How Should Christians Handle Halloween? Listener Questions | Daily Devotional & Bible Study

Every year around this time I get the same question. What do we do about Halloween?

You'll hear everything from it's a free-for-all with no spiritual implication, to turn the lights off and hide in the house. My answer lands somewhere in the middle, and it starts here: I don't want to live in a way that hands the devil my days.

Today we take on Halloween, and then a harder question about free will and the passages where God hardens a heart.

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How should Christians handle Halloween?

I'm answering this as both a parent and a former children's pastor. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment and later served in a charismatic one, so I've watched different churches handle this very differently.

Here's my baseline. As Christians we're called to take light into the darkness, not run from it. Most Christians would agree. But for some reason we treat Halloween as the one exception.

I don't want to give the devil any of my days. If I'm on this earth a hundred years and I hide every Halloween, that's a hundred days I handed over out of fear.

That said, I won't pretend there's nothing there. There are real spiritual implications around Halloween. So my answer isn't either extreme.

What does a good alternative look like?

When I was a children's pastor, we did a trunk or treat. We played music from Jump Start 3, a ministry that set Scripture to music kids actually liked, and gave away their CDs. We served a lot of low income families whose kids didn't get CDs bought for them. We used that same music in Sunday school because it got God's Word into kids in a way they remembered.

We had rules for the trunks. Nothing evil, nothing scary, nothing representing the occult. We had a Candyland trunk and an apple harvest trunk. We ran contests and giveaways and made it a genuinely fun night, so families had somewhere good to go. If your church does something like that, it's a great option.

When does a church alternative go wrong?

I've also seen the other side of it.

We took our youngest daughter to a trunk or treat at a local church. They'd advertised a fall harvest party, so we weren't expecting anything unusual. It turned out to be inside the building, and to get in you had to walk through a black tunnel with skeletons on the walls, stinky smoke, and fire. I thought maybe it was one of those heaven-or-hell presentations, which I'm not a fan of, but you couldn't turn around and you couldn't get out.

When we came through, the gymnasium was covered in scary, creepy Halloween decorations. My husband and I looked at each other and we were out. Then we met the pastor and he told us they wanted to make it even scarier next year.

That's losing the plot entirely. There's no reason to invite families into a church building and hand them a haunted house.

What else can we do on Halloween?

We're called to live in the world and not of it, so this has looked like different things for our family over the years. Sometimes when we went house to house, we gave something instead of taking something. Sometimes we'd make it an exchange and ask people if they needed prayer.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Yes, there is evil happening that night. It's also a night when kids and families are out looking for something. They are literally going door to door asking.

If you live in a neighborhood with kids, you could hand out Scripture music, or candy with a Bible verse attached. Or you could simply say, I love your costume, is there anything you need prayer for?

This is one of the few nights a year when we have a natural reason to meet our neighbors. If we have the good news, why wouldn't we offer it on a night when people are at our door asking for something?

Now, if you start handing out ghosts and goblins, you've missed the plot. But hiding with the lights off and pretending we're not home is literally hiding your light under a bushel. We all learned that song as kids. Halloween is a good chance to actually live it.

What about my kids?

If you're going to participate, it comes with a conversation, and it's still your responsibility to protect your children.

Letting them dress up as a witch is not okay. But there are plenty of options. They can be a favorite character or dress up as popcorn. There's a lot of room between a witch costume and hiding in the house.

While you're out, if a house looks evil, you skip it. Or maybe you pray for it. Or maybe you go up and offer to pray for those people. That depends on the age of your kids. If you have a four-year-old, I wouldn't. If you have a sixteen-year-old, maybe you should.

If we take the mentality of hiding from evil, where does it stop? We're not called to hide. We're called to face it.

What about "God hardened his heart" and free will?

A listener wrote in accepting that God is sovereign while also believing we can choose to turn away, and wrestling with Romans 9 and the Pharaoh passages. You're not the first to sit with this. Scholars have discussed it for centuries.

Start in the garden. God put the tree there and gave a real command with a real consequence. That means they had a choice, and that matters, because love that can't say no isn't love. It's control. That theme runs all the way through. Moses sets before Israel life and death and tells them to choose life. Joshua says choose this day whom you will serve. God calls people to respond, but He doesn't force it.

So what about Pharaoh?

Before the plagues begin, God tells Moses that Pharaoh's heart will be hardened. Read that alone and it's troubling. Read the whole story and something else emerges.

Again and again, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. He sees God's power, experiences a plague, asks Moses to stop it, the plague is removed, then he changes his mind and hardens his heart again. Only later does Exodus say the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.

This isn't a willing heart that God forces into rebellion. Pharaoh is already resisting. God allows that resistance to solidify and uses it for His purpose.

The Hebrew helps. One word is chazaq, meaning to strengthen or make firm. When I taught this to kids I compared it to Jell-O. The ingredients are all there, and eventually they set. Another is kabed, carrying the sense of making something heavy. The picture is God confirming Pharaoh in a direction he already chose.

That connects to Romans 1, where three times Paul says God gave them over to the sin they had chosen. Sometimes God's judgment isn't forcing someone to do what they don't want. It's allowing them further down the road they keep insisting on.

How should I read Romans 9?

In context, which means reading 9, 10, and 11 together. Those chapter divisions were added centuries later by scribes.

Paul doesn't open Romans 9 with a lecture on predestination. He opens by grieving, saying he has unceasing anguish because his own people have rejected Jesus. The question he's answering is whether God's promise to Israel failed.

His answer is no. God's purposes have not failed, and He has always been free to choose how He accomplishes them. That's the context for I will have mercy on whom I have mercy. The point isn't that God randomly decides who gets saved. It's that He decides how He accomplishes His plan.

Keep reading. In chapter 10, Paul says everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Everyone. Then that Israel can be grafted back in, and eventually that God has bound everyone over to disobedience so He may have mercy on them all.

How do both things hold together?

Scripture doesn't feel the need to pick one and throw out the other. At Pentecost, Peter says Jesus was handed over according to God's deliberate plan, and in the same breath tells the people they were responsible for His death. Paul says work out your salvation with fear and trembling, then adds that it is God who works in you.

We also read difficult passages in light of clear ones. God wants all people to be saved. Jesus stood over Jerusalem and said how often He longed to gather her children, and they were not willing.

So here's where I land. God is sovereign and nothing is outside His authority, and our choices are real. I don't believe God creates some people for salvation and others for hell. That isn't consistent with His character, and predestining someone to hell and then holding them responsible for a choice they were never free to make throws out free will entirely.

He is powerful enough to accomplish His purposes even when people resist. Pharaoh said no and God didn't lose control.

Mystery isn't the same thing as contradiction. When we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Why we do Q&A episodes
• 01:40 The Halloween question
• 03:06 Taking light into the darkness
• 03:32 A hundred years, a hundred days
• 04:32 What our trunk or treat looked like
• 06:25 The trunk or treat that went wrong
• 07:51 When churches lose the plot
• 08:17 Giving instead of taking
• 08:47 They're already at your door asking
• 09:45 Hiding your light under a bushel
• 10:13 Talking with your kids about it
• 11:26 The free will question
• 14:22 What about Pharaoh?
• 16:31 Chazaq and kabed
• 18:37 Reading Romans 9 in context
• 26:36 Where I land on it
• 28:27 Mystery is not contradiction

Frequently asked questions

What is Jump Start 3?
A music ministry that set Scripture to music kids enjoyed. We used it in Sunday school and gave the CDs away at our trunk or treat.

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