Anna Nicole reaped what she sowed

The furor over Anna Nicole Smith's funeral has died down, but the questions about the paternity of her daughter and the division of her estate remain.

In that light, it is well to ask one another: What can we learn from Anna Nicole Smith's life and death? There are at least four major conclusions.

TRENDING: Is this what you voted for, America?

First, alcohol and drugs, even prescription drugs, are a continuing danger.

Alcohol should be consumed only in moderate quantities, if at all. Illegal drugs like marijuana, heroin, cocaine, crack, speed and Ecstasy should be avoided altogether. Finally, prescription drugs should not be abused and should only be taken under the care and supervision of a good, if not great, medical doctor who knows what he or she is doing.

Second, I have heard some pundits say, even supposedly "conservative" and "religious" ones, that we should have pity or sympathy for the fate of Anna Nicole Smith because she didn't do anything "evil."

These people have a warped, inaccurate definition of what is "evil". They have fallen pray to the sin of moral relativism, one of mankind's worst evils.

The God of the Bible, including Jesus Christ in Mark 7:20-23 and other passages, calls all sexual immorality, including pre-marital sex, adultery, incest, homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality, evil. By all accounts, not only did Anna Nicole Smith engage in posing naked for such evil publications as Playboy, she also engaged in promiscuous pre-marital sex, perhaps also including some lesbian homosexual activity. Also, she often appeared inebriated, which could have been the effect of her possible abuse of pain medication, sleeping medication, "downers" and/or alcohol.

We live in a physical world with real consequences for such evil behavior. Thus, her untimely, early death, not to mention the untimely death of her son, should come as no surprise to anyone.

Consequently, though we can and should have a degree of sympathy for someone who becomes trapped in a vicious cycle of substance abuse, we also should be disgusted by Anna Nicole's alleged substance abuse and her connection to pornography and sexual immorality, for these things are clearly evil acts that are not victimless.

Therefore, the third conclusion we can reach about Anna Nicole Smith's life and death is that the evil she represents with her connection to pornography and other sexual immorality must be thoroughly and publicly condemned by every religious Christian and Jew and every conservative, or liberal for that matter, committed to God's moral truth in the Bible.

Yet, I remember back in the 1990s when Vice President Dan Quayle got little or weak support, especially from liberals but also from many Christians and conservatives, for his strong condemnation of having children out of wedlock. He got such little support that, to this day, he has to qualify his comments lest he offend single mothers who get so much unconstitutional – and unbiblical – help from the state and federal governments and so much undeserved sympathy from the left-wing, atheist news media. (The news media are not merely liberal; most are also radically left and vociferously atheist, if not anti-Christian and anti-Semitic.)

Finally, the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith show the dangerous superficiality of the celebrity culture of fame and fortune in which we now live. Our society has become terribly corrupted by all this unbalanced, if not evil, focus on celebrity. It has become so corrupted that, as many serious pundits noted, the funeral of Anna Nicole Smith was a media, public relations circus, not a real funeral. And, too many average citizens treated it like a celebrity event rather than a funeral, much less as another strong example of the eternal truth that "the wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23)

There is hope, however, not only for those of us who are still alive, but also for future Anna Nicole Smiths and future victims of the immoral, celebrity lifestyle they represent.

That hope lies in the eternal salvation and ultimate freedom from sin and evil (including ultimate freedom from substance abuse as well as sexual immorality, greed, envy, murder, theft, arrogance, etc.) that comes by the Grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:1-10). For in Jesus Christ, all of God's people "are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit." (Ephesians 2:22)

Related special offer:

Order Ted Baehr's "MOVIEGUIDE?: The Family Guide to Movies & Entertainment" at WND's online store.

Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder are founder and editor, respectively, of "MOVIEGUIDE?: The Family Guide to Movies & Entertainment."