Warning, this program contains content that may not be suitable to some listeners. It contains decency, truth, ageless wisdom, a father who cares. It's Generations with Kevin Swanson. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Generations. My name is Kevin Swanson. I'm Executive Director of Christian Home Educators. I'm a pastor. But the reason I'm here today, I'm a father of five. I'm raising my five children on the plates of the Elbert, Colorado. We homeschool our children out here. And in the news, in an Associated Press article on the Senate budget plan, the Senate Republicans are voting to increase the national debt. by an additional 781 billion dollars to nine trillion dollars. Why am I concerned about this? Well, I have children and children and grandchildren will have to address the national debt. If approved, the latest version of the budget would mean that the debt had grown from about six trillion dollars to nine trillion dollars under the presidency of George W. Bush. Folks, that's an increase of 33 percent over the last, what, five, six years. They are looking at adding another seven billion dollars for education research And the underlying Senate budget plan is notable chiefly for dropping Bush's proposed cuts to Medicare and for abandoning his efforts to expand health savings accounts or pass legislation to make permanent his 2001 tax cut bill. Well, big government increases and it's not just the president. We thought it was the president's fault. He's the conservative in this game. It's the Senate Republicans that are concerned about re-election that are belling up to the bar and shoveling the money into the trough for as many of the swine that are belling up to the trough. The glory days of small government under Clinton are over, folks. the days of big government march on. You mean to say it took 225 years to get to six trillion dollars of debt and then in six years we're going to go another three trillion? Another three trillion, yeah, in just six years. We've done in six years what took a hundred and fifty years. That's progress. That's major progress for the big government socialist worldview of guys like Karl Marx, John Jockers, and the other big government addicts of the 1800s. Well, I've got a number of tough ethical questions here that are coming from our listening audience, and we always encourage feedback today. Tough ethical questions from our listening audience. We've collected a few of these. First question here, did you like The film, The Passion, that is The Passion of the Christ, produced by Mel Gibson a while back. Yes, I did see that film. You know, there are strong opinions on this one, Dave, from all sorts of sides. Now, the non-Christians don't like it, the pagan Hollywood types don't like it, because, well, it brings up the idea that Jesus Christ actually came for a reason. and all of that. But even within Christians, they're very much split on this issue, because you've got the concern of the Second Commandment, which tells us not to make any graven image, or bow down to that graven image. It forbids a representation of God. Well, there are some Christians, on the one hand, that say that this is not a representation of God, but a representation of the man nature of Christ. You know, it's not a representation of God-nature, but simply the man-nature of Christ. But the problem, of course, is that movies like this provide a temptation to a lot of people to violate the Second Commandment, and literally bow down and worship an image of Christ. And there were examples in the showing of The Passion where I saw examples of people that literally bowed down. They did! They bowed down to the movie screen! That's just the way people are. That's the idolatry in the human heart that sometimes gives way when you make any kind of a pictorial representation of Jesus Christ. My impressions of the movie, as I watched the movie, I could not help but think that this was a story that reminded me of another story. A story I had read in the Bible, but I never could get myself to think that this was the actual story of what Jesus did as recorded in the words of scripture. So I didn't equate the story of the Bible with the story that Mel Gibson presented. Now, there were some problems with the film. Peter did obeisance and asked forgiveness of Mary, for example, in the film. That's not biblical. You're not going to find that anywhere in the Gospels. So there are some things in the film that just are not representations of what the Bible actually brings out. And the one scene that the fellow who emailed me was concerned about was the torturous scene where Jesus is being tortured in the Praetorium, and it was extraordinarily gruesome. Now, I know we had Brian Gadawa on the air, and he's okay with that torturous scene. He thought that was appropriate. But as I watched the scene, I could not help but feel myself and see myself growing calloused to the torture itself as I was watching it. So I was pressed to turn my eyes away from it. I could not continue to watch it because of what it was doing to me subjectively. So I think there are limits to what you can what you can produce on the film, on the screen. And of course this is one reason why God by his infinite wisdom decided not to reveal the story of the atonement by means of video. He decided to do it by written literature. Now I'm left wondering whether a movie ever effectively presents the truth of the atonement or can. the Word of God effectively presents the message of the Atonement. I know there are a lot of Christians out there that are saying that Passion of the Christ is the way that we are going to get the message of the Gospel out to the nations, and this is a fantastic way to communicate the Gospel. You know what? I don't think there's any better way than by the reading of God's Word and the preaching of God's Word to present the Atonement of Jesus Christ. That's my take on the Passion of Christ. Okay, let's move on to the next question, shall we? Next question, very interesting question, How does a biblical worldview look upon hermaphrodites? Alright, now there's, I'm sure, a few people out there wondering what the word hermaphrodites is all about. This is a tough ethical question, probably one of the most difficult ethical questions that is ever posed to a biblical worldview. Well, a child born as a hermaphrodite is a little one whose gender is hard to determine. if not impossible to determine when he's born. That is, as you look at this little one coming out of the womb, it's hard to determine whether the child is a boy or a girl. Now there's been a lot of television programs on this sort of thing, on the Discovery Channel or the Health Channel or whatever, on television, and of course The modern world is very taken in by the hermaphrodite because what they see here is evolutionary causes. A lot of the programs see the hermaphrodite as some kind of an apologetic of sorts to choosing your own sex or homosexuality, which is very popular today. You've got a lot of people out there who've grown up as a man and then they decide to be a woman. They think that somehow there's a choice here and they use the hermaphrodite as an apologetic for this transsexual world that we live in today. The fact of the matter is, these children born as hermaphrodites have ambiguous external organs, they have internal organs of either sort, and often the chromosome, the 24th chromosome I believe it is, is a mixture of the XX and the XY. In other words, it can be either one. It could be a mixture depending on the cells that they take a look at. So this makes it almost impossible to determine at birth whether or not this child is a boy or a girl. Now modern medical science encourages intervention by way of hormonal treatments and surgery to encourage parents to pick a gender for the child but oftentimes as you watch some of these documentaries on the hermaphrodites oftentimes you'll find that that by picking a gender it tends to produce an emotional scarring or confusion later on in life. Now, as I mentioned, there's no question this is one of the most difficult, complex moral decisions out there. We maintain that the Bible is sufficient to develop our ethics. That is, we look at the world through the eyeglasses, or the contact lenses, this is 2006, through the contact lenses of the Word of God. and we interpret the world that we see out there by God's Word. So the question before us today, folks, is, is the Word of God sufficient to equip the man of God for every good work? Can we be equipped to make the right decisions as parents if we have a little child who happens to be a hermaphrodite? And my answer to that is, yes! Why? Because in 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, God says, hey, my word is sufficient to equip the man of God for every good work, for every good decision, no matter what that decision happens to be. Well, I think the answer, I've thought about this for a while, but the answer is clearly laid out by Jesus in Matthew chapter 19. Let me read this for you. The Word of God says this, all men cannot receive this saying, save except they to whom it is given. This is Jesus again. For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men and there be eunuchs which were made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Those are the words of Jesus. Now, Jesus very clearly says, there are some who are born eunuchs from their mother's womb. In the context of this, he's talking about marriage, whether or not people ought to get married. And his answer is, no, they should not get married if they are born eunuchs from their mother's wombs. That is, these little guys born eunuchs from their mother's womb are not intended to get married. These little guys that are born as hermaphrodites, if there's anybody out there listening, I think it's about 1 in 100,000 that are born hermaphrodites. So it's a very rare situation, yet it happens. These little guys are not mistakes. They're not mistakes. They are fully intended by God to be what they are. This is God's creation. And they are made in the image of God. They are made for a glorious purpose in the kingdom of God. But that glorious purpose does not happen to include marriage. So from the earliest years, these parents should prepare their children for a special calling in life that does not include marriage. You see, the word of God addresses all issues. And it certainly does not allow for an apologetic for some sort of sex change or the homosexual vision that is foisted upon us today by the modern humanist worldview. Ladies and gentlemen, tough ethical questions today. When we get back, we are going to consider Gunther von Hagen. He has these plastinated, flayed corpses of human bodies on display in Los Angeles and Denver this year. Another tough ethical question next on Generations. Stay tuned. My name is Kevin Swanson. You are listening to Generations with Kevin Swanson. Deeply embedded on the front lines of the war of the worldviews, here's your host, Kevin Swanson. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back. The program is Generations. My name is Kevin Swanson. Today, tough ethical questions as we look at the world through a biblical worldview. And Forbes.com has labeled the exhibition, The Glorious Show on Earth. 18 million people worldwide have viewed Body Worlds, the plastinated, flayed human corpses set in lifelike poses. And they are now being demonstrated in Denver. They were demonstrated out in Los Angeles. The genius behind this project is a German fellow by the name of Gunther von Hagen. He has performed the first public autopsy in 170 years before a sellout crowd in London's Atlantis Gallery. I guess that was just a year or two ago. Now the Denver Catholic Archbishop has endorsed the project. So evidently those who claim the Word of God has something to say about life have taken different positions on this, whether or not it's appropriate to display these flayed human bodies at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Now you can get in for ten bucks. I haven't done it. I don't plan to. But these are real human bodies, okay? They're muscles, nerve systems, slices of human heads, brains, even a pregnant woman and her fetus in the fifth month of pregnancy. This is just gory, Dave. But this is all for the glory of God to show how God has intricately knit people together in the womb and this couldn't come by chance. This is all for the glory of God. I haven't seen that yet in Von Hagen's worldview. Von Hagen actually presents the exhibit as bearing an attractiveness. That's about the closest to anything we can get. Whether it's art or science is a little bit of a question. It's attractiveness. Like, I love you on the inside. Yeah, yeah. I guess so. He sees it as attractive. He obviously sees his work as art. That's something that should be enjoyed. Like, you go through an art gallery and you enjoy paintings from Michelangelo or somebody like that. It seems to me it's the ultimate of immodesty. You've gone beyond taking off your clothes and now you're taking off your skin. You're taking off your skin and that's of course what Von Hagen has done to all of these creations of God. God has created these bodies in his image and he's stripping them out so everybody can see. Now let's take a look at what the Word of God, what the Bible has to say about handling the human body. Isn't that the question here? Because we've got at least a couple of hundred bodies that he has obtained. Now, there was some rumor that the guy had obtained them illegitimately, that these were people who had been shot in prison camps in China. Now, I guess he's got proof that this isn't the case. These are people who have voluntarily given up their bodies for the use of art or science or whatever he's doing. They did that before they died? I guess so. That's what he claims. But let's look at the Word of God and what it has to say about the treatment of bodies. Now what's really interesting, in 1 Samuel, at the end, in chapter 30, the Philistines have the bodies of Saul and Jonathan displayed, not in the Museum of Science and Art, but on the walls of Beth-shan. So you had these valiant men of Israel who broke through and risked their lives to retrieve the bodies and then they buried them. Now, I want to read from 2 Samuel 2 and verse 5. This is David speaking prophetically over what was done. Listen to David. Blessed be ye of Yahweh, that you have shown this kindness to your Lord, even unto Saul, and have buried him. And now the Lord show kindness and truth unto you. I would say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what David is saying is the proper thing to do, the proper way to show respect to these bodies, was not to display the half-rotting corpses, they were evidently rotting on the walls of Bethshan, not to display them, but to bury them, to put them under the soil. Now typically in the Bible they would wrap the bodies, or at the very least they would bury the bodies. Also, Ecclesiastes 6 and verse 3 says, if one lives long and has no burial, I say that a miscarriage is better that he. So, that's pretty clear. That God sees it to be a preferential thing to get that body under the ground. Now in the history of the church, one of the interesting things you see, Francis Schaeffer pointed this out in his book, How Should We Then Live? The difference between Christians and pagans was evident in the treatment of the bodies. The pagan Romans would burn the bodies and the Christians buried theirs with respect. So the priority for dead bodies is to bury the body. To bury a body is to respect the body. I think this ties in, Dave, to what you were saying about modesty earlier. The Bible prohibits us from undressing people and looking at their nude bodies. That's disrespecting them, with the exception, of course, of the marital relationship. The Bible also sees that the hanging of rotting dead bodies on the walls of cities as a disrespect of those bodies. Now, what about science and medicine? Now, of course, Von Hagen doesn't see this as science. He's already said it's all about art. That's his perspective. It's about the wonderful aesthetic experience of seeing these flayed bodies, these skinned bodies, in these museums. But now science and medicine does allow for some uncovering of the body. It was appropriate, for example, for the priests to look at the body to see if there was leprosy on the body in the Old Testament and the New Testament as well. But at some point, doctors and morticians can cross the line into immodesty. But see, the point here is that the default position for the human body has got to be a covering. What we've got here with Gunther von Hagen is that he's not a Christian. The man's a pagan. He does not believe that the body is made in the image of God and that man has fallen into sin and therefore needs to be covered and buried. He doesn't see that. He doesn't agree with that. He doesn't believe that man needs to be covered and buried. He doesn't believe that man is created in the image of God. There were others that didn't believe this. Just 60 years ago at Reich University in Strasbourg, Nazi doctors selected 112 Jewish prisoners, photographed them, measured them, and murdered them. Then they studied their bones and tissues and then sent the bodies to Strasbourg where their flesh was removed and skeletons put on display. So this sort of thing has happened all along. I think it's a matter of worldviews. Worldviews really matter, folks. The worldview of the Gunther von Hagens in the world is very, very important. Kevin, it's been traditional in warfare that soldiers would go back out to the battlefield and retrieve the fallen bodies of their brothers. So they give them a proper burial. It was also traditional. The very worst thing that you could do was to take a body, not bury it, but put it on display. I think of William Wallace. whose heads and hands were displayed on a pike to scare other people. It was a defilement of not just William Wallace, but of the whole movement. A proper burial is something that exists predominantly in a Christian worldview. And it's so important that soldiers, even as late as Vietnam, would risk their lives to retrieve bodies, to bring them home and give them a proper burial and the respect that they deserve. Dave, I think what's happening in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is something that's very, very dangerous. When you cease to believe that that body is made in the image of God and it's just a product of chance evolution, and you display these skinned human bodies in ridiculous displays in all these positions, they have them in swimming positions with chalk in their hands as if they're teaching classes and running and all this sort of thing. When you display these human bodies stripped of their clothes, stripped of their skin. In these sorts of positions, you are denying the fact that they are made in the image of God. And most certainly you are suggesting to every little Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer and Dr. Mengele want to be out there, that he can fiddle around with that body any way he wants to, and in the end desecrate the image of God. That's the message that everybody is getting out there, and we live in dangerous times as well. Two comments. First off, if it is art and not science, it's in the wrong museum. It should be in the art museum if it truly is art. It would be entirely different when you say if these were mannequins that were used for teaching science, that were used for teaching medical students. These are real bodies. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a dangerous age today. An age where, I just read a news story where people with five-year-old children suing doctors because those doctors didn't tell them that their child had birth defects and they didn't have a chance to abort that child who's now five years of age. We live in an age where doctors are helping people to commit suicide in Oregon. 50 million children have been aborted, and abortuaries wash down sinks across the country. The church has given up on a stand on God's law. I think we're in Nazi Germany in 1931, folks. It probably won't be the Jews next time. Christians, maybe. I don't know who. But we've got a Holocaust coming, and I think it's time for Christians to take a stand on the standards of God's law in every single church and home and school in America. Let me encourage you all, those of you listening today, to start right now to give your children a biblical worldview. Give them a worldview course, much like how to think biblically. How to Think Like a Christian. This course is produced by Dr. David Noble and Chuck Edwards. We handle it at our Resource Center in Parker. You can get a hold of it by calling 877-842-CHECK. It's called How to Think Like a Christian. How to Think Like a Christian. And our perspective in respect to ethics starts with teaching our children what the Word of God has to say about life, about how we live. Get this course, How to Think Like a Christian, for your family today. by calling 877-842-CHECK. We live in critical times, folks. It's time to get a biblical worldview. Call 877-842-CHECK and you can interact with this program again by emailing me, host at kevinswanson.com. That's host at kevinswanson.com. You can also hear the program anytime, anywhere in the world at kevinswanson.com. This is Kevin Swanson inviting you back again next time as we lay down a vision for the next generation You've been listening to Generations with Kevin Swanson, where we take a look at life through a biblical worldview and a generational focus. If you've been challenged by this program, you need to get a copy of Kevin Swanson's new book, Upgrade! The 10 Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child. Get an upgrade at KevinSwanson.com.