Transcript: Episode 0029

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast, I am Corey J. Moeller, and I'm Woe.

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Remember O Lord what has befallen us, look and see our disgrace.

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Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners.

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We have become orphans, fatherless.

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Our mothers are like widows.

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We must pay for the water we drink, the wood we get must be bought.

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Our pursuers are at our necks, we are weary, we are given no rest.

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We have given the hand to Egypt and to Assyria, to get bread enough.

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Our fathers sinned, and are no more, and we bear their iniquities.

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Slaves rule over us, there is none to deliver us from their hand.

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We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness.

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Our skin is hot as an oven, with the burning heat of famine.

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Women are raped in Zion, young women in the towns of Judah.

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Princes are hung up by their hands, no respect is shown to the elders.

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Young men are compelled to grind at the mill, and boys stagger under loads of wood.

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The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music.

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The joy of our hearts has ceased, our dancing has been turned to mourning.

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The crown has fallen from our head, woe to us, for we have sinned.

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For this our heart has become sick, for these things our eyes have grown dim.

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For Mount Zion, which lies desolate, jackals prowl over it, but you, O Lord, reign forever.

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Your throne endures to all generations.

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Why do you forget us forever?

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Why do you forsake us for so many days?

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Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored.

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Do our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry

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with us.

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Today's episode of Stone Choir is a discussion around the idea of generations.

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That was an opening reading from the end of Lamentations, discussing the generations that

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had been abandoned by God, cursed for their faithlessness.

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We're talking today about what generations are, what they're in scripture, what they

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are just in human life, and giving some specific modern examples of the generations that are

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extant today, and how they're relevant to the problems that we face.

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The first part we're going to discuss is scripture.

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The middle part we're going to talk about the current generations and how generations

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work in society.

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In the end, we're going to specifically talk about the boomer question.

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We've had some people ask us to do an episode on boomers in particular.

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It's an important subject, so we're going to talk about why the boomer hate, why is

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one generation of all the living generations particularly signaled out for criticism, where

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when you look at the other generations, they're a mess too.

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We did some thinking and some study, and we're going to talk today about why there might

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be a difference there.

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So we're going to begin with scripture in the history of the concept before we get

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into the direct application of why would it matter if the elder generation of our day

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isn't living up to their responsibilities, but we're going to begin in scripture.

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The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God came

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into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them.

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These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

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The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention

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of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and the Lord regretted that he

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had made man on the earth, and had grieved him to his heart.

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So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land,

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man and animals and creeping things, and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have

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made them, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

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And so of course here in Genesis 6 we see really the first instance of an entirely pervasively

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wicked generation, because God wipes out everyone except Noah and his immediate family with

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the flood.

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God doesn't wipe out part of the earth, God doesn't wipe out only certain people.

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He wipes out an entire generation of man and starts over in this case.

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And so of course that is an explicit argument against those who say the flood was regional,

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the flood was not regional.

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It speaks of all the high mountains under heaven having the floodwaters above them.

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This was a worldwide flood.

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God wiped out everyone because of the wickedness of this generation.

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Of course with the adults, with those who would be considered under secular considerations

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guilty of their crimes, all of the children are also wiped away, because this is not a

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generation that has no children.

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This is not a world populated only by individuals who are 25 or 30 and up.

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There are infants who are wiped away with the flood.

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This is all of humanity from the oldest, however old he would have been in the anti-Diluvian

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period, probably some hundreds of years, to the youngest day old infant washed away in

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the floodwaters.

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Because the sins of the fathers do indeed fall on the sons.

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And the children of wicked parents will in fact pay for the wickedness of their parents.

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Not always of course, but generally yes.

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If your parents were wicked, you most likely will suffer for their wickedness.

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Now you will suffer more if you are also wicked, you add wickedness to wickedness.

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The sins of the fathers do fall on the sons.

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That is simply the way things work.

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And just to start out, we could have of course started back earlier in Genesis because of

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original sin.

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One of the core truths, one of the core doctrines of our faith is that children do in some ways

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pay for, suffer for the sins of their parents.

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Because original sin is inherited sin, it is ancestral sin, which is the term used in

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some translations and some languages.

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Original sin is sin that was committed by our first parents, that we inherit, and this

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we meaning all of us who are born naturally of the union of man and woman.

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Christ of course, born without original sin because he was not born from the union of

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man and woman, and so he was not born from sinful seed.

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That is why Christ was born without sin.

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We are born from the union of man and woman.

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We are all born in and with sin.

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We all inherit that from our first parents.

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And so sin is a generational curse.

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There is the original sin, which is the sin we all inherit, and then there are other specific

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sins committed by previous generations in specific lines.

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And those who proceed from those lines will inherit to some degree the consequences of

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those sins.

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We see that in many ways.

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There are certain lines of people who are given over to certain kinds of sin.

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This does not mean that if you come from that line, you must necessarily commit that sin.

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No.

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You may very well have a predisposition toward that sin.

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You may be more likely to engage in that sin, and that is a burden that you will bear because

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of being the progeny of that line, because of the sin of your forebears.

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And one of the best examples of this, really, one of the easiest for people to understand

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and immediately grasp would be if you have a lot of inbreeding in your family line, you

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are going to suffer very obvious consequences of that, because there are consequences in

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the flesh of that behavior, of that sin, because of course it is a sin because it is prohibited

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by God, and there are very obvious consequences for it in our fallen world.

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But the basic point is that sin does not fall only on the individual.

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Sin also falls on those around the individual, and particularly on that man's family, on

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his children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

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That can continue to pursue the family as it were for many generations.

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Now of course, if you are a child of sinful parents, sinful grandparents, great-grandparents,

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it is incumbent on you to try to do the best with what you have been given.

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You are not to follow in the steps of your sinful forebears.

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Yes, you still have to honor them.

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The fourth commandment is still in play.

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We'll get into that more.

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But it is incumbent on you to do the best you can to turn around that family tradition

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as it were, to not follow in those sinful footsteps.

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And that's going to be a challenge, and we'll get into that in other parts of this episode.

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That is part of the reason that certain generations are viewed in a negative light, particularly

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by their progeny, because of what those generations have placed as a burden on their children.

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I think Noah is such a good example, because his family was saved for his sake.

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He was a faithful patriarch, so his wife and his children were faithful in obedience to

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him.

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But all of his friends, everyone else he had ever known his entire life, they were all

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killed in the flood.

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Everyone he had ever known, except for his own immediate family, were slaughtered by

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God justly.

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And I think the reason that the flood is such an important example of God's judgment of

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generations of groups collectively is that although there was tremendous wickedness in

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that day, naturally some men were going to be more wicked than others.

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Some men simply were doing more sin than others.

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They got up earlier in the morning.

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And so the idea that although there was a variability in the degree of their evil, the

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punishment was the same as we've talked about in some past episodes, is men, we think, well,

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that's not fair.

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Why would they all get the same treatment when they didn't commit the same crime?

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Well, God judged the generation, and he wiped them all out.

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And the only generation that he saved was Noah's immediate family.

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This is an episode that we're doing in part because we want to continue to whittle away

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at people's egalitarian enlightenment priors to believe that we are all individuals and

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everything that will ever happen to us is a product of us as individuals, when that's

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simply not scriptural.

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It's not Christian.

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As Corey said, you die because Adam ate the wrong piece of fruit, period.

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You inherited that evil, and it wouldn't have mattered if you lived a perfect life.

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You would still die because of what Adam did.

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He is your father, you inherit his evil.

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On top of it, we, of course, that's just off to the races.

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As men, we know that Adam eating a piece of fruit 6,000 years ago is by far the least

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of our problems.

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Nevertheless, that alone is sufficient for our death, and it was the reason that God

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had to send his only begotten Son to save us from all of that sin, the sin of history,

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the sin of our own personal action.

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All of it must be overcome on the cross because nothing else can make up for it.

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That is fundamentally what libertarians today call collectivism.

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If you have ever gone near libertarian thought, collectivism is the worst thing imaginable.

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You'll be subject to any manner of insane belief if it protects you from the boogeyman

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of collectivism.

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What God did to Noah's generation was, I mean, we don't really think about it in terms

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of collectivism, but that's what it was.

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He killed them all.

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He wiped them all.

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He dashed every baby on the rocks.

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The babies hadn't been doing as much evil as the old men, or the men who were in their

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prime as they were doing their evil.

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Nevertheless, they all ended up dead.

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They all ended up at the bottom of the ocean, an ocean that hadn't even been there before

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God raised up oceans from the deep and from the skies specifically to kill everyone, and

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it was only his mercy and in recognition of the promise that had been made to Adam to

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fulfill the promise of the Messiah through his bloodline.

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God had to preserve Noah so that he could keep his promise.

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It's not God's hands being tied.

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God can't lie in the sense that whatever God says is true, but that is the way that he

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fulfilled it by preserving them, even as the entire generation itself was punished.

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We touched on an important point there, and it ties back into the discussion of headship

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that we've gone over a number of times in a number of episodes, but when it comes down

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to it, the basic fact of reality is that you are going to have one of two heads.

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Originally, the head of humanity is, of course, Adam, ultimately God, because God is the head

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of Adam in the garden in his perfection, but Adam is the federal head of humanity, and

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so we are all contained, in a sense, in Adam.

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We all follow from Adam.

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We all flow from Adam.

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Adam is our federal head, and so Adam's actions are imputed to us.

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They actually are, in a very real way, our own.

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And you see this in Scripture, for instance, when it speaks of the Levites tithing to Melchizedek

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because they were still in Abraham at the time.

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But in the case of humanity, in the fall, Adam chose to have Satan as his head instead

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of God, and so for all of us who flow from Adam, Satan is now our federal head in our

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fallen state.

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The only way to get out of that fallen state is to have another federal head.

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In this case, Christ.

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Christ is your head, if you are in Christ, which is to say, if you have faith, if you

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are adopted into the family of God, you become a child of God, a son of God, and Christ is

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your head.

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In Christ being your head, you are now in Christ, you have His righteousness instead

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of the wickedness of the old Adam, because, of course, Adam also believed in the promise

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of the gospel, and so Adam himself is in Christ.

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But that's the point you either have as your head Christ or Satan, and that's the difference.

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You either have eternal life in Christ with Him as your head, or you have eternal death

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with Satan in the pit prepared for Him in His fallen angels.

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And we really lose sight of that fact when we focus on individualism, on the individual,

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particularly in the modern egalitarian context, because if you think of yourself simply as

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an individual, all of these things in Scripture seem very foreign.

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If I'm an individual, why does it matter what Adam did in the far distant past, what

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he did 6,000 years ago?

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How does that affect me?

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I'm not Adam, I didn't do that.

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That's if you're an individual, you don't understand how this works.

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You are affected by Adam because you flow from Adam, because you are in Adam, because

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you come from Adam.

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The same as you are affected by the things your father did, and his father did, and his

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father all the way back to Adam.

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You are not an individual.

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Now when I say that, of course, that's going to set some people's hair on fire, because

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they think that we're denying some sort of central truth or fundamental aspect of reality.

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But really, to some degree, what we're just doing is attacking an idol.

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When I say you aren't an individual, what I mean is that you are not the libertarian

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or the modernist conception of an individual.

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You're not a standalone island.

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You are connected to a vast number of people.

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Yes, in your daily life, you're connected to people in all of the ways that should immediately

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come to mind.

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Someone grows your food, someone made your clothing.

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Chances are you didn't do either of those.

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Just right now, I could start naming things on my desk that were made by other people,

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because all of them were made by other people, except for the handwritten notes I did happen

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to make those.

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I didn't make the paper or the pen that I used.

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But even more fundamentally than that, you are not an individual because you are the

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son or daughter of your mother and your father, and they are, respectively, son and daughter

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of their parents.

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And that goes all the way on and back.

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You are a collection of all of the people in your line.

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It may be that you have your eyes from a great-grandparent, and maybe someone who was alive at that time

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can see that person's eyes in you, and you start to notice more of this as you get older

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in life.

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You'll start to see, well, that person has the same eyes as that person, or it's the

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same hair or all these little things because you're not an individual.

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God didn't make us to be isolated individuals.

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That's not what we are.

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We are a species.

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We live in communities first and foremost and fundamentally as a family, and then from

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a family up to a clan or a tribe and then a nation, and eventually up to humanity as

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a whole.

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So we all descend from Adam, and so we are all one greater whole in that sense.

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Yes, we are divided today into smaller groups, and we know that.

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Your immediate family is different in kind from the neighbor's immediate family.

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You have different duties to your brother by blood than you have to that neighbor.

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You still have duties to that neighbor, particularly because he is, in fact, a neighbor.

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But they're different in kind because there's a different relationship there because God

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designed us to live in these relationships, in these webs of relationships with other

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human beings.

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And so again, at risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, you are not an individual.

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You are a son or a daughter of your parents and grandparents and great grandparents.

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But it is important to keep that perspective.

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Because if you don't have that perspective, one, you are going to fundamentally misunderstand

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who and what you are, what God made you to be.

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But two, and in this case, perhaps more importantly, you are not going to understand scripture because

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you are going to be looking at scripture with alien eyes, and you will never understand

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what it is telling you.

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Because when you read through the Genesis narrative, when you read through the fall,

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you're going to think, why does this apply to me?

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Maybe it explains why the world is the way it is.

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But what effect does it have on me?

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I'm not in this story.

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You are in the story because you're in Adam, you're in Eve.

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You are contained in your first parents.

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That history is your history.

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What happens there flows down to you in time.

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And so this is a fundamental problem with the pre-Reformation sects, which is to say

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Rome and the East primarily.

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They deny the reality of original sin.

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And if you deny the reality of original sin, you will never understand the atonement.

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You will never understand why it was necessary for Christ to die on the cross in order to

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save you and the rest of believing humanity.

22:05.180 --> 22:10.580
To atone for the entirety of creation, yes, but of course the benefit accrues only to

22:10.580 --> 22:12.740
those who have faith.

22:12.740 --> 22:18.940
It is the objective, the universal justification versus the subjective, the personal justification,

22:18.940 --> 22:22.820
the latter being applied to individuals.

22:22.820 --> 22:27.060
But if you don't understand original sin, if you don't understand the fullness of the

22:27.060 --> 22:33.540
consequences of original sin, then you are going to miss the fullness of Christ's work.

22:33.540 --> 22:37.060
You are going to miss the nature of what he did on the cross.

22:37.060 --> 22:40.780
You are certainly going to miss the depth and the breadth of it.

22:40.780 --> 22:46.620
And there are Protestant groups that also do this because they would limit the atonement

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to a tiny group of people, the elect.

22:50.260 --> 22:56.580
When in reality, that for which Christ atoned was not just the elect.

22:56.580 --> 23:04.100
He atoned for all of creation because in Adam creation fell because Adam was created as

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the head of creation.

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That is the purpose of man.

23:08.400 --> 23:11.260
That is the role of man.

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We are the head of creation.

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We are to represent God in creation.

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That's part of what it means to be the image of God.

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That's a more complicated topic that we may get to eventually.

23:23.140 --> 23:29.660
But in being this representative of God in creation, in being the head of creation, what

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we do falls on creation.

23:33.820 --> 23:36.900
Similar to what a father does falls on his children.

23:36.900 --> 23:41.540
And so in Adam, the fullness of creation fell.

23:41.540 --> 23:49.300
And so in Christ, being the greater Adam, being the antitype to Adam's type, in Christ

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the fullness of creation was redeemed.

23:51.980 --> 23:55.300
He atoned for everything.

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And so that is the fundamental important point that we need to understand as Christians

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and why we cannot come to this looking at it through alien eyes of a modernist believing

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himself to be an individual.

24:07.500 --> 24:12.980
You have to look at these relationships at this, the fullness of this reality, the totality

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of what is happening.

24:14.780 --> 24:18.060
In Adam all fell.

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In Christ all is redeemed.

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That is the core of the Christian faith.

24:25.880 --> 24:31.360
And if you look at this scripture, if you look at these threads with, as I've said,

24:31.360 --> 24:34.720
alien eyes, you're going to miss that.

24:34.720 --> 24:40.240
I'm not saying that you will necessarily be damned if you don't understand these things.

24:40.240 --> 24:44.320
Because of course you can still have faith in Christ, a saving faith in Christ, if you

24:44.320 --> 24:51.040
don't understand why modernist ideology with regard to individuals and collectivism, etc.

24:51.040 --> 24:52.040
is wrong.

24:52.400 --> 24:55.400
However, you are missing the fullness.

24:55.400 --> 25:00.760
You are not recognizing the true reality, the scope and the scale of what Christ did

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for us in his life, death and resurrection.

25:05.680 --> 25:10.280
And so you're missing the fullness of the faith, which is one of the things for which

25:10.280 --> 25:12.600
we are arguing so often on this podcast.

25:12.600 --> 25:17.720
We're not saying that if you don't get this right, that if you miss this particular thing,

25:17.720 --> 25:20.600
that if you misunderstand this, what have you?

25:20.600 --> 25:24.240
We're not saying you will not be a Christian, or that you are going to spend eternity in

25:24.240 --> 25:25.240
hell.

25:25.240 --> 25:28.240
You can very well be a Christian and get many of these things wrong.

25:28.240 --> 25:30.880
Plenty of Christians do.

25:30.880 --> 25:33.640
But you are missing out on the fullness of the faith.

25:33.640 --> 25:36.440
God wants to give you super abundant gifts.

25:36.440 --> 25:40.560
God wants to give you more than you are ready to receive.

25:40.560 --> 25:45.960
And if you close yourself off from that, by ignoring the reality of what scripture says,

25:45.960 --> 25:52.400
by filtering everything through this modernist false lens, then you are simply missing out

25:52.400 --> 25:55.040
on what you could be as a Christian.

25:55.040 --> 26:00.520
Yes, of course, much of this will be cleared up in eternity.

26:00.520 --> 26:04.760
But why not start to realize these things here in time to benefit from the things that

26:04.760 --> 26:07.560
God wants to give you?

26:07.560 --> 26:10.200
That's why we are addressing these topics.

26:10.200 --> 26:12.720
That's why we bring up these issues.

26:12.720 --> 26:19.400
Because we want you to have a fuller, more profound faith, not drinking from the thimble

26:19.400 --> 26:25.080
that is modern theology, but drinking from the deep well that is scripture, that is the

26:25.080 --> 26:30.480
fullness of God's truth, of all of the gifts that He wants to give you.

26:30.480 --> 26:35.960
I think one of the best examples of how that plays into the way God uses generations goes

26:35.960 --> 26:38.880
back to our episode on election.

26:38.880 --> 26:45.520
We spent the first half of that talking about how God used the propagation of the faith

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through time to bring some men to faith, and other men did not receive the faith.

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That occurred generationally when we talked about how the Americas, North and South America,

26:58.440 --> 27:04.720
the men who came over on the land bridge, they did not propagate the faith.

27:04.720 --> 27:10.880
However it was lost between Mount Ararat and the Tower of Abel, and when they came

27:10.880 --> 27:14.040
across through Alaska or wherever.

27:14.040 --> 27:17.840
We don't know when the Christian faith was lost, when they lost the knowledge of God,

27:17.840 --> 27:19.920
but we do know that it was lost.

27:19.920 --> 27:24.080
We know that for hundreds of generations, the men who lived in the Americas, and also

27:24.080 --> 27:29.400
the men who lived in Sub-Saharan Africa, as we said in that episode, once you get away

27:29.400 --> 27:36.080
from modern-day Ethiopia and Sudan, right there on the coast, there's no evidence that

27:36.080 --> 27:40.840
there was any Christianity, any faith of any kind in those parts of the world for thousands

27:40.840 --> 27:43.480
and thousands of years.

27:43.480 --> 27:50.520
Those generations were all cursed by the faithlessness of their fathers, just as Noah's sons and

27:50.520 --> 27:54.160
their wives were saved by his faithfulness.

27:54.160 --> 27:55.800
They didn't necessarily do it.

27:55.800 --> 28:00.320
If they'd had a different father, they would have died in the flood as well.

28:00.320 --> 28:05.480
This is something that pops up in a smaller degree, not to the degree of a generation,

28:05.480 --> 28:11.600
but in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, when the angels came to Lot's house after they

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realized how wicked the place was, and they saw it with their own eyes as God has sent

28:15.760 --> 28:21.400
them, their response was to say to Lot, get your wife, get your daughters, get your son

28:21.400 --> 28:26.160
law, and if you have family here, you need to get him out of town tonight because we're

28:26.160 --> 28:29.000
going to destroy this place.

28:29.000 --> 28:33.100
Lot went to his sons-in-law and said, hey, God's going to destroy this place.

28:33.100 --> 28:34.680
You better leave with me right now.

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They laughed at him.

28:35.680 --> 28:36.680
They thought he was joking.

28:36.680 --> 28:40.160
They didn't take him seriously, and so they stayed behind.

28:40.160 --> 28:44.920
Now I think that's an interesting example of when we're talking about generational guilt

28:44.920 --> 28:51.520
because presumably his sons-in-law weren't the ones trying to rape the angels, and yet

28:51.520 --> 28:58.360
they still died in the conflagration that God sent because they were there.

28:58.360 --> 28:59.360
They were judged.

28:59.360 --> 29:03.200
They were destroyed for being there.

29:03.200 --> 29:05.040
That doesn't sound fair.

29:05.040 --> 29:07.120
All they had to do was not laugh at Lot.

29:07.120 --> 29:10.580
All they had to do was go with him, and they would have been saved too.

29:10.580 --> 29:13.040
His own wife looked over her shoulder.

29:13.040 --> 29:14.040
She looked back.

29:14.040 --> 29:18.720
She turned into a pillar of salt because they told them, leave.

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This place is cursed.

29:21.120 --> 29:27.720
She left, but she looked over her shoulder, and that small amount of doubt cost her life.

29:27.720 --> 29:31.480
The reason that the example of Lot and his family and Sodom and Gomorrah are important

29:31.480 --> 29:38.480
when we're talking about generations is that God collectively judges.

29:38.480 --> 29:43.520
That entire area was incinerated, everything, not just people, animals, plants.

29:43.520 --> 29:45.520
Everything was completely incinerated.

29:45.520 --> 29:50.040
God said, this area in particular, I am ending.

29:50.040 --> 29:55.400
Lot's family could have been saved if they had obeyed God, but because they disobeyed

29:55.400 --> 29:59.200
in the smallest possible ways, because they didn't take it as serious as they could have,

29:59.200 --> 30:01.680
they too died.

30:01.680 --> 30:06.720
When we talk about generations, again, we're just trying to make the basic, crucial fundamental

30:06.720 --> 30:11.400
point that judging a generation is what God does.

30:11.480 --> 30:15.640
120 generations in North and South America all went to hell.

30:15.640 --> 30:16.640
Why?

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Because their fathers were faithless generation after generation.

30:20.560 --> 30:25.080
Once you've lost the knowledge of God, everybody goes to hell.

30:25.080 --> 30:30.240
The only way that that can be undone is when someone else comes and brings the gospel,

30:30.240 --> 30:36.360
which was the other half of that episode on election, is that it was only once Europeans

30:36.400 --> 30:41.320
went into deep, a starkest Africa, when they went into North and South America that they

30:41.320 --> 30:47.640
brought the gospel to a place that for the first time in 3,500 years hadn't had it.

30:47.640 --> 30:52.880
Over the very first time, all these generations that had belonged to Satan suddenly had the

30:52.880 --> 30:59.200
opportunity to hear the truth about God and to be saved by it.

30:59.200 --> 31:02.920
Part of the purpose of doing that election episode was to say that those generations

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of faithlessness were offset by many centuries of faithfulness in Europe.

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When the Christian faith left where it was born in the Middle East, in the end, it basically

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only thrived in Europe.

31:18.320 --> 31:22.080
There were a couple small corners elsewhere that didn't amount to anything in terms of

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propagating the faith.

31:23.680 --> 31:29.560
It was only in the places where generation after generation, faithfulness to God resulted

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in doctrine being preserved, and in some cases, corrupted were Lutherans.

31:36.120 --> 31:42.120
I think most people listening are probably some variation of post-reformation.

31:42.120 --> 31:44.920
Things went wrong because there was not perfect faithfulness.

31:44.920 --> 31:47.400
We can never be perfectly faithful.

31:47.400 --> 31:51.920
Yet even at that, when those generations had preserved the faith and then men started getting

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on boats from Europe and traveling all around the world, what did they do?

31:55.720 --> 32:01.880
They brought the gospel to places where for generations it had never existed.

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For the first time, in the fulfillment of the Great Commission, those Christian conquistadors

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and others who went to various parts of the world, they came flying the flag and they

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came carrying the cross.

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They conquered people and they subjugated them and they converted them.

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We talked in that episode as well.

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Forcible conversion doesn't sound like something that Christians want to hear about, and yet

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the same story is heard in Acts where a man would be baptized along with his whole household.

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That's a forcible conversion.

32:38.240 --> 32:41.480
The babies, the children, the slaves don't get a vote.

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If the man of the house says, we are a Christian household now, it goes for everyone under

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his domain in the same as true of kings.

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Unfaithful generation can turn back the clock, can undo the damage caused by previous generations,

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but as long as you're just looking at things in terms of individualism, it's much harder

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to recognize what the fix is because, yes, there is an aspect in which the fix is that

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each individual person needs to have the gospel brought to them, but at some point that doesn't

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necessarily scale.

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That's not me saying something negative about the power of God's word.

33:23.260 --> 33:29.360
We know from history how God propagated his word, and it wasn't simply individual missionaries

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going hat in hand and sharing the gospel.

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It was often done under flag and under sword, and that is how God chose to spread his word.

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We're not necessarily calling for that today, but it's important recognition that when God

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used those means, they were efficacious.

33:48.300 --> 33:56.440
We can't doubt the results, and so a faithful generation begets future faithful generations,

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just as an unfaithful generation will damn all generations after it until someone else

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comes along and cleans up the mess.

34:03.800 --> 34:10.320
In the Americas and in Africa and in Asia, generation after generation, hellbound, hellbound, hellbound.

34:10.320 --> 34:11.320
Why?

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Because their inheritance from their fathers was not only original sin, but complete ignorance

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of the word of God.

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That's damning all by itself.

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When a faithless generation comes along, it must be replaced.

34:26.480 --> 34:32.120
You need a generation of faithful men to undo the damage by bringing something that had

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been lost.

34:34.200 --> 34:39.280
These conversations around individualism versus collectivism, however, when you talk about

34:39.280 --> 34:46.360
it, they're fundamentally reaching the heart of the Christian faith, which is not individualist,

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yes, I have faith because God gave it to me personally.

34:50.360 --> 34:51.680
The Holy Spirit was placed in me.

34:51.680 --> 34:55.280
It wasn't placed over some zip code.

34:55.280 --> 34:58.720
However, I became a Christian because my dad was a Christian.

34:58.720 --> 34:59.720
My mom was a Christian.

34:59.720 --> 35:01.400
They made me a Christian.

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God made me a Christian through my parents.

35:04.220 --> 35:10.360
That generational bequeathing of the faith is how it works.

35:10.360 --> 35:14.680
And the reason that today we have faithless generations is that the inheritance from many

35:14.680 --> 35:19.840
of our own parents has not been one of Christianity.

35:19.840 --> 35:23.640
Part of the reason we're doing this episode is that it kind of a tie into last week's

35:23.640 --> 35:28.600
we talked about some of the small things that we can do to try to undo some of the damage

35:28.600 --> 35:30.280
that's been done.

35:30.280 --> 35:37.120
We need to recognize that there may be a generational discontinuity in the Christian life.

35:37.120 --> 35:42.400
If you were a new convert near listening, or if your parents were weak or whatever,

35:42.400 --> 35:48.240
if there was a lull and kind of the graph of Christianity in your ancestry and you're

35:48.240 --> 35:53.640
back on the upswing, be consciously aware of that.

35:53.640 --> 35:58.920
Know that you are turning the tide just as the tide has been turned many times before

35:58.920 --> 36:04.600
in many places by a faithless generation being replaced by a faithful one.

36:04.600 --> 36:06.520
It's okay to be conscious about this stuff.

36:06.520 --> 36:13.960
In a situation like we're in today where civilization is literally on the line, it is imperative

36:13.960 --> 36:21.240
that we be aware of the fact that generational faithlessness is a death sentence to civilization,

36:21.240 --> 36:23.760
to everyone, to all future generations.

36:23.760 --> 36:29.400
If we lose the faith, all of our children for 120 generations after us will all go to

36:29.400 --> 36:33.760
hell unless God sends someone else to bring the gospel to them.

36:34.640 --> 36:38.640
Our task is to bring the gospel to them.

36:38.640 --> 36:43.600
God will sort things out in his time, but if we are not a faithful generation, we have

36:43.600 --> 36:46.880
no reason to expect that our children and grandchildren will receive that.

36:46.880 --> 36:51.800
This is something that happens over and over in Scripture.

36:51.800 --> 37:00.600
When Joshua died, it describes his death and his burial, and it says, and they buried

37:00.600 --> 37:04.960
him within the boundaries of his inheritance in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the

37:04.960 --> 37:10.440
mountains of Gash, and all the generations also were gathered to their fathers.

37:10.440 --> 37:14.360
There arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that

37:14.360 --> 37:18.160
he had done for Israel, which is something that had happened in the previous generation

37:18.160 --> 37:24.240
with Moses, with the faithlessness of the Hebrew people, the Israelites when they were

37:24.240 --> 37:25.760
brought out of Egypt.

37:25.760 --> 37:31.360
They immediately sinned against God, and so they wandered in the Zet Desert for 40 years,

37:31.360 --> 37:35.920
specifically so that that entire generation could be judged and die.

37:35.920 --> 37:38.560
Not one of them was permitted into the Promised Land.

37:38.560 --> 37:40.240
Moses was one of the last to die.

37:40.240 --> 37:45.040
He was able to go and see the land of milk and honey, and then God killed him on the spot.

37:45.040 --> 37:49.480
He said, you can see it, but you're never going to be there because he disobeyed.

37:49.480 --> 37:54.160
Moses disobeyed in a small way, but it was enough for him to be included in the generation

37:54.160 --> 37:57.600
that never received the inheritance that had been promised to them.

37:57.600 --> 38:05.880
That inheritance was passed on to their children to receive as the next generation of believers.

38:05.880 --> 38:08.720
When Joshua was raised up, he began circumcision again.

38:08.720 --> 38:14.440
There had been no circumcision in the desert, and so a faithless generation was replaced

38:14.440 --> 38:20.520
by a faithful one, and still when Joshua died, the cycle happened again.

38:20.520 --> 38:24.680
This is something that's always been a part of the faith, and it's something that God

38:24.680 --> 38:28.240
continuously has to deal with us for.

38:28.240 --> 38:34.240
When he operates against and for generations, that is something that is a part of the Christian

38:34.240 --> 38:35.240
faith.

38:35.240 --> 38:41.880
This stuff is intrinsic to how God operates in our lives, and we cannot ignore that.

38:41.880 --> 38:46.440
I think this is a good place to go over something that we actually haven't explicitly touched

38:46.440 --> 38:50.360
on yet in the podcast.

38:50.360 --> 38:56.760
That is the place of knowledge in the Christian faith, and what exactly we mean by knowledge

38:56.760 --> 39:02.000
when it comes to the Christian faith, and there are three different levels as it were

39:02.000 --> 39:07.080
when it comes to knowledge that are relevant for belief.

39:07.080 --> 39:12.920
Those three levels are called Noticia, Ascensus, and Fiducia, which just Latin for basically

39:12.920 --> 39:18.600
the first two you can probably understand, Notice and Ascent, and the last one is the

39:18.600 --> 39:23.320
Latin word from which we get fiduciary, so trust.

39:23.320 --> 39:28.840
Essentially, this is you have to take notice of the fact, ascent to the fact, and then

39:28.840 --> 39:30.600
trust in it.

39:30.600 --> 39:36.200
In the case of the Christian faith, of course, that is the core tenets of the Christian faith,

39:36.200 --> 39:41.880
you have to not merely know of them, ascent to them, you have to also trust in them.

39:41.880 --> 39:46.520
That is what it means to have faith in Christ.

39:46.600 --> 39:52.360
If that knowledge is lost, that does mean that the faith is lost.

39:52.360 --> 39:56.800
If you don't know the content of the Christian faith, if that was not passed down to you

39:56.800 --> 40:00.360
by your forefathers, it's gone.

40:00.360 --> 40:01.760
You are not going to get it back.

40:01.760 --> 40:07.760
Yes, we have frequently spoken on this podcast about natural revelation, but natural revelation

40:07.760 --> 40:09.760
does not reveal the gospel.

40:09.760 --> 40:14.720
That has to be written down, that has to be recorded in some way, that has to be transmitted

40:14.760 --> 40:17.760
from one generation to the next.

40:17.760 --> 40:22.440
And if you lose that, if you lose the scriptures, if you lose the gospel, you are not going

40:22.440 --> 40:25.040
to find it in nature, you are not going to get it back.

40:25.040 --> 40:30.480
It will have to be brought to you by some other people who did not lose it.

40:30.480 --> 40:38.040
And so we could just look at a quick example of this in the natural world.

40:38.040 --> 40:42.440
If you're making whiskey, let's say there are five steps, we're going to go with five,

40:42.560 --> 40:44.720
more complicated and that will simplify it.

40:44.720 --> 40:48.520
You have to grow barley, you have to malt the barley, you have to grind it, you have

40:48.520 --> 40:51.040
to ferment it, and then you have to distill.

40:51.040 --> 40:53.840
That's how you make whiskey.

40:53.840 --> 40:59.840
Any one of those steps, you could lose the knowledge necessary to perform it.

40:59.840 --> 41:03.840
If you lose that knowledge, you're never going to make whiskey.

41:03.840 --> 41:07.440
You may make something else, but you will not make whiskey.

41:07.440 --> 41:11.360
Because you need that knowledge at each one of those steps in order to make the actual

41:11.360 --> 41:13.680
end product.

41:13.680 --> 41:17.400
And so if you forget how to grow barley, well, you're not going to make whiskey, at least

41:17.400 --> 41:19.840
not barley based whiskey.

41:19.840 --> 41:23.960
If you forget how to malt, you're certainly not going to make malt whiskey.

41:23.960 --> 41:29.160
If you forget how to ferment, you're not going to have the starting product you need for

41:29.160 --> 41:32.520
the distillation process.

41:32.520 --> 41:38.440
And so you need this knowledge to produce the desired end result.

41:38.440 --> 41:40.960
The same is true in the Christian faith.

41:40.960 --> 41:46.160
You need the knowledge of God, you need the knowledge of the gospel, you certainly need

41:46.160 --> 41:50.680
the knowledge of original sin and of sin generally, because if you don't have that, you're not

41:50.680 --> 41:54.120
going to think you need the gospel and you're never going to believe in it.

41:54.120 --> 41:58.680
But you need this knowledge in order to have faith.

41:58.680 --> 42:02.880
Faith is more than knowledge, as I said, three levels, the final being trust, which is actual

42:02.880 --> 42:04.720
living faith.

42:04.720 --> 42:09.600
But you need the other two upon which you build that faith.

42:09.600 --> 42:12.840
Because you have to know of the law.

42:12.840 --> 42:15.080
You have to know of the gospel.

42:15.080 --> 42:19.760
You have to assent to the truth of them, and then you have to believe in the gospel.

42:19.760 --> 42:25.720
You have to believe that Christ died for you, washed away your sins.

42:25.720 --> 42:33.400
And so the point here is that if the forefathers of a particular people, if a particular generation

42:33.440 --> 42:42.440
at some point in the past failed to pass down this knowledge, the children of that generation

42:42.440 --> 42:47.200
and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren will all suffer for that wickedness because

42:47.200 --> 42:53.000
they will all be damned, because they will not have the knowledge necessary to have the

42:53.000 --> 42:55.240
faith.

42:55.240 --> 43:02.360
And so a prior generation, a wicked generation at some point in the past, can damn every

43:02.400 --> 43:10.040
generation that proceeds from it unless some outside party comes in and re-delivers the

43:10.040 --> 43:17.640
truth and transmits that knowledge that the wicked generation failed to transmit.

43:17.640 --> 43:20.040
And we see that as with the whiskey example.

43:20.040 --> 43:24.800
This is very obviously something that can happen in reality.

43:24.800 --> 43:29.160
There are things that our ancestors in some distant past knew how to do that we don't

43:29.160 --> 43:31.560
really know how to do today.

43:31.600 --> 43:37.240
We could very easily lose things that we know how to do today, tomorrow.

43:37.240 --> 43:44.040
The faith is not different from these things that we see in the so-called secular world,

43:44.040 --> 43:47.840
at least not different in kind.

43:47.840 --> 43:51.560
Because it is still knowledge and knowledge has to be transmitted.

43:51.560 --> 43:57.920
And if the knowledge is not transmitted, you can never achieve the end goal for which that

43:57.920 --> 44:01.000
knowledge is necessary.

44:01.040 --> 44:06.920
One last verse that I wanted to pull in just to establish the legitimacy of speaking of

44:06.920 --> 44:12.920
generations as having properties comes from Jesus himself.

44:12.920 --> 44:17.880
When the crowds were increasing, Jesus began to say, this generation is an evil generation.

44:17.880 --> 44:22.640
It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.

44:22.640 --> 44:27.080
For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this

44:27.080 --> 44:28.760
generation.

44:28.760 --> 44:33.720
Now when Jesus said that, the disciples were present, there were obviously some living

44:33.720 --> 44:39.920
Jews in that day who received faith, who believed in him, and who were saved.

44:39.920 --> 44:43.360
And yet he said, this is an evil generation.

44:43.360 --> 44:46.880
Jesus did not misspeak when he said that.

44:46.880 --> 44:52.520
Jesus was describing accurately the generation of Jews in that day, and frankly, every generation

44:52.520 --> 44:59.160
since, because their inheritance was one of rejecting Christ, which is why Christianity

44:59.160 --> 45:06.880
ended up leaving the Middle East and being eventually all but exterminated there.

45:06.880 --> 45:12.360
When we speak about generations, just as when we speak about races, or when we speak about

45:12.360 --> 45:17.880
sexes, these are properties of the world, they're properties of creation, they're how

45:17.880 --> 45:21.760
God makes us.

45:21.760 --> 45:24.480
I am born of a certain generation.

45:24.480 --> 45:28.720
Someone who's 40 years younger than me is clearly a different generation.

45:28.720 --> 45:30.360
That's the way it works.

45:30.360 --> 45:33.640
You're born, you live, you die.

45:33.640 --> 45:36.440
It's a recurring theme in scripture, it's a recurring theme in everything because it

45:36.440 --> 45:40.760
is the recurring theme of the universe.

45:40.760 --> 45:45.560
We know from astronomy even stars have a birth, life, and death cycle.

45:45.560 --> 45:47.640
It's the way everything works.

45:47.640 --> 45:49.160
God is immortal.

45:49.160 --> 45:51.160
Everything else comes and goes.

45:51.560 --> 45:56.760
A generation, it's more generally kind of now moving away from scripture a little bit.

45:56.760 --> 46:00.200
Generation is just the current people who are living.

46:00.200 --> 46:06.960
I think that's one of the important things to deal with in this section is that historically

46:06.960 --> 46:10.240
it's always been understood that your generation is just whoever's alive.

46:10.240 --> 46:18.040
The generation of Noah, it wasn't people between 25 and 54, it wasn't the key demo.

46:18.040 --> 46:19.040
It was everyone.

46:19.040 --> 46:21.280
Who's alive is the current generation.

46:21.280 --> 46:24.240
Jesus was referring to the same thing in his day when he was preaching.

46:24.240 --> 46:25.560
This is an evil generation.

46:25.560 --> 46:27.480
It was all the people who were alive.

46:27.480 --> 46:30.120
The former generation wasn't being spoken to.

46:30.120 --> 46:33.040
The next generation wasn't being spoken to.

46:33.040 --> 46:37.040
I think that generations are slightly distinct from some of the other categories that we've

46:37.040 --> 46:44.660
talked about in the past for the reason that it's an inherent property not based on how

46:44.660 --> 46:48.480
you're begotten but when you're begotten.

46:48.600 --> 46:53.520
I think everybody knows at this point, if you believe me, I'm a white guy.

46:53.520 --> 46:57.600
If someone is a black guy, he might be my neighbor, but he's not my brother according

46:57.600 --> 46:58.600
to the flesh.

46:58.600 --> 47:01.840
I would hope that he would be my brother according to the faith.

47:01.840 --> 47:04.040
He may well be in my generation.

47:04.040 --> 47:09.040
If we were born in a similar time, if we had similar experiences, in the more narrow modern

47:09.040 --> 47:14.960
idea of a generation, if we're roughly the same age with similar socioeconomic status,

47:14.960 --> 47:19.600
I'm a black guy, absolutely the same generation because we're alive at the same time experiencing

47:19.600 --> 47:21.960
many of the same things.

47:21.960 --> 47:29.600
I think one of the things that white people really do ridiculously coming from libs primarily

47:29.600 --> 47:37.240
is when African-Americans talk about having black culture, we try to say, no, you're American.

47:37.240 --> 47:38.240
You have American culture.

47:38.240 --> 47:39.240
You don't have black culture.

47:39.920 --> 47:46.080
A, that's false on its face, but B, they have their stuff and they want it.

47:46.080 --> 47:50.000
If you want to make a value judgment about whether one culture is better than another,

47:50.000 --> 47:54.840
that's entirely legitimate, but it's not legitimate to say, no, you don't have any culture at

47:54.840 --> 48:00.000
all because if I'm born at the same time as a black guy and yet we have very different

48:00.000 --> 48:04.840
upbringings and very different experiences, which is usually the case, we're in overlapping

48:04.840 --> 48:10.000
generations, but there's not the familiarity of brotherhood that would be there if we had

48:10.000 --> 48:11.320
the same sort of upbringing.

48:11.320 --> 48:16.520
I think that's one of the things that makes discussion of generation today trickier is

48:16.520 --> 48:22.680
that it just happens by virtue of when you're born and it used to be that when you were

48:22.680 --> 48:28.240
born didn't have, it had a much broader impact than I think it does today because there was

48:28.240 --> 48:30.880
much more of a monoculture in the past.

48:30.880 --> 48:37.680
What I mean by that is that with the advent of mass media and then today almost in micromedia,

48:37.680 --> 48:45.640
we moved away from being shaped by our family and by our faith and by the nations that we

48:45.640 --> 48:51.600
lived in and became more and more shaped by pop culture, by culture that could be brought

48:51.600 --> 48:57.720
by a salesman selling you a book or a movie or a video game or whatever it is today, something

48:57.720 --> 49:01.480
that can be brought in that you can say, yes, this is what I'm going to spend my time and

49:01.480 --> 49:07.080
my energy and my focus on, can very easily become your own personal culture that you'll

49:07.080 --> 49:11.680
share with other people with similar interests.

49:11.680 --> 49:18.280
What's happened is that before mass media, before all of this stuff was so readily available,

49:18.280 --> 49:20.680
people pretty much were on the same page.

49:20.680 --> 49:25.000
What's happened really in the last century or two is that we've begun more and more and

49:25.080 --> 49:30.680
more to bifurcate so that although I was born in a certain time and I have some commonality

49:30.680 --> 49:35.400
with people born in my age, I had so many options available to me that the books that

49:35.400 --> 49:41.040
I read, the movies that I watched, the summer camps that I went to, all those things that

49:41.040 --> 49:48.000
produced the particularity of my interests and who I am today may be completely alien

49:48.000 --> 49:49.600
to someone else.

49:49.600 --> 49:53.400
Although we may be from the same generation, it may not matter anymore.

49:53.400 --> 49:57.960
I think one of the things that's worth thinking about as a person, I think that's incredibly

49:57.960 --> 49:58.960
unhealthy.

49:58.960 --> 50:03.080
I think for so many people to be living in the same place at the same time and to have

50:03.080 --> 50:09.280
mutually alien experiences is fundamentally harmful because if somebody was born at the

50:09.280 --> 50:13.920
same time as me, but I have nothing in common with them except for maybe religion, but even

50:13.920 --> 50:16.480
that only goes so far.

50:16.480 --> 50:19.000
There's a lot to talk about in life besides religion.

50:19.000 --> 50:22.320
If all your experiences are alien to me, what are we going to talk about?

50:22.520 --> 50:26.680
You're going to talk about how weird your childhood was.

50:26.680 --> 50:29.000
At some point, you have to have commonality.

50:29.000 --> 50:33.160
It's exciting to meet someone with similar interests, with similar background because

50:33.160 --> 50:37.120
you feel that you're part of a mutual generation.

50:37.120 --> 50:41.320
What's changed is that those generations have been winnowed.

50:41.320 --> 50:46.840
We call them subcultures really, but it's like a generation doesn't have the same continuity

50:46.840 --> 50:48.680
that it used to.

50:48.680 --> 50:53.840
I think it's something that's really hurt us as human beings to be chopped up in these

50:53.840 --> 50:59.440
bits and pieces based on distinct experiences that can be radically different from someone

50:59.440 --> 51:04.120
maybe even just living down the street because he was visiting different web forms in you

51:04.120 --> 51:08.680
or because he played sports and you didn't because not everyone played sports anymore.

51:08.680 --> 51:13.000
Whatever the differences are, when you start chopping people up to the point that they can

51:13.000 --> 51:18.640
be neighbors, they can be from the same blood, but they can have a fundamentally alien culture,

51:18.640 --> 51:24.040
it kind of breaks the generational cohesion that I think God has always wanted for us.

51:24.040 --> 51:28.920
I think for those of us who grew up in large cities, we can see this even more distinctly

51:28.920 --> 51:35.920
because if you grew up in a small town, 500 people, you were even perhaps, there are going

51:35.920 --> 51:41.080
to be a lot of similarities simply because of the scale of things.

51:41.080 --> 51:47.560
You are going to have done fairly similar things during the summer in your childhood.

51:47.560 --> 51:54.540
You are going to have gone to the same places after school, etc., things like that.

51:54.540 --> 52:00.720
But if you grew up in a really big city, in my case I grew up in LA, there are many, many

52:00.720 --> 52:03.680
different little subcultures here and there.

52:03.680 --> 52:07.920
And you're going to have that even within your own high school, granted my high school

52:07.920 --> 52:08.920
is fairly large.

52:08.920 --> 52:14.320
I think my graduating class was over a thousand students, but you're going to be divided into

52:14.320 --> 52:21.960
these little groups and not really have a shared culture as would have been the case

52:21.960 --> 52:23.600
in the past.

52:23.600 --> 52:28.560
Now we're not saying that everyone has to be conformist, as it were, and everyone have

52:28.560 --> 52:34.640
exactly the same preferences and the same hobbies, and no, that's not the point.

52:34.640 --> 52:42.960
But the issue is, if there's no overlap, then you're really living in a nation of aliens,

52:42.960 --> 52:47.480
even being alien from his neighbor and everyone else.

52:47.480 --> 52:54.400
If you don't have these things in common, then you don't have anything you share with

52:54.400 --> 52:56.040
your neighbor.

52:56.040 --> 53:01.680
And that makes him your neighbor by virtue only of proximity, which, yes, that is the

53:01.680 --> 53:07.280
core sense of what it means to be a neighbor, a neighbor is the person next door.

53:07.280 --> 53:13.840
But in a functioning society, the person who is next door will also share many things with

53:13.840 --> 53:15.040
you.

53:15.040 --> 53:18.240
You'll have the same religion, you'll have some of the same taste, you'll have some

53:18.240 --> 53:23.280
of the same hobbies, you will be able to get along with and talk to this person about more

53:23.280 --> 53:27.280
than just what you did for an hour on Sunday.

53:27.280 --> 53:29.280
It's not to say the church is not important.

53:29.280 --> 53:30.600
Of course it is.

53:30.600 --> 53:34.040
It is among the most important things in life, but it is not the only important thing in

53:34.040 --> 53:35.880
life.

53:35.880 --> 53:42.160
And so we really need to think about what it is that we have had handed to us by previous

53:42.160 --> 53:47.240
generations and what we have continued to make our own.

53:47.240 --> 53:55.040
Because yes, this fracturing of the culture, these micro cultures that were created in

53:55.040 --> 54:00.760
decades past, they were passed to us, but we've entrenched them and we continue to engage

54:00.760 --> 54:01.760
in them.

54:01.760 --> 54:05.240
And we don't really cross these little lines that we've built.

54:05.240 --> 54:12.240
And so you know the goths go over here, the jocks go over here, the coffee culture goes

54:12.240 --> 54:13.480
over here.

54:13.480 --> 54:17.480
It's all these little groups of the various little hobbies that people have.

54:17.480 --> 54:19.960
And that's not how human beings are supposed to live.

54:19.960 --> 54:24.720
Yes, it's important to have your core group of friends and that's fine.

54:24.720 --> 54:25.720
That's important.

54:25.720 --> 54:26.720
That's part of life.

54:26.720 --> 54:28.800
That's part of what it means to be a human being.

54:28.800 --> 54:33.400
But the fullness of what it means to be a human being is greater than that.

54:33.400 --> 54:38.280
And church can, of course, help with that because just by the very nature of church,

54:38.280 --> 54:45.320
you are going to have some crossing of these micro cultural lines will call them because

54:45.320 --> 54:50.560
you're going to have people together on Sunday, preferably for more than just an hour, but

54:50.560 --> 54:56.000
together on Sunday for at least an hour who have different hobbies, who have taken very

54:56.000 --> 54:59.240
different paths in life, who have very different jobs.

54:59.240 --> 55:05.040
And it's important to have that mixing as it were in society.

55:05.040 --> 55:10.200
Because if you start to stratify and isolate and fracture your society down into these

55:10.200 --> 55:17.320
tiny groups, you no longer have a nation, you no longer even really have a culture.

55:17.320 --> 55:20.200
And that is what we see today.

55:20.200 --> 55:27.280
The US, as I've said before, really America, if I want to be more specific, the US is a

55:27.280 --> 55:29.960
number of nations.

55:29.960 --> 55:36.360
America is also, to some degree, not one fully cohesive nation, because you have different

55:36.360 --> 55:44.720
subgroups, subnations, really, within America, partly due to geography, because the US is

55:44.720 --> 55:48.360
vast by historical standards.

55:48.360 --> 55:52.160
And of course, they're going people who think, well, Rome, etc. were fairly large.

55:52.160 --> 55:54.520
Yes, of course.

55:54.640 --> 55:58.160
But Rome never contended to be one nation.

55:58.160 --> 55:59.280
Rome was an empire.

55:59.280 --> 56:05.180
An empire is a collection of nations, or a collection of countries under one central

56:05.180 --> 56:07.520
authority.

56:07.520 --> 56:13.080
America is a nation, but it is a nation that increasingly shares little in common with

56:13.080 --> 56:19.320
itself, which is to say, again, we have a neighbor, but we don't necessarily share anything

56:19.320 --> 56:21.160
with him.

56:21.160 --> 56:28.240
We should be making an effort, as Americans, and also as Christians, to actually have something

56:28.240 --> 56:34.720
in common with our neighbors, to share something with them more than simple proximity.

56:34.720 --> 56:40.840
Because God wants us to have more than what we have built for ourselves.

56:40.840 --> 56:46.800
God didn't design us to spend all of our time in our own homes, isolated, consuming

56:46.800 --> 56:51.040
media tailored to us and ignoring the greater world.

56:51.040 --> 56:54.120
That's not what it means to be a human being.

56:54.120 --> 56:59.280
We have created these little fractured worlds for ourselves that are mere shadows of what

56:59.280 --> 57:04.520
God clearly wanted for us, what he gave us.

57:04.520 --> 57:10.640
And so part of this is going to be that this generation is going to have to put in a lot

57:10.640 --> 57:20.520
of hard work in order to break what has become a cycle and attempt to restore actual normalcy.

57:20.520 --> 57:26.680
What it means to be a human being living in society, among other human beings.

57:26.680 --> 57:29.000
And that is going to be a challenge.

57:29.000 --> 57:30.480
Like I said, that is going to be hard work.

57:30.480 --> 57:33.520
None of this is going to be easy.

57:33.520 --> 57:39.120
Because by and large, we've become accustomed to something that is totally unnatural.

57:39.120 --> 57:43.080
And human beings are very good at becoming accustomed to things.

57:43.080 --> 57:47.960
We can adjust to or at least suffer through almost anything.

57:47.960 --> 57:49.320
Just look at prisoners of war.

57:49.320 --> 57:58.680
They can survive sometimes many years, sometimes more than a decade in extremely harsh conditions.

57:58.680 --> 58:01.720
Because humans are very adaptable.

58:01.720 --> 58:04.200
That can be used for good or for ill.

58:04.200 --> 58:10.400
When it is used as resiliency, it is used to survive periods of stress and trial, that

58:10.400 --> 58:12.320
is good.

58:12.320 --> 58:20.600
When it is used to adjust to what we have today to a fundamental inversion of what society

58:20.600 --> 58:23.600
and culture should actually be, it is no longer good.

58:23.600 --> 58:25.480
Because we have misused it.

58:25.480 --> 58:27.000
We have misapplied it.

58:27.000 --> 58:30.120
We have used it toward wicked ends.

58:30.120 --> 58:32.320
That's not to say that it started out.

58:32.320 --> 58:33.440
It was used toward wicked ends.

58:33.440 --> 58:39.120
Because to some degree, the younger members of Gen X and millennials and we'll get more

58:39.120 --> 58:41.640
into these lines in a little bit.

58:41.640 --> 58:47.240
But to some degree, we were born into a world where this was already the case.

58:47.240 --> 58:53.840
And so this was merely adapting to the world which was given to us.

58:53.840 --> 58:57.280
That's good to some degree because yes, you have to survive in the world that was handed

58:57.280 --> 58:59.760
to you by your parents and your grandparents.

58:59.760 --> 59:05.920
But that doesn't mean that you keep it the way that they made it if it is not good.

59:05.920 --> 59:11.680
And so part of our task is to reverse some of these things, to return to a more natural

59:11.680 --> 59:18.200
way of living, to align ourselves with what God clearly wanted for humanity instead of

59:18.200 --> 59:24.560
what we have built in the last, say, 100, 150 years in the modern world.

59:24.560 --> 59:30.240
One of the things that changed about man's understanding of generations in the last 100,

59:30.240 --> 59:37.120
150 years was that it went from being just those who are alive during a certain period

59:37.120 --> 59:43.360
to really being more about these smaller cohorts that today, most of the discussion, pretty

59:43.360 --> 59:47.760
much all the discussion that you hear today around generations, like the baby boom generation,

59:47.760 --> 59:53.560
for example, that's a marketing term that was specifically designed.

59:53.560 --> 01:00:01.240
It's something that's used by marketers to figure out the purchasing cohort for preferences

01:00:01.240 --> 01:00:03.320
in a capitalist sense.

01:00:03.320 --> 01:00:10.200
Who wants to buy cruises and time shares versus who wants to buy whatever else?

01:00:10.200 --> 01:00:14.480
You have some people with a lot of money and they have certain tastes, other people with

01:00:14.480 --> 01:00:17.840
less resources and different tastes.

01:00:17.840 --> 01:00:22.440
There tend to be generational breakdowns there, so let's call those the generations.

01:00:22.480 --> 01:00:26.760
That's really where we are today and that's where most of the conversation is around.

01:00:26.760 --> 01:00:30.840
One of the reasons we're talking about this today and we're going to end by specifically

01:00:30.840 --> 01:00:36.440
talking about baby boomers was that if your view of what a generation is is shaped entirely

01:00:36.440 --> 01:00:42.440
by marketers, then yes, it would be absolutely unfair to say what Jesus said, but this is

01:00:42.440 --> 01:00:43.960
an evil generation.

01:00:43.960 --> 01:00:46.480
How could you say that?

01:00:46.480 --> 01:00:51.560
If I look at the sins of the baby boomers and say, well, this is bad and this is bad,

01:00:51.560 --> 01:00:55.360
then they retort as they always do by saying, well, what about what this generation does

01:00:55.360 --> 01:00:57.240
and this thing and this thing?

01:00:57.240 --> 01:00:58.880
They're not wrong.

01:00:58.880 --> 01:01:05.400
These things are, regardless of whose sin is worse or who has accumulated a greater amount

01:01:05.400 --> 01:01:11.560
of sins, there's something wrong with every generation beyond any shadow of a doubt.

01:01:11.560 --> 01:01:18.040
If the generations, as they're described today, these smaller generations, if it's really

01:01:18.040 --> 01:01:20.800
just a marketing cohort, then yeah, who cares?

01:01:20.800 --> 01:01:26.160
Why would you pick on the older people when the younger people have these different problems

01:01:26.160 --> 01:01:29.920
that are in some ways worse?

01:01:29.920 --> 01:01:34.640
I think it's important to understand that one of the things that we've lost by comprehending

01:01:34.640 --> 01:01:41.080
ourselves in terms of those marketing cohorts is that if you think of all the living as

01:01:41.080 --> 01:01:47.400
sort of a horizontal stack where you have the oldest at the bottom and then the youngest

01:01:47.400 --> 01:01:55.640
at the top, if you think about everyone who's alive at a certain point in terms of continuity,

01:01:55.640 --> 01:02:00.600
it's very different than if you think about it in terms of this discontinuous marketing

01:02:00.600 --> 01:02:02.680
segmentation that we have.

01:02:02.680 --> 01:02:11.320
So it used to be the generations of, for example, fathers, children, grandchildren.

01:02:11.320 --> 01:02:12.720
Those are generations too.

01:02:12.720 --> 01:02:16.040
That's something we all understand and we're not trying to redefine it.

01:02:17.000 --> 01:02:22.440
As people have been having kids older and older, it means that you're less and less likely

01:02:22.440 --> 01:02:26.560
to ever know your grandparents or certainly your great-grandparents.

01:02:26.560 --> 01:02:30.000
I'm sure there are many kids alive today who were born after their great-grandparents

01:02:30.000 --> 01:02:31.280
were dead.

01:02:31.280 --> 01:02:33.360
That didn't used to be the case.

01:02:33.360 --> 01:02:38.480
Generations used to be closer together, the father to son sort of generation, such that

01:02:38.480 --> 01:02:44.840
the living generation could very easily encompass four or even five generations.

01:02:44.840 --> 01:02:51.800
When we lose that, we're losing the sort of vertical continuity of family that, going

01:02:51.800 --> 01:02:57.080
back to the first segment, is such a vital part of perpetuating not only faith but also

01:02:57.080 --> 01:02:59.120
culture in general.

01:02:59.120 --> 01:03:04.880
One of the things that's terrible about the so-called modern family is that there's typically

01:03:04.880 --> 01:03:06.960
no extended family around.

01:03:06.960 --> 01:03:14.200
So when a couple, they're 33, 34 years old, they have their first kid, we're the grandparents.

01:03:14.200 --> 01:03:18.560
Probably grandma might fly out for a couple months to help and then she goes home and

01:03:18.560 --> 01:03:20.560
moms by herself again.

01:03:20.560 --> 01:03:21.560
That's messed up.

01:03:21.560 --> 01:03:26.080
We talked last week about how much I had moved around as a kid and hoping that as a culture

01:03:26.080 --> 01:03:28.400
we'll get away from doing that.

01:03:28.400 --> 01:03:32.320
Think about what that does for family formation when the older generations are nowhere to

01:03:32.320 --> 01:03:33.480
be found.

01:03:33.480 --> 01:03:37.720
Even if they exist, even you see them at Christmas or whatever and they send presents and we

01:03:37.720 --> 01:03:42.800
have FaceTime video and things so you can have some kind of socialization.

01:03:42.800 --> 01:03:48.000
But it's nothing like having your mother and your aunts and your cousins and your grandmother

01:03:48.000 --> 01:03:50.720
all there to help care for you new baby.

01:03:50.720 --> 01:03:52.680
That's a fundamentally different thing.

01:03:52.680 --> 01:03:58.760
And so I think one of the things that we've lost by believing the modern marketer version

01:03:58.760 --> 01:04:05.360
of generations where you have these adversarial groups of purchasing cohorts, it turns us

01:04:05.360 --> 01:04:12.880
into these economic cogs and strips us of the vertical orientation that we have relative

01:04:12.880 --> 01:04:17.320
to each other when it comes to taking care of family.

01:04:17.320 --> 01:04:22.920
You know, of course, I spent a lot of time emphasizing the family nature of generations.

01:04:22.920 --> 01:04:27.640
That's something that you lose when you just think about it in terms of demographics.

01:04:27.640 --> 01:04:32.120
You can wrap data science around the stuff all you want.

01:04:32.120 --> 01:04:37.160
But in the end, it's fundamentally a question about do we have relationships with older

01:04:37.160 --> 01:04:41.600
and younger generations and our own families and then more broadly.

01:04:41.600 --> 01:04:46.520
I can tell you one of the things that's really surprised me for the last few years and one

01:04:46.520 --> 01:04:50.600
of the reasons I wanted to do this episode in particular is that a lot of guys I talk

01:04:50.600 --> 01:04:53.080
to are about half my age.

01:04:53.080 --> 01:04:59.480
And I'm thankful to talk to those guys so frequently because if I didn't hear them talking about

01:04:59.480 --> 01:05:06.720
their own lives, I would say the stupidest things imaginable about what their lives would

01:05:06.720 --> 01:05:10.400
be like or should be like or how they could do things differently.

01:05:10.400 --> 01:05:15.200
Because if I were just sitting resting on my own laurels from my experience growing up,

01:05:15.200 --> 01:05:21.400
you know, not that many years prior to them, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy.

01:05:21.400 --> 01:05:23.000
I have pretty good common sense.

01:05:23.000 --> 01:05:26.240
I generally have some degree of wisdom in most things.

01:05:26.240 --> 01:05:31.240
And yet my conclusions, if I weren't talking to these younger men, would be utterly retarded.

01:05:31.240 --> 01:05:35.800
I would be saying the stupidest, most pernicious things imaginable because I wouldn't have

01:05:35.800 --> 01:05:37.800
known what their experience was.

01:05:37.800 --> 01:05:40.880
I would assume that what was a little bit different than mine, but it can't be that

01:05:40.880 --> 01:05:42.240
much different.

01:05:42.240 --> 01:05:48.600
I'm here to tell you, if you are not talking to young men and women and their teens in

01:05:48.600 --> 01:05:52.040
early 20s, you have no idea.

01:05:52.040 --> 01:05:57.760
And I say this specifically because if you're giving them advice and you're not first listening

01:05:57.760 --> 01:06:00.760
to them, you're going to give them terrible advice.

01:06:00.760 --> 01:06:03.560
I know this because I would be giving terrible advice.

01:06:03.560 --> 01:06:08.880
I would be making stupid and lame comments all the time about things if I weren't hearing

01:06:08.880 --> 01:06:12.200
them and listening to them talk about what they deal with.

01:06:12.200 --> 01:06:16.400
Because it's utterly alien to my experience in ways that I can't understand.

01:06:16.400 --> 01:06:21.400
In its mutual alienation, they have no idea what it was like growing up in my generation.

01:06:22.280 --> 01:06:24.520
That's something that's totally unnatural.

01:06:24.520 --> 01:06:28.000
The world is not supposed to be changing that rapidly.

01:06:28.000 --> 01:06:33.480
That's something we're talking about the last segment is that the duty of the elder generation

01:06:33.480 --> 01:06:38.400
is to prevent such chaotic change from occurring in the younger generations because it just

01:06:38.400 --> 01:06:40.400
tears everything apart.

01:06:40.400 --> 01:06:47.160
How can you possibly propagate wisdom in a society when the guy who's 20 and the guy

01:06:48.080 --> 01:06:54.080
who's 60 and the guy who's 80 all have such completely different experiences that if the

01:06:54.080 --> 01:06:58.520
20-year-old asks the 60 or the 80-year-old or even the 40-year-old, he's going to get

01:06:58.520 --> 01:06:59.520
bad advice.

01:06:59.520 --> 01:07:03.520
He's going to say, what do I do about girls these days?

01:07:03.520 --> 01:07:07.320
These old guys are going to, they're just going to have a head full of rocks.

01:07:07.320 --> 01:07:11.160
Whatever advice they have, even if it was good advice when they were kids, it's going

01:07:11.160 --> 01:07:16.720
to be bad advice because they're not dealing, I hate to say, but in the same context, that's

01:07:16.760 --> 01:07:22.360
a weasel word that a lot of people abuse, but unless you're seeing and experiencing

01:07:22.360 --> 01:07:28.240
how much things have changed, you don't understand how much worse it is for the younger generations.

01:07:28.240 --> 01:07:29.680
We've done that to them.

01:07:29.680 --> 01:07:33.840
We have given them a world that is on fire and they don't know any better.

01:07:33.840 --> 01:07:40.120
If young people knew the world that boomers had, there would be a bloodbath.

01:07:40.120 --> 01:07:44.320
I think that's part of the reason that there's a lot of boomer hate today is that when younger

01:07:44.360 --> 01:07:51.360
people see high school videos from the 90s and 80s film, they don't believe it's real,

01:07:53.080 --> 01:07:55.280
whereas someone who's from that period when they look at it, they think, well, that's

01:07:55.280 --> 01:07:56.280
high school.

01:07:56.280 --> 01:07:57.800
Of course, that's what it looks like.

01:07:57.800 --> 01:08:01.960
In some cases, you look at high school today and high school then, and an older person

01:08:01.960 --> 01:08:07.360
maybe looks at it and can't even tell the difference, but a younger person sees a world

01:08:07.360 --> 01:08:09.720
that they've never even known.

01:08:09.760 --> 01:08:15.880
That's the kind of alienation that's occurred because generations are not seeking to preserve

01:08:15.880 --> 01:08:19.240
sanity for their own children.

01:08:19.240 --> 01:08:24.320
I hope that if you get nothing else from this episode, please consider actually talking

01:08:24.320 --> 01:08:27.520
to and listening to younger people.

01:08:27.520 --> 01:08:30.040
Not in some hippie, oh, we got to learn from the children thing.

01:08:30.040 --> 01:08:33.520
A lot of times, these young guys have no idea how bad it is.

01:08:33.520 --> 01:08:37.880
I listen to them and I understand in some ways what they're saying better than they

01:08:37.880 --> 01:08:43.440
do, but if I weren't listening to them, I would have idiotic things to say about what

01:08:43.440 --> 01:08:46.840
their lives are like because I wouldn't know the specifics.

01:08:46.840 --> 01:08:50.920
They have the specifics, but they don't understand the context historically or the context of

01:08:50.920 --> 01:08:55.800
even what their parents and their grandparents experienced that was so different than them

01:08:55.800 --> 01:09:00.040
that there's a mutual unintelligibility.

01:09:00.040 --> 01:09:05.700
It's really a crisis for a civilization when a father and a son can't talk about something

01:09:05.700 --> 01:09:08.420
and reach a sane conclusion.

01:09:08.420 --> 01:09:09.920
That is terrible.

01:09:09.920 --> 01:09:16.700
To some degree, that's really the story of the last, say, century and a half since maybe

01:09:16.700 --> 01:09:23.460
the 1880s to, well, today, but we don't know when it will stop yet.

01:09:23.460 --> 01:09:31.300
We've just had constant upheaval every decade or so, and it is getting worse.

01:09:31.300 --> 01:09:39.300
To some degree, the more recent generations have made it worse in a way that is different

01:09:39.300 --> 01:09:47.660
in degree, but so almost in kind from previous generations because you have these major upheavals

01:09:47.660 --> 01:09:53.900
and we could, of course, go over the history, but most people probably know the rough outlines.

01:09:53.900 --> 01:09:57.500
You have, of course, the world wars, you have the Great Depression, you have the Korean

01:09:57.500 --> 01:10:00.780
War, the Vietnam War, the Spanish American War.

01:10:00.780 --> 01:10:07.300
Something that many people forget is the American Indian Wars didn't end until the 1920s, started

01:10:07.300 --> 01:10:10.780
in the 1600s, went for the fullness of three centuries.

01:10:10.780 --> 01:10:16.100
All of these upheavals, many of them have been to some degree externally caused, but

01:10:16.100 --> 01:10:22.220
the difference in kind for the baby boomers is that many of the problems they have given

01:10:22.220 --> 01:10:28.580
to their children and grandchildren were not externally caused.

01:10:28.580 --> 01:10:32.140
The baby boomers imported these issues.

01:10:32.140 --> 01:10:35.460
The baby boomers created these issues.

01:10:35.460 --> 01:10:40.180
And that is part of why you see this growing resentment on the part of millennials and

01:10:40.180 --> 01:10:45.380
younger when it comes to the older generations, because as was mentioned, millennials and

01:10:45.380 --> 01:10:49.860
younger see what these older generations had.

01:10:49.860 --> 01:10:55.260
And what we do not have, which means that the baby boomers failed to preserve it and

01:10:55.260 --> 01:11:01.500
failed to pass it on, which, of course, is one of the fundamental duties of older generations,

01:11:01.500 --> 01:11:07.260
of parents, is to pass to their children what was passed to them by their parents and to

01:11:07.260 --> 01:11:10.620
do so in a way that is better.

01:11:10.620 --> 01:11:15.420
It is not just to preserve the principle, but to grow it and to pass more to the future

01:11:15.420 --> 01:11:19.900
generation than was passed to you by previous generations.

01:11:19.900 --> 01:11:26.420
And in the case of the baby boomers, they were handed more than almost any other generation

01:11:26.420 --> 01:11:29.700
in history, particularly in the American context.

01:11:29.700 --> 01:11:35.780
There are obviously some nuances in some contexts in other parts of the world, particularly

01:11:35.780 --> 01:11:42.100
Central Europe recovering from the world wars and having to deal in the East with communism,

01:11:42.100 --> 01:11:44.100
with the USSR.

01:11:44.100 --> 01:11:47.940
But in the American context, you had a peaceful society.

01:11:47.940 --> 01:11:50.740
You had a prosperous society.

01:11:50.740 --> 01:11:54.800
You had almost everything going for that generation.

01:11:54.800 --> 01:12:00.620
You could go out and get a job simply by walking in somewhere and talking to the owner.

01:12:00.620 --> 01:12:05.760
Many baby boomers will tell younger generation today, well, you should just go hit the paper

01:12:05.760 --> 01:12:09.240
document with your printed resume, and that's not how it works now.

01:12:09.240 --> 01:12:11.000
They don't understand.

01:12:11.000 --> 01:12:15.400
You wind up having to fill out a thousand applications on a bunch of different websites

01:12:15.400 --> 01:12:18.020
and then maybe someone calls you back.

01:12:18.020 --> 01:12:20.520
These are fundamentally different worlds.

01:12:20.520 --> 01:12:24.360
And so as was mentioned, the older generations give terrible advice on these things because

01:12:24.360 --> 01:12:28.780
they do not understand the reality of the modern world.

01:12:28.780 --> 01:12:33.680
If you ask for advice from the older generations about the opposite sex, you will get fundamentally

01:12:33.680 --> 01:12:38.680
terrible advice in the modern context, because they do not understand the world that they

01:12:38.680 --> 01:12:41.560
created and passed to their children.

01:12:41.560 --> 01:12:46.600
Because don't forget, they were the ones who created this by doubling down on what happened

01:12:46.600 --> 01:12:49.300
in the sixties.

01:12:49.300 --> 01:12:55.620
By doubling down on the evils of their parents and passing that on to their children.

01:12:55.620 --> 01:13:01.100
Because when you look at the reality of what we have today, the absolute chaos between

01:13:01.100 --> 01:13:08.160
the sexes, and you have an untold number of women producing pornography in their spare

01:13:08.160 --> 01:13:14.500
time as it were, you have men who don't even consider dating.

01:13:14.500 --> 01:13:16.920
And of course, I could just continue listing the problems.

01:13:16.920 --> 01:13:19.200
They are legion at this point.

01:13:19.200 --> 01:13:26.640
But all of these problems are the progeny of the profligate nature of the behavior of

01:13:26.640 --> 01:13:30.160
those who live through the sixties.

01:13:30.160 --> 01:13:35.260
We are living in the consequences of the sexual revolution.

01:13:35.260 --> 01:13:38.780
Of course, it is still getting worse, because as we have mentioned many times before, there

01:13:38.780 --> 01:13:40.020
is no floor with sin.

01:13:40.020 --> 01:13:41.300
It can always get worse.

01:13:41.300 --> 01:13:45.700
There is no bottom things can always get worse.

01:13:45.700 --> 01:13:49.100
And so there is no point at which you should say, Well, I shouldn't bother to do anything

01:13:49.100 --> 01:13:50.580
because this is as bad as it can get.

01:13:50.580 --> 01:13:52.500
No, it can get worse.

01:13:52.500 --> 01:13:58.940
And so you should always try to arrest the free fall and to turn things around.

01:13:58.940 --> 01:13:59.940
And we're living in that.

01:13:59.940 --> 01:14:03.360
And so if you ask the older generations for advice on dating, they will give you advice

01:14:03.360 --> 01:14:08.600
that may be made sense in the fifties, or even perhaps in part of the sixties, if you

01:14:08.600 --> 01:14:15.200
weren't in the worst areas of the country, but certainly won't make sense today.

01:14:15.200 --> 01:14:18.920
And this causes a real divide between these generations.

01:14:18.920 --> 01:14:22.120
You have essentially the older generation and the younger generation.

01:14:22.120 --> 01:14:27.160
Yes, we could divide things up and, you know, the lost greatest silent boomers, Gen X, Millennials

01:14:27.180 --> 01:14:32.100
and Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, now the more recent one, but why?

01:14:32.100 --> 01:14:36.580
It really comes down to there is a fundamental divide between those who belong to the older

01:14:36.580 --> 01:14:40.780
generation, which you can use baby boomers as the shorthand, and those who belong to

01:14:40.780 --> 01:14:44.260
the younger generation, which is basically Millennials and Younger.

01:14:44.260 --> 01:14:50.460
Yes, Gen X, we do realize that you exist, but you don't really exist because the older

01:14:50.460 --> 01:14:54.900
members of Gen X or baby boomers, the younger members of Gen X or Millennials.

01:14:54.900 --> 01:14:56.780
That's how this really plays out.

01:14:56.800 --> 01:15:04.800
It's sort of a before and after watershed moment where you have those who lived in this

01:15:04.800 --> 01:15:14.800
almost idyllic, almost paradisical reality of the postwar period in the U.S.

01:15:14.800 --> 01:15:19.760
And those who were born after that had all been squandered.

01:15:19.760 --> 01:15:23.040
That's the divide between these two generations, really.

01:15:23.040 --> 01:15:31.380
And that is why many in the younger generation feel enmity with the older generation.

01:15:31.380 --> 01:15:36.140
For those anyway who recognize what has been lost, as was mentioned, many in the truly

01:15:36.140 --> 01:15:39.980
younger part of the younger generation don't recognize what was lost.

01:15:39.980 --> 01:15:42.460
They did not grow up with it.

01:15:42.460 --> 01:15:44.420
They didn't even grow up with the promise of it.

01:15:44.420 --> 01:15:49.260
They didn't even grow up with the idea of it because it is so alien to them because

01:15:49.260 --> 01:15:54.200
what they were given by their parents and grandparents is so fundamentally different

01:15:54.200 --> 01:15:59.540
that they cannot even conceptualize what the world was like in the U.S. in the 40s and

01:15:59.540 --> 01:16:01.780
the 50s.

01:16:01.780 --> 01:16:08.040
And there's no chance they could conceptualize what it was like in the 10s and the 20s, before

01:16:08.040 --> 01:16:12.320
of course the Depression hit.

01:16:12.320 --> 01:16:18.080
But for Millennials, for the older Millennials, in this case this would, I am an older millennial,

01:16:18.080 --> 01:16:24.340
from 1985, we are, to some degree, on the cusp of it.

01:16:24.340 --> 01:16:29.360
Because yes, for the younger members of Gen X, they got to experience some of the good

01:16:29.360 --> 01:16:33.680
times as it were, and then watch, and they are still watching, of course, as things are

01:16:33.680 --> 01:16:35.540
getting worse.

01:16:35.540 --> 01:16:40.120
But Millennials, we were the turning point, really, in very many ways.

01:16:40.120 --> 01:16:45.240
Because we were the ones who could see what our parents had when they grew up.

01:16:45.240 --> 01:16:46.320
So we understood that.

01:16:46.320 --> 01:16:50.800
We saw what the world was like for them, and it still was, in some parts of the country.

01:16:50.800 --> 01:16:55.160
And then, particularly for those of us who grew up in some of the coastal regions or

01:16:55.160 --> 01:17:01.860
larger cities, we watched the whole progression as things collapsed.

01:17:01.860 --> 01:17:05.880
And we were given the terrible advice all along the way.

01:17:05.880 --> 01:17:11.160
Gen Z, as it were, and younger, don't necessarily ask boomers and older for advice, because

01:17:11.160 --> 01:17:14.600
in part they recognize they're going to get terrible advice, and in part they just don't

01:17:14.600 --> 01:17:15.600
do it.

01:17:15.600 --> 01:17:19.120
But for Millennials, well, the baby boomers were our parents.

01:17:19.120 --> 01:17:24.440
So of course, we were given advice by them all along the way.

01:17:24.440 --> 01:17:28.160
But as a generation, I don't mean just to complain as a millennial, I'm simply highlighting

01:17:28.160 --> 01:17:32.800
the reality of what happened, both for the younger listeners and for the handful of older

01:17:32.800 --> 01:17:38.320
listeners we have to understand the perspective, understand what happened to the younger generations.

01:17:38.320 --> 01:17:42.520
But for Millennials, one of the most common refrains that we heard, and talked to any

01:17:42.520 --> 01:17:46.960
millennial, and he will agree with me on this one, we were told, you have to go to

01:17:46.960 --> 01:17:49.360
university or else you'll work at McDonald's.

01:17:49.360 --> 01:17:51.660
And it was always McDonald's.

01:17:51.660 --> 01:17:52.660
Almost always anyway.

01:17:52.660 --> 01:17:55.800
I assume some parts of the country, maybe it was Burger King or Carl's Jr.

01:17:55.800 --> 01:17:56.800
What have you.

01:17:56.800 --> 01:18:01.040
But it was go to university or you'll work in fast food.

01:18:01.040 --> 01:18:04.000
And so many of us went to university.

01:18:04.000 --> 01:18:11.040
We are probably the most educated generation, possibly in history.

01:18:11.040 --> 01:18:14.160
We have some of the most degrees and advanced degrees.

01:18:14.160 --> 01:18:20.240
And so we were told, if you go to university, if you get this degree, if you put in this

01:18:20.240 --> 01:18:25.560
work this time this effort, if you devote these four years of your life, and leaving

01:18:25.560 --> 01:18:29.920
aside all the problems that cause particularly with female students, we were told you would

01:18:29.920 --> 01:18:32.600
have a good job, it would be waiting for you.

01:18:32.600 --> 01:18:35.800
And you could build a good life like your parents and your grandparents had, you would

01:18:35.800 --> 01:18:40.920
be able to get the big house and the dog and go on vacations and all of these things.

01:18:40.920 --> 01:18:45.000
All the things the boomers have and took for a given.

01:18:45.000 --> 01:18:51.800
And that didn't happen because boomers crashed the economy and wiped out those jobs and then

01:18:51.800 --> 01:18:56.920
imported millions of foreigners to destroy the labor market.

01:18:56.920 --> 01:19:01.360
And so when millennials graduated, those jobs didn't exist.

01:19:01.360 --> 01:19:06.000
And then came the second punch from the boomers as it were.

01:19:06.000 --> 01:19:12.120
Millennials were told, after we had been told when we were younger, you have to go to university

01:19:12.120 --> 01:19:15.680
or you'll work at McDonald's, we were told, oh, are you too good to work at McDonald's

01:19:15.680 --> 01:19:17.760
with your bachelors?

01:19:17.760 --> 01:19:19.520
And that's what happened.

01:19:19.520 --> 01:19:21.200
And that's just been the case all along.

01:19:21.200 --> 01:19:23.920
There are so many examples of this that could be given.

01:19:23.920 --> 01:19:27.560
There's the example of student loans where you had the boomer generation who could pay

01:19:27.560 --> 01:19:36.440
for university with a summer job versus millennials, where for many it was six figures, low six

01:19:36.440 --> 01:19:38.280
figures, but still six figures.

01:19:38.280 --> 01:19:45.640
So you would come out of university $100,000 in debt if you went on to get a master's degree.

01:19:45.640 --> 01:19:46.640
God help you.

01:19:46.640 --> 01:19:50.840
You came out of university $200,000 plus in debt.

01:19:50.840 --> 01:19:56.600
And so sometimes what millennials and younger, but very much millennials in this case would

01:19:56.600 --> 01:20:02.440
hear from boomers is that they started with nothing and they had to build up and build

01:20:02.440 --> 01:20:04.920
this life for themselves.

01:20:04.920 --> 01:20:07.600
Millennials didn't start with nothing.

01:20:07.600 --> 01:20:13.040
Millennials started in a really deep hole because the housing market had skyrocketed,

01:20:13.040 --> 01:20:14.840
so you couldn't buy a house.

01:20:14.840 --> 01:20:19.840
You came out of university with this massive debt burden, so you couldn't possibly save

01:20:19.840 --> 01:20:24.280
for a down payment even if you could afford the house because you couldn't get the good

01:20:24.280 --> 01:20:25.480
job.

01:20:25.480 --> 01:20:27.360
And so you couldn't get the vacation time.

01:20:27.360 --> 01:20:32.080
You couldn't start to build a family, et cetera, et cetera.

01:20:32.080 --> 01:20:36.760
And so that is the reason, one of the main reasons that the fertility rate in the U.S.

01:20:36.760 --> 01:20:38.400
has absolutely collapsed.

01:20:38.400 --> 01:20:44.520
Millennials simply did not have very many children, still haven't had very many children

01:20:44.520 --> 01:20:52.320
because of the economic situation in large part because we know that there is a direct

01:20:52.320 --> 01:20:58.880
correlation between economic stability and well-being, between financial security and

01:20:58.880 --> 01:21:00.520
number of children.

01:21:00.520 --> 01:21:06.080
Now, that's a mixed bag because, yes, you should trust God and that He will provide

01:21:06.080 --> 01:21:10.200
because children are a blessing from God and He will provide for you if He gives you that

01:21:10.200 --> 01:21:11.200
blessing.

01:21:11.200 --> 01:21:17.840
Yes, you still have to put in the work, of course, but human beings do respond to incentives

01:21:17.840 --> 01:21:19.400
to some degree.

01:21:19.400 --> 01:21:23.120
I'm not giving too much credit to economics, but I'll give some credit where credit is

01:21:23.120 --> 01:21:24.620
due.

01:21:24.620 --> 01:21:26.000
Humans do respond to incentives.

01:21:26.000 --> 01:21:33.520
And if you have an economy that is stable, where people can earn a living, where wives

01:21:33.520 --> 01:21:37.760
can stay at home to keep the home and raise children, you are going to have a higher fertility

01:21:37.760 --> 01:21:39.720
rate.

01:21:39.720 --> 01:21:45.080
And that collapsed because of the actions of the baby boomers.

01:21:45.080 --> 01:21:50.520
Millennials understand that, particularly older millennials, because we watched it happen.

01:21:50.520 --> 01:21:56.080
The younger members of the younger generation, so Gen Z and Younger, don't really see this

01:21:56.080 --> 01:21:58.660
because they didn't live through it.

01:21:58.660 --> 01:22:05.320
Some of them have gone back and looked at what happened and realized it, understood what

01:22:05.320 --> 01:22:10.400
was done to millennials and what was therefore sort of by proxy done to the younger generations

01:22:10.400 --> 01:22:14.120
as well, but they didn't live through it.

01:22:14.240 --> 01:22:22.920
This is why you see that enmity from younger generations toward baby boomers and older.

01:22:22.920 --> 01:22:29.520
It's not because it's not youthful rebellion, which sometimes baby boomers will try to argue

01:22:29.520 --> 01:22:31.960
that it's youthful rebellion.

01:22:31.960 --> 01:22:33.640
Millennials now are turning 40.

01:22:33.640 --> 01:22:36.200
This is not youthful rebellion anymore.

01:22:36.200 --> 01:22:37.520
Our knees crack when we stand up.

01:22:37.520 --> 01:22:40.320
It can't be youthful rebellion.

01:22:40.320 --> 01:22:48.200
But it's because when a generation is handed everything, handed great conditions and a

01:22:48.200 --> 01:22:54.320
good life and that is not passed on to future generations, there is going to be enmity and

01:22:54.320 --> 01:22:59.760
some of that is most certainly warranted because it is the duty of parents to pass to their

01:22:59.760 --> 01:23:03.560
children a better world than was passed to them.

01:23:03.560 --> 01:23:07.760
And that has not been happening for the last handful of generations.

01:23:07.760 --> 01:23:11.640
It has in fact been accelerating in the opposite direction.

01:23:11.640 --> 01:23:16.520
Now there was a period of time where inertia carried things along and things kept going.

01:23:16.520 --> 01:23:21.800
They looked fine, regardless of all of the structural foundational problems that were

01:23:21.800 --> 01:23:23.920
creeping in.

01:23:23.920 --> 01:23:27.640
But inertia doesn't last forever and we're at the tail end of that now.

01:23:27.640 --> 01:23:32.080
And that's why we see things have fallen off a cliff.

01:23:32.080 --> 01:23:41.840
And so the younger generations don't have these feelings with regard to the older generations

01:23:41.840 --> 01:23:44.160
for no reason.

01:23:44.160 --> 01:23:46.560
Gen Z is a mess.

01:23:46.560 --> 01:23:47.720
So are millennials.

01:23:47.720 --> 01:23:48.720
So is Gen X.

01:23:48.720 --> 01:23:51.480
Every generation is a mess in some certain ways.

01:23:51.480 --> 01:23:57.680
But when we don't recognize that a lot of these problems arise because of the actions

01:23:57.680 --> 01:24:02.040
of previous generations, we not only place the blame in the wrong place.

01:24:02.040 --> 01:24:08.920
But we make it almost impossible to actually address the problem.

01:24:08.920 --> 01:24:13.560
And so you get those who will say, well, just pick yourself up by your bootstraps or if

01:24:13.560 --> 01:24:19.160
you just worked hard enough or if you just did X, Y and Z, and that's not the case.

01:24:19.160 --> 01:24:25.400
Some problems that we have in this life, some of the burdens we bear are because of actions

01:24:25.400 --> 01:24:27.600
of those who came before us.

01:24:27.600 --> 01:24:32.760
So the best that we can do in some cases is to work as hard as we can to make sure that

01:24:32.760 --> 01:24:37.440
we don't pass those problems to our children and our grandchildren.

01:24:37.440 --> 01:24:40.360
And that is the reality of being a human being.

01:24:40.360 --> 01:24:43.080
That is the reality of the way the world works.

01:24:43.080 --> 01:24:45.040
These things are generational.

01:24:45.040 --> 01:24:48.480
Curses are generational and so are blessings.

01:24:48.480 --> 01:24:53.800
If your parents failed in their tasks, you may very well suffer because of that.

01:24:54.640 --> 01:25:00.080
On the flip side, if you succeed in what you are doing, your children will benefit because

01:25:00.080 --> 01:25:01.080
of it.

01:25:01.080 --> 01:25:05.000
And so will your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.

01:25:05.000 --> 01:25:10.240
And that is one of the reasons that we fundamentally oppose this conception of the individual as

01:25:10.240 --> 01:25:12.320
the be all end all.

01:25:12.320 --> 01:25:16.680
Because if you conceive of yourself as an individual and the individual is the only

01:25:16.680 --> 01:25:23.680
thing that matters, you are inevitably going to make decisions that will harm future generations.

01:25:24.400 --> 01:25:28.560
And that is what we have seen in the last handful of decades.

01:25:28.560 --> 01:25:37.560
I think the overarching reason that boomers in particular are seen as deserving of greater

01:25:37.560 --> 01:25:42.320
criticism is simply because they are the senior generation.

01:25:42.320 --> 01:25:50.880
And so as a result, they're basically in the position of Moses or of Lot, except they're

01:25:50.880 --> 01:25:52.800
not doing what they were supposed to do.

01:25:52.800 --> 01:25:55.600
They're not acting as the leaders.

01:25:55.600 --> 01:25:59.720
It's very much an entire generation of, I got mine.

01:25:59.720 --> 01:26:08.520
And so on one hand, you have some of the economic envy and jealousy in both directions.

01:26:08.520 --> 01:26:13.200
But on the other hand, if the boomers aren't going to lead, if they're not going to set

01:26:13.200 --> 01:26:18.200
a good example, if they're not going to take care of their children and grandchildren, who

01:26:18.200 --> 01:26:19.520
is?

01:26:19.520 --> 01:26:26.360
And so I think a lot of the anger and the criticism, whether it's coming from a good

01:26:26.360 --> 01:26:30.680
place or not, I think anger can come from a good place.

01:26:30.680 --> 01:26:33.320
It can also come from an evil, terrible place.

01:26:33.320 --> 01:26:36.480
And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to discuss this, is that the idea of boomer

01:26:36.480 --> 01:26:38.720
hate is wrong.

01:26:38.720 --> 01:26:43.240
You shouldn't just absolutely hate an entire generation because they have something and

01:26:43.240 --> 01:26:44.480
you don't have it.

01:26:44.480 --> 01:26:49.760
I think that the much more fundamental issue, at least from my perspective, is their abdication

01:26:49.760 --> 01:26:57.720
of their headship by them failing to propagate a Christian society in a Christian nation,

01:26:57.720 --> 01:27:04.720
by them failing to propagate economic and social policies that were going to feed family

01:27:04.720 --> 01:27:07.960
formation for their own children and grandchildren.

01:27:07.960 --> 01:27:13.560
They've left the world in a state where when they're dead and gone, who's going to pick

01:27:13.560 --> 01:27:15.120
up the pieces?

01:27:15.120 --> 01:27:21.400
Because at this point, there's basically almost no one left if there's anyone left alive who's

01:27:21.400 --> 01:27:23.880
ever seen it done properly.

01:27:23.880 --> 01:27:25.660
And that's why headship matters.

01:27:25.660 --> 01:27:30.760
If you don't have anyone setting a good example, where are you going to get your example?

01:27:30.760 --> 01:27:37.560
I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of the trad memes appear online.

01:27:37.560 --> 01:27:44.280
It's frustration, it's understanding implicitly, even if not consciously, that we as the living

01:27:44.280 --> 01:27:53.240
generation need to leapfrog our own ancestors, not in terms of cultural progress or anything,

01:27:53.240 --> 01:27:55.740
just in terms of they screwed up.

01:27:55.740 --> 01:27:59.320
If we do what they did, we're only going to make it worse.

01:27:59.320 --> 01:28:05.480
And so I think a lot of the nostalgia desire that's so prevalent, especially in a lot

01:28:05.480 --> 01:28:11.880
of young people, is just, I want something that I'm told once existed, and I don't know

01:28:11.880 --> 01:28:16.680
how to get it, and I don't know of anyone alive who can show me how to get it.

01:28:16.680 --> 01:28:19.200
I think that's the single greatest failing.

01:28:19.200 --> 01:28:23.840
Even beyond the economic errors and the moral failings and all the rest, is it without a

01:28:23.840 --> 01:28:28.520
good example, you only have bad examples.

01:28:28.520 --> 01:28:33.560
And that's a death knell for a civilization.

01:28:33.560 --> 01:28:39.320
It's a death knell for a people when their elders are not acting in the best interests

01:28:39.320 --> 01:28:43.480
of their progeny, of their posterity.

01:28:43.480 --> 01:28:48.000
What happens when the parents and the grandparents are going to spend all their money on cruises

01:28:48.000 --> 01:28:52.200
and jewelry, and then they're going to write their own kids and grandkids out of the will

01:28:52.200 --> 01:28:58.000
because I got mine and I don't want them to be brats, so I'm not going to give them anything.

01:28:58.000 --> 01:29:06.320
On one hand, children aren't implicitly entitled in some small sense to just being given whatever

01:29:06.320 --> 01:29:07.680
their parents earned.

01:29:07.680 --> 01:29:12.480
But on the other hand, there's a strong moral case to be made.

01:29:12.480 --> 01:29:17.960
The parents have a duty, and this is something that's in Scripture, we're just making up.

01:29:17.960 --> 01:29:25.160
All of human history has been defined in large part by parents bequeaving a better life for

01:29:25.160 --> 01:29:26.160
their children.

01:29:26.280 --> 01:29:30.640
Now the difference is that what was bequeathed from the boomers to their children and grandchildren

01:29:30.640 --> 01:29:35.760
was going to debt because you'll make so much money that you'll be able to pay for the debt

01:29:35.760 --> 01:29:38.520
and have all the nice stuff that we have too.

01:29:38.520 --> 01:29:41.760
That's clearly failed multiple generations.

01:29:41.760 --> 01:29:47.360
And so yes, today when you look at particularly the zoomers who are really, I think the first

01:29:47.360 --> 01:29:51.760
generation that is split right down the middle.

01:29:51.760 --> 01:29:53.560
I don't think there are a lot of milk-toed zoomers.

01:29:53.560 --> 01:29:59.080
I think the zoomers are either radical, far right.

01:29:59.080 --> 01:30:06.040
We're going to goose-step our way back to civilization, or they're physically and mentally and spiritually

01:30:06.040 --> 01:30:11.960
destroying their bodies in the final throes of what boomers have given them.

01:30:11.960 --> 01:30:18.520
Utter prophecy where there's no morality, there's complete self-definition, do whatever

01:30:18.520 --> 01:30:19.520
you want.

01:30:19.520 --> 01:30:23.080
Because that is fundamentally the spiritual inheritance that the boomers have passed down

01:30:23.080 --> 01:30:25.240
since the 60s.

01:30:25.240 --> 01:30:34.240
And I'm glad to see that there are at least some zoomers who they're doing some of the

01:30:34.240 --> 01:30:37.840
right things and they're trying to figure out the right ways.

01:30:37.840 --> 01:30:42.840
And the reason we're talking about this is that I wanted to talk about generations in

01:30:42.840 --> 01:30:49.920
particular because it is my belief that the boomer generation in terms of leadership is

01:30:49.920 --> 01:30:51.960
a total write-off.

01:30:52.960 --> 01:30:54.920
And I agree with Corey.

01:30:54.920 --> 01:30:56.920
I don't think Xers even exist.

01:30:56.920 --> 01:31:00.240
I think that boomers basically started about 50.

01:31:00.240 --> 01:31:01.720
Would I be my that?

01:31:01.720 --> 01:31:03.400
Forget the marketing stuff.

01:31:03.400 --> 01:31:09.800
If you have an example of a question about some of these things, or let me give a specific

01:31:09.800 --> 01:31:10.800
example.

01:31:10.800 --> 01:31:14.680
I have a JPEG on my hard drive that's a map of Europe.

01:31:14.680 --> 01:31:18.760
It's a map of Europe from the mid-1940s.

01:31:18.760 --> 01:31:25.600
And on that map it shows the locations of where the Germans had certain types of camps.

01:31:25.600 --> 01:31:29.040
These were camps where they sent people who were arrested.

01:31:29.040 --> 01:31:31.600
Some of them were called concentration camps.

01:31:31.600 --> 01:31:34.920
Some of them were called death camps or liquidation camps.

01:31:34.920 --> 01:31:39.160
And so on this map you can see all these locations, some of the names you would recognize, their

01:31:39.160 --> 01:31:44.360
names that are associated with horrors, and the illicit of visceral reaction when you

01:31:44.360 --> 01:31:47.360
hear the names.

01:31:47.360 --> 01:31:52.280
The reason I'm mentioning this map is that one of the most interesting facts about it

01:31:52.280 --> 01:31:58.120
is that it's also color-coded to show for those two different types of camps whether

01:31:58.120 --> 01:32:05.800
they were on the Allied side of the post-war lines or whether they were on the Soviet side.

01:32:05.800 --> 01:32:09.480
Because it turns out when you look at this particular map, it's not something you would

01:32:09.480 --> 01:32:14.000
get if you're just reading in text, but when you look at the map it's plainly obvious that

01:32:14.360 --> 01:32:21.360
every single camp that were told was a death camp where murder and cruelty was taking place,

01:32:21.360 --> 01:32:25.200
100% of those camps were behind Soviet lines.

01:32:25.200 --> 01:32:28.280
In other words, Allied soldiers never went to them.

01:32:28.280 --> 01:32:32.880
Allied soldiers never went to a single camp where those horrors were taking place.

01:32:32.880 --> 01:32:36.880
They went to other camps where there were people who were sick, who were dying from starvation

01:32:36.880 --> 01:32:42.160
in some case, some had typhus, and so they looked very emaciated.

01:32:42.200 --> 01:32:46.480
But there was no mass torture and murder, as we're told, was the narrative for those

01:32:46.480 --> 01:32:47.880
other camps.

01:32:47.880 --> 01:32:52.240
So the reason I bring this up is if I were to show this picture to someone who's over

01:32:52.240 --> 01:33:00.240
50, I can guarantee that basically every case, the response that I'm going to get from them

01:33:00.240 --> 01:33:08.280
is going to be some sort of rote, emotional response along the lines of the official narrative.

01:33:08.400 --> 01:33:13.400
They will go probably so far as to say, well, yes, the communists were good allies against

01:33:13.400 --> 01:33:14.400
the fascists.

01:33:14.400 --> 01:33:16.200
Thank God for the communists.

01:33:16.200 --> 01:33:19.280
Pretty much 50 and up, that's the only kind of response you're going to get from that

01:33:19.280 --> 01:33:21.640
map, from just facts.

01:33:21.640 --> 01:33:26.800
Whatever you think about the story behind the map, the facts are indisputable.

01:33:26.800 --> 01:33:32.040
The reason that I think that cut off is about 50 is seminal, is that if I show the same

01:33:32.040 --> 01:33:36.760
map to someone who's 40 or 30 or 20, some portion of those people are going to have

01:33:36.760 --> 01:33:37.760
their interest peaked.

01:33:37.760 --> 01:33:39.640
I think, wow, that's really weird.

01:33:39.640 --> 01:33:43.680
Why is it that all these camps that we have these terrible stories about, only coming

01:33:43.680 --> 01:33:45.760
from Stalin?

01:33:45.760 --> 01:33:50.160
Why are they only coming from the communists who were stealing our nuclear secrets and

01:33:50.160 --> 01:33:52.960
plotting to overthrow and destroy the United States?

01:33:52.960 --> 01:33:57.800
Why did they find all those camps and then the other places where we went, we didn't

01:33:57.800 --> 01:33:59.280
find any of them?

01:33:59.280 --> 01:34:04.120
Regardless of what you think about the narrative of World War II and what happened in Germany

01:34:04.120 --> 01:34:11.480
and greater Germany, the response to that picture is, in my book, it's a litmus test

01:34:11.480 --> 01:34:16.760
of how open-minded someone is.

01:34:16.760 --> 01:34:18.760
Anyone over 50 is going to have a knee-jerk reaction.

01:34:18.760 --> 01:34:21.200
I could write down half a dozen things.

01:34:21.200 --> 01:34:27.880
They're going to say one or more of them automatically, without any interest in the facts or any

01:34:27.880 --> 01:34:32.160
other estimate.

01:34:32.160 --> 01:34:36.680
When you're dealing with a generation that has been demoralized to that degree, that

01:34:36.680 --> 01:34:43.080
has been programmed to that degree, the reason that I think it's such a problem that the

01:34:43.080 --> 01:34:50.160
older generation is not fit to lead is that, as Corey talked about earlier with the Fourth

01:34:50.160 --> 01:34:57.600
Commandment, what do we do in a situation where we're to honor and obey our parents,

01:34:57.600 --> 01:35:01.560
but our elders are giving us the worst possible advice?

01:35:01.560 --> 01:35:06.280
Because we can't sin, we can't do something that's evil, we can't believe lies because

01:35:06.280 --> 01:35:08.480
old people say it's okay.

01:35:08.480 --> 01:35:11.200
They don't get to override God.

01:35:11.200 --> 01:35:17.400
I think that one of the tricks that we, one of the hurdles that we have to overcome as

01:35:17.400 --> 01:35:24.560
this generation, by this generation, I mean those who are living, there's a set of people

01:35:24.720 --> 01:35:30.600
in my book, 50 and Up, that you just shouldn't listen to at all when it comes to most things.

01:35:30.600 --> 01:35:36.640
Because they have been subjected to a degree of propaganda and life experiences that no

01:35:36.640 --> 01:35:41.640
longer have any basis in reality for what we're dealing with.

01:35:41.640 --> 01:35:47.920
If we try to listen to them, all we're going to get is more of the same.

01:35:47.920 --> 01:35:50.040
Younger people do not want more of the same.

01:35:50.040 --> 01:35:55.280
They see that they're drowning in quicksand and they don't know how to get out of it.

01:35:55.280 --> 01:35:59.200
That's an incredibly dangerous place for a civilization to be because you have young

01:35:59.200 --> 01:36:04.800
people who are angry at older people, you have older people who are frustrated and disillusioned

01:36:04.800 --> 01:36:12.360
by younger people, and everybody just wants to go their separate ways, and it's a recipe.

01:36:12.360 --> 01:36:17.380
It's a setup for a bloodbath, it's a setup for horrors beyond imagining, and as Christians

01:36:17.380 --> 01:36:19.920
that's absolutely what we don't want.

01:36:20.160 --> 01:36:25.920
The reason for us to mention this is I think that in good conscience, the best thing that

01:36:25.920 --> 01:36:33.520
we can do is recognize that although our elders are to be respected and they're to be loved,

01:36:33.520 --> 01:36:38.720
there are large swaths of decision-making that we need to make for ourselves and for

01:36:38.720 --> 01:36:43.360
future generations where we simply can't ask them, and most of them frankly don't care

01:36:43.360 --> 01:36:44.360
anyway.

01:36:44.360 --> 01:36:48.280
It's not like they're begging to give good advice, but I think that we need to recognize

01:36:48.320 --> 01:36:52.520
that we are a generation without a head, and I think that a lot of the boomer hate is

01:36:52.520 --> 01:37:01.040
rooted not simply in economic envy, but in a slow growing realization that the men who

01:37:01.040 --> 01:37:06.840
should be in charge of providing wisdom and guidance, they're checked out, we're a headless

01:37:06.840 --> 01:37:15.240
generation, and I think the only way that we can fix that in order to create a future

01:37:15.400 --> 01:37:20.360
civilization was this civilizational stuff, this isn't, you know, we talked last week

01:37:20.360 --> 01:37:22.840
about small ticket, this is the big ticket.

01:37:22.840 --> 01:37:27.320
I think the only way to get from where we are today where we see things in freefall

01:37:27.320 --> 01:37:31.400
to a place where our children and grandchildren can be safe and not have to deal with these

01:37:31.400 --> 01:37:36.760
problems is if we explicitly acknowledge that we are headless, we cannot look to the older

01:37:36.760 --> 01:37:42.040
generation to answer these problems and to get it right, and so rather than going to them

01:37:42.040 --> 01:37:47.640
and deferring to them, I think we need to simply set them aside respectfully, not antagonistically,

01:37:47.640 --> 01:37:53.080
but I think that we need to realize that they are such a demoralized generation that the only

01:37:53.080 --> 01:37:57.480
thing that they can possibly do with their mouths is to cause harm, and I hate to say that, it's

01:37:58.520 --> 01:38:07.080
the last thing that I want, and yet when doing what they say to do is going to do harm, we can't

01:38:07.080 --> 01:38:12.840
do it, and so the reason for talking about generations is that there is a particular

01:38:12.840 --> 01:38:21.640
generation with a particular set of problems that is so wicked and so far gone that all we can do

01:38:21.640 --> 01:38:26.280
is pray for them to go to heaven and otherwise not really listen to what they say.

01:38:26.840 --> 01:38:30.840
It's not the way it should be, it's not the way any civilization should ever be,

01:38:31.400 --> 01:38:37.800
and yet when we're looking at a civilization that's in freefall and a generation that despises God

01:38:37.800 --> 01:38:42.840
in every good thing, and you have some people who are younger in particular looking for something

01:38:42.840 --> 01:38:48.520
trad, looking for something older, I think we need to be free to recognize that maybe older

01:38:48.520 --> 01:38:52.520
is older than anyone who's living, which is part of the reason that a lot of what we talk about

01:38:52.520 --> 01:38:58.120
on Stone Choir is older doctrine. Doctrine shouldn't be changing, God didn't change, Christianity

01:38:58.120 --> 01:39:02.920
didn't change, but if some of this stuff fell by the wayside and nobody talked about it for a

01:39:02.920 --> 01:39:09.720
generation, for a century, I think that at some point we have to just recognize that and say it

01:39:09.720 --> 01:39:15.720
out loud and say, okay, the only way to get any of this back on track is to ignore what the boomers

01:39:15.720 --> 01:39:21.480
say and to go back further, to go back to the good advice that they ignored from their parents and

01:39:21.480 --> 01:39:27.000
grandparents, wherever this began, we need to find where the good ended and the bad began and refer

01:39:27.000 --> 01:39:31.320
to that. And as Christians, we know that above all else, scripture is the source for that. That's

01:39:31.320 --> 01:39:35.480
why we began in scripture and we're winding up by discussing the boomer question because

01:39:36.040 --> 01:39:40.680
I don't want there to be hatred. I don't want there to be slander and just disgust,

01:39:40.680 --> 01:39:46.280
but at the same time, like I said, I'm talking to guys half my age. If I gave them advice without

01:39:46.280 --> 01:39:50.680
having talked to them first, it would be idiotic advice. It would be the worst possible things. I

01:39:50.680 --> 01:39:56.680
know I would say stupid things to them. And so when I hear boomers saying the same stuff to them,

01:39:56.680 --> 01:40:01.560
it just makes me die inside because that complete alienation of the generations,

01:40:02.760 --> 01:40:07.240
it's intractable. It shouldn't be this way, but it's intractable to the point that the only thing

01:40:07.240 --> 01:40:14.360
we can do is try to build a future world where the next generation and then next generation after

01:40:14.360 --> 01:40:21.080
that won't have the same problems. I think that much of the people who are living today are in

01:40:21.080 --> 01:40:25.800
some ways a write-off and we have to figure out how to do that respectfully and in a way that's

01:40:25.800 --> 01:40:30.920
not destructive. And we have to look at rebuilding things that are good, even if it means ignoring

01:40:31.960 --> 01:40:35.960
maybe your own parents and grandparents. And so as Christians, we have to figure out how to do that

01:40:35.960 --> 01:40:41.000
in a way that doesn't violate the Fourth Commandment because we are to honor and obey our parents.

01:40:41.560 --> 01:40:47.160
So this is a tricky thing. Again, we're not giving a prescription here to say, yes, absolutely do

01:40:47.160 --> 01:40:51.400
this, but I think that when you're looking at the advice coming from people who are 50 and up,

01:40:52.040 --> 01:40:57.800
if you listen at all, I think you need to give it the most extremely rigorous

01:40:59.000 --> 01:41:04.600
going over. And you may well be forced to disregard it entirely. And if you do that,

01:41:04.600 --> 01:41:08.360
I think that there's probably a good case to be made for doing that with a clean conscience.

01:41:09.160 --> 01:41:15.400
So this is one of those episodes where some of the things we've said are not easy truths,

01:41:15.400 --> 01:41:23.560
they are hard truths. And that's part of life. Just because something is uncomfortable or unpleasant

01:41:24.440 --> 01:41:30.760
or what have you, doesn't mean that we get to ignore it, particularly when it is as important

01:41:30.760 --> 01:41:38.120
as the things we are covering as we covered in this episode. There are some very real differences

01:41:38.680 --> 01:41:44.440
for very many reasons, some of which we covered in this episode, some of which we did not because

01:41:44.440 --> 01:41:48.760
we didn't want to make this a 40 part episode that lasts for 120 hours.

01:41:50.360 --> 01:41:53.960
We're not going to go for three hours. I'm not implying that. But

01:41:55.960 --> 01:42:00.360
these are very real problems because of the very real differences between the generations.

01:42:00.360 --> 01:42:04.520
And as we mentioned in the last episode about the small stuff,

01:42:04.600 --> 01:42:13.400
we are to a very real extent, and by we, I mean, millennials and younger, as again,

01:42:13.400 --> 01:42:17.960
a reminder, we are including the younger members of Gen X in that most certainly.

01:42:19.240 --> 01:42:26.440
But essentially those of us who are now living and not members of the older generation now retiring,

01:42:27.160 --> 01:42:30.200
exiting the workforce and positions of leadership, etc.

01:42:30.600 --> 01:42:39.480
It falls to us to be an interim generation. We have to rebuild all of the things that were torn

01:42:39.480 --> 01:42:47.320
down in the last century or so. And there is no roadmap for much of what we have to do.

01:42:47.320 --> 01:42:52.200
There's a roadmap for some of it because, of course, we are Christians, first and foremost.

01:42:52.200 --> 01:42:56.040
And so we have God's roadmap in Scripture for many of these problems.

01:42:56.360 --> 01:43:03.080
But Scripture does not provide a complete roadmap for rebuilding a civilization.

01:43:05.160 --> 01:43:09.560
And more than rebuilding a civilization, we are rebuilding a civilization

01:43:11.320 --> 01:43:17.000
in a way that has not really been done before. And what I mean by that is that usually when

01:43:17.000 --> 01:43:24.200
a generation has to rebuild to the extent that we will have to rebuild, it is because they have

01:43:24.200 --> 01:43:30.920
just gone through an extremely destructive war or plague or some sort of horrible natural disaster.

01:43:32.040 --> 01:43:38.360
And we aren't rebuilding from that. So when you look around, things don't look necessarily that

01:43:38.360 --> 01:43:43.480
bad unless you look too closely, particularly, say, at the downtown area of large cities.

01:43:44.920 --> 01:43:50.360
But you're probably living in a home or an apartment or a condo, some sort of structure with a roof.

01:43:50.920 --> 01:43:57.240
Most people have food on the table. I'm in an air conditioned room right now because it's 80

01:43:57.240 --> 01:44:03.400
some degrees outside already because I live in the south. There are things that are still functioning

01:44:03.400 --> 01:44:09.080
that still look good. But the core of our civilization, the core of our society,

01:44:09.080 --> 01:44:14.680
of our culture has rotted away. And so we are rebuilding from dust and ashes,

01:44:15.640 --> 01:44:21.160
but not from visible dust and ashes. And that's a difficult position in which we find ourselves

01:44:22.680 --> 01:44:29.720
because we have to point out to our fellows that we are rebuilding from nothing in a very real sense

01:44:31.080 --> 01:44:36.440
because everything has been eroded away to the foundation, if not the foundation itself,

01:44:37.160 --> 01:44:43.880
having been eroded away. That is a unique position because, as I said, previous

01:44:44.440 --> 01:44:50.200
generations that have had to rebuild from nothing have had to rebuild from nothing,

01:44:50.200 --> 01:44:56.760
from literal dust and ashes. And so we find ourselves in a position

01:44:57.880 --> 01:45:05.640
that is not only difficult, but difficult. And without example, we don't have a roadmap.

01:45:06.840 --> 01:45:11.720
We are building this from the ground up as the first generation to do it.

01:45:14.280 --> 01:45:19.560
That doesn't mean that we're going to fail. I don't think we will. I think we can do this.

01:45:19.560 --> 01:45:25.800
I think we are up to this task. It is going to be difficult. But many of the things in life that

01:45:25.800 --> 01:45:30.920
are worth doing are in fact difficult. Just because something is hard does not mean it is not worth

01:45:30.920 --> 01:45:36.760
doing. In fact, many of the things that are worth doing are in fact hard. Staying in good shape

01:45:36.760 --> 01:45:42.600
physically is hard work. It's worth doing. Learning how to play an instrument is hard work. It's

01:45:42.600 --> 01:45:49.080
worth doing. Learning a new language is hard work. It's worth doing. Raising children is most

01:45:49.080 --> 01:45:54.360
certainly hard work. And it is most certainly worth doing because children are a blessing from God.

01:45:55.320 --> 01:46:02.040
And that really is what we're doing. We are building, rebuilding our civilization,

01:46:02.600 --> 01:46:05.560
building a better tomorrow for the generations that will follow us.

01:46:07.640 --> 01:46:12.760
Because where the generations that came before us squandered what was given to them,

01:46:12.760 --> 01:46:19.320
and so burdened us with what we have today, we want to pass something better to future generations.

01:46:20.120 --> 01:46:26.600
We want to give them the things that we didn't receive, the things that our elders had when

01:46:26.600 --> 01:46:34.280
they were our age, when they were younger, but they did not pass to us. That is the task of this

01:46:34.280 --> 01:46:41.640
generation. And so there will be some rewards, some temporal rewards. There will certainly be

01:46:41.640 --> 01:46:46.600
eternal rewards because these are good works. These are things on which God will smile,

01:46:46.600 --> 01:46:51.720
things that God will bless. Some of those blessings, because of the nature of how it works,

01:46:51.720 --> 01:46:56.520
will not accrue in our lifetimes. They will accrue to our children and our grandchildren.

01:46:58.360 --> 01:47:04.440
But again, you're not an individual. You are a link in the chain that extends all the way back

01:47:04.440 --> 01:47:12.120
to Adam and extends all the way down to whenever your line ends. Maybe it will be before the end,

01:47:12.120 --> 01:47:14.920
maybe it will be at the end when God returns.

01:47:18.440 --> 01:47:24.920
But your task as that link in the chain is to pass as much of the good as possible

01:47:24.920 --> 01:47:32.280
to those who will follow after you. And so we started with Scripture and will end with Scripture,

01:47:32.840 --> 01:47:35.480
going to read from Psalm 78.

01:47:35.560 --> 01:47:42.520
Give ear, O my people, to my teaching. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

01:47:43.080 --> 01:47:47.080
I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings from of old,

01:47:47.720 --> 01:47:52.840
things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them

01:47:52.840 --> 01:47:57.880
from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and

01:47:57.880 --> 01:48:04.200
his might, and the wonders that he is done. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed

01:48:04.200 --> 01:48:10.120
a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation

01:48:10.120 --> 01:48:15.320
might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children,

01:48:15.320 --> 01:48:21.160
so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments,

01:48:21.800 --> 01:48:26.360
and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation,

01:48:26.920 --> 01:48:32.120
a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.