in-point of all that threatens our land. But there is a deeper lesson.

Scripture tells us that the enemy of our souls comes to kill, steal and destroy. The death of Anna Nicole Smith's troubled young son and the death of his mother just a few months later illustrates this so clearly. Anna died in deep depression over her son's death, her legal woes and the emptiness of a life lived in complete rejection of her Creator. The enemy did his job well. The heartbreaking reality is that the Lord Jesus Christ offered her a way out of her sorrow and her living death. Satan offered her an endless stream of broken relationships and empty sex, robbed of its sacred significance, but the Lord Jesus Christ offered forgiveness of sins, healing and a new life of deep meaning and worth in Him. Satan offered despair and death, while the Lord Jesus offered eternal life. The promise of the Gospel was there for Anna Nicole Smith, just as it is there for each one of us. In those atoning wounds of Jesus Christ on the cross, old things are cleared away, and all things are made new. If only Anna had known. And if she did know, if only she had believed that the same Savior who walked among the prostitutes and the tax collectors and the religious hypocrites of His day and offered them forgiveness, offered her the same, no matter what she had done. If only the freedom and life found by the adulterous woman at Jesus' feet could have been found by Anna Nicole Smith. If only-two of the saddest words in the English language.

As American culture spins more and more out of control, the job of each of us as Christian believers is to live out the grace that Jesus Christ offers us. The message of the Gospel needs to exude from our lives and not just our mouths. More than ever before, the world needs to see the life that Jesus offers lived out in front of them. When the church looks just like the world, the light is put out and culture grows ever darker. As the pitch blackness of sin holds planet earth in its grip, may the brilliant light of the Gospel shine out for those who stumble hopelessly in the dark-offering hope and life.

Brightly beams our Father's mercy from His lighthouse evermore,
But to us He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore.
Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Some poor struggling, sinking sailor you may rescue, you may save.

Dark the night of sin has settled, loud the angry billows roar;
Eager eyes are watching, longing, for the lights, along the shore.
Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Eager eyes are watching, longing, for the lights, along the shore.

Trim your feeble lamp, my brother, some poor sailor tempest tossed,
Trying now to make the harbor, in the darkness may be lost.
Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Trying now to make the harbor, some poor sailor may be lost.

--Philip Bliss

By Ingrid Schlueter Email: vcyproducer@aol.com Click here for bio and archived articles