NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - Dave Rubin: Why "Conservative" Is Not Enough
Aired: 2022-03-29
Duration: 01:45:02


=== Writing Blaze: Christ or Chaos (03:12) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
[00:00:03]  If you've been blessed by our content and you like this show, would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five star review?
[00:00:09]  This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do to ensure that this content gets out to as many people as possible.
[00:00:17]  Thanks.
[00:00:18]  In this episode of Theology Applied, I was privileged to have Delano Squires, who is a regular contributor for The Blaze.
[00:00:24]  We discuss his most recent article where he addresses the transgender issue, he addresses Leah Thomas, a hulking dude taking trophies away from girls and swim meets.
[00:00:34]  He also addresses Dave Rubin and his big announcement of adopting two children with his gay partner, and how many conservative outlets like The Blaze came out and congratulated Dave Rubin.
[00:00:46]  Prager, you would be another example of that.
[00:00:48]  So we talk about how being conservative is not enough.
[00:00:51]  At the end of the day, it's either Christ or chaos.
[00:00:54]  Applying God's word to every aspect of life.
[00:00:58]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:01:05]  All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:01:07]  I am your host.
[00:01:08]  Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:01:10]  And in today's episode, I am privileged to have as a special guest Delano Squires, who sadly lives in the DC area.
[00:01:18]  So he's in the heart of Babylon right now.
[00:01:21]  But the Lord is being faithful and keeping him, his wife, his family safe.
[00:01:26]  What he does that most people are probably familiar with him is a regular contributor to The Blaze.
[00:01:32]  He's written for multiple publications and outlets in the past, but that's where you can probably find him most often these days is writing for The Blaze.
[00:01:39]  So without further ado, Delano, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:01:42]  Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
[00:01:46]  Well, thank you for having me, Pastor Joel.
[00:01:48]  My name is Delano Squires.
[00:01:50]  As you said, I'm currently a contributor with The Blaze.
[00:01:53]  I write for The Blaze twice a week and I appear twice a week on the podcast Fearless with Jason Whitlock.
[00:02:03]  So we talk politics, we talk culture, we talk faith, we talk race.
[00:02:09]  Prior to writing for The Blaze, I've written for The Root, The Griot.
[00:02:15]  And the Federalist.
[00:02:16]  I actually got started writing probably a little more than 10 years ago for a website called Black and Married with Kids, which was created to provide more positive images of Black married couples and families.
[00:02:30]  At the time, I was the only single writer and went from there and just started to write for other publications, had my own blog for a period of time, and now I'm all with the blaze.
[00:02:42]  So, really love what I'm doing.
[00:02:45]  Yeah, people can check me out there.
[00:02:47]  Great.
[00:02:48]  So I became familiar with you really just more recently in the last couple months.
[00:02:53]  My wife turned me on to you because she likes to listen to Ali Beth Stuckey and you were a guest on her show recently.
[00:02:59]  And then you sent me an article and I looked at some other ones that you've written.
[00:03:02]  I thought that you did a great job.
[00:03:04]  And the most recent, well, maybe it's probably not the most recent.
[00:03:07]  Is it your most recent article at the time right now that we're recording?
[00:03:11]  The one that we were going to discuss?

=== Foundational Issues in the Church (15:46) ===

[00:03:12]  Yes.
[00:03:13]  Okay.
[00:03:14]  Yes.
[00:03:14]  So by the time this comes out, it may come out in a week or so.
[00:03:17]  So it probably won't be Delano's most.
[00:03:18]  Recent material, but what was the title of this article that we were going to discuss?
[00:03:23]  Remind me if I can.
[00:03:24]  I think this one is, I'm paraphrasing, but when it comes to some to the fact that when it comes to Christians, we, sorry, hold on.
[00:03:35]  No, go ahead.
[00:03:36]  I actually got it on my phone.
[00:03:37]  So if you.
[00:03:38]  The choice for Christian conservatives, Christ or chaos.
[00:03:42]  That's right.
[00:03:42]  The choice for Christian conservatives, Christ or chaos.
[00:03:44]  I hate to put you on the spot.
[00:03:45]  I thought, surely he remembers the title of his own article, but.
[00:03:49]  Maybe not.
[00:03:49]  You probably, I mean, if you're writing twice a week, yeah, if you're writing twice a week, I get that.
[00:03:54]  I get people always, you know, they'll ask me, well, you know, two years ago, you preached a sermon on such and such.
[00:03:59]  And what did you mean by that?
[00:04:00]  And I'm like, I don't remember that.
[00:04:04]  You know, the scary thing, though, is it's all recorded, you know, and so, and that's why, you know, Charles Spurgeon, they said Charles Spurgeon, he rarely would ever speak on a particular theological subject unless he was completely made up in his mind.
[00:04:19]  And so you don't see, actually, throughout the life of his ministry, you don't see a lot of retractions.
[00:04:24]  I sadly did not have some of that wisdom.
[00:04:26]  So when I go back down the rabbit hole, I'm like, oh, no.
[00:04:30]  I said that?
[00:04:31]  Did I really say that?
[00:04:32]  Growth, growth, growth.
[00:04:34]  Yeah.
[00:04:35]  All right.
[00:04:35]  So let me read an excerpt from your article, and then I just want to pick your brain and see what else we can draw out.
[00:04:41]  So you wrote this If 100 men in peak physical condition were stranded on an island with 100 transgender women, in 100 years, not a single person on the island would be alive, and no new generations would have been created.
[00:04:55]  That is a fact, not an attack.
[00:04:58]  The question we should answer as a society is whether enshrining such radical changes in our laws and culture is a sign of Progress.
[00:05:06]  In 15 years, there will be thousands of adults with serious mental illness and conversion regret who will be rightfully upset at the adults who failed to tell them the truth in love.
[00:05:17]  Some of these individuals will be missing hunks of their flesh from their legs and other parts of their bodies that were used to fashion artificial sex organs.
[00:05:26]  Christian leaders who are largely silent on these issues are neither loving nor kind.
[00:05:31]  The evangelical church should be taking the lead in answering those questions.
[00:05:35]  But an honest observer can see the unspoken compact between the sacred and the secular realms that has developed over time.
[00:05:44]  I thought that was fantastic.
[00:05:46]  What are your further thoughts?
[00:05:47]  What kind of inspired you to write that?
[00:05:51]  I was trying to find a way to really capture sort of the ideology that we're dealing with.
[00:05:59]  And as someone, you know, I grew up in a church, I grew up in church, I did not come to sort of Reformed theology, so to speak, until I was maybe five, six years ago.
[00:06:12]  So much, much later in life.
[00:06:14]  So issues around sexual ethics and biblical worldview are ones that were sort of in my orbit, but I didn't have a fully sort of fleshed out worldview as it related to sex and marriage and some of these other things.
[00:06:33]  I mean, again, I think I had a biblical view of marriage.
[00:06:37]  One man, one woman for one lifetime, right?
[00:06:40]  Obviously, to the.
[00:06:41]  But it was hanging in midair.
[00:06:42]  A lot of guys, right?
[00:06:43]  So it's like a lot of guys knew the what, but they didn't know the why.
[00:06:46]  So they have the right view, but it's hanging in midair.
[00:06:48]  They don't have the framework to actually root it and say it springs out of blank.
[00:06:52]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:06:54]  So when I thought about the issues, and particularly as it relates to transgenderism, right?
[00:06:58]  Because this is wordplay.
[00:07:01]  We know that a transgender woman is a man, right?
[00:07:06]  He may have cut his hair, he may have.
[00:07:09]  You know, wearing women's clothes, he may go by a different name, but he's still a man.
[00:07:14]  Every cell in his body says that he's a male.
[00:07:16]  That's right.
[00:07:18]  So I wanted an example that would show exactly how male a transgender woman is.
[00:07:25]  So this really was to counter the narrative, and I'm sure you've seen this where people will say, oh, transgender women are women.
[00:07:34]  Okay.
[00:07:35]  Well, if they really were, again, you get 100 guys in peak physical condition and you get 100 actual women in peak physical condition.
[00:07:43]  And absent any medical issues and so on and so forth, those people can be fruitful.
[00:07:50]  But the sort of.
[00:07:54]  But 100 men and 100 transgender women cannot be fruitful.
[00:07:58]  Correct, correct.
[00:07:59]  And I wanted to sort of point out that this thing terminates at those two individuals.
[00:08:04]  That's right.
[00:08:06]  You cannot be faithful to God's command to be fruitful and multiply.
[00:08:11]  And actually, this hit me today in a different way.
[00:08:15]  I was going to tweet about it, but I'll say it here first.
[00:08:17]  You have people whose entire worldview in terms of creation is based on Darwinian evolution, who are embracing an ideology.
[00:08:28]  That if you take their worldview to its logical end, they will cull themselves from the herd, right?
[00:08:35]  Because they just, that would be their contribution to natural selection.
[00:08:42]  And that's sort of what I was trying to get at when I use that passage.
[00:08:47]  The other part of it, towards the latter part, was, as I said, the compact.
[00:08:54]  It's a quiet compact, but I notice it from Big Eva, right?
[00:08:59]  Some of these prior church ministries.
[00:09:04]  The pastors and the public theologians, men and women, who use social media to comment on every social issue.
[00:09:14]  I mean, when a 17 year old kid from Eastern Kentucky with a MAGA hat on has half a smirk, these people summon and they say, Oh, this is the face of white privilege, and so on and so on and so forth.
[00:09:27]  But then when you see these issues going on, I mean, it's so.
[00:09:30]  And never apologize.
[00:09:31]  They never walk it back.
[00:09:32]  Correct.
[00:09:32]  That's the other thing.
[00:09:33]  They never walk it back.
[00:09:35]  But when you see these issues going on, and these are civilizational issues, right?
[00:09:38]  I mean, these are types of things where if you can't get male and female right, you can't get anything right.
[00:09:43]  You're talking about foundational stuff.
[00:09:46]  And these people will never say, like, hit on the gender ideology and the sexual orientation ideology nearly as hard as they hit on issues of racism or sexism.
[00:10:02]  So when they go to the Atlantic or when they're featuring the New York Times, I already know what they're going to say.
[00:10:11]  They're either going to be silent or they're going to handle these issues with extreme care and caution.
[00:10:18]  When it comes to rooting out what they see as any vestige of Trumpism or Christian nationalism, then they go full bloodhound.
[00:10:28]  Right.
[00:10:29]  No, you're absolutely right.
[00:10:30]  I always say it's, you know, so that compact, one way that I would describe that is I would say that the compact was at some point.
[00:10:37]  You know, I think of Southern Baptists, right?
[00:10:39]  So there was, you know, the great conservative resurgence.
[00:10:41]  They had guys in the seminaries who were saying that Jesus was the bastard son of a whore and taking the Bible and literally throwing it in the trash.
[00:10:50]  Their first day, the first day of class when they were passing out the syllabuses.
[00:10:54]  And so, you know, Al Muller came in, you know, and he was one of the guys who kind of led this, you know, this conservative resurgence and cleaned house, you know, and all those kinds of things.
[00:11:03]  And they won the battle for inerrancy.
[00:11:04]  And John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul and guys were a part of that.
[00:11:07]  I personally see Al Muller as kind of an opportunist because I think that he says on the briefing things that are conservative, but I don't see him in action doing those same things in his seminary today.
[00:11:17]  He did them in the past.
[00:11:19]  But my point is with inerrancy, I think part of the compact is that Big Eva has said, You let us say the Bible is inerrant, and we promise not to make it sufficient.
[00:11:28]  So if you give us inerrancy, we'll surrender sufficiency.
[00:11:32]  Because the Bible, saying Jesus is Lord and all those kinds of things, saying these things as though they are truths and as though they are universal, absolute truths.
[00:11:39]  With the silent promise never to apply the truths, then Caesar doesn't see that as a threat.
[00:11:47]  John the Baptist, he took his gospel and law, he took his truths of the Bible, and he applied it.
[00:11:53]  He didn't just apply it to people in the church who had given him permission, but he applied it to even Herod.
[00:11:58]  It is not lawful for you to have her.
[00:12:01]  He's not a professing Christian.
[00:12:02]  He's not a part of the church.
[00:12:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:04]  God has commandments, and they're not given to the church, they're given to mankind.
[00:12:09]  Everybody.
[00:12:10]  It's not lawful for him to have her.
[00:12:12]  And he begins to apply the scripture to someone in the civil magistrate, somebody outside of the church, in the public square.
[00:12:19]  And the result is he loses his head.
[00:12:21]  But we have in Big Evo, we have those who love the glory that comes from men more than the glory that comes from God.
[00:12:27]  And so I think you're right.
[00:12:28]  There's absolutely this silent agreement that's been made.
[00:12:33]  And you're right.
[00:12:33]  It's kind of like: have you ever seen a movie where there's like a big honking, you know, hulking bully who's like six feet tall and it's like he's failed the eighth grade, you know, three times?
[00:12:42]  He's twice the size of all the other kids and he's picking on somebody.
[00:12:46]  And that person doesn't want to lose face because everybody's standing around, you know, in the lockers and watching this thing go down.
[00:12:52]  And so he, you know, says something really strong to the shrimpy kid next to him, who's standing next to the bully.
[00:12:59]  And I feel like that's Russell Moore, that's Tim Keller, you know.
[00:13:02]  And I'm grateful for things that these guys have done in the past, but right now it's like, you know, it's like the enemy's at the gate.
[00:13:07]  You've got, you know, the undoing of God's created order down to its rudimentary form of male and female.
[00:13:14]  And they're picking on the kid with a smirk on his face and a mag hat.
[00:13:17]  Like, you, you know, so you got a giant.
[00:13:19]  Goliath is standing right in front of you.
[00:13:21]  And instead, you're talking to one of the Philistines next to him as though he's the actual threat.
[00:13:26]  Because you don't want to say nothing because then you're seen as a coward.
[00:13:30]  So you got to say something, but you can't actually say something to the real threat.
[00:13:33]  To the real giant because you're afraid.
[00:13:38]  And I think this brings up a number of really important issues.
[00:13:42]  And I think issues that at some point every believer is going to have to deal with, right?
[00:13:48]  One of them is what happens when the desire to be seen as respectable among the people who hate you makes you sort of shave down, smooth the rough edges of the gospel, of God's word.
[00:14:08]  Or even just of nature, right?
[00:14:13]  When you want to be respected by the Atlantic crowd or the New York Times crowd, there's a certain way that you have to speak.
[00:14:18]  There's a certain way you have to carry yourself.
[00:14:20]  And I understand that.
[00:14:23]  I see that because I read a lot of people.
[00:14:27]  One of the benefits, as I said, of coming to sort of reform theology later in life is I get to see some of these.
[00:14:37]  For lack of a better term, living legends, these luminaries.
[00:14:42]  And I get to see and hear what they're saying today.
[00:14:46]  Not what they wrote about issues 15 years or 20 years ago.
[00:14:51]  I'm looking at people today.
[00:14:52]  The other thing is, I haven't been, for lack of a better term, as tainted by sort of standards around who I'm supposed to be listening to or not.
[00:15:04]  Right?
[00:15:04]  You don't have some of the nostalgia.
[00:15:06]  Correct.
[00:15:07]  So, to be quite honest, I listened to blog and May blog from Doug Wilson.
[00:15:12]  At least once a week.
[00:15:13]  Me too.
[00:15:14]  I mean, to me.
[00:15:15]  Well, it is.
[00:15:15]  Then that means you listen to every episode because it comes out once a week.
[00:15:18]  Right.
[00:15:20]  So, and what I hear is a man, and it's ironic, right?
[00:15:25]  The first time I was introduced to Doug Wilson, I was watching Cross Politic, right?
[00:15:30]  With Chop Knox and Waterboy and Pastor Toby.
[00:15:35]  And I think they were talking about slavery or something.
[00:15:40]  And you know, this is one of these issues that comes up, particularly in the church.
[00:15:45]  And I disagree with his take.
[00:15:47]  I left a long comment, right?
[00:15:51]  I didn't let it sour me because how people interpret events and issues and historical matters from 300 years ago may differ from person to person.
[00:16:04]  People will have different perspectives on the same thing, right?
[00:16:08]  So when I listen to Pastor Doug and he's talking about the American Revolution and making sort of a justification for it, and I'm wondering whether he would make the same justification for the Haitian Revolution, right?
[00:16:22]  I'm just trying to figure out, okay, so what are the principles at play?
[00:16:26]  Yeah.
[00:16:27]  But so I heard some of the criticisms.
[00:16:32]  But then as I started to listen to him more, particularly around issues of gender, of sex, and how men and women interact with one another, during the age of COVID, all those things, I said, there's probably no one who has a better pulse on what is going on, who can see.
[00:16:52]  Over the hill to see what's coming right now than Doug Wilson.
[00:16:57]  I agree.
[00:16:58]  And it's one of those things where I think if I grew up in Big Eva, I would have had enough people to tell me, oh, you can't listen to Doug Wilson.
[00:17:06]  No, you're right.
[00:17:07]  No, you're right.
[00:17:08]  So, yeah, you'd have the nostalgia with some people that you really shouldn't be listening to today because they're not being courageous and being faithful today.
[00:17:15]  And then you'd also be tainted with some of the guys that you should listen to.
[00:17:18]  Because you're right, Doug Wilson has been, you know, he was blacklisted a very, very, very long time ago.
[00:17:22]  But there, you know, once upon a time, He was at Ligonier conferences sitting on the stage with panels with RC Sproul.
[00:17:27]  So it wasn't always that way, but something happened along the lines where he spoke on some things that were against the code.
[00:17:38]  And he got dismissed.
[00:17:41]  And as I said, I think his comfort with being seen as not respectable, quote unquote, gives him the courage to say things that other people just won't say.
[00:17:55]  And I'll sort of bring this home to some.
[00:17:58]  Sort of tangible issues, right?
[00:18:01]  There's a way in which, you know, when I listen to certain personalities within evangelicalism, even when they engage issues of race, and I'm talking black pastors now, I know that there's less than a 1% chance that any of these people are going to use the words father, marriage, family, responsibility, because to them, if, if,
[00:18:29]  You take a focus off of, again, Nick Salmon and the Covington kids, and you ask questions about, okay, what about the crimes that are going on in our cities, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Baltimore?
[00:18:45]  What about, you know, when black folks are victimized by other black people?
[00:18:50]  Is that not a problem?
[00:18:50]  And they'll say, no, that's it.
[00:18:53]  You're trying to move attention away from white privilege and anti racism and so on and so forth.

=== Leadership Beyond Woke Elites (05:06) ===

[00:18:59]  And I'm to the point now, I'm just like, I'm not questioning these people's faith.
[00:19:06]  It's just that type of leadership is useless to me.
[00:19:11]  Right.
[00:19:11]  I agree.
[00:19:12]  That type of leadership only, particularly for me as a black man, that is the type of thing that if I raise my sons in that, they would become adult males who live their entire lives on their knees, asking to be validated and affirmed by people that they don't know because they think that those people owe them something.
[00:19:34]  Even though those people have never sinned against them and have never met them.
[00:19:38]  But from listening to some of these leaders, right, both black and white, who play different roles, on one side you have the extortionists, and on the other side you have the paternalists.
[00:19:51]  That type of ideology would not allow me to raise my sons as men who stand on their feet as image bearers and interact with other people who look different from them as brothers and sisters in Christ, as opposed to acting like children who are seeking the validation of their parents.
[00:20:10]  And I'm not talking about me and their mom.
[00:20:11]  Right.
[00:20:12]  You know what I mean?
[00:20:12]  So, yeah, no, I hear you.
[00:20:13]  What you're talking about, you know, like, so making a mountain, you know, out of a molehill and, you know, taking this peripheral issue over here, you know, about one individual, you know, white person and their privilege versus, all right, we've got, I mean, let's look at the statistics of black on black crime that's going on in our major cities here in America.
[00:20:31]  That whole thing of shifting the focus, Jesus had an illustration for that, a metaphor.
[00:20:35]  He said that the Pharisees would strain a gnat and swallow a camel.
[00:20:39]  You know, and that's exactly what it is.
[00:20:42]  And even that being said, I'm not of the position that there are no downstream effects, right?
[00:20:49]  So we always say, you know, politics is downstream of culture.
[00:20:51]  And that's true to an extent, but I think it's less of a stream and more of a two way street.
[00:20:56]  I think that often, you know, that culture is downstream of politics as well.
[00:21:00]  You know, that sometimes you put something in at the legislative level and then people begin abiding by it and then they begin to change their thought process.
[00:21:10]  And, you know, and so even with black culture, I think, you know, some of the things I'm like, well, You know, some of this is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
[00:21:19]  Some of this is systematic, but it's not the way that you mean by systematic.
[00:21:23]  You know, so I think, you know, when you incentivize a black mother not to marry the father of her children, right?
[00:21:31]  And you're doing this across the board, but you're doing it in such a way that it is disproportionately affecting somebody else.
[00:21:38]  You know, like that, there is a systematic effect of that, but it's not the systematic racism that people are talking about, you know, today.
[00:21:47]  It's quite the opposite.
[00:21:48]  It's It's what you're talking about, the fear that you would have as a father with your own sons.
[00:21:53]  That if you raise men to be fragile, if you raise them to be victims, if you raise them to be entitled, then you are hating your sons.
[00:22:02]  You are hating your children, and you are going to set them up.
[00:22:05]  And they'll be responsible later on for the bad choices they made.
[00:22:08]  But you also will be responsible.
[00:22:09]  So there is a string there.
[00:22:10]  There is responsibility that comes from others that has had a negative influence.
[00:22:16]  But the irony is it's like the exact opposite.
[00:22:21]  Of what the woke progressive elites in our culture today are saying it is.
[00:22:25]  They're saying it's all this discrimination.
[00:22:28]  And I would say, yeah, it is discrimination, but on the other side of the equation.
[00:22:33]  Yeah.
[00:22:35]  And I see that every day.
[00:22:36]  I mean, it's one of these things where, again, even around marriage and family, which I write and talk about a lot, it's a big thing, which dovetails perfectly with the column we were looking at.
[00:22:50]  But It is one of these things where I know if I was to start a national campaign around marriage, right?
[00:22:59]  Multiracial, multi ethnic, everybody's in.
[00:23:03]  But for the component that sort of focuses on the black community, because there are some specific challenges there in terms of why people think marriage disappeared.
[00:23:13]  And I took that to the NAACP and I said, hey, I want you guys to join on with me.
[00:23:18]  They said, no, no thanks.
[00:23:20]  Now, if I took them a same sex adoption, Campaign.
[00:23:26]  Oh, yeah, they'll join on with that.
[00:23:29]  So it's one of these things where getting back to sort of Big Eva, you need people.
[00:23:36]  And I think I said this late in the column we got ushers when we needed guardians.
[00:23:42]  And it's one of the things that, to be quite frank, I think the feminization of the church writ large ushered in a number of changes in terms of how people communicate, what types of things get let in the door.

=== Patriarchy and Righteous Aggression (11:56) ===

[00:24:06]  Because women, generally speaking, tend to care more about people having a sense of belonging, feeling included, you know, feeling comfortable.
[00:24:14]  They tend to be more relational.
[00:24:17]  And that's the perfect type.
[00:24:19]  That is exactly who you want when it comes to making a home or making people feel comfortable in a particular space.
[00:24:29]  That's not the person you want when it comes to guarding the city gate.
[00:24:33]  Yes.
[00:24:33]  And a lot of men have abdicated their responsibility.
[00:24:37]  Both in the church and the community, and even in the home.
[00:24:39]  I mean, some of the things I write about, and my kids are small six, three, and two but I know that there's some guys who are just as afraid to say anything to their teenage daughters as they are to their wives, right?
[00:24:57]  If they really thought, you know, I don't want my daughter wearing, you know, some tight shorts with the word juicy across the bottom, but I don't, you know, I don't, who am I to tell her what to do with her body and she's 16?
[00:25:11]  And, you know, it's one of those things where if you, I think we're reaping what we've been sowing for generations.
[00:25:21]  And for generations, men who have not been willing to lovingly stand up to the people in their lives that they care about the most, we're seeing that those men also will not stand up for them.
[00:25:35]  That's right.
[00:25:35]  They need to stand up to them, and now they're not standing up for them.
[00:25:39]  That's right.
[00:25:39]  Yeah.
[00:25:39]  If you don't have the strength to stand up, To someone, then you're not going to have the strength to stand up for them.
[00:25:43]  You're absolutely right.
[00:25:44]  And I think pastors have failed by preaching against, again, it's the gnat and the camel, right?
[00:25:51]  So you're swallowing a camel, you know, while straining out a gnat.
[00:25:55]  Pastors, you know, would preach sermons about, you know, boys who could shave, you know, and these kinds of things.
[00:26:00]  And it was always hard on men, hard on men, hard on men.
[00:26:03]  Every Mother's Day was, aren't we grateful for moms, you know?
[00:26:06]  And every Father's Day was like, you should do better.
[00:26:08]  You guys are, you know, lousy.
[00:26:11]  And one of the big sins, you know, that would be addressed with men is being.
[00:26:15]  Overly dominant, being too forceful, being aggressive, abuse.
[00:26:22]  But masculinity can fail in one of two directions.
[00:26:25]  You can fall off the wall on one of two sides.
[00:26:30]  You can abuse, but you can also abdicate.
[00:26:33]  So there can be aggression and unholy aggression because there is a righteous aggression.
[00:26:38]  The kingdom of God, since the beginning, has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.
[00:26:43]  Nobody's going to waltz into the kingdom.
[00:26:45]  Apart from waging holy violence.
[00:26:48]  And the Puritans used to talk about, Thomas Watson has a whole section talking about waging holy violence.
[00:26:54]  But you can fall off on the ungodly, unrighteous violence, aggression, that kind of side.
[00:27:00]  But you can also fall off on the apathy and the abdicating side.
[00:27:04]  And again, it's like we take the minority and we preach to that.
[00:27:08]  And I think the reason why is, and we all do this, but pastors, they do it at a mass level, they do it publicly.
[00:27:16]  But I think the reason why that's in the heart of men is because, again, it's cowardice.
[00:27:20]  It's the fear of man.
[00:27:20]  It's loving the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
[00:27:23]  Because ultimately, if I could describe it, it's this what we're doing is we're addressing the enemy that's already been slain rather than the enemy that's currently at large.
[00:27:33]  So it's like when Amazon says elevating black voices, that would be courage if it was 50 years ago.
[00:27:41]  But you're too late to be courageous.
[00:27:43]  Like SNL did their skit, they were just ridiculous where they're making fun of, basically poking fun at themselves for maybe we took COVID too far.
[00:27:53]  And did I really have to completely cut off that friendship with someone that I knew for 15 years just because they didn't want to get their fourth booster shot?
[00:28:02]  And we're all laughing.
[00:28:03]  It's like, yeah, but wait a second.
[00:28:05]  It's been two years, and you guys are the spitting image of the ones who were doing that.
[00:28:12]  It's too late.
[00:28:15]  It's not courage.
[00:28:15]  It's not even comedy.
[00:28:16]  Comedy requires courage.
[00:28:18]  That's why nobody's funny anymore.
[00:28:20]  There's no comedy anymore because comedy requires, it assumes a certain measure of courage to cross the line, but nobody's willing to cross the line.
[00:28:29]  And so we're basically walking around and we're getting in a circle around an enemy that's already been slain, a rotting dead corpse, and taking turns kicking it.
[00:28:39]  Meanwhile, you know, meanwhile, it's like the enemy is actually, there's another enemy over here that's at large, you know, that's currently walking around and terrorizing people.
[00:28:49]  And so, all that being said, my point is, you know, pastors preaching about men, you know, with abuse, that again, and immediately the counter, you know, somebody listening to this would say, well, I, you know, I have this experience, you know, and my stepdad, he was abusive.
[00:29:02]  And we're not saying that abuse doesn't exist.
[00:29:05]  We're not saying racism doesn't exist.
[00:29:07]  But we're saying, is this really the predominant enemy of our hour?
[00:29:12]  And I think, you know, I've been quoting this a lot lately, but a Martin Luther quote where he says, Wherever the battle rages the fiercest, there the loyalty of the soldier is tried.
[00:29:23]  If he is faithful in battle on every other field, but the one point that is currently being contested, he is not professing Christ.
[00:29:34]  He's failed.
[00:29:36]  He's not a faithful follower of Jesus.
[00:29:38]  And so I think that we have these points that are currently being contested, that the The battle of Bunker's Hill, the point where it's actually being contested, and we won't address it.
[00:29:49]  And so that means talking to men about the sin of apathy, not just abuse, because I think that's far more pervasive.
[00:29:54]  But it also requires men preaching about the sins of women in their church.
[00:30:00]  And I think what we've done, talk about abdicating.
[00:30:03]  So you won't preach on the sin of abdicating with males because you, Pastor, as a male, are committing that sin by abdicating your responsibility.
[00:30:11]  You're not pastor of half of the church.
[00:30:13]  Yeah.
[00:30:14]  So I'm patriarchal.
[00:30:16]  I don't even like complimentary.
[00:30:17]  I feel that's too squishy.
[00:30:18]  So, I am patriarchal.
[00:30:20]  I believe in male pastors.
[00:30:21]  I hold a male diaconate.
[00:30:23]  And the pastors, the male pastors that God has appointed in a church are pastors of the whole church, not just the men in the church.
[00:30:29]  And that doesn't mean the women can't get together and do certain things.
[00:30:32]  But this idea of women's ministry and women's leaders, and they become pseudo, those women become pseudo pastors of, and you have two other churches.
[00:30:40]  And then, you know, don't get me started, but you throw in, you know, childcare on top of it.
[00:30:43]  So, I'm family integrated.
[00:30:45]  But, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King, he used to, you know, Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.
[00:30:51]  I think it's, Still the most segregated, but not by race, but by gender and age.
[00:30:57]  So, anyways, my point is, pastors, we drop the ball, and Christians at a large level, we drop the ball by not addressing the sin of the hour and thinking we can't address the sins of women.
[00:31:08]  Certainly, we need to be gentle there.
[00:31:10]  But there is something to be said for Elijah, decrying the sins of Jezebel.
[00:31:17]  So, he doesn't just speak to Ahab for being a pushover, he also condemns Jezebel.
[00:31:24]  So I think, you know, so I, and I think we got both alive and well in the church today.
[00:31:28]  We've got Ahab and Jezebel.
[00:31:30]  They won't let you talk about Jezebel today.
[00:31:32]  They say that they'd call the Tone Police, which is the only law enforcement that some of them actually support.
[00:31:41]  And they'd say, You can't say that.
[00:31:43]  Oh, that's not loving.
[00:31:45]  This is a downside of patriarchy.
[00:31:48]  And I think, as you said, we need people, and particularly men, with courage.
[00:31:57]  I will say this because I think sometimes, maybe to an outsider, It can be difficult to understand how people with our worldview view the role of women.
[00:32:12]  I will say this some of the most courageous people I follow on social media are Christian women.
[00:32:19]  Many of them are stay at home moms, many of them are homeschool moms.
[00:32:22]  I mean, they have and show a lot more courage than some of the guys I follow, even some of the Christian men, to be quite frank, especially the ones with the largest platforms.
[00:32:35]  They are committed to their families.
[00:32:38]  They love and respect their husbands.
[00:32:42]  They love and protect their children.
[00:32:44]  And they realize something that both the broader culture and much of the church does not realize, which is that the people who are shaping the hearts and minds of the next generation have the most important job in any society.
[00:32:59]  Now, we give lip service to that in our culture.
[00:33:02]  We'll say, oh, teachers are the greatest, appreciate teachers.
[00:33:06]  Until a woman says she wants to stay home and teach her own children, then it's, oh, you're wasting your college degree and you could be doing more with your life.
[00:33:16]  But I think this is why women need to know their Bible.
[00:33:23]  Christian women need to know their Bibles.
[00:33:26]  They need to be as thoroughly familiar with the gospel and the scriptures and the different genres and what it all means and applying it practically and apologetics and so on and so forth.
[00:33:39]  As their husbands, right?
[00:33:40]  Because they have an extremely important job.
[00:33:43]  Because they're training children.
[00:33:44]  Yeah, women need to be educated.
[00:33:46]  Sometimes, you know, in my realm, which is very, very conservative and patriarchal and post mill and theonomic, I'm all the things you're not supposed to be.
[00:33:54]  I would be all those things.
[00:33:55]  You know, 1689, confessional, congregational, the whole nine yards.
[00:33:59]  But in my world, sometimes people are like, man, well, I, you know, should women really go to college and rack up, you know, $60,000 of debt and bring that into their marriage when all they really want to do, you know, is be a faithful wife?
[00:34:10]  And we're talking about a Christian woman, you know, and I'm.
[00:34:12]  A mother, and I would completely agree and say, Yeah, that's foolish to rack up all that debt.
[00:34:17]  However, that doesn't mean that no woman should go to college because primarily women are going to be educators, they're going to be educating their children.
[00:34:25]  And so we want them to be educated.
[00:34:26]  We want brilliant mothers who are faithfully training their children and raising them up and teaching them.
[00:34:34]  And it's what you said, you know, you said the teachers, you know, it's like, Oh, well, you know, the teachers, we praise them for shaping the next generation.
[00:34:41]  And the old adage was, The hand that rocks the cradle.
[00:34:44]  Rules the world, right?
[00:34:46]  And we still praise that hand, we just think now that it belongs to the state, to state, instead of home.
[00:34:51]  So, the hand we just we still say the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and that hand is attached to the arm of the state because now we outsource the rocking of the cradle.
[00:35:02]  We outsource, and our government wants to extend that as far as it can.
[00:35:06]  Let's get two extra years before school starts, state school, with you know, that state funded child care, and then let's you know, college keeps extending further and further.
[00:35:15]  People were just like career students who never actually.
[00:35:18]  Join the work, and so it's just all within the state.
[00:35:22]  So we still recognize as a culture that those who are shaping the next generation are vitally important.
[00:35:28]  We just don't think that that shaping primarily should take place with families.
[00:35:33]  We think it should primarily take place with the state.
[00:35:38]  And then we wonder why the world is looking the way it is, right?
[00:35:43]  Because as you said, we've outsourced that job to the state, but the state is not satisfied with rocking the cradle.
[00:35:50]  The state wants to reach into the crib and touch your child, which is why they're pushing gender ideology on children as young as three years old.
[00:35:58]  In D.C., you can start.
[00:36:00]  Pre K at three years old.

=== State Intrusion on Family Life (04:39) ===

[00:36:02]  I've seen materials and I've posted some online where they talk about introducing transgenderism to three year olds using a YouTube video of this show called I Am Jazz, or this teenage boy thinks he's a girl, got all sorts of surgeries, so on and so on and so forth.
[00:36:20]  And then the lesson plan says, introduce the terms transgender and non binary.
[00:36:26]  This is for three year olds.
[00:36:28]  So the state is not just content to rock the cradle.
[00:36:31]  Right.
[00:36:32]  They want to touch your child.
[00:36:36]  That's if your child actually makes it here alive because now the state is saying, up until your child draws its first breath, maybe, you know, if you're not sure whether you want it, right?
[00:36:50]  And the left's play on abortion has moved from endangering the life of the mother to, I want to say it's the term that I've seen is like life or health.
[00:37:01]  Right.
[00:37:01]  Certainly, health can mean mental health.
[00:37:03]  Exactly.
[00:37:03]  That includes psychological mental health and what, you know, yeah.
[00:37:06]  And that opens the door for, you know, I just don't think I can do it.
[00:37:10]  I'm going to be depressed, so on and so forth.
[00:37:12]  So we have allowed, I think, bad theology, and I'm talking about Christians now, have allowed the arms and tentacles of the state to extend further and further into our lives.
[00:37:24]  The way I put it on the show with Jason Whitlock is Uncle Sam has morphed into Daddy Sam.
[00:37:32]  Yeah, right.
[00:37:33]  You're right.
[00:37:33]  He no longer stays in the basement, he stays a couple weeks at a time.
[00:37:37]  Right.
[00:37:38]  He is taking up this house now, he or so he thinks, right?
[00:37:42]  And he said, I've sent your dad away because you know the scriptures say if you want to, you know, rob a house, you got to tie up the straw man.
[00:37:48]  That's right.
[00:37:49]  I've sent your dad away and I'm the captain now.
[00:37:53]  And a lot of people, COVID has certainly revealed this, um, have a desire to be led as much as they talk about they don't like, um, they don't like rules, they don't like authority.
[00:38:11]  The last two years have made it crystal clear that some people have a desire to be ruled.
[00:38:17]  It's just a matter of who is going to be doing the ruling.
[00:38:19]  And where I live, you know, my wife and I took the kids to the playground the other day.
[00:38:24]  And I'd say at least 70% of the kids, the children outdoors, are still wearing masks.
[00:38:31]  Right?
[00:38:32]  Not in Texas, man.
[00:38:34]  But go ahead.
[00:38:35]  Yeah.
[00:38:35]  I'm sorry to hear that.
[00:38:37]  But you're right.
[00:38:38]  Yeah.
[00:38:38]  People have lost their minds.
[00:38:40]  Yeah.
[00:38:40]  Yeah.
[00:38:40]  People have lost their minds.
[00:38:41]  And I think, you know, going back to the column, One of the reasons I wanted to write it is because, you know, what started with love, hate the sin,
[00:38:58]  love the sinner, and tolerance has moved to love is love and complete affirmation as it relates to all things related to sex, sexuality, marriage, and family.
[00:39:13]  Right.
[00:39:15]  We're at a point now where the nuclear family, the way we've thought about it, I feel like we're in a state of fissure, right?
[00:39:25]  Whereas the whole thing is falling apart.
[00:39:28]  And the energy that's going to be released from that is something that none of us, I think, really understand the true impact of.
[00:39:37]  And one of the things that happened last week, and I talked about in the piece with Dave Rubin and sort of, I don't want to say darling of the right, but certainly respected on the right, a self professed classical liberal who's gay, who was an atheist at one point, it says he's seeking now, grew up as a secular Jew in New York.
[00:39:59]  Um, when he says that him and his quote unquote husband are expecting two babies, not twins, one in August, one in October, and you see conservatives and some self professed Christians saying, Congratulations, this is a great such a great thing.
[00:40:16]  I think that really sent a shockwave through sort of the online conservative right.
[00:40:23]  I think it was a necessary shockwave because it can be very tempting to associate conservatism with Christianity, yeah.
[00:40:33]  Now, to be fair, some of these people have never professed Christ.
[00:40:36]  So we projected things onto them that they never accepted on themselves.

=== Implantation vs Fertilization Debate (04:01) ===

[00:40:42]  But I think every Christian conservative should be ready and willing to live as an outlaw, an outcast, and a renegade in the culture because we see where the lines are going.
[00:40:55]  And some of this is, you know, some of us, even some believers, do not have sort of a fully orbed theology as it relates to some of these issues, right?
[00:41:06]  Mm hmm.
[00:41:07]  Abortion, sure.
[00:41:09]  The vast majority of evangelicals will say we're against abortion.
[00:41:13]  But when it comes to reproductive technology, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, I think there's a lot of territory that's been left unexplored.
[00:41:24]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:41:25]  I remember doing counseling with a couple that weren't actually a part of our church, but they were related to somebody who was part of our church.
[00:41:33]  And 13 of their children are frozen.
[00:41:37]  So they took two.
[00:41:39]  And one split, so they ended up having triplets.
[00:41:42]  But they, you know, they, right?
[00:41:44]  Better safe than sorry.
[00:41:45]  Let's get a whole bunch of, you know, fertilized eggs in here, you know, so that, you know, because if the procedure doesn't work, you know, it's expensive to do it again.
[00:41:53]  We don't want to spend the money twice, but not thinking about the real moral implications of that.
[00:42:00]  Those are children.
[00:42:01]  If we believe that life begins at fertilization, not implantation, because the medical community has changed that, you know, so that's why.
[00:42:09]  Even the pill, the birth hormonal pill.
[00:42:12]  Oh, you know, because if you ask your doctor, that's the problem.
[00:42:14]  Is, you know, I used to say that when I was a little bit more naive, you know, five, six, seven years ago, I would say, well, ask your doctor, you know, if you're talking about birth control and ask them explicitly, is it abortive?
[00:42:25]  But the problem is the doctor will say no because they've changed where life begins.
[00:42:28]  So it's implantation rather than fertilization.
[00:42:31]  So, you know, the three primary measures of the hormonal birth control pill is, you know, that there's the thickening of the cervical fluid so the sperm can't make it to the egg.
[00:42:41]  There's also the Trying to make the egg to where it doesn't actually drop.
[00:42:45]  Those are both preventative.
[00:42:46]  But the third measure is the thinning of the uterine lining.
[00:42:51]  So that if an egg is actually fertilized, it has an inhospitable habitat where it has no choice but to die.
[00:43:01]  And so you don't know, and you're playing Russian roulette.
[00:43:04]  So you say, well, you know, some would argue in the Christian world, some would say, well, it's fine because they would argue if the first two preventative measures are failing, then we should assume that the third is failing.
[00:43:14]  As well.
[00:43:14]  But that's not based off of testing.
[00:43:16]  That's not based off of actually observing that that happens, that if the first two fail, then the third always fails.
[00:43:22]  Because that's what you have to argue.
[00:43:23]  You'd have to say that if the first two measures that are preventative fail, then this third measure, the thinning of the uterine wall, that that always fails with it.
[00:43:31]  Because if the first two fail and the third remains intact, then you have just set up the context for the death of your child.
[00:43:39]  And even for those who come off of the birth hormonal pill, the first two, so the cervical fluid begins to thin again, you know, and then it's not as thick.
[00:43:48]  And so sperm are able to make it to the egg.
[00:43:50]  You start producing eggs, all these kinds of things.
[00:43:51]  A woman starts going on her period.
[00:43:53]  But, but, What has been tested and has been proven is that the uterine lining sometimes could take six months, sometimes could take a year to thicken.
[00:44:01]  And so you're trying to have a kid and you don't even know because these would be very, very, very what we would consider to be very early miscarriages.
[00:44:10]  But it is the death of a child because it's not implantation, it is fertilization.
[00:44:15]  And so women and men leading them in that are killing their children.
[00:44:21]  And these are good Christian couples, even who just don't know.
[00:44:26]  They have not been educated on these things.
[00:44:28]  And that's to say nothing about, you know, the, what is, I always get it mixed up, IED or IUD.
[00:44:36]  What is it that goes in the arm?
[00:44:38]  One of them is a bomb with soldiers.
[00:44:41]  And one of them is IUD.

=== Parenting Apart from Christ Leads to Chaos (15:48) ===

[00:44:43]  Yeah.
[00:44:44]  So the IUD, sometimes I say IED and they're like, Joel, that is a bomb.
[00:44:48]  That is not the same thing.
[00:44:51]  But, you know, it's the same kind of thing.
[00:44:53]  It is abortive by nature.
[00:44:54]  If we believe that life begins at fertilization and then certainly in vitro, you're, you know, and, you know, there's a snowflake.
[00:45:01]  Program that they have where you can adopt, you know, the fertilized eggs that somebody doesn't want.
[00:45:07]  And I've counseled couples in doing that, you know.
[00:45:08]  So some of these frozen children do get adopted, but many of them do not.
[00:45:13]  Many of them stay frozen and eventually are either thrown out once they reach their expiration date.
[00:45:21]  And, you know, so it's, but all those kinds, those are the kinds of, so it's like, yeah, you shouldn't commit abortion.
[00:45:27]  But if we really take life seriously, like we need to talk about it at, At every single level in the womb, where does life begin?
[00:45:33]  We need to be consistent, and you're right, that's that's part of the problem.
[00:45:36]  As Christians, we're not even consistent, but then we it's kind of hypocritical, we get upset when people who never even professed to be a Christian are not consistent, you know.
[00:45:45]  And that goes back to the Dave Rubin thing.
[00:45:46]  And so, one of the things you know, that's so the title of your article, just to kind of bring it back to that because I thought it was so good, but just Christ or Chaos, right?
[00:45:53]  That's that's a Doug Wilson thing, you know, that's a that's a that's a thing that that a lot of faithful guys have been saying, and they're absolutely right.
[00:45:59]  The way I say it is, I say, um.
[00:46:02]  I say the principles of Christ, apart from the person of Christ, will never produce the peace of Christ.
[00:46:07]  You know, and there's a lot of guys who like his principles, and they like his principles because we live in God's world.
[00:46:12]  And so God's principles work in God's world, they are fruitful principles.
[00:46:18]  So there's a lot of people who have come to see by common grace, right?
[00:46:21]  So they're not regenerate, they're not born again, but by common grace, there are people who have come to see that Christ's principles work.
[00:46:28]  Now, there are other people who even hate his principles, they're so deceived.
[00:46:32]  And so, They have, like Doug Wilson would say, like this the gay agenda is all encompassing.
[00:46:38]  It's not just gay relationships, but it's gay economics.
[00:46:40]  And he uses the word gay, meaning fruitless, right?
[00:46:43]  So they want fruitless economics.
[00:46:45]  They want fruitless politics.
[00:46:46]  They want fruitless marriages.
[00:46:48]  It's gay marriages, gay economics, gay.
[00:46:50]  It's fruitless.
[00:46:52]  So socialism is the economic version of gay marriage.
[00:46:56]  And it's fruitless.
[00:46:58]  It's all fruitless.
[00:47:00]  And so you see that the left is consistent.
[00:47:05]  They're being consistent in those regards.
[00:47:07]  But over here on the right, you've got guys who are Christian, and then you've got guys who are merely conservative.
[00:47:14]  By God's common grace, they love Christ's principles, but they don't pay homage to Christ Himself.
[00:47:21]  They want the fruit that the Lord produces, but they don't want the Lord.
[00:47:27]  And then we're shocked when the rubber meets the road and we realize, oh, yeah, we're not on the same team.
[00:47:32]  And I think we can partner with these people.
[00:47:35]  We can link arms in common grace with people who are fighting for the same things.
[00:47:40]  I think that there's a biblical argument for that.
[00:47:43]  The problem, though, is, you know, so I think of like.
[00:47:46]  I think of 1 Timothy 5, where it talks about rebuking an elder publicly if he persists in sin, so that the rest may stand in fear and say, and do nothing from favoritism.
[00:47:56]  And I don't think it's a coincidence that the apostle immediately follows up with the temptation of favoritism, because what he's saying is, who's going to be taking this elder before the congregation to make him publicly repent?
[00:48:07]  Well, it's going to be the other elders.
[00:48:09]  And when you're ministering, when you're fighting, linking arms together, working together, you're in the trenches together, you're going to develop, and rightfully so, God's designed it this way, but you're going to develop deep friendships.
[00:48:21]  But then the problem is that sometimes somebody veers off the path.
[00:48:27]  Somebody goes the wrong way.
[00:48:29]  Or they, you know, in the case of Dave Rubin, they were never on the path, but we just had a certain degree where we could partner and a certain degree where we cannot, right?
[00:48:37]  Some things that we can affirm is good because they come from God.
[00:48:41]  Every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights.
[00:48:43]  But then some things that come from Dave Rubin's actual Father, who is Satan, right?
[00:48:47]  John chapter 8 says if you're not a Christian, you're a chip off the old block.
[00:48:51]  You are a Father of Lights.
[00:48:52]  Or a child of Satan.
[00:48:53]  He is your father.
[00:48:54]  And so we pray that God would save Dave Rubin, but we should not be surprised.
[00:48:58]  But we have to, it's hard because we have to be immediately able to say, I'm with you here, friend.
[00:49:05]  And then in the very next breath, say, I love you.
[00:49:08]  I'm not mad at you.
[00:49:09]  I love you, but this is wrong.
[00:49:12]  And I like the way, to bring it back to you, I like the way that you worded it because you talked about like the mothers involved in that picture.
[00:49:19]  Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:49:20]  I thought just the way you drew that out was really good.
[00:49:23]  Yeah, and a lot of this has been like an educational fly for me as well.
[00:49:29]  You know, listening to people like Ali Beth Stuckey, and she's had guests on.
[00:49:34]  One woman named Katie Faust, who runs an organization called Them Before Us, where she talks about the rights of children to a mother and a father.
[00:49:43]  She's also a believer, so she sort of roots her philosophy around that area in the scripture.
[00:49:52]  And I've heard a number of people talk about what happens.
[00:49:58]  In particularly this type of surrogacy, when you have a same sex couple who take the eggs from one woman, and this is what Dave Roman said they did excuse me, they took I think it was 18 eggs from one woman, you know, I guess successfully fertilized.
[00:50:20]  I don't know exactly how all of these so right there, that's what I was on.
[00:50:22]  So right there, you already have a bunch of children who are frozen, those are children, right?
[00:50:28]  And then they implanted those embryos in two separate women, right?
[00:50:34]  Each of Dave and his partner, who's also named Dave, both contributed their sperm to the eggs so that they would have a biological connection to each of the children.
[00:50:50]  So even in their actions, they understand the importance of biological connection, right?
[00:50:56]  So whether you believe in Genesis, Or you're a scientism type person who says, I only believe in genetics.
[00:51:06]  The pull is there, it's the same pull.
[00:51:09]  So, they took eggs from one woman, implanted them into two other women.
[00:51:16]  And when those women have those children, Lord willing, none of the three women, I'm assuming, are going to play the role of mother for the children.
[00:51:28]  So, this is not even about same sex adoption, which, again, there's a theological ethic to be discussed there.
[00:51:39]  This is the creation of children.
[00:51:42]  By means of reproductive technology, purely for the benefit of two men who cannot produce children in and of themselves within their own relationship.
[00:51:56]  It's the divorcing of procreation and parenting.
[00:51:59]  Correct.
[00:51:59]  Which, in God's created order, are two peas in a pod.
[00:52:03]  It's a package deal.
[00:52:04]  It never was meant to be severed.
[00:52:05]  And you have procreation is one thing, and procreation doesn't assume parenting.
[00:52:11]  And parenting, in the case of Dave Rubin and Dave and Dave, I can't help but think, I'll say this, you don't have to say this, this is me.
[00:52:19]  But you know you love yourself when you're attracted to your own sex.
[00:52:23]  When you really know you love yourself when you need to find someone who has your own name.
[00:52:27]  Yeah.
[00:52:27]  So, anyway, but on Dave's side, Dave and Dave, it's parenting apart from procreation, right?
[00:52:34]  But on both sides, so the mothers are procreating, but no parenting.
[00:52:38]  And then you have parenting, but no procreation.
[00:52:41]  And that's not God's design.
[00:52:43]  To think that we can just do that.
[00:52:45]  And that there are no implications for those mothers, that there'll be no regret, that there'll be no pain, that there'll be no sense of loss.
[00:52:54]  And that the fathers, that there'll be no, who are not biological fathers, but adopted fathers is a thing.
[00:53:01]  It's just gay mirage is not a thing.
[00:53:03]  I was adopted, so my father did not, I was not procreated by him.
[00:53:08]  But we do have a biblical theology for adoption.
[00:53:11]  That is a legitimate form of parenting.
[00:53:14]  But not within gay mirage, not within.
[00:53:18]  Children need a mother and they need a father.
[00:53:20]  And so there's, there's, yeah.
[00:53:22]  So it's, I mean, there's going to be problems for Dave and Dave.
[00:53:25]  There's going to be problems for these mothers and there's going to be problems for these children.
[00:53:28]  And that's the last piece of the puzzle.
[00:53:31]  It shouldn't be last, but for our culture, that's not even a piece of the puzzle for them.
[00:53:36]  But if it were, it would be the last and priority.
[00:53:39]  There's no thought, there's no concern.
[00:53:43]  People just, we live in a world where children are just, they're not, We live in a world that hates kids at every level, from the womb, from the moment of conception.
[00:53:55]  A child is under constant attack and threat.
[00:53:58]  John Piper, he sucks on politics, but one of the things he said back in the day that was good was he talked about with the black community.
[00:54:06]  He said, contrary to popular belief, the streets of Chicago are not the most dangerous place for a black man.
[00:54:11]  It is rather his mother's womb.
[00:54:13]  Wait, he said this?
[00:54:14]  Yeah, he said that.
[00:54:15]  Oh, boy.
[00:54:16]  Yeah, John Piper used to say some great stuff.
[00:54:19]  Oh, boy.
[00:54:20]  He used to say some great stuff.
[00:54:22]  But he's just saying statistically, you've got a higher likelihood of dying.
[00:54:25]  And that's across the board in terms of ethnicities, but especially in the black culture.
[00:54:32]  It's true.
[00:54:32]  I mean, there's so much of what you said there that I agree with.
[00:54:38]  And you use the term severing.
[00:54:42]  And as humans, as sinful fallen people, we are constantly trying to sever what God has made whole.
[00:54:51]  So even the way that our culture thinks about sex is all about.
[00:54:55]  Recreation, not about reproduction.
[00:54:58]  So, when the left talks about reproductive justice, it's like, well, abortion is not reproductive justice.
[00:55:07]  One, because no sort of moral or philosophical or theological framework that I'm aware of construes justice as the systematic murder of the innocent.
[00:55:21]  That's typically what justice means.
[00:55:24]  The other part of it is that by the time an abortion takes place, reproduction has already occurred.
[00:55:29]  That's right.
[00:55:30]  So, it's not.
[00:55:31]  It's not like this stops reproduction.
[00:55:34]  It's like, no, you kill what is already alive and that which belongs to God.
[00:55:40]  So we've changed the way we look at that.
[00:55:44]  We've certainly severed marriage and child rearing.
[00:55:48]  What to paraphrase Andy Stanley, we've unhitched marriage and child rearing.
[00:55:56]  And then we turn around and wonder why we have so many of these issues as it relates to parents and children.
[00:56:03]  As you said, from Trying to, you know, as it relates to, you know, abortion, and then kids come into the world, and particularly in this day and age, from the time they hit preschool, there are people there who think it's their job to indoctrinate them into, you know, radical gender ideology.
[00:56:25]  So then you get kids who are not even done elementary school who question the sex that God assigned to them, not the doctor, who are on, You know, hormone treatments and puberty blockers by 10, 11, who are mutilating healthy breast tissue by 15, 16, and some who are going in for, you know, genital removal or genital surgery by 19, 20.
[00:56:54]  Right.
[00:56:54]  So, this is, as I said, and I think I said this in the piece and other places, none of this is loving, none of it is kind.
[00:57:01]  Christians who think that they're being winsome by tiptoeing around these issues.
[00:57:09]  Are being cowardly.
[00:57:10]  But I will say this I was telling my wife this last week.
[00:57:15]  Writing this article actually convicted me in a very particular way.
[00:57:21]  I was thinking about the Christians, particularly evangelical leaders, who will not address these issues directly, particularly when they're given platforms that would reach, let's say, the left, liberals, Democrats, so called progressives.
[00:57:43]  Because of their fear of man.
[00:57:46]  But then I thought, do I not do the same thing as it relates to sharing my faith with people because I don't want to be seen a particular way?
[00:57:57]  I don't want to say something that may be offensive.
[00:58:00]  And it convicted me, right?
[00:58:02]  Which I hope I turn that conviction into a greater sense of boldness and fearlessness for Christ, not for the sake of my platform, not for the sake of my writing.
[00:58:17]  But really, because we're talking about God's creation and we should care enough about people to tell them the truth.
[00:58:24]  And if we saw someone about to drive off a cliff, we would be more concerned about their well being than our reputation.
[00:58:33]  And I think I want to acknowledge that to some extent, many of us struggle with that tendency to fear man more than we fear God.
[00:58:48]  You're right.
[00:58:49]  You're absolutely right.
[00:58:49]  And I think part of it is, you know, because of these partnerships and the relationships that ensue because of them.
[00:58:55]  You know, if you partner with the left, you're really going to have a problem.
[00:58:57]  But even if you partner with the right, again, merely being conservative does not mean that you're a Christian.
[00:59:02]  And so there are people within, you know, the right, politically and culturally, that we would align with on this and on that.
[00:59:09]  But we would not align with on other issues, and particularly the issue of the lordship of Jesus Christ.
[00:59:16]  And so there is a temptation for over here on the right side of things.
[00:59:21]  There is still that temptation to save face, a temptation to.
[00:59:25]  You know, to be lofty and, you know, and to have, you know, the praise and the glory that comes from men.
[00:59:30]  So you're absolutely right about that.
[00:59:32]  And when it comes to conservatism, and this is one of the things you said in your article, but we have to realize that apart from Christ, it all leads to chaos.
[00:59:40]  Everything leads to chaos.
[00:59:41]  The question is just which path and how fast are we going to walk?
[00:59:45]  You know, so I mean, you know, communism leads to chaos real quick, socialism pretty quick, you know.
[00:59:52]  But over here, you know, Dave Rubin, what he's espousing still leads to chaos.
[00:59:57]  It's either Christ, there is only one.
[01:00:00]  One king who can really set order to his world.
[01:00:05]  And apart from him, it is chaos.
[01:00:08]  And the problem is that it's a problem for sinners, but God will not be mocked.
[01:00:14]  A man will reap what he sows.
[01:00:17]  And the piper will be coming, and we're going to have to pay.
[01:00:22]  And right now, we are setting up for ourselves and for our children and our grandchildren a world of hurt financially.

=== Craving Biblical Order Over Nuance (03:57) ===

[01:00:32]  Sexually, culturally, politically, all these different things, I can't imagine.
[01:00:38]  We just keep putting, we are running up this insurmountable tab right now as a nation, thinking that we won't have to pay it, thinking that God will be mocked and that we could somehow sow something and never reap it.
[01:00:52]  Right.
[01:00:53]  We think we're going to convince God to forgive our student loan debt, like people try to do to the Democrats, right?
[01:00:59]  Yeah, because God is an empathetic God, right?
[01:01:02]  Just like our empathetic president.
[01:01:04]  But I mean, there's a couple of things you said I wanted to key in on.
[01:01:08]  There was one part of the column where I tried to sort of lay out the difference between sort of the left, the right, and the Christian.
[01:01:18]  So I said the left craves political power, the right craves, you know, constitutional freedoms, liberty.
[01:01:30]  And or liberty, I think I might have said liberty.
[01:01:33]  And the Christian should.
[01:01:36]  Not always, we don't always, but we should crave biblical order.
[01:01:42]  And that is one word that just keeps coming up over and over in my writing and my thinking about these issues order.
[01:01:51]  So much of our society is chaotic because order is nowhere to be found.
[01:01:57]  It's not found in the family, it's not found in the schoolhouse, sometimes it's not found in the church house.
[01:02:03]  And wherever order is absent, Disorder will be present.
[01:02:09]  And sometimes it appears that people can manage it in ways that seem functional.
[01:02:16]  But if disorder is your norm, then it's only a matter of time before you reap that chaos.
[01:02:23]  And the other thing I wanted to say, real quick, is as I said, I started writing years ago, like over 10 years ago.
[01:02:32]  And I had a friend.
[01:02:34]  At that time, I wrote, I think I was trying to submit a piece to the root.
[01:02:38]  So for viewers who may not be familiar, The Root is like an online site publication that caters primarily to an African American audience, right?
[01:02:50]  So, I think it was created a number of years, probably over 15 years ago, out of the Washington Post.
[01:02:57]  They had people, you know, Henry Louis Gates and, you know, some intellectuals, academics, and serious journalists who got it started, right?
[01:03:07]  And I would write things in a way that basically I was arguing both sides of an issue well on this hand, well on that hand, and some think, and they think.
[01:03:22]  And she told me, I don't hear your voice in this.
[01:03:27]  And to this day, that stuck with me.
[01:03:29]  And then as I got older, and certainly as I matured in my faith, I realized that the people whose writing and speaking and preaching I hold most dear are the men who are willing to speak the truth boldly and apologetically.
[01:03:51]  Right?
[01:03:52]  They don't have to raise their voice, they don't have to pound the table, they don't have to use coarse language.
[01:03:58]  But they will call a thing a thing.
[01:04:01]  And that actually helped clarify things for me.
[01:04:05]  And it helps me in my writing because the worst thing that someone could say to me after reading a column that I've written is, I'm not really sure how you feel about that issue.
[01:04:16]  Or I'm sort of confused on what you meant by X, Y, and Z. Because I try to write clearly, using clear language, with commonly accepted definitions to words that are recognizable to most people.

=== Calling Things What They Are (11:13) ===

[01:04:29]  And I try to.
[01:04:31]  To, for lack of a better term, hit with my hardest punch.
[01:04:34]  So, the examples, the metaphors, the analogies to draw a clear picture of what it is that I'm trying to say and why it is that I'm trying to say it.
[01:04:44]  So, when we talk about men like Voddy Bacham or Doug Wilson or men of that stature, even when I disagree with them on something, I appreciate the fact that they're willing to state their views without apology, without caveat, without.
[01:05:05]  Sort of a suffocating sense of nuance.
[01:05:07]  Right.
[01:05:07]  Without spending, you know, an hour sermon, 15 minutes is the point that they're getting across, and 45 minutes is building the escape hatch.
[01:05:14]  Correct.
[01:05:14]  So they can, correct.
[01:05:16]  Get out of there if somebody, you know, starts to actually criticize.
[01:05:20]  And what you see on the left, and the behavior of the left actually brings us into sharper focus, is I find that it's extremely difficult to get people on the left to actually defend their positions with clear words, right?
[01:05:37]  If you believe that abortion should be legal up until the point of a child drawing its first breath, then why don't you just tell me why you believe that?
[01:05:48]  Stand on it.
[01:05:49]  Like, literally, stand on that position like a man.
[01:05:54]  But instead, they'll say, oh, you just want to push women back into the 1950s and backyard, back alley abortions.
[01:06:03]  It's emotionalism, it's name cult, it's ad hominem, it's all these things on the gender stuff.
[01:06:10]  On abortion, on COVID policies.
[01:06:15]  I once asked a college professor, you know, we were going back and forth on abortion, a black woman, she's a self identified radical black feminist, right?
[01:06:24]  I was familiar with her work.
[01:06:25]  So at one point she said she made a comment to a different commentator that she's pro family.
[01:06:31]  And I said, well, I know that's not the case.
[01:06:32]  You've written that it's a good thing that a nuclear family has gone the way of the floppy disk, so to speak.
[01:06:40]  And she was talking about abortion, and I just asked a simple question.
[01:06:44]  Do you believe that human life has inherent value?
[01:06:48]  And her response to me is, that's an incorrect question.
[01:06:56]  Why?
[01:06:57]  You know, like, why is it an incorrect question?
[01:06:59]  These are the type of people that, if you send your kid to college to major in, you know, queer studies or ethnic studies or women's studies or anything that ends with studies, this is what they're going to be getting.
[01:07:17]  Are advancing an ideology that they won't even defend.
[01:07:22]  And one of the things that I feel has freed me up to be bolder in my writing and speaking is the fact that these people have no problem proselytizing in school, in culture, in media.
[01:07:41]  And they have no problem shaming people who don't hold to their dogmatic belief system.
[01:07:48]  I think the clearest example of this.
[01:07:51]  I didn't write it in this piece, but I've written in other pieces.
[01:07:54]  Is, you know, Dr. Ibram Kendi, whose belief system has infiltrated Big Eva.
[01:08:00]  Whenever you hear Jamar Tisby talking and saying, talking to Phil Vischer, saying that you either have to be racist or anti racist, he is.
[01:08:12]  Echoing Ibram Kendi.
[01:08:14]  I was going to say he's engaging in syncretism, right?
[01:08:17]  In a syncretic religion where he's taking sort of a fistful of Christian doctrine.
[01:08:23]  And a tiny bit of Kendi, and he's pushing that off as sort of an authentic gospel.
[01:08:31]  But Kendi has no problem telling any audience, you are either racist or anti racist.
[01:08:39]  There's no in between.
[01:08:40]  You better get with it.
[01:08:42]  But here comes the Christian, even on a Sunday, even outside our church, and we would be scared to make such a bold declaration.
[01:08:50]  So, my thing is this if this is the marketplace of ideas, sometimes I will paraphrase.
[01:08:58]  Frederick Douglass, who talked about the three boxes of liberty, he talked about the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box, right?
[01:09:05]  I believe in all three of those.
[01:09:07]  There's a fourth one, the soap box.
[01:09:09]  So if the public square is going to be democratized and people like Ibrahim Kendi feel comfortable saying, you're either a racist or you're anti racist, then I think Christians should feel more comfortable saying, look, either for Christ or against him.
[01:09:22]  You are either going to abide by the order of the God who created this world or you're going to live in chaos.
[01:09:29]  And it doesn't matter how much.
[01:09:31]  You try to suppress God's order, whether it's sex and sexuality.
[01:09:37]  Like I brought this up on the show with Rillock.
[01:09:40]  One of the most fascinating things that you'll see, or that you'll never see, is two women who present as masculine, as people will call, you know, butch women.
[01:09:51]  You'll never see two of them together, ever.
[01:09:54]  It's always one who presents as more masculine, and she always goes after a woman who presents more feminine.
[01:10:00]  So even in their rejection of the creation order as it relates to male and female, They are trying to act out in their behavior, right?
[01:10:09]  And I'm not even going to go into how they act this out all the way, but they're trying to act out in their behavior what God models in his scripture.
[01:10:18]  In terms of, I asked my wife this way I said, which one of them is the dude?
[01:10:23]  And she'll say, well, don't say that.
[01:10:24]  I said, no, but somebody's playing the role.
[01:10:26]  So it doesn't matter how much people try to suppress God's word and his truth and his order, just like a beach ball, you push it down the water, it doesn't matter how.
[01:10:36]  That thing is coming right back up.
[01:10:38]  And I think we're starting to see that.
[01:10:40]  And the increasing darkness in this world has made the little lights that we carry around all day long start to shine even brighter.
[01:10:49]  Yep, I completely agree.
[01:10:50]  I always tell people it's the difference between the dominion mandate versus, well, ultimately just rebellion against God and his created order.
[01:10:59]  So the dominion mandate is that we're actually pushing back the curse on nature.
[01:11:04]  So Adam was a federal head, not just for him and his wife and all their future children, not just humanity, but Adam was a federal head of the cosmos, of the whole created order, of the earth itself.
[01:11:13]  Which is why when Adam sinned, God doesn't just say, You're cursed, your wife is cursed, but cursed is the ground.
[01:11:19]  The earth is actually under this curse.
[01:11:22]  And we see that in scripture, the creation itself is groaning with eager expectations for the sons of God to be revealed.
[01:11:29]  Some of the radical two kingdom kind of guys would hold to that and say, You know, like Michael Horton would be an example.
[01:11:34]  And he'd be right about a lot of things.
[01:11:36]  I like him, but I think he's wrong on this.
[01:11:38]  But Michael Horton would say, You know, that the creation is groaning with eager expectations for the sons of God to be revealed because in the revealing of The sons of God, and in their redemption, the earth will soon dissolve like snow, right?
[01:11:51]  Getting to like 2 Peter's, you know, epistle, but they would hold that in a literal sense that God is going to annihilate the creation, the cosmos, except for humanity.
[01:12:02]  So the only physical thing that will enter into the new heavens and the new earth is our physical body, and they have to hold to that because if you don't hold to the resurrection of the body, then you're a heretic.
[01:12:10]  But apart from that, they would say everything is going to literally, God's going to annihilate the creation rather than God actually restoring and redeeming.
[01:12:17]  The earth, the new heavens coming to this earth.
[01:12:20]  And so all that gets, you know, that lets you know where I'm at with post mill and all that kind of stuff.
[01:12:23]  But my point is the dominion mandate is not just preaching the gospel, the Great Commission, but there's the cultural mandate.
[01:12:32]  And in that, you know, there is a pushing back, not just the sin in the hearts of men by preaching the gospel and by the grace of God, there being regeneration and conversion, but actually pushing back the curse of sin as it rests on creation.
[01:12:45]  So to fight against cancer, Which a non Christian can do by common grace.
[01:12:50]  But to fight against cancer is that cultural mandate, that dominion mandate, pushing back against the curse that is on creation, the curse on nature.
[01:12:59]  Nature is under a curse.
[01:13:01]  But fighting against the genders is not fighting against the curse on nature, but fighting nature itself.
[01:13:07]  And nature, insofar as it's not the curse, and so we have to distinguish between the world is under a curse because of sin.
[01:13:16]  But there's the curse on the world, and then there's God's world.
[01:13:20]  There's the effects of sin on nature, and then there's just nature.
[01:13:25]  I said this in one of my other episodes, but as one great prophet from Jurassic Park once said, nature always finds a way.
[01:13:32]  You fight nature, and you'll find yourself losing that fight.
[01:13:36]  Because in fighting nature, ultimately, what you're fighting is you're fighting God.
[01:13:41]  In the same way that you can't win a battle against the scripture, which is special revelation, God's word, God's speaking, you can't win a battle against God.
[01:13:49]  The cosmos against creation because that's also God speaking, that is natural revelation.
[01:13:55]  Both reveal who God is.
[01:13:58]  Now, you know, natural revelation reveals less of who God is.
[01:14:01]  Romans 1 says, you know, his eternal power, his divine nature, whereas, you know, we need special revelation to reveal to us the gospel.
[01:14:08]  But natural revelation does reveal something about God.
[01:14:11]  We have an ordered creation because we have a God of order and not a God of chaos.
[01:14:15]  And so to fight against nature, similar to fighting against scripture, is to fight against the very word of God, which is to fight against God.
[01:14:25]  And nobody is going to win that fight.
[01:14:28]  And that's what our, you know, we've gone from using technology and all these different things to fight, you know, in a Christian sense, whether everybody was actually a Christian or not, actually regenerate, there was still this Christian worldview, these Christian principles, and fighting against the curse on nature.
[01:14:44]  And now it's like we've turned our weaponry, our sights on nature itself.
[01:14:51]  And somebody, I can't remember his name, but said, you know, in terms of narratives and storytelling, that's like every horror movie, especially sci fi horror movie that's ever been written.
[01:15:01]  Is you know, there's some kind of discovery, some kind of innovation, um, technological development, um, but then all of a sudden it gets used, you know, for bad purposes to try to overcome something, you know, where man tries to play the role of God and try to do something that we're never meant to do, and and everything, you know, creates some kind of you create dinosaurs, and oh, then you know, you get eaten, you create this, you know, so but it's like I feel like we should have learned this.
[01:15:29]  This is like every horror movie there's ever been, and that's what we're doing right now, we're playing God.
[01:15:35]  We're doing it with life.
[01:15:36]  We're doing it with gender.
[01:15:37]  We're doing it.
[01:15:38]  And that's not the curse on nature.
[01:15:40]  That's fighting nature itself.
[01:15:41]  And you don't win that fight.

=== Fighting Nature: Man's Law or God's Law (13:43) ===

[01:15:43]  Exactly.
[01:15:44]  And I think, as you said, on all these different issues, we're doing that.
[01:15:48]  And, you know, the way, you know, when my wife and I moved out of the city and moved slightly outside of D.C., we were getting a home inspection on our new home.
[01:16:02]  And, you know, it has a deck out back.
[01:16:05]  So we'd never had a deck.
[01:16:07]  So this was like a big thing to us.
[01:16:08]  Yeah.
[01:16:08]  And it looked great and sturdy and spacious.
[01:16:12]  And the inspector said, You know, it looks good.
[01:16:18]  The problem is, it's not attached to the house.
[01:16:22]  So you may be on it for a little while, but eventually it may collapse.
[01:16:28]  And that was like a perfect metaphor for when I talk about, you know, Christ or chaos, it's like, okay, yeah, it looks good, right?
[01:16:38]  Classical liberalism may get you, you know, freedom of speech.
[01:16:41]  Speech and individual rights and so on and so forth.
[01:16:43]  Sure.
[01:16:45]  Now, when you have that sort of philosophical framework in a country that, even as you said, if everyone is not Christian, where a God honoring culture, right, a Christadom, right, is sort of a part of the norm, imperfect as it may be, right?
[01:17:05]  Because people are going to hear this and say, well, do you, DeLon, do you want to go back to living in the 1930s?
[01:17:10]  And I'm not saying that.
[01:17:12]  But what I'm saying is, you had.
[01:17:15]  A culture that honored God in many respects, you can have individual liberty in terms of having a society, a functioning society, right?
[01:17:32]  Because you know that there are certain things that teenagers won't do.
[01:17:36]  They won't beat up old ladies and steal their cars, right?
[01:17:41]  You have children who will show a certain level of respect for their elders and their parents and teachers.
[01:17:48]  But when you have a society in which no one likes to hear the word no, there are no restraints on behavior, whether that's what people say or do or sexual behavior, what you find is that that sort of nucleus just tends to deteriorate very, very quickly.
[01:18:14]  So you have all these brilliant philosophers who everybody reads.
[01:18:18]  I didn't, I studied engineering in school, right?
[01:18:20]  So I'm.
[01:18:21]  I'm just, that wasn't my world.
[01:18:25]  But I understand what it's like when you have a beautiful house with a messed up foundation.
[01:18:31]  And just like that inspector told us, it looks good, but eventually it's going to collapse.
[01:18:35]  I think what you're seeing is the collapse of much of the West in terms of its, you know, the political order that we took for granted.
[01:18:49]  I don't think it's any coincidence that you don't see the rise of transgenderism in Saudi Arabia or.
[01:18:56]  You know, parts of Africa, right?
[01:18:59]  Because even though obviously those, some particular Saudi Arabia, they have a different faith, they practice Islam, but there's still certain realities that they just abide by.
[01:19:10]  And they say, no, we would never do that.
[01:19:12]  We're not, a man can't be a woman and a woman can't be a man.
[01:19:14]  That's just not going down here.
[01:19:17]  But in cultures where liberty and freedom are sacrosanct, if there are no boundaries, if you remove all guardrails, if there's no center that holds everything, Then people are going to say, Whatever it is that I feel like doing, no one can tell me no.
[01:19:34]  Well, why can't I?
[01:19:39]  Why can't it be two men and a woman in a marriage?
[01:19:43]  Why not?
[01:19:43]  If you can be two men or two women, why can't you have two people?
[01:19:47]  Right.
[01:19:48]  And all of these things are things that we've opened that portal and we have no idea what's coming through.
[01:19:55]  Well, we've ushered in a new enemy because you compared it to Islam and said, Well, in Islam, they would never.
[01:20:01]  Embrace transgenderism, right?
[01:20:04]  That you know, Islam they wouldn't do this, they wouldn't do that.
[01:20:06]  There are certain biblical norms, even though they do not honor Christ.
[01:20:11]  Um, and you know, a Muslim person by prescribing to the teachings of Islam will be in hell, they will ultimately take someone to hell.
[01:20:20]  Um, and yet there are still these norms that we would share things that are ultimately come from God's created order, they come from God's principles.
[01:20:28]  Um, and I think, I think what we're experiencing now, I think the reason why it's different is because this is a new enemy, like so you know.
[01:20:34]  Recently, been trying to study a little bit of world history, you know, because history is always so isolated and narrow, right?
[01:20:41]  You're studying the history of a particular nation and, you know, in a 40 to 50 year, you know, a generation, one short time span.
[01:20:49]  But looking at like big picture, you know, and looking, you know, so there's a small little book.
[01:20:54]  It's really just a collection of a couple essays.
[01:20:56]  It's called The Fate of Empires.
[01:20:57]  And it talks about how all these different empires, on average, lasted about 250 years, whether it be the Roman Empire, which was one of the longest.
[01:21:06]  So it was closer to 400 years, but if you split it up, because technically there was a shift in Rome, so you could count it as two empires, but Ottoman Empire, Babylonian Empire, all these different empires, British Empire, which seems to be the sun is dawning or setting on the British Empire.
[01:21:28]  And the American Empire, here we are right at that 250 year mark.
[01:21:31]  Now, that said, I think, I do think that America is different because I think America is the closest we've ever gotten.
[01:21:38]  So, I think Christendom has all of its bad things.
[01:21:42]  But that said, I think the solution is to try it again.
[01:21:46]  I think Christendom 2.0.
[01:21:47]  And if that doesn't work, 3.0.
[01:21:49]  I think that we should seek to fill the whole earth with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.
[01:21:56]  And that doesn't mean everyone's going to be regenerate, but that does believe, I do believe, that the nations are Christ's inheritance and the nations will bow to Christ one by one.
[01:22:04]  He's currently ruling over the nations, but I think one by one we are going to see Christian nations.
[01:22:08]  I'm all about separation of church and state.
[01:22:10]  So, I'm not advocating for theocracy, but I am advocating for theonomy.
[01:22:16]  I believe that separation of church and state is not the same as separation of God and state.
[01:22:20]  At the end of the day, you know, rush duty, it's either, you know, it's not whether but which, right?
[01:22:24]  So it's either autonomy or theonomy.
[01:22:27]  It's either man's law or God's law.
[01:22:28]  It's either chaos or Christ.
[01:22:31]  And so I'm advocating that we would disciple the nations, that we would baptize the nations, that we teach them to obey all of Christ's commands, not just in the home of the church, but also in the third institute that God divinely instituted, the state, the civil realm.
[01:22:46]  And as we do that, my whole point is to say that as we do that, I think that.
[01:22:52]  There are certain enemies that we're going to face.
[01:22:54]  And so you look at all these empires of the past, and I think America is probably the closest we've ever gotten.
[01:22:59]  There are bugs and features, right?
[01:23:00]  So, slavery, I would say, is a bug.
[01:23:04]  Whereas features, I would say, the Constitution and free speech and individual liberties and property rights and all that, these are features.
[01:23:12]  And right now, what we're doing is we're burning up the features and saying, that's the problem.
[01:23:17]  It's like, well, no, no, no, no, the Constitution is not the problem.
[01:23:21]  We had to live up to those ideals, and it took us a little while.
[01:23:24]  But this was actually good software.
[01:23:26]  This was really good software.
[01:23:28]  And we were producing a lot on this software.
[01:23:31]  And there were some bugs that we needed to work out.
[01:23:33]  But we don't need to burn the whole thing down.
[01:23:35]  But I think because of our foundation as a nation, with America being probably in world history terms, the closest to any nation in world history of having the most similar, not a one to one ratio, but the most similar to Christian values, apart from, of course, Israel under the old covenant as a true theocracy, I think that maybe we'll get more than that average of 250 years.
[01:23:56]  But like Hezekiah, who cries out to the Lord and repents, and the Lord gives him 15 more years, we're going to have to repent.
[01:24:04]  And as a nation, repentance can't just be a return to principles.
[01:24:07]  It has to be repentance involves the reconciliation to a person.
[01:24:12]  And we're going to have to say his name.
[01:24:16]  And his name is Jesus.
[01:24:17]  He's the one that we've offended, he's the one that we've trampled underfoot.
[01:24:21]  And we're going to have to look him in the face, as it were.
[01:24:23]  We're going to have to say his name.
[01:24:26]  Then I think God will heal our land.
[01:24:28]  And I think that we can have more time.
[01:24:30]  I don't think America will necessarily exist all the way till the return of Christ.
[01:24:33]  I think the church will.
[01:24:35]  I think the church will.
[01:24:36]  And I think the nations will be Christian.
[01:24:37]  And if America isn't going to be Christian, then God will destroy it and use America as fertilizer for the next Christian nation that will rise in its place.
[01:24:47]  And I think little by little we'll get closer.
[01:24:49]  But all that back to Islam, and I think, you know, as we're doing this with nations and empires and getting closer and all these kinds of things, my view is that there have been lots of enemies that we've had before.
[01:24:59]  Islam is an enemy of Christ.
[01:25:01]  Buddhism is an enemy of Christ.
[01:25:04]  But one of the most formidable enemies, I think, in terms of human history that we faced ever before is secularism.
[01:25:12]  And it's a novel enemy.
[01:25:15]  It really is a novel enemy.
[01:25:16]  And I'm not just saying novel like the last five years, but the last 350 or so years, tracking it back through.
[01:25:24]  And there were all these significant pieces, right?
[01:25:26]  So you have Freud and the secularization and psychology, and you've got Marx, and there's the economic structure of secularism, and you've got All these, and but then there was still like, okay, but physically, how do people exist if there's no creator?
[01:25:39]  And then here comes Darwin, you know, and I got an answer for that, you know, and so all these things construct together, um, to not have just a false god, but to have no god, um, right.
[01:25:48]  And the reality is it's not whether, but which there's always a god, um, but but the god is man, um, right.
[01:25:54]  And so man becomes god, it's autonomy, it's um, and so with that comes egalitarianism, comes androgyny, comes uh, feminism, comes all these different things, comes abortion, comes that you know, all these new things, transgenderism.
[01:26:07]  And so you're never going to see transgenderism come out of Islam.
[01:26:11]  That doesn't mean you never see one individual Muslim person embrace it, but out of the Islam in general is not going to produce that kind of evil.
[01:26:20]  Secularism does.
[01:26:21]  Islam produces other kinds of evil, like taking someone captive and beheading them.
[01:26:28]  That's pretty bad too.
[01:26:30]  But I'm just saying there are different enemies, and one by one, I believe that Christ is subjecting them under his feet as a footstool for his feet.
[01:26:36]  But secularism may be, arguably, one of the most formidable enemies that the church has yet faced.
[01:26:44]  And I think we'll beat it just like every other one.
[01:26:48]  The nice thing about secularism, though, and really any enemy of Christ, Christ uses his church.
[01:26:55]  I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
[01:26:58]  The gates of hell, that's a defensive mechanism.
[01:27:00]  So it's not the church on the ropes, battered and bruised, and Jesus comes in the ninth hour, and in the 12th round, ring the bell, and saved by the bell, Jesus comes in.
[01:27:08]  But I really believe I will build my church, meaning I will advance.
[01:27:11]  The church will grow, the church will advance, the church will increase.
[01:27:15]  And Christ is going to build his church, and hell's on the defense.
[01:27:18]  The gates of hell are on the defense, and the battering ram of the church in the hands of Christ is going to ultimately break those gates down.
[01:27:26]  And my point is, Christ defeats his enemies through his church.
[01:27:31]  Pre-mill and post-mill, in a nutshell, I always say pre-mill, they believe, Alibeth would be pre-mill, they believe that Christ wins.
[01:27:37]  John MacArthur, I appreciate John MacArthur.
[01:27:39]  They believe Christ wins despite the church.
[01:27:41]  Post-mill believes that Christ will win through his church.
[01:27:45]  But both believe that Christ wins, and by virtue of Christ winning, we, through union with Christ by faith, win as well.
[01:27:53]  But I think that Christ is winning through his church and not just despite his church.
[01:27:59]  And so Christ has beat all these enemies before and still currently battling and beating enemies through his church.
[01:28:05]  But one other way that Christ beats his enemies is he lets his enemies at times beat themselves.
[01:28:12]  Because ultimately, Anything that does not acknowledge Christ, who is the source of all that is good and all that is lovely, the source of life, is like that deck that's not attached to the house.
[01:28:26]  And eventually it'll collapse.
[01:28:28]  You can go out there with a chainsaw and work real hard all day long and take it down.
[01:28:33]  But eventually it'll take itself down because it has no root.
[01:28:36]  It has no.
[01:28:38]  And secularism is a parasite.
[01:28:42]  It is a self defeating enemy.
[01:28:45]  It's a formidable enemy.
[01:28:46]  It's a terrorizing enemy.
[01:28:47]  It's a horrible enemy.
[01:28:49]  But all these enemies, if we're, we just think in such small terms.
[01:28:53]  We think about ourselves, we think about our culture, our lives, we think about the next, you know, the last five years, the next five years, you know.
[01:29:01]  But if we pan out and look, all these enemies, their lifespan, it's short in real terms.
[01:29:08]  You know, when we think of, you know, thousands of years, 250 years for an empire like that, there was a time where no one thought that they could ever defeat Babylon.
[01:29:17]  Babylon will live forever and it will rule with an iron scepter and oppress every nation.
[01:29:24]  Subject everyone under its power.

=== Loving Neighbor Beyond Small Terms (11:54) ===

[01:29:27]  And then Babylon falls, you know, and secularism will fall.
[01:29:32]  Yeah.
[01:29:33]  And I think the way you describe that, you know, so, so poignantly, and particularly going full circle, coming full circle with the transgenderism issue, when you asked me why I wrote that passage that we started with, that's exactly what I had in mind, right?
[01:29:51]  Like this, this, this ideology and the behavior that comes with it.
[01:29:57]  Is not self sustaining.
[01:29:59]  And I don't think, certainly me, I won't speak for other Christians, but even in the way that I thought about sex and sexuality and relationships, marriage and family, I know certain things to be true, but they're not necessarily top of mind, front of mind all the time.
[01:30:15]  But it's like, you put two people of the same sex together, that's it.
[01:30:21]  They cannot be fruitful.
[01:30:24]  Now they can adopt and they can say, And you'll hear this oh, well, every couple can't have children, so we're just the same.
[01:30:32]  I said, well, no, we engage in a category error, right?
[01:30:35]  So, absent medical issues, male and female can reproduce.
[01:30:41]  But there's no context in which male and male or female and female can reproduce.
[01:30:44]  So, you have to benefit from the reproduction of a male and female.
[01:30:48]  But I think you, I hope what we're seeing, and I feel like this is the case even among unbelievers who may call themselves conservative.
[01:31:01]  I think people are starting to see that these ideologies, these ideas cannot sustain themselves, which is why when they actually are put to the test, whether it's the trans stuff, one of the funniest may not be the best word, but two years ago, a bunch of people on the left were talking about defunding the police.
[01:31:23]  Some cities and jurisdictions, through rhetoric and policy, Sort of put that into their sort of cultural water stream and airways.
[01:31:36]  And then a year and a half later, when high end stores are getting robbed and people are getting killed, they turn around and say, Well, we don't know what happened.
[01:31:47]  Well, the God of this world says, Punish evil, punish it swiftly and decisively so that the people who remain would say, We don't want any part of that.
[01:32:00]  I mean, I was writing a different article.
[01:32:03]  And I noticed that in the Old Testament, I don't have the words correctly, but Exodus and Deuteronomy, it was something to the effect of take this punishment so that the people would see and fear, right?
[01:32:16]  Something to that.
[01:32:17]  Yeah, no, I know exactly what it is.
[01:32:19]  Basically, when justice is delayed, the evil abounds, something along those lines.
[01:32:24]  But it's the same thing in 1 Timothy 5, same principle, right?
[01:32:26]  Rebuke an elder publicly so the rest may stand in fear.
[01:32:30]  So it is with justice in the public square.
[01:32:32]  Correct.
[01:32:33]  Yeah, if justice is postponed.
[01:32:36]  Then people think they can get away with murder.
[01:32:38]  Correct.
[01:32:39]  And when you treat the criminals, regardless of who they are, what they look like, when you treat them as the victims, and you treat the law abiding as the perpetrators who are willing to send these people off to jail and you don't care about it, and it's social justice means to fight on behalf of the lawbreaker, what you have is a society in chaos.
[01:33:01]  So you have some of the same Democrats.
[01:33:04]  I mean, they are run.
[01:33:05]  They would beat Jesse Owens in a foot race.
[01:33:07]  They're running so far away from defunding police.
[01:33:09]  Yes, they are.
[01:33:10]  Yeah.
[01:33:10]  Because they're starting to see what it looks like when they reap what they've sown.
[01:33:18]  But again, if they had believed on God and believed his word and his order for the world that he created, they would have known that this is the only place that could have ended.
[01:33:30]  Of course.
[01:33:30]  Now, my frustration is with the Christians, and I've heard some.
[01:33:37]  Who said, Yeah, we need to defund the police.
[01:33:39]  Now, these are people who know better because some of them have gone to seminary, men and women.
[01:33:45]  And I'm saying to myself, if the God of this world says to punish evil in order to protect the innocent, who are you to say, no, we need to reward evil, either by not punishing it or going a step further and saying, well, we know that Paul told the people who were stealing to steal no more and do something useful with your hands.
[01:34:06]  But what you have to understand is that they grew up in a social context where there are few resources.
[01:34:12]  So the reason that they steal is because, and insert whatever.
[01:34:17]  Pablum, you know, they spit on a particular day.
[01:34:22]  Which is crazy.
[01:34:23]  I mean, it's just, yeah, like first century people, they had plenty.
[01:34:28]  But in America in the 21st century, that's the rule.
[01:34:32]  There's not enough.
[01:34:34]  But this goes back to secularism and how it is infiltrating the church, right?
[01:34:39]  The notion that man is at his core a material being, and if he has all of his material needs met, he won't commit crimes.
[01:34:50]  Right.
[01:34:52]  Is completely ignores you know the scripture.
[01:34:55]  I mean, um, you have you know creation in Genesis 1, and you have you know sort of further pushing into that story, and the first marriage of Genesis 2.
[01:35:05]  And I think Genesis 3, you have the fall, yeah, my Genesis 4, the first murder.
[01:35:12]  Yeah, I'm with Cain.
[01:35:14]  So, I mean, the people who think, well, if everybody just had everything that they needed, that we wouldn't have these problems.
[01:35:22]  No, this is.
[01:35:23]  And as I said, as a believer, these people should know better.
[01:35:27]  They are importing Marxian philosophy, both economic and social, into the church and have believers disregarding their Bible.
[01:35:42]  So it's both the either racist or anti racist, and the you know, we need to address income inequality and inequitable distribution of resources in order to get.
[01:35:56]  X, Y, and Z social outcome.
[01:35:58]  Right.
[01:35:58]  The disparity has to equate to discrimination.
[01:36:02]  Correct.
[01:36:03]  And these are all very, very harmful and destructive ideologies to the church.
[01:36:07]  And one of the biggest things that Marx got wrong in his understanding of economics is he thought that wealth was a zero sum game because he denied the living God.
[01:36:16]  He didn't believe that it was possible that God actually created a world in such a way that the pie can grow, that we can actually multiply resources.
[01:36:26]  And so, you know, so when you think of it in those terms, I always say it like this.
[01:36:30]  Completely reversed.
[01:36:31]  So, secularism thinks that man is on the inside, right?
[01:36:35]  So, the Disney message follow your heart.
[01:36:38]  So, on the inside, man is totally good.
[01:36:41]  And on the outside, in a physical capacity, man is a leech, right?
[01:36:46]  So, we need population control, overpopulation scare, climate crisis, all these kind of things.
[01:36:52]  We need less people because people are fundamentally, speaking of the exterior, people are fundamentally a drain, they're a burden.
[01:37:01]  But inside, each individual is a snowflake and unique and special and follow your heart and you know, good, which is the precise opposite of what the Bible teaches.
[01:37:08]  The Bible says on the inside, the heart of man is totally depraved.
[01:37:11]  So on the inside, every intention of his thought was only evil continually, Genesis chapter 6.
[01:37:18]  But on the outside, the doctrine of the imago Dei, created in the image of God, because of that, man is not first and foremost a consumer, but a creator, a lower C creator.
[01:37:29]  We don't create ex nihilo out of nothing, God alone does that, but we do take the resources that God has provided us with.
[01:37:35]  And we do create more.
[01:37:36]  We do multiply.
[01:37:38]  God has created a pie in such a way that it can grow, and he's created man in such a way that he knows how to make that pie grow.
[01:37:44]  And so the Bible would say, on the inside, bad until conversion, you must be born again.
[01:37:48]  But on the inside, bad, that's the doctrine of total depravity.
[01:37:51]  On the outside, good.
[01:37:53]  You can make suspension bridges and cure cancer.
[01:37:57]  And one farmer can, with technology and all these kind of things, feed thousands of people with his crops, which is exactly the opposite of what the world.
[01:38:07]  So, in terms of abortion, it's like 60 million children, give or take, dead in our nation since.
[01:38:12]  Since Roe, and you know, the last whatever I can't remember exactly what it is at this point about 50 years, but but since since that point, you got you know about 60 million murdered in their mother's womb, and that and that doesn't even begin to it's over 100 million easy when you think of early abortion, when you think of the abortion pill, you know, taking a pill and all those kind of things.
[01:38:34]  If we're consistent, life begins and the future generations that never you're right, yeah, exactly, exactly.
[01:38:41]  Those wouldn't be murdered, but those would be people lost.
[01:38:43]  And so the left thinks, secularism thinks in terms of looking how many less mouths we have to feed.
[01:38:49]  But for Christians, we should be thinking how many of those would have been the next Einstein?
[01:38:53]  How many of those would have been another Elon Musk?
[01:38:58]  Maybe we'd be in Mars right now, cultivating another planet.
[01:39:01]  Maybe we'd be, who knows?
[01:39:03]  Who knows?
[01:39:04]  People, what is our view?
[01:39:07]  The problem is right now we are not treating people very well.
[01:39:11]  We are not actually loving our neighbor.
[01:39:13]  We call it loving our neighbor, but we're not loving our neighbor.
[01:39:15]  And the reason why is because we don't understand our neighbor.
[01:39:17]  We have bad anthropology.
[01:39:18]  And the reason why is because we have bad theology.
[01:39:20]  We don't know God.
[01:39:21]  And apart from knowing Christ, we can't know man.
[01:39:26]  And we think wrong things about mankind.
[01:39:29]  And so then we do wrong things to our fellow man things that, you know, it's just a little common sense.
[01:39:34]  You're like, that is mutilation.
[01:39:37]  It's like, no, it's liberation.
[01:39:38]  You know, it's like, but you can't see it because you don't know, you don't understand man.
[01:39:43]  And you don't understand man because you won't listen to God.
[01:39:46]  God told you who man is, and you just won't listen.
[01:39:49]  And you ignore him.
[01:39:50]  Yeah.
[01:39:50]  So I'll give you the final word because I know we've been going long, but go ahead and you land the plane.
[01:39:56]  So, I mean, I think you said that beautifully.
[01:39:59]  I've started to say that, you know, we mentioned that people say, you know, is it politics is downstream from culture, right?
[01:40:08]  I would say I've been saying that sociology is downstream from theology, but I think anthropology is maybe a step, you know, in between those two.
[01:40:19]  And that People who do not understand God and the world that He created are inevitably not going to understand man.
[01:40:30]  And when you talked about how we're not loving our neighbor, I use some imagery in that column.
[01:40:35]  I talk about people with a hunk of flesh missing out of their leg.
[01:40:40]  That actually is a cover, I think it was New York Magazine, of a woman who thinks that she's a man and the doctors took a hunk of flesh out of her leg and just on the cover to fashion.
[01:40:55]  A penis.
[01:40:57]  And this is celebrated in our country as some sign of progress.
[01:41:03]  Now, you can tell that this person is a woman because one of the things that I've learned is the hips never lie.
[01:41:09]  You're right.
[01:41:10]  You're right.
[01:41:11]  So I don't care what you take from it.
[01:41:15]  So they just don't lie.
[01:41:17]  They speak of God's glory in terms of his creative power.

=== Generational Grace Without Despair (03:39) ===

[01:41:22]  But I am not for.
[01:41:27]  Aiding and abetting and encouraging people to mutilate their bodies, to poison their minds, to kill their children, to destroy their families in the name of winsomeness, love, or affirmation.
[01:41:44]  That's right.
[01:41:45]  If saying those things makes me, you know, disreputable, if it means that I don't get invited to certain parties or certain, you know, the cool kids, whether.
[01:41:57]  Secular or within the church, don't want to hang out with me.
[01:42:01]  I'm fine with that.
[01:42:03]  I will go on trying to grow where I'm planted and to love my wife and my children and my church family the best that I can to be a service and an asset in my community and to proclaim God's truth as boldly as I can for as long as I can.
[01:42:17]  So, Amen.
[01:42:19]  That's really where I am right now.
[01:42:21]  And, you know, I'm thankful for brothers like you who are out in the front lines and You know, shepherding your flock and teaching and sort of training people up and to see what is going on in this world.
[01:42:37]  Not to live in despair, because I think that can be tempting at times.
[01:42:42]  Oh, woe is me.
[01:42:43]  The world is so terrible.
[01:42:44]  Everything is so messed up.
[01:42:46]  But to train them to be happy warriors.
[01:42:48]  Right.
[01:42:49]  That's right.
[01:42:50]  That's the way I think about it right now.
[01:42:51]  And that is what I'm trying to do with my own family and to think generationally.
[01:42:58]  Right.
[01:42:59]  I'm all for history and I respect the past and my ancestors.
[01:43:05]  But any culture that spends more time focusing on the society that its ancestors endured rather than the one its descendants will inherit is going to be in trouble.
[01:43:20]  That's a good one.
[01:43:21]  So, you know, I'm thinking generationally.
[01:43:24]  I think I heard Vodi talk about that he's raising, when he was talking about his kids, he was saying, I'm raising my grandchildren.
[01:43:30]  Those parents, and I sort of borrowed that.
[01:43:33]  Um, and and I want to be a patriarch, right?
[01:43:37]  I want when I get to 75 80, Lord willing, my children and their children come to me because the way I've lived my life as a believer in this world indicates to them that I'm a source of wisdom.
[01:43:55]  That's the future that I would want for myself, and by God's grace, I'll get there.
[01:43:59]  But this, this.
[01:44:01]  Me first, I'll destroy my family because it's not fulfilling me, both men and increasingly women.
[01:44:11]  That type of house won't stand because it's divided in a way that just is not sustainable for the future.
[01:44:20]  So I'm thinking, I'm looking downrange all the way, fourth and fifth generation Squires.
[01:44:28]  That's what I'm looking at.
[01:44:29]  And as I said, I'm thankful for brothers like you who are out there, you know.
[01:44:34]  In the trenches and in the foxholes.
[01:44:36]  And as I said, by God's grace, we will be victorious.
[01:44:40]  Amen.
[01:44:41]  Amen.
[01:44:41]  Thanks for coming on the show, Delano.
[01:44:42]  I really appreciate it.
[01:44:43]  Appreciate you having me, man.
[01:44:44]  Yeah.
[01:44:45]  All right.
[01:44:45]  Thanks so much for listening.
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