Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And I'm Wo.
On today's episode of Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing deism,
the belief the what's called commonly the watchmaker theory, that there is
a God, there's a creator, but once he set things in motion,
he basically just stepped back and let things run.
Uh the reason we're discussing that today is that I think that
Christianity has been overtaken by a soft form of deism.
Maybe some of you even listening have some elements of this deistic
view in your own hearts, even while you confess the true God.
You know, it's deism is a is a non-Trinitarian heresy and an
anti divinity heresy in some ways, but the aspect of it that
is compatible with modern Christianity, which is to say not Christianity at
all, is the belief that God set things in motion and he
just kind of vanished.
So the first half of the episode is going to be talking
about that.
And then the second half we're going to be illustrating some examples
of how scripture talks about sin specifically having temporal consequences and how
we fundamentally don't believe that today, even as we say that we
do. And just as an alert to any Roman Catholic listeners, I
know there are a few of you at least.
When we're talking in that, we're going to be using completely different
terminology than you use in your own confessions.
So please don't mistake us for being in agreement.
We're actually in complete disagreement.
This is one of the reasons why we split from Rome.
It was one of the principal reasons for the rest from Reformation.
So we're gonna be using some of the same terms you use
that mean completely different things.
So we're not this is gonna be a polemic episode, but just
no upfront when we're saying some of those words we are not
talking about what you believe.
A specific warning to parents before we get into this, towards the
end we're going to be giving an example that is necessarily graphic
in a sexual nature.
We're going to be using one or two words that you may
not want to explain to your children today, so I'd caution you
to maybe screen this episode before you listen with a family, as
we know many of you are now, and we're thankful for that.
Whether or not your kids listen to this episode now or later,
the reason that we're going to, you know, create some trouble for
you as a parent is specifically that the example is such a
crucial example of how Christianity in sort of the the modern form
of Jesus died for us and so everything's okay is fundamentally destructive
to how we are living our lives.
So we're gonna make the case for that.
And that specific example is one the whether or not your kids
listen with you today, your kids need to know before they go
and get married.
They need to understand how certain sins should affect mate selection because
they will affect the rest of their lives.
They've affected your lives, they've affected everyone's lives in varying ways.
So again, I'm going to give a brief recap of scripture as
it relates to God acting in time.
And I'm gonna cover just a few highlights of God doing stuff
in time.
The reason for highlighting these is that I think that as Christians
today, even faithful Christians, we kind of look at God's action in
creation is basically limited to what God said he did in scripture
and then we have this hiatus and then at some point he's
gonna come back.
And so that's why I say we're kind of functionally deists.
we'll make that case.
But it's not that we're saying God never did anything after the
six days of creation, but we kind of believe that Jesus ascended
into heaven and then God's just kind of hands off And later
on God will come back and do more stuff.
But in the meantime, we're kind of on our own.
And that's false.
That's plainly contradictory to scripture.
And again, it affects how we confess our faith and how we
live our lives.
So So
in the beginning the word was with God and the word was
God, and God said, Let there be light.
And by the end of the sixth day of creation, God had
finished all of the things that he intended to make, and he
saw that it was very good.
God walked with Adam face to face as friends.
Even as creature and creator, there was no adversarial nature there as
there is today.
Adam Adam sinned.
When he sinned, God cursed him, expelled him from the garden, declared
that you will die, and God blessed him and said, Through your
lineage, I will solve this problem.
I will undo the damage that you have done to all of
creation in the fall.
For about fifteen hundred years, mankind became more and more wicked from
the days of the garden until in the days of Noah, that
generation was so evil that God regretted he ever ever made man
to begin with.
And only for the sake of keeping the promise he had made
to Adam did he not kill all of mankind.
So he preserved eight souls, along with all the animals that needed
to hitch a ride on the ark through the flood.
Everything else in creation on this planet was destroyed.
Five hundred years after that, God came to Abram and made Abram
a new promise.
Two thousand years after God promised Adam that there would be something
in the future through his lineage that would undo this damage, God
specifically promised Abram that it would be through his descendants that that
promise would be fulfilled.
And for the next two thousand years, God worked directly in the
lives of Abraham's ancestors to preserve those promises, those prophecies,
and to preserve that lineage, to br preserve the bloodline passed from
Adam through Noah to Abraham and his sons, and fulfillment of God's
promise. Two thousand years after the promise to Abraham, four thousand years
after the promise to Adam, Jesus was born the Christ, the Messiah.
He came in the flesh.
He lived for thirty years as a normal man.
Thirtieth year of his life, he began his ministry.
And for three years he publicly taught, he performed miracles, he fulfilled
the law of God, he fulfilled the perfect life that Adam failed
to lead.
And he also fulfilled through his ministry and his miracles every single
promise, every single prophecy of the Messiah that was made in the
Old Testament.
On the cross, when Jesus died, and he said it was finished,
four thousand years after God said that creation was finished, Jesus said
that his perfect redemption, perfect redeeming work of redemption was completed in
his death on the cross.
He rose three days later from the dead.
For forty days he appeared and ministered to hundreds of people.
He was witnessed widely as being As being alive after been having
been provably visibly dead, murdered, and dead in the ground for three
days. After forty days he ascended into heaven.
And that's kind of where a lot of the direct action of
God disappears.
Now, interestingly, the timing of this episode is that in the church
calendar, in the Western calendar, ascension was last week, and this coming
Sunday is the Sunday of the first Sunday of Pentecost.
So in that ten days between Christ's ascension and the Sunday fifty
days after Easter, when those tongues of fire come upon the disciples
and the gathered people on the Sunday of Pentecost, that is a
very visible miracle of God performing in the world.
And subsequent to that, I think almost all the miracles that were
performed were performed specifically by the apostles and by by believers in
fulfillment again of those prophecies that have been made in the old
testament. Once the apostles had died, once they had spread knowledge of
God once they had revealed what had been taught to them during
their three years of seminary, listening at Christ's feet every day, and
the direct revelations that they were receiving from God.
We don't have any warrant to believe that there's been subsequent direct
revelation from God.
Since the last apostles has died, most Christians consider the direct revelation
from God of new things has ended.
And unfortunately, I think that has caused us to believe that God
vanished. You know, God stopped directly acting, and although he made subsequent
promises in the New Testament as well as the old to us,
we don't believe them in quite the same fashion that it was
believed leading up to that point.
And so we're going to begin by by talking about the advent
of deism
subsequent to Christ's death and resurrection and ascension, fast forward about another
1500 years in our timeline, the Renaissance began and it led into
the Enlightenment.
And so today, two thousand years after Christ's ascension, we haven't really
seen much activity from God, not in the same way that it
was seen in the past.
And we ignore a lot of the things that God said about
how he would be active in the world.
And I think that that has caused tremendous problems for us in
our lives as Christians because by forgetting all the promises that God
made about being specifically active in our lives, we forget his nature
as our creator and as our redeemer.
The God who promised all of those good things and and sacrificed
himself on the cross all also promised the small stuff.
Give us this day our daily bread.
That is a prayer for God to remember his promise to us.
And while I think many of us say grace before meals and
try to be cognizant of the fact that food theoretically comes from
God, I don't think we necessarily have the sort of immediate understanding
that what you are eating is direct providence from the Almighty.
That's something that in in past generations we did have because we
didn't have grocery stores.
You had food in you know many cases it was food you
grew yourselves.
If you had a crop failure, you could potentially stay face starvation.
Today we're insulated from crop failures.
It doesn't matter how bad the weather is, how bad the crops
are, you can always go to the store and find food.
So
post Enlightenment, post-industrial revolution, the world we live in today has pushed
God out of the way and let us live in a world
where we can believe that, yeah, God's not really around, He's not
doing much.
We should obey Him, but it's all just kind of theoretical.
That God's not doing stuff today.
So we're going to begin specifically by talking about the advent of
deism and the influence that it has had on the Christian faith.
So
as is becoming a theme with this podcast, we are going to
mention the Enlightenment, because really Deism entered Western civilization, Western
society, and in time the Christian Church in the West, during the
Enlightenment, and there are a number of individuals we could discuss when
it comes to Enlightenment deism, but one of the main individuals would
of course be David Hume.
Now before getting to Hume, specifically, what deism is in this historical
context is essentially a rejection of special revelation, not general revelation, but
special revelation, a rejection of miracles, and a rejection of mystery.
Because in essence what Deism wants to do is be able to
explain the world purely via observation, empirical observation, and so
subject the world to human reason, human logic, and so there was
a removal, literally in some cases, of the miracles and the mystery
from Christianity, from the Bible.
For instance, Jefferson is one of the best examples of this.
He literally took a razor and glue and cut out parts of
the Bible and moved things out things around, because he did not
like the miracles.
He did not like the parts that could not be reduced to
human reason, and so there goes the mysteries as well, which would
be the sacraments.
Because of course you're not going to explain communion or baptism without
mystery, at least if you're being true to Scripture.
To expand on what exactly I mean for those who aren't familiar
with the terms by special revelation versus general revelation, essentially it's the
distinction between the natural world being general revelation and scripture being special
revelation. And that is scripture in so far as the things revealed
in Scripture are not revealed in the general revelation in creation.
And so for instance, Deus will affirm that there is a God
One would hope that is obvious by the name Dius coming from
Latin Deus God, but they will affirm that there is a higher
being, there is a creator god, there is a god who is
in control.
They deny that he acts in time in his creation.
It's the the watchmaker idea that God wound up the universe after
creating the universe, obviously, and then let it go.
And he stands back and he watches it, and so he is
transcendent and not imminent.
That is imminent with an A, not an I.
But special revelation is what you have in Scripture.
Special revelation
is those things that are not revealed in the creation itself.
And so, for instance, the core of the Christian faith, not revealed
in the general revelation.
Yes, you can discern there is a God, yes, you can discern
some things about God, but you cannot discern what God's disposition towards
you is and how he wants you to interact with him.
Yes, you can reasonably come to the conclusion that you should worship
God, and that is correct.
Insofar as pagans came to that conclusion, they were right.
But without Scripture, you cannot know about Christ.
You cannot know about original sin, except in so far as you
look around and see that things are not as they should be.
But you don't know what to do with that.
And so you need that special revelation to
know that Christ died for you, and that belief in Christ is
how you have a right relationship with God.
That is special revelation.
You cannot get that from simply looking at nature.
And
just to throw in a verse here, just so that we're establishing
that we're not just making this stuff up and we're not trying
to sell some sort of weird pagan version of Christianity.
The very beginning of Romans, Romans 1, God God writes, For the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness
of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because
God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes, namely, namely his eternal power and divine nature,
have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in
the things that have been made, so they are without excuse, for
although they knew God they did not honor him as God or
give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and
their foolish hearts were darkened.
So when we talk about natural revelation, general revelation revealing God.
We're not saying you don't need Jesus and you don't need Scripture.
We're pointing to Scripture to say what God said about Himself.
God says that the heavens testify to his glory.
We mentioned on numerous paps episodes.
Go read Job 38 and following.
Read it devotionally every week.
That is God delivering an extended soliloquy about how creation itself testifies
to his glory to every man, not only to Christians, but at
to every man who has ever lived.
So Romans 1, the very beginning of one of the most important
books in all of Scripture, says exactly what we're saying here.
And we have a lot of critics who just flat out lie
about everything we say.
We are not making this stuff up.
It's not a good idea that we had.
God literally says this.
So when we are battling deism, it's we're battling in our own
church for precisely this reason.
There are men who believe the natural revelation doesn't say anything about
God. Now they're flipping it.
They're saying that Scripture is the only way to know anything and
nature tells you nothing.
God says both.
God says that Scripture reveals himself and then nature reveals himself in
different ways and for different purposes, but to neglect one for the
sake of the other is evil.
As Christians we don't get to do that.
And it's also just ridiculous when they try to argue that Scripture
alone reveals God's glory, because usually when God in Scripture appeals to
his own glory, he appeals to creation.
So Scripture itself is directing us to creation to see the glory
of God, and of course you paraphrase there the beginning of Psalm
nineteen. I'll read the first six verses because they're highly relevant here.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims
his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not
heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words
to the end of the world.
In them he is set a tent for the sun, which comes
out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man,
runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit
to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its
heat.
That is speaking about creation, it's speaking about what God has done,
what you can see when you look out the window.
And so again, general revelation, creation, special revelation, scripture.
Both are true, both reveal truths about God, and Christians can refer
to both.
But then to move on to
David Hume, as mentioned, he is one of the ones who created
the modern conception, or really the the modern framework of thought, that
turns into modern deism.
Because in his essay, one of his more famous essays, of miracles,
in one of his books, he basically argues that miracles are impossible.
The problem is if you actually look at the essay and assess
the logic used in it, the entire thing is begging the question
in the technical sense.
When someone says begging the question in everyday speech, most likely he
is wrong.
Because begging the question is a technical term.
It is a term of art.
If something brings up a question, it is raising the question.
If something begs the question, what it is doing is in the
question, in the inquiry itself, you are assuming the conclusion.
And that is what Hume does.
Because the basic outline of Hume's argument is that a miracle is
something, this is how he defines miracles.
A miracle is something that transgresses the natural law.
It is something that is outside of a natural law that goes
against it, and so the most common example that's going to be
given is a man coming back from the dead, because of course
the goal of denying miracles is to deny the resurrection.
Both Christ's resurrection and ultimately our resurrection.
And so what he argues is, miracles cannot exist because natural laws
are established over time due to the empirical observation of many
men. This is the argument that an empirical truth, if you have
contending arguments, the one that is true is the one that has
the greater weight of evidence behind it Behind it.
Now there are a number of problems with this, some of you
will undoubtedly be able to see them.
For instance, if you have a long established error, how do you
overturn that with accurate observations?
Because every accurate observation is going to be Is going to be,
by Hume's own rule, thrown out because it doesn't accord with this
supposedly established natural law.
And so as you can see, he's begging the question.
He's saying, a miracle can't happen because a miracle is outside the
natural law and only things that are inside the natural law can
happen. And so it's just complete gibberish.
But this is the definition
of a miracle.
Ex
Exactly, that's the problem.
He's he throws out the idea of a miracle by saying a
miracle can't happen because a miracle is contrary to natural law.
Natural law here being the laws of nature, not capital N, Capital
L natural law flowing from God.
But that's the core of this, and this is bled over into
first the Academy, because of the sciences, particularly the hard sciences that
infected the
liberal arts.
And then from there, because of course, theology is a liberal art.
Theology used to be called the queen of the liberal arts in
proper academia in centuries past.
From there it bled over into the church.
And so you have Christians
who basically affirm this sort of thought pattern without really thinking about
what it is they're affirming.
And so you you have a denial of God's active involvement in
the world.
You have this conception of God as being, as was mentioned earlier,
transcendent and not imminent, which is to say, above it all, sitting
back watching, he's he's off in heaven somewhere.
this is an error that some make when they contend that Christ
is at the right hand of God, not that Christ being at
the right hand of God is an error, but the conception of
what the right hand of God is can be an error.
God is not a body.
God is spirit.
God is not contained in some heaven that is a physical location.
The right hand of God is a position of power and authority.
And so Christ isn't contained, according to divinity or humanity, in some
in some physical location somewhere.
He is omnipresent, because of course the fullness of Deity dwells bodily
in Christ.
Therefore he has the fullness of the attributes of Deity, one of
course being omnipresence, sort of a a tangent, but it's important here,
because if you deny
that God is imminent by saying that he is only transcendent, then
you are denying his involvement in the creation, and really you're at
least verging on denying the very nature of God, because you're denying
omnipresence. And so what we need to do is have more of
the mindset that our ancestors, our forebears in the faith, would have
had, where they looked at the natural world with wonder because they
looked at it as God being actively involved.
God is the one who causes the sun to rise and the
sun to set.
God is the one who causes the change of the seasons.
God is the one who causes every seed to germinate in your
field or not.
Everything we have comes from God.
He is involved in everything, from the grandest scale, the movement of
galaxies in the universe, the interaction of the galaxies, this grand awesome
scale, all the way down to the smallest interactions of whether it's
individual atoms or particles inside of one.
God controls all of that.
He is involved.
He upholds everything
by his power.
Without God's active, imminent involvement, nothing happens.
And that includes miracles.
Now Hume's definition of what a miracle is
isn't entirely wrong, because when we speak of a miracle, what we
really mean is that God involved himself in a particular way that
is so out of the ordinary that it is utterly undeniable.
So God is involved, as I said, in everything, so the cell
divisions in your body right now, God controls those, those happen because
he wills it.
But we don't call that a miracle.
It is a miracle in the broader sense of the term, but
we don't call it a miracle because it is in perfect accord
with the way God made things to operate.
What we would call a miracle is a man coming back from
the dead, because that is not in accord with how the fallen
world works.
God has to intervene in a special sort of way to cause
a man to come back from the dead, and so that's what
we mean really when we say miracle, and that's what these individuals,
born of the enlightenment thought, deny.
They rip them literally out of the Bible in some cases and
say you can't possibly have a miracle because God isn't actually involved
in creation.
He is merely sitting back and watching the machine that he spun
up and then let loose.
And
I think at some point what has really happened is that while
they were trying to deny miracles outright, you know, special things like
resurrection of the dead, as you laid out, they ultimately are fundamentally
denying that God is doing the things that God says that He
does in cr in Scripture.
In Jeremiah ten, it's written, It is He who made the earth
by His power, who established the world by His wisdom, and by
His understanding stretched out the heavens.
When He utters His voice there is a tumult of waters in
the heaven, and he makes the mist rise from the ends of
the earth, he makes lightning for the rain, and he brings forth
the wind from its storehouses.
And wind from the storehouses is a phrase that's repeated several times
throughout scripture.
Now today, thanks to modern science, we know that sunlight heats the
earth's crust, causes differences in temperature, which cause differences in pressure in
the atmosphere.
And so we get wind.
We get winds, we get cyclones, we get all manner, you know,
everything from the smallest breeze to the most powerful tornado is all
caused more or less by the same things.
And none of it's supernatural on paper.
You can model it and the models work.
You can have a model of how a tornado or a hurricane
or a breeze works that doesn't involve supernatural.
There's no variable for God in those models.
And yet they're very predictive.
The problem that we have today as functional deists is that because
post-Enlightenment, we have these new understandings of the facts on the ground.
Oh, well, okay, that's how wind works.
That's neat.
And you know, maybe you're really into it and you become a
meteorologist. That's fine, but if you then go on to deny Jeremiah
10 and the other passages that says that God brings forth the
wind from his storehouses, you can't be Christian.
And see, that's that's the reason that this is a subject that's
worth tackling is that if you're denying these trivial parts of scripture,
and I say that tongue in cheek, there's no such thing, that's
the point.
If you know how wind works, and you decide, well, I know
how that works with the a at the atomic level, so it
can't have anything to do with God.
When God says I did that, the disconnect is that the fact
that we have now introspective through reason how things work does doesn't
tell us the ultimate cause of it working.
And God himself says that.
He's doing all of it.
One of the points that that I made elsewhere is that I
think there's something very important to be discerned from Revelation as John
is being given his revelation in in heaven in his vision.
When he first comes to the throne of God and the terrifying
beasts are there.
They say two things.
The very first thing that they say to him is holy, holy,
holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is
to come.
So right there they're confessing the Trinity with the triple holy, and
the next thing that they say to him as he stands before
the throne, listen to this, worthy are you our Lord and God
to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.
Now the reason I think that's so important is that the very
first two things that are said in heaven before the throne of
God have nothing to do with Christ's sacrifice on the cross.
I do not say that to diminish that in the slightest.
That is the third thing.
But it's important, I think, that in order it says then worthy
are you to take the scroll, and to open its seals.
For you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for
God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you
have made them a kingdom and priest to our God, and they
shall reign on the earth.
So the twenty four gathered around the throne do confess Christ as
the Redeemer.
That's absolutely a fundamental part of Christianity.
There are two other things that are said before the throne of
God first.
The first is the Trinity, and the second is declaring the glory
of God in creation.
And so again, as we introspect the glory of God in creation,
as Christians, that should give us a greater appreciation for the glory
of God.
It shouldn't make us appreciate science, which aga again is just it's
a word for knowledge.
That's literally what it means.
Scantia is knowledge.
It's not special.
It's not a it's not a different religion.
It is a knowledge can only be of a true thing.
So when we have scientific knowledge, which is redundant, of things, what
we're saying is okay, we understand better how it's working.
And to to Corey's point about Hume and his definition of Definition
of what we can accept, that's the problem that science faces today.
The established science, like made up things like anthropocentric global warming, are
complete nonsense.
But because ninety-five doctors out of a hundred say this is how
it works, no one is allowed to even get funding to say,
well, that's complete nonsense.
So
these false beliefs have effects on our lives in the left hand
kingdom and in the right.
As we get further and further away from believing that God is
active in creation, it's easier to forget the other things.
You know, one of our recurring themes is that Satan doesn't care
which lie you buy.
You know, is is Christians and most of you listening or Protestants,
you're not going to fall for the the trick that you can
save yourself, that you can do something to earn your salvation.
We got that one nailed.
We figured it out 500 years ago and we've stuck to our
guns. Satan didn't rest on those laurels.
He's found other avenues of attack that are not frontal assaults on
the second article of the Creed.
He's going after the other stuff that we don't have good arguments
against. It's part of the reason that Stone Choir exists.
We're talking about this stuff that no one's really talked much about
because Satan wasn't attacking it before.
Now that Satan is attacking it, it should become one of the
chief concerns of the church.
Capital C.
Every Christian denomination is either struggling with some of these questions, you
know, things like tranneism and and other matters related to the flesh
and how we're created, or they're adopting wholesale the religion of the
world and they're ceasing to be Christian, even as they still have
the creeds and confessions, whatever your confession is in your denomination.
When you start whittling away at what God has done in his
creation, that is an overt denial of the creator.
You can't get around that.
If you say no, God, the wind didn't come from you, the
wind came from solar radiation.
God will judge you for that as a false confession that you
were denying him.
And if you deny God, he will deny you on the last
day.
I
think it may be helpful for the listeners to go over guess
really just a couple practical matters when it comes to deism in
our own daily lives in the modern world and
it should be mentioned first the first point the Freemasons are deist.
That is one of the reasons of a number of very strong
reasons that Christians cannot be Masons.
And I know that some will think, well, my grandfather was a
Christian and a Mason, and maybe that was so.
But if he was a Christian, it was because he was a
bad Mason.
And if he was a good Mason, he was not a Christian.
Because again, Freemasonry is deist.
It denies that God is active in his creation, that he is
involved, and it denies the mysteries.
It is exactly what we've been describing thus far.
It is an organized form of deism.
It is It is a deistic competing religion to Christianity.
And so again, no, you cannot be a Mason and a Christian.
These are incompatible, and historically, Lutheran churches, among others, have barred membership
to Freemasons, and certain other groups have actually persecuted the Masons historically,
which is of course what a Christian ruler would do, because they're
an anti Christian cult.
But then another point that I want to make is something that
many have undoubtedly read at some point, and that is
C. S.
Lewis's trilemma the I'm not going to recommend C.S.
Lewis generally as a theologian.
He is a decent apologist, but apologist and theologian usually not found
together in one man.
Usually a man who is a good theologian is a bad apologist,
and a good apologist is usually not a very good theologian.
Lewis should have let others do the theology, but his trilemma is
actually quite sound.
It is quite good.
I'm not going to say that it is purely logically sound, as
in you could turn it into a modal logic problem and arrive
at the conclusion.
That's not the point.
It is compelling, which is why I am calling it sound.
And the trilemma, of course, is when you deal with what Christ
taught and what Christ claimed, you are left with three options for
what Christ is, and that is lunatic, liar, or lord.
You can say that he was a lunatic, that he was a
crazy man who lived in the desert and told people some good
stuff and claimed some crazy things, like he was God.
Or you can claim he was a liar, that he was just
a swindler, that he was one of a long line, actually, in
Palestine, of those claiming to be a Messiah.
Or you can conclude that he is your Lord.
Because if you take his claims seriously, that's the only option, if
the things that Christ did and the things that Christ claimed are
both true, then he is your Lord and Savior.
Deists don't want to deal with this.
That's why you have men like Jefferson who want to say, I
really like what Christ taught, and then cut out all this other
stuff. Why is what Christ taught compelling
absent his other claims?
And why can we just jettison those claims?
They don't have an answer for this from the deist perspective.
It's the same sort of argument as those who would say we
agree with this confession in so far as we like what it
says, which for Lutherans, of course, I'm speaking of quatonous subscription to
the Book of Concord, which is an argument that the Book of
Concord, in so far as it is correct, correct of course being
here from the position, the viewpoint of the one making the argument,
in so far as it is correct, or in agreement with our
interpretation of scripture, that's completely meaningless.
To say that you subscribe to something insofar as it is correct,
in your opinion, means nothing.
Insofar as the menu at my local Thai restaurant is correct.
Yeah, of course I subscribe to that.
Because insofar as it's correct it's true, that's the case for all
documents. It's a totally meaningless claim.
And that's the problem that we have here with deism.
Their claims about Christ make him irrelevant, meaningless, and really highlight
the bankruptcy of deism itself.
I think one of the worst consequences of the Industrial Revolution was
that it separated Us from our food.
It separated us from our food sources, from how God provides things
to us.
And there's so much of how God wanted the world to be
ordered that hinges on Providence.
The hinges on him acting directly to us.
Now I'm not making a case for everyone returning to doing everything
himself. That's I I would be dead if that were the case.
I'm I can't grow anything.
It's not fundamentally a rejection of specialization of labor, but I think
it's important for us to acknowledge that in the industrial age we
have been separated from the immediacy of God's delivery of these things
to us.
As I said earlier, I've mentioned before, a grocery store is a
miracle. You can go in there any time of the year, any
season, and basically get food pretty much from around the world that's
if you have a decent grocery store, it's gonna be in good
shape, it's gonna be fresh.
You know, some of the stuff is genetically engineered now, so it's
been messed with, so it looks good.
But even with that, the fact that there's always food when you're
hungry if you can afford it, is itself a miracle.
And I think
Because we have gotten away from the lifestyle that involved hand to
mouth in the sense that you are growing the food or the
animal, the plants, whatever it is, whatever sort of gardening or farming
you're doing on any scale, when that's no longer a part of
our lives, we forget that someone's doing that on our behalf.
And that specialization means that the farmer the witnesses birth and death,
that witnesses the sacrifice of the animals as they're dying to be
our food.
The farmer sees that and it's kept out of sight.
And frankly one of the other horrors of the industrial age is
industrial farming, which is absolutely evil and should be destroyed and made
illegal everywhere.
That is vile what is done to creatures today.
It makes me sick.
If you can support local farmers just as an aside, please do
that. Because a local farmer is always going to be taking better
care of their animals.
I have a friend a few years ago who grew some pigs.
They had one bad day in their life and they didn't even
know it.
They were outside, they were eating like crazy, he cleared several acres
with with the pigs eating everything up, and then they made incredibly
good bacon and ham.
And they never even knew it was coming.
They had a wonderful life as pigs.
And then we enjoyed them for a year as dinner.
That is the way God has ordered things since Noah got off
the ark.
God said, As I gave you the plants, I now give you
all the animals too.
Everything is yours to eat.
Now that we have grocery stores, now that we have all these
other sources of things, we forget that God is still doing that
for us.
It's really the polar opposite of manna from heaven, where they were
wandering in the desert and they had no food and then it
just it rained, you know, this this bread for them.
And that was their sustenance.
The immediacy of that is it's the same sort of immediacy we
we get from a grocery store, but without any of the notion
that it's a miracle that God's doing it.
I want to read again Matthew 6, just this passage where Jesus
is specifically preaching against us believing the watchmaker theory in any regard.
He talks about the smallest things in this passage as an illustration
that if you can trust God for the small things, you can
certainly trust Him for the big ones.
Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what
you will eat or what you will drink or about your body
or what you will put on.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air.
They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your
heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they?
And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour
to his span of life?
And why are you anxious about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in
all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which to
day is alive, and to morrow is thrown into the oven, will
he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
Therefore do not be anxious, saying what shall we eat, or what
shall we drink, or what shall we wear?
For the Gentiles seek after these things, and year heavenly Father knows
that you need them all.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all
these things will be added to you.
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious
for itself.
Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
This is a passage I've I've read at least once before in
a previous episode that the reason I keep returning to is one,
it countermands deism flatly.
It's saying that your food, your clothing, all of it comes to
God. Not only is some sort of miraculous intervention outside of the
laws of nature, but it's how God provides things.
God gives you a job, God gives you a house, God gives
you food, all the things that God gives you are his blessings.
And they're everybody much as bit a blessing as the miraculous manna
from heaven.
God is simply fulfilling this promise to all his creatures in a
different way in our lives.
And that's a blessing too.
I'm not complaining about grocery stores.
I'm saying that the fact that we have this blessing of such
great abundance should be a reason for even greater thanksgiving and not
certainly a reason for us to forget that it's God that's producing
all of it.
He sends the rain, he sends the winds, he grows the crops,
he gives us farmers and grocery stores and truck drivers and all
the things that are so mundane that without which we would starve.
So all of that is God acting in our lives.
And the f fact that there's scientific reasoning and understanding that let
us think, oh, well, I understand how the economy works.
I understand how the weather works.
I understand how crop rotation and germination works.
If you forget God, you've missed the entire point of everything.
You'd be better off starving to death and remembering God than being
fed and forgetting him.
God is giving us both in nature and in scripture, and all
we have to do is receive it with thanksgiving.
I think a final point that we should make in the US
context, which of course is our primary context, yes, we have listeners
from all over the world in fact, but in the US context,
many operate under the assumption that the US doesn't have an established
religion, an official religion, and that we cannot have that.
Of course that's a different argument from another time, perhaps.
No. The Constitution doesn't actually bar an established religion.
It bars Congress from doing it.
But the US does have an official religion.
And it is deism.
It is called ceremonial deism.
Now some of course will try to argue that it's not actually
a religion, but it is in fact a religion.
It was first mentioned in Lynch V.
Donnelly in a dissenting opinion, but I will I'll read just a
quick paragraph from that dissenting opinion.
I would suggest that such practices as the designation of in God
we trust as our national motto, or the references to God contained
in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, can best be understood
in Dean Rostow's apt phrase as a form of a ceremonial deism,
protected from establishment clause scrutiny, chiefly because they have lost through rote
repetition any significant religious content.
And so essentially our state religion is an anti-religion.
It is a rejection of Christianity, because of course that is ultimately
what deism is.
A rejection of Christianity, and this comes from
the Jewish law school professor Eugene Rostow.
I think at the time he was actually the dean of the
law school.
But his argument is that the U.S.
has a ceremonial deism as its religion, which makes appeals to God
or a higher authority that aren't actually truly religious in that they
aren't really an appeal to God, but an appeal to a sort
of tradition or belief in a higher principle, which of course is
deism. And And
that is an important point about deism.
It's this appeal to a higher power, which we of course see
in Alcoholics Anonymous, or an appeal to providence, any number of different
terms are used for this.
If you see someone who uses only those terms, you should be
deeply suspicious.
That person is most likely a deist, not a Christian.
Now there is
a bit of complexity or potential confusion here because Christians can also
use those terms.
It is perfectly permissible for a Christian to refer to God as
uppercase p providence, or as
the higher power.
However, a Christian will necessarily also refer a Refer explicitly to Christ
as Lord and Savior at some point.
A Christian will be able to give that confession of the faith.
That's the dividing line.
The deist will never give that confession of Christ.
The Christian will give the confession of Christ even if he also
uses these terms that overlap with terms used by deist, and so
it is important, it is incumbent on Christians, to pay close attention,
particularly to those who are speaking in the public sphere, when they
use these terms, and perhaps even more importantly, which terms they neglect
to use.
And so we the living in this generation separated two thousand years
from Christ's ascension, have inherited this post-Enlightenment version of Christianity
that most of us hold lazily.
You know, it's it's simultaneously a true confession and a false confession.
Because if you stop believing that God is doing certain things, even
while you believe he's God, we're not sitting here pronouncing judgment on
who has true faith and who doesn't.
God alone knows that.
But we can say with absolute certainty that you are endangering your
salvation by endangering your faith by adopting a false confession that denies
God's things that He reveals in Scripture that He does.
And one of the reasons that we wanted to do this episode,
and one of the reasons that we began by specifically talking about
the idea of a watchmaker God who's basically checked out now is
that as we've gotten into a gospel reductionistic version of Christianity within
the church where when we are professing our faith, we don't want
to talk about God punishing sins anymore.
We don't want to we even want to say the word sin.
We talk about brokenness.
Yeah, we talk about things being problematic, which is a Marxist term.
We don't say sin, we don't say evil.
That's one of the reasons that Corey and I say sin and
evil a lot.
It's not being obsessive or trying to be controversial.
It's that that's what these things are.
That's what God calls them.
So when God calls something evil and you call it problematic, there's
a disconnect.
And if you claim to be Christian and you won't say things
the way God said them, you're gonna get into trouble, even while
you're confessing all the other parts of the faith that are true.
And one of the chief problems that we have today is that
Christians don't believe that God punishes sin in this life.
We believe that you sin and sin and sin, or you try
not to sin and maybe you do a decent job.
Obviously, no matter what, you're going to sin some.
that's part of the Christian confession.
We cannot live a perfect life.
Jesus two thousand years ago lived the only perfect human life.
We will only be perfected in the resurrection, covered in his blood.
Until that day, no matter how hard we try, we will fail.
Nevertheless, we are to try to obey God in in confession that
He is our God, He is our Creator.
We to confess as the as the angels before the throne, holy,
holy, holy, you are God Almighty.
I will do what you say.
That should be simple and obvious to everyone.
Instead, what we hear from so many of our teachers is oh,
don't worry about that sin stuff, Jesus has it covered, just try
to do better, and you're forgiven.
And
by no means would quarrier diminish forgiveness in the slightest.
The entire Christian faith is predicated upon the creator of the universe
six thousand years ago, coming two thousand years ago to repair the
damage that Adam did and that we perpetuate through our sinful lives
and our sinful being.
The fact that God paid the eternal price for our sins on
the cross does not obviate the fact that there are temporal punishments
for those sins.
Not always, not automatic, it's not a one-to-one correlation.
Nevertheless, it is absolutely the case that God will punish us in
this life for the things that we do.
I want to read now the confession, the general confession that's given
publicly in in virtually all Lutheran churches for hundreds of years.
O Almighty God, merciful Father, I, poor, miserable sinner, confess unto you
all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended you,
and justly deserved your temporal and eternal punishment.
But I am heartily sorry for them and sincerely repent of them,
and I pray you of your boundless mercy, and for the sake
of the wholly innocent bitter sufferings and death of your beloved Son
Jesus Christ, to be gracious and merciful to me, a poor sinful
being Now, every week Lutherans are saying, justly deserved your temporal and
eternal punishment.
And we focus a lot on the eternal punishment.
That's hell.
That's taken care of as a Christian with this confession, with a
true confession of God.
You are off the hook for the eternal punishment.
We never think about the temporal punishment.
As I said at the beginning, if any of you happen to
be familiar with Roman Catholic doctrine, we're not remotely talking about the
same thing.
Temporal and eternal are two different spheres.
One is bounded in eternity, the other is bounded in time.
Temporal is not a synonym for temporary.
And the reason I mention Roman Catholicism in particular is that this
is how indulgences came about.
They realized that if they could attribute some additional penance to pay
in time for sins, they could raise money.
Is one of the reasons politically that the Reformation was fought was
that you know the St.
Peter's Basilica, all the beautiful things in Italy, those were being built
with indulgence money extracted largely from Germans.
It was it was a racial national extortion racket in the name
of Rome, in the name of the Pope, to get money from
one nation and give it to others.
Now the indulgences were everywhere, but they're pushed particularly hard in Germany.
And so when Roman Catholics talk about temporal punishments, they specifically mean
doing something to get off the hook in this life.
That's not what we mean.
That's not what the Lutherans are talking about when we talk about
temporal punishment.
Lutherans are talking about what Nathan brought to David in second Samuel
twelve. Nathan said, You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with a
sword and have taken his wife to be your wife, and you
have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.
Now therefore the swords shall never depart from your house, because you
have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite
to be your wife.
Thus says the Lord, behold, I will raise up evil against you
out of your own house, and I will take your wives before
your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie
with your wives in the sight of this sun, for you did
it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and
before all the sun.
David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.
And Nathan said to David, The Lord also has put away your
sin, you shall not die.
Nevertheless, because of this deed, you have utterly scorned the Lord The
child who is born to you shall die.
So that's a temporal punishment.
Now that is a specific, you might say miraculous temporal punishment.
But the fact remains, Nathan said, the Lord has put away your
sin, meaning the eternal punishment.
Nevertheless, David's son was killed by God.
That was the temporal consequence, and notably, in light of some of
our previous episodes, the temporal consequence for David's sin was visited upon
his son, who had you know, by our standards, had done nothing,
but he was the product of an evil union, and God cursed
it with death.
So what When we talk about temporal consequences for sin, as we've
talked about in the past, we're dedicating this episode specifically to the
point, God will sometimes use
punishment in this life, in your life, as you are living and
breathing, punishment for a sin that you have committed by way of
chastisement and reproach, and to bring you to repentance.
In the case of David and Nathan, he had already confessed his
sin, and he was confronted by Nathan, and the yet still the
punishment was visited upon him, even as God forgave the eternal price
for that sin.
So So it is absolutely Christian doctrine that something you do in
this life will have punishment from God in this life.
That's how this ties in with deism.
If you believe in the deistic God, you know, he Jesus ascended
to heaven and he's gonna show up on the last day, but
in between God's not really gonna do anything.
Oh, you know, maybe he feeds us, but the idea that God
would cause in your life specific punishment for specific sin is a
big deal.
And it's something that has a direct impact on our lives, on
every man's life.
And so when we're talking about obeying God or not obeying God,
and we're talking about Christian doctrine focusing, we would argue too much
on forgiveness.
I know that sounds terrible, but we're trying to make the point
that if all of your focus is on forgiveness, that's the eternal
forgiveness, the specific point we're making here is that God does not
forgive the temporal punishments for your sins.
You will still face some consequence.
Again, not a one-to-one relationship.
Not every sin has a direct and immediate punishment.
God doesn't promise that.
He does, however, promise that there will be temporal punishments for sins.
And so when they are visited, Christians are to point to them
and say this is God's punishment for this sin.
Sometimes as a demonstration that the thing itself is sin, when you
see the punishment for the thing, that is a demonstration of the
evil of it.
It's a proof that it is sin.
And when antinomians want to focus on, well, Jesus died for you,
God forgave all that, don't worry about it, that's fundamentally destructive to
the faith because it allows you to keep on sinning and sinning
and knowing that Jesus paid for it all on the cross.
So you can just kind of do whatever you want and try
not to sin so much.
Well, when someone says you're actually destroying your body and your mind
and your soul all at the same time by your evil, that's
part of what Christians need to be able to tell each other.
You should be able to tell your friend who is sinning, you're
abusing drugs.
Look what it's doing to your body.
Look what it's doing to your family.
You're being punished for your evil.
Stop being evil, and those punishments, some of them will go away.
The consequences for the punishments may linger, but they're a consequence of
sin in time.
That's a part of the Christian faith and it's one that we
have to remember because as the world gets worse and worse, I
don't think we can just cling more and more to the cross
and think about forgiveness in eternity while ignoring the destruction that we're
inflicting on creation.
Destroying creation is sin.
Destroying your body is sin.
We can't do that.
When you continue to sin unrepentantly, you're jeopardizing your salvation.
So this is a matter of profound urgency and importance.
It's the whole reason that we're we're setting this up in terms
of deism and temporal consequences because w rejection of a God who's
active in the world fundamentally results in rejection of a God who
will ever punish you for anything you do.
Christians think that they can just live a consequence-free life by doing
anything, and then as soon as they confess, okay, it's over.
You can't you you know not touching, can't get mad.
You're forgiven in eternity.
You may still have to face consequences in this life.
And so this is where we'll get into the section about which
we warned you at the beginning of the beginning of the podcast
where we will be covering some topics that you may not want
your children to hear just yet.
We're not going to cover this in particular depth because it gets
very technical very quickly.
Some of you may have noticed as an aside here, that we
didn't touch really on theistic evolution in this episode.
We didn't do that because that is also a subject that gets
very complex, very quickly, both philosophically and biologically.
We will probably eventually do a future episode on that.
It will be a deep dive episode.
It will be involved and complicated.
You may want to listen to it a few times, but that
is not this episode today.
However, we are going to touch on some biology here, because this
ties into the temporal consequences of certain kinds of sin, particularly in
this case sexual sins.
And so first off, it is necessary to mention just some basics
about human reproduction for those who
perhaps skipped health class, biology, what have you, humans are ohogamous.
Essentially means that we have two different kinds of gametes that come
together to produce offspring.
That's all that means.
And it's anisogamus, which is that they are different from one another,
which is just to say that the sperm cell and the egg
cell are different.
Because of course the sperm cell is motile and the ovum is
not. Now the reason I mention this is because the fact that
the sperm cell is motile is what is important here.
Because for a woman, when she has sex with a man, if
he ejaculates inside her, those cells, the DNA contained in them, do
not stay put.
Because again, sperm are motile, they can move and they do so.
And so the ultimate consequence of this is that the woman winds
up having some of the DNA from the man with whom she
had sex, in various places in her body, including in her brain,
and her cerebral spinal fluid.
They've conducted autopsies on deceased, obviously, women, and found male
DNA in the female brain.
Now this happens a number of different ways.
One is having sex.
If the man ejaculates inside the woman, well you now have male
DNA inside the woman and it makes its way to various other
places inside her body.
The other of course would be pregnancy, because if the woman becomes
pregnant with a son, well the son has male DNA, obviously, and
there is an exchange of cells between the child and the mother.
Some of those do cross the placential barrier.
And so you will wind up with immune cells and others from
the mother in the child, and from the child in the mother.
Now there are some benefits to this.
There have been cases where those cells that cross the barrier from
the child to the mother have actually repaired damage to the mother's
body and potentially saved her life.
It's very obvious why God designed the system the way he did.
There are some stresses on the female body during pregnancy.
The pregnancy itself takes care of some of those stresses, and potentially
of other damage that existed before the pregnancy in order to help
bring the pregnancy to term.
One example that I read many years ago was a woman who
had a defective heart valve, she got pregnant, and the fetal cells
actually fixed the heart valve.
Which obviously vastly increases the odds of the pregnancy coming to term,
because of course there will be stresses on the heart throughout the
pregnancy and particularly during the birth.
And so this mother survived, whereas she probably would not otherwise have
survived because of that microchimerism, which is what we're talking about here.
Microchimerism is when you have a population of cells.
You actually have multiple populations of cells if you're talking about the
distinct genetic lineages.
But you have a grouping of cells where the overwhelming majority of
them are from one line, in this case, the mother.
They are primarily her cells.
But you have a significant although small percentage of those cells that
are from another line, usually defined as less than 1%.
That may not sound like a lot to most people because it's
you know less than 1%, 1% is small, but if 1% of
your cells are foreign, that's huge.
And no, I'm not talking about the ones in your gut, those
don't count.
These are cells that are actually in your body potentially doing things.
Because some of these are going to be stem cells, and stem
cells are going to produce other cells.
Some of them are going to be hematopoietic, which is to say
producing the components that make blood, some of them are going to
do other things, as I mentioned the ones that for instance could
repair a heart valve, do something like that.
And so for a woman you have this microchimerism as a result
of having sex with a man or being pregnant, and that can
include if she has a spontaneous abortion, which is to say a
miscarriage, or an actual abortion.
Because that also still leaves behind those cells.
Now the point of this, and how it ties in to what
we're discussing with regard to sin and the temporal consequences of sin,
is that if a woman has sex with many different men, she
is going to have DNA, not necessarily from every single man with
whom she had sex, but from a number of them.
The consequences of this are going to be biological and psychological.
We'll start with the biology.
Biologically, you are going to have expression of certain proteins, various
other things.
I said we won't delve too deeply into it so we won't
do that, but you're going to have various consequences for the woman
herself and additionally for any children she has from that point forward,
from her having sex with a number of different men, you are
going to actually change the ultimate genetic makeup of the child due
to the mother's past actions.
Which means for a man, of course, if your wife is a
virgin and she has sex with you and only you, your children
are going to be maximally related to you.
In fact, each additional child you have with that same woman is
going to be more related to you because you are literally injecting
your DNA into her every time you have sex with her, not
just when she gets pregnant.
And so she becomes
not necessarily more like you over time, but more genetically yours.
That is how God designed it.
God was not speaking idly, or even truly figuratively, when he said
that man and wife become one flesh.
It is more literal than most people would happen to think, and
certainly more literal than those living a profligate libertine lifestyle in our
modern world would like to think.
And so biologically, your children are going to be less related to
you, as the man
If your wife
has had sex with a number of other men.
And that just continues to get worse as she has more and
more partners.
Of course, there are other biological consequences, we know STIs and things
like that, but these are the ones that are related to the
discussion we're having here of the temporal consequences of sin.
Because everyone knows the obvious ones.
We're talking about the less obvious ones that Christian fathers should be
teaching to their sons and their daughters.
Because women need to know this is a thing that is going
to happen to your body, you have no control over it, it
is a permanent change.
And so there are very real, very permanent consequences of being promiscuous.
And then to speak on the psychological consequences, there is evidence in
the literature, and really anyone who knows women who have made very
poor life choices can confirm this, certainly that's anecdote, but if you
get enough anecdotes together the plural actually is data.
The psychological consequences for a woman of having many sexual partners start
to look a lot like schizophrenia.
Because there's psychological damage caused to a woman by engaging in this
behavior. There is also probably some biological basis to it because, as
mentioned previously, a lot of this DNA, or at least a a
good portion, ends up in the cerebral spinal fluid and ultimately in
the woman's brain.
We don't yet know exactly what is happening there because some of
this research is relatively recent.
There's been centuries of speculation on these matters, but we now have
it very well confirmed.
This is established, we know this happens.
But some of the the earlier some of the earliest research, I
guess, in some cases, is only probably a decade, a decade and
a half old So some of this is still in an infancy
stage, but we know positively, absolutely, this is something that is happening.
When a woman has sex with a man, she becomes to some
small degree that man.
He makes her his own.
And so this is part of the reason that scripture so vehemently
condemns promiscuity and sexual sin, because sexual sin is indeed different in
kind from other sins.
Now, for men it doesn't really have these consequences because there's nothing
from the female body entering you during sex.
That's not how God designed it.
There's a reason God describes women as a field, and men are
the ones sowing the seed.
The field doesn't really change the farmer.
The farmer changes the field.
That is how God designed it, that is how God wants it
to work.
Because the wife becomes one flesh with her husband, she becomes his.
And so as Christians, we have to address this because this is
something that our culture does not want to accept, does not want
to teach.
Because if you teach this, if you speak on these actual consequences,
then women are going to be hesitant to be promiscuous.
Of course there are there are other psychological consequences too.
We know that there's essentially not quite exponential, but somewhere between exponential
and linear decline in the success of marriages as you increase the
number of sexual partners of the wife.
Not the husband, but the wife.
Because the number of sexual partners a woman has is directly related
to her ability to pair bond.
And so a woman who has had many sexual partners will not
be able to pairbond.
And if she cannot pair bond, the marriage is not going to
succeed. Are there exceptions?
Some few.
But you're playing the odds, and the odds are not in your
favor. And so that right there is why so many Christians and
others do not want to recognize this reality, because this is a
temporal consequence of sin.
And it is a permanent consequence of sin, permanent in the sense
that in this life it cannot be fixed, it cannot be changed.
These women are permanently damaged because of their past actions, and there
is nothing we can do to change that.
They are going to have less of an ability to pair bond,
their children are going to be less related to their supposed fathers.
This is simply the reality, the biological reality of how God made
women. And so we have to deal with that.
If we just obeyed God, if we listened to what he says
in Scripture, if we were faithful to what he commands, none of
this would be a problem.
This would be great.
This is a good thing.
This helps build families.
This helps build marriages.
This creates a stable society.
But when we live in a society that is an open rebellion
against the things that God says are good, against the things that
God commands us to do, this is damning.
This destroys people.
And we want to be able to say, speaking as the the
general generic sort of Christian, they want to be able to say,
Well, if you just believe in Jesus, all your problems will go
away. It's a sort it's a sort of therapeutic gospel, and it's
false. All your problems will not go away.
That is not what God promises.
Your eternal problems will go away because you don't go to hell.
That's certainly important.
That is the most important thing, but the temporal consequences are real
and they remain.
You are not going to be cured of the STIs you've acquired
through a libertine lifestyle.
You are not going to have all the foreign DNA removed from
your body if you're a woman or incidentally a homosexual male, if
you become a Christian.
These things remain, these consequences remain.
Yes, the eternal punishment for the actions that led to the temporal
consequences, those eternal consequences are removed.
But the temporal ones are not.
And we do a great disservice to the younger generations, particularly parents
and grandparents, do a great disservice to their children and grandchildren, when
they do not tell them these things.
Because lying to them about them is one thing, yes, that's sin
certainly sinful, and that's a problem.
You are derelict in your duty, but failing to teach them these
things is also sinful.
Because you are to train up a child in the way he
should go.
Because that promise of God that when he is old he will
not depart from it doesn't apply if you don't do the train
up a child in the way he should go part.
The basic takeaway from this is that there are very real
Biological and psychological consequences of sex, particularly for women, and the consequences
are temporally permanent.
And so Christians need to recognize this and teach future generations these
truths so that they can at least have the information necessary, maybe
to make better decisions, than the last handful of generations with regard
to these matters.
Because things are certainly now not trending upward, because we continue to
lie to the younger generations about the very real consequences of these
lifestyles that are supposedly consequence free.
I'm sure that there are a lot of people listening right now
who are shaking your heads in disbelief.
It sounds like a completely insane theory.
We're gonna put a number of links in the show notes.
You can just Google microchimerism as in chimera.
That's is literally what we're talking about.
We're talking about small scale chimeric changes.
It sounds insane.
It sounds fancible, it sounds like sci-fi.
It sounds certainly sexist because here's two men saying women will be
screwed up if you sleep around and men are not affected to
the same degree.
Everything about what Cory has just said is blasphemy against the spirit
of this age.
That's part of why we're talking about it.
I would guess that most of you have probably never heard about
this before.
Or maybe if you've heard about it, you haven't thought about the
consequences that it has for yourself and for your spouse, for your
children. Think about what Corey's just said in terms of the two
different ways to approach God's order.
Yeah, we talk a lot on Stone Choir about God ordered things
in such a way.
So God says do this, and then we can either obey him
or we can disobey him.
And it can go either way.
You can you can do whatever you want.
God rarely intervenes and prevents someone from disobeying him.
That happens sometimes.
it's part of the point of this episode.
God does intervene.
But most of the time, if you want to go off and
sin, it's gonna happen.
And then you're gonna suffer the consequences.
But the point of this part of the episode is that
an orderly marriage where there's a union of one man and one
woman in matrimony, the one flesh union where they're both virgins coming
in. Think about the consequences of microchimerism in that yeah, Corey described
it, but I just want to reiterate to emphasize it's a fork
in the road.
On one hand, if you obey God, you the husband with your
virgin wife, every time you lie down together, she becomes more yours.
You become more one.
It's not just a temporal one until you're done.
She becomes more you, more yours every single time, your entire life.
By the end of your life, she was far more yours than
when you took her hand in marriage.
That's a blessing from God.
That's absolutely a blessing.
And when you're not using contraception, more often than not, God is
going to bless your physical union with with children, with child after
child. And as Corey described, what happens when there's a baby in
the mother's womb?
The placental barrier is not an absolute barrier against the sharing of
DNA. And just as in the case with the spermatozoa, I want
to make explicit, we're not saying that the sperm somehow gets into
the cerebrospinal fluid.
However, the DNA does.
Not in every case, but the more The more times that a
woman has a man inside her, the more chances there are for
that foreign DNA to become a part of her body.
And because of the circulatory system, it just floats around.
There's no way of knowing or predicting where it's going to settle.
Now, they've found in most of the organs in the body at
various times they have discovered male DNA inside women.
And it's the DNA, it's not it's not just cells, it's subparts
of cells.
It's the DNA which then propagate for decades.
There was one case that I read about whereas a ninety-four year
old woman had a substantial amount of male DNA in whatever part
of her body that they were introspecting.
Now, obviously if she had had children, that would have been decades
and decades prior.
So it's not just DNA floated around and then eventually got disposed
of. It becomes a part of the woman's body and her own
body perpetuates that foreign DNA as its own, she becomes less herself
and more the man with whom she has had sex.
And so when you're properly ordering these things, that man is your
husband. Every time you have sex, there's more of him in you
remaining. Every time you have a child, that child becomes a part
of you.
You know, that's not just a metaphor.
Mothers talk about their children being a part of them.
We now We now know scientifically, you know, it's the scientific part
is certainly less important than the metaphysical spiritual part of a child
being of the mother, but it's also physically real.
The more children that she has, the more of their DNA is
in her.
And the children's DNA propagates as well.
The firstborn will propagate his or her DNA to subsequent offspring.
So that the children will be even more closely related.
And
this is a blessing.
Like this is a beautiful thing.
As Corey said, this is how God designed all this to work.
That is absolutely a beautiful miracle for a family to be so
closely united that they're all fundamentally of the father by virtue of
that union.
That's incredible.
And on the flip side, you have the girl who whores, the
girl who chases after man after man, and does the same things
except in a disordered fashion.
The more times that happens, the more disjoint her own insides become,
the more separate people she has in tiny pieces in her.
And as Corey mentioned, I want to say this explicitly: the more
times that a girl has had sex with different men, the greater
the likelihood and the greater degree that any offspring you have with
her your with her will not be your own, not to the
same degree as if she were a virgin.
Yes, they'll mostly come from your DNA, but some of the DNA
in your children of a girl who has been whoring will be
the other men.
They will leave their mark on her and it will be in
your children.
And we see examples sometimes where that may actually have been the
case. You know, when you see a twin twins where one is
black and the other is white from the same biological parents, and
everyone's like, Oh, it's a miracle race isn't real.
Well, I race is real.
I would bet a large amount of folding money that that woman
in that particular example had had sex with an African American and
his DNA was hanging out enough to change her the skin color
of one of the children.
These have real consequences.
As Corey said, they have psychological consequences too, particularly because some of
this does literally get into the brain.
And we're not just talking about DNA floating around in this in
the fluid.
It literally gets into these cells, which then replicate.
And so the brain of a woman in some small part is
replaced by the brain of whichever man has been inside her.
If it's your wife, that's a blessing.
If it's random men, that's absolutely a curse.
It's horrifying.
And so part of the reason that we broke our general rule
with this episode of trying to avoid subjects that you know you
wouldn't be able to listen to with your kids is that this
is so important for you to share with your kids in whatever
manner is suitable.
They don't need to listen to this.
They need to hear from you.
Don't ever have sex with anyone who is not your spouse.
Ever. One man, one woman, forever.
Any deviation from that makes things exponentially worse.
And to the point of the temporal consequences, it's permanent.
There's no undo for this.
There's forgiveness, but there's no undue.
it's fundamentally the same as a man or a woman deciding that
they're transsexual and that they need to mutilate their body to be
the other sex.
So men will chop off their genitals, women will chop off their
breasts. If on the rare occasions when those people repent and return
to Christ, their body parts don't grow back, once you mutilate your
body, once you do this physical harm, that is an obvious punishment
for the sin you're committing.
There's no undo.
God will fix you in the resurrection.
To what degree we don't know.
We don't know what our perfect resurrected bodies are going to be
like, except that they'll be ours.
But we do know that in That until you die, you're gonna
be the way you are.
Whatever you damage stays that way.
That is a big deal.
And the reason that we want to talk about this is that
don't do the crime and you won't face the punishment.
See, when we talk about temporal consequences, you know, in the case
of David and Bathsheba and Uriah and Nathan, when Nathan came to
David and said to him what God had proclaimed that his child
would die, there wasn't a direct connection between his action and the
child dying.
The child died as a punishment against David.
However, in these other cases, it's much more obvious what the connection
is. If you're a man who thinks so you're a woman and
you chop off your penis, what's the punishment for that?
It worked.
That's the punishment.
It worked.
When we sin against our own bodies it works.
God doesn't need to have some other separate punishment to just be
delivered from the sky, not discounting at all that that will happen.
We know for a fact it happened to Sodom and Gomorrah.
But the immediate effect is what is described at the end of
Romans 1.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions, for their
women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and
the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed
with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and
receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
That's explicitly a temporal punishment.
And it wasn't fireballs from the sky, it was STDs.
It was corruption of the flesh as a direct consequence of the
flesh being used for corrupt purposes.
So when we're talking today about temporal consequences in opposition to a
deistic God, this is why.
Satan wants us to believe Like if you want to believe in
God the creator, fine, that's fine.
But he doesn't do anything.
He's not really watching.
You know, maybe there's a judgment day someday, but you can live
your life however you want, and there'll be no consequences.
And oh, Jesus died for everything and you're saved, and that's great.
Don't worry about it.
The reality is very different.
The God of Scripture says: when you sin against him, you may
well face consequences.
He doesn't promise, again, there will be a one-to-one relationship, but he
promises that there is a due penalty for those sins.
And if you receive it, you can't do anything but confess.
And so
one of the things that's things that's happened recently in Lutheranism in
the last few years, there was a blow-up not long ago related
to the claim online that men preferred debt-free virgins without tattoos.
Now Now, this is a true claim.
This is a moral claim.
It is what some would call a judgmental claim.
And that's that's the root of this.
That's the root of the antinomian spirit within so much of Christianity
today. When a man says I would prefer to marry a girl
who is debt free, she's a virgin and she doesn't have tattoos,
the immediate response from the antinomian is shrieking in rage and terror.
How dare you judge someone for their past actions?
She confessed, she repented, God forgives her, you must do the same.
And that's a complete sleight of hand because that's not at all
what's being talked about.
If you have a girl who has $200,000 in debt, who has
slept with 30 men, and who's covered in tattoos, she She's going
to be a worse wife.
Absolutely, period.
She's going to be a worse wife.
Christians should be able to say that because it's plainly obvious.
If she's 200 grand in debt or any amount of debt, what
is that going to do to your family finances?
Well now you're a debt slave for the bad decisions of her
father before you even met her.
If she's a whore, you now are going to have children with
a woman who's not going to be able to properly bond with
you, and your kids won't be related to you, not to the
same degree as if she were actually yours.
And tattoos are self-loathing.
When a girl is covered in tattoos, she's saying I hate myself.
Usually they go hand in hand because she's so messed up from
the other bad choices that she has left herself in such a
state that even when she turns to God, pray that every single
one of them would, would repent of those sins, would return to
the flock and would stop doing those things.
The point of this is that the temporal consequences remain.
She can be forgiven by God for all those things.
She's still $200,000 in debt.
She still has a body riddled with other men's DNA.
She still has a body that's been defaced in opposition to how
God made her flesh.
And so when you as a man are looking at two perspective
mates, you must choose the one who is going to be a
better choice for you.
That's a matter of wisdom.
Now, part of the problem that we have today is that so
many people are screwed up, so many people have sinned so grievously
that it's almost impossible to find a girl that doesn't have a
body count.
That's consequential.
And
there's a small way in which the people who say we have
to just forgive her and move on are not entirely wrong.
And that is this one narrow point.
As a generation where virtually every girl has done these things, the
only way to perpetuate the human race is for some of them
to get married and to have kids.
And maybe have a broken generation or two, but then if they're
faithful, you can put things back together.
But if you as a man have a choice between one type
of girl and the other, you only have one choice.
You should never choose the girl who has done this sort of
harm to herself.
Because it's not a question of you holding her past sins against
her. And that's a crucial point here.
It's not saying Jesus forgave her, but I'm not going to.
Jesus forgives her in eternity.
You can tell that Jesus hasn't lifted the penalty for her temporal
sins because she's still stuck with them.
She's still riddled with another man's DNA and covered in tattoos and
two hundred thousand dollars in debt.
If Jesus had forgiven those in the sense that they mean that
you care about, they would all vanish.
She would go back to being a virgin.
She would go back to being, you know You know, the sixteen
year old girl in her under her father's roof before all those
bad choices were made.
So when Christians try to set soteriology of Jesus' relationship
to us and forgiving our sins
against what we have to live with in this life, it's a
false dichotomy, and it's one that ultimately will lead to destruction.
Because as Corey says, if if you if you forgive all those
sins, if you fall in love with her madly and you want
to marry the the girl who has all those problems, you're going
to live with the consequences of that.
She will have more mental problems.
She absolutely will.
She will not love you as much as a girl who never
did those things because she biologically can't.
I think that's the key takeaway from that one aspect of it.
A girl who has had sex with multiple men literally cannot love
her husband as much as one who hasn't.
It's a fact.
The we'll have links in the show notes to demonstrate this.
It sounds unforgiving, it sounds unchristian, it sounds like we're trying to
set science in all this new stuff in opposition to what Scripture
says. The point we're making is that Scripture says what we say.
Scripture says that there's a temporal punishment for sins.
And sometimes you can't see it.
Sometimes it doesn't happen.
Sometimes you don't wouldn't know about it.
You certainly can't see microchimerism.
You can meet a girl who will lie about her body count
and say she's a virgin or say, you know, one or two
guys, you know, oh well that's not too bad.
You can't see the consequences, but they're there.
And so
like we talked about in the last couple episodes, the reason for
sharing these things is not even so much for the guys who
are listening to try to find a wife, although it's certainly for
you. It's really in large part for you if you're going to
find a wife and then have kids or the parents and then
the audience.
Make sure that your kids don't make any of these mistakes to
begin with.
And obviously that's impossible to do perfectly, but warn them.
Tell your daughters every man you sleep with becomes a part of
you forever.
And when someday you decide you want to settle down and give
your husband children, they won't be his.
Most girls are gonna find that pretty horrifying.
Some of the girls who are listening right now probably find that
pretty horrifying.
I can assure you the men who hear it, including myself, find
it horrifying.
That's messed up.
Why? Because it's not how God designed things.
God designed things where one man and one woman come together and
that's it.
And the propagation within that family unit is a beautiful wholesome thing.
We've created the opposite with our disobedience and we can't paper over
the consequences of that.
So we're gonna have to do the best we can with this
generation and pray that the next generation will heed the warning of
our own, to heed the warning of, hey, don't do all these
stupid things that we've done because they're destructive.
Not only does scripture say it, but if you're dumb enough to
need science to tell you too, we got both now.
We can absolutely prove that you're destroying your life by doing these
things. So, whatever reason is good enough for you not to do
them, go with it.
It should be God's obedience, and that's the point.
The reason we talk about God says and when we don't do
we get the consequences is that that's what God says.
If you just obey God and you don't know anything about science,
you don't know anything about how any of this stuff works, it
doesn't matter.
The obedient person who serves God faithfully will simply never face these
consequences. That is a blessing, and that is what we should be
sharing with our children in future generations.
What we're dealing with here, really when we speak on the issue
of temporal consequences and more so those who more or less reject
temporal consequences, is Gnosticism.
It's an ancient heresy that continually crops up in the church, and
there are some who will say that
Christians are paranoid about Gnosticism, at least certain Christians, and they see
it everywhere.
The problem is that it is everywhere, and that it constantly crops
up. It is something that we have been fighting in the church
for millennia.
Very actively, certainly for centuries, it comes in ebb and flow.
Sometimes it is a very strong opponent to the church, sometimes it's
weaker. Today it's very strong.
In our society, we have a very weird relationship to the body,
to the flesh, because there's a very strong strain of transhumanism in
modern thought, the idea that we can transcend this mortal coil and
become something greater, whether it is through
hallucinogens, some try that route, or body modification, which is to say
perhaps cybernetics, or genetic engineering, whatever it is, there's this belief that
we can transcend all Our mere flesh.
And then on the other hand, there are those who totally deny
the flesh and focus instead on the spirit, and think, well, the
flesh doesn't matter.
Ultimately, we're a spirit, and so what happens to the flesh is
irrelevant. And that is part of some forms of ancient paganism, particularly
the Greek paganism, to some degree the Romans.
There's a bit of it in Hinduism and other places, certainly the
you know, escape from samsara, things like that, but
Gnosticism
tells you to deny the reality of the flesh, and that is
what underlies those who argue
against temporal consequences for sin For sin.
What they're ultimately saying is that it's the spirit alone that matters,
and the flesh isn't real, because as soon as you are converted,
as soon as you believe in Christ, as soon as you have
faith, well, your your spirit is now right with God, and so
the flesh, well it's that's irrelevant.
that's just something you have for a time and no, that's not
what Scripture says.
That's not what God made.
You are body and soul.
You are not soul riding around in body.
You are not body that happens to have a soul.
You are soul and body, body and soul.
You are both of those as a human being.
If you lose either of those, you're incomplete.
And so the destruction of the flesh, of course, yes, is one
thing you have.
Christ says, Don't be afraid of those who can kill your body,
rather fear God alone who can destroy both body and soul in
hell? But
those are both real.
That's why they're both mentioned there.
Because both the body and the soul can be destroyed.
And note what it says about hell.
Body and soul.
Those in hell are still body and soul because that is what
it means to be a human being.
And so when you deny the reality of temporal consequences, when you
deny the reality of biology, whatever it happens to be, whether you
deny that microchimerism happens, whether you deny that there are psychological consequences,
in this case with a biological basis for women who are promiscuous,
or you deny the reality of the sexes, you deny the reality
of race, whatever it happens to be, whichever one of these biological
truths you deny, ultimately what you are doing is rejecting the reality
of the flesh and telling God that he's wrong and know I'm
just a spirit and this flesh is just something you gave me
for a time and it really doesn't matter.
That is not what it means to be a human being.
That is not what Scripture teaches, that is not what Christians are
permitted to hold or must hold.
Christians must hold that the flesh is real, both the flesh and
the spirit.
As I've mentioned before, when this topic has arisen, I am deliberately
ignoring dualism versus trialism.
I hold to the latter.
That's not the discussion right now.
You are body and soul.
You have to affirm, as a Christian, the reality of both.
And the flesh comes with very real consequences in time when you
abuse the flesh, or when you suffer something, because of course it's
not always abuse.
If you lose a limb, having faith in Christ does not regrow
the limb, and you may have lost that due to no error
on your part.
Because sin does not have consequences just for the sinner.
Sin has consequences for everyone around the sinner.
Sin has consequences for creation.
Creation fell because Adam sinned.
Everything was subjected to futility because of Adam's sin.
Your pets die because Adam sin, your pets die because you sin.
Sin has very real consequences here in time.
It will also have consequences in eternity if you do not believe
in Christ.
But the consequences in time are not removed
simply because you have faith.
They will be removed in eternity, because you will be perfect.
But they are not removed in time.
And to deny that is to become a Gnostic, and a Christian
cannot be a Gnostic, because Gnosticism is a rejection of Scripture, it
is a rejection of God's truth, and it is also rejection of
what it means to be human.
It is a rejection of our nature and our essence, which of
course is again a rejection of God, because rejecting the creation is
rejecting the creator.
And so that is why we keep bringing up these sorts of
topics. Because there are Christians who stumble into these heresies because they
listen to the world and they don't pay attention.
They don't assess, they don't look critically at what it is they're
being told to believe, and so they stumble into heretical position.
Now maybe felicitous inconsistency will save them.
Maybe they don't really ultimately in their heart of hearts believe these
lies they profess.
Maybe they trust in Christ alone.
But that isn't the position that you want to take before the
judgment throne.
You want to hold to a true confession that doesn't have all
these little lies attached to it.
You don't want to have to rely on, well, someone lied to
me and I was deceived, and that's not an excuse.
Certainly it is better to have been deceived and believed something false
than it is to willfully believe something false, but ignorance is not
an excuse.
The pagans who lived in deepest darkest Africa millennia ago, and never
heard the gospel, did not therefore have an excuse.
Because God's law is written on the human heart, and there are
very real consequences in time for the individual and generationally for that
person's progeny when that man sins.
So do not think that as a Christian
you can just say, Well I believe in Christ, and therefore all
these other things are irrelevant.
That is not how it works.
Belief in Christ is the most important thing, yes.
But all of the other truths flow from that, because if you
believe in God, if you believe in Christ, if you believe in
this ultimate ground of reality and truth, then you must believe everything
else about Him.
Not just that He gave His only begotten Son to die for
you, that he raised him again from the dead, that you are
covered in his blood, that you are made whole in Christ, that
you're forgiven.
Because there are other truths about God, he reveals them in nature,
he reveals them in scripture, and as Christians we are beholden to
believe in those things.
Because to believe otherwise is to believe something false about God at
best, and at worst it is to accuse God of lying.
And if you accuse God of lying, things don't get better from
there. You will eventually apostatize.
That is the end of that row.
That is the broad path.
And so all of these truths about God that we keep mentioning
in these episodes, the reason they are important, as we have said
so many times, they are not the core of the faith.
That's not the point.
The point is if you believe a lie, if you believe any
lie, because Satan's goal is to get you to believe any lie.
He just wants an opening somewhere.
It doesn't matter.
He doesn't need you to open the front door.
Just open the back window.
He'll happily climb in.
If you believe a lie, then you will eventually be faced with
a choice.
And that choice will be accepting you believed the lie, rejecting it
and believing the truth, which is what we are calling you to
do, or
you can refuse to accept that you believed a lie because it's
uncomfortable to have to admit that, and you can double down, and
you'll double down by believing another lie, and another lie, and another
lie, and it never ends, because as we've said many times, there's
no floor, it can always get worse.
And so yes, there are temporal consequences of sin.
Yes, those stick with you.
Yes, those will not go away in this life in many cases.
But if you continue sinning, it will continue getting worse.
And so stop.
Turn from your sins, repent, and live the best life you can,
even with the consequences of your past sin.
If you don't accept that those consequences are real, you will forever
be lying about the nature of reality, the nature of your own
flesh, and the nature of God.
That is not how you have a right relationship with God.
You have a right relationship with God by accepting His truth, accepting
the consequences of your past errors, and attempting to live the best
life you can going forward with what God has given you in
light of both God's gifts and the consequences of your actions.
The Christian life is not a life of perfection.
It is a life of repentance and yes, attempting to do better.
That is part of the Christian life.
You do have good works, because good works flow from a living
faith. But it's not perfection.
You won't be perfect in this life, those temporal consequences do remain.
As a Christian, affirm the truth and move forward.
I want to close with a brief story that's recounting uh Issues
etcetera episode from twenty nineteen.
As I was listening to it back when I used to still
listen to issues and thought that Todd was a decent guy.
This particular episode that I'm gonna recount briefly is where I initially
had the realization of what we're describing today.
The episode was with a woman who at the age of sixteen
in nineteen seventy three, got knocked up by her boyfriend.
She hid it from her family, her Lutheran family, until she began
showing. One day her mother realized she was pregnant, took her straight
to the doctor, uh it was a family doctor who was also
Lutheran I don't remember if it's a Lutheran hospital, but pretty close.
He was very gruff with her.
He told the mother point blank she can't keep it.
Uh they had ten kids at home and so he said you're
not gonna be able to you're not gonna be equipped to handle
this child as well.
She agreed and so
the sixteen year old girl, you know, didn't have any input.
The decision was made to give the child up for adoption through
Lutheran child and family services are the precursor to it.
She received no prenatal care.
She basically just went on with her life.
She was not taken out of school.
Uh the law had been changed, so they weren't able to expel
her either.
So she attended school every day, pregnant as a teenager, unwed.
Uh her boyfriend skipped.
He wanted nothing to do with it.
So she was on her own.
She went into labor at school, she came home, told her mom
she was having contractions.
When dad got home he drove her to the hospital and she
was basically on her own.
And the way she described the delivery was that they wheeled her
in, they put up a curtain at her midsection.
She wasn't able to see anything.
She delivered the baby.
She never even knew if it was a boy or a girl.
She never got to hold it, uh never got to see it
at all.
She literally gave birth and then it the baby vanished.
And then she went home.
She recuperated and she went back to school and it was like
it never happened.
And part of the reason that she was telling the story was
that she described how not long after she met the nice Lutheran
boy and they got married and started a family and had a
couple other kids.
She never told anyone that she had had this child this child
at sixteen.
She did learn a few days after the birth that it was
a boy, so she knew it was a boy and that was
it. And she had been told that I believe that they would
go the child would be adopted by a Lutheran family.
family and that was that was the extent of it, but she
never knew anything beyond that.
Fast forward to you know recent memory, she got on twenty three
and me because she had Crohn's disease, one of her daughters had
Crohn's disease, which is a heritable disease, and so she was curious.
She found her son and so it connected them.
And you know, she was shocked and terrified and didn't know what
to do, but I don't know if excited was the right word.
It was you know, it was it was like free fall, she
didn't know what to feel.
But she had described her life before that as being one of
complete numbness.
She described how when she gave birth to her children in her
marriage, it didn't have the same type of joy that
it would have had if not for her first child.
And until she did the 23 in me, she never told her
husband. She never told her family.
Her and her parents parents were the only people who knew that
she had ever been pregnant, you know, in in her circle of
friends. And so after she met her son, who at this point
was I think forty five years old, he was an attorney, had
five kids of his own, he was successful and happy and Lutheran
and so yeah, it was it was a good reunion, but it
was still very difficult for her and you know, she talked to
her f her husband and her kids and everyone was happy about
it. But one of the points of the episode as she recounted
all these various facts was her describing her own suffering and emptiness
from having given birth to a child and then having the child
vanish, you know, through adoption.
And she said that, you know, her the child whom she gave
up for adoption forgave her.
He understood why it had happened.
He said he agreed with her was the right thing to do
under the circumstances.
What struck me about hearing her describe the suffering and the numbness
and the the silent trauma of those events was that there was
literally only one difference between her second pregnancy and her first.
It was the same act of conception, it was the same gestational
process, it was the same type of birth, the only difference was
the moral circumstances surrounding with whom she had had sex.
In the first case it was a boyfriend in high school.
That was wrong.
That was disordered.
That was not to whom she had been given.
She gave herself away to someone inappropriately, sinfully.
The result of that coupling was that her entire life has been
scarred. And that was one of the things that she talked about.
She knew he was she was forgiven.
Everyone in her family and her life forgave her.
No one holds her morally culpable.
And yet, to this day, even after having been reunited with him
and all the rest, her entire life has been defined by the
numbness of a pregnancy outside of marriage, to the point that it
even had a small detriment on her bondage bonding with her subsequent
children. And what I realized as I was listening to that was
how profound that is that if her first child had been with
her husband, it would have been only joy.
It would have been 100% joy.
It was the single act of disobedience of having sex outside of
marriage and the resulting pregnancy that set a chain of events in
motion that were the temporal consequences of her sin.
She's forgiven.
She's confessed.
I'm not holding in her against her morally.
I'm not sitting in judgment.
That's not the point.
The point is that the suffering that she endured and continues to
endure, she still has psychological problems from it.
I would imagine this is a few years ago.
She's probably doing better now that she's reconciled with her her adopted
son. But the fact remains that she lost out on most of
her life as being the sort of life it would have been
by that one single act.
And that's the point of this whole episode.
All it takes is one deviation from God's commandments to potentially wreck
your entire life.
Now this is sort of basic parental advice for anyone.
You make one bad choice, it can ruin your life.
The reason that we're discussing it, this is even true among Christians.
It's even true with Jesus Christ and the forgiveness at the cross.
Even when you sin and you are forgiven and you confess it,
the sin may still harm you for the rest of your life.
And the only way to fix that is never to do it.
There is no undoe button.
There's no undo for her having slept with her boyfriend when she
was sixteen.
And she paid for the rest of her life for having done
that
Knowing that she was forgiven.
And I think that's one of the important parts of this is
that it's not psychologizing guilt and loss and separation, anxiety, and all
these psychological terms we throw around.
She was injured by her sin.
What should have been the most joyous day of her life became
the worst.
And the worst day of her life became the defining moment of
her life.
Even though she went on to have a good and happy life,
it wasn't as good and happy as if she had not done
that. And so I would ask everyone who's listening to remember that
that is the point of this.
It is not about sitting in judgment retroactively and say, well, you
did this and you did that and we need to we need
to
you. The point is that the only way to prevent these temporal
consequences for our sin is not to do them in the first
place. And the best bet, if you're not gonna simply believe God
and obey him, there's backup.
If you believe that God is active in this world, believe that
there are temporal consequences for your sin.
And even if you don't want to obey God for the sake
of being a faithful creature.
Perhaps if the if the curb there is you will only but
obey him because you don't want the consequences, that's fine.
You're still obeying God.
In the future, God will hopefully strengthen and preserve your faith to
the point that just obeying him for its own sake will be
enough. But the only way to prevent any of this harm, any
of this damage, is not to do the sin in the first
place. And we're in a generation that is so pervasively affected by
this and so many other sins that people want to be defensive
about their own past actions.
Christians need to get past that.
And they need to get past it in part by not relying
on the cross as a crutch.
That's not what it's there for.
We're comforted that we're forgiven, but we still need to be reminded
that there's punishment for evil in this life.
God built it that way.
God did both of those things.
And the cross is the most important thing, but no less important
in terms of shaping our lives can be God's will is revealed
to us in scripture And in some cases, things that are contrary
to nature, it's revealed in nature itself.
God has organized everything so that we have to go out of
our way to make things worse.
And one of the things we're trying to emphasize is believe God,
obey Him, and you won't make things worse.
To the contrary, if you do disobey God, if you do sin
either willfully or accidentally, and fall into these traps and these errors,
you may well receive the due punishment in your flesh that will
never go away.
And civilizationally, and as a church, both the left hand and the
right hand of Christ, we must acknowledge that there's punishment for sin.
God paid for everything on the cross.
The temporal punishments are only paid by those who have committed the
sins, and in some cases their family, and their friends, and their
neighborhoods, and their communities, and in some cases their very civilizations.
So this is a matter that affects all of us.
This is not about secret sins and it's not about retribution.
It's about making sure that we teach our children and we shape
those who still have a chance not to go down these paths
to tell them how bad it will get.
And sometimes how bad it will get is the best incentive to
obey God
and later on you realize what a blessing it is from God
to have these things revealed and to have people in a senior
position to warn you don't go there.
You will only make make things worse for yourself in a way
that will never go away until the resurrection.
So
if you listen with kids, or if you have kids, or if
you're going to have kids, talk to them about this.
This generation is a mess.
The next generation doesn't have to be.
That's with you.
That's with the parents.
If you have made these mistakes, if your kids are on the
path of making these mistakes, think about these consequences for the rest
of their lives.
Think about the ways that they you can help them avoid suffering
and create an environment in your home and in your church and
your community where we have these curves around these behaviors so that
they just don't happen.
It used to be that profligate sexual behavior was thoroughly frowned upon.
It was scorned.
It was despised by society.
We need to bring that back because when that's being maintained at
the societal level, you don't need people to even believe in God.
They just need to know that it's gonna hurt if they disobey
God, whether or not they believe in him or not.
Just believing that if I cross the line with these with these
things, I'm going to pay for it socially.
That will keep people from sinning, from doing evil.
That benefits everyone, most of all them.
Again, to rein in someone's sinful nature through a curb that says
if you act like a slut, you're going to be scorned and
shamed publicly and you're gonna have a terrible reputation, that should come
back. And the fact that that went away was a necessary precursor
for everything else.
So this is not about finger pointing or recrimination.
It's about preventing the evil from occurring in the first place.
Because only by preventing the evil from occurring can we avoid the
temporal consequences?
And let's not have no more reasons to nail Christ to the
cross. As faithful Christians, that should be our chief concern.
But as Christians living in this world, all of these things are
equal concerns.
We have to be faithful to God.
We have to obey Him.
Because what choice do we have?
He's told us these things for our benefit, and the more we
obey, the better things are.
I what's the downside?
God has given us all these blessings, let's receive them with thanksgiving
and share them with others.