During a recent conference, American Christian speaker and evangelist Joyce Meyer made a biblical case for getting tattoos and admitted she has been thinking of getting one herself just to shut the mouths of religious people.
The video clip posted by Joyce Meyer Ministries kicked off with Meyer explaining the difference between being holy and religious.
“Holiness is not legalism,” Meyer declared.
She went on to explain that religious people have made a mess of holiness by putting a bunch of rules and regulations on people. She listed drinking, dancing, wearing makeup and more among those rules.
According to Christian Post, Meyer quoted Isaiah 44:5 in defence of getting permanent markings. The scripture says,
“One will say, I am the Lord’s; and another will call himself by the name of Jacob; and another will write [even brand or tattoo] upon his hand, I am the Lord’s, and surname himself by the [honorable] name of Israel.”
She also shared the counterargument often used to discourage believers from getting tattoos found in Leviticus 19:28: “Do not cut your bodies for the dead and do not mark your skin with tattoos. I am the LORD.”
Televangelist Pat Robertson, among others, has cited Leviticus to argue that getting tattoos is a “heathen practice.”
“You look at the Bible, the people are told not to mark their bodies and cut themselves like the heathen did. Tattooing is a heathen practice, it is not a Christian practice,”Robertson said in 2016.
But Meyer rejected the argument and contended that God also tattooed those He loves to Himself.
“The Bible says in Isaiah 49 that God has a picture of you tattooed on the palm of His hand,” she maintained.
“I’m right on the verge of going and getting a tattoo,” she added, pointing to her shoulder blade. “I thought I might as well just push all the religious people right off the cliff and just get it over with.”
Meyer said her ink would say, “I belong to the Lord.” She admitted that her husband pushed back a bit on her stance but they realized it was just a religious stance stemming from legalism.
A tattoo is a form of body modification where a design is made by inserting ink, dyes and pigments, either indelible or temporary, into the dermis layer of the skin to change the pigment. Tattoos fall into three broad categories: purely decorative (with no specific meaning); symbolic (with a specific meaning pertinent to the wearer); pictorial (a depiction of a specific person or item). Tattoos have historically been regarded in the West as ‘uncivilised’, and over the last 100 years the fashion has been associated mainly with sailors, working men and criminals. By the end of the 20th Century many Western stigmas of the tattoo culture had been dismissed and the practice has become more acceptable and accessible for people of all trades and levels of society.
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