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You are listening to Bible Direction
for Life, the sermon podcast of West Side Baptist Church in
Bremerton, Washington. We pray that the preaching and
teaching you hear on this podcast connects the truth of the Bible
to your life, that you would learn more about the triune God
who made you and what he made you for. And now here's today's
message. Go ahead and turn in your Bibles
to Genesis chapter 3. We'll be continuing on. And again,
we won't be working through every verse, but those will be the
first texts that we will reference. Let's go before the Lord in prayer
and we'll get started. Father, I come before you. I
thank you for each of these men. I thank you for this room in
which we're meeting and for this time in which to meet. I pray
that you would help us to understand better, as a result of our time
together this morning, the obstacles that we face as we seek to live
in reality. I pray this in the name of your
Son, Christ Jesus. Amen. There's a handout that
was passed out. One of the things we're going
to do this morning is, at a few points along the way, we'll actually
pause and give you time to write something down in that handout.
So make sure you have it handy, and you know where a pen is,
so that when we get to those points, you're ready to go. We
spent our time last night exploring the pattern of reality. Specialization,
according to sex, is not an obstacle to be overcome on the path to
true liberation. It's instead the foundation of
truly human flourishing. We began with the way that this
pattern has been revealed in the scriptures, especially in
the first two chapters of Genesis. Rather than a rigid checklist
of rules, Genesis provides us with a powerful pattern for the
way that men and women should work together to carry out our
mission as the earthly image of God's heavenly rule. There
is a clear pattern of forming and filling in the days of creation.
This same pattern is echoed in the close-up of creation of man
and woman in Genesis 2, in the commissioning of man and woman
in Genesis 1, and in the differing creations of Adam and Eve in
Genesis 2 as well. which in turn correspond to the
differing vocations of men and women today. And we have a precedent
in the New Testament for getting this kind of vision from this
passage in particular, when we have questions about how men
and women should relate, that we should look at the pattern
we're given in the first chapters of Genesis. The complementary
roles of men and women are rooted in the corresponding natures
of men and women. Men are distinctively called
to and equipped for the task of forming, and women are distinctively
called to and equipped for the task of filling. These basic
principles that we find in Genesis work together to summarize, or
three basic principles, work together to summarize the pattern
of creational correspondence. First, men and women are equal
in value. Second, men and women are different
in nature. And third, men and women are
corresponding in function. The same pattern of reality that
has been revealed in God's Word can also be seen in our world.
Our bodies are biologically binary. No one has ever seen a merely
human body. There are only male and female
bodies. This basic biological reality
goes all the way down. As men and women, our bodies
are organized for differing reproductive purposes. Our chromosomes are
different. Our hormones are different. Our
bodies are different. Our brains are different. And
these differences are not arbitrary. Our bodies correspond to our
vocations, and our differing vocations correspond to our shared
mission as the image-bearers of God. Men are more strongly
equipped for forming by their higher levels of aggression and
greater aptitude for abstraction, and women are more strongly equipped
for filling by their higher capacity for nurture and their greater
ability for integration. Men are designed to give women
a place. Women are designed to give men a future. Men are designed
to be conquerors. Women are designed to be carers.
These are not only theological truths, though they are that,
they are also basic biological realities that can be observed
even by those who give no heed to Genesis. Whether we recognize
it or not, whether we like it or not, it's simply a fact that
our bodies are specialized according to sex. We will not flourish
as individuals, as a community, or as a society until we stop
trying to run away from this reality and begin to take it
as foundational in every area of private and public life. Now
our task this morning is to consider the problem of rebellion. When
God rested on the seventh day, he pronounced all that he had
made to be very good. Adam was a living male body with
male biology, male capacities, and a masculine vocation. And
God said, this was good. Eve was a living female body
with female biology, female capacities, and a feminine vocation, and
God said that this was good. God brought Eve to Adam and united
them as a one flesh union called to work together to form and
to fill the earth, and God said that this was very good. Sadly, Genesis 2 is followed
by Genesis 3. Adam failed as a man. He failed
as a woman. And their joint rebellion brought
ruin and destruction to all of God's very good creation. While the fundamental vocations
of man and woman have not changed, indeed, Genesis 3, though we
won't work through that for the sake of time this morning, but
Genesis 3 strongly reiterates when God gives judgment on the
man and woman, in so doing, he points them back to the vocation
they had failed at. But he also points out that those
locations will be more difficult to carry out. We no longer can
simply return to the foundational pattern of male and female and
set to work at building something beautiful, because the materials
with which we have to work have been warped and distorted by
the ravages of rebellion, and the building site has been covered
over with rubble. So there are obstacles that are
in the way. If we want to say, there's this
beautiful pattern, let's get to work. Well, actually, there's
some things we're going to need to do first. We're going to have
to clear all the trash off the building site. We're going to
have to straighten out some of the timber. We're going to have
to find some of the bolts that have been lost and we're going
to have to repair before we can build. It's not at all difficult
to see that something has gone wrong in the relationship between
men and women in our world. But if we are to truly recover
the creational pattern, what we need to see is that there
is more than one obstacle in our way. We saw this when we
did our series on pornography, didn't we? Everyone can see that
pornography addiction is a problem, and most of us could identify,
hey, here's one aspect of the problem, but to actually break
the power that this has over so many men's lives, we need
to realize there's more than one strand to the cord that is
holding men down. And you have to see the whole
scope of the problem to be able to actually break free of it.
And the same is true when we come to this matter of sexual
difference and the obstacles that are in our way when we seek
to recover the goodness of it. The first and perhaps the most
obvious obstacle is the problem of depravity. Because of the
rebellion of humanity, we're born with a bent in the wrong
direction. We do not want what we should, and we want what we
should not want, and we fall short as men and women, as women,
but we're men here, so we're gonna talk about how men fall
short. Men fall short of the pattern, and in so doing, we
break stuff. We make it not work. The second
obstacle is the problem of ideology. While depravity refers to sinful
desires, us not doing and wanting what we should do and want, ideology
has to do with wrong ideas. It's entirely possible to sincerely
desire to please God. You have a clean conscience,
you're trying to do what's right, but you have a skewed vision,
and so you're setting out to do what you think is right, but
what you think is right is not what is actually right, and you
end up not fixing things, because you don't understand what you
ought to be doing. You're hamstrung by the insidious influence of
false ideologies. The third obstacle is a little
more difficult to name precisely, but we might call it the problem
of economy, and this came up a little bit in the discussion
last night. I'm using this term economy in a very broad sense
to refer to all of the ways that our society as a whole organizes
its resources, from the technologies we use to the laws that we live
under. While the false ideologies attack
the meaning of sexual difference in principle, our broken economy
distorts the function of sexual difference in practice, that
you have the moral problem of depravity, the intellectual problem
of ideology, and the environmental problem of economy. The world
that we live in affects us in ways that we may not even be
aware of because we just take the water we swim in for granted.
First up, however, is the problem of personal depravity, the moral
problem of depravity. We sometimes think that sin is
restricted to the intentional breaking of God's law, but in
reality, sin goes deeper than that. It spreads broader than
that. Sin, most fundamentally, is any rejection of or departure
from God's creational design for humans. For our purposes
this morning, what we need to see is that sin is never gender
neutral. Women sin by departing from God's
creational design for women. Men sin by departing from God's
creational design for men. Now, of course, there are many
sins in which the sin of men and women looks very similar.
And there are many virtues in which the virtue of men and women
look similar. But if you think of love, the
virtue to which all Christians are called, the love of a man
and the love of a woman are not the same, even though they both
are recognizably love. The deceit of a man and the deceit
of a woman are not the same, even though they both are recognizably
deceit, and thus sinful. As the Mausers put it, maleness
and femaleness are written in our bodies, and masculinity and
femininity are written in our souls. To be simply a good person
or a bad person is not an option. If we are male, we must inevitably
choose to be a good son, brother, man, husband, or father. If we're
female, we must inevitably choose to be a good daughter, sister,
woman, wife, or mother, or conversely, choose to be a bad son, brother,
husband, father, or a sinful daughter, sister, woman, wife,
or mother. Because men and women are equal
in value, their sin is equally serious. Because men and women
are different, not just in role, but in nature, their sin is gendered. Because men and women are corresponding
in function, their sin is far-reaching in its effects. Like the positive
and negative terminals on a battery, men and women always exist in
relationship to one another. No matter how much sinful men
want to be independent of women, they never truly are. And no
matter how much sinful women want to be independent of men,
they never truly are. The sin of men always harms women,
even if no women are around. And the sin of women always harms
men, even if no men are in sight. While women are depraved as well
as men, this is a men's retreat, there are no women in the room.
Therefore, when we in this room sin, we do it by rebelling against
God's creational design for men. You do not sin as a generic human,
you sin as a man. As many authors have seen, there
are two fundamental forms of masculine depravity. Most, if
not all, male sins follow one of these two paths. And the first
path of rebellion is that of abandoning our masculine responsibilities. The second path of rebellion
is that of abusing our masculine authority. So abandoning our
responsibilities or abusing our authority are the two fundamental
paths in which male rebellion shows up. And though they look
very different at first glance, they're equally effective at
obscuring the goodness and glory of sexual difference. And in
fact, these two paths, they look different, they feel different,
but as we'll see, they actually have more in common with one
another than we might at first realize. But let's start with
the first path, abandoning our masculine responsibilities. In
broader Christianity, there's a tendency to rage against the
abuse of authority and to whisper about the abandonment of responsibility.
This is something that we must not do. The scriptures are clear
that the rebellion of passive men is just as destructive as
the rebellion of abusive men. We'll have plenty to say about
the path of abuse in a moment, but for now I want to be very
clear about how despicable male abdication really is in God's
sight and how deplorable it ought to be in ours. Remember Adam. In Genesis 2.14, we're told that
God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden, and he
told him to dress it and to keep it, to work it and to watch over
it. In Hebrew, the word translated
here in the King James as keep is shamar. This is the exact
same word and even the same grammatical form that we find in Genesis
3.24, where the cherubim and a flaming sword are put in place
to keep, to guard, the way of the tree of life. It's also one
of the words used to describe the duties of the Levites in
guarding the tabernacle from desecration. In other words,
Adam had the same job description as the cherubim. That thing they
were using the flaming, whirling sword for, that was the job God
gave to Adam. He was commanded to guard the
garden against unlawful intruders. That was literally his job. When a skeptical serpent showed
up and started questioning God's authority, Adam knew what he
was supposed to do, or he ought to have known what he was supposed
to have done. He was supposed to guard the
garden. And whatever else that command may have implied in how
that fits with the breaking in of evil into the world, we don't
know all of those details. But one thing we can tell is
that it certainly demanded that those who questioned God's rule
ought to be removed from God's sanctuary. It definitely required
that. but Adam did not do his job.
He failed to guard the garden. Everything else that transpires
in Genesis 3 spirals out of Adam's initial failure to do the task
that God had given him to do. Now, of course, he goes on to
join the serpent's rebellion. There's a lot more rebellion
that shows up in that chapter, but it all spirals out from the
initial failure to keep the garden. We're still dealing with the
consequences today. As a man, you stand in Adam's place. You
have stepped into his male vocation, his masculine responsibilities.
As men, we are responsible not only for the things that we do
that we shouldn't do, but also for the things we should have
done but didn't. If you abdicate your responsibilities today,
your great-grandchildren and mine will pay the price in this
life, and you will answer for your abdication in the next.
Our sinful abdication as men is one of the chief reasons why
so many in our day find the false ideologies we'll address in a
moment to be plausible. So we're gonna talk about these
false ideologies and you would say, how could anyone believe
this nonsense? Sometimes we need to look in
the mirror. We're the reasons why people find nonsense more
beautiful than the truth. Because when we abdicate our
responsibilities, we obscure the beauty and the glory of God's
creational pattern. In the parable of the talents,
Jesus doesn't give the lazy servant who hid the talents a slap on
the wrist. The guy did nothing. He didn't
do anything. And Jesus doesn't say, ah man,
you should have tried harder. No. He cast him out into the
outer darkness, the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
We must not miss this. The lazy servant who does nothing
is punished just as severely as the wicked vineyard keepers
who kill the master's own son. They receive the same reward.
They're treated in the same way because they've been equally
wicked. Failure to take responsibility isn't just less than ideal. Man,
I should have tried harder. It's a wicked sin that will damn
us if we do not repent. Surely, you might say, my failures
can't possibly be that big a deal. I mean, I know there are some
areas where I've abdicated responsibility. Yeah, I get it. I should probably
pay more attention to what my wife is consuming on social media
and what's influencing her and what snakes, that's how the snakes
are coming into the garden. I should be paying more attention to them.
Yeah, I know. Yeah, probably someday I should do that. Yeah,
maybe my kids shouldn't have a smartphone or a computer or
a television in their room, or I guess that new game system
does have internet access and chat too, and I should probably
be paying attention to who they're connected with. I know I should
have said no to that sleepover. I should probably be more involved
in my children's education. If I'm being honest, you might
admit, investing my talents for the kingdom would, yeah, if I
was going to really think in those terms, I should spend less
time scrolling YouTube and more time developing new skills, less
time watching Netflix and more time reading The Word, less time
watching the game and more time investing in those around me,
less time playing video games and more time with my wife. But
really, you might say, on the whole, I'm not doing so bad for
an ordinary guy. After all, I'm not a king, I'm
not a general, I'm not a pastor. As long as I don't do any of
the really bad things, then everything is going to be all right. Sure,
I may not end up with as many rewards as the next guy, but
I can live with that. I don't need to have all those
rewards. Those can go to the next guy. You might think that
way. Many men do. But you need to
know that you may see things that way, but God does not see
things that way. You may not be a king, but you
are a man. That alone means that you are
the heir to Adam's commission. You have been called to tend
and to guard the garden. You have been called to bring
what is now wild under cultivation. You have a Y chromosome. You
have testosterone levels that are 10 to 20 times higher than
a woman's. Not only are you already stronger
than the overwhelming majority of women, but you have a greater
capacity for increasing your strength through exercise. Your
brain is wired to obsessively tackle big problems and to solve
them. These are talents that God has entrusted to your care. and their talents he's going
to require back with profit from your hands. So, brother, what
are you doing with them? I don't want you to be thinking
right now about all the bad things that you aren't doing. I want
you to seriously take a moment to think about what you are doing
with what you've been given as a man, with whether you're truly
turning a profit for Christ's kingdom or you're simply coasting
in the hopes that everything is gonna turn out all right.
Adam tried that. It doesn't work. Coasting is
rebellion. Coasting is rebellion. If you aren't stepping up to
the plate as a godly man, then you need to kneel down and repent
as an ungodly man. Or you will be judged as a rebellious
man. Most of you are married. You
need to remember the submission God demands of your wife isn't
about her serving you so that your life can be more comfortable.
It's instead about you increasing her opportunities to serve God. That's one of the things that
you're there for. That's what your headship is about. It's
about you using your masculine strength to form a space so that
she can use her feminine strength to fill that space so that God
can receive the glory for both of your labors together. It's
about your mission to expand her capacity for glory you're
calling to form so that she and her sisters can fill. And so,
brother, let me ask you directly, how is this actually going in
your life? When was the last time that you
thought about this? Are you doing your job as a man,
as a husband, as a father, as a brother? Are you guarding the
gardens that God has placed under your care? Are you trading with
the talents you've been given, or have you left them buried
in the dirt and said, you know what, nothing really bad is going
wrong, I think coasting is going to be okay, surely it's going
to turn out. So before we continue, I want
you to take your papers. I want you to take a couple of minutes,
and I want you to think about what specific responsibilities
in your life are you neglecting right now. As we've been talking
through this, if the Lord has been convicting you and saying,
oh man, that thing, yep, it's that thing that I should have
been doing and I haven't been giving attention to it, then
write it down while it's on your mind. In about two minutes or so, we'll
continue. When we and others abandon our masculine responsibilities,
we obscure the biblical pattern for men and women, making it
harder for everyone to see the goodness and glory of God's creational
design for sexual difference. But there's a second path of
male rebellion, and this second path is that of abusing our masculine
authority. God has given every man tremendous
abilities. He has given us those abilities that we can continue
his work of forming the earth, transforming the untamed wilds
into a garden for women to fill with glory. That's why he made
us stronger and more aggressive than our wives. So this is something
that we need to see, that this strength and aggression, these
are tools for taking dominion over the wilds. We set up this
analogy, I want you to keep this in mind. It's like a pickaxe
that you can use to break up that which is hard. That's what
aggression is for. Magician's Genesis 3 provides
us with an example of a man abandoning his masculine responsibility.
Adam's not stepping up to the plate. He's not doing what he's
supposed to be doing, and things spiral down from there. So Genesis
4 provides us with an example of a man who abused his masculine
authority. We have both of these pathways
illustrated in the first chapters of Genesis. So as we work through
this passage, we'll see that the core rebellion at the heart
of abuse is rather different than we might sometimes Think,
the actual dynamic of what it means to be an abuser as a man
is not what we might assume. Cain was Adam's firstborn son.
This was no small matter. We often miss this, but this
is no small matter. When Adam returned to the dust, Cain was
in line to take over as the leader of the human race. Cain had a
legitimate position of authority, as the firstborn son, Cain had
a legitimate position of authority over his younger brother Abel.
His desire for respect from Abel was not, in and of itself, a
wrong desire. We need to remember that Cain
was no slouch. He was the first recorded farmer.
His struggle against the thorns and the thistles had been a successful
one. He's the first one to turn the
wilderness into a garden. Maybe Adam did, but we're not
told about Adam's labors in that respect. We are told about Cain's.
Even after the devastation of the fall, even after the exile
from Eden, Cain had succeeded at forming a patch of the wild
into a little part of Eden. And this is where the story picks
up in Genesis 4 and verse 3. And in the process of time it
came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an
offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of
the first things of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the
Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering, but unto Cain
and unto his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very
wroth, he was very angry, and his countenance fell. Though
Abel was the younger brother, the Lord accepted his offering
and not Cain, and this caused Cain to literally lose face. And he was not happy about it.
Cain could not handle it. He was the older brother. He
deserved the respect, he thought, and so he became furiously angry.
And the Lord comes to Cain and confronts him. Of course, we
have an echo of this in Jesus' parable of the younger and the
older brother, the prodigal son. Genesis 4, 6. God first points
out to Cain that the problem is with Cain, not with Abel. Cain is the one who got his offering
wrong, and we don't know what instructions were given for the
offerings, but it appears that whatever those instructions were,
Cain got it wrong. Most likely, there needed to
be an animal sacrifice. There needed to be blood. That
certainly fits the pattern that we have revealed in later sections
of Scripture. But in any respect, Cain is the
one who got his offering wrong, and if Cain fixes his failure,
God will accept him. And if Cain does not, a sin offering
is even now resting at the door, and he can seek atonement for
his sin. And then God says this, and unto
thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. Now,
while there are a great many passages where I think the ESV
and other more recent translations do a better job of capturing
the meaning of the original, there are a few places where
I'm convinced the King James is still better, and this is
one of those few places. In Hebrew, the words that the
King James translates as his and him are indeed normal masculine
pronouns. The word for rule is the ordinary
word for the rule of humans over other humans. The rule that is
the firstborn son was Cain's by right. The position of status
that his failed offering threatened. This is why Cain is upset. Furthermore,
Cain and Abel are the only characters introduced in the story, and
the story is about the conflict between them. So there really
isn't, often people will read this as the personification of
a sin or a demon or something like that, but such a character
is not actually ever introduced in the story. We're told about
a personal conflict between Cain and Abel, where the rule of Cain
over Abel has been threatened by God's rejection of Cain. That
is actually the problem in the story. In other words, as Calvin
pointed out long ago, the simplest way of taking the text is that
this refers to the restoration of Cain's rule over Abel. Those
are the characters in the story. That's what's been disrupted
by God's rejection of Cain, and that's what Cain wants to be
restored. In other words, what God is saying to Cain is that
if Cain will repent and offer the sin offering he should have
offered to begin with, then he can regain the status that he
has lost. Cain wants his status back. God says, look, Cain, it's
up to you. Here's the path. Humble yourself,
offer a offering, and your position will be restored. But tragically,
like countless men since his time, Cain refused to listen
to God. Cain murdered his brother. Cain
decided to take the strength that God had given him, the very
strength he had once used to tame the wilds, and use it as
a shortcut to get what he wanted, which was dominance over Abel.
He wanted to be in charge, not have his rule threatened by Abel,
and so he took a shortcut by killing Abel. No Abel, no one
to challenge Cain. That was his strategy. Now most
of us have never murdered anyone. But the truth is, you don't have
to allow the literal devil to talk to your wife in order to
abdicate your masculine responsibilities, and you don't have to physically
murder your brother in order to abuse your masculine authority.
All of us have things that we want. Despite what some might
try to tell us, there's nothing wrong with having strong desires.
Our sex drive is good, because without it, our women would never
be able to civilize us. Our desire for honor and authority
is good because without it we'd never be willing to make the
countless sacrifices that obtaining and exercising leadership demand.
But the problem with Cain wasn't what he wanted, it was the shoddy
shortcut he was willing to take to get it. Cain wasn't too much
of a man, he was too little of a man. His murder of his brother
represented a lazy failure to do the difficult work of real
repentance that real restoration would have required. God didn't
say to Cain and say, Cain, what do you want status for? That's
too much. You're being too macho, Cain.
You need to tone it down a little bit. No, God actually pointed
Cain to the path that he needed to take to get what he wanted. And Cain said, too difficult.
I'm going to take the easy way out. That's what Cain actually
did. His murder of his brother represented
a lazy failure to do the difficult work of real repentance that
real restoration would have required. He didn't need more feminine
softness, he needed more masculine endurance. And when men abuse
their authority, this same pattern shows up over and over again.
A man wants sex, nothing wrong with that, being fruitful and
multiplying, part of the job description, as humans. And this
desire should drive him to get it the right way, to get a job,
to find a wife, to learn what makes her tick, and then to enjoy
the process of making some more image bearers. But some men are
too lazy for all of that. They don't want to put in the
hard work required to win and to please a good woman, and so
they abuse their masculine authority and abilities by taking shoddy
shortcuts to get what they want. And so rapists get sex by force.
And porn users pay others to abuse women on their behalf.
Hook-up artists learn how to use the creational design of
women against them. Fornicators and adulterers deceive and destroy
themselves and those they claim to love. One and all, abusive
men like these follow in the way of Cain. They're taking shortcuts,
they're taking abilities that were given to them to do one
thing, and they're using them as a shortcut to get something
else. Of course, it isn't just sex.
As with Cain himself, it could be a desire for status. As men,
we want to be in charge of our homes. This desire is not wrong. We're not called to be doormats
or figureheads. We're supposed to exercise authority
by ruling over our own household. It's one of the qualifications
for elders. Not that they be a figurehead
in their home, but that they rule their home. That's what
men are supposed to do. And therefore, if you're called
to rule your home, it ought to trouble you when your wife or
children disrespect you or refuse to submit to your rule. But when
that happens, you're going to be tempted. When that happens,
as it probably will at some point, you need to be more of a man
than Cain. You'll be tempted to take the strength and aggression
God has given you to take dominion over the dirt and use it to dominate
your family. Remember what I said earlier,
that strength and aggression that is to take the unformed
wilds and turn it into a garden, it's like a pickaxe. And you've
got this tool in your shed that's given to you to use for one purpose,
but you're tempted to take what God gave you to overcome the
dirt and use it to dominate what is not dirt. I hope and pray
that no one here would ever actually beat their wives or harm their
children. If that's you, shame on you.
You really need to repent. But what all of us need to realize
is you don't have to use your fists to take the tools God's
given you to form the dirt and use them to control your wife.
A loud and angry voice may not send you to prison, but it's
a shortcut all the same. Your physical presence as a man
that you can use to control the animals and to control the dirt,
all of that, that forcefulness that you have, that's for the
dirt. That's not for the garden. Real men know the difference
between tending their gardens and taming the wild. And when
their vine and their olive plants, this image that God uses for
our wives and our children, aren't responding as they should, real
men don't attack them with a pickaxe of aggression. You're not doing
what I want? Well, I'm going to tell you what
I want, and you're going to do it. That's like taking a pickaxe
and attacking a fruit tree, because it isn't doing what you want.
Yeah, you can get the fruit tree out of your way, but it's not
going to be fruitful for very long if you keep treating it
that way. When their vine and their olive
plants aren't responding as they should, real men don't attack
them with the pickaxe of aggression, prioritizing short-term control
over long-term health. They take the time to figure
out what's actually gone wrong in their home. They learn to
dwell with their wives according to knowledge. They learn to stop
exasperating their children. They learn to value the slow
restoration of life-giving rule more than the illusion of control
offered by the shortcut of abuse. Because you know what? That control
that you get by that dominating presence that's intended to conquer
the wilds, and you bring that into your home and you say, I'm
going to control this little garden. It's an illusion of control.
Cain didn't get respect from Abel after Abel was dead. Instead,
Cain got shamed to himself. For all of history and all of
eternity, he got shamed to himself. He thought he was solving the
problem, but he was making it worse. And this is something
that we as men do. Because we go into this problem-solving
mode and we see this problem, my wife and my children are not
respecting me, my household is not under control, I'm going
to take control! But you're actually breaking
and making the problem worse. and you need to be patient to
actually figure out what has gone wrong. That was the path
that God pointed out to Cain. He pointed to Cain, where did
things actually go wrong? Cain, they went wrong when you
offered the wrong offering. If you go back and fix that,
then all of these other things are going to be in order. So brother, let me ask you directly,
how is this actually going in your life? Where are you being
tempted to use the strength and aggression God has given you
to take dominion over the dirt, to control relationships you're
unwilling to actually repair? Are you seeking, when something
goes wrong in your home, do you seek to actually repair what
is wrong, or to dominate and control it, so that you don't
have to deal with the consequences or the difficulty of actually
fixing the problem? Where are you being tempted to
take a pickaxe to your fruit trees? Where do you lack the masculine
endurance needed to satisfy your desires in the right way? In
short, where are you right now being tempted to take shortcuts
in your life? Let's take a moment, and that's
this next question on the practicum there. So write down, is there
a place in your life where you're being tempted to take shortcuts?
Was the spirit pulling on your heart and saying, ah, there's
this situation that actually needs repair in my life? It's easy to see the many ways
in which our culture is at war against reality. And in just
a moment, we're going to directly confront some of the false ideologies
of our day. But it will do us no good at
all to flame the libs on X if we're following in the footsteps
of Adam and Cain in our homes. In a few minutes we're going
to talk about the way that our broader economy, the structure of our
society, obscures the patterns of creation, but it will do us
no good to understand the hidden challenges posed by technology
if we're unwilling to deal with the destruction caused by our
own depravity. Reclaiming reality begins with
clearing away the rubble, and clearing away the rubble begins
with repentance for the ways that we ourselves have abandoned
our masculine responsibilities and abused our masculine authority. And we can see the particular
problems of this stage in human history, but often what we'll
find, if we trace it back, is that the ideologies of today
are responding and a result of the depravities of yesterday.
And we could intellectually respond to all the false ideas that are
present in our society, but if we don't begin by dealing with
our own sin, then we're merely laying the ground for the false
ideologies of tomorrow. If we really want to make progress,
we have to begin by not making things worse. And that starts
in our homes. As I mentioned at the beginning,
while the problem of depravity is perhaps the most obvious obstacle
to recovering the goodness and glory of sexual difference, it's
by no means the only rubble that needs to be cleared away before
we can begin to rebuild. Where recovering reality begins
with repenting of our sinful desires, repentance alone is
not enough. We must go on to do the hard
mental work of destroying arguments and every lofty opinion that
is raised against the knowledge of God. We must wrestle with
ideas until we are able to take every thought captive to the
obedience of Christ. We must recognize that good intentions
alone are not enough to protect us against the consequences of
bad ideas. We must address the problem of ideology. Now, in our time tonight, we're
going to spend, we're going to discuss, we're going to consider
foundational principles for how to think as Christians. So we're
going to talk tonight about the problem of ideological thinking
as such, and this ideological mindset versus actually thinking
about reality. But in our time together this
morning, we're going to focus on three specific and widespread
ideologies of our day that must be taken captive if we are to
recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference. The
unisex ideology teaches the lie that men and women are interchangeable.
The macho ideology teaches the lie that men are more valuable
than women. And the female ideology teaches the lie that women are
more valuable than men. While I trust that all of us
would quickly reject these ideologies, I don't think there's anyone
here that would say, men and women are interchangeable. If that
was what you thought, you probably would have left by now. I don't
think there's anyone who would say, men are better than women.
If that's so, we all ought to tackle you afterwards. And I
don't think there's anyone here that would say, women are better
than men. No one would say that bluntly like that. I'm not sure
how we would respond to that. But I don't think anyone would
say that. All of us would reject these
ideologies when stated as clearly as this. What we need to see,
and what I hope we'll see by the time we're done with this
section, is that all three of these ideologies also exist in
watered down and partially Christianized forms that have influenced all
of us and are influencing all of us. In other words, when we
consider the problem of ideology, our primary task is not to mock
the inanities of our collapsing culture, but rather to trace
the subtle ways in which that culture influences us. Because in simple truth, at one
point or another, all of us have been influenced by one or more
of these false ideologies, and most of us have been influenced
by all three. I know for myself, as I was preparing
this, I thought of seasons and times and areas in my life where
I have been impacted or thought that one or more of these ideologies
was plausible in one of these watered-down forms. Let's start
with the unisex ideology. In its extreme form, the unisex
ideology teaches that ultimately there's no difference at all
between men and women. Mary Harrington does a brilliant
job of summarizing this view. In this vision, she says, our
bodies cease to be interdependent, sexed, and sentient, and are
instead reimagined as a kind of meat Lego built of parts that
can be reassembled at will. As she later adds, under meat
lego Gnosticism, that is one of the most brilliant phrases
ever. I just love that. Under meat lego Gnosticism, all,
quote, humans must be interchangeable. The aim is to replace every single
sex group with a unisex jumble of meat parts, segregated by
an unfalsifiable identity. Sadly, Harrington is not dealing
in straw men. There are indeed people in our
society who truly believe that our bodies are no more than meaningless
meat legos that tell us nothing about who we really are, Since
we spent a good deal of time discussing in our series on embodiment
and transgenderism and all of that, we're not going to dive
into that further here. That is an ideology that I think
all of us could recognize as false and contrary to God's creation
order. Of course, this unisex ideology
also shows up in much more moderate varieties as well. From the injustices
of Title IX administration to the absurdities of employment
law, our legal system is built on a fundamental rejection of
any culturally meaningful difference between men and women. It's difficult
to exaggerate how deeply this lie is baked into our current
culture, or how different modern industrial society is from every
previous culture in human history in this respect. Ivan Illig,
backed up by a mountain of historical evidence, put it like this, Unisex work is the rare exception
if it exists at all. Few things can be done by women
and also by men. There is men's work, and there
is women's work, and very rarely do the twain ever meet outside
of our modern economy, where we talked about this in the discussion,
where we've got fungible economic units rather than men and women,
and we are optimized and abstracted purely for profit. Before the
modern technological society, it was almost universally recognized
that men and women had different needs, saw the world in different
ways, occupied different spheres, and were suited for different
tasks. Now, I want to be clear that pre-industrial societies
were still sinful and rebellious with false ideologies and wicked
practices of their own, some of which we'll address in a moment.
They did recognize the fundamental reality that men and women are
different in nature, but they had other rebellions of their
own. We're not looking back to this bygone era. We can see what
they got right, but if we were to go back to that era, we would
also have to address the many things they got wrong. We'll
see a little bit of that in the next point. Unfortunately, though,
it's not only in secular society that this fundamental truth has
been lost sight of. So we've got the extreme unisex ideology
that openly and blatantly says it and tries to live like it's
true. We've got a slightly more moderate unisex ideology that
shows up in every area of our culture. But we also have a more
watered-down and Christianized form that this same basic error
shows up, not only in the sort of openly egalitarian writers
that I quoted from last night that are saying we want men and
women to be interchangeable, but also among many varieties
of self-described complementarianism. For example, Kathy Keller summarizes
her position like this. Anything that an unordained man
is allowed to do, a woman is allowed to do. Anything that
an unordained man is allowed to do, a woman is allowed to
do, this is one of the, in conservative churches, that make some sort
of difference between men and women, this is actually the standard
and practice that is taken most frequently. It's a very widespread
view. And at first glance, it can even
sound good. I remember many years ago, the
first time that I heard this, it sounded good to me. But a
second glance reveals a profound capitulation to the unisex ideology. As we've seen, Scripture teaches
that men and women are different by nature. Male and female are
real categories that exist in the Word and in the world. Scripture
does not teach any such difference between ordained men and non-ordained
men in the New Testament Church. While we find many references
to the elders or pastors of particular congregations, there is an office
of pastor that is a real office. In real particular churches,
there is not one verse in the New Testament that is addressed
to ordained men as a group. This is not a real category.
If I leave West Side and move to Cambridge, I will not do so
as an ordained man, but simply as a man with past pastoral experience
who is no longer in that office of pastor. When Paul gives instructions
for who should do what in worship, he does not speak of the differences
between what the ordained and the non-ordained can do. There's
not a single verse in the New Testament that supports that
distinction. Instead, he speaks of differences between what men
and women should do. It's not the unordained who are
commanded to keep silent in the churches, it's the women. Apart
from an ability to teach, the requirement for those who desire
to serve as pastors basically boil down to being an exemplary
man. You want to be a pastor, set an example as a man, have
an ability to teach other men. Those are the requirements. And have those abilities recognized
by the congregation as a whole, and have a desire to serve in
that office. Those would also be helpful, or necessary, rather.
To teach that the real difference in ministry is between the ordained
and the non-ordained is to teach that apart from eligibility to
ordination, men and women are essentially interchangeable.
It's to say these real categories of men and women, they don't
matter. The only category that matters is ordained and not ordained.
And the only way that men and women filter into that is to
say men can be ordained and women, sadly, you can't. This is simply
not true. We don't have to be unkind. We
don't have to mock the motives or scorn the integrity. You can
be sincerely wrong. But this is a false ideology,
and we need to be able to name it as such. From the unisex ideology,
we turn now to the macho ideology, the false belief that men are
better than women. Once again, we'll start with the extreme
form of this view, consider more moderate forms of it, and then
examine the way that it shows up closer to home. And after
this section, we'll take a short break. As we seek to combat the
unisex ideology that is so prevalent in our day, it can be easy to
forget how prevalent the macho ideology used to be and how destructive
and unbiblical it really was and is. While we must not be
seduced by the lies of the various feminist movements, we must remember
that these movements were often responding to real injustices
in their own time. The male misogyny of the past,
in other words, is not simply a feminist myth. It was and is
a real ideology that has caused and does cause real harm to women
and men alike. For example, in 1879, the prominent
social psychologist Gustave Le Bon had this to say about women,
quote, all psychologists who have studied the intelligence
of women recognize today that they represent the most inferior
forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children
and savages than to an adult civilized male, end quote. These disgusting sentiments did
not turn up in some obscure self-published screed on an incel blog somewhere. Le Bon's
book, in fact, won a major award from the French Academy of Sciences.
It was touted as the latest and greatest in social research.
It was profoundly influential. Sadly, it'd be easy to multiply
examples of Le Bon's sentiments. If interchangeability is the
ruling false ideology of our modern technological society,
then the macho ideology has been the dominant false ideology of
countless traditional societies, and they're both equally wicked.
Both obscure the pattern of creation. This false ideology denies the
fundamental biblical truth that men and women are equal in value
before God. While the natures and vocations of men and women
are different, both natures and both vocations are equally important
and ought to be equally honored and rewarded. Ironically enough,
the same basic misogyny against which they claim to be reacting
is itself basic to a number of strands of the feminist movement.
As Neuer put it, the tragedy of feminism is that it propagates
precisely the opposite of the real interest of women. Instead
of helping women to develop their femaleness to its optimum, it
tends to encourage them to imitate men. Women should participate
to the same extent as men in careers, in society, and in politics.
This masculinization of women that goes along with this is
bought at the cost of a radical devaluation of the most vital
maternal tasks. The standard for feminist demands
is paradoxically what men do and not what corresponds to a
woman's nature. Men like Le Bon claimed that because women were
different than men, they were of lesser value than men. But
any response that bases women's value on their ability to compete
with men has already accepted the false and wicked premise
that the activities and abilities of men are more important than
the activities and abilities of women. That's actually the
problem. In a world filled with illusions,
we need to constantly remind ourselves of the most basic realities.
It is not at all misogynistic to say that men, not women, are
the ones called to lead and to guard society. What is both absurdly androcentric
and profoundly misogynistic is the view that it's somehow liberating
for women to measure their value by their success in competing
with men on male terms as though their female activities were
not worthy of any respect or consideration at all. That is
what is truly misogynistic. We don't need to have, as Christians,
this low-level embarrassment about what the scriptures teach
about the relationship between men and women. We should instead
be embarrassed for those who treat women the
way our society treats women. profoundly devaluing the maternal
task and everything that resembles it. That's misogynistic. Those are the ones who should
be embarrassed. Even if, in how we say that in
public, may need to have a little bit of wisdom of serpents and
harmlessness of doves, lest we be fired from our jobs. The truth
is that it isn't only But the truth is, it isn't only misogynistic
men like Le Bon or women-hating feminists who are captive to
this macho ideology. This lie also has a Christianized
form, one that I've seen Christian men fall prey to, to one degree
or another. A man believes rightly that he
ought to be the leader of his household. But leading a wife
who is a full partner in the mission of humanity is difficult.
Forming so that she can fill is hard, so some men take shortcuts. Rather than stepping up to the
task of leading and loving an adult woman, they demean their
helpmate by treating her like another one of the children.
As Marias puts it, the man who needs to regard woman as a minor
is precisely the man who does not feel sure of his own masculine
condition. If you try to control your wife's
every move, if you insist on winning every argument, if you
consistently refuse to place any trust in her competence or
give any value to her insight, then you are treating her like
a child. You aren't demonstrating how
impressive you are as a patriarch, you're demonstrating how insecure
you are as a man. Even if you deny it with your
words, you're showing by your actions that you really think
men are better than women. And you are better than your
wife. you need to realize that this is a false ideology. Because
men and women are corresponding in function, you cannot diminish
your wife without diminishing yourself. She is not one of your
children that you need to keep under control. She is your partner
that you need to be forming so that she can fill. Your mission
is not to dominate her. Your mission is to take dominion
with her. This is a good point, I think,
for us to take a short break. Let's come back in five minutes.
All right. We have considered the unisex
ideology that teaches that women and men are interchangeable and
the macho ideology that teaches that men are better than women.
We come now to the female ideology that teaches that women are better
than men. As with each of these ideologies, there are those in
our society who really do take this to its logical and inhuman
extreme. On the one hand, those who made
the hashtag kill all men trend on Twitter a few years ago don't
seem to be very serious about getting the job done. We're all
men and we're not killed. On the other hand, there are really
those in our society who do seem to truly believe that, as Hillary
Clinton famously said, the future is female. There are, in fact,
many men in our society who are deeply ashamed of their so-called
male privilege and who actively seek to, quote, do better by
acting less like men and more like women. I doubt very much
that any of those men are here, so I won't use up our time addressing
them further. But what we do need to see is
that this same ideology in a subtly different form has, in fact,
had a profound influence on us all. Now, this is the one section
of all of this that you're going to need to pay very careful attention
to. But it will also have, I think,
a profound practical impact. So you're going to have to put
your thinking caps on and wrestle with a big idea with me for a
moment. Because we need to give a little
bit of background. In the Old Testament, Israel is repeatedly
described as the bride of the Lord. While the Song of Songs
is certainly talking in the first instance about ordinary human
love between a man and a woman as a creational good, there are
also hints in the text itself that intentionally point us to
see it as a picture of the love of God for his people. This same
image is picked up over and over again in the prophets, especially
in Ezekiel and Hosea. In the New Testament, the Church
does not replace Israel, the Church simply is Israel, purified
and restored, and with the Gentile branches grafted in, and the
hope that many Jewish branches will one day be grafted back
in again. This is why Paul in Ephesians
5 does not hesitate to pick up on the bridal imagery of the
Old Testament, Israel as the bride, that shows up already
in Exodus, as I mentioned, in many of the prophets, and apply
it directly to the New Testament church, describing the church
as the bride of Christ. It is not as though God the Father
has one bride and God the Son has another bride. There simply
is God's people pictured as a bride under the Old and the New Covenants.
We find this same image at the end of Revelation, where the
New Jerusalem, explicitly including the saints of both the Old Testament
and the New Testament, is pictured as a bride. So you have a bride,
and the bride is pictured as a city, and the city has foundations,
and the city has gates, the 12 tribes, and the 12 apostles.
In other words, they join in a heavenly marriage feast. In
other words, as a collective, the church is clearly and repeatedly
described in bridal and feminine terms. So when we think of the
church as a collective, the church is a feminine entity and the
church is pictured as a bride. So far, so biblical. Are you
still tracking with me? But in the 1200s, the profoundly
influential theologian Bernard of Clairvaux gave this whole
idea a new twist. Drawing on the earlier ideas
of origin, Bernard took the feminine imagery of the Song of Songs,
imagery that is rightly applied to the collective church, and
directly applied it to the relationship of individual souls to God. So we have an image that's applied
to the bride, to the collective, and he takes that image and applies
it to individuals. But I'd argue that in relationship
to God, all believers, men as well as women, should think of
themselves in feminine terms, as the individual brides of God.
As he put it in his enormously popular and influential commentary
on the Song of Songs, it is not unfitting to, quote, to call
the soul that loves God a bride. Bernard, speaking to an audience
of exclusively male monks, went on to describe the truly godly
soul in explicitly feminine terms, urging them, for example, let
your bosoms expand with milk, not swell with passion, and many
other such expressions. It's impossible to overestimate
the influence of Bernard's bridal mysticism on the spirituality
of the Western Church. Bernard is not just quoted by
Catholic writers. He was also a favorite of the
Reformers, the Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards, just to name
a few. And not all of these, obviously, go as far as Bernard
did, but all of them were influenced in their conception of spirituality
by Bernard's idea of the soul as the individual bride of Christ. Literally countless writers have
asserted or implied or assumed that, as one writer put it, in
relation to God, we are all, men and women alike, basically
feminine. This is not a quote characterizing someone else's
idea. This is something that I actually read in one of the
books that I read. You actually find expressions like this even in books that
are defending the differences between men and women. They'll
say, men and women are different in the order of nature, but in
the order of grace, we're all basically feminine. This is a
very, very common idea. In other words, according to
this view, while we may be called to be masculine in other areas
of life, when it comes to our personal relationship with God,
all of us need to set aside our masculine initiative and take
a feminine and receptive role. While I want to stress that I
have the utmost respect for many of the men who have been influenced
by this view to one degree or another, I also want to be clear
that it is wrong and dangerously so. And this is one of those
ideologies that has probably influenced, whether we're aware
of it or not, it has influenced all of us. If you want to know where the
Jesus Is My Boyfriend songs come from, they may never have heard
of Bernard of Clairvaux, but this is the ideological root
of the feminized music that characterizes so much of Western Christianity.
But this idea is wrong. To begin with, the bridal imagery
in scripture is never applied to the relationship between Christ
and the individual soul. While Jesus frequently exhorted
his disciples to humble themselves as little children, he never
called on them to shed their masculinity and become more like
women. So there is a headship, that we're part of the father's
house, and we're under the father's rule, and he is our head, as
we are the heads of our homes, but he is our head, as our father,
and we as his sons or daughters, not individually, as his bride. In Ephesians 5, Paul does not
call on men to imitate the femininity of the church. He does not say,
men, the church is feminine, therefore you should think. of
God as your husband and you as his bride. No, he says, the church
is feminine and God is masculine. Therefore, men should imitate
the masculinity of God and women should imitate the femininity
of the church. That's what he says. Yes, it is true that Christ
is our covenant head as we are the heads of our wives, but what
we need to remember is that this matter of covenant headship is
not restricted to the relationship between husbands and wives. It
applies equally, though differently, to the relationship between fathers
and their children. Once again, when the New Testament
uses imagery to address the relationship between God and individual believers,
it never uses bridal imagery for that relationship. It uses
paternal imagery. As the Mausers explain, on the
contrary, men are pursued and held accountable by God as men,
sons, soldiers, fishermen, elders, kings, judges. Jesus sometimes
calls his disciples fools and children, but he never calls
them women or girls. Scripturally, men are masculine
from conception to eternity. The masculine Father pursues
men individually as wayward sons and rebellious servants, not
as women. They go on to provide a profoundly
hopeful example of the relationship of a ship to its sailors. A ship,
many of you have served on ships. A ship is a mother to her sailors
and universally considered feminine. She is their home, haven, and
life source in an alien sea. Why is a ship, I'll just pause
here, why is a ship considered feminine? Well, because women
hold things, they hold new life in their womb, and they're designed
to cradle babies in their arms. And so that is why a ship, because
a ship holds things, that's actually why ships get described as in
feminine language. But officers and sailors do not
become daughters or little mothers as they set sail. They do not
take on the gender of the corporate entity that encompasses them.
On the contrary, the masculine roles are intensified for sailors. To command husband and defend
the ship is the duty of mariners, even on pain of death. So the
overall entity is collective. The collective entity that holds
them all is a feminine picture, but that feminine collective
actually intensifies their individual masculine responsibilities with
regard to it. So yes, as men, we are held within
the feminine church. But we are not ourselves the
individual brides of God, and we should not think of ourselves
as such, and we do not have to become more feminine to become
more spiritual. We are God's sons, and we are called to join
our older brother in carrying out our father's mission. We
do not have to become less masculine in order to become more spiritual.
We instead need to have our masculinity sanctified to become more like
the perfect masculinity of our older brother, Jesus Christ.
In the first creation, God made both men and women because he
wanted both men and women in the world. And in the new creation,
God saves both men and women because he desires both glorified
masculinity and glorified femininity to bring their fruits into his
kingdom, to form and to fill it to his glory. As the Mausers
conclude in their section on this, which is so, so helpful,
men remain men inside mother church. Christian men live inside
the church and are part of it, just as sailors and citizens
live inside ships and cities. However, as with mariners and
city fathers, the men of Christ's church are commanded and called
to heighten their manhood and masculine work, not to diminish
it. Consider the scene of Mary, Elizabeth, Jesus, and John. In
utero, in the womb, John and Jesus were completely encompassed
by their mothers. but they were individually masculine
boys already anticipating their manly works. Just so are Christian
men inside Mother Church. Their life and nurture come to
them from God through the church, but they remain men responsible
to lead, nurture, build, and defend her. Just so. Those are
good words. Recovering the goodness and the
glory of sexual difference begins with repenting of our own depravity,
but it must not stop There, we must go on to do the hard mental
work of wrestling with the false ideologies of our day and of
figuring out how the often surprising forms in which these ideologies
have infiltrated our own ways of thinking. And so we're going
to have another moment of pause. And the third question on your
sheet, and you should all have a sheet for session two now,
and there'll be another sheet for session three tonight, so make
sure you get that tonight. But here's the question. Which
of the three false ideologies, unisex, macho, or female, has
influenced your thinking the most? We'll take a little bit
less time for this one, but just think of it as you thought of
these. Which of these ideologies Have you seen, hey, I thought
I needed to be feminine in respect to God? This is female ideology.
Or I've been acting like I'm more important than my wife.
It's a macho ideology. All right. If we're to reclaim
reality, we must reject the false claims of unisex, macho, and
female thinking. We must insist that men and women
are not interchangeable, that male vocations are not more valuable
than female vocations, and that femininity is not more godly
than masculinity. But we're still not done clearing
away the rubble that stands in between us and the beauty and
glory of creation. So having considered the problems of depravity
and ideology, we must go on to consider the problem of economies.
We've got three big obstacles in the way of recovering the
biblical pattern. We've dealt with two of those,
we're now going to deal with the last of them. As I mentioned earlier,
I'm using this term economy in a very broad sense to refer to
all the ways in which our society organizes its resources. So the
problem of depravity is a moral problem. Even though we may recognize
and agree to the creational pattern and principle, our depravity
means we distort it in practice. Ever since the fall of man, there's
something twisted inside of us. Like Adam, we abandon our masculine
responsibilities, and like Cain, we abuse our masculine authority.
But the problem of ideology is an intellectual problem. False
ideologies, even in watered-down and Christianized forms, have
consequences. To a greater or lesser degree, they obscure the
goodness and the glory of sexual difference. The problem of economy
is an environmental problem. The structure of our society
shapes both the way that we see the world and the way that we
live in it. While false ideologies attack the meaning of sexual
difference in principle, our broken economy obscures and distorts
the function of sexual difference in practice. As humans, God created
us with the capacity to create tools and systems that increase
our agency in the world. We call these tools and systems
technology, but technology is a broader concept than we often
think. We often just think of the tools
and systems we don't understand yet and call those technology,
but the same principles actually apply to all technologies. In
and of itself, the human capacity to leverage our knowledge for
world-shaping purposes, that's basically a definition of what
technology is doing, it's taking knowledge of the world and leveraging
it to shape the world, is a good thing. Humans are supposed to
be toolmakers. From a tool as simple as a hammer
to a system as complex as chat GPT, every human technology,
though, changes us in at least three ways. So when we're thinking
about a technology, there are three things that every technology,
from a simple hammer to a complex AI system, changes three things. First, it multiplies some aspect
of our capacity in the world. With my thumb, I can push a tack
into drywall. But with even a small hammer,
I can drive a large nail into very hard wood. With a large
hammer, I can smash rocks. The hammer multiplies my capacity
to use nails to build things or to use hammers to break things.
So a tool or a technology multiplies some aspect of our capacity in
the world, often at the expense of some other capacity. Second,
it shapes our attention to the world. As the old saying has
it, to the man who has a hammer, everything looks like a knout.
If you get a new chainsaw, how many of you have ever gotten
a new chainsaw? Do you not all of a sudden start to see things
that need to be cut down that you never noticed before? You
have a new tool. Or there was once a man in our
church. So when Matthew got his excavator,
all of a sudden he was seeing things that needed to be dug
everywhere. It was amazing the opportunities that he saw for
excavation that just simply he hadn't noticed before. Because
now he had this new thing, and it changed the way he saw the
world. He saw it in terms of excavation. It was really quite
remarkable. All of us have done the same
thing. Third, any new technology filters our interactions with
the world. On the one hand, driving a car massively multiplies the
amount of distance that you can cover. So you think about it,
your capacity has been multiplied because now you can take a trip
to Idaho, or you can go down to California, or you can go
anywhere that you want to go in your car as long as you pay
for your tag and fill it with gas and keep insurance on it.
Don't let the taillight go out and all of the other things you
have to do to maintain your car. But if you have a car, your capacity
for covering distance is multiplied. But your interaction with the
world is filtered and will be filtered from now on by where
other people decided to put roads suitable for your car. So you
have a car. Your interaction with all of
reality is now filtered by where there are roads. and the planning
for houses and how villages develop and everything else, the entire
society becomes filtered and ordered, not for humans, but
for cars. So we adapt to our technologies,
and that filters the way that we see the world in a way that
maybe humans didn't see the world before. Even after the fall,
none of these features of technology is necessarily a problem. At
its best, technology can mitigate the curse, restoring some of
the lost goodness of creation. But what we need to realize is
that our technologies are never neutral. In order to multiply
some human capacities, technology must diminish others. Over time,
the reshaping of our attention can cause us to be completely
oblivious to what was once blindingly obvious. The filtering of our
interactions with the world can distort our understanding of
the world, as well as deepen our understanding of the world.
While I would love to develop a full theology of technology
and a full exploration of the way our technologies work together
to form our overall economy and to transform our experience of
the world, that would be a mandatory and a half in and of itself.
But what I would like to do instead over the next few minutes is
to briefly consider a few examples that highlight how some of the
technologies we take for granted obscure and distort the function
of sexual difference in practice. And so there are lots of different
technologies we consider, but here's what we're actually going
to do. We're going to consider the way our world as a whole
has been shaped by two different specific technologies. Now, a
full exploration would definitely include the internet, but the
internet would also be a menstrual treat by itself. So I'm going
to be a little bit more focused than that. We're going to think
about the pill, hormonal contraception, and we're going to think about
the microphone. because both of these have a profound impact
on the way we see the relationship between men and women. So after
we've talked about these two specific technologies, we're
then going to consider the way that the meaning of the household
has been reshaped by the broader economic and legal systems in
which we find ourselves today. And while we don't usually think
of these changes in and of themselves as technologies, they're still
human-built systems that expand some capacities for the sake
of others, shape our attention to the world, and filter our
interactions with the world. So when we think of how this
technology affects our ability to see and practice sexual difference,
it's not only specific technologies, here's my new invention and here's
how it shapes the world, but it's also systems in which different
technologies are put together and together that system functions
as a technology. So we're going to start with
the pill, the hormonal contraceptive that was first approved by the
FDA in 1960. Mary Ebersat put it well, no single event since
Eve took the apple has been as consequential for relations between
the sexes as the arrival of modern contraception. This may sound
extreme at first, but if you know your history, you know that
Mary is only speaking the sober truth. The ideas at the heart
of the sexual revolution go back hundreds, if not thousands, of
years. Already by the late 1700s, radical thinkers, inspired in
part by the French Revolution, were openly advocating for so-called
free love that would separate sex from the bonds of marriage.
Yet though they were advocating these ideas with increasing stridency
as the years passed, such ideas consistently failed to catch
on in broader society. One thing stood in the way. For
women, sex leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy leads to babies.
And if the babies were not murdered in or outside the womb, itself
a risky business in that era, then somebody has to feed them
and clothe them and shelter them. As long as sex and babies were
connected, both women and men had at least one strong reason
to reserve sex for marriage. Not everyone did, of course,
but the difficult consequences that awaited those that didn't
helped to remind everyone of why fornication was a bad thing,
and even when people did fornicate, it was usually in the context
of a promise of marriage because they knew that sex leads to babies,
and babies lead to children that need to be taken care of. They
need a home. And so this connection of sexual
intercourse and reproduction is what placed a cap on any of
these radical ideas of so-called free love. But the pill changed
everything. Approved by the FDA in 1960,
the pill made every stage of the sexual revolution possible
because the pill created the illusion that sexual intercourse
could be consequence-free. From being a consequential activity,
sex began to be seen as primarily a recreational activity, both
inside and outside of marriage. Now, we need to be clear, this
is actually an illusion. Sex is never truly consequence-free. But the pill makes us think that
it can be, and that it should be, and that it's an unfortunate
accident that it's anything other than consequence-free. The early
boosters of the pill promised that the pill would lead to a
reduction of abortion. Spoiler alert! That didn't happen. It instead led to an explosion
in it, and eventually to worldwide legalization of it. Not only
that day, but to this day, they continue to lie about the far-reaching
and truly frightening side effects of what is, after all, a rather
extreme intervention in human biology. The knock-on biological
effects are horrific. The pill multiplied the capacity
of those pushing for the spread of sexual experimentation. Well,
we can and should trace the ideas that have led to the world we
live in. Without the pill, those ideas would have remained on
the radical fringe. And this is actually how society
changes. We can trace the ideological
ideas, how ideas shape the world. But ideas only shape the world
when they intersect with technologies. Technologies, inventions, don't
shape the world. It's inventions that force multiply ideas. that
cause real change in the world. When systems and ideas meet together,
then things change very quickly. And the pill reshaped the way
that our world is seen. To a man with a hammer, everything
looks like a nail. And to a man who knows the girls
have access to the pill, every girl looks like, and often is,
an easy consequence. And you can actually read the
testimonies of those who were early casualties of the sexual
revolution, and they would write, well, I didn't really want to,
but I didn't have a reason to say no anymore, so I said yes.
Women are naturally agreeable. And when they don't have a reason
to say no, they'll often say yes. And that's what happened. And our world has never been
the same. To a man who knows the girls have access to the
pill, every girl looks like, and often is, an easy consequence.
But this isn't just about predatory men and easy women. As Peter
Gurry, who preached here recently, put it in a recent article, the
pill also severed the link between sex and procreation in the minds
of entire generations. In doing so, it paved the way
for no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and today's transgender
movement. Without the pill, you get none of those. The pill filters
our interaction with the world. Even if our own wives or daughters
have never been on the pill, all of us live in the world the
pill created. Men look at your daughters differently because
they know that women have access to the pill. Your daughters will
deal with things that women 100 years ago didn't deal with, regardless
of the decisions that you or they make, because of the decisions
that others have made and the way those decisions have reshaped
our society. All of us live in a world in
which we have to argue that sexual intercourse means something.
Without the pill, no one had to argue that. No one would ever
say, well, it's just sex. You just like to say, it's just
murder. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a human life, it's
meaningless, right? We don't have to make that case,
I know, it's just murder, it's no big deal, right? You don't
have to make that case for ordinary people. But now, because the
pill has flattened out the signals of nature, people say all the
time, it's just sex, friends with benefits, it has no meaning,
it should have no consequences. Technology has changed that.
Some technologies, like the pill, are evil all the way down, concentrated
manifestations of the worst aspects of human rebellion. But it isn't
just evil technology that can make it harder for us to see
and to hear the goodness and glory of created sexual difference.
Good technologies, technologies with perfectly legitimate uses,
can have the same effect. If the pill is an example of
the first, a evil technology, the microphone is an example
of the second. Personally, I'm very thankful for modern sound
systems. We use them every Sunday, and I don't have the slightest
qualms about doing so. But we also need to remember
that apart from modern amplification technology, we would never have
politicians like Kamala Harris or preachers like Joyce Meyer.
They simply would not be technically possible. Walter Ong explains
what was once obvious to everyone. The typical male voice can articulate
intelligible words at a far greater volume than can the typical female
voice. Until electronic amplification of the human voice, few, if any,
women's voices could project articulate, intelligible speech
to audiences of hundreds and indeed thousands of persons to
whom male orators from classical antiquity through the early 20th
century often had to bellow their orations. A woman's scream can
carry a great distance, but intelligibly articulated speech is another
problem. Women frequently narrate folktales with great skill and
effect for smaller groups in oral cultures. But for large
crowds, public speech was almost exclusively the business of men. If you read Spurgeon's lectures
to my students, you'll find he spends a whole chapter, page
after page, wrestling with the physical difficulties of enabling
one's voice to carry to a large audience. Absent amplification,
this is something that women simply could not do no matter
how hard they tried. Yes, of course, there were any
number of queens in the ancient world, but queens gained their
position based on their birth or their marriage, not by delivering
orations to large audiences. Cleopatra did not become the
queen by gaining votes at large rallies. Yes, there were always
eccentric women who harangued small groups about spiritual
subjects. But there were no female George
Whitfields or Charles Spurgeons. And while I'm sure a handful
of exceptions could potentially be mustered, there were not,
as a rule, female politicians in democratic societies such
as America. Here's how you gain leadership
as a politician. You need to be able to give an
oration to hundreds or thousands of people at once in the open
air without amplification. You think of the Lincoln-Douglas
debates where they would go back and forth for hour after hour
in front of massive audiences, and they're projecting their
voice so that they can be heard. Without amplification, politics
was largely limited to those who could make themselves heard,
and those who could make themselves heard were almost always going
to be men, not all men, but a selection of men. In other words, our differing
voices as men and women clearly teach that men were made to lead
in large groups, and women were made to influence in domestic
settings. This is what our voices tell us, our bodies tell us this,
and until about a hundred years ago, this was blindingly obvious
to just about everyone, everywhere, and it didn't need to be argued
for, because everyone knew it. There's nothing inherently evil
about the microphone, but we need to recognize that it makes
it harder for us and for others to see a creational pattern that
used to be obvious. Having discussed two specific
inventions, it's time now to consider the way that the Industrial
Revolution has transformed the function of the household. So
we've talked about two specific inventions. Now we're going to
talk about the technological revolution and the function of
the household, and the legal revolution in the situation,
legal status of the household. By American standards, my family
and I live a rather simple life. At the same time, we still, as
most of you do, have a decent number of appliances and other
modern conveniences. To start with, we have running
water. That's a relatively recent human invention. We have a washer
and a dryer. We have a refrigerator and a
freezer. We have an electric oven and a stove. We have a dishwasher
and a microwave, a KitchenAid and an Instapot. Our cupboards
are filled with canned goods that we bought at the store,
and our refrigerator is stocked with perishables that we also
bought at the store. It isn't just our kitchen. The
clothes in our closet were almost all purchased online or in stores.
I've got jeans on, I've got a shirt on, and I ordered both of those
online. I've got shoes that I ordered
online, and, well, I guess I bought the belt at the store. But anyways,
the clothes that we wear, we bought them at a store. My wife
did not make any of these clothes. Almost without exception, our
furniture was made in large factories, and most of those factories were
overseas because we have cheap furniture. Don't get me wrong.
I'm truly grateful for every one of the things that I've just
mentioned. In and of themselves, none of them is bad. But the
fact is that all of them make it harder for many in our society
to see the goodness and glory of sexual difference. Let's back
up a few hundred years, or even just 100 years, depending on
the part of the country. Running a household was labor
intensive. And much of that labor was highly skilled and widely
respected. Valuable labor gets respect.
While not all men were married, those who weren't generally lived
in boarding houses that were run by women. Men didn't just
live by themselves and live off of TV dinners and a microwave.
There were no TV dinners. There were no microwave. If they
lived as bachelors, they lived in a boarding house, by and large.
There's a reason for that. In pre-industrial societies,
as I mentioned earlier, men and women simply did not do the same
tasks. It was obvious to men that their
enjoyment of life depended on the skilled household labor performed
by women. There were no TV dinners or microwaves
to warm them up. Without a woman to take care
of them, men were condemned to a rather miserable existence.
As Rebecca Merkel put it, speaking of her husband's great-grandmother,
who lived during World War I, even not that long ago in the
American West, For a woman of that generation, being a homemaker
was an enormous job, massive. Getting your family through the
winter was a big deal. Gardening, for a woman like her, wasn't
just a hobby, it was critically important. Those women had to
work like crazy if they wanted to feed and clothe their families.
Not only was the work incredibly difficult, it took skill, perseverance,
and creativity, it also included the possibility of a huge amount
of satisfaction in a job well done, or devastating consequences
of failure, and because that labor was so consequential, There
was societal status to be gained by performing it well. That's
critical. But the Industrial Revolution
has changed all of that. It took the skilled activities
that were once performed by women in their own households and outsourced
them to factories that were largely run by men. As Clark explains
well, the domestic role of women in a technological society where
the household has lost much of its strength and significance
means something quite different from the domestic role of women
in a society where the household is central to the corporate life
of the entire society. So this is where this connects
with the question you asked earlier, Stephen, that when we just say
no to our wives, But the place we're saying, no, you should
just do this thing, but we're not paying attention to the fact
that this thing we're saying you should just do has a radically
different social value than it did a hundred years ago, then
we're actually saying, without perhaps even intending to, that
our labors are valuable and our lives are not. We think of things
like dishwashers as labor-saving devices. The fact is, they are
nothing of the kind. The production of a machine as
complicated as a dishwasher, and that lasts for as little
as most dishwashers today last, requires an enormous amount of
material and labor as attested by the price tag. It, like most
of the appliances in our home, is instead a labor outsourcing
device. They're technologies for replacing the skilled labor
of individual homemakers with the unskilled labor of poorly
paid factory workers in Vietnam and Mexico. They are devices
for replacing the work of women with the work of men. That's
what they are. Now I know, and you know, that,
let's see, I'll get to that. Yeah, now I know and you know
that none of these devices replace the real value of what my wife
does and our home for me and for our children. So this is
again one of those things of an illusion, right? So the pill
does not actually make sex have no consequences, but it creates
the illusion that sex ought to have no consequences. And similarly,
the real value of my wife in the home is not her ability to
take bare grain and turn it into bread without a bread maker or
without a kitchen aid. That's not her real value. Her
real value is her role in the home with our children. But all
these technologies create an illusion that there's no skilled
labor left. You see? It doesn't actually
change the reality, but it creates this false appearance. Because
she does not have to spend her entire day processing food, she's
able to give our kids a world-class education in our homes that simply
wasn't possible in previous generations when we were working all day
on all of these other things. Because she doesn't have to weave her
own cloth and make her own clothes, I'm able to have more than two
shirts, and she's able to run her own home-based photography
business, teach piano lessons, and serve in many ways in our
church community. But we need to recognize that these developments
have consequences. In our day, households require
vastly more money. So all of these appliances that
are now standard make the household more capital-intensive. Starting
a household takes more money today than it did 100 years ago,
which makes it harder to start, and predictably fewer households
are formed. Households require vastly more money and require
far fewer skills. It used to be obvious to just
about everyone why women should focus their attention on the
home. For all but the wealthiest, it was a matter of basic survival,
and any fragment of flourishing was going to depend on that.
You didn't have to argue that it was a good thing for a woman
to be home with her children in the home. But now you have
to make the case that this is actually not a waste of her life.
If they didn't, if you didn't have this, everyone suffered
in ways that were immediately obvious. Everyone knew that homemaking
was a valued and essential calling that was worthy of respect, but
everyone doesn't know that anymore. This is no longer the case. And
while there may be times when we choose to do without some
modern convenience, we can't simply choose to roll back the
clock. Because even if our wives learned all the skills of their
great-great-grandmothers, those skills simply do not have the
economic value or command the societal respect that they once
did. So there's nothing wrong with
a woman learning to can. But no woman has the choice to
can so her family can make it through the winter because the
store is always there with beans for 65 cents. So the, I canned,
and now my family doesn't starve, and your family is starving,
isn't a thing. It doesn't have the social value
that it once did, and we can't make it have the social value
that it once did. You can say, I'm not going to
have a dishwasher, I'm not going to have a refrigerator, I'm not
going to have an electric stove, I'm going to do everything the
old-fashioned way, but you can't make it have the old-fashioned
value that it once had. You're just playing pretend house. Now, if that's your hobby, that's
fine. There's nothing wrong with that. You can because it's healthier
and it has that value, right? You can do all of these things.
It's not wrong to have these things as hobbies, but you can't
make it a society-wide respected activity that's essential for
human survival because we don't live in that world anymore. We'll
talk tonight about some of the ways we can respond to that.
None of the developments I've mentioned are sinful. All of
these can be used for good. But at the same time, we need
to recognize they make it harder for us and for others to see
the created goodness of specialization according to sex as an obvious
reality that applies to every area of life. Our technologies
obscure that reality. And what we have to do, we can't
just say, I want to live like they did in Little House on the
Prairie. We don't live in that day. What we need to do is think
through, how can we recover the biblical pattern in this society? What does that look like? We
can't simply go back, we have to go forward. We'll talk about
that more tonight. We began by contrasting two specific technologies. The pill is a wicked invention
developed for evil purposes from the beginning. While the microphone,
on the other hand, is a good invention with many good uses,
it still obscures aspects of the creational pattern that were
once obvious to everyone. We have this same basic pairing
and the two broader influences on the household we're considering
now. Pardon me. In and of themselves, the conveniences
we have in our household are good. While we need to recognize
that they make it harder for us to order our households according
to the biblical pattern, we can give thanks for them in good
conscience and use them for good. We cannot do the same for the
transformations that have taken place in our legal system with
regard to the household. Pardon me. As Aaron Run explains,
patriarchy was always more than just a theological interpretation
of Ephesians 5. It was a legal and cultural system
in which the man of the house held real authority backed by
the institutions of society. Today, America is a legally and
culturally egalitarian society. Among other things, divorce and
child custody courts and public assistance systems undermine
marriage and fathers. A modern wife's ability to divorce
her husband at any time for any reason, and generally to get
at least an equitable if not a profitable settlement in the
process, renders the notion of resurrecting patriarchy little
more than play acting. So a man is able to be a patriarch
only as long as his wife wants to play along. If she changes
her mind, the charade is over. Believing in or advocating for
revival of patriarchy today is somewhat like believing in the
divine right of kings. Sadly, Wren is absolutely right. If you are a husband and a father,
you are called by God to rule over your household. This is
the creational pattern, and this creational pattern ought to be
reflected in the laws of our country. But we have to recognize
that we live in a legal economy, a particular way of ordering
the resources of society that intentionally, effectively, and
effectively distorts that pattern. Many of these laws were well-intentioned,
originally intended to address cases of extreme abuse. So again,
we see the way that depravity leads to ideology. leads to technological
changes that affect the environment in which we live, making it harder
for us to see the original pattern that that depravity was departing
from. Sometimes these laws still function as intended, but the
cumulative result is a radical reshaping of the very meaning
of the household and society. This is the world we actually
live in. Your wife can divorce you at any time for any reason
or for no reason. Your children can lodge, or your
neighbors for that matter, can lodge a complaint with CPS at
any time for any reason or for no reason. If they are good liars
or if your children are simply rebellious enough to hate the
way they are being brought up, they can get themselves removed
from your care even if you have done nothing actually wrong. And in such cases, by the way,
you are guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. And
because family law is not technically considered to be a criminal prosecution,
accused parents are afforded almost none of the legal rights
given even to accuse murderers, rapists, and terrorists. They
are not given the basic protections found in the Bill of Rights.
Those do not apply to family law. Furthermore, this is not
something that you can solve by moving to Texas or Idaho.
This is a legal system under which our nation as a whole,
and indeed the civilized world as a whole, now lives in. It
may not apply to some corners of Africa, but you will have
other problems there. West Virginia, one of the reddest
of red states, permanently terminates parental rights both faster and
more frequently than any other state in the nation. So this
is not a red or blue problem. This is a society-wide problem.
This same welfare state, furthermore, stands ready and willing to take
your place as the primary provider for your wife and children. Not
only will the state force you to continue to provide after
an unwanted divorce, it will also, through coercive taxation,
force me to supply the funds necessary to enable your family
to dissolve. If any of us at any time refuse
to play along, then we will face the full wrath of the law without
affecting the outcome in the slightest because the resources
will still be confiscated and the dissolution will still proceed.
Because of this perverse legal system, your ability to actually
rule your household is completely dependent on the continued goodwill
of your wife and children. It doesn't matter which bomb
throwers you follow on X, how many books you read, or what
T-shirts you buy, or how many covenants you sign. In the world
in which we actually live, you can only be the head of your
household as long as your wife and children allow you to do
so. That's the world that we live in. I don't say these things
to drive you to rage or despair. We need to remember that Paul
and Peter did not tell slaves, abandon all hope, you're slaves,
you should just despair. That's not what he said. Simply
because they were slaves without legal rights or privileges. They
told them that faithfulness began where they actually were. And
Paul and Peter, were they alive today to see the changes that
have taken place in the legal status of the household would
say the same to us. While we must be honest about
the challenges that we face, none of these challenges can
stop us from recovering the goodness and the glory of the creational
pattern. Because after all, they were already telling first century
believers to dwell with their lives according to knowledge.
They were already telling first century believers not to exasperate
their children. Well now, you just need to know,
if you don't carry that out, then you won't have the alternative.
You may not have the alternative of keeping your wife and your
children if you exasperate them too much. But you weren't supposed
to exasperate them at all to begin with. We can adapt to the
circumstances in which we find ourselves and continue to be
faithful, even if those circumstances are deeply broken. But adapting
to one's circumstances and continuing to be faithful does demand that
you recognize the circumstances under which you actually live.
While we must be honest about the challenges that we face,
and if these challenges can stop us from recovering the goodness
and the glory of the creational pattern, they're simply hurdles
that can and must be cleared in the course of a race. Yet
you cannot run an obstacle course well if you don't recognize that
it is on an obstacle course that you are running. Though minefields
can be cleared, only fools try to sprint through them. Recovering
the goodness and glory of sexual difference, restoring our households,
our community, and our society begins by recognizing the full
extent of the obstacles that we face. That's what we've tried
to wrestle with this morning. We began our time yesterday by
surveying the pattern of reality that has been revealed in the
word and can be seen in the world. Specialization according to sex
is the foundation of truly human flourishing. Men and women are
equal in value, different in nature and corresponding in function.
Before we can recover the goodness and the glory of sexual difference,
we must first confront a number of obstacles. We must confront
the moral problem of depravity, the intellectual problem of false
ideologies, and the environmental problem of life in an economy
that obscures and distorts truths that were once obvious to just
about everyone. In our time together tonight, we'll return to these
three categories to consider what it might look like to overcome
these problems of rebellion as we fight to recover the pattern
of reality. Thank you for listening to this
message. If you would like to learn more about the Westside
Baptist Church, please visit our website, www.bibledirectionforlife.com. Subscribe to the podcast if you
would like to hear new sermons and lessons each week. And remember
that a sermon podcast is no substitute for opening up a Bible and reading
it for yourself. you
Reclaiming Reality- Lesson 2
Series Reclaiming Reality
| Sermon ID | 111324112525440 |
| Duration | 1:39:42 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Genesis 3 |
| Language | English |
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