Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Out of the Question podcast. first command that God gave Adam and Eve can be found in Genesis 1.28. This is how it reads, And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Now, sometimes this is referred to as the cultural mandate, and it reflects the religion of the Bible to be a culture of life. Now, this mandate is repeated to Noah, Abraham, throughout Old Testament history. The Great Commission is a restatement of this cultural mandate. And then, of course, the Book of Revelation shows that in the fullness of time, everything God decreed and established will come to fruition. But Charles, today's culture has an emphasis on the exact opposite, what we might readily call the culture of death. Is it safe to say that this is its express intention to be diametrically opposed to the culture of life? Well, I suppose if you ask people directly that question, they might deny it. But that doesn't change the reality. And the old saying, ideas have consequences, or beliefs have consequences. And another one of those sayings attributed to Henry Van Til in his book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, culture is the externalized religion of any people. Whether they are conscious of it or not, people who deny the true God of Scripture and His law word are in love with death. And our oft-quoted Proverbs 8.36 tells us that, that any people who are in rebellion against God Almighty are thereby in love with death. Now, maybe the average person would hear that and say, well, are you crazy? I don't want to die. I don't have anything to do with death. But as we know from For example, what Dr. Rastuni has written on this topic rather extensively, the idea that people can be in love with death is not given to only its most visceral manifestations. And I'll use the example of film. There've always been scary movies, but that was a special genre of film with a very limited audience. Now it seems as though almost all motion pictures such as they are are focused on death and dying and killing and the most macabre things associated with death. So whether or not we're talking about something like that, there are other aspects of this that pervade every area of human culture and society that are in rebelling against God. One of the things that Dr. Rustuni mentions is in the area of economics and money and inflation. That if people don't have a biblical view of their lives and what they are to be about doing in terms of reflecting God's image and being as creatures, they're not going to be concerned about an economic system and a system of money, for example, that promotes life and has a future. It will rather be focused on something that is purely focused on the now and everything else can just go to the devil because I just want to have all this money and spend it. That's another example of being focused and being in love with death that most people would assume has nothing to do with it, but it does. Exactly. When you think about fruitful, multiply, replenish, all the things that you mentioned tie into that. But one of the things that actually prompted this topic is how much of cultural norms and things that are promoted actually promote infertility or the reduction of human beings. Now, we're familiar with the story about Exodus, about how Pharaoh thought there were way too many Hebrews. The first thing he wanted to do was to have the midwives kill the boys when they were born. When that didn't work, throw them into the Nile. So clearly, that was expressly intended to prevent the proliferation of a certain people. Well, we could say the same thing is true and it's pretty well documented that abortion facilities are inordinately located in poor communities, specifically black communities, and No longer do you have to round people up and put them up against a wall. The newer way is to convince them that if they have a pregnancy they don't want, whether it's a female who doesn't want to be pregnant or the male doesn't want her to be pregnant, hey, there's this easy solution. It seems to be less grotesque and obvious if you're not rounding people up and deciding that they have to be killed. So you give it a new term, you call it family planning, you call it planned parenthood, and so you obfuscate the fact that what you're really intending to do is killing a certain group of people. So that got me thinking. We all are familiar with the expression, follow the money. So for something to be promoted so heavily, there must be a financial gain. Well, we now know that in terms of abortion, now this waste material, quote unquote, the baby, can be sold to pharmaceutical companies, medical research companies. And so it ends up being a money-making business with very low overhead, especially if you get it subsidized by tax dollars. But then I was thinking, what about this gender thing? Like how is this so protected now that in California, for example, if you disagree with the choice of your son or daughter to become something other than they are, you can just have the child taken away from you. But you know, Charles, the common thread I saw in all of this was limiting the population. The truth is once you start taking chemicals, to change your hormonal balance or you get surgery, the net result is you can't reproduce. So this is really like abortion, like birth control pills, which actually in many cases create an abortion. This is a war against fertility. It's a war against be fruitful and multiply. Yes, and that's a great point because it really does go all the way back to the beginning and the lie believed by Adam that if he ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would not surely die. And so we have to consider, since he broke God's law and partook of the forbidden fruit, he didn't drop dead physically on the spot when he did that. But he did surely die in a variety of ways. And that curse that is upon humanity has ripple effects down through history, down through cultures. And what you described are a couple of modern examples. Now, they've always been there. But of course, in ancient history, the manifestation of this will to death and the desire for death was seen in various other ways. Now, abortion is not something that just came on the scene in the 1970s. It's always been around, even back in ancient times, people would find means to end pregnancies. But the other side of it, as you mentioned, is the attack on fertility and the idea that having children or perpetuating the human race or having a family, regardless of how it's called, is sort of a waste of time and a great burden. That, of course, is what drove a lot of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. And again, it's a focus not so much on planning for a future and the idea of inheritance and moving forward within the context of a culture that is beholden to God and his covenant, but the idea that, hey, I can live for myself. I can do what I want. All that matters is the current moment. And I don't want to be hampered by having a family. Again, whether you're male or female, it's the same principle. So let's do what we can to maximize hedonism and pleasure without the responsibilities. And one of the things that Dr. Rastuni points out in his writings on this is that the will to hedonism and the trend and the desire for pleasure and hedonism is just the corollary of being in love with death. If you're not perpetuating life on God's terms, you're going to go in just the opposite direction. And even though things that are, quote, pleasurable, you wouldn't think would tend toward death. As a matter of fact, they almost always do when they're taken to their extremes. And so it's not unusual to see societies and cultures where the promotion of hedonism and finery, there are different manifestations of it. But probably one of the major areas where we've seen this I think we've referred to this writing once before because Dr. Rastuni wrote an entire book on the subject. It was in the writings of the Marquis de Sade and his taking this hedonistic will to death to its ultimate conclusion. I mean ultimately the pursuit of hedonism The pursuit of absolute, total pleasure for the moment is a useless, futile thing. And people realize that, so they keep trying to perpetuate it and do something even better than the last time, whether it be a better meal, or better sex, or more material possessions. They never are enough, because they aren't what God designed us to be about doing and focusing on. So you go back to the Garden of Eden, we like to talk about let's go back, not so we're gonna go back to Eden, that should be our pursuit like the 60s pursuit of we're gonna get back to the garden. But we gotta get back to the garden when it comes to understanding. So was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the best tasting fruit? Or could you look at it as God telling Adam and Eve It's kind of like poison ivy. You don't want to go near there because the results won't be good. I think too often we frame it in that God was just exercising his sovereignty, which he's free to do, but there's a benefit in following God's law. For example, chastity before marriage and then faithfulness in marriage eliminates a lot of problems that we see happen in terms of a culture that doesn't follow the law. So there's venereal diseases, there's HIV, there's all sorts of things that can be avoided by being obedient. And so, is it a conspiracy? Is it safe to call it a conspiracy? That what we see are manifestations of, oh, no, no, you shall not surely die. Actually, there are more options than God has given you. Well, God gave us the options. Anything you want other than deciding for yourself what's good and evil, you follow what I have to say. And then you realize that so much of the things that we say are abhorrent in our society is a way in which to make sin of little consequence, right? So you're promiscuous, okay, so you get pregnant, this isn't the right time. Well, here, this is the remedy for that. And on top of it all, it won't cost you very much, because we figured out a way to have everybody pay for this for you. So if we fail to look at these things from the point of view, it's for our good that God's law is given so that we won't suffer consequences. Rather than looking at the law of God as being oppressive, it's actually life. It's actually the gift of life and perpetuating the ability to serve God's kingdom. And that goes back to what I said at the beginning in terms of where we see our culture presently and the path it's been on, say, for the past generation is this ever-increasing cycles of focusing on death rather than life and the true celebration of life. We can see it in all areas of culture and society. But probably the most tragic manifestation is in the area that we've been talking about, which has to do with human sexuality and family life. Just as the birth control agenda that was promoted in the 60s and 70s especially was put forth as, listen, this will make your life easier and better. I mean, everybody's going to have premarital sex, so you might as well go ahead and get this. It solved all these problems that may end up And there you go. And so now we find the transgender agenda, gender identity, fluidity. These all sound like, well, these are things that people are struggling with. And so the simplest thing to do and the most humanitarian and good hearted thing to do is help them along in this path. Just like with the birth control agenda, you end up losing an entire generation. And I'm not even talking about the abortion side, which of course is just as even more devastating in some ways. But you have the ripple effects of having massive numbers of couples and women who are not having children. And then now we have this agenda of transgenderism, which is the most obvious will to death. A woman who transitions, quotes, quote unquote, cannot have children. I mean, if she does it all the way, and vice versa for a man. I mean, it's the perfect suicidal pursuit. And we can only imagine that Satan and all the demons in hell must be doing cartwheels over this. This is the greatest thing. We could have never imagined that they'd fall for this. But that's exactly what it is, and people aren't thinking about that. And of course, we have the technocrats and humanists who are happy with it as well because, okay, you don't need a family. If you have a desire for that, we can create an artificial environment where you can live in a, quote, family thing. It's really a fantasy world. And that'll solve all your problems. Don't worry about it. And I think there are gonna be a few people who will say, well, yes, this is true. This is true outside the church, but not inside the church. And I would beg to differ with them. I can tell you, I have the privilege of mentoring a number of women who are the mothers of large families. And sometimes the biggest opposition they have to announcing we're having child number seven or child number 11 is, oh my goodness, Do you realize that we have a shortage of resources? Why are you doing this? Why can't you just be satisfied with 10 children? And then some are so presumptuous to say, don't they know that how children happen, that they could prevent it? Well, there's no place in scripture that ever says, this is how you prevent children, other than by doing those things that are abhorrent to God's word. We're told to be fruitful and multiply. and that having a full quiver, well, some would say, well, a full quiver is seven. Why aren't seven enough? In other words, the idea is that there's too many people, that we don't have enough resources, that, in fact, people who have this many children are selfish. And then you'll hear the argument, well, that was true for an agrarian society where people had to live off the land and children often died early because we didn't have all these breakthroughs. But God's word isn't limited to an agrarian society or to a industrial society or to a technologically advanced society, his word is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And I'm always appalled at the disdain, and I'm talking disdain, that some fellow believers have to large families. And all they can say is, oh, those children are noisy, or this, that, and the other thing, and they don't look at it as a blessing. As a matter of fact, some, and I'm sure you've heard people say this, Charles, yes, we're gonna get married, but we're gonna wait three or four years before we have children. Oh, I see. You're going to wait three or four years before God blesses you. You're going to decide when you have children, as if conception comes about just because of the act of a man and a woman coming together, as opposed to God creating life. Yeah, these are manifestations of how confessing Christians have been hoodwinked and are not looking carefully as to what it is they really believe in worship. And in our circles, and by that I mean the circle of the larger Reformed and Theonomic or Calvinistic world, You know, there's entire sections of churches and people who think that as long as they have all the doctrinal issues, I's dotted and T's crossed, then that's the main thing. And so that's why we find in those kind of churches that ought to know better, people sending their kids to government schools, taking the approach to family life or in the best sense, family planning in the ways that you've described. And also to say that the thing that's missing from that is to recognize that we have been given this mandate by God to take dominion, to be fruitful, and to multiply and subdue the earth. And so you've got to have the means of production, so to speak, to subdue the earth. And that means having lots of children and having people to do it. Now, God is sovereign. He can do what he wants in terms of how many children people have. That's not what this is about. The point is You know, what is the attitude of the part of the supposedly Bible-believing couple, man or woman, about this issue of having children and the perpetuation of a godly kingdom in this world? Now, in the area of, you've talked about women that you've talked to and that sort of thing, we see a similar thing for men in the area of masculinity and manhood, in that Okay. Hollywood has its versions or used to, I don't know about nowadays. It's probably not even worth talking about nowadays, but you know, it used to be the characteristic of manhood that young men or boys were exposed to, you know, where the, the tough guy, the, um, the guy who was the gunslinger or, you know, whatever it was, the, the, you know, the Asian martial arts film where the guy gets revenge on somebody for punching his sister and he kills a thousand people with his bare hands, all those kinds of things. But now in the Christian world, we have, at least I think I'm seeing it, and I've heard from others, that a lot of Christian men are sort of getting the idea that what it means to be a man nowadays is to smoke cigars and drink whiskey. Now serious, this is an issue that has come up in some circles. I know, I interrupt you for a second, I know, because I hear from women in these churches going, what is going on here? That's what the Bible calls manhood? Yeah. We could devote an entire episode as to where that comes from and why it's come to the fore when it has. But I go back to this thing I've referred to before that Francis Schaeffer talked about, where you've got the number line from 1 to 10, and each number represents a different point on the scale of the important aspects of the Christian life and doctrine and belief and all that. One of the numbers starts to fade away because at that point it's not being emphasized. And then something else, another number starts to get 50 times bigger than what it should be because that's being overemphasized and there's a reaction to it. I think that's some of what we're seeing. I mean, we've gone through a time when Christian men and boys have not had good models and they've not been following the biblical pattern of what that looks like. But to bring it back to what we're talking about, certainly one thing that Christian men and young men need to understand is that whether you smoke a cigar, drink a glass of whiskey or not, you should be a father and start thinking about having a family and what being a godly father looks like and perpetuating the kingdom of God through that means. Exactly. And subtly in our culture, it becomes harder and harder to have a large family. I started noticing this years ago. My husband's in the car business and I would see the new cars that were coming out and it was like, what happened to the station wagon? When I was growing up, large families had station wagons and they could put their eight children in or things like that. Well, cars got smaller and smaller and it became difficult. And so You would hear people say, we would like more children, but we just can't afford it. I mean, what car would we have or where would we live? And so now the consideration is that it's a burden to have children as opposed to a blessing. And a friend of mine has nine children and she went to the zoo. And they gave her a hard time because she had too many children for the family discount. And she has to argue with them over and over again, because when we say family discount, we meant three, four children. You've got nine. Now, when you think about it, as they're walking around the zoo, it's not like five more children consume what more than one child would do, but it's subtle. In other words, we're not going to acknowledge that this is a good thing. On top of it all, we're going to penalize you. So it does become harder and harder, and it does become harder to support children, a number of children, unless you adapt the biblical model that they're a blessing And quite frankly, a lot of large families end up homeschooling, not because, oh, gee, we wish we could send them to school. They recognize that they have a more cohesive family, a more productive family. and that the children end up really being contributors to the family as opposed to the leeches or just the consumers. And so the more I thought about it, Charles, I looked around, I go, yep, there's an example. Yep, there's an example. And it made me realize that to change this, we have to, as always, go back to what God considers important, what God considers a blessing, and what he considers a curse. I think that even pagan cultures that have not had an explicit understanding of God's covenant and the commission that he's given his people have, on some level, depending on the culture, they've recognized at least some aspect of the importance of family life and having children and having a central family model that allows society to go forward. Not all pagan cultures have been that way, but it's interesting, I think. And I'm not willing to write a dissertation on this topic. We're just sort of thinking out loud here. But I do know that in ancient Roman culture, there was a significant emphasis on the importance of the family. It didn't mean that these are biblical families and everything's perfect. But Roman family life was tremendously significant and important in that ancient culture. And I don't think it's any coincidence that the Roman Empire was the powerful thing that it was and that it endured for so long. Now, most all of it was for evil on one level, but when we look at the mechanics, it's interesting that the biblical model was being aped or copied in some way, and obviously without any biblical foundation or understanding, but it was being followed nonetheless. I can share with our listeners something from my own life, how when I was in junior high and high school, I got to know a fellow student who came from a family very different from mine and different than most of the other kids I grew up with. And he came from a family where they were, he must have had seven or eight brothers and sisters. I didn't know any families like that, but his did. And that part was novel enough. But I can recall many times going over to his house and visiting with him and just being amazed at what a pleasant experience it was. Not that everybody was behaving themselves and everything was hunky dory, but there was something there in that family that was missing in my own and most of the other kids I knew. Of course, some of it was a blessed chaos. But there was something very unique about that that I found personally very attractive, and I couldn't have even given it a Christian articulation. I talked to this fellow some years later and mentioned that to him, because I certainly had never told him that when we were in junior high school. It's not the sort of thing you talk about in your high school, I guess. But when I told him this, he said, you know, you're not the first person to tell me that. He said, you know, there were people that I was friends with, that we were friends with, that would come to my house and they would mention years later what a blessing it was to be in that kind of environment. A lot of the manifestations of our culture are anti-family. Think of the inheritance tax. If you don't understand it, the inheritance tax is when the state says, we're your first born and we get all of it and you have to justify why you want to keep some of it. But this anti-family thing makes it so that then the family can somewhat be irrelevant, pick or choose if you want to. Whereas, as the primary, the initial, and the most important, according to scripture, of all the institutions, the family, all these things work to disempower the family, undercut the family, so that even though they don't have to say, this is an anti-family law, this is an anti-family practice, by and large, that's what it amounts to. Now, I'm gonna bring up some things that some people might find exception to, but in the 30 years, 40 years that we have been fighting this war on cancer, the three major processes that are recommended if you find out you have cancer is chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. But what a lot of people don't know, and we praise the research that's being done to knock out childhood cancer and they have continuous rounds of chemotherapy or radiation, most of the time, these people are gonna end up infertile. The likelihood of them having children is very, very slim. On top of it, once you chemically or with radiation, you make them more vulnerable to infection and illness, and they have to be on medication of some sort for the rest of their lives. How many people would pursue this if we didn't have this culture of death that says, well, okay, if I can't have kids, I can't have kids, whatever, right? As opposed to, no, this is a price too much to pay because I want to be a parent. I want to have children. I want to further the kingdom of God. Why haven't there been better publicized alternatives, which do exist? They do exist and people have seen their cancers go away. but it feeds into this idea, we need fewer people, and this is a good way to do it, and we'll get people to donate for the causes. Yes, and another part of that is, we used to hear the term a lot, euthanasia, and now it's just the idea that if you have a certain degraded quality of life, if you're at an age where everything hurts and you're dying, as the T-shirt says, why don't you just go ahead and end it all, do us all a favor, do yourself a favor, take this chemical and take this injection, whatever, and just go ahead and die. We've seen in the past several years that there are some places where government-sanctioned agencies have been set up to help people, quote unquote, make that decision to kill themselves. And this goes to something that I never thought this much about this point until I read the works of R.J. Rastuni. And I think this is an example of how incisive His writings and thoughts were on this. If I decide I'm going to kill myself, I may put it in language that makes it sound good to me, and it may be what the state approves me doing. But the idea is I'm making a decision to kill something, in this case, myself, or in the case of the state, someone else, without just cause. And so Dr. Rushton points out, and it's in volume one of the collected Chalcedon reports and position papers concerning the love of death and how in Exodus 2013, God's law stipulates, and I'll challenge our listeners to check your Bible translation. If you have something that translated anything other than you shall not kill, thou shalt not kill, then you might want to consider whether you're getting the full force of what's actually said there in the Hebrew. As Dr. Rastuni points out, there's another term used in Hebrew for murder. And literally, though, the technical term that is translated here literally means to kill. And he points out that that is a very important fact because all of life is answerable to God, and God is the author of life, and therefore he is the sovereign over life. And he is the one that determines, according to his law, what is lawful killing and what is unlawful killing. Murder is only one example of an unlawful killing. But if you restrict that commandment to you shall not murder, well then that sort of, at least in some minds, can open the door to where some other authority can make the decision about what it means to kill here or kill there. And I just want to use one other analogy. We all understand that if we have an infestation of vermin in our homes, whether it be rats or bugs or whatever it may be, we want to kill them all and get rid of them. That is a lawful thing because it threatens life. But what people need to understand is that there are governments, there are people in positions of power who look upon humanity generally in the same way that we would look upon vermin and bugs and rats and things like that. And they think there are too many of us. This isn't a fantasy. This isn't a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. More enterprising listeners can find all this information for themselves and various sources from the people themselves. The people who perpetuate population control, climate control, all of these things are geared toward the same thing. We need to limit the number of people in this world because we're going to use up all the resources and all the rest of it. And either you will be taken to war to eliminate mass numbers of people, kill a number of people. You may be given, like you described, chemotherapy, medical treatments that end up either killing people directly or making it such that the species, the race of humanity, won't be perpetuated because of that. Now, this is part of a larger agenda of people who are in the highest echelons of society and politics and government in love with death. And I think that's something that we have to come to terms with. If we are on the same side of those who love death, but we try to sprinkle it with some sort of nice attribute, then we're on the wrong side. Just this morning, I read of a law in Michigan. You have to understand how this law came about, okay? So there are people who want children. Sometimes they're homosexual couples, and obviously, no matter what they say about men and women aren't the same, two men cannot produce a child. So this industry has come up with sperm banks, acquiring good eggs. Now it's much easier to acquire sperm than it is to acquire eggs. Quite frankly, a man just has to ejaculate into a cup and then give it to somebody and however they preserve it until they want it to be used. So this case, this is allowing someone to birth children to some degree, but not take care of his own, which the Bible will say makes him worse than an infidel, okay? Then there's this need for eggs because you have to fertilize the sperm. And so they look to Ivy League universities, to good looking women, intelligent women, and they may pay them $20,000 depending on their resume. And then the women justify it by, okay, now I can pay for law school or now I can do this or that. Okay, so then they go ahead and they create the opportunity for the sperm and the egg to come together. In some cases, an infertile woman might be the recipient of this, but in most cases, it's a surrogate. So a surrogate is found to carry the baby. Now, this article pointed out for the amount of time that she's pregnant and goes through all these treatments and such, she's probably making about six to $7 an hour for her time in trouble, okay? Well, this has been going on for quite some time, so I'm not revealing anything that's new. What's new is that the woman who is carrying the child now realizes she's bonded with this child and she doesn't really wanna give the child up. Or in the FIPP case, She's carrying a child. It's discovered that this child has a defect. And now the paying couple says, uh-uh, we're not paying for this. We wanted a good child. We didn't want a diseased child or a disabled child. Well, now in the state of Michigan, a law is in place that is changing the terminology so that surrogate, even though she's carrying the child, cannot be considered a parent. And so now who owns the child? The people who paid for it. It's kind of like ordering a car with the various luxuries that you might want to have and then the car is delivered and you look at it and say, no, sorry, I wanted a full surround sound stereo. I'm not taking the car. the opposite in the case of the woman who says, no, this is now, I mean, I bonded with this child. I love this child. And now I'm thinking twice about where this child is gonna go. So in an era where we hate life and we're saying there's too many people, there's this growing industry where homosexuals can produce children through these means. And so is it any surprise when the Bible says, all that hate God love death. In other words, on the one hand, we're saying there's too many people, but then you have these places that freeze people's embryos because yes, they went through the process to had the possibility of having children, but they really don't want six or seven children, so what they do is they put them in deep freeze, and now there's a whole industry that talks about taking these snowflake babies and then bringing them into your house. I mean, does God's word envision any of this, Charles? Well, not perhaps in the technocratic sense in which we have it today, but in the larger sense, yes. I mean, it's the essence of paganism, and it also Trends towards something that we've talked about before, and that's magic. Magic is the human drive and desire to control everything in what is called nature. I mean, it's really God's creation. We could debate that term. And I think what you've described really are, I'm struggling with the term here. It's an archetype. It's a template or a model. for where the people that I've described in my previous comments want ultimately to move human society where the entire project of perpetuating human beings, if they're needed at all, will be something in the domain of scientists and technocrats. So, okay, just like, you know, you remember 150 years ago, whatever, you used that woman as a surrogate. Well, now we can do this by means of machines and computers and technology. You know, I just thought about this, and I'm not sure where this all went, but if you go back In around 2018 or 2019, just before the pandemic, there was a massive amount of discussion going on, at least in some quarters. And this wasn't anything, some marginal weird stuff. I mean, this stuff was being talked about how a coming industry was going to be sex robots. And they were manufacturing these sex robots for men and women that were increasingly realistic to where you really wouldn't need a human partner anymore for a sexual experience. When I first encountered this, it reminded me of a scene in a Woody Allen movie, where everything was futuristic and you'd go into this machine, it looked more like a phone booth in his movie, and you'd have a sexual experience. It wasn't clear exactly what that looked like with the machine, but it was definitely not anything human or humanistic. Then all of a sudden, that just vanished with the COVID stuff. uh... but that too was and when i first heard about this i thought you know this is this is going to be the end of the human race I mean, if men especially don't need the responsibility of a wife, a woman for sexual fulfillment, all they need is this realistic looking robot. And I think there were even a few HBO type, Amazon type movies that were made based on this premise. Then that's going to dramatically reduce the number of people being born into the world. So I think that this example of the surrogate mother, different types of people who could not normally quote-unquote have kids. This is leading us up to ultimately the state saying okay we can take care of this. Obviously we've got people who want same-sex relationships, they want transgender relationships, they don't want any relationships, they want to consider themselves cats and dogs and all the rest of it. You know if we need people then we can create them in this kind of environment and that'll solve the problem for us. And what's more, what you hear as these things come out about this law here or this law there, it's like, wait a second, this should be regulated. And they're like, the government needs to regulate sperm banks. The government needs to regulate surrogacy. The government needs to determine what we do with all these frozen embryos. Well, the funny part is, is God's word already regulates all this. But it goes back to, we will have anyone to rule over us but this man being Jesus Christ. So, first of all, let me state, Charles, I do not think we will see the end of the human race. God has promised us things that maybe we won't experience better times in our lifetime. But this too is a judgment on the church of Jesus Christ. If we will not stand for the word of God, and we will not exhibit and put all our eggs into the basket of God's word and the kingdom of God, then we can expect to see bizarre things that we would never have imagined before. So yes, we currently find ourselves in the minority in this culture of death. So the question is, do we need to be a majority in the culture of life, or do we just need to be faithful? So those people who are told, no, no, no, you know, God is putting in your heart to expand your family, to change your family, and to be to be bigger and more effective, instead of saying, oh, that's just terrible, what can we do to help those families? What can we do to foster this culture of life, which is the original culture before sin? And stop looking at well, this makes me uncomfortable, you know, like all those, those people, my family, when they come to church, you know, that the child keeps making noise as if that's some, you know, awful thing. I think one of the things I love best about listening to Dr. Rushdoony's sermons, even Mark Rushdoony's sermons that are on our Chalcedon website is to hear the screams and the kids crying in the background and In both cases, both those men didn't stop and say, excuse me, could you silence that child? They keep talking because they're also talking to the children. So this quiet church idea that, oh, now I'm not suggesting that kids should run around and be doing like playing tag as the sermon is being given, but we just got to make sure that we correct a problem rather than deciding that we should eliminate the problem, which is children. Yes, and so to my mind, what we're talking about here is that we are to be fruitful and multiply. But the other thing that God enjoins upon us is that we are to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. And that's where the issue of behavior comes in and being taught how to live in family, church, and state, and abide by God's law, word, and all of those areas. But the foundation of any of that is a recognition that God is absolutely sovereign over all areas of life, including the issue of life itself, and that any pretended effort to usurp that position from God ends and trends toward death. And I appreciate the fact that as we kind of wind things up here, you have emphasized that we don't believe that the people who do perpetuate these evil things will any way, shape, or form be successful. Now maybe from their standpoint, they're getting successful, but one thing they will realize, but it'll be too late, is that their success means their death. And I was listening to Mark in a presentation he gave some years ago about his father and how to understand R.J. Rastuni. And he made the point that even when Dr. Rastuni was on his deathbed, He was promoting the idea and ensuring his family that God in Christ is victorious and ours is a victorious faith and will succeed in history and in time. And when Christ returns, he returns to a Christian world. Now granted for a lot of people, that's hard to imagine, but then they're just walking by sight, not by faith. And let me close with just one observation. Fruitful and multiply are not synonyms. Otherwise, the word could be, God commanded them to multiply and multiply. But to be fruitful in that multiplication, right? You can plant a lot of seeds in a garden and not take care of those seeds. And guess what? You don't get fruit. So the emphasis that we always seem to come back to is, Faithfulness to God's Word, desiring to be faithful, will allow us to be fruitful. So some people, some wombs God chooses not to open, those women, those families, husband and wife, can still be fruitful. and their multiplication efforts can be with families who God has opened the womb many times for a woman, but they could use some help because the society in general hates them, despises them. For a sexually promiscuous society to despise a family that has 10 children, what they really are despising, I guess, is that the man and the woman love each other, and they engage in the act that produces children. And for some reason, that disgusts them. Yet, having multiple partners, sometimes people you just know one time and move on and maybe didn't even know their names. So we've got to see the contradiction and recognize that God's way is the right way. And if We have the desire to be faithful, and we don't know how to do it. By God's grace, there are plenty of people who've lived long enough to be able to share what they know and how they know it. I know many couples, for example, that had gone down the road of, yep, too many children, and so the husband got the vasectomy. And then they were like, what did we do? What did we buy into? And by God's grace, they were able to go and have that situation reversed. Now, in all cases, it didn't necessarily produce children. Sometimes it did. But they recognized that what they had done was cut off their ability to generate, to be fruitful, and multiply. So a lot of these things need to be examined. And if you're among those who fell into the trap, fell into the sin of irreparably changing your ability to have children, that like other things can be forgiven of the Lord, but don't think it means you can't be fruitful now. You can. And let's encourage our listeners to read, I wouldn't say the entire book of Proverbs, but especially those chapters like chapter eight that talk about the importance of God's wisdom and living a life based on it. And as his word tells us in Proverbs 8, 35, that whoever finds me, that is God's wisdom, finds life and obtains favor from the Lord. Absolutely. Thanks everyone for listening. As always, you can reach us at outofthequestionpodcast at gmail.com. Thank you to those who have been sending in emails with questions, with encouraging words, and even those who don't always like what we have to say, I still appreciate hearing from you, because this is meant to be a discussion starter, not the end all of everything. So Charles, thank you, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit calcedon.edu.