The Generational Divide

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Cory J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. Remember, O Lord what has befallen us, look and see our disgrace. Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners. We have become orphans, fatherless. Our mothers are like widows. We must pay for the water we drink. The wood we get must be bought. Our pursuers are at our necks, we are weary, we are given no rest. We have given the hand to Egypt and to Assyria, to get bread enough. Our fathers sinned, and are no more, and we bear their iniquities. Slaves rule over us, there is none to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness. skin is hot as an oven, with the burning heat of famine.

1:30 Women are raped in Zion, young women in the towns of Judah. Princes are hung up by their hands, no respect is shown to the elders. Young men are compelled to grind at the mill, and boys stagger under loads of wood. The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased, our dancing has been turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head, woe to us, for we have sinned. For this our heart has become sick, for these things our eyes have grown dim, for Mount Zion, which lies desolate, jackals prowl over it, but you, O Lord, reign forever. Your throne endures to all generations. Why do you forget us forever? Why do you forsake us for so many days?

2:20 Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us. Today's episode of Stone Choir is a discussion around the idea of generations. That was uh opening reading from the end of Lamentations, discussing the generations that had been uh abandoned by God, cursed for their faithlessness. So we're talking today about what generations are, uh what they are in scripture, what they are just in in human life, and giving some specific modern examples of the generations that are extant today and how they're relevant to the problems that we face. Uh the so the first part we're gonna discuss script scripture.

3:09 The middle part we're going to talk about you know kind of the current generations and how generations work in society. And the end we're gonna specifically talk about the boomer question. We've had some people ask us to do an episode on on boomers in particular and it's an important subject. So we're going to talk about why they're you know, why why why the boomer hate? Why is one generation of all the living generations particularly singled out for criticism where when you look at the other generations, they're a mess too. And so we did some thinking and and some study and we're gonna talk today about why why there might be a difference there. So we're gonna begin with you know scripture and in the history

3:50 of the concept. Before we get into the the direct application of why would it matter if the elder generation of our day isn't living up to their responsibilities? But we're going to begin in scripture. When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be one hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of

4:33 renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things, and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. And so of course here in Genesis six we see really the first instance of an entirely pervasively wicked generation, because God wipes out everyone, except Noah and his immediate family with the flood. God doesn't wipe out part of the earth.

5:24 God doesn't wipe out only certain people. He wipes out an entire generation of man and starts over in this case. And so, of course, that is an explicit argument against those who say the flood was regional. The flood was not regional. It speaks of all the high mountains under heaven having the floodwaters above them. This was a worldwide flood. God wiped out everyone because of the wickedness of this generation. Of course with the adults, with those who would be considered under secular considerations guilty of their crimes, all of the children are also wicked away because this is not a generation that has no children. This is not a world populated only by individuals who are twenty five or thirty and up.

6:12 There are infants who are wiped away with the flood. This is all of humanity Humanity from the oldest however old he would have been in the antideluvian period, probably some hundreds of years, to the youngest day old infant washed away in the floodwaters. Because the sins of the fathers do indeed fall on the sons, and the children of wicked parents will in fact pay for the wickedness of their parents. Not always, of course, but generally yes. If your parents were wicked, you most likely will suffer for their wickedness. Now you will suffer more if you are also wicked, you add wickedness to wickedness, but the sins of the fathers do fall on the sons. That is simply the way things work. And just to start out, we could have, of course, started back

7:08 earlier in Genesis because of original sin. One of the core truths, one of the core doctrines of our faith, is that children do in some ways pay for, suffer for, the sins of their parents. Because original sin is inherited sin, it is ancestral sin, which is the term used in some translations in some languages original sin is sin that was committed by our first parents, that we inherit, and this we mean all of us who are born naturally of the union of man and woman. Christ, of course, born without original sin because he was not born from the union of man and woman, and so he was not born from sinful seed. That is why Christ was born without sin. We are born from the union of man and woman. We are all born in and with sin.

8:05 We all inherit that from our first parents. And so sin is a generational curse. There is the original sin, which is the sin we all inherit, and then there are other specific sins committed by previous generations in specific lines, and those who proceed from those lines will inherit to some degree the consequences of those sins. We see that in many ways. There are certain lines of people who are given over to certain kinds of sin. This does not mean that if you come from that line, you must necessarily commit that sin. No. But you may very well have a predisposition toward that sin. You may be more likely to engage in that sin, and that is a burden that you will bear because of being the progeny

8:57 of that line, because of the sin of your forbearers. And one of the best examples of this, really, one of the easiest for people to understand and immediately grasp would be if you have a lot of inbreeding in your family line, you are going to suffer very obvious consequences of that. Because there are consequences in the flesh of that behavior, of that sin, because of course it is a sin because it is prohibited by God, and there are very obvious consequences for it in our fallen world. But the the basic point is that sin does not fall only on the individual. Sin also falls on those around the individual and particularly on that man's family, on his children and grandchildren, great grandchildren.

9:48 That can continue to pursue the family as it were for many generations. Now, of course, if you are a child of sinful parents, sinful grandparents, great grandparents, it is incumbent on you to try to do the best with what you have been given. You are not to follow in the steps of your sinful forebears. Yes, you still have to honor them. The fourth commandment is still in play, we'll get into that more. But it is incumbent on you to do the best you can to turn around that family tradition as it were, to not follow in those sinful footsteps. And that's going to be a challenge, and we'll get into that in other parts of this episode. That is part of the reason that certain generations are viewed in a negative light, particularly by their

10:35 progeny, because of what those generations have placed as a burden on their children. I think Noah is such a good example because his family was saved for his sake. I mean he he was a faithful patriarch, so his wife and his children were faithful in obedience to him, but all of his friends, everyone else he had ever known his entire life, They were all killed in the flood. everyone he had ever known, except for his own immediate family, were slaughtered by God justly. And I think the reason that the flood is such an important example of God's judgment of generations, of groups collectively, is that although there was tremendous wickedness in that day, naturally some men were going to be more wicked than others.

11:25 Some men simply were doing more sin than others. They got up earlier in the morning. And so the idea that although there was a variability in the degree of their evil The punishment was the same as we've talked about in some past episodes. As men, we think, well, that's not fair. Why would why would they all get the same treatment when they didn't commit the same crime? Well, God judged the generation and he wiped them all out. And the only generation that he saved was Noah's immediate family. It's this is an episode that we're doing in part because we want to continue to whittle away at people's egalitarian enlightenment priors to believe that we are all individuals and everything that will ever happen

12:12 to us is a product of us as individuals when that's simply not scriptural. It's not Christian. So Corey said, You die because Adam ate the wrong piece of fruit, period. You inherited that evil. And it wouldn't have mattered if you lived a perfect life, you would still die because of what Adam did. He is your father, you inherit his evil. On top of it, we of course, that's just off to the races, you know, as as men, we know that Adam eating a piece of fruit six thousand years ago is by far the least of our problems. Nevertheless, that alone is sufficient for our death. And it was the reason that God had to send his only begotten Son to save us from all of that sin. The sin of history, the sin of our own personal action, all

12:58 of it must be overcome on the cross because nothing else can make up for it. So that is fundamentally you know what libertarians today call collectivism. You know if if you have ever gone near libertarian thought, collectivism is the worst thing imaginable. you'll be subject to any manner of insane belief if it protects you from the boogeyman of collectivism. Well what God did to Noah's generation was I mean, it's we don't really think about in terms of collectivism, but that's what it was. He killed 'em all. He wiped them all out. He dashed every baby on the rocks. The babies hadn't been doing as much evil as the old men, or the men who were in their prime as they were doing their evil. Nevertheless, they all ended up dead.

13:44 They all ended up at the bottom of the ocean. An ocean hadn't even been there before God raised up oceans from the deep and from the skies, specifically to kill everyone, and it was only his mercy and in recognition of the promise that had been made to Adam to fulfill the promise of the Messiah through his bloodline. So God had to preserve Noah so that he could keep his promise. And it's not God's hands being tied. God can't lie in the sense that whatever God says is true. But that is the way that he fulfilled it by preserving them even as the entire generation itself was punished. You touched on an important point there, and it ties back into the discussion of headship that we've gone over a number of times

14:26 in a number of episodes But when it comes down to it, the basic fact of reality is that you are going to have one of two heads. Originally, the head of humanity is of course Adam, ultimately God, because God is the head of Adam in the garden in his perfection. But Adam is the federal head of humanity, and so we are all contained in a sense in Adam. We all follow from Adam, we all flow from Adam. Adam is our federal head, and so Adam's actions are imputed to us. They actually are in a very real way our own. And you see this in scripture, for instance, when it speaks of the Levites tithing to Melchizedek because they were still in Abraham at the time. But in the case of humanity, in the fall, Adam chose to

15:30 have Satan as his head instead of God. And so for all of us who flow from Adam, Satan is now our federal head in our fallen state. The only way to get out of that fallen state is to have another federal head. In this case, Christ. Christ is your head if you are in Christ, which is to say if you have faith, if you are adopted into the family of God, you become a child of God, a son of God, and Christ is your head. And Christ being your head, you are now in Christ, you have his righteousness, instead of the wickedness of the old Adam. Because of course Adam also believed in the promise of the gospel, and so Adam himself is in Christ. But that's the point. You either have as your head Christ or Satan.

16:29 And that's the difference. You either have eternal life in Christ, with him as your head, or you have eternal death with Satan in the pit prepared for him and his fallen angels. And we really lose sight of that fact when we focus on individualism, on the individual, particularly in the modern egalitarian context. Because if you think of yourself simply as an individual, all of these things in Scripture seem very foreign. If I'm an individual, why does it matter what Adam did in the far distant past, what he did six thousand years ago. How does that affect me? I'm not Adam. I didn't do that. That's if you're an individual, you don't understand how this works. you are affected by Adam because you flow from Adam, because you

17:21 are in Adam, because you come from Adam. The same as you are affected by the things your father did, and his father did, and his father all the way back to Adam. You are not an individual. Now when I say that, of course, that's going to set some people's hair on fire, because they think that we're denying some sort of central truth or fundamental aspect of reality, but really to some degree what we're just doing is attacking an idol. When I say you aren't an individual, what I mean is that you are not the the libertarian or the modernist conception of an individual. You're not a standalone island. You are connected to a vast number of people. Yes, in your daily life you're connected to people in all of

18:11 the the ways that should immediately come to mind. Someone grows your food, someone made your clothing. Chances are you didn't do either of those Just right now, I could start naming things on my desk that were made by other people, because all of them were made by other people, except for the handwritten notes. I did happen to make those. I didn't make the paper or the pen that I used. But even more fundamentally than that, you are not an individual because you are the son or daughter of your mother and your father, and they are respectively son and daughter of their parents. And that goes all the way on and back. You are a collection of all of the people in your line. it may be that you know you have your eyes from a

19:01 great grandparent, and maybe someone who was alive at that time can see that person's eyes in you. And you start to notice more of this as you you get older in life. You'll start to see well that person has the same eyes as that person, or it's the same hair, or all these little things. Because you're not an individual. God didn't make us to be isolated individuals. That's not what we are. We are a species. We live in communities first and foremost and fundamentally as a family. And then from a family up to a clan or a tribe and then a nation, and eventually up to humanity as a whole. But we all descend from Adam, and so we are all one greater whole in that sense. Yes, we are divided today into smaller groups, and we know that.

19:57 Your immediate family is different in kind from the neighbor's immediate family. You have different duties to your brother by blood than you have to that neighbor. You still have duties to that neighbor, particularly because he is in fact a neighbor. But they're different in kind Different in kind because there's a different relationship there, because God designed us to live in these relationships, in these webs of relationships with other human beings. And so again, at risk of repeating myself ad nauseum, you are not an individual. You are a son or a daughter of your parents and grandparents and great grandparents. And it is important to keep that perspective, because if you don't have that perspective, one, you are going to fundamentally misunderstand who and

20:53 what you are, what God made you to be, but two, and in this case, perhaps more importantly, you are not going to understand Scripture. Because you are going to be looking at Scripture with alien eyes, and you will never understand what it is telling you. Because when you read through the Genesis narrative, when you read through the fall, you're going to think, why does this apply to me? Maybe it explains why the world is the way it is, but what effect does it have on me? I'm not in this story, you are in the story. Because you're in Adam, you're in Eve, you are contained in your first parents. That history is your history. What happens there flows down to you in time. And so this is a fundamental problem with the pre Reformation sects,

21:42 which is to say, Rome and the East primarily. They deny the reality of original sin. And if you deny the reality of original sin, you will never understand the atonement. You will never understand why it was necessary for Christ to die on the cross on the cross in order to save you and the rest of believing humanity. To atone for the entirety of creation, yes, but of course the benefit accrues only to those who have faith. That is the objective, the universal justification versus the subjective, the personal justification, the latter being applied to individuals. But if you don't understand original sin, if you don't understand the fullness of the consequences of original sin, then you are going to

22:31 miss the fullness of Christ's work. You are going to miss the nature of what He did on the cross. You are certainly going to miss the depth and the breadth of it, and there are Protestant groups that also do this, because they would limit the atonement to a tiny group of people, the elect. When in reality, that for which Christ atoned was not just the elect. He atoned for all of creation, because in Adam creation fell, because Adam was created as the head of creation. That is the purpose of man, that is the role of man. We are the head of creation. We are to represent God in creation. That's part of what it means to be the image of God. That's a more complicated topic that we may get to eventually.

23:22 But in being this representative of God in creation, in being the head of creation, what we do falls on creation, similar to what a father does falls on his children. And so in Adam the fullness of creation fell, and so in Christ, being the greater Adam, being the antitype, to Adam's type. In Christ, the fullness of creation, was redeemed. He atoned for everything. And so that is the fundamental important point that we need to understand as Christians, and why we cannot come to this looking at it through alien eyes of a modernist believing himself to be an individual. You have to look at these relationships at this the fullness of this reality, the totality of what is happening, in Adam all

24:16 fell. In Christ all is redeemed. That is the core of the Christian faith. And if you look at this scripture, if you look at these threads, with, as I've said, alien eyes, you're going to miss that. I'm not saying that you will necessarily be damned if you don't understand these things. Because of course you can still have faith in Christ, a saving faith in Christ, if you don't understand why modernist ideology with regard to individuals and collectivism, etc., is wrong. However, you are missing the fullness. You are not recognizing the true reality, the scope, and the scale of what Christ did for us in his life, death, and resurrection. And so you're missing the fullness of the faith. Which is one of the things for which we are arguing so

25:11 often on this podcast. We're not saying that if you don't get this right, that if you miss this particular thing, that if you misunderstand this, what have you, we're not saying you will not be a Christian, or that you are going to spend eternity in hell. You can very well be a Christian and get many of these things wrong. Plenty of Christians do. But you are missing out on the fullness of the faith. God wants to give you superabundant gifts. God wants to give you more than you are ready to receive. And if you close yourself off from that by ignoring the reality of what Scripture says, by filtering everything through this modernist false lens, then you are simply missing out on what you could be as

25:53 a Christian. Yes, of course, much of this will be cleared up in eternity, but why not start to realize these things here in time, to benefit from the things that God wants to give you? That's why we are addressing these topics. That's why we bring up these issues. Because we want you to have a fuller, more profound faith, not drinking from the thimble that is modern theology, but drinking from the deep well that is scripture, that is the fullness of God's truth, of all of the gifts that He wants to give you. I think one of the best examples of how that plays into the way God uses generations goes back to our episode on election. We spent the first half of that talking about how God used the propagation of the faith through time to bring some men to

26:48 faith and other men were did not receive the faith. That occurred generationally when we talked about how the Americas, North and South America America. You know, the men who came over on the land bridge, they did not propagate the faith. Wherever it was lost between Mount Ararat and the Tower of Abel and you know the when they came across through Alaska or wherever. We don't know when the Christian faith was lost, when they lost the knowledge of God, but we do know that it was lost. And we know that for hundreds of generations the men who lived in the Americas and also the men who lived in in sub Saharan Africa. You know, when as we said in that episode, once you get away from modern day Ethiopia and Sudan, right there on the coast,

27:34 there's no evidence that there was any Christianity, any faith of any kind in those parts of the world for thousands and thousands of years. And so those generations were all cursed by the faithlessness of their fathers, just as Noah's sons and their wives were saved by his faithfulness, they didn't necessarily do it. If they had had a different father, they would have been they would have died in the flood as well. And this is something that pops up in a a smaller degree, not to the degree of a generation, but in the the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when the angels came to Lot's house, after they realized how wicked the place was, and they saw with their own eyes as God has sent them, Their response was to say

28:17 to Lot, get your your wife, get your daughters, get your son-in-law, any if you have family here, you need to get him out of town tonight because we're going to destroy this place. And Lot went to his sons-in-law and said, Hey, God's gonna destroy this place, you better leave with me right now. They laughed at him. They thought he was joking. They didn't take him seriously. And so they stayed behind. Now I think that's an interesting example of when we're talking about generational guilt, because presumably his sons-in-law weren't the ones trying to rape the angels, and yet they still died in the conflagration that God sent because they were They were there. They were judged. They were destroyed for being there.

29:02 That doesn't sound fair. You know, all they had to do was not laugh at Lot. All they had to do was go with him, and they would have been saved too. His own wife looked over her shoulder. She looked back. She turned into a pillar of salt because they told them Leave. This place is is cursed. She left, but she looked over her shoulder, and that small amount of doubt cost her her life. So the reason that the example of Lot and his family and Sodom and Gomorrah are important, we're talking about generations, is that God collectively judges. Those that that entire area was incinerated, everything. Not just people, animals, plants, everything was completely incinerated. God said, this area in particular, I am ending.

29:48 And Lot's family could have been saved if they had obeyed God, but because they disobeyed in the smallest possible ways, because they didn't take it as serious as they could have, they too died. And so when we talk about generations, again, we're just trying to make the basic crucial fundamental point that judging a generation is what God does. Hundred and twenty generations in North and South America all went to hell. Why? Because their fathers were faithless generation after generation. And once you've lost the knowledge of God, everybody goes to hell. The only way that that can be undone is when someone else comes and brings the gospel, which was the the other half of that episode on election, is that it was only once Europeans went

30:36 into deepest darkest Africa, when they went into North and South America, that they brought the gospel to a place that for the first time in thirty five hundred years hadn't had it. And so for the very first time, all these generations that had belonged to Satan started Suddenly had the opportunity to hear the truth about God and to be saved by it. Part of the purpose of doing that election episode was to say that those generations of faithlessness were offset by, you know many centuries of faithfulness in Europe. When the Christian faith left where it was born in the Middle East, in the end, it basically only thrived in Europe. There were a couple small corners elsewhere that didn't amount to anything

31:21 in terms of propagating the faith. It was only in the places where generation after generation faithfulness to God resulted in doctrine being preserved and in some cases corrupted. You know, we're we're Lutherans. I think most people listening are probably at least some variation of post-Reformation. Things went wrong because there was not perfect faithfulness. We can never be perfectly faithful. And yet even at that, when those generations had preserved the faith, and then men started go getting on boats from Europe and traveling all around the world, what did they do? They brought the gospel to places where for generations it had never existed. And so for the first time, in the fulfillment of the

32:04 Great Commission, those Christian conquistadors and others who went to various parts of the world They came flying the flag and they came carrying the cross. And they conquered people and they subjugated them and they converted them. And you know, we talked in that episode as well, forcible conversion doesn't sound like something that Christians want to hear about, and yet the same story is is heard in Acts where a man would be baptized along with his whole household. That's a forcible conversion. The babies, the children, the slaves don't get a vote. If the man of the house says we are a Christian household now, it goes for everyone under his domain. And the same is true of kings. And so one faithful generation can turn back the clock, can undo

32:54 the damage caused by previous generations. But as long as you're just looking at things in terms of individualism, it's much harder to recognize what the fix is. Because yes, there is an aspect in which the fix is that each individual person needs to have the gospel brought to them, but at some point that doesn't necessarily scale. And that's not us, that's not me saying something negative about the power of God's word. We know from history how God propagated his word. And it wasn't simply individual missionaries going hat in hand and sharing the gospel. It was often done under flag and under sword. And that is how God chose to spread his word. Now we're not necessarily calling for that today, but it's an important

33:42 recognition that when God used those means, they were efficacious. We can't doubt the results. And so a faithful generation begets future faithful generations, just as an unfaithful generation will damn all generations after it, until someone else comes along and cleans up the mess. In the Americas and in Africa and in Asia Generation after generation, hellbound, hellbound, hellbound. Why? Because their inheritance from their fathers was not only original sin, but complete ignorance of the word of God. That's damning, all by itself. And so when a faithless generation comes along, it must be replaced. You need a generation of faithful men to undo the damage by bringing something that had been lost.

34:33 And so these conversations around individualism versus collectivism, however when you talk about it, they're fundamentally reaching the heart of the Christian faith, which is not individualist. Yes, I I have faith because God gave it to me personally. The Holy Spirit was placed in me. It wasn't placed over, you know, some zip code. However, I became a Christian because my dad was a Christian. My mom was a Christian. They made me a Christian. God made me a Christian through my parents. That generational bequeathing of the faith is how it works. And the reason that today we have faithless generations is that the inheritance from many of our own parents has not been one of Christianity. And that's part of the reason for doing this episode is

35:21 that it kind of a tie-in to last week's where we talked about kind of the sum of the small things that we can do to try to undo some of the damage that's been done. We need to recognize that there may be a generational discontinuity in the Christian life. If you were a new convert and you're listening or you know, if your parents were weak or whatever, if there was a lull in kind of the graph of of Christianity in your ancestry and you're back on the upswing Be consciously aware of that. Know that you are turning the tide, just as the tide has been turned many times before in many places, by a faithless generation being replaced by a faithful one. It's okay to be conscious about this stuff.

36:06 And in a situation like we're in today where civilization is literally on the line, it is imperative that we be aware of the fact that generational faithlessness is a death sentence to civilization, to everyone, to all future generations. If we lose the faith, all of our children for 120 generations after us will all go to hell. Unless God sends someone else to bring the gospel to them. But our task is to bring the gospel to them. It's not for that God will sort things out in his time, but if we are not a faithful generation, we have no reason to expect that our children and grandchildren will receive that. This is something that happens over and over in in Scripture. When Joshua died, it describes

36:56 his his death and his burial and it says and they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in the the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountains of Gash, and all the generations also were gathered to their fathers. And And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel, which is something that had happened in the previous generation with Moses, with the faithlessness of the Hebrew people, the Israelites, when they were brought out of Egypt, they immediately sinned against God, and so they wandered in the Zed Desert for forty years, specifically so that that entire generation could be judged and die. Not one of them was permitted into the promised land.

37:38 Moses was one of the last to die. He was able to go and see the land of milk and honey, and then God killed him on the spot. He said, You can you can see it, but you're never going to be there. Because he disobeyed. Moses disobeyed in a small way, but it was enough for him to be included in the generation that never received the inheritance that had been promised to them. That inheritance was passed on to their children to receive as the next generation of believers. And so when Joshua was was raised up, he began circumcision again. There'd been no circumcision in the desert. And so a faithless generation was replaced by a faithful one. And still when you know when Joshua died, the cycle happened again.

38:20 This is something that's always been a part of the faith and it's something that God continuously has to deal with us for. So when He operates against and for generations, that is something that is a part of the Christian faith. This stuff is it's intrinsic to how God operates in our lives, and we cannot ignore that. I think this is a good place to go over something that we actually haven't explicitly touched on yet in the podcast. And that is the the place of knowledge in the Christian faith, and what exactly we mean by knowledge when it comes to the Christian faith. And there are three different levels as it were when it comes to knowledge that are relevant for for belief. And those three levels are called notitia, ascensus, and fiducia, which just

39:11 Latin for basically the first two you can probably understand, notice and ascent, and the last one is the Latin word from which we get fiduciary, so trust. And so essentially, this is you have to take notice of the fact, assent to the fact, and then trust in it. In the case of the Christian faith, of course, that is the core tenets of the Christian faith, you have to not merely know of them, assent to them, you have to also trust in them. That is what it means to have faith in Christ. But if that knowledge is lost, that does mean that the faith is lost. If you don't know the content of the Christian faith, if that was not passed down to you by your forefathers, it's gone. You are not going to get it back.

40:01 Yes, we have frequently spoken on this podcast about natural revelation, but natural revelation does not reveal the gospel. That has to be written down, that has to be recorded in some way, that has to be transmitted from one generation to the next. And if you lose that, if you lose the scriptures, if you lose the gospel, you are not going to find it in nature, you are not going to get it back. It will have to be brought to you by some other people who did not lose it. And so we could just look at a quick example of this in the natural world. If you're making whiskey, let's say there are five steps. We're gonna go with five, it's more complicated than that, we'll simplify it. You have to grow barley, you have to malt the barley,

40:47 you have to grind it, you have to ferment it, and then you have to distill. That's how you make whiskey. Any one of those steps, you could lose the knowledge necessary to perform it. If you lose that knowledge, you're never going to make whiskey. You may make something else, but you will not make whiskey. Because you need that knowledge at each one of those steps in order to make the actual end product. And so if you forget how to grow barley, well you're not going to make whiskey, at least not barley based whiskey. If you forget how to malt, you're certainly not going to make malt whiskey. If you forget how to ferment, you're not going to have the starting product you need for the distillation process.

41:32 And so you need this knowledge to produce the desired end result. The same is true in the Christian faith. You need the knowledge of God, you need the knowledge of the gospel, you certainly need the knowledge of original sin and of sin generally, because if you don't have that, you're not going to think you need the gospel and you're never going to believe in it. But you need this knowledge in order to have faith. Faith is more than knowledge, as I said, three levels, the final being trust, which is actual living faith. But you need the other two upon which you build that faith. Because you have to know of the law, you have to know of the gospel, you have to assent to the truth of them, and then you have to believe in the gospel you have to

42:20 believe that Christ died for you, washed away your sins. And so the point here is that if the forefathers of a particular people, if a particular generation at some point in the past failed to pass down this knowledge, the children of that generation and the grandchildren and the great grandchildren will all suffer for that wickedness, because they will all be damned, because they will not have the knowledge necessary to have the faith. And so a prior generation, a wicked generation at some point in the past, can damn every generation that proceeds from it, unless some outside party comes in and re delivers the truth and transmits that knowledge that the wicked generation failed to transmit.

43:17 And we see that as with the whiskey example. This is very obviously something that can happen in reality, there are things that our ancestors in some distant past knew how to do that we don't really know how to do today, and we could very easily lose things that we know how to do today tomorrow. The faith is not different from these things that we see in the so-called secular world, at least not different in kind. Because it is still knowledge, and knowledge has to be transmitted. And if the knowledge is not transmitted, you can never achieve the end goal for which that knowledge is necessary. One last verse that I wanted to pull in just to establish the legitimacy of speaking of generations

44:08 as having properties comes from Jesus Himself. When the crowds were increasing, Jesus began to say say this generation is an evil generation, it seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it, except the sign of Jonah, for as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. Now, when Jesus said that, the disciples were present. There were obviously some living Jews in that day who received faith, who believed in him, and who were saved. And yet he said, this is an evil generation. Jesus did not meet misspeak when he said that. Jesus was describing accurately the generation of Jews in that day, and frankly, every generation since, because their inheritance was one of rejecting Christ,

44:56 which is why Christianity ended up leaving the Middle East and being eventually all but exterminated there. When we speak about generations, just as when we speak about races or when we speak about sexes, these are properties of the world, they're properties of creation. They're how God makes us. You know, I am born of a certain generation. Someone who's 40 years younger than me is clearly a different generation. That's the way it works. You're born, you live, you die. This is you know it's a recurring theme in scripture, it's a recurring theme in everything because it is the recurring theme of the universe. You know, we know from astronomy even stars have a birth, life, and death cycle. It's the way everything works.

45:47 God is immortal. Everything else comes and goes. And so a generation more generally kind of now moving away from scripture a little bit, a generation is just the current people who are living. And I think that's one of the important things to to deal with in this section is that historically it's always been understood that your generation is just whoever's alive. You know, the generation of Noah is It wasn't people between 25 and 54. You know, it wasn't the the key demo. It was everyone. Whoever's alive is the current generation. Jesus was referring to the same thing in his day when he was preaching. This is an evil generation. It was all the people who were alive. The former generation wasn't being spoken to.

46:30 The next generation wasn't being spoken to. So I think that generations are slightly distinct from some of the other categories that we've talked about in the past for for the reason that it's an inherent property not based on how you're begotten, but when you're begotten. So I think everybody knows at this point, if you believe me, I'm a white guy. If someone is a black guy, he might be my neighbor, but he's not my brother according to the flesh. I would hope that he would be my brother according to the faith. He may well be in my generation. If we were born in a similar time, if we had similar experiences in the more narrow modern idea of a generation, if we're roughly the same age with similar socioeconomic status, white guy and a

47:15 black guy, absolutely the same generation. Because we're alive at the same time, experiencing many of the same things. I think one of the things that white people really do kind of ridiculously coming coming from libs primarily is when when African Americans talk about having black culture, we try to say no, you don't. you're American. You have American culture. You don't have black culture. Well, A, that's false on its face, but B, they have their stuff and they want it. And if you want to make a value judgment about whether one culture is better than another, that's entirely legitimate. But it's not legitimate to say no, you don't have any culture at all. Because if I'm born at the same time as a black guy

47:58 and yet we have very different upbringings and very different experiences, which is usually the case, we're in overlapping generations, but there's not the familiarity of brotherhood that would be there if we had the same sort of upbringing. And so I think that's one of the things that makes discussion of generation today trickier is that it just happens by virtue of when you're born. And it used to be that when you were born didn't have it had a much broader impact than I think it does today because there was much more of a monoculture in the past. What I mean by that is that with the advent of mass media and then today almost micromedia. We moved away from being shaped by by our family and by

48:42 our faith and by our you know the nations that we lived in and became more and more shaped by pop culture, by culture that could be brought by a salesman selling you a book or a movie or a video game or whatever it is today. Something that can be brought in that you can say, yes, this is where I'm gonna spend my time and my energy and my focus on, can very easily become your own personal culture that you'll share with other people, you know, with similar interests. And so what's happened is that before mass media, before all of this stuff was so readily available, people pretty much were on the same page. And what's happened really in the last century or two is that we've begun more and more and more to bifurcate so that although

49:27 I was born at a certain time and I have some commonality with people born in my age, I had so many options available to me that what the books that I read, the movies that I watched, the you know summer camps that I went to, all those things that produce the particularity of my interests and in who I am today may be completely alien to someone else. And so although we may be from the same generation, it may not matter anymore. And I think one of the things that's worth thinking about is personally I think that's incredibly unhealthy. I think for so many people to be living in the same place at the same time and to have mutually alien experiences is fundamentally harmful because if somebody was born at the same time as

50:10 me, but I have nothing in common with them, except for maybe religion, but even that only goes so far. Like there's a lot to talk about in life besides religion. If all your experiences are alien to me, what are we gonna talk about? Like you're gonna talk about how weird your childhood was? Like it's at some point you have to have commonality, and so it's exciting to meet someone with similar interests with similar background because you feel that you're part of a mutual generation. What's changed is that those generations have been winnowed, so they're now kind of we call them subcultures really, but it's kind of it's like a generation doesn't have the same continuity that it used to. And that's I think it's something that's really hurt us as human

50:51 beings to to be chopped up in these bits and pieces based on distinct experiences that can be radically different from someone maybe even just living down the street because he was visiting different web forums and you, or because he played sports and you didn't, because you know, not everyone played sports anymore. Whatever the differences are, when you start charging people up to the point that they can be neighbors, they can be from the same blood, but they can have a fundamentally alien culture, it kind of breaks the generational cohesion that I think God has always wanted for us. I think for those of us who grew up in large cities we can see this even more distinctly. Because if you grew up in a a small town, you know,

51:31 five hundred people, fewer even, perhaps, there are going to be a lot of similarities simply because of the scale of things. You are going to have done fairly similar things during the summer in your childhood, you are going to have gone to the same places after school, etc. things like that. But if you grew up in a really big city, in my case, I grew up in LA, there are many, many different little subcultures here and there. And you're going to have that even within, say, your own high school. Granted, my high school was fairly large. I think my graduating class was over a thousand students. But you're going to be divided into these little groups and not really have a shared culture as would have been the case in

52:22 the past. Now we're not saying that everyone has to be conformist, as it were, and everyone have exactly the same preferences and the same hobbies, and no that's not the point. But the issue is if there's no overlap, then you're really living in a nation of aliens, everyone being alien from his neighbor and everyone else. If you don't have these things in common, then you don't have anything you share with your neighbor. And that makes him your neighbor by virtue only of proximity. Which, yes, that is the core sense of what it means to be a neighbor. A neighbor is the person next door. But in a functioning society, the person The person who is next door will also share many things with you.

53:14 You'll have the same religion. You'll have some of the same tastes, you'll have some of the same hobbies. You will be able to get along with and talk to this person about more than just what you did for an hour on Sunday. It's not to say that church is not important. Of course it is. It is among the most important things in life, but it is not the only important thing in life. And so we really need to think about what it is that we have had handed to us by previous generations and what we have continued to make our own. Because, yes, this fracturing of the culture, these microcultures, that are that were created in decades past, they were passed to us, but we've entrenched them, and we continue to engage in them, and we don't really cross these

54:03 little lines that we've built. And so you know the the Goths go over here, the jocks go over here, the the coffee culture goes over here. It's all these little groups of the various little hobbies that people have. And that's not how human beings are supposed to live. Yes, it's important to have your core group of friends, and that's fine. That's important, that's part of life, that's part of what it means to be a human being. But the fullness of what it means to be a human being is greater than that. And church can of course help with that, because just by the very nature of church you are going to have some crossing of these microcultural lines we'll call them. Because you're going to have people together on Sunday, preferably for more

54:49 than just an hour, but together on Sunday for at least an hour, who have different hobbies, who have taken very different paths in life, who have very different jobs, and it's important to have that mixing as it were in society. Because if you start to stratify and isolate and fracture your society down into these tiny groups, you no longer have a nation, you no longer even really have a culture. And that is what we see today. The US, as I've said before, really America, if I want to be more specific, the US is a number of nations. America is also to some degree not one fully cohesive nation because you have different subgroups, subnations really, within America, partly due to geography, because the US is vast by historical standards.

55:47 And of course, there are going to people who think, well, Rome, etc., were fairly large. Yes, of course. But Rome never contended to be one nation. Rome was an empire. An empire is a collection of nations, or a collection of countries under one central authority. America is a nation, but it is a nation that increasingly shares little in common with itself. Which is to say, again, we have a neighbor, but we don't necessarily share anything with him. We should be making an effort as Americans and also as Christians to actually have something in common with our neighbors, to share something with them more than simple proximity. Because God wants us to have more than what we have built for ourselves.

56:40 God didn't design us to spend all of our time in our own homes isolated, consuming media tailored to us and ignoring the greater world. That's not what it means to be a human being. We have created these little fractured worlds for ourselves that are mere shadows of what God clearly wanted for us, what He gave us. And so part of this is going to be that this generation is going to have to put in a lot of hard work in order to break what has become a cycle, an attempt to restore actual normalcy, what it means to be a human being living in society among other human beings. And that is going to be a challenge. Like I said, that is going to be hard work. None of this is going to be easy. Because by and large, we become accustomed to something that is totally

57:37 unnatural. And human beings are very good at becoming accustomed to things. We can adjust to or at least suffer through almost anything. Just look at prisoners of war. They can survive sometimes many years, sometimes more than a decade, in extremely harsh conditions because humans are very adaptable. That can be used for good or for ill. When it is used as resiliency, it is used to survive periods of stress and trial, that is good. When it is used to adjust to what we have today to a fundamental inversion of what society and culture should actually be, it is no longer good because we have misused it, we have misapplied it, we have used it toward wicked ends. That's not to say that it started out, used toward wicked ends,

58:33 because to some degree the younger members of Gen X and millennials and we'll get more into these lines in a little bit, but to some degree, we were born into a world where this was already the case. And so this was merely adapting to the world which was given to us. That's good to some degree because yes, you have to survive in the world that was handed to you by your parents and your grandparents. But that doesn't mean that you keep it the way that they made it if it is not good. And so part of our task is to reverse some of these things, to return to a more natural natural way of living to align ourselves with what God clearly wanted for humanity instead of what we have built in the last say hundred, hundred and fifty years

59:22 in the modern world. One of the things that changed about man's understanding of generations in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years, was that it went from being just those who were alive during a certain period to really being more about these smaller cohorts that today most of the discussion, pretty much all the discussion that you hear today around generations, like the baby boom generation, for example, That's a marketing term that was specifically designed. It's something that's used by marketers to figure out the purchasing cohort for preferences in a capitalist sense. Who wants to buy cruises and timeshares versus who wants to buy whatever else. You know, you have some people with a lot of money and

1:00:11 they have certain tastes. You have other people with less resources and different tastes. There tend to be generational breakdowns there. So let's call those the generations. And that's really where we are today. And that's where most of the conversation is around. So one of the reasons that you know, we're we're talking about this today, and we're going to end by specifically talking about baby boomers, was that if your view of what a generation is is shaped entirely by marketers, then yes, it would be absolutely unfair to say what Jesus said, that this is an evil generation. How could you say that? Like how, you know, if if I look at the sins of the baby boomers and say, well, this is bad and this is

1:00:50 bad, and they retort, as they always do, by saying, Well, what about what this generation does and this thing and this thing? They're not wrong. These things are regardless of whose sin is worse or who who has accumulated a greater amount of sins, there's something wrong with every generation, beyond any shadow of a doubt. So if the generations as as they're described today, you know, these these smaller generations, if it's really just a marketing cohort, then yeah, who cares? Why would you pick on the older people when the younger people have these different problems that are in some ways worse? And so I think it's important to understand that one of the things that we've lost by comprehending ourselves in terms of those marketing

1:01:37 cohorts is that if you think of all the living as sort of a a horizontal stack, you know, where you have the the oldest at the bottom and then the youngest at the top. If you think about everyone who's alive at a certain point in terms of uh continuity, it's very different than if if you turn think about it in terms of this Of this discontinuous marketing segmentation that we have. So, you know, if it used to be the generations of, you know, for example, fathers, children, grandchildren, those are generations too. that's something we all understand. And we're not trying to redefine it. But as people have been having kids older and older, it means that you're less and less likely to ever know your grandparents or certainly your

1:02:25 great grandparents. I'm sure there are many kids alive today who were born after their great grandparents were dead. That didn't used to be the case. Generations used to be closer together, you know, the father to son sort of generation Such that the living generation could very easily encompass four or even five generations. When we lose that, we're losing the sort of vertical continuity of family that going back to the first segment is so such a vital part of perpetuating not only faith but also culture in general. You know, one of the things that's terrible about the so-called modern family is that there's typically no extended family around. So when a couple, you know, they're thirty-three, thirty-four years old, they

1:03:10 have their first kid, we're the grandparents. Yeah, usually grandma might, you know, fly out for a couple months to help. And then she goes home and mom's by herself again. That's messed up. You know, we talked last week about how much I had moved around as a kid and hoping that as a culture will get away from doing that. Think about what that does for family formation when the older generations are nowhere to be found. Even if they exist, even you see them at Christmas or whatever and they send presents and you know we have FaceTime video and things, so you can have some kind of socialization, but it's nothing like having your mother and your aunts and your cousins and your grandmother all there to help care for you a new baby.

1:03:50 That's a fundamentally different thing. And so I think one of the things that we've lost by believing the modern marketer version of generations where you have these adversarial groups of purchasing cohorts, it turns us into these economic cogs and strips us of the vertical orientation that we have relative to each other when it comes to taking care of family. You know, Corey spent a lot of time emphasizing the family nature of generations, that's something that you lose when you just think about it in terms of demographics. Yeah, you can you can wrap data science around this stuff all you want, but in the end, it's fundamentally a question about do we have r relationships with older and younger generations in our own

1:04:39 families, and then more broadly. I can tell you one of the things that's really surprised me for the last few years, and one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode in particular is that a lot of guys I talked to are about half my age. And I'm thankful to talk to those guys so frequently because if I didn't hear them talking about their own lives, I would say the stupidest things imaginable about what their lives would be like or should be like or how they could do things differently. Because if I were just sitting resting on my own laurels from my experience growing up, you know, not that many years prior to them, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, I have pretty good common sense, I generally have some degree of wisdom in most things, and yet

1:05:26 my conclusions if I weren't talking to these younger men would be utterly retarded. I would be saying the stupidest, most pernicious things imaginable because I wouldn't have known what their experience was. I I would assume that well was a little bit different than mine, but it can't be that much different. I'm here to tell you, if you are not talking to young men and women in their teens and early 20s, you have no idea. And I say this specifically because if you're giving them advice and you're not first listening to them, you're going to give them terrible advice. I know this because I would be giving terrible advice. I would be making stupid inane comments all the time about things if I weren't hearing them and listening to them talk about what

1:06:10 they deal with. Because it's utterly alien to my experience in ways that I can't understand. And it's mutual alienation. They have no idea what it was like growing up in my generation. And that's something that's totally unnatural. The world is not supposed to be changing that rapidly. That's something we were talking about the last segment is that the duty of the elder generation is to prevent such chaotic change from occurring in the younger generations because it just tears everything apart. How can you possibly propagate wisdom of In a society when the guy who's 20 and the guy who's 40 and the guy who's 60 and the guy who's 80 all have such completely different experiences that if the 20-year-old asks the 60 or the 80-year-old or even

1:06:56 the 40-year-old, he's gonna get bad advice. He's gonna say, What do I do about girls these days? These old guys are gonna they're just gonna have a head full of rocks. They're whatever advice they have, even if it was good advice when they were kids, it's gonna be bad advice because they're not dealing I hate to say, but in the same context. You know, that's a weasel word that a lot of people abuse. But unless you're seeing and experiencing how much things have changed, you don't understand how much worse it is for the younger generations. And we've done that to them. We have given them a world that is on fire and they don't know any better. If young people knew the world that boomers had, there would be

1:07:38 a bloodbath. And I think that's part of the reason that there's a lot of boomer hate today is that when younger people see high school videos from the nineties and eighties, you know, film, they don't believe it's real. Whereas someone who's from that period, when they look at it, they think, well, that's high school. Of course that's what it looks like. And in some cases, you look at high school today and high school then School then, and an older person maybe looks at it and can't even tell the difference. But a younger person sees a world that they've never even known. That's the kind of alienation that's occurred because generations are not seeking to preserve sanity for their own children.

1:08:18 And so I hope that if you get nothing else from this episode, please consider actually talking to and listening to younger people and not not in some hippie oh we gotta learn from the children thing. A lot of times these guy these young guys have no idea how bad it is. So I listen to them and I I understand in some ways what they're saying better than they do. But if I weren't listening to them, I would have idiotic things to say about what their lives are like because I wouldn't know the specifics. They have the specifics, but they don't understand the context historically, or the context of even what their parents and their grandparents experienced. It was so different than them that there's a mutual unintelligibility.

1:08:59 That's it's really a crisis for a civilization when a father and a son can't talk about something and reach a sane conclusion. That is terrible. To some degree, that's really the story of the last say century and a half, since maybe the eighteen eighties to well today, but we don't know when it will stop yet. We've just had constant upheaval every decade or so. And it is getting worse. To some degree, the more recent generations have made it worse in a way that is different in degree, but so almost in kind from previous generations. Because you have these major upheavals, and we could of course go over the the history, but most people probably know the rough outlines. You have, of course, the world wars, you have the Great Depression,

1:09:56 you have the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Spanish American War. Something that many people forget is the American Indian Wars didn't end until the nineteen twenties, started in the sixteen hundreds, went for the fullness of three centuries. All of these upheavals, many of them have been to some degree externally caused, but the difference in kind for the baby boomers is that many of the problems they have given to their children and grandchildren were not externally caused. The baby boomers imported these issues. The baby boomers created these issues. And that is part of why you see this growing resentment on the part of millennials and younger when it comes to the older generations. Because as was mentioned, millennials and younger see what these older

1:10:47 generations had and what we do not have, which means that the baby boomers failed to preserve it and failed to pass it on, which of course is one of the fundamental duties of older generations, of parents, is to pass to their children what was passed to them by their parents, and to do so in a way that is better. It is not just to preserve the principle, but to grow it and to pass more to the future generation than was passed to you by previous generations. And in the case of the baby boomers, they were handed more than almost any other generation in history. Particularly in the American context, there are obviously some nuances in some contexts in other parts of the world, particularly Central Europe recovering from

1:11:37 the world wars and having to deal in the East with communism, with the USSR. But in the American context, you had a peaceful society, you had a prosperous society, you had almost everything going for that generation. You could go out and get a job simply by walking in somewhere and talking to the owner. Many baby boomers will tell younger generation today, well, you should just go hit the pavement with your printed resume, and that's not how it works now. They don't understand. You wind up having to fill out a thousand applications on a bunch of different websites and then maybe someone calls you back. These are fundamentally different worlds. And so as was mentioned, the older generations give terrible advice on

1:12:23 these things because they do not understand the reality of the modern world. If you ask for advice from the older generations about the opposite sex, you you will get fundamentally terrible advice in the modern context because they do not understand the world that they created and pass to their children. Because don't forget, they were the ones who created this by doubling down on what happened in the sixties, by doubling down on the evils of their parents and passing that on to their children. Because when you look at the reality of what we have today, the absolute chaos between the sexes, and you have an untold number of women producing pornography in their spare time, as it were, you have men who don't even consider dating, and of

1:13:14 course I could just continue listing the problems, they are legion at this point. But all of these problems are the progeny of the profligate nature of the behavior of those who live through the sixties. We are living in the consequences of the sexual revolution. Of course it is still getting worse because as we have mentioned many times before, there is no floor. With sin it can always get worse. There is no bottom. Things can always get worse. And so there is no point at which you should say, well I shouldn't bother to do anything because this is as bad as it can get, no it can get worse. And so you should always try to arrest the free fall and to turn things around. But we're living in that, and so if you ask the older

1:14:00 generations for advice on dating, they will give you advice that maybe made sense in the fifties or even perhaps in part of the 60s, if you weren't in the worst areas of the country, but certainly won't make sense today. And this causes a real divide between these generations. You have essentially the older generation and the younger generation. Yes, we could divide things up in, you know, the lost, greatest, silent boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z, bo and Gen Alpha, now the more recent one, but why? It really comes down to there is a fundamental divide between those who belong to the older generation, which you can use the baby boomers as a shorthand, and those who belong to the younger generation,

1:14:41 which is basically millennials and younger. Yes, Gen X, we do realize that you exist, but you don't really exist. Because the older members of Gen X are baby boomers, the younger members of Gen X are millennials. That's how this really plays out. Because it's sort of a before and after watershed moment where you have those who lived in this almost idyllic, almost paradisical reality of the post-war period in the US. And those who were born after that had all been squandered. That's the divide between these two generations, really. And that is why many in the younger generation feel enmity with the older generation. For those anyway, who recognize what has been lost, as was mentioned, many in the truly younger part of the younger generation don't recognize

1:15:38 what was lost. They did not grow up with it. They didn't even grow up with the promise of it. They didn't even grow up with the idea of it. Because it is so alien to them, because what they were given by their parents and grandparents is so fundamentally different that they cannot even conceptualize what the world was like in the US in the forties and the fifties. And And there's no chance they could conceptualize what it was like in the tens and the twenties, before of course the depression hit. But for millennials for the older millennials, in this case this would I am an older millennial, born in nineteen eighty five. We are to some degree on the cusp of it, because yes, for the younger members of Gen X, they got to experience some

1:16:28 of the good times as it were, and then watch, and they are still watching of course as things are getting worse. But millennials we were the turning point, really, in very many ways. Because we were the ones who could see what our parents had when they grew up, so we understood that. We saw what the world was like for them, and it still was in some parts of the country. And then, particularly for those of us who grew up in some of the coastal regions or larger cities, we watched the whole progression as things collapsed. And we were given the terrible advice all along the way. Gen Z, as it were, and younger don't necessarily ask boomers and older for advice because in part they recognize they're going to get

1:17:12 terrible advice, and in part they just don't do it. But for millennials, well, the baby boomers were our parents. So of course, we were given advice by them all along the way. But as a generation, I don't mean just to complain as a millennial, I'm simply highlighting the reality of what happened, both for the younger listeners and for the handful of older listeners we have to understand the perspective, understand what happened to the younger generations. But for millennials, one of the most common refrains that we heard, and talk to any millennial, and he will agree with me on this Me on this one, we were told you have to go to university or else you'll work at McDonald's. And it was always McDonald's.

1:17:51 Almost always, anyway. I assume some parts of the country maybe it was Burker King or Carls Jr., what have you, but it was go to university or you'll work in fast food. And so many of us went to university. We are probably the most educated generation possibly in history. We have some of the most degrees and advanced degrees, and so we were told if you go to university, if you get this degree, if you put in this work, this time, this effort, if you devote these four years of your life and leaving aside all the problems that cause, particularly with female students, we were told you would have a good job. It would be waiting for you, and you could build a good life like your parents and your grandparents had.

1:18:35 You would be able to get the big house and the dog and go on vacations and all of these things, all the things the boomers have and took for a given. And that didn't happen. Because boomers crashed the economy and wiped out those jobs and then imported millions of foreigners to destroy the labor market. And so when millennials graduated, those jobs didn't exist. And then came the second punch from the the boomers as it were. Millennials were told after we had been told when we were younger, you have to go to university or or you'll work at McDonald's, who were told, Oh, are you too good to work at McDonald's with your bachelors? And that's what happened. And that's just been the case all along.

1:19:21 There are so many examples of this that could be given. There's the example of student loans where you had the boomer generation who could pay for university with a summer job versus millennials where for many it was six figures, low six figures, but still six figures. So you would come out of university a hundred thousand dollars in debt if you went on to get A master's degree, God help you, you came out of university $200 plus thousand dollars in debt. And so sometimes what millennials and younger, but very much millennials in this case, would hear from boomers Is that they started with nothing and they had to build up and build this life for themselves. Millennials didn't start with nothing.

1:20:06 Millennials started in a really deep hole because the housing market had skyrocketed, so you couldn't buy a house. You came out of university with this massive debt burden, so you you couldn't possibly save for a down payment, even if you could afford the house. Because you couldn't get the good job, and so you couldn't get the vacation time, you couldn't start to build a family, etc. etc. And so that is the reason, one of the main reasons, that the fertility rate in the US has absolutely collapsed. Millennials simply did not have very many children, still haven't had very many children, because of the economic situation in large part, because we know that there is a direct correlation between economic stability and well

1:20:55 being, between financial security and number of children. Now, that's a mixed bag, because yes, you should trust God and that He will provide, because children are a blessing from God, and He will provide for you if He gives you that blessing. Yes, you still have to put in the work, of course. But human beings do respond to incentives to some degree. I'm not giving too much credit to economics, but I'll give some credit where credit is due. Humans do respond to incentives, and if you have an economy that is stable, where people can earn a living, where wives can stay at home to keep the home and raise children, you are going to have a higher fertility rate. And that collapsed because of the actions of the baby boomers.

1:21:44 Millennials understand that, particularly older millennials, because we watched it happen. The younger members of the younger generation, so Gen Z and younger, don't really see this because they didn't live through it. Some of them have gone back and looked at what happened and realized it. understood what was done to millennials and what was therefore sort of by proxy done to the younger generations as well, but they didn't live through it. But this is why you see that enmity from younger generations toward baby boomers and older is not because it's not youthful rebellion, which sometimes baby boomers will try to argue that it's youthful rebellion. Millennials now are turning forty. This is not youthful rebellion anymore.

1:22:35 Our knees crack when we stand up. It can't be youthful rebellion. But it's because when a generation is handed everything, handed great conditions and a good life, and that is not passed on to future generations, there is going to be enmity, and some of that is most certainly warranted, because it is the duty of parents to pass to their children a better world than was passed to them, and that has not been happening for the last handful of generations. It has in fact been accelerating in the opposite direction. Now there was a period of time where inertia carried things along, and things kept going they looked fine, regardless of all of the structural, foundational problems that were creeping in.

1:23:23 But inertia doesn't last forever, and we're at the tail end of that now, and that's why we see things have fallen off a cliff. And so the younger generations don't have these feelings with regard to the older generations for no reason. Gen Z is a mess. So are millennials, so is Gen X. Every generation is a mess in some certain ways, but when we don't recognize that a lot of these problems arise because of the actions of previous generations, we not only place the blame on the wrong place, but we make it almost impossible to actually address the problem. And so you get those who will say, Well, just pick yourself up by your bootstraps, or if you just worked hard enough, or if you just did X, Y, and Z, and that's not the

1:24:17 case. Some problems that we have in this life, some of the burdens we bear, are because of actions of those who came before us. So the best that we can do in some cases is to work as hard as we can to make sure that we don't pass those problems to our children and our grandchildren. And that is the reality of being a human being. That is the reality of the way the world works. These things are generational. Curses are generational, and so are blessings. If your parents failed in their tasks, you may very well suffer because of that. But, on the flip side, if you succeed in what you are doing, your children will benefit because of it, and so will your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.

1:25:04 And that is one of the reasons that we fundamentally oppose this conception of the individual as the be all end all. Because if you conceive of yourself as an individual, and the individual is the only thing that matters, you are You are inevitably going to make decisions that will harm future generations. And that is what we have seen in the last handful of decades. I think the overarching reason that boomers in particular are seen as deserving of greater criticism is simply because they are the senior generation. And so as a result, they're basically in the position of Moses or of Lot, except they're not doing what they were supposed to do. They're not acting as the leaders. It's very much an entire generation of I got mine.

1:25:59 And so on one hand you have some of the economic envy and jealousy in both directions. But on the other hand, if the boomers aren't going to lead, if they're not going to set a good example, if they're not going to take care of their children and grandchildren, who is? And so I think a lot of the the anger and the criticism, whether it's coming from a good place or not, I I think anger can come from a good place. It can also come from an evil, terrible place. And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to discuss this: is that the idea of boomer hate is wrong. You shouldn't just absolutely hate an entire generation because they have something and you don't have it. I think that the much more fundamental issue, at least from my

1:26:47 perspective, Is their abdication of their headship by them failing to propagate a Christian society in a Christian nation, by them failing to propagate economic and social policies that were going to feed family formation for their own children and grandchildren. They've left the world in a state where when they're dead and gone, who's gonna pick up the pieces? Because at this point, there's basically almost no one left, if there's anyone left alive, who's ever seen it done properly. And that's why headship matters. If you don't have anyone setting a good example, where are you going to get your example? I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of the trad memes up here online, it's frustration, it's it's understanding implicitly, even

1:27:40 if not consciously, that we as the living generation need to leapfrog our own ancestors. Not in terms of cultural progress or anything, just in terms of they screwed up. If we do what they did, we're only gonna make it worse. And so I think a lot of the nostalgia desire that's that's so prevalent, especially in in a lot of young people young people is just I want something that I'm told once existed and I don't know how to get it and I don't know of anyone alive who can show me how to get it. I think that's the single greatest failing. Even beyond the economic errors and the moral failings and all the rest, is that without a good example, there's simply you only have bad examples. And that's that's a death knell for a civilization.

1:28:32 It's a death knell for a people when their elders are not acting in the best interests of their progeny, of their posterity. What happens when the parents and the grandparents are gonna spend all their money on cruises and jewelry and then they're gonna write their own kids and grandkids out of the will because I got mine and I don't want them to be brats, so I'm not gonna give them anything. On one hand, children aren't implicitly entitled in some small sense to just being given whatever their parents earned. But on the other hand, there's a strong moral case to be made. The parents have a duty, and this is something that's in scripture. Like it's not something we're just making up. All of human history has been defined in large part by parents

1:29:22 bequeathing a better A better life for their children. Now the difference is that what was bequeathed from the boomers to their children and grandchildren was go into debt because you'll make so much money that you'll be able to pay for the debt and have all the nice stuff that we have to. That's clearly failed multiple generations. And so, yes, today when you look at particularly the zoomers who are really, I think the first generation that is split right down the middle. I don't think there are a lot of milktose zoomers. I think the zoomers are either radical, far right. We're gonna goose step our way back to civilization, or they're physically and mentally and spiritually destroying their bodies in the final throes of

1:30:09 what boomers have given them. Utter profligacy, where there's no morality, there's complete self-definition. Do whatever you want. Because that is fundamentally the spiritual inheritance that the boomers have passed down since the 60s. And I'm glad to see that there are at least some Zoomers who they're doing some of the right things and they're trying to figure out the right ways. And the reason we're talking about this is that I wanted to talk about generations in particular because it is my belief that the boomer generation in terms of leadership is a total write-off. And I I agree with Corey, I don't think Xers even exist. I think the boomers basically start at about 50. What I bean by that, forget the marketing stuff.

1:31:03 If you have an example of a question about some of these some of these things or let me give a specific example. I have a JPEG on my hard drive that's a map of Europe. It's a map of Europe from the mid-1940s. And on that map it shows the locations of where the Germans had certain types of camps. These were camps where they sent people who were arrested. Some of them were called concentration camps. Some of them were called death camps or liquidation camps. And so on this map you can see all these locations, some of the names you would recognize, they're names that are associated with horrors, and they elicit a visceral reaction when you hear the names. The reason I'm mentioning this map is that one of the most

1:31:50 interesting facts about it is that it's also color-coded to show for those two different types of camps whether they were on the Allied side of the post-war lines or whether they were on the Soviet side. Because it turns out when you look at this particular map, it's not something you would get if you're just reading in text, but when you look at the map, it's plainly obvious that every single camp that we're told was a death camp where murder and cruelty was taking place, one hundred percent of those camps were behind Soviet lines. In other words Allied soldiers never went to them. Allied soldiers never went to a single camp where those horrors were taking place. They went to other camps where there were people who are sick,

1:32:35 who were dying from starvation in some case. Some had typhus and so they looked very emaciated. But there was no mass torture and murder, as we're told was the was the narrative for those other camps. So the reason I bring this up is if I were to show this picture to someone who's over 50, I can guarantee that in basically every case the response that I'm going to get from them is going to be some sort of rote emotional response along the lines of the official narrative. And they will go probably so far as to say, well, yes, the communists were good allies against the fascists, thank God for the communists. Pretty much 50 and up, that's the only kind of response you're going to get from that map, from just facts.

1:33:20 You know, w wh whatever you think about the story behind the map, the facts are indisputable. And the reason that I think that cutoff is about fifty is is seminal is that is that if I show the same map to someone who's 40 or 30 or 20, some portion of those people are gonna have their interest peaked. I think, wow, that's really weird. Why is it that all these camps that we have these terrible stories about only coming from Stalin. Why are they only coming from the communists who were stealing our nuclear secrets and plotting to overthrow and destroy the United States? Why did they find all those camps and then the other places where we went, we didn't find any of 'em? Regardless of what you think about the narrative of World War II

1:34:02 and what happened in Germany and Greater Germany, the response to that picture is in my book, it's a litmus test of how open-minded someone is. Anyone over fifty is gonna have a knee-jerk reaction. I could write down half a dozen things, they're gonna say one or more of them automatically without any interest in the facts or any of the rest of it. When you're dealing with a generation that has been demoralized to that degree, that has been programmed to that degree. The reason that I think it's such a problem that the older generation is not fit to lead is that as Corey to talked about earlier with the fourth commandment, what do we do in a situation where we're to honor and obey our parents, but our elders

1:34:58 are giving us the worst possible advice because we can't sin. We can't do something that's evil, we can't believe lies because old people say it's okay. They don't get to override God. And so I think that one of the tricks that we one of the hurdles that we have to overcome as this generation, by this generation, I mean those who are living. There's a set of people in my book, 50 and up, that you just shouldn't listen to at all when it comes to most things. Because they have been subjected to a degree of propaganda and life experiences that no longer have any basis in reality for what we're dealing with. And if we try to listen to them, all we're going to get is more of the same. And younger people do not want more of the same.

1:35:49 They see that they're drowning in quicksand and they don't know how to get out of it. And that's an incredibly dangerous place for a sit a civilization to be because you have young people who are angry at older people, you have older people who are frustrated and disillusioned by younger people, and everybody just wants to go their separate ways and it's a it's a recipe it's a it's a setup for a bloodbath. It's a setup for horrors beyond imagining. And as Christians, that's absolutely what we don't want. And so the reason for us to mention this is I think that in good conscience, the best thing that we can do is recognize that although our elders are to be respected and they're to be loved, there are large swaths of decision making that we need

1:36:37 need to make for ourselves and for future generations where we simply can't ask them. And most of them frankly don't care anyway. Like it's it's not like they're begging to give good advice. But I think that we need to recognize that we are a generation without a head. And I think that a lot of the boomer hate is rooted not simply in economic envy, but in a a slow growing realization that the men who should be in charge of providing wisdom and guidance, they're checked out. we're a headless generation. And I think the only way that we can fix that in order to create a future civilization. This is civilizational stuff. This isn't you know, we talked last week about small ticket. This is the big ticket.

1:37:22 I think the only way to get from where we are today where we see things in free fall to a place where our children and grandchildren can be safe and not have to deal with these problems is if we explicitly acknowledge that we are headless. We cannot look to the older generation to answer these problems and to get it right. And so rather than going to them and deferring to them, I think we need to simply set them aside respectfully, not antagonistically. But I think that we need to realize that they are such a demoralized generation that the only thing that they can possibly do with their mouths is to cause harm. And I hate to say that. It's not it's it's the last thing that I want. And yet when

1:38:02 doing the doing what they say to do is gonna do harm, we can't do it. And so the reason for talking about generations is there is a particular generation with a particular set of problems that is so wicked and so far gone that all we can do is pray for them to go to heaven and otherwise not really listen to what they say. It's not the way it should be, it's not the way any civilization should ever be. And yet, when we're looking at a civilization that's in free fall and a generation that despises God in every good thing, and you have some people who are younger in particular looking for something trad, looking for something older. I think we need to be free to recognize that maybe older is older than anyone who's living, which is part of the reason

1:38:51 that a lot of what we talk about on Stone Choir is older doctrine. Doctrine shouldn't be changing. God didn't change. Christianity didn't change. But if some of this stuff fell by the wayside and nobody talked about it for a generation, for a century, I think that at some point we have to just recognize that and say it out loud and say, okay, the only way to get any of this back on track is to ignore what the boomers say and to go back further, to go back to the good advice that they ignored from their parents and grandparents, wherever this began, we need to find where the good ended and the bad began and refer to that. And as Christians, we know that above all else, Scripture is a source for that.

1:39:31 That's why we began in scripture and we're wondering up by discussing the boomer question because I don't want there to be hatred. I don't want there to be slander and just disgust. But at the same time, like I said, I'm talking to guys half my age. If I gave them advice without having talked to them first, it would be idiotic advice. It would be the worst possible things. I know I would say stupid things to them. And so when I hear boomers saying the same stuff to them, it just makes me die inside Side because that complete alienation of the generations, it's intractable. It shouldn't be this way. But it's intractable to the point that the only thing we can do is try to build a future world where the next generation

1:40:12 and then next generation after that won't have the same problems. I think that much of the people who are living today are in some ways a write-off and we have to figure out how to do that respectfully and in a way that's not destructive. And we have to look at rebuilding things that are good, even if it means ignoring maybe your own parents and grandparents. And so as Christians, we have to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn't violate violate the fourth commandment because we are to honor and obey our parents. So this is a tricky thing. And I we're not, again, that we're not giving a prescription here to say yes, absolutely do this, but I think that when you're looking at the advice coming from people who are 50 and up,

1:40:53 if you listen at all, I think you need to give it the most extremely rigorous going over. And you may well be forced to to disregard it entirely. And if you do that, I think that there's probably a good case to be made for doing that with a clean conscience. So this is one of those episodes where some of the things we've said are not easy truths. They are they are hard truths. And that's part of life. Just because something is uncomfortable or unpleasant or what have you, doesn't mean that we get to ignore it. Particularly when it is as important as the things we are covering as we covered in this episode. There are some very real differences for very many reasons, some of which we covered in this episode, some of which we did not,

1:41:44 because we didn't want to make this a forty part episode that lasts for a hundred and twenty hours. We're not going to go for three hours, I'm not implying that. But These are very real problems because of the very real differences between the generations. And as we mentioned in the last episode about the small stuff, we are to a very real extent, and by we I mean millennials and younger, as again a reminder, we are including the younger members of Gen X in that most certainly. But essentially those of us who are now living and not members of the older generation now retiring, exiting the workforce and positions of leadership, etc., it falls to us to be To be an interim generation. We have to rebuild all of the things that were torn

1:42:41 down in the last century or so. And there is no roadmap for much of what we have to do. There's a roadmap for some of it, because of course we are Christians, first and foremost, and so we have God's roadmap in Scripture for many of these problems. But Scripture does not provide a complete roadmap for rebuilding a civilization. And more than rebuilding a civilization, we are rebuilding a civilization in a way that has not really been done before. And what I mean by that is that usually when a generation has to rebuild to the extent that we will have to rebuild, it is because they have just gone through an extremely destructive war or a plague or some sort of horrible natural disaster. And we aren't rebuilding from that.

1:43:33 So when you look around, things don't look necessarily that bad unless you look too closely, particularly say at the downtown area of large cities. But you're probably living in a home, or an apartment or a condo, some sort of structure with a roof. Most Most people have food on the table. I'm in an air conditioned room right now because it's eighty some degrees outside already because I live in the south. There are things that are still functioning that still look good. But the core of our civilization, the core of our society, of our culture, has rotted away. And so we are rebuilding from dust and ashes, but not from visible dust and ashes. And that's a difficult position in which we find ourselves ourselves

1:44:22 because we have to point out to our fellows that we are rebuilding from nothing in a very real sense because everything has been eroded away to the foundation, if not the foundation itself having been eroded away. That is a unique position. Because as I said, previous generations that have had to rebuild from nothing, have had to rebuild from nothing, from literal dust and ashes. And so we find ourselves in a position that is not only difficult, but difficult and without example, we don't have a road map. We are building this from the ground up as the first generation to do it. That doesn't mean that we're going to fail. I don't think we will. I think we can do this. I think we are up to this task.

1:45:22 It is going to be difficult. But many of the things in life that are worth doing are in fact difficult. Just because something is hard does not mean it is not worth doing. In fact, many of the things that are worth doing are in fact hard. Staying in good shape physically is hard work, it's worth doing. Learning how to play an instrument is hard work, it's worth doing. Learning a new language is hard work, it's worth doing. Raising children is most certainly hard work, and it is most certainly worth doing, because children are a blessing from God. And that really is what we're doing. We are building rebuilding, our civilization, building a better tomorrow for the generations that will follow us.

1:46:07 Because where the generations that came before us squandered what was given to them, and so burdened us with what we have today, we want to pass something better to future generations. We want to give them the things that we didn't receive, the things that our elders had when they were our age, when they were younger, but they did not pass to us. That is the task of this generation. And so there will be some rewards, some temporal rewards, there will certainly be eternal rewards, because these are good works. These are things on which God will smile, things that God will bless. Some of those blessings, because of the nature of how it works, will not accrue in our lifetimes. They will accrue to our children and our grandchildren.

1:46:58 But again, you're not an individual. You are a link in the chain that extends all the way back to Adam and extends all the way down to whenever your line ends. Maybe it will be before the end, maybe it will be at the end when God returns. But your task as that link in the chain is to pass as much of the good as possible to those who will follow after you. And so we started with scripture and will end with scripture going to read from Psalm seventy eight. Give ear, O my people, to my teaching, incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the

1:47:54 coming generation, the glorious deeds of the Lord in his might, and the wonders that he has done. He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments, and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.