Ask the Pastors S7 E9: "What is this ‘6 7’ thing about and should Christians care?"
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Welcome to Ask the Pastors a segment of the West Hills Podcast where you have the opportunity to ask your questions and receive biblically grounded, pastorally sensitive answers from our pastoral staff. My name is Brian, your host, and I'm joined by Pastor tha. Hey everyone. And our lead pastor. Will, where are we looking today? We got a lot of cameras.
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Should I go for the phone in the middle and then we just got,
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Could you go for, if you're going to look at a camera, the one
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Directly across from you.
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Oh, really? On the tripod.
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If you're going to say something that's really good, look right at the camera. Right.
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Actually, should I, and then y'all are going to look at that and then we're all going to look weird on the middle one when we're looking
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Like, well, does anybody watch the live
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Jeremy Feet? Does anyone listen? Callie B?
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Yeah. Actually,
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I know you two watch. I hope you're on right now.
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I've had a couple a shout out. Yeah, I've had a couple
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People I'm checking. I'm checking right now. Who's
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Josh? Josh, I was going to give Josh a shout out to the sermon, but Josh, I can get a shout out here. He went all the way through our 80 minute, my 80 minute after the sermon from last week. So way to go. Josh, you win. Okay. What's our topic today, Brian?
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Well, the question submitted by Margaret Congregant, I don't
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Know by Margaret. She always hates being called out, especially if she feels like, I mean, she probably, she didn't say it would be as silly she thought. She's like, I don't think a lot of probably parents in particular are going to be familiar with our topic, but they're not going to know some of the information that we hope to drop on 'em today. She's like, I think they should know. I think they should know. I think you should talk about it, but it's another one of the K-Pop demon. No one's even remembers what K-pop demon hunters are now, two months later after we did that one, they're coming out with another one. Anyways, sorry. Let's back up and just do the topic and then
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What is this six, seven thing about? And should Christians care first? You said it wrong,
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So could you try it again and look at the camera and do it?
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You're trying to encourage him to play into the whole demonic mantra that we're trying to call
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Out here. I want to say it once,
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I
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Don't want to sum anything. Say it for our fans.
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Thad is the youth pastor. He should be the expert on, is it more of a, I'm hearing this for months. Is it more of a youth thing or a kid thing you think? Or both? All
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Of it's more a kid thing, but is it middle school down?
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Oh really? The high schoolers
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On high schoolers did, but
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Once the middle schoolers started, then it got not cool. It goes away. So six seven is what we're talking
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About
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Now.
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Pastor Brian's height
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Close. I'm six
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Eight.
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Oh, I think, yeah, he's,
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He's six seven. He's totally six
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Seven. He dropped that now he's aspiring. Yeah, he doesn't want to claim the six seven. And that's a whole weird connection. The LA middle of ball thing. The professional NBA basketball player who's six. Anyway, so what is the six seven nonsense and should Christians care about it?
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So here's what I'll say up front is half of our people listening maybe, I don't know. Maybe if you're young enough to know how to do a podcast, then you do know what this is. Because I'll get questions from our 50 and 60 year olds a lot of times that are like, and I'll say, oh, we did a podcast on that. Here, let me send it to you. Rather than me type out a whole email like I already did. Here it is. Oh, I don't do podcasts. But I wonder if maybe self-selected. It may be, if folks are actually listening, watching this, hopefully it is reaching, hopefully. I mean, if they saw it, they're curious and maybe they've come across it. So what is it, six, seven, what is this and should we care? Do we care?
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Yeah. It's brain rot for sure. That's another term for our listeners out there. It comes from origin of it. There seems to be, I would say, 95 agreement from the artist Skrilla, who I really just would not recommend coming up from his most stream song in Duke, which is a riff off of Baby Shark. So it comes from there and he references
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Six, seven, oh, sorry. And in parentheses six, seven, dude, six seven. So if you want go on spot, Spotify. It's intentional. You said 50 million streams on Spotify. 53 million. 53 million streams just of that song, dude, and dude, six, seven,
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Wild.
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How many, I wonder how many. There's no way of telling how many kids, this is a Gen Alpha thing, right? This is dictionary dot com's Word of the year, which I hate. Six seven.
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Is it really? Yeah.
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Yeah. And here's how they explained it. They said, they said, where is it? dictionary.com chosen Word of the year culturally. Oh, here it is. The dictionary. The definition is complicated. Some youngsters sensing an opportunity.
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Youngsters first mistake,
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Some youngsters. Gen alpha, I think in particular. So even because you're Gen Z? No, you're gen. Gen Z. So even below, yeah,
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Sounds right.
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Sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders will use it to stand in for a reply to just about Any question. Hello, darling. How was school today? Six, seven. A perfectly timed six, seven signals that you're a part of the ingroup if you're already using it. Emerging spinoffs. Six 70 and 41. Elijah started 6, 7, 4. Anyway, you might be even cooler. Perhaps the most defining feature of six seven is that it is impossible to define. It's meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brain rot. That's what you said. And I read a whole New York, New York Times article on it, just basically about the title was something like, what is all this? Six, seven? Don't ask Jen Alpha to explain it to you. They basically said,
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Because they'll just respond.
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Six, seven. Yeah, the whole point is either it seems like it's kind of like an Ecclesiastes one, like meaningless meanings. Everything's meaningless. It's like their version of why words are meaningless. So I'm just going to say meaningless things, but okay, now let's look at the actual factual, historical roots of it. You already mentioned it, this rapper named Scrilla. I feel like maybe I had come across him before this. I don't know. I know there's Skrillex, right? Is another, that's what
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Comes to mind for me,
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Very different. Is that like an EDDM type or what is Skrillex? I don't know.
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Rock.
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Not like a house. House. It's a
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Rock. Oh, no, I
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Think it's like a house.
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Yes.
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Skrill
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Not being confused with Skillet.
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Skillet. Skillet. That's
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Christian came to mind.
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Punk Christian, hard rock. Yeah, a lot of, but yeah, this is Skrilla Philadelphian, very much not Christian rapper. And that you were mentioning, you posted on your social media. They had
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Babylon B came out with just a great one of turns out Mark of the beast is six seven,
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Actually six, seven, not 6, 6, 6. It's a
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Mistranslation. It made me laugh so much. That
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Makes me laugh.
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But back to this Illa. So he comes out with this song September, 2024. So it's
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Old
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As far as the
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Music scene goes, that's, but it takes a while for this to,
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It takes a long time. He comes up with it. There's seemingly two references that six, seven could be either a police call for, there's been a murder in Philadelphia, ten six, seven is one. And then the other one refers to a specific street in Chicago where he was born in Philly, but lives in Chicago, 67th Street, which is apparently a really dangerous street in Chicago. In the song that he's referencing reflects death, someone being murdered with a gun. And then he says six, seven, and then it just kind of moves
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On the song. I mean, it is, how do you say it? Trash?
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Well, it is like insider baseball street lingo enough that for me, upper middle class suburban, I can't even make heads or tails of the song. I listened to it for this to try and it's marked it explicit on Spotify, but I don't even think, unless maybe he's inventing new bat curse words. I don't know obscene word, but it's just like this whole song seems meaningless. But I guess to your point, it probably is, if you come from the streets, I guess maybe you would understand it. And it's about, like you said, a homicide or something. Certainly the vibe, just the feeling of the song feels demonic. I'll say just the beat. And then you watch the, I don't know if it's the music video or we came, so the whole reason for all of this was my son comes home from school saying this, doing this six, seven thing that all these kids now are on the playground at recess, and he doesn't know what it means.
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None of them know what it means. They don't know anything about Silla, just their older sibling did it because their friend did it. And probably very few people know that origin with this rap song. But anyway, I stumbled across on YouTube this I guess Christian mom blogger thing, that it was the real origins of six seven and why your kid should avoided something. So I got a little 12 minute video, so I'm like, oh, interesting. Watched it, and I was like, whoa. So I don't know if we want post it in the show notes or not, but I mean, you can just Google for yourself or whatever. To me, it was very disturbing to me. And I mean, that's saying something, but this, yeah, I mean, she plays a little clip of the song and just talks about the really the, she goes more into Sillas, his religious background background and where some of the other lyrics in that song and others of his songs specifically connected to the occult and specifically, I guess he's an open practitioner of Santeria kind of religion, which is this old now, I guess somewhat syncretistic blend of sort of West African indigenous animistic religions that slaves brought over to the, I don't know if we've just lost on Facebook, but brought over to Central America and Haiti and Dominican Republic and those kinds of, before they were actually called that and blended with kind of the Catholicism.
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Anyway, but it's very pagan. It's very
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Animal sacrifices.
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Yeah, animal sacrifices. It's very, I think any Christian biblical Christian who was actually doing a thoughtful analysis of Santeria kind of religion. That's the official term for voodoo. Basically it's like voodoo. It's my fun kind of side thing. My aunt actually went down to the Dominican Republic, this is, I don't know, 40 years ago or something, to get a witch doctor to put a, what's the little thing with the pins in the cushion? Voodoo doll? Yeah. Is it a voodoo doll? Yeah, on her, I don't know, but my mom went with her. I don't know, it's a whole thing, but my mom's like, yeah, it is black magic. I mean, we read about prohibitions and scripture against the occult and sorc witch and witchcraft, and it seems very far removed from us, but man, it still exists in the world. And
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It's actually, you think New Orleans, it's not that far removed with how much is,
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I mean, even something like this where you have this guy who just unapologetically, he openly in, he's filmed multiple different videos that she clipped together of, yeah, he was giving him a tour of his godfather's house where he grew up or whatever, and all the little voodoo dolls and all just look, so I mean the demonic different gods and just the, oh my gosh, oppressive sort of darkness, all the Ephesians six cosmic forces of evil kind of stuff. Anyway, so I mean, that seems like the context for this. His whole, and he's, I guess again, unapologetically, he talks in his songs about wanting to snatch kids' souls and animal sacrifices. And even the Duke thing, like you said, is a reference to Baby Shark. And I mean, I was just thinking about that. It almost seems like a calculated like, okay, I'm going to take the most, she talks a lot in that video about just the power of music and sort of ritual, or not ritual, but just the rhythmic kind of mantra, incantation almost sort of thing.
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And it gets stuck down in you on a deep level and just like, okay, what is the stickiest thing that, especially for Gen Alpha kids in the last five to whatever years grew up on baby shark, right? So I'm going to take that and then I'm going to reappropriate it for this. Again, really dark demonic kind of a thing to, and it has, it's kind of taken on a life of its own clearly that has outstripped the song itself, even with 53 million streams. But to think about how many kids on the playground, like I said, mine,
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Who
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Are saying these things that they don't know where it's from. So I guess maybe that's a segue to the question of should we care? Should we care? If our kids don't know where it comes from, do you even bring it up? Should we care? Is it just nonsense and they're just having fun and it's just silly, goofy words and let kids be kids and don't introduce and layer all of the adult stuff onto it for them. I don't know. How do you think about that?
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Yeah, I think there's two things, and one way in which I've dealt with this is at youth group, we've got a six, seven swear jar for students if they say it, one, because it became so obnoxious, and two, because I knew the background of it, whether or not they knew. So part of the reason for doing that is I'm trying to teach them some maturity level that it really is as you read in dictionary.com, like brain rot, which again, we could do something else of teaching our children one the power of words and not to waste words that if asked a question and your response is six, seven, that's actually a poor use of words. And often, and they talked about it in your definition to frustrate the elderly of really a disrespectful manner in doing it. And so one, regardless of whether it had connection to scrilla in that, it's just a poor use of words, and I understand let children be kids and play, but we can teach them, inform them to have a better value in meaning for words.
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Yeah, Jesus said, let your yes be yes and your no be no. Which I think he's saying more than just about taking oaths or not, or not taking, I think he's saying your word needs to matter when you say something, you do it when you mean something, you say it that words matter. And obviously, I mean, you've got any number of biblical kind of support for everything you're saying. I mean, that was almost the bigger takeaway to me than anything about stupid six, seven or the occult or something. I mean, obviously don't dabble in the occult, all that, but yeah, as far as, like you said, talking with our kids about these kinds of things, even more so than, well, let me tell you about the origins of that. To me, it's just, yeah, it's like Proverbs 1821, death and life are in the power of your tongue.
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Matthew 1236, I mean this one, gosh, if you want Matthew 1236, Jesus says, I tell you, on the day of judgment, people will give account for every careless word they speak. Now I know if you want to look at the context of him saying that like six, seven is not, but I mean, if you just want to take him at face value on careless words, thoughtless words, meaningless words, obviously if you're condescending or talking down somewhere or speaking death instead of life or tearing someone down, I mean, that's probably even more so what he's talking about there. But careless, careless, just, yeah, you're not careful. You're not thoughtful about what comes out of you. And I mean, she's himself said too, right? Mark seven, Matthew 15, he says, it's not that which goes into a man that makes him unclean, but that which comes out him for out of the bonus of the heart, the mouth speaks. So I mean, I think when you are content or happy to just be spewing nonsense, what does that say about what's in your heart?
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And honestly, I think that that is, again, to me, almost the bigger, if people are going to listen to this and be, oh, you're making too much of it, but I mean more so even than again, anything dark or demonic. For most people it's not. But just why does this phrase, why is six seven, it's not even a word. Why is six seven, even the dictionary dot com's word of the year? Because for them, I think they're naming, they're marking the fact that this does seem to sadly define a sort of cultural moment like the zeitgeist. That's what they're trying to capture with their word of the year is capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. What is the spirit of the age? The spirit of the age is meaningless. Everything is meaningless, and words don't matter, nothing matters. What really matters
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On that of what? dictionary.com, I thought this was by a fact, I thought last year's was gibby, which again, another just
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Like a
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Terrible brain thing,
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Further decline into, again, when I want to make it all a whole big thing, political, whatever. But you just see the breakdown of trust in everything around us, in institutions, in trust, in certainly politics and media. And it's like your words don't matter because the President says, I'm not going to touch the White House. And then two days later, you've taken a bulldozer to the east wing. It's like your words mean nothing. Whose words mean anything anymore. Words are just words. It's meaningless. And so I think you want to teach your kids to think about, to what extent are we participating in the degradation of the power and meaning and purpose of your words in light of being a biblical Christian, where God's word is life.
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So this week, I mean, we're starting this new sermon series, the Antidote, countering or combating the world's contagions with God's Cures. This first Sunday, we're going to be talking about how as Christians, we combat the world's chaos. Confusion lies with the truth of God's word. And again, you just think about, I mean, Hebrews one, I think it's Hebrews one, three, by the power of His word, God created everything that there is. It is is God's word that sanctifies us and saves us one. Peter two. I mean, you just go down the list of the importance of the word made flesh. Jesus. It's so much in scripture, in God's word about the importance and the power and the meaning and the weightiness of certainly in God's case, his word, his promises to us, his power of creation, Jesus the Word. But because of that, the Bible has tons and tons and tons to say about the power of our words and the importance of how we use our words. And Christians ought not to participate in the cheapening of that. And again, just selling the degradation of the importance of the word, the spoken word. So I think that to me is almost the thing.
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Yeah. Again, I don't have data on this. My assumption though, the voodoo impact, I don't think any that I am aware of students or my own kids who they've heard it are going and listening to silla and are affected by his music, although just to name there is great power in music, and I think we should care what our kids are listening to. We should not be careless, just, I would say the same about kids, social media intake, their video watching intake, video games that they're playing. Again, similar to last week, a lot of this comes back to how are you discipling your kids? And if you are not intentionally discipling your kids, something else is going to discip them, whether it's you let it be their phone or social media or friends or whatever. And to again, care deeply about them. I don't think it should be the expectation that parents know everything going on in the culture as a youth pastor, don't know every single thing going on in the
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Culture. Half the reason I got out of the game, it's like not only do I have, I stop being able to keep up, I don't care. I don't want to keep, it was this kind of stuff. It was this kind of stuff that I'm like, I actively, I can't tell you how much I don't care about the things that y'all are spending your time and caught up in, but I feel like I need to be a good youth pastor. But now I'm back in it with kids, with my own kids, and okay, I can't just like, oh, kids are silly.
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I'm out on this.
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No, it's your point. As a responsible parent, you can't just be like, oh, well, kids are silly. It's like, no, who'd you hear that from? And where'd you, okay, let's together. That's one of the things I like as a parent is, and again, some parents are going to be like, oh, I want to shelter my kids from the whole black magic thing of it. I'm like, alright, Elijah, if you want to say this thing, I want you to watch this with me. I want you to know where this comes and then let's talk about it. Do you think that it's something wise that you ought to be saying that your friends, now, I'm not trying to turn him into the little whatever, narc at school and that he's going to be telling teachers on people. And Elijah would not be that way anyway. That would be a different child.
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But anyway, just that because to your point, I want, and I said the same thing with the K-pop demon hunters, I'd rather me pay attention and then turn it into a conversation with them and use it. Even silly things like this, use it as a discipleship tool to hopefully help them on both of those fronts. Don't pay attention to the things that you say and where they come from and why other, and what the meaning is. And then also just pay attention and be careful with just your tongue in general and the importance of that. It's like that old song we grew up singing, be Careful Little Eyes, what you see, careful little ears, what you hear, careful little tongue, what you say. I mean, I think this is a good example of all of those and where we as parents can help our kids maybe just pay a little bit more attention.
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And here's another one as parenting is just in general, not just going with the flow. I mean, Elijah is a follower. He is. He's always watching what are the older, cooler kids doing? And that's a real thing that we're going to have to deal with in parenting. And a lot of parents in general, there's more followers than leaders in the world. And so just knowing your kid, and man, if you know, that's the tendency. It's like it starts at six seven and what is it next? It's like, what is the version of everyone's doing it in eighth grade that we're like, oh, crap. So challenging that now too. Okay. Just because every other kid on the playground or the older, bigger kids are saying, is that a good reason to do things? So I don't know. I'm off on a parenting thing now, but just
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To echo what you're saying, but that's what this
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Is though.
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This provides another avenue or opportunity as a discipleship tool in our homes for parents that we can't just, oh, that's dumb. So I'll just cover my ears and just ignore it, but actually address it for all the reasons, again, maybe less than demonic, but more power of words. And why would you want to waste words? And again, it just provides an avenue for discipleship, which we should be viewing all of life as discipleship.
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I agree. The only other thing that I wanted to say those, my two big takeaways was viewing it as an opportunity to disciple your kids. Again, I'm coming at all of this through the lens of parent, but I guess, I don't know, maybe others are clicking on this episode and listening for other reasons. I don't know some weirdo in your workplace who's saying six, seven, I don't know. But the discipleship and parenting, the second being, in many ways, the most important, being that in the power of the words and not participating in cheapening of words. The last one for me is, and maybe this is a stretch and seems like even more of just kind of, I don't know, a Jesus Duke kind of bringing it all back to the gospel or whatever, but I really do think that, again, part of what this six, seven word of the year thing speaks to is the meaningless nonsense.
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What is life all about kind of thing. But another is that goes along with that. And I'm again making this connection to Ecclesiastes one and everything under the sun. It's meaningless is, and that word we talked about a lot when we did Ecclesiastes, and it's not just meaningless. It's vanity, futility. It's hard to translate in English. It, it's emptiness in really, it's fleetingness. It's here today, gone tomorrow. And that's part of what Solomon says there in that first chapter. He is like, it's just like the sun. I mean, it's here, it's gone. It's here, it's gone. It's like the river. It's as soon as you see it, it's gone down river. You can't get your hands around it. And later he contrasts that with how God has put eternity in the heart of man. And I just think this is, again, this word. By the time that anyone listens, even on Thursday when we post this, it'll, there'll be a new word, six seven will be gone. Or certainly, I mean, I'm a little hyperbolic, but a month from now, certainly a year from, no one's going to be like, wait, six, seven, what was that?
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My daughter dressing up in pop demon hunters. It's like everything, everything is hell these days. Everything is just, it's obsolete the day after. And in a world like that, and in a world where that is the word of the year, a word that is not even going to make sense, try and explain 6, 7, 10 years from now to anyone, and they're going to be like, I don't even remember that. It doesn't make any sense, is how much more of an opportunity there is for Christians to point people to the hope of the gospel. And one Peter one says, the hope that we have, that's imp, imperishable, undefiled, unchanging, stored up in heaven for us, it's not going anywhere. It's the opposite of heaven. It's secure. It is eternally meaningful. It fulfills all of your heart's deepest longings. It is the opposite of the just the empty sort of confusing, chaotic, and how much more do we want that?
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I think reason for the popularity of these things is really, it comes out of an angst and a longing, a misplaced longing for that, and just not being able to find it anywhere and almost just kind of a, I don't know. Maybe I'm reading way too much into all that, but I think it's an opportunity in a world just more and more every day full of shifting sand and nothing worth building your life on everything we thought we could. Maybe trust the news or the President or this. It's like there's nothing here. The church like pastors falling left and right every day. Don't trust any of us. Trust God's word. Grass withers, the flowers fade. The word of the Lord endures forever. Six, seven here today. Going to, I mean, everything else, it's just a passing trend. It's a fad. There's only one thing is the opposite of a fad that will never pass away, and that's the word of God. Anything else?
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That's it for this week's episode of Ask the Pastors. Remember that you can submit your questions by visiting the info bar at West Hills by submitting them online through our website at www.westhillssstl.org. If you enjoyed this week's episode, hit that like button, subscribe and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening, and Lord ruling, we'll catch you right back here next week.