Transcript: Episode 0029

“The Generational Divide”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:00 – 00:00:02:	oh

00:00:30 – 00:00:44:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast, I am Corey J. Moeller, and I'm Woe.

00:00:44 – 00:00:49:	Remember O Lord what has befallen us, look and see our disgrace.

00:00:49 – 00:00:53:	Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners.

00:00:53 – 00:00:56:	We have become orphans, fatherless.

00:00:56 – 00:00:58:	Our mothers are like widows.

00:00:58 – 00:01:02:	We must pay for the water we drink, the wood we get must be bought.

00:01:02 – 00:01:07:	Our pursuers are at our necks, we are weary, we are given no rest.

00:01:07 – 00:01:12:	We have given the hand to Egypt and to Assyria, to get bread enough.

00:01:12 – 00:01:17:	Our fathers sinned, and are no more, and we bear their iniquities.

00:01:17 – 00:01:21:	Slaves rule over us, there is none to deliver us from their hand.

00:01:21 – 00:01:26:	We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness.

00:01:26 – 00:01:30:	Our skin is hot as an oven, with the burning heat of famine.

00:01:30 – 00:01:35:	Women are raped in Zion, young women in the towns of Judah.

00:01:35 – 00:01:40:	Princes are hung up by their hands, no respect is shown to the elders.

00:01:40 – 00:01:45:	Young men are compelled to grind at the mill, and boys stagger under loads of wood.

00:01:45 – 00:01:49:	The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music.

00:01:49 – 00:01:54:	The joy of our hearts has ceased, our dancing has been turned to mourning.

00:01:54 – 00:02:00:	The crown has fallen from our head, woe to us, for we have sinned.

00:02:00 – 00:02:05:	For this our heart has become sick, for these things our eyes have grown dim.

00:02:05 – 00:02:12:	For Mount Zion, which lies desolate, jackals prowl over it, but you, O Lord, reign forever.

00:02:12 – 00:02:15:	Your throne endures to all generations.

00:02:15 – 00:02:17:	Why do you forget us forever?

00:02:17 – 00:02:20:	Why do you forsake us for so many days?

00:02:20 – 00:02:24:	Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored.

00:02:24 – 00:02:30:	Do our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry

00:02:30 – 00:02:33:	with us.

00:02:33 – 00:02:39:	Today's episode of Stone Choir is a discussion around the idea of generations.

00:02:39 – 00:02:44:	That was an opening reading from the end of Lamentations, discussing the generations that

00:02:44 – 00:02:50:	had been abandoned by God, cursed for their faithlessness.

00:02:50 – 00:02:55:	We're talking today about what generations are, what they're in scripture, what they

00:02:55 – 00:03:01:	are just in human life, and giving some specific modern examples of the generations that are

00:03:01 – 00:03:07:	extant today, and how they're relevant to the problems that we face.

00:03:07 – 00:03:09:	The first part we're going to discuss is scripture.

00:03:09 – 00:03:14:	The middle part we're going to talk about the current generations and how generations

00:03:14 – 00:03:17:	work in society.

00:03:17 – 00:03:21:	In the end, we're going to specifically talk about the boomer question.

00:03:21 – 00:03:25:	We've had some people ask us to do an episode on boomers in particular.

00:03:25 – 00:03:31:	It's an important subject, so we're going to talk about why the boomer hate, why is

00:03:31 – 00:03:37:	one generation of all the living generations particularly signaled out for criticism, where

00:03:37 – 00:03:41:	when you look at the other generations, they're a mess too.

00:03:41 – 00:03:47:	We did some thinking and some study, and we're going to talk today about why there might

00:03:47 – 00:03:48:	be a difference there.

00:03:48 – 00:03:52:	So we're going to begin with scripture in the history of the concept before we get

00:03:52 – 00:03:58:	into the direct application of why would it matter if the elder generation of our day

00:03:58 – 00:04:03:	isn't living up to their responsibilities, but we're going to begin in scripture.

00:04:17 – 00:04:27:	The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God came

00:04:27 – 00:04:30:	into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them.

00:04:30 – 00:04:34:	These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

00:04:34 – 00:04:38:	The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention

00:04:38 – 00:04:43:	of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and the Lord regretted that he

00:04:43 – 00:04:47:	had made man on the earth, and had grieved him to his heart.

00:04:47 – 00:04:52:	So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land,

00:04:52 – 00:04:56:	man and animals and creeping things, and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have

00:04:56 – 00:05:02:	made them, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

00:05:02 – 00:05:12:	And so of course here in Genesis 6 we see really the first instance of an entirely pervasively

00:05:12 – 00:05:20:	wicked generation, because God wipes out everyone except Noah and his immediate family with

00:05:20 – 00:05:22:	the flood.

00:05:22 – 00:05:27:	God doesn't wipe out part of the earth, God doesn't wipe out only certain people.

00:05:27 – 00:05:34:	He wipes out an entire generation of man and starts over in this case.

00:05:34 – 00:05:38:	And so of course that is an explicit argument against those who say the flood was regional,

00:05:38 – 00:05:39:	the flood was not regional.

00:05:39 – 00:05:44:	It speaks of all the high mountains under heaven having the floodwaters above them.

00:05:44 – 00:05:47:	This was a worldwide flood.

00:05:47 – 00:05:53:	God wiped out everyone because of the wickedness of this generation.

00:05:53 – 00:06:00:	Of course with the adults, with those who would be considered under secular considerations

00:06:00 – 00:06:04:	guilty of their crimes, all of the children are also wiped away, because this is not a

00:06:04 – 00:06:07:	generation that has no children.

00:06:07 – 00:06:12:	This is not a world populated only by individuals who are 25 or 30 and up.

00:06:12 – 00:06:16:	There are infants who are wiped away with the flood.

00:06:16 – 00:06:22:	This is all of humanity from the oldest, however old he would have been in the anti-Diluvian

00:06:22 – 00:06:29:	period, probably some hundreds of years, to the youngest day old infant washed away in

00:06:29 – 00:06:31:	the floodwaters.

00:06:31 – 00:06:37:	Because the sins of the fathers do indeed fall on the sons.

00:06:37 – 00:06:43:	And the children of wicked parents will in fact pay for the wickedness of their parents.

00:06:43 – 00:06:46:	Not always of course, but generally yes.

00:06:46 – 00:06:52:	If your parents were wicked, you most likely will suffer for their wickedness.

00:06:52 – 00:06:58:	Now you will suffer more if you are also wicked, you add wickedness to wickedness.

00:06:59 – 00:07:03:	The sins of the fathers do fall on the sons.

00:07:03 – 00:07:05:	That is simply the way things work.

00:07:05 – 00:07:11:	And just to start out, we could have of course started back earlier in Genesis because of

00:07:11 – 00:07:13:	original sin.

00:07:13 – 00:07:20:	One of the core truths, one of the core doctrines of our faith is that children do in some ways

00:07:20 – 00:07:25:	pay for, suffer for the sins of their parents.

00:07:25 – 00:07:31:	Because original sin is inherited sin, it is ancestral sin, which is the term used in

00:07:31 – 00:07:35:	some translations and some languages.

00:07:35 – 00:07:43:	Original sin is sin that was committed by our first parents, that we inherit, and this

00:07:43 – 00:07:48:	we meaning all of us who are born naturally of the union of man and woman.

00:07:48 – 00:07:53:	Christ of course, born without original sin because he was not born from the union of

00:07:53 – 00:07:56:	man and woman, and so he was not born from sinful seed.

00:07:56 – 00:08:00:	That is why Christ was born without sin.

00:08:00 – 00:08:03:	We are born from the union of man and woman.

00:08:03 – 00:08:06:	We are all born in and with sin.

00:08:06 – 00:08:09:	We all inherit that from our first parents.

00:08:09 – 00:08:12:	And so sin is a generational curse.

00:08:12 – 00:08:18:	There is the original sin, which is the sin we all inherit, and then there are other specific

00:08:18 – 00:08:25:	sins committed by previous generations in specific lines.

00:08:25 – 00:08:31:	And those who proceed from those lines will inherit to some degree the consequences of

00:08:31 – 00:08:33:	those sins.

00:08:33 – 00:08:35:	We see that in many ways.

00:08:35 – 00:08:40:	There are certain lines of people who are given over to certain kinds of sin.

00:08:40 – 00:08:45:	This does not mean that if you come from that line, you must necessarily commit that sin.

00:08:45 – 00:08:46:	No.

00:08:46 – 00:08:49:	You may very well have a predisposition toward that sin.

00:08:49 – 00:08:56:	You may be more likely to engage in that sin, and that is a burden that you will bear because

00:08:56 – 00:09:01:	of being the progeny of that line, because of the sin of your forebears.

00:09:01 – 00:09:07:	And one of the best examples of this, really, one of the easiest for people to understand

00:09:07 – 00:09:14:	and immediately grasp would be if you have a lot of inbreeding in your family line, you

00:09:14 – 00:09:19:	are going to suffer very obvious consequences of that, because there are consequences in

00:09:19 – 00:09:24:	the flesh of that behavior, of that sin, because of course it is a sin because it is prohibited

00:09:24 – 00:09:30:	by God, and there are very obvious consequences for it in our fallen world.

00:09:30 – 00:09:37:	But the basic point is that sin does not fall only on the individual.

00:09:37 – 00:09:44:	Sin also falls on those around the individual, and particularly on that man's family, on

00:09:44 – 00:09:48:	his children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

00:09:48 – 00:09:53:	That can continue to pursue the family as it were for many generations.

00:09:53 – 00:10:02:	Now of course, if you are a child of sinful parents, sinful grandparents, great-grandparents,

00:10:02 – 00:10:06:	it is incumbent on you to try to do the best with what you have been given.

00:10:06 – 00:10:09:	You are not to follow in the steps of your sinful forebears.

00:10:09 – 00:10:11:	Yes, you still have to honor them.

00:10:11 – 00:10:12:	The fourth commandment is still in play.

00:10:12 – 00:10:15:	We'll get into that more.

00:10:15 – 00:10:20:	But it is incumbent on you to do the best you can to turn around that family tradition

00:10:20 – 00:10:24:	as it were, to not follow in those sinful footsteps.

00:10:24 – 00:10:28:	And that's going to be a challenge, and we'll get into that in other parts of this episode.

00:10:28 – 00:10:35:	That is part of the reason that certain generations are viewed in a negative light, particularly

00:10:35 – 00:10:42:	by their progeny, because of what those generations have placed as a burden on their children.

00:10:42 – 00:10:49:	I think Noah is such a good example, because his family was saved for his sake.

00:10:49 – 00:10:54:	He was a faithful patriarch, so his wife and his children were faithful in obedience to

00:10:54 – 00:10:55:	him.

00:10:55 – 00:11:01:	But all of his friends, everyone else he had ever known his entire life, they were all

00:11:01 – 00:11:03:	killed in the flood.

00:11:03 – 00:11:07:	Everyone he had ever known, except for his own immediate family, were slaughtered by

00:11:07 – 00:11:09:	God justly.

00:11:09 – 00:11:15:	And I think the reason that the flood is such an important example of God's judgment of

00:11:15 – 00:11:21:	generations of groups collectively is that although there was tremendous wickedness in

00:11:21 – 00:11:26:	that day, naturally some men were going to be more wicked than others.

00:11:26 – 00:11:29:	Some men simply were doing more sin than others.

00:11:29 – 00:11:31:	They got up earlier in the morning.

00:11:31 – 00:11:38:	And so the idea that although there was a variability in the degree of their evil, the

00:11:38 – 00:11:44:	punishment was the same as we've talked about in some past episodes, is men, we think, well,

00:11:44 – 00:11:46:	that's not fair.

00:11:46 – 00:11:49:	Why would they all get the same treatment when they didn't commit the same crime?

00:11:49 – 00:11:53:	Well, God judged the generation, and he wiped them all out.

00:11:53 – 00:11:59:	And the only generation that he saved was Noah's immediate family.

00:11:59 – 00:12:03:	This is an episode that we're doing in part because we want to continue to whittle away

00:12:03 – 00:12:10:	at people's egalitarian enlightenment priors to believe that we are all individuals and

00:12:10 – 00:12:15:	everything that will ever happen to us is a product of us as individuals, when that's

00:12:15 – 00:12:16:	simply not scriptural.

00:12:16 – 00:12:17:	It's not Christian.

00:12:17 – 00:12:23:	As Corey said, you die because Adam ate the wrong piece of fruit, period.

00:12:23 – 00:12:29:	You inherited that evil, and it wouldn't have mattered if you lived a perfect life.

00:12:29 – 00:12:31:	You would still die because of what Adam did.

00:12:31 – 00:12:34:	He is your father, you inherit his evil.

00:12:34 – 00:12:38:	On top of it, we, of course, that's just off to the races.

00:12:38 – 00:12:44:	As men, we know that Adam eating a piece of fruit 6,000 years ago is by far the least

00:12:44 – 00:12:45:	of our problems.

00:12:45 – 00:12:50:	Nevertheless, that alone is sufficient for our death, and it was the reason that God

00:12:50 – 00:12:56:	had to send his only begotten Son to save us from all of that sin, the sin of history,

00:12:56 – 00:12:58:	the sin of our own personal action.

00:12:58 – 00:13:04:	All of it must be overcome on the cross because nothing else can make up for it.

00:13:04 – 00:13:09:	That is fundamentally what libertarians today call collectivism.

00:13:09 – 00:13:15:	If you have ever gone near libertarian thought, collectivism is the worst thing imaginable.

00:13:15 – 00:13:22:	You'll be subject to any manner of insane belief if it protects you from the boogeyman

00:13:22 – 00:13:24:	of collectivism.

00:13:25 – 00:13:30:	What God did to Noah's generation was, I mean, we don't really think about it in terms

00:13:30 – 00:13:32:	of collectivism, but that's what it was.

00:13:32 – 00:13:33:	He killed them all.

00:13:33 – 00:13:34:	He wiped them all.

00:13:34 – 00:13:36:	He dashed every baby on the rocks.

00:13:36 – 00:13:40:	The babies hadn't been doing as much evil as the old men, or the men who were in their

00:13:40 – 00:13:42:	prime as they were doing their evil.

00:13:42 – 00:13:44:	Nevertheless, they all ended up dead.

00:13:44 – 00:13:48:	They all ended up at the bottom of the ocean, an ocean that hadn't even been there before

00:13:48 – 00:13:53:	God raised up oceans from the deep and from the skies specifically to kill everyone, and

00:13:53 – 00:13:59:	it was only his mercy and in recognition of the promise that had been made to Adam to

00:13:59 – 00:14:03:	fulfill the promise of the Messiah through his bloodline.

00:14:03 – 00:14:07:	God had to preserve Noah so that he could keep his promise.

00:14:07 – 00:14:08:	It's not God's hands being tied.

00:14:08 – 00:14:13:	God can't lie in the sense that whatever God says is true, but that is the way that he

00:14:13 – 00:14:18:	fulfilled it by preserving them, even as the entire generation itself was punished.

00:14:18 – 00:14:24:	We touched on an important point there, and it ties back into the discussion of headship

00:14:24 – 00:14:29:	that we've gone over a number of times in a number of episodes, but when it comes down

00:14:29 – 00:14:36:	to it, the basic fact of reality is that you are going to have one of two heads.

00:14:36 – 00:14:46:	Originally, the head of humanity is, of course, Adam, ultimately God, because God is the head

00:14:46 – 00:14:53:	of Adam in the garden in his perfection, but Adam is the federal head of humanity, and

00:14:53 – 00:14:57:	so we are all contained, in a sense, in Adam.

00:14:57 – 00:14:58:	We all follow from Adam.

00:14:58 – 00:15:01:	We all flow from Adam.

00:15:01 – 00:15:07:	Adam is our federal head, and so Adam's actions are imputed to us.

00:15:07 – 00:15:12:	They actually are, in a very real way, our own.

00:15:12 – 00:15:19:	And you see this in Scripture, for instance, when it speaks of the Levites tithing to Melchizedek

00:15:19 – 00:15:25:	because they were still in Abraham at the time.

00:15:25 – 00:15:33:	But in the case of humanity, in the fall, Adam chose to have Satan as his head instead

00:15:33 – 00:15:39:	of God, and so for all of us who flow from Adam, Satan is now our federal head in our

00:15:39 – 00:15:41:	fallen state.

00:15:41 – 00:15:47:	The only way to get out of that fallen state is to have another federal head.

00:15:47 – 00:15:50:	In this case, Christ.

00:15:50 – 00:15:56:	Christ is your head, if you are in Christ, which is to say, if you have faith, if you

00:15:56 – 00:16:04:	are adopted into the family of God, you become a child of God, a son of God, and Christ is

00:16:04 – 00:16:05:	your head.

00:16:05 – 00:16:12:	In Christ being your head, you are now in Christ, you have His righteousness instead

00:16:12 – 00:16:19:	of the wickedness of the old Adam, because, of course, Adam also believed in the promise

00:16:19 – 00:16:23:	of the gospel, and so Adam himself is in Christ.

00:16:23 – 00:16:30:	But that's the point you either have as your head Christ or Satan, and that's the difference.

00:16:30 – 00:16:35:	You either have eternal life in Christ with Him as your head, or you have eternal death

00:16:35 – 00:16:40:	with Satan in the pit prepared for Him in His fallen angels.

00:16:40 – 00:16:47:	And we really lose sight of that fact when we focus on individualism, on the individual,

00:16:47 – 00:16:52:	particularly in the modern egalitarian context, because if you think of yourself simply as

00:16:52 – 00:16:59:	an individual, all of these things in Scripture seem very foreign.

00:16:59 – 00:17:05:	If I'm an individual, why does it matter what Adam did in the far distant past, what

00:17:05 – 00:17:07:	he did 6,000 years ago?

00:17:07 – 00:17:09:	How does that affect me?

00:17:09 – 00:17:12:	I'm not Adam, I didn't do that.

00:17:12 – 00:17:16:	That's if you're an individual, you don't understand how this works.

00:17:16 – 00:17:22:	You are affected by Adam because you flow from Adam, because you are in Adam, because

00:17:22 – 00:17:24:	you come from Adam.

00:17:24 – 00:17:28:	The same as you are affected by the things your father did, and his father did, and his

00:17:28 – 00:17:32:	father all the way back to Adam.

00:17:32 – 00:17:35:	You are not an individual.

00:17:35 – 00:17:39:	Now when I say that, of course, that's going to set some people's hair on fire, because

00:17:39 – 00:17:45:	they think that we're denying some sort of central truth or fundamental aspect of reality.

00:17:45 – 00:17:49:	But really, to some degree, what we're just doing is attacking an idol.

00:17:49 – 00:17:56:	When I say you aren't an individual, what I mean is that you are not the libertarian

00:17:56 – 00:18:02:	or the modernist conception of an individual.

00:18:02 – 00:18:04:	You're not a standalone island.

00:18:04 – 00:18:08:	You are connected to a vast number of people.

00:18:08 – 00:18:13:	Yes, in your daily life, you're connected to people in all of the ways that should immediately

00:18:13 – 00:18:14:	come to mind.

00:18:14 – 00:18:17:	Someone grows your food, someone made your clothing.

00:18:17 – 00:18:21:	Chances are you didn't do either of those.

00:18:21 – 00:18:25:	Just right now, I could start naming things on my desk that were made by other people,

00:18:25 – 00:18:29:	because all of them were made by other people, except for the handwritten notes I did happen

00:18:29 – 00:18:30:	to make those.

00:18:30 – 00:18:33:	I didn't make the paper or the pen that I used.

00:18:33 – 00:18:39:	But even more fundamentally than that, you are not an individual because you are the

00:18:39 – 00:18:46:	son or daughter of your mother and your father, and they are, respectively, son and daughter

00:18:46 – 00:18:49:	of their parents.

00:18:49 – 00:18:52:	And that goes all the way on and back.

00:18:52 – 00:18:58:	You are a collection of all of the people in your line.

00:18:58 – 00:19:04:	It may be that you have your eyes from a great-grandparent, and maybe someone who was alive at that time

00:19:04 – 00:19:10:	can see that person's eyes in you, and you start to notice more of this as you get older

00:19:10 – 00:19:11:	in life.

00:19:11 – 00:19:14:	You'll start to see, well, that person has the same eyes as that person, or it's the

00:19:14 – 00:19:20:	same hair or all these little things because you're not an individual.

00:19:20 – 00:19:25:	God didn't make us to be isolated individuals.

00:19:25 – 00:19:26:	That's not what we are.

00:19:26 – 00:19:29:	We are a species.

00:19:29 – 00:19:36:	We live in communities first and foremost and fundamentally as a family, and then from

00:19:36 – 00:19:43:	a family up to a clan or a tribe and then a nation, and eventually up to humanity as

00:19:43 – 00:19:45:	a whole.

00:19:45 – 00:19:52:	So we all descend from Adam, and so we are all one greater whole in that sense.

00:19:52 – 00:19:58:	Yes, we are divided today into smaller groups, and we know that.

00:19:58 – 00:20:05:	Your immediate family is different in kind from the neighbor's immediate family.

00:20:05 – 00:20:10:	You have different duties to your brother by blood than you have to that neighbor.

00:20:10 – 00:20:15:	You still have duties to that neighbor, particularly because he is, in fact, a neighbor.

00:20:15 – 00:20:19:	But they're different in kind because there's a different relationship there because God

00:20:19 – 00:20:28:	designed us to live in these relationships, in these webs of relationships with other

00:20:28 – 00:20:31:	human beings.

00:20:31 – 00:20:37:	And so again, at risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, you are not an individual.

00:20:37 – 00:20:45:	You are a son or a daughter of your parents and grandparents and great grandparents.

00:20:45 – 00:20:48:	But it is important to keep that perspective.

00:20:48 – 00:20:52:	Because if you don't have that perspective, one, you are going to fundamentally misunderstand

00:20:52 – 00:20:56:	who and what you are, what God made you to be.

00:20:56 – 00:21:02:	But two, and in this case, perhaps more importantly, you are not going to understand scripture because

00:21:02 – 00:21:06:	you are going to be looking at scripture with alien eyes, and you will never understand

00:21:06 – 00:21:08:	what it is telling you.

00:21:08 – 00:21:14:	Because when you read through the Genesis narrative, when you read through the fall,

00:21:14 – 00:21:17:	you're going to think, why does this apply to me?

00:21:17 – 00:21:20:	Maybe it explains why the world is the way it is.

00:21:20 – 00:21:21:	But what effect does it have on me?

00:21:21 – 00:21:22:	I'm not in this story.

00:21:22 – 00:21:27:	You are in the story because you're in Adam, you're in Eve.

00:21:27 – 00:21:31:	You are contained in your first parents.

00:21:31 – 00:21:33:	That history is your history.

00:21:33 – 00:21:37:	What happens there flows down to you in time.

00:21:37 – 00:21:43:	And so this is a fundamental problem with the pre-Reformation sects, which is to say

00:21:43 – 00:21:46:	Rome and the East primarily.

00:21:46 – 00:21:49:	They deny the reality of original sin.

00:21:49 – 00:21:54:	And if you deny the reality of original sin, you will never understand the atonement.

00:21:54 – 00:22:01:	You will never understand why it was necessary for Christ to die on the cross in order to

00:22:01 – 00:22:05:	save you and the rest of believing humanity.

00:22:05 – 00:22:10:	To atone for the entirety of creation, yes, but of course the benefit accrues only to

00:22:10 – 00:22:12:	those who have faith.

00:22:12 – 00:22:18:	It is the objective, the universal justification versus the subjective, the personal justification,

00:22:18 – 00:22:22:	the latter being applied to individuals.

00:22:22 – 00:22:27:	But if you don't understand original sin, if you don't understand the fullness of the

00:22:27 – 00:22:33:	consequences of original sin, then you are going to miss the fullness of Christ's work.

00:22:33 – 00:22:37:	You are going to miss the nature of what he did on the cross.

00:22:37 – 00:22:40:	You are certainly going to miss the depth and the breadth of it.

00:22:40 – 00:22:46:	And there are Protestant groups that also do this because they would limit the atonement

00:22:46 – 00:22:50:	to a tiny group of people, the elect.

00:22:50 – 00:22:56:	When in reality, that for which Christ atoned was not just the elect.

00:22:56 – 00:23:04:	He atoned for all of creation because in Adam creation fell because Adam was created as

00:23:04 – 00:23:06:	the head of creation.

00:23:06 – 00:23:08:	That is the purpose of man.

00:23:08 – 00:23:11:	That is the role of man.

00:23:11 – 00:23:12:	We are the head of creation.

00:23:12 – 00:23:15:	We are to represent God in creation.

00:23:15 – 00:23:17:	That's part of what it means to be the image of God.

00:23:17 – 00:23:23:	That's a more complicated topic that we may get to eventually.

00:23:23 – 00:23:29:	But in being this representative of God in creation, in being the head of creation, what

00:23:29 – 00:23:33:	we do falls on creation.

00:23:33 – 00:23:36:	Similar to what a father does falls on his children.

00:23:36 – 00:23:41:	And so in Adam, the fullness of creation fell.

00:23:41 – 00:23:49:	And so in Christ, being the greater Adam, being the antitype to Adam's type, in Christ

00:23:49 – 00:23:51:	the fullness of creation was redeemed.

00:23:51 – 00:23:55:	He atoned for everything.

00:23:55 – 00:23:59:	And so that is the fundamental important point that we need to understand as Christians

00:23:59 – 00:24:04:	and why we cannot come to this looking at it through alien eyes of a modernist believing

00:24:04 – 00:24:07:	himself to be an individual.

00:24:07 – 00:24:12:	You have to look at these relationships at this, the fullness of this reality, the totality

00:24:12 – 00:24:14:	of what is happening.

00:24:14 – 00:24:18:	In Adam all fell.

00:24:18 – 00:24:21:	In Christ all is redeemed.

00:24:21 – 00:24:25:	That is the core of the Christian faith.

00:24:25 – 00:24:31:	And if you look at this scripture, if you look at these threads with, as I've said,

00:24:31 – 00:24:34:	alien eyes, you're going to miss that.

00:24:34 – 00:24:40:	I'm not saying that you will necessarily be damned if you don't understand these things.

00:24:40 – 00:24:44:	Because of course you can still have faith in Christ, a saving faith in Christ, if you

00:24:44 – 00:24:51:	don't understand why modernist ideology with regard to individuals and collectivism, etc.

00:24:51 – 00:24:52:	is wrong.

00:24:52 – 00:24:55:	However, you are missing the fullness.

00:24:55 – 00:25:00:	You are not recognizing the true reality, the scope and the scale of what Christ did

00:25:00 – 00:25:05:	for us in his life, death and resurrection.

00:25:05 – 00:25:10:	And so you're missing the fullness of the faith, which is one of the things for which

00:25:10 – 00:25:12:	we are arguing so often on this podcast.

00:25:12 – 00:25:17:	We're not saying that if you don't get this right, that if you miss this particular thing,

00:25:17 – 00:25:20:	that if you misunderstand this, what have you?

00:25:20 – 00:25:24:	We're not saying you will not be a Christian, or that you are going to spend eternity in

00:25:24 – 00:25:25:	hell.

00:25:25 – 00:25:28:	You can very well be a Christian and get many of these things wrong.

00:25:28 – 00:25:30:	Plenty of Christians do.

00:25:30 – 00:25:33:	But you are missing out on the fullness of the faith.

00:25:33 – 00:25:36:	God wants to give you super abundant gifts.

00:25:36 – 00:25:40:	God wants to give you more than you are ready to receive.

00:25:40 – 00:25:45:	And if you close yourself off from that, by ignoring the reality of what scripture says,

00:25:45 – 00:25:52:	by filtering everything through this modernist false lens, then you are simply missing out

00:25:52 – 00:25:55:	on what you could be as a Christian.

00:25:55 – 00:26:00:	Yes, of course, much of this will be cleared up in eternity.

00:26:00 – 00:26:04:	But why not start to realize these things here in time to benefit from the things that

00:26:04 – 00:26:07:	God wants to give you?

00:26:07 – 00:26:10:	That's why we are addressing these topics.

00:26:10 – 00:26:12:	That's why we bring up these issues.

00:26:12 – 00:26:19:	Because we want you to have a fuller, more profound faith, not drinking from the thimble

00:26:19 – 00:26:25:	that is modern theology, but drinking from the deep well that is scripture, that is the

00:26:25 – 00:26:30:	fullness of God's truth, of all of the gifts that He wants to give you.

00:26:30 – 00:26:35:	I think one of the best examples of how that plays into the way God uses generations goes

00:26:35 – 00:26:38:	back to our episode on election.

00:26:38 – 00:26:45:	We spent the first half of that talking about how God used the propagation of the faith

00:26:45 – 00:26:52:	through time to bring some men to faith, and other men did not receive the faith.

00:26:52 – 00:26:58:	That occurred generationally when we talked about how the Americas, North and South America,

00:26:58 – 00:27:04:	the men who came over on the land bridge, they did not propagate the faith.

00:27:04 – 00:27:10:	However it was lost between Mount Ararat and the Tower of Abel, and when they came

00:27:10 – 00:27:14:	across through Alaska or wherever.

00:27:14 – 00:27:17:	We don't know when the Christian faith was lost, when they lost the knowledge of God,

00:27:17 – 00:27:19:	but we do know that it was lost.

00:27:19 – 00:27:24:	We know that for hundreds of generations, the men who lived in the Americas, and also

00:27:24 – 00:27:29:	the men who lived in Sub-Saharan Africa, as we said in that episode, once you get away

00:27:29 – 00:27:36:	from modern-day Ethiopia and Sudan, right there on the coast, there's no evidence that

00:27:36 – 00:27:40:	there was any Christianity, any faith of any kind in those parts of the world for thousands

00:27:40 – 00:27:43:	and thousands of years.

00:27:43 – 00:27:50:	Those generations were all cursed by the faithlessness of their fathers, just as Noah's sons and

00:27:50 – 00:27:54:	their wives were saved by his faithfulness.

00:27:54 – 00:27:55:	They didn't necessarily do it.

00:27:55 – 00:28:00:	If they'd had a different father, they would have died in the flood as well.

00:28:00 – 00:28:05:	This is something that pops up in a smaller degree, not to the degree of a generation,

00:28:05 – 00:28:11:	but in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when the angels came to Lot's house after they

00:28:11 – 00:28:15:	realized how wicked the place was, and they saw it with their own eyes as God has sent

00:28:15 – 00:28:21:	them, their response was to say to Lot, get your wife, get your daughters, get your son

00:28:21 – 00:28:26:	law, and if you have family here, you need to get him out of town tonight because we're

00:28:26 – 00:28:29:	going to destroy this place.

00:28:29 – 00:28:33:	Lot went to his sons-in-law and said, hey, God's going to destroy this place.

00:28:33 – 00:28:34:	You better leave with me right now.

00:28:34 – 00:28:35:	They laughed at him.

00:28:35 – 00:28:36:	They thought he was joking.

00:28:36 – 00:28:40:	They didn't take him seriously, and so they stayed behind.

00:28:40 – 00:28:44:	Now I think that's an interesting example of when we're talking about generational guilt

00:28:44 – 00:28:51:	because presumably his sons-in-law weren't the ones trying to rape the angels, and yet

00:28:51 – 00:28:58:	they still died in the conflagration that God sent because they were there.

00:28:58 – 00:28:59:	They were judged.

00:28:59 – 00:29:03:	They were destroyed for being there.

00:29:03 – 00:29:05:	That doesn't sound fair.

00:29:05 – 00:29:07:	All they had to do was not laugh at Lot.

00:29:07 – 00:29:10:	All they had to do was go with him, and they would have been saved too.

00:29:10 – 00:29:13:	His own wife looked over her shoulder.

00:29:13 – 00:29:14:	She looked back.

00:29:14 – 00:29:18:	She turned into a pillar of salt because they told them, leave.

00:29:18 – 00:29:21:	This place is cursed.

00:29:21 – 00:29:27:	She left, but she looked over her shoulder, and that small amount of doubt cost her life.

00:29:27 – 00:29:31:	The reason that the example of Lot and his family and Sodom and Gomorrah are important

00:29:31 – 00:29:38:	when we're talking about generations is that God collectively judges.

00:29:38 – 00:29:43:	That entire area was incinerated, everything, not just people, animals, plants.

00:29:43 – 00:29:45:	Everything was completely incinerated.

00:29:45 – 00:29:50:	God said, this area in particular, I am ending.

00:29:50 – 00:29:55:	Lot's family could have been saved if they had obeyed God, but because they disobeyed

00:29:55 – 00:29:59:	in the smallest possible ways, because they didn't take it as serious as they could have,

00:29:59 – 00:30:01:	they too died.

00:30:01 – 00:30:06:	When we talk about generations, again, we're just trying to make the basic, crucial fundamental

00:30:06 – 00:30:11:	point that judging a generation is what God does.

00:30:11 – 00:30:15:	120 generations in North and South America all went to hell.

00:30:15 – 00:30:16:	Why?

00:30:16 – 00:30:20:	Because their fathers were faithless generation after generation.

00:30:20 – 00:30:25:	Once you've lost the knowledge of God, everybody goes to hell.

00:30:25 – 00:30:30:	The only way that that can be undone is when someone else comes and brings the gospel,

00:30:30 – 00:30:36:	which was the other half of that episode on election, is that it was only once Europeans

00:30:36 – 00:30:41:	went into deep, a starkest Africa, when they went into North and South America that they

00:30:41 – 00:30:47:	brought the gospel to a place that for the first time in 3,500 years hadn't had it.

00:30:47 – 00:30:52:	Over the very first time, all these generations that had belonged to Satan suddenly had the

00:30:52 – 00:30:59:	opportunity to hear the truth about God and to be saved by it.

00:30:59 – 00:31:02:	Part of the purpose of doing that election episode was to say that those generations

00:31:02 – 00:31:10:	of faithlessness were offset by many centuries of faithfulness in Europe.

00:31:10 – 00:31:16:	When the Christian faith left where it was born in the Middle East, in the end, it basically

00:31:16 – 00:31:18:	only thrived in Europe.

00:31:18 – 00:31:22:	There were a couple small corners elsewhere that didn't amount to anything in terms of

00:31:22 – 00:31:23:	propagating the faith.

00:31:23 – 00:31:29:	It was only in the places where generation after generation, faithfulness to God resulted

00:31:29 – 00:31:36:	in doctrine being preserved, and in some cases, corrupted were Lutherans.

00:31:36 – 00:31:42:	I think most people listening are probably some variation of post-reformation.

00:31:42 – 00:31:44:	Things went wrong because there was not perfect faithfulness.

00:31:44 – 00:31:47:	We can never be perfectly faithful.

00:31:47 – 00:31:51:	Yet even at that, when those generations had preserved the faith and then men started getting

00:31:51 – 00:31:55:	on boats from Europe and traveling all around the world, what did they do?

00:31:55 – 00:32:01:	They brought the gospel to places where for generations it had never existed.

00:32:01 – 00:32:07:	For the first time, in the fulfillment of the Great Commission, those Christian conquistadors

00:32:07 – 00:32:12:	and others who went to various parts of the world, they came flying the flag and they

00:32:12 – 00:32:14:	came carrying the cross.

00:32:14 – 00:32:21:	They conquered people and they subjugated them and they converted them.

00:32:21 – 00:32:23:	We talked in that episode as well.

00:32:23 – 00:32:30:	Forcible conversion doesn't sound like something that Christians want to hear about, and yet

00:32:30 – 00:32:36:	the same story is heard in Acts where a man would be baptized along with his whole household.

00:32:36 – 00:32:38:	That's a forcible conversion.

00:32:38 – 00:32:41:	The babies, the children, the slaves don't get a vote.

00:32:41 – 00:32:46:	If the man of the house says, we are a Christian household now, it goes for everyone under

00:32:46 – 00:32:50:	his domain in the same as true of kings.

00:32:50 – 00:32:57:	Unfaithful generation can turn back the clock, can undo the damage caused by previous generations,

00:32:57 – 00:33:02:	but as long as you're just looking at things in terms of individualism, it's much harder

00:33:02 – 00:33:08:	to recognize what the fix is because, yes, there is an aspect in which the fix is that

00:33:08 – 00:33:16:	each individual person needs to have the gospel brought to them, but at some point that doesn't

00:33:16 – 00:33:18:	necessarily scale.

00:33:19 – 00:33:23:	That's not me saying something negative about the power of God's word.

00:33:23 – 00:33:29:	We know from history how God propagated his word, and it wasn't simply individual missionaries

00:33:29 – 00:33:33:	going hat in hand and sharing the gospel.

00:33:33 – 00:33:40:	It was often done under flag and under sword, and that is how God chose to spread his word.

00:33:40 – 00:33:44:	We're not necessarily calling for that today, but it's important recognition that when God

00:33:44 – 00:33:48:	used those means, they were efficacious.

00:33:48 – 00:33:56:	We can't doubt the results, and so a faithful generation begets future faithful generations,

00:33:56 – 00:34:01:	just as an unfaithful generation will damn all generations after it until someone else

00:34:01 – 00:34:03:	comes along and cleans up the mess.

00:34:03 – 00:34:10:	In the Americas and in Africa and in Asia, generation after generation, hellbound, hellbound, hellbound.

00:34:10 – 00:34:11:	Why?

00:34:11 – 00:34:16:	Because their inheritance from their fathers was not only original sin, but complete ignorance

00:34:16 – 00:34:18:	of the word of God.

00:34:18 – 00:34:22:	That's damning all by itself.

00:34:22 – 00:34:26:	When a faithless generation comes along, it must be replaced.

00:34:26 – 00:34:32:	You need a generation of faithful men to undo the damage by bringing something that had

00:34:32 – 00:34:34:	been lost.

00:34:34 – 00:34:39:	These conversations around individualism versus collectivism, however, when you talk about

00:34:39 – 00:34:46:	it, they're fundamentally reaching the heart of the Christian faith, which is not individualist,

00:34:46 – 00:34:50:	yes, I have faith because God gave it to me personally.

00:34:50 – 00:34:51:	The Holy Spirit was placed in me.

00:34:51 – 00:34:55:	It wasn't placed over some zip code.

00:34:55 – 00:34:58:	However, I became a Christian because my dad was a Christian.

00:34:58 – 00:34:59:	My mom was a Christian.

00:34:59 – 00:35:01:	They made me a Christian.

00:35:01 – 00:35:04:	God made me a Christian through my parents.

00:35:04 – 00:35:10:	That generational bequeathing of the faith is how it works.

00:35:10 – 00:35:14:	And the reason that today we have faithless generations is that the inheritance from many

00:35:14 – 00:35:19:	of our own parents has not been one of Christianity.

00:35:19 – 00:35:23:	Part of the reason we're doing this episode is that it kind of a tie into last week's

00:35:23 – 00:35:28:	we talked about some of the small things that we can do to try to undo some of the damage

00:35:28 – 00:35:30:	that's been done.

00:35:30 – 00:35:37:	We need to recognize that there may be a generational discontinuity in the Christian life.

00:35:37 – 00:35:42:	If you were a new convert near listening, or if your parents were weak or whatever,

00:35:42 – 00:35:48:	if there was a lull and kind of the graph of Christianity in your ancestry and you're

00:35:48 – 00:35:53:	back on the upswing, be consciously aware of that.

00:35:53 – 00:35:58:	Know that you are turning the tide just as the tide has been turned many times before

00:35:58 – 00:36:04:	in many places by a faithless generation being replaced by a faithful one.

00:36:04 – 00:36:06:	It's okay to be conscious about this stuff.

00:36:06 – 00:36:13:	In a situation like we're in today where civilization is literally on the line, it is imperative

00:36:13 – 00:36:21:	that we be aware of the fact that generational faithlessness is a death sentence to civilization,

00:36:21 – 00:36:23:	to everyone, to all future generations.

00:36:23 – 00:36:29:	If we lose the faith, all of our children for 120 generations after us will all go to

00:36:29 – 00:36:33:	hell unless God sends someone else to bring the gospel to them.

00:36:34 – 00:36:38:	Our task is to bring the gospel to them.

00:36:38 – 00:36:43:	God will sort things out in his time, but if we are not a faithful generation, we have

00:36:43 – 00:36:46:	no reason to expect that our children and grandchildren will receive that.

00:36:46 – 00:36:51:	This is something that happens over and over in Scripture.

00:36:51 – 00:37:00:	When Joshua died, it describes his death and his burial, and it says, and they buried

00:37:00 – 00:37:04:	him within the boundaries of his inheritance in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the

00:37:04 – 00:37:10:	mountains of Gash, and all the generations also were gathered to their fathers.

00:37:10 – 00:37:14:	There arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that

00:37:14 – 00:37:18:	he had done for Israel, which is something that had happened in the previous generation

00:37:18 – 00:37:24:	with Moses, with the faithlessness of the Hebrew people, the Israelites when they were

00:37:24 – 00:37:25:	brought out of Egypt.

00:37:25 – 00:37:31:	They immediately sinned against God, and so they wandered in the Zet Desert for 40 years,

00:37:31 – 00:37:35:	specifically so that that entire generation could be judged and die.

00:37:35 – 00:37:38:	Not one of them was permitted into the Promised Land.

00:37:38 – 00:37:40:	Moses was one of the last to die.

00:37:40 – 00:37:45:	He was able to go and see the land of milk and honey, and then God killed him on the spot.

00:37:45 – 00:37:49:	He said, you can see it, but you're never going to be there because he disobeyed.

00:37:49 – 00:37:54:	Moses disobeyed in a small way, but it was enough for him to be included in the generation

00:37:54 – 00:37:57:	that never received the inheritance that had been promised to them.

00:37:57 – 00:38:05:	That inheritance was passed on to their children to receive as the next generation of believers.

00:38:05 – 00:38:08:	When Joshua was raised up, he began circumcision again.

00:38:08 – 00:38:14:	There had been no circumcision in the desert, and so a faithless generation was replaced

00:38:14 – 00:38:20:	by a faithful one, and still when Joshua died, the cycle happened again.

00:38:20 – 00:38:24:	This is something that's always been a part of the faith, and it's something that God

00:38:24 – 00:38:28:	continuously has to deal with us for.

00:38:28 – 00:38:34:	When he operates against and for generations, that is something that is a part of the Christian

00:38:34 – 00:38:35:	faith.

00:38:35 – 00:38:41:	This stuff is intrinsic to how God operates in our lives, and we cannot ignore that.

00:38:41 – 00:38:46:	I think this is a good place to go over something that we actually haven't explicitly touched

00:38:46 – 00:38:50:	on yet in the podcast.

00:38:50 – 00:38:56:	That is the place of knowledge in the Christian faith, and what exactly we mean by knowledge

00:38:56 – 00:39:02:	when it comes to the Christian faith, and there are three different levels as it were

00:39:02 – 00:39:07:	when it comes to knowledge that are relevant for belief.

00:39:07 – 00:39:12:	Those three levels are called Noticia, Ascensus, and Fiducia, which just Latin for basically

00:39:12 – 00:39:18:	the first two you can probably understand, Notice and Ascent, and the last one is the

00:39:18 – 00:39:23:	Latin word from which we get fiduciary, so trust.

00:39:23 – 00:39:28:	Essentially, this is you have to take notice of the fact, ascent to the fact, and then

00:39:28 – 00:39:30:	trust in it.

00:39:30 – 00:39:36:	In the case of the Christian faith, of course, that is the core tenets of the Christian faith,

00:39:36 – 00:39:41:	you have to not merely know of them, ascent to them, you have to also trust in them.

00:39:41 – 00:39:46:	That is what it means to have faith in Christ.

00:39:46 – 00:39:52:	If that knowledge is lost, that does mean that the faith is lost.

00:39:52 – 00:39:56:	If you don't know the content of the Christian faith, if that was not passed down to you

00:39:56 – 00:40:00:	by your forefathers, it's gone.

00:40:00 – 00:40:01:	You are not going to get it back.

00:40:01 – 00:40:07:	Yes, we have frequently spoken on this podcast about natural revelation, but natural revelation

00:40:07 – 00:40:09:	does not reveal the gospel.

00:40:09 – 00:40:14:	That has to be written down, that has to be recorded in some way, that has to be transmitted

00:40:14 – 00:40:17:	from one generation to the next.

00:40:17 – 00:40:22:	And if you lose that, if you lose the scriptures, if you lose the gospel, you are not going

00:40:22 – 00:40:25:	to find it in nature, you are not going to get it back.

00:40:25 – 00:40:30:	It will have to be brought to you by some other people who did not lose it.

00:40:30 – 00:40:38:	And so we could just look at a quick example of this in the natural world.

00:40:38 – 00:40:42:	If you're making whiskey, let's say there are five steps, we're going to go with five,

00:40:42 – 00:40:44:	more complicated and that will simplify it.

00:40:44 – 00:40:48:	You have to grow barley, you have to malt the barley, you have to grind it, you have

00:40:48 – 00:40:51:	to ferment it, and then you have to distill.

00:40:51 – 00:40:53:	That's how you make whiskey.

00:40:53 – 00:40:59:	Any one of those steps, you could lose the knowledge necessary to perform it.

00:40:59 – 00:41:03:	If you lose that knowledge, you're never going to make whiskey.

00:41:03 – 00:41:07:	You may make something else, but you will not make whiskey.

00:41:07 – 00:41:11:	Because you need that knowledge at each one of those steps in order to make the actual

00:41:11 – 00:41:13:	end product.

00:41:13 – 00:41:17:	And so if you forget how to grow barley, well, you're not going to make whiskey, at least

00:41:17 – 00:41:19:	not barley based whiskey.

00:41:19 – 00:41:23:	If you forget how to malt, you're certainly not going to make malt whiskey.

00:41:23 – 00:41:29:	If you forget how to ferment, you're not going to have the starting product you need for

00:41:29 – 00:41:32:	the distillation process.

00:41:32 – 00:41:38:	And so you need this knowledge to produce the desired end result.

00:41:38 – 00:41:40:	The same is true in the Christian faith.

00:41:40 – 00:41:46:	You need the knowledge of God, you need the knowledge of the gospel, you certainly need

00:41:46 – 00:41:50:	the knowledge of original sin and of sin generally, because if you don't have that, you're not

00:41:50 – 00:41:54:	going to think you need the gospel and you're never going to believe in it.

00:41:54 – 00:41:58:	But you need this knowledge in order to have faith.

00:41:58 – 00:42:02:	Faith is more than knowledge, as I said, three levels, the final being trust, which is actual

00:42:02 – 00:42:04:	living faith.

00:42:04 – 00:42:09:	But you need the other two upon which you build that faith.

00:42:09 – 00:42:12:	Because you have to know of the law.

00:42:12 – 00:42:15:	You have to know of the gospel.

00:42:15 – 00:42:19:	You have to assent to the truth of them, and then you have to believe in the gospel.

00:42:19 – 00:42:25:	You have to believe that Christ died for you, washed away your sins.

00:42:25 – 00:42:33:	And so the point here is that if the forefathers of a particular people, if a particular generation

00:42:33 – 00:42:42:	at some point in the past failed to pass down this knowledge, the children of that generation

00:42:42 – 00:42:47:	and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren will all suffer for that wickedness because

00:42:47 – 00:42:53:	they will all be damned, because they will not have the knowledge necessary to have the

00:42:53 – 00:42:55:	faith.

00:42:55 – 00:43:02:	And so a prior generation, a wicked generation at some point in the past, can damn every

00:43:02 – 00:43:10:	generation that proceeds from it unless some outside party comes in and re-delivers the

00:43:10 – 00:43:17:	truth and transmits that knowledge that the wicked generation failed to transmit.

00:43:17 – 00:43:20:	And we see that as with the whiskey example.

00:43:20 – 00:43:24:	This is very obviously something that can happen in reality.

00:43:24 – 00:43:29:	There are things that our ancestors in some distant past knew how to do that we don't

00:43:29 – 00:43:31:	really know how to do today.

00:43:31 – 00:43:37:	We could very easily lose things that we know how to do today, tomorrow.

00:43:37 – 00:43:44:	The faith is not different from these things that we see in the so-called secular world,

00:43:44 – 00:43:47:	at least not different in kind.

00:43:47 – 00:43:51:	Because it is still knowledge and knowledge has to be transmitted.

00:43:51 – 00:43:57:	And if the knowledge is not transmitted, you can never achieve the end goal for which that

00:43:57 – 00:44:01:	knowledge is necessary.

00:44:01 – 00:44:06:	One last verse that I wanted to pull in just to establish the legitimacy of speaking of

00:44:06 – 00:44:12:	generations as having properties comes from Jesus himself.

00:44:12 – 00:44:17:	When the crowds were increasing, Jesus began to say, this generation is an evil generation.

00:44:17 – 00:44:22:	It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.

00:44:22 – 00:44:27:	For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this

00:44:27 – 00:44:28:	generation.

00:44:28 – 00:44:33:	Now when Jesus said that, the disciples were present, there were obviously some living

00:44:33 – 00:44:39:	Jews in that day who received faith, who believed in him, and who were saved.

00:44:39 – 00:44:43:	And yet he said, this is an evil generation.

00:44:43 – 00:44:46:	Jesus did not misspeak when he said that.

00:44:46 – 00:44:52:	Jesus was describing accurately the generation of Jews in that day, and frankly, every generation

00:44:52 – 00:44:59:	since, because their inheritance was one of rejecting Christ, which is why Christianity

00:44:59 – 00:45:06:	ended up leaving the Middle East and being eventually all but exterminated there.

00:45:06 – 00:45:12:	When we speak about generations, just as when we speak about races, or when we speak about

00:45:12 – 00:45:17:	sexes, these are properties of the world, they're properties of creation, they're how

00:45:17 – 00:45:21:	God makes us.

00:45:21 – 00:45:24:	I am born of a certain generation.

00:45:24 – 00:45:28:	Someone who's 40 years younger than me is clearly a different generation.

00:45:28 – 00:45:30:	That's the way it works.

00:45:30 – 00:45:33:	You're born, you live, you die.

00:45:33 – 00:45:36:	It's a recurring theme in scripture, it's a recurring theme in everything because it

00:45:36 – 00:45:40:	is the recurring theme of the universe.

00:45:40 – 00:45:45:	We know from astronomy even stars have a birth, life, and death cycle.

00:45:45 – 00:45:47:	It's the way everything works.

00:45:47 – 00:45:49:	God is immortal.

00:45:49 – 00:45:51:	Everything else comes and goes.

00:45:51 – 00:45:56:	A generation, it's more generally kind of now moving away from scripture a little bit.

00:45:56 – 00:46:00:	Generation is just the current people who are living.

00:46:00 – 00:46:06:	I think that's one of the important things to deal with in this section is that historically

00:46:06 – 00:46:10:	it's always been understood that your generation is just whoever's alive.

00:46:10 – 00:46:18:	The generation of Noah, it wasn't people between 25 and 54, it wasn't the key demo.

00:46:18 – 00:46:19:	It was everyone.

00:46:19 – 00:46:21:	Who's alive is the current generation.

00:46:21 – 00:46:24:	Jesus was referring to the same thing in his day when he was preaching.

00:46:24 – 00:46:25:	This is an evil generation.

00:46:25 – 00:46:27:	It was all the people who were alive.

00:46:27 – 00:46:30:	The former generation wasn't being spoken to.

00:46:30 – 00:46:33:	The next generation wasn't being spoken to.

00:46:33 – 00:46:37:	I think that generations are slightly distinct from some of the other categories that we've

00:46:37 – 00:46:44:	talked about in the past for the reason that it's an inherent property not based on how

00:46:44 – 00:46:48:	you're begotten but when you're begotten.

00:46:48 – 00:46:53:	I think everybody knows at this point, if you believe me, I'm a white guy.

00:46:53 – 00:46:57:	If someone is a black guy, he might be my neighbor, but he's not my brother according

00:46:57 – 00:46:58:	to the flesh.

00:46:58 – 00:47:01:	I would hope that he would be my brother according to the faith.

00:47:01 – 00:47:04:	He may well be in my generation.

00:47:04 – 00:47:09:	If we were born in a similar time, if we had similar experiences, in the more narrow modern

00:47:09 – 00:47:14:	idea of a generation, if we're roughly the same age with similar socioeconomic status,

00:47:14 – 00:47:19:	I'm a black guy, absolutely the same generation because we're alive at the same time experiencing

00:47:19 – 00:47:21:	many of the same things.

00:47:21 – 00:47:29:	I think one of the things that white people really do ridiculously coming from libs primarily

00:47:29 – 00:47:37:	is when African-Americans talk about having black culture, we try to say, no, you're American.

00:47:37 – 00:47:38:	You have American culture.

00:47:38 – 00:47:39:	You don't have black culture.

00:47:39 – 00:47:46:	A, that's false on its face, but B, they have their stuff and they want it.

00:47:46 – 00:47:50:	If you want to make a value judgment about whether one culture is better than another,

00:47:50 – 00:47:54:	that's entirely legitimate, but it's not legitimate to say, no, you don't have any culture at

00:47:54 – 00:48:00:	all because if I'm born at the same time as a black guy and yet we have very different

00:48:00 – 00:48:04:	upbringings and very different experiences, which is usually the case, we're in overlapping

00:48:04 – 00:48:10:	generations, but there's not the familiarity of brotherhood that would be there if we had

00:48:10 – 00:48:11:	the same sort of upbringing.

00:48:11 – 00:48:16:	I think that's one of the things that makes discussion of generation today trickier is

00:48:16 – 00:48:22:	that it just happens by virtue of when you're born and it used to be that when you were

00:48:22 – 00:48:28:	born didn't have, it had a much broader impact than I think it does today because there was

00:48:28 – 00:48:30:	much more of a monoculture in the past.

00:48:30 – 00:48:37:	What I mean by that is that with the advent of mass media and then today almost in micromedia,

00:48:37 – 00:48:45:	we moved away from being shaped by our family and by our faith and by the nations that we

00:48:45 – 00:48:51:	lived in and became more and more shaped by pop culture, by culture that could be brought

00:48:51 – 00:48:57:	by a salesman selling you a book or a movie or a video game or whatever it is today, something

00:48:57 – 00:49:01:	that can be brought in that you can say, yes, this is what I'm going to spend my time and

00:49:01 – 00:49:07:	my energy and my focus on, can very easily become your own personal culture that you'll

00:49:07 – 00:49:11:	share with other people with similar interests.

00:49:11 – 00:49:18:	What's happened is that before mass media, before all of this stuff was so readily available,

00:49:18 – 00:49:20:	people pretty much were on the same page.

00:49:20 – 00:49:25:	What's happened really in the last century or two is that we've begun more and more and

00:49:25 – 00:49:30:	more to bifurcate so that although I was born in a certain time and I have some commonality

00:49:30 – 00:49:35:	with people born in my age, I had so many options available to me that the books that

00:49:35 – 00:49:41:	I read, the movies that I watched, the summer camps that I went to, all those things that

00:49:41 – 00:49:48:	produced the particularity of my interests and who I am today may be completely alien

00:49:48 – 00:49:49:	to someone else.

00:49:49 – 00:49:53:	Although we may be from the same generation, it may not matter anymore.

00:49:53 – 00:49:57:	I think one of the things that's worth thinking about as a person, I think that's incredibly

00:49:57 – 00:49:58:	unhealthy.

00:49:58 – 00:50:03:	I think for so many people to be living in the same place at the same time and to have

00:50:03 – 00:50:09:	mutually alien experiences is fundamentally harmful because if somebody was born at the

00:50:09 – 00:50:13:	same time as me, but I have nothing in common with them except for maybe religion, but even

00:50:13 – 00:50:16:	that only goes so far.

00:50:16 – 00:50:19:	There's a lot to talk about in life besides religion.

00:50:19 – 00:50:22:	If all your experiences are alien to me, what are we going to talk about?

00:50:22 – 00:50:26:	You're going to talk about how weird your childhood was.

00:50:26 – 00:50:29:	At some point, you have to have commonality.

00:50:29 – 00:50:33:	It's exciting to meet someone with similar interests, with similar background because

00:50:33 – 00:50:37:	you feel that you're part of a mutual generation.

00:50:37 – 00:50:41:	What's changed is that those generations have been winnowed.

00:50:41 – 00:50:46:	We call them subcultures really, but it's like a generation doesn't have the same continuity

00:50:46 – 00:50:48:	that it used to.

00:50:48 – 00:50:53:	I think it's something that's really hurt us as human beings to be chopped up in these

00:50:53 – 00:50:59:	bits and pieces based on distinct experiences that can be radically different from someone

00:50:59 – 00:51:04:	maybe even just living down the street because he was visiting different web forms in you

00:51:04 – 00:51:08:	or because he played sports and you didn't because not everyone played sports anymore.

00:51:08 – 00:51:13:	Whatever the differences are, when you start chopping people up to the point that they can

00:51:13 – 00:51:18:	be neighbors, they can be from the same blood, but they can have a fundamentally alien culture,

00:51:18 – 00:51:24:	it kind of breaks the generational cohesion that I think God has always wanted for us.

00:51:24 – 00:51:28:	I think for those of us who grew up in large cities, we can see this even more distinctly

00:51:28 – 00:51:35:	because if you grew up in a small town, 500 people, you were even perhaps, there are going

00:51:35 – 00:51:41:	to be a lot of similarities simply because of the scale of things.

00:51:41 – 00:51:47:	You are going to have done fairly similar things during the summer in your childhood.

00:51:47 – 00:51:54:	You are going to have gone to the same places after school, etc., things like that.

00:51:54 – 00:52:00:	But if you grew up in a really big city, in my case I grew up in LA, there are many, many

00:52:00 – 00:52:03:	different little subcultures here and there.

00:52:03 – 00:52:07:	And you're going to have that even within your own high school, granted my high school

00:52:07 – 00:52:08:	is fairly large.

00:52:08 – 00:52:14:	I think my graduating class was over a thousand students, but you're going to be divided into

00:52:14 – 00:52:21:	these little groups and not really have a shared culture as would have been the case

00:52:21 – 00:52:23:	in the past.

00:52:23 – 00:52:28:	Now we're not saying that everyone has to be conformist, as it were, and everyone have

00:52:28 – 00:52:34:	exactly the same preferences and the same hobbies, and no, that's not the point.

00:52:34 – 00:52:42:	But the issue is, if there's no overlap, then you're really living in a nation of aliens,

00:52:42 – 00:52:47:	even being alien from his neighbor and everyone else.

00:52:47 – 00:52:54:	If you don't have these things in common, then you don't have anything you share with

00:52:54 – 00:52:56:	your neighbor.

00:52:56 – 00:53:01:	And that makes him your neighbor by virtue only of proximity, which, yes, that is the

00:53:01 – 00:53:07:	core sense of what it means to be a neighbor, a neighbor is the person next door.

00:53:07 – 00:53:13:	But in a functioning society, the person who is next door will also share many things with

00:53:13 – 00:53:15:	you.

00:53:15 – 00:53:18:	You'll have the same religion, you'll have some of the same taste, you'll have some

00:53:18 – 00:53:23:	of the same hobbies, you will be able to get along with and talk to this person about more

00:53:23 – 00:53:27:	than just what you did for an hour on Sunday.

00:53:27 – 00:53:29:	It's not to say the church is not important.

00:53:29 – 00:53:30:	Of course it is.

00:53:30 – 00:53:34:	It is among the most important things in life, but it is not the only important thing in

00:53:34 – 00:53:35:	life.

00:53:35 – 00:53:42:	And so we really need to think about what it is that we have had handed to us by previous

00:53:42 – 00:53:47:	generations and what we have continued to make our own.

00:53:47 – 00:53:55:	Because yes, this fracturing of the culture, these micro cultures that were created in

00:53:55 – 00:54:00:	decades past, they were passed to us, but we've entrenched them and we continue to engage

00:54:00 – 00:54:01:	in them.

00:54:01 – 00:54:05:	And we don't really cross these little lines that we've built.

00:54:05 – 00:54:12:	And so you know the goths go over here, the jocks go over here, the coffee culture goes

00:54:12 – 00:54:13:	over here.

00:54:13 – 00:54:17:	It's all these little groups of the various little hobbies that people have.

00:54:17 – 00:54:19:	And that's not how human beings are supposed to live.

00:54:19 – 00:54:24:	Yes, it's important to have your core group of friends and that's fine.

00:54:24 – 00:54:25:	That's important.

00:54:25 – 00:54:26:	That's part of life.

00:54:26 – 00:54:28:	That's part of what it means to be a human being.

00:54:28 – 00:54:33:	But the fullness of what it means to be a human being is greater than that.

00:54:33 – 00:54:38:	And church can, of course, help with that because just by the very nature of church,

00:54:38 – 00:54:45:	you are going to have some crossing of these micro cultural lines will call them because

00:54:45 – 00:54:50:	you're going to have people together on Sunday, preferably for more than just an hour, but

00:54:50 – 00:54:56:	together on Sunday for at least an hour who have different hobbies, who have taken very

00:54:56 – 00:54:59:	different paths in life, who have very different jobs.

00:54:59 – 00:55:05:	And it's important to have that mixing as it were in society.

00:55:05 – 00:55:10:	Because if you start to stratify and isolate and fracture your society down into these

00:55:10 – 00:55:17:	tiny groups, you no longer have a nation, you no longer even really have a culture.

00:55:17 – 00:55:20:	And that is what we see today.

00:55:20 – 00:55:27:	The US, as I've said before, really America, if I want to be more specific, the US is a

00:55:27 – 00:55:29:	number of nations.

00:55:29 – 00:55:36:	America is also, to some degree, not one fully cohesive nation, because you have different

00:55:36 – 00:55:44:	subgroups, subnations, really, within America, partly due to geography, because the US is

00:55:44 – 00:55:48:	vast by historical standards.

00:55:48 – 00:55:52:	And of course, they're going people who think, well, Rome, etc. were fairly large.

00:55:52 – 00:55:54:	Yes, of course.

00:55:54 – 00:55:58:	But Rome never contended to be one nation.

00:55:58 – 00:55:59:	Rome was an empire.

00:55:59 – 00:56:05:	An empire is a collection of nations, or a collection of countries under one central

00:56:05 – 00:56:07:	authority.

00:56:07 – 00:56:13:	America is a nation, but it is a nation that increasingly shares little in common with

00:56:13 – 00:56:19:	itself, which is to say, again, we have a neighbor, but we don't necessarily share anything

00:56:19 – 00:56:21:	with him.

00:56:21 – 00:56:28:	We should be making an effort, as Americans, and also as Christians, to actually have something

00:56:28 – 00:56:34:	in common with our neighbors, to share something with them more than simple proximity.

00:56:34 – 00:56:40:	Because God wants us to have more than what we have built for ourselves.

00:56:40 – 00:56:46:	God didn't design us to spend all of our time in our own homes, isolated, consuming

00:56:46 – 00:56:51:	media tailored to us and ignoring the greater world.

00:56:51 – 00:56:54:	That's not what it means to be a human being.

00:56:54 – 00:56:59:	We have created these little fractured worlds for ourselves that are mere shadows of what

00:56:59 – 00:57:04:	God clearly wanted for us, what he gave us.

00:57:04 – 00:57:10:	And so part of this is going to be that this generation is going to have to put in a lot

00:57:10 – 00:57:20:	of hard work in order to break what has become a cycle and attempt to restore actual normalcy.

00:57:20 – 00:57:26:	What it means to be a human being living in society, among other human beings.

00:57:26 – 00:57:29:	And that is going to be a challenge.

00:57:29 – 00:57:30:	Like I said, that is going to be hard work.

00:57:30 – 00:57:33:	None of this is going to be easy.

00:57:33 – 00:57:39:	Because by and large, we've become accustomed to something that is totally unnatural.

00:57:39 – 00:57:43:	And human beings are very good at becoming accustomed to things.

00:57:43 – 00:57:47:	We can adjust to or at least suffer through almost anything.

00:57:47 – 00:57:49:	Just look at prisoners of war.

00:57:49 – 00:57:58:	They can survive sometimes many years, sometimes more than a decade in extremely harsh conditions.

00:57:58 – 00:58:01:	Because humans are very adaptable.

00:58:01 – 00:58:04:	That can be used for good or for ill.

00:58:04 – 00:58:10:	When it is used as resiliency, it is used to survive periods of stress and trial, that

00:58:10 – 00:58:12:	is good.

00:58:12 – 00:58:20:	When it is used to adjust to what we have today to a fundamental inversion of what society

00:58:20 – 00:58:23:	and culture should actually be, it is no longer good.

00:58:23 – 00:58:25:	Because we have misused it.

00:58:25 – 00:58:27:	We have misapplied it.

00:58:27 – 00:58:30:	We have used it toward wicked ends.

00:58:30 – 00:58:32:	That's not to say that it started out.

00:58:32 – 00:58:33:	It was used toward wicked ends.

00:58:33 – 00:58:39:	Because to some degree, the younger members of Gen X and millennials and we'll get more

00:58:39 – 00:58:41:	into these lines in a little bit.

00:58:41 – 00:58:47:	But to some degree, we were born into a world where this was already the case.

00:58:47 – 00:58:53:	And so this was merely adapting to the world which was given to us.

00:58:53 – 00:58:57:	That's good to some degree because yes, you have to survive in the world that was handed

00:58:57 – 00:58:59:	to you by your parents and your grandparents.

00:58:59 – 00:59:05:	But that doesn't mean that you keep it the way that they made it if it is not good.

00:59:05 – 00:59:11:	And so part of our task is to reverse some of these things, to return to a more natural

00:59:11 – 00:59:18:	way of living, to align ourselves with what God clearly wanted for humanity instead of

00:59:18 – 00:59:24:	what we have built in the last, say, 100, 150 years in the modern world.

00:59:24 – 00:59:30:	One of the things that changed about man's understanding of generations in the last 100,

00:59:30 – 00:59:37:	150 years was that it went from being just those who are alive during a certain period

00:59:37 – 00:59:43:	to really being more about these smaller cohorts that today, most of the discussion, pretty

00:59:43 – 00:59:47:	much all the discussion that you hear today around generations, like the baby boom generation,

00:59:47 – 00:59:53:	for example, that's a marketing term that was specifically designed.

59:53 – 01:00:01
It's something that's used by marketers to figure out the purchasing cohort for preferences

01:00:01 – 01:00:03:	in a capitalist sense.

01:00:03 – 01:00:10:	Who wants to buy cruises and time shares versus who wants to buy whatever else?

01:00:10 – 01:00:14:	You have some people with a lot of money and they have certain tastes, other people with

01:00:14 – 01:00:17:	less resources and different tastes.

01:00:17 – 01:00:22:	There tend to be generational breakdowns there, so let's call those the generations.

01:00:22 – 01:00:26:	That's really where we are today and that's where most of the conversation is around.

01:00:26 – 01:00:30:	One of the reasons we're talking about this today and we're going to end by specifically

01:00:30 – 01:00:36:	talking about baby boomers was that if your view of what a generation is is shaped entirely

01:00:36 – 01:00:42:	by marketers, then yes, it would be absolutely unfair to say what Jesus said, but this is

01:00:42 – 01:00:43:	an evil generation.

01:00:43 – 01:00:46:	How could you say that?

01:00:46 – 01:00:51:	If I look at the sins of the baby boomers and say, well, this is bad and this is bad,

01:00:51 – 01:00:55:	then they retort as they always do by saying, well, what about what this generation does

01:00:55 – 01:00:57:	and this thing and this thing?

01:00:57 – 01:00:58:	They're not wrong.

01:00:58 – 01:01:05:	These things are, regardless of whose sin is worse or who has accumulated a greater amount

01:01:05 – 01:01:11:	of sins, there's something wrong with every generation beyond any shadow of a doubt.

01:01:11 – 01:01:18:	If the generations, as they're described today, these smaller generations, if it's really

01:01:18 – 01:01:20:	just a marketing cohort, then yeah, who cares?

01:01:20 – 01:01:26:	Why would you pick on the older people when the younger people have these different problems

01:01:26 – 01:01:29:	that are in some ways worse?

01:01:29 – 01:01:34:	I think it's important to understand that one of the things that we've lost by comprehending

01:01:34 – 01:01:41:	ourselves in terms of those marketing cohorts is that if you think of all the living as

01:01:41 – 01:01:47:	sort of a horizontal stack where you have the oldest at the bottom and then the youngest

01:01:47 – 01:01:55:	at the top, if you think about everyone who's alive at a certain point in terms of continuity,

01:01:55 – 01:02:00:	it's very different than if you think about it in terms of this discontinuous marketing

01:02:00 – 01:02:02:	segmentation that we have.

01:02:02 – 01:02:11:	So it used to be the generations of, for example, fathers, children, grandchildren.

01:02:11 – 01:02:12:	Those are generations too.

01:02:12 – 01:02:16:	That's something we all understand and we're not trying to redefine it.

01:02:17 – 01:02:22:	As people have been having kids older and older, it means that you're less and less likely

01:02:22 – 01:02:26:	to ever know your grandparents or certainly your great-grandparents.

01:02:26 – 01:02:30:	I'm sure there are many kids alive today who were born after their great-grandparents

01:02:30 – 01:02:31:	were dead.

01:02:31 – 01:02:33:	That didn't used to be the case.

01:02:33 – 01:02:38:	Generations used to be closer together, the father to son sort of generation, such that

01:02:38 – 01:02:44:	the living generation could very easily encompass four or even five generations.

01:02:44 – 01:02:51:	When we lose that, we're losing the sort of vertical continuity of family that, going

01:02:51 – 01:02:57:	back to the first segment, is such a vital part of perpetuating not only faith but also

01:02:57 – 01:02:59:	culture in general.

01:02:59 – 01:03:04:	One of the things that's terrible about the so-called modern family is that there's typically

01:03:04 – 01:03:06:	no extended family around.

01:03:06 – 01:03:14:	So when a couple, they're 33, 34 years old, they have their first kid, we're the grandparents.

01:03:14 – 01:03:18:	Probably grandma might fly out for a couple months to help and then she goes home and

01:03:18 – 01:03:20:	moms by herself again.

01:03:20 – 01:03:21:	That's messed up.

01:03:21 – 01:03:26:	We talked last week about how much I had moved around as a kid and hoping that as a culture

01:03:26 – 01:03:28:	we'll get away from doing that.

01:03:28 – 01:03:32:	Think about what that does for family formation when the older generations are nowhere to

01:03:32 – 01:03:33:	be found.

01:03:33 – 01:03:37:	Even if they exist, even you see them at Christmas or whatever and they send presents and we

01:03:37 – 01:03:42:	have FaceTime video and things so you can have some kind of socialization.

01:03:42 – 01:03:48:	But it's nothing like having your mother and your aunts and your cousins and your grandmother

01:03:48 – 01:03:50:	all there to help care for you new baby.

01:03:50 – 01:03:52:	That's a fundamentally different thing.

01:03:52 – 01:03:58:	And so I think one of the things that we've lost by believing the modern marketer version

01:03:58 – 01:04:05:	of generations where you have these adversarial groups of purchasing cohorts, it turns us

01:04:05 – 01:04:12:	into these economic cogs and strips us of the vertical orientation that we have relative

01:04:12 – 01:04:17:	to each other when it comes to taking care of family.

01:04:17 – 01:04:22:	You know, of course, I spent a lot of time emphasizing the family nature of generations.

01:04:22 – 01:04:27:	That's something that you lose when you just think about it in terms of demographics.

01:04:27 – 01:04:32:	You can wrap data science around the stuff all you want.

01:04:32 – 01:04:37:	But in the end, it's fundamentally a question about do we have relationships with older

01:04:37 – 01:04:41:	and younger generations and our own families and then more broadly.

01:04:41 – 01:04:46:	I can tell you one of the things that's really surprised me for the last few years and one

01:04:46 – 01:04:50:	of the reasons I wanted to do this episode in particular is that a lot of guys I talk

01:04:50 – 01:04:53:	to are about half my age.

01:04:53 – 01:04:59:	And I'm thankful to talk to those guys so frequently because if I didn't hear them talking about

01:04:59 – 01:05:06:	their own lives, I would say the stupidest things imaginable about what their lives would

01:05:06 – 01:05:10:	be like or should be like or how they could do things differently.

01:05:10 – 01:05:15:	Because if I were just sitting resting on my own laurels from my experience growing up,

01:05:15 – 01:05:21:	you know, not that many years prior to them, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy.

01:05:21 – 01:05:23:	I have pretty good common sense.

01:05:23 – 01:05:26:	I generally have some degree of wisdom in most things.

01:05:26 – 01:05:31:	And yet my conclusions, if I weren't talking to these younger men, would be utterly retarded.

01:05:31 – 01:05:35:	I would be saying the stupidest, most pernicious things imaginable because I wouldn't have

01:05:35 – 01:05:37:	known what their experience was.

01:05:37 – 01:05:40:	I would assume that what was a little bit different than mine, but it can't be that

01:05:40 – 01:05:42:	much different.

01:05:42 – 01:05:48:	I'm here to tell you, if you are not talking to young men and women and their teens in

01:05:48 – 01:05:52:	early 20s, you have no idea.

01:05:52 – 01:05:57:	And I say this specifically because if you're giving them advice and you're not first listening

01:05:57 – 01:06:00:	to them, you're going to give them terrible advice.

01:06:00 – 01:06:03:	I know this because I would be giving terrible advice.

01:06:03 – 01:06:08:	I would be making stupid and lame comments all the time about things if I weren't hearing

01:06:08 – 01:06:12:	them and listening to them talk about what they deal with.

01:06:12 – 01:06:16:	Because it's utterly alien to my experience in ways that I can't understand.

01:06:16 – 01:06:21:	In its mutual alienation, they have no idea what it was like growing up in my generation.

01:06:22 – 01:06:24:	That's something that's totally unnatural.

01:06:24 – 01:06:28:	The world is not supposed to be changing that rapidly.

01:06:28 – 01:06:33:	That's something we're talking about the last segment is that the duty of the elder generation

01:06:33 – 01:06:38:	is to prevent such chaotic change from occurring in the younger generations because it just

01:06:38 – 01:06:40:	tears everything apart.

01:06:40 – 01:06:47:	How can you possibly propagate wisdom in a society when the guy who's 20 and the guy

01:06:48 – 01:06:54:	who's 60 and the guy who's 80 all have such completely different experiences that if the

01:06:54 – 01:06:58:	20-year-old asks the 60 or the 80-year-old or even the 40-year-old, he's going to get

01:06:58 – 01:06:59:	bad advice.

01:06:59 – 01:07:03:	He's going to say, what do I do about girls these days?

01:07:03 – 01:07:07:	These old guys are going to, they're just going to have a head full of rocks.

01:07:07 – 01:07:11:	Whatever advice they have, even if it was good advice when they were kids, it's going

01:07:11 – 01:07:16:	to be bad advice because they're not dealing, I hate to say, but in the same context, that's

01:07:16 – 01:07:22:	a weasel word that a lot of people abuse, but unless you're seeing and experiencing

01:07:22 – 01:07:28:	how much things have changed, you don't understand how much worse it is for the younger generations.

01:07:28 – 01:07:29:	We've done that to them.

01:07:29 – 01:07:33:	We have given them a world that is on fire and they don't know any better.

01:07:33 – 01:07:40:	If young people knew the world that boomers had, there would be a bloodbath.

01:07:40 – 01:07:44:	I think that's part of the reason that there's a lot of boomer hate today is that when younger

01:07:44 – 01:07:51:	people see high school videos from the 90s and 80s film, they don't believe it's real,

01:07:53 – 01:07:55:	whereas someone who's from that period when they look at it, they think, well, that's

01:07:55 – 01:07:56:	high school.

01:07:56 – 01:07:57:	Of course, that's what it looks like.

01:07:57 – 01:08:01:	In some cases, you look at high school today and high school then, and an older person

01:08:01 – 01:08:07:	maybe looks at it and can't even tell the difference, but a younger person sees a world

01:08:07 – 01:08:09:	that they've never even known.

01:08:09 – 01:08:15:	That's the kind of alienation that's occurred because generations are not seeking to preserve

01:08:15 – 01:08:19:	sanity for their own children.

01:08:19 – 01:08:24:	I hope that if you get nothing else from this episode, please consider actually talking

01:08:24 – 01:08:27:	to and listening to younger people.

01:08:27 – 01:08:30:	Not in some hippie, oh, we got to learn from the children thing.

01:08:30 – 01:08:33:	A lot of times, these young guys have no idea how bad it is.

01:08:33 – 01:08:37:	I listen to them and I understand in some ways what they're saying better than they

01:08:37 – 01:08:43:	do, but if I weren't listening to them, I would have idiotic things to say about what

01:08:43 – 01:08:46:	their lives are like because I wouldn't know the specifics.

01:08:46 – 01:08:50:	They have the specifics, but they don't understand the context historically or the context of

01:08:50 – 01:08:55:	even what their parents and their grandparents experienced that was so different than them

01:08:55 – 01:09:00:	that there's a mutual unintelligibility.

01:09:00 – 01:09:05:	It's really a crisis for a civilization when a father and a son can't talk about something

01:09:05 – 01:09:08:	and reach a sane conclusion.

01:09:08 – 01:09:09:	That is terrible.

01:09:09 – 01:09:16:	To some degree, that's really the story of the last, say, century and a half since maybe

01:09:16 – 01:09:23:	the 1880s to, well, today, but we don't know when it will stop yet.

01:09:23 – 01:09:31:	We've just had constant upheaval every decade or so, and it is getting worse.

01:09:31 – 01:09:39:	To some degree, the more recent generations have made it worse in a way that is different

01:09:39 – 01:09:47:	in degree, but so almost in kind from previous generations because you have these major upheavals

01:09:47 – 01:09:53:	and we could, of course, go over the history, but most people probably know the rough outlines.

01:09:53 – 01:09:57:	You have, of course, the world wars, you have the Great Depression, you have the Korean

01:09:57 – 01:10:00:	War, the Vietnam War, the Spanish American War.

01:10:00 – 01:10:07:	Something that many people forget is the American Indian Wars didn't end until the 1920s, started

01:10:07 – 01:10:10:	in the 1600s, went for the fullness of three centuries.

01:10:10 – 01:10:16:	All of these upheavals, many of them have been to some degree externally caused, but

01:10:16 – 01:10:22:	the difference in kind for the baby boomers is that many of the problems they have given

01:10:22 – 01:10:28:	to their children and grandchildren were not externally caused.

01:10:28 – 01:10:32:	The baby boomers imported these issues.

01:10:32 – 01:10:35:	The baby boomers created these issues.

01:10:35 – 01:10:40:	And that is part of why you see this growing resentment on the part of millennials and

01:10:40 – 01:10:45:	younger when it comes to the older generations, because as was mentioned, millennials and

01:10:45 – 01:10:49:	younger see what these older generations had.

01:10:49 – 01:10:55:	And what we do not have, which means that the baby boomers failed to preserve it and

01:10:55 – 01:11:01:	failed to pass it on, which, of course, is one of the fundamental duties of older generations,

01:11:01 – 01:11:07:	of parents, is to pass to their children what was passed to them by their parents and to

01:11:07 – 01:11:10:	do so in a way that is better.

01:11:10 – 01:11:15:	It is not just to preserve the principle, but to grow it and to pass more to the future

01:11:15 – 01:11:19:	generation than was passed to you by previous generations.

01:11:19 – 01:11:26:	And in the case of the baby boomers, they were handed more than almost any other generation

01:11:26 – 01:11:29:	in history, particularly in the American context.

01:11:29 – 01:11:35:	There are obviously some nuances in some contexts in other parts of the world, particularly

01:11:35 – 01:11:42:	Central Europe recovering from the world wars and having to deal in the East with communism,

01:11:42 – 01:11:44:	with the USSR.

01:11:44 – 01:11:47:	But in the American context, you had a peaceful society.

01:11:47 – 01:11:50:	You had a prosperous society.

01:11:50 – 01:11:54:	You had almost everything going for that generation.

01:11:54 – 01:12:00:	You could go out and get a job simply by walking in somewhere and talking to the owner.

01:12:00 – 01:12:05:	Many baby boomers will tell younger generation today, well, you should just go hit the paper

01:12:05 – 01:12:09:	document with your printed resume, and that's not how it works now.

01:12:09 – 01:12:11:	They don't understand.

01:12:11 – 01:12:15:	You wind up having to fill out a thousand applications on a bunch of different websites

01:12:15 – 01:12:18:	and then maybe someone calls you back.

01:12:18 – 01:12:20:	These are fundamentally different worlds.

01:12:20 – 01:12:24:	And so as was mentioned, the older generations give terrible advice on these things because

01:12:24 – 01:12:28:	they do not understand the reality of the modern world.

01:12:28 – 01:12:33:	If you ask for advice from the older generations about the opposite sex, you will get fundamentally

01:12:33 – 01:12:38:	terrible advice in the modern context, because they do not understand the world that they

01:12:38 – 01:12:41:	created and passed to their children.

01:12:41 – 01:12:46:	Because don't forget, they were the ones who created this by doubling down on what happened

01:12:46 – 01:12:49:	in the sixties.

01:12:49 – 01:12:55:	By doubling down on the evils of their parents and passing that on to their children.

01:12:55 – 01:13:01:	Because when you look at the reality of what we have today, the absolute chaos between

01:13:01 – 01:13:08:	the sexes, and you have an untold number of women producing pornography in their spare

01:13:08 – 01:13:14:	time as it were, you have men who don't even consider dating.

01:13:14 – 01:13:16:	And of course, I could just continue listing the problems.

01:13:16 – 01:13:19:	They are legion at this point.

01:13:19 – 01:13:26:	But all of these problems are the progeny of the profligate nature of the behavior of

01:13:26 – 01:13:30:	those who live through the sixties.

01:13:30 – 01:13:35:	We are living in the consequences of the sexual revolution.

01:13:35 – 01:13:38:	Of course, it is still getting worse, because as we have mentioned many times before, there

01:13:38 – 01:13:40:	is no floor with sin.

01:13:40 – 01:13:41:	It can always get worse.

01:13:41 – 01:13:45:	There is no bottom things can always get worse.

01:13:45 – 01:13:49:	And so there is no point at which you should say, Well, I shouldn't bother to do anything

01:13:49 – 01:13:50:	because this is as bad as it can get.

01:13:50 – 01:13:52:	No, it can get worse.

01:13:52 – 01:13:58:	And so you should always try to arrest the free fall and to turn things around.

01:13:58 – 01:13:59:	And we're living in that.

01:13:59 – 01:14:03:	And so if you ask the older generations for advice on dating, they will give you advice

01:14:03 – 01:14:08:	that may be made sense in the fifties, or even perhaps in part of the sixties, if you

01:14:08 – 01:14:15:	weren't in the worst areas of the country, but certainly won't make sense today.

01:14:15 – 01:14:18:	And this causes a real divide between these generations.

01:14:18 – 01:14:22:	You have essentially the older generation and the younger generation.

01:14:22 – 01:14:27:	Yes, we could divide things up and, you know, the lost greatest silent boomers, Gen X, Millennials

01:14:27 – 01:14:32:	and Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, now the more recent one, but why?

01:14:32 – 01:14:36:	It really comes down to there is a fundamental divide between those who belong to the older

01:14:36 – 01:14:40:	generation, which you can use baby boomers as the shorthand, and those who belong to

01:14:40 – 01:14:44:	the younger generation, which is basically Millennials and Younger.

01:14:44 – 01:14:50:	Yes, Gen X, we do realize that you exist, but you don't really exist because the older

01:14:50 – 01:14:54:	members of Gen X or baby boomers, the younger members of Gen X or Millennials.

01:14:54 – 01:14:56:	That's how this really plays out.

01:14:56 – 01:15:04:	It's sort of a before and after watershed moment where you have those who lived in this

01:15:04 – 01:15:14:	almost idyllic, almost paradisical reality of the postwar period in the U.S.

01:15:14 – 01:15:19:	And those who were born after that had all been squandered.

01:15:19 – 01:15:23:	That's the divide between these two generations, really.

01:15:23 – 01:15:31:	And that is why many in the younger generation feel enmity with the older generation.

01:15:31 – 01:15:36:	For those anyway who recognize what has been lost, as was mentioned, many in the truly

01:15:36 – 01:15:39:	younger part of the younger generation don't recognize what was lost.

01:15:39 – 01:15:42:	They did not grow up with it.

01:15:42 – 01:15:44:	They didn't even grow up with the promise of it.

01:15:44 – 01:15:49:	They didn't even grow up with the idea of it because it is so alien to them because

01:15:49 – 01:15:54:	what they were given by their parents and grandparents is so fundamentally different

01:15:54 – 01:15:59:	that they cannot even conceptualize what the world was like in the U.S. in the 40s and

01:15:59 – 01:16:01:	the 50s.

01:16:01 – 01:16:08:	And there's no chance they could conceptualize what it was like in the 10s and the 20s, before

01:16:08 – 01:16:12:	of course the Depression hit.

01:16:12 – 01:16:18:	But for Millennials, for the older Millennials, in this case this would, I am an older millennial,

01:16:18 – 01:16:24:	from 1985, we are, to some degree, on the cusp of it.

01:16:24 – 01:16:29:	Because yes, for the younger members of Gen X, they got to experience some of the good

01:16:29 – 01:16:33:	times as it were, and then watch, and they are still watching, of course, as things are

01:16:33 – 01:16:35:	getting worse.

01:16:35 – 01:16:40:	But Millennials, we were the turning point, really, in very many ways.

01:16:40 – 01:16:45:	Because we were the ones who could see what our parents had when they grew up.

01:16:45 – 01:16:46:	So we understood that.

01:16:46 – 01:16:50:	We saw what the world was like for them, and it still was, in some parts of the country.

01:16:50 – 01:16:55:	And then, particularly for those of us who grew up in some of the coastal regions or

01:16:55 – 01:17:01:	larger cities, we watched the whole progression as things collapsed.

01:17:01 – 01:17:05:	And we were given the terrible advice all along the way.

01:17:05 – 01:17:11:	Gen Z, as it were, and younger, don't necessarily ask boomers and older for advice, because

01:17:11 – 01:17:14:	in part they recognize they're going to get terrible advice, and in part they just don't

01:17:14 – 01:17:15:	do it.

01:17:15 – 01:17:19:	But for Millennials, well, the baby boomers were our parents.

01:17:19 – 01:17:24:	So of course, we were given advice by them all along the way.

01:17:24 – 01:17:28:	But as a generation, I don't mean just to complain as a millennial, I'm simply highlighting

01:17:28 – 01:17:32:	the reality of what happened, both for the younger listeners and for the handful of older

01:17:32 – 01:17:38:	listeners we have to understand the perspective, understand what happened to the younger generations.

01:17:38 – 01:17:42:	But for Millennials, one of the most common refrains that we heard, and talked to any

01:17:42 – 01:17:46:	millennial, and he will agree with me on this one, we were told, you have to go to

01:17:46 – 01:17:49:	university or else you'll work at McDonald's.

01:17:49 – 01:17:51:	And it was always McDonald's.

01:17:51 – 01:17:52:	Almost always anyway.

01:17:52 – 01:17:55:	I assume some parts of the country, maybe it was Burger King or Carl's Jr.

01:17:55 – 01:17:56:	What have you.

01:17:56 – 01:18:01:	But it was go to university or you'll work in fast food.

01:18:01 – 01:18:04:	And so many of us went to university.

01:18:04 – 01:18:11:	We are probably the most educated generation, possibly in history.

01:18:11 – 01:18:14:	We have some of the most degrees and advanced degrees.

01:18:14 – 01:18:20:	And so we were told, if you go to university, if you get this degree, if you put in this

01:18:20 – 01:18:25:	work this time this effort, if you devote these four years of your life, and leaving

01:18:25 – 01:18:29:	aside all the problems that cause particularly with female students, we were told you would

01:18:29 – 01:18:32:	have a good job, it would be waiting for you.

01:18:32 – 01:18:35:	And you could build a good life like your parents and your grandparents had, you would

01:18:35 – 01:18:40:	be able to get the big house and the dog and go on vacations and all of these things.

01:18:40 – 01:18:45:	All the things the boomers have and took for a given.

01:18:45 – 01:18:51:	And that didn't happen because boomers crashed the economy and wiped out those jobs and then

01:18:51 – 01:18:56:	imported millions of foreigners to destroy the labor market.

01:18:56 – 01:19:01:	And so when millennials graduated, those jobs didn't exist.

01:19:01 – 01:19:06:	And then came the second punch from the boomers as it were.

01:19:06 – 01:19:12:	Millennials were told, after we had been told when we were younger, you have to go to university

01:19:12 – 01:19:15:	or you'll work at McDonald's, we were told, oh, are you too good to work at McDonald's

01:19:15 – 01:19:17:	with your bachelors?

01:19:17 – 01:19:19:	And that's what happened.

01:19:19 – 01:19:21:	And that's just been the case all along.

01:19:21 – 01:19:23:	There are so many examples of this that could be given.

01:19:23 – 01:19:27:	There's the example of student loans where you had the boomer generation who could pay

01:19:27 – 01:19:36:	for university with a summer job versus millennials, where for many it was six figures, low six

01:19:36 – 01:19:38:	figures, but still six figures.

01:19:38 – 01:19:45:	So you would come out of university $100,000 in debt if you went on to get a master's degree.

01:19:45 – 01:19:46:	God help you.

01:19:46 – 01:19:50:	You came out of university $200,000 plus in debt.

01:19:50 – 01:19:56:	And so sometimes what millennials and younger, but very much millennials in this case would

01:19:56 – 01:20:02:	hear from boomers is that they started with nothing and they had to build up and build

01:20:02 – 01:20:04:	this life for themselves.

01:20:04 – 01:20:07:	Millennials didn't start with nothing.

01:20:07 – 01:20:13:	Millennials started in a really deep hole because the housing market had skyrocketed,

01:20:13 – 01:20:14:	so you couldn't buy a house.

01:20:14 – 01:20:19:	You came out of university with this massive debt burden, so you couldn't possibly save

01:20:19 – 01:20:24:	for a down payment even if you could afford the house because you couldn't get the good

01:20:24 – 01:20:25:	job.

01:20:25 – 01:20:27:	And so you couldn't get the vacation time.

01:20:27 – 01:20:32:	You couldn't start to build a family, et cetera, et cetera.

01:20:32 – 01:20:36:	And so that is the reason, one of the main reasons that the fertility rate in the U.S.

01:20:36 – 01:20:38:	has absolutely collapsed.

01:20:38 – 01:20:44:	Millennials simply did not have very many children, still haven't had very many children

01:20:44 – 01:20:52:	because of the economic situation in large part because we know that there is a direct

01:20:52 – 01:20:58:	correlation between economic stability and well-being, between financial security and

01:20:58 – 01:21:00:	number of children.

01:21:00 – 01:21:06:	Now, that's a mixed bag because, yes, you should trust God and that He will provide

01:21:06 – 01:21:10:	because children are a blessing from God and He will provide for you if He gives you that

01:21:10 – 01:21:11:	blessing.

01:21:11 – 01:21:17:	Yes, you still have to put in the work, of course, but human beings do respond to incentives

01:21:17 – 01:21:19:	to some degree.

01:21:19 – 01:21:23:	I'm not giving too much credit to economics, but I'll give some credit where credit is

01:21:23 – 01:21:24:	due.

01:21:24 – 01:21:26:	Humans do respond to incentives.

01:21:26 – 01:21:33:	And if you have an economy that is stable, where people can earn a living, where wives

01:21:33 – 01:21:37:	can stay at home to keep the home and raise children, you are going to have a higher fertility

01:21:37 – 01:21:39:	rate.

01:21:39 – 01:21:45:	And that collapsed because of the actions of the baby boomers.

01:21:45 – 01:21:50:	Millennials understand that, particularly older millennials, because we watched it happen.

01:21:50 – 01:21:56:	The younger members of the younger generation, so Gen Z and Younger, don't really see this

01:21:56 – 01:21:58:	because they didn't live through it.

01:21:58 – 01:22:05:	Some of them have gone back and looked at what happened and realized it, understood what

01:22:05 – 01:22:10:	was done to millennials and what was therefore sort of by proxy done to the younger generations

01:22:10 – 01:22:14:	as well, but they didn't live through it.

01:22:14 – 01:22:22:	This is why you see that enmity from younger generations toward baby boomers and older.

01:22:22 – 01:22:29:	It's not because it's not youthful rebellion, which sometimes baby boomers will try to argue

01:22:29 – 01:22:31:	that it's youthful rebellion.

01:22:31 – 01:22:33:	Millennials now are turning 40.

01:22:33 – 01:22:36:	This is not youthful rebellion anymore.

01:22:36 – 01:22:37:	Our knees crack when we stand up.

01:22:37 – 01:22:40:	It can't be youthful rebellion.

01:22:40 – 01:22:48:	But it's because when a generation is handed everything, handed great conditions and a

01:22:48 – 01:22:54:	good life and that is not passed on to future generations, there is going to be enmity and

01:22:54 – 01:22:59:	some of that is most certainly warranted because it is the duty of parents to pass to their

01:22:59 – 01:23:03:	children a better world than was passed to them.

01:23:03 – 01:23:07:	And that has not been happening for the last handful of generations.

01:23:07 – 01:23:11:	It has in fact been accelerating in the opposite direction.

01:23:11 – 01:23:16:	Now there was a period of time where inertia carried things along and things kept going.

01:23:16 – 01:23:21:	They looked fine, regardless of all of the structural foundational problems that were

01:23:21 – 01:23:23:	creeping in.

01:23:23 – 01:23:27:	But inertia doesn't last forever and we're at the tail end of that now.

01:23:27 – 01:23:32:	And that's why we see things have fallen off a cliff.

01:23:32 – 01:23:41:	And so the younger generations don't have these feelings with regard to the older generations

01:23:41 – 01:23:44:	for no reason.

01:23:44 – 01:23:46:	Gen Z is a mess.

01:23:46 – 01:23:47:	So are millennials.

01:23:47 – 01:23:48:	So is Gen X.

01:23:48 – 01:23:51:	Every generation is a mess in some certain ways.

01:23:51 – 01:23:57:	But when we don't recognize that a lot of these problems arise because of the actions

01:23:57 – 01:24:02:	of previous generations, we not only place the blame in the wrong place.

01:24:02 – 01:24:08:	But we make it almost impossible to actually address the problem.

01:24:08 – 01:24:13:	And so you get those who will say, well, just pick yourself up by your bootstraps or if

01:24:13 – 01:24:19:	you just worked hard enough or if you just did X, Y and Z, and that's not the case.

01:24:19 – 01:24:25:	Some problems that we have in this life, some of the burdens we bear are because of actions

01:24:25 – 01:24:27:	of those who came before us.

01:24:27 – 01:24:32:	So the best that we can do in some cases is to work as hard as we can to make sure that

01:24:32 – 01:24:37:	we don't pass those problems to our children and our grandchildren.

01:24:37 – 01:24:40:	And that is the reality of being a human being.

01:24:40 – 01:24:43:	That is the reality of the way the world works.

01:24:43 – 01:24:45:	These things are generational.

01:24:45 – 01:24:48:	Curses are generational and so are blessings.

01:24:48 – 01:24:53:	If your parents failed in their tasks, you may very well suffer because of that.

01:24:54 – 01:25:00:	On the flip side, if you succeed in what you are doing, your children will benefit because

01:25:00 – 01:25:01:	of it.

01:25:01 – 01:25:05:	And so will your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.

01:25:05 – 01:25:10:	And that is one of the reasons that we fundamentally oppose this conception of the individual as

01:25:10 – 01:25:12:	the be all end all.

01:25:12 – 01:25:16:	Because if you conceive of yourself as an individual and the individual is the only

01:25:16 – 01:25:23:	thing that matters, you are inevitably going to make decisions that will harm future generations.

01:25:24 – 01:25:28:	And that is what we have seen in the last handful of decades.

01:25:28 – 01:25:37:	I think the overarching reason that boomers in particular are seen as deserving of greater

01:25:37 – 01:25:42:	criticism is simply because they are the senior generation.

01:25:42 – 01:25:50:	And so as a result, they're basically in the position of Moses or of Lot, except they're

01:25:50 – 01:25:52:	not doing what they were supposed to do.

01:25:52 – 01:25:55:	They're not acting as the leaders.

01:25:55 – 01:25:59:	It's very much an entire generation of, I got mine.

01:25:59 – 01:26:08:	And so on one hand, you have some of the economic envy and jealousy in both directions.

01:26:08 – 01:26:13:	But on the other hand, if the boomers aren't going to lead, if they're not going to set

01:26:13 – 01:26:18:	a good example, if they're not going to take care of their children and grandchildren, who

01:26:18 – 01:26:19:	is?

01:26:19 – 01:26:26:	And so I think a lot of the anger and the criticism, whether it's coming from a good

01:26:26 – 01:26:30:	place or not, I think anger can come from a good place.

01:26:30 – 01:26:33:	It can also come from an evil, terrible place.

01:26:33 – 01:26:36:	And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to discuss this, is that the idea of boomer

01:26:36 – 01:26:38:	hate is wrong.

01:26:38 – 01:26:43:	You shouldn't just absolutely hate an entire generation because they have something and

01:26:43 – 01:26:44:	you don't have it.

01:26:44 – 01:26:49:	I think that the much more fundamental issue, at least from my perspective, is their abdication

01:26:49 – 01:26:57:	of their headship by them failing to propagate a Christian society in a Christian nation,

01:26:57 – 01:27:04:	by them failing to propagate economic and social policies that were going to feed family

01:27:04 – 01:27:07:	formation for their own children and grandchildren.

01:27:07 – 01:27:13:	They've left the world in a state where when they're dead and gone, who's going to pick

01:27:13 – 01:27:15:	up the pieces?

01:27:15 – 01:27:21:	Because at this point, there's basically almost no one left if there's anyone left alive who's

01:27:21 – 01:27:23:	ever seen it done properly.

01:27:23 – 01:27:25:	And that's why headship matters.

01:27:25 – 01:27:30:	If you don't have anyone setting a good example, where are you going to get your example?

01:27:30 – 01:27:37:	I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of the trad memes appear online.

01:27:37 – 01:27:44:	It's frustration, it's understanding implicitly, even if not consciously, that we as the living

01:27:44 – 01:27:53:	generation need to leapfrog our own ancestors, not in terms of cultural progress or anything,

01:27:53 – 01:27:55:	just in terms of they screwed up.

01:27:55 – 01:27:59:	If we do what they did, we're only going to make it worse.

01:27:59 – 01:28:05:	And so I think a lot of the nostalgia desire that's so prevalent, especially in a lot

01:28:05 – 01:28:11:	of young people, is just, I want something that I'm told once existed, and I don't know

01:28:11 – 01:28:16:	how to get it, and I don't know of anyone alive who can show me how to get it.

01:28:16 – 01:28:19:	I think that's the single greatest failing.

01:28:19 – 01:28:23:	Even beyond the economic errors and the moral failings and all the rest, is it without a

01:28:23 – 01:28:28:	good example, you only have bad examples.

01:28:28 – 01:28:33:	And that's a death knell for a civilization.

01:28:33 – 01:28:39:	It's a death knell for a people when their elders are not acting in the best interests

01:28:39 – 01:28:43:	of their progeny, of their posterity.

01:28:43 – 01:28:48:	What happens when the parents and the grandparents are going to spend all their money on cruises

01:28:48 – 01:28:52:	and jewelry, and then they're going to write their own kids and grandkids out of the will

01:28:52 – 01:28:58:	because I got mine and I don't want them to be brats, so I'm not going to give them anything.

01:28:58 – 01:29:06:	On one hand, children aren't implicitly entitled in some small sense to just being given whatever

01:29:06 – 01:29:07:	their parents earned.

01:29:07 – 01:29:12:	But on the other hand, there's a strong moral case to be made.

01:29:12 – 01:29:17:	The parents have a duty, and this is something that's in Scripture, we're just making up.

01:29:17 – 01:29:25:	All of human history has been defined in large part by parents bequeaving a better life for

01:29:25 – 01:29:26:	their children.

01:29:26 – 01:29:30:	Now the difference is that what was bequeathed from the boomers to their children and grandchildren

01:29:30 – 01:29:35:	was going to debt because you'll make so much money that you'll be able to pay for the debt

01:29:35 – 01:29:38:	and have all the nice stuff that we have too.

01:29:38 – 01:29:41:	That's clearly failed multiple generations.

01:29:41 – 01:29:47:	And so yes, today when you look at particularly the zoomers who are really, I think the first

01:29:47 – 01:29:51:	generation that is split right down the middle.

01:29:51 – 01:29:53:	I don't think there are a lot of milk-toed zoomers.

01:29:53 – 01:29:59:	I think the zoomers are either radical, far right.

01:29:59 – 01:30:06:	We're going to goose-step our way back to civilization, or they're physically and mentally and spiritually

01:30:06 – 01:30:11:	destroying their bodies in the final throes of what boomers have given them.

01:30:11 – 01:30:18:	Utter prophecy where there's no morality, there's complete self-definition, do whatever

01:30:18 – 01:30:19:	you want.

01:30:19 – 01:30:23:	Because that is fundamentally the spiritual inheritance that the boomers have passed down

01:30:23 – 01:30:25:	since the 60s.

01:30:25 – 01:30:34:	And I'm glad to see that there are at least some zoomers who they're doing some of the

01:30:34 – 01:30:37:	right things and they're trying to figure out the right ways.

01:30:37 – 01:30:42:	And the reason we're talking about this is that I wanted to talk about generations in

01:30:42 – 01:30:49:	particular because it is my belief that the boomer generation in terms of leadership is

01:30:49 – 01:30:51:	a total write-off.

01:30:52 – 01:30:54:	And I agree with Corey.

01:30:54 – 01:30:56:	I don't think Xers even exist.

01:30:56 – 01:31:00:	I think that boomers basically started about 50.

01:31:00 – 01:31:01:	Would I be my that?

01:31:01 – 01:31:03:	Forget the marketing stuff.

01:31:03 – 01:31:09:	If you have an example of a question about some of these things, or let me give a specific

01:31:09 – 01:31:10:	example.

01:31:10 – 01:31:14:	I have a JPEG on my hard drive that's a map of Europe.

01:31:14 – 01:31:18:	It's a map of Europe from the mid-1940s.

01:31:18 – 01:31:25:	And on that map it shows the locations of where the Germans had certain types of camps.

01:31:25 – 01:31:29:	These were camps where they sent people who were arrested.

01:31:29 – 01:31:31:	Some of them were called concentration camps.

01:31:31 – 01:31:34:	Some of them were called death camps or liquidation camps.

01:31:34 – 01:31:39:	And so on this map you can see all these locations, some of the names you would recognize, their

01:31:39 – 01:31:44:	names that are associated with horrors, and the illicit of visceral reaction when you

01:31:44 – 01:31:47:	hear the names.

01:31:47 – 01:31:52:	The reason I'm mentioning this map is that one of the most interesting facts about it

01:31:52 – 01:31:58:	is that it's also color-coded to show for those two different types of camps whether

01:31:58 – 01:32:05:	they were on the Allied side of the post-war lines or whether they were on the Soviet side.

01:32:05 – 01:32:09:	Because it turns out when you look at this particular map, it's not something you would

01:32:09 – 01:32:14:	get if you're just reading in text, but when you look at the map it's plainly obvious that

01:32:14 – 01:32:21:	every single camp that were told was a death camp where murder and cruelty was taking place,

01:32:21 – 01:32:25:	100% of those camps were behind Soviet lines.

01:32:25 – 01:32:28:	In other words, Allied soldiers never went to them.

01:32:28 – 01:32:32:	Allied soldiers never went to a single camp where those horrors were taking place.

01:32:32 – 01:32:36:	They went to other camps where there were people who were sick, who were dying from starvation

01:32:36 – 01:32:42:	in some case, some had typhus, and so they looked very emaciated.

01:32:42 – 01:32:46:	But there was no mass torture and murder, as we're told, was the narrative for those

01:32:46 – 01:32:47:	other camps.

01:32:47 – 01:32:52:	So the reason I bring this up is if I were to show this picture to someone who's over

01:32:52 – 01:33:00:	50, I can guarantee that basically every case, the response that I'm going to get from them

01:33:00 – 01:33:08:	is going to be some sort of rote, emotional response along the lines of the official narrative.

01:33:08 – 01:33:13:	They will go probably so far as to say, well, yes, the communists were good allies against

01:33:13 – 01:33:14:	the fascists.

01:33:14 – 01:33:16:	Thank God for the communists.

01:33:16 – 01:33:19:	Pretty much 50 and up, that's the only kind of response you're going to get from that

01:33:19 – 01:33:21:	map, from just facts.

01:33:21 – 01:33:26:	Whatever you think about the story behind the map, the facts are indisputable.

01:33:26 – 01:33:32:	The reason that I think that cut off is about 50 is seminal, is that if I show the same

01:33:32 – 01:33:36:	map to someone who's 40 or 30 or 20, some portion of those people are going to have

01:33:36 – 01:33:37:	their interest peaked.

01:33:37 – 01:33:39:	I think, wow, that's really weird.

01:33:39 – 01:33:43:	Why is it that all these camps that we have these terrible stories about, only coming

01:33:43 – 01:33:45:	from Stalin?

01:33:45 – 01:33:50:	Why are they only coming from the communists who were stealing our nuclear secrets and

01:33:50 – 01:33:52:	plotting to overthrow and destroy the United States?

01:33:52 – 01:33:57:	Why did they find all those camps and then the other places where we went, we didn't

01:33:57 – 01:33:59:	find any of them?

01:33:59 – 01:34:04:	Regardless of what you think about the narrative of World War II and what happened in Germany

01:34:04 – 01:34:11:	and greater Germany, the response to that picture is, in my book, it's a litmus test

01:34:11 – 01:34:16:	of how open-minded someone is.

01:34:16 – 01:34:18:	Anyone over 50 is going to have a knee-jerk reaction.

01:34:18 – 01:34:21:	I could write down half a dozen things.

01:34:21 – 01:34:27:	They're going to say one or more of them automatically, without any interest in the facts or any

01:34:27 – 01:34:32:	other estimate.

01:34:32 – 01:34:36:	When you're dealing with a generation that has been demoralized to that degree, that

01:34:36 – 01:34:43:	has been programmed to that degree, the reason that I think it's such a problem that the

01:34:43 – 01:34:50:	older generation is not fit to lead is that, as Corey talked about earlier with the Fourth

01:34:50 – 01:34:57:	Commandment, what do we do in a situation where we're to honor and obey our parents,

01:34:57 – 01:35:01:	but our elders are giving us the worst possible advice?

01:35:01 – 01:35:06:	Because we can't sin, we can't do something that's evil, we can't believe lies because

01:35:06 – 01:35:08:	old people say it's okay.

01:35:08 – 01:35:11:	They don't get to override God.

01:35:11 – 01:35:17:	I think that one of the tricks that we, one of the hurdles that we have to overcome as

01:35:17 – 01:35:24:	this generation, by this generation, I mean those who are living, there's a set of people

01:35:24 – 01:35:30:	in my book, 50 and Up, that you just shouldn't listen to at all when it comes to most things.

01:35:30 – 01:35:36:	Because they have been subjected to a degree of propaganda and life experiences that no

01:35:36 – 01:35:41:	longer have any basis in reality for what we're dealing with.

01:35:41 – 01:35:47:	If we try to listen to them, all we're going to get is more of the same.

01:35:47 – 01:35:50:	Younger people do not want more of the same.

01:35:50 – 01:35:55:	They see that they're drowning in quicksand and they don't know how to get out of it.

01:35:55 – 01:35:59:	That's an incredibly dangerous place for a civilization to be because you have young

01:35:59 – 01:36:04:	people who are angry at older people, you have older people who are frustrated and disillusioned

01:36:04 – 01:36:12:	by younger people, and everybody just wants to go their separate ways, and it's a recipe.

01:36:12 – 01:36:17:	It's a setup for a bloodbath, it's a setup for horrors beyond imagining, and as Christians

01:36:17 – 01:36:19:	that's absolutely what we don't want.

01:36:20 – 01:36:25:	The reason for us to mention this is I think that in good conscience, the best thing that

01:36:25 – 01:36:33:	we can do is recognize that although our elders are to be respected and they're to be loved,

01:36:33 – 01:36:38:	there are large swaths of decision-making that we need to make for ourselves and for

01:36:38 – 01:36:43:	future generations where we simply can't ask them, and most of them frankly don't care

01:36:43 – 01:36:44:	anyway.

01:36:44 – 01:36:48:	It's not like they're begging to give good advice, but I think that we need to recognize

01:36:48 – 01:36:52:	that we are a generation without a head, and I think that a lot of the boomer hate is

01:36:52 – 01:37:01:	rooted not simply in economic envy, but in a slow growing realization that the men who

01:37:01 – 01:37:06:	should be in charge of providing wisdom and guidance, they're checked out, we're a headless

01:37:06 – 01:37:15:	generation, and I think the only way that we can fix that in order to create a future

01:37:15 – 01:37:20:	civilization was this civilizational stuff, this isn't, you know, we talked last week

01:37:20 – 01:37:22:	about small ticket, this is the big ticket.

01:37:22 – 01:37:27:	I think the only way to get from where we are today where we see things in freefall

01:37:27 – 01:37:31:	to a place where our children and grandchildren can be safe and not have to deal with these

01:37:31 – 01:37:36:	problems is if we explicitly acknowledge that we are headless, we cannot look to the older

01:37:36 – 01:37:42:	generation to answer these problems and to get it right, and so rather than going to them

01:37:42 – 01:37:47:	and deferring to them, I think we need to simply set them aside respectfully, not antagonistically,

01:37:47 – 01:37:53:	but I think that we need to realize that they are such a demoralized generation that the only

01:37:53 – 01:37:57:	thing that they can possibly do with their mouths is to cause harm, and I hate to say that, it's

01:37:58 – 01:38:07:	the last thing that I want, and yet when doing what they say to do is going to do harm, we can't

01:38:07 – 01:38:12:	do it, and so the reason for talking about generations is that there is a particular

01:38:12 – 01:38:21:	generation with a particular set of problems that is so wicked and so far gone that all we can do

01:38:21 – 01:38:26:	is pray for them to go to heaven and otherwise not really listen to what they say.

01:38:26 – 01:38:30:	It's not the way it should be, it's not the way any civilization should ever be,

01:38:31 – 01:38:37:	and yet when we're looking at a civilization that's in freefall and a generation that despises God

01:38:37 – 01:38:42:	in every good thing, and you have some people who are younger in particular looking for something

01:38:42 – 01:38:48:	trad, looking for something older, I think we need to be free to recognize that maybe older

01:38:48 – 01:38:52:	is older than anyone who's living, which is part of the reason that a lot of what we talk about

01:38:52 – 01:38:58:	on Stone Choir is older doctrine. Doctrine shouldn't be changing, God didn't change, Christianity

01:38:58 – 01:39:02:	didn't change, but if some of this stuff fell by the wayside and nobody talked about it for a

01:39:02 – 01:39:09:	generation, for a century, I think that at some point we have to just recognize that and say it

01:39:09 – 01:39:15:	out loud and say, okay, the only way to get any of this back on track is to ignore what the boomers

01:39:15 – 01:39:21:	say and to go back further, to go back to the good advice that they ignored from their parents and

01:39:21 – 01:39:27:	grandparents, wherever this began, we need to find where the good ended and the bad began and refer

01:39:27 – 01:39:31:	to that. And as Christians, we know that above all else, scripture is the source for that. That's

01:39:31 – 01:39:35:	why we began in scripture and we're winding up by discussing the boomer question because

01:39:36 – 01:39:40:	I don't want there to be hatred. I don't want there to be slander and just disgust,

01:39:40 – 01:39:46:	but at the same time, like I said, I'm talking to guys half my age. If I gave them advice without

01:39:46 – 01:39:50:	having talked to them first, it would be idiotic advice. It would be the worst possible things. I

01:39:50 – 01:39:56:	know I would say stupid things to them. And so when I hear boomers saying the same stuff to them,

01:39:56 – 01:40:01:	it just makes me die inside because that complete alienation of the generations,

01:40:02 – 01:40:07:	it's intractable. It shouldn't be this way, but it's intractable to the point that the only thing

01:40:07 – 01:40:14:	we can do is try to build a future world where the next generation and then next generation after

01:40:14 – 01:40:21:	that won't have the same problems. I think that much of the people who are living today are in

01:40:21 – 01:40:25:	some ways a write-off and we have to figure out how to do that respectfully and in a way that's

01:40:25 – 01:40:30:	not destructive. And we have to look at rebuilding things that are good, even if it means ignoring

01:40:31 – 01:40:35:	maybe your own parents and grandparents. And so as Christians, we have to figure out how to do that

01:40:35 – 01:40:41:	in a way that doesn't violate the Fourth Commandment because we are to honor and obey our parents.

01:40:41 – 01:40:47:	So this is a tricky thing. Again, we're not giving a prescription here to say, yes, absolutely do

01:40:47 – 01:40:51:	this, but I think that when you're looking at the advice coming from people who are 50 and up,

01:40:52 – 01:40:57:	if you listen at all, I think you need to give it the most extremely rigorous

01:40:59 – 01:41:04:	going over. And you may well be forced to disregard it entirely. And if you do that,

01:41:04 – 01:41:08:	I think that there's probably a good case to be made for doing that with a clean conscience.

01:41:09 – 01:41:15:	So this is one of those episodes where some of the things we've said are not easy truths,

01:41:15 – 01:41:23:	they are hard truths. And that's part of life. Just because something is uncomfortable or unpleasant

01:41:24 – 01:41:30:	or what have you, doesn't mean that we get to ignore it, particularly when it is as important

01:41:30 – 01:41:38:	as the things we are covering as we covered in this episode. There are some very real differences

01:41:38 – 01:41:44:	for very many reasons, some of which we covered in this episode, some of which we did not because

01:41:44 – 01:41:48:	we didn't want to make this a 40 part episode that lasts for 120 hours.

01:41:50 – 01:41:53:	We're not going to go for three hours. I'm not implying that. But

01:41:55 – 01:42:00:	these are very real problems because of the very real differences between the generations.

01:42:00 – 01:42:04:	And as we mentioned in the last episode about the small stuff,

01:42:04 – 01:42:13:	we are to a very real extent, and by we, I mean, millennials and younger, as again,

01:42:13 – 01:42:17:	a reminder, we are including the younger members of Gen X in that most certainly.

01:42:19 – 01:42:26:	But essentially those of us who are now living and not members of the older generation now retiring,

01:42:27 – 01:42:30:	exiting the workforce and positions of leadership, etc.

01:42:30 – 01:42:39:	It falls to us to be an interim generation. We have to rebuild all of the things that were torn

01:42:39 – 01:42:47:	down in the last century or so. And there is no roadmap for much of what we have to do.

01:42:47 – 01:42:52:	There's a roadmap for some of it because, of course, we are Christians, first and foremost.

01:42:52 – 01:42:56:	And so we have God's roadmap in Scripture for many of these problems.

01:42:56 – 01:43:03:	But Scripture does not provide a complete roadmap for rebuilding a civilization.

01:43:05 – 01:43:09:	And more than rebuilding a civilization, we are rebuilding a civilization

01:43:11 – 01:43:17:	in a way that has not really been done before. And what I mean by that is that usually when

01:43:17 – 01:43:24:	a generation has to rebuild to the extent that we will have to rebuild, it is because they have

01:43:24 – 01:43:30:	just gone through an extremely destructive war or plague or some sort of horrible natural disaster.

01:43:32 – 01:43:38:	And we aren't rebuilding from that. So when you look around, things don't look necessarily that

01:43:38 – 01:43:43:	bad unless you look too closely, particularly, say, at the downtown area of large cities.

01:43:44 – 01:43:50:	But you're probably living in a home or an apartment or a condo, some sort of structure with a roof.

01:43:50 – 01:43:57:	Most people have food on the table. I'm in an air conditioned room right now because it's 80

01:43:57 – 01:44:03:	some degrees outside already because I live in the south. There are things that are still functioning

01:44:03 – 01:44:09:	that still look good. But the core of our civilization, the core of our society,

01:44:09 – 01:44:14:	of our culture has rotted away. And so we are rebuilding from dust and ashes,

01:44:15 – 01:44:21:	but not from visible dust and ashes. And that's a difficult position in which we find ourselves

01:44:22 – 01:44:29:	because we have to point out to our fellows that we are rebuilding from nothing in a very real sense

01:44:31 – 01:44:36:	because everything has been eroded away to the foundation, if not the foundation itself,

01:44:37 – 01:44:43:	having been eroded away. That is a unique position because, as I said, previous

01:44:44 – 01:44:50:	generations that have had to rebuild from nothing have had to rebuild from nothing,

01:44:50 – 01:44:56:	from literal dust and ashes. And so we find ourselves in a position

01:44:57 – 01:45:05:	that is not only difficult, but difficult. And without example, we don't have a roadmap.

01:45:06 – 01:45:11:	We are building this from the ground up as the first generation to do it.

01:45:14 – 01:45:19:	That doesn't mean that we're going to fail. I don't think we will. I think we can do this.

01:45:19 – 01:45:25:	I think we are up to this task. It is going to be difficult. But many of the things in life that

01:45:25 – 01:45:30:	are worth doing are in fact difficult. Just because something is hard does not mean it is not worth

01:45:30 – 01:45:36:	doing. In fact, many of the things that are worth doing are in fact hard. Staying in good shape

01:45:36 – 01:45:42:	physically is hard work. It's worth doing. Learning how to play an instrument is hard work. It's

01:45:42 – 01:45:49:	worth doing. Learning a new language is hard work. It's worth doing. Raising children is most

01:45:49 – 01:45:54:	certainly hard work. And it is most certainly worth doing because children are a blessing from God.

01:45:55 – 01:46:02:	And that really is what we're doing. We are building, rebuilding our civilization,

01:46:02 – 01:46:05:	building a better tomorrow for the generations that will follow us.

01:46:07 – 01:46:12:	Because where the generations that came before us squandered what was given to them,

01:46:12 – 01:46:19:	and so burdened us with what we have today, we want to pass something better to future generations.

01:46:20 – 01:46:26:	We want to give them the things that we didn't receive, the things that our elders had when

01:46:26 – 01:46:34:	they were our age, when they were younger, but they did not pass to us. That is the task of this

01:46:34 – 01:46:41:	generation. And so there will be some rewards, some temporal rewards. There will certainly be

01:46:41 – 01:46:46:	eternal rewards because these are good works. These are things on which God will smile,

01:46:46 – 01:46:51:	things that God will bless. Some of those blessings, because of the nature of how it works,

01:46:51 – 01:46:56:	will not accrue in our lifetimes. They will accrue to our children and our grandchildren.

01:46:58 – 01:47:04:	But again, you're not an individual. You are a link in the chain that extends all the way back

01:47:04 – 01:47:12:	to Adam and extends all the way down to whenever your line ends. Maybe it will be before the end,

01:47:12 – 01:47:14:	maybe it will be at the end when God returns.

01:47:18 – 01:47:24:	But your task as that link in the chain is to pass as much of the good as possible

01:47:24 – 01:47:32:	to those who will follow after you. And so we started with Scripture and will end with Scripture,

01:47:32 – 01:47:35:	going to read from Psalm 78.

01:47:35 – 01:47:42:	Give ear, O my people, to my teaching. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

01:47:43 – 01:47:47:	I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings from of old,

01:47:47 – 01:47:52:	things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them

01:47:52 – 01:47:57:	from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and

01:47:57 – 01:48:04:	his might, and the wonders that he is done. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed

01:48:04 – 01:48:10:	a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation

01:48:10 – 01:48:15:	might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children,

01:48:15 – 01:48:21:	so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments,

01:48:21 – 01:48:26:	and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation,

01:48:26 – 01:48:32:	a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.