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