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INTRODUCTION

As we seek to address the marital dislocations that confront us in every direction, remember that we want to do so in a way that respects the men, particularly the young men. If they don’t solve the problem, then nobody is going to solve the problem. And if the problem is caused by our culture-wide hostility to masculinity, we will only be pouring gasoline on these cultural fires if bring any additional contempt.

THE TEXT

“And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do . . .” (1 Chron. 12:32).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

Remember that the Word of God is given to men, and this means that it is not thrown into the Abyss or Void. In order to understand the Word, it is necessary to understand how it was intended to apply, and that requires exegesis of the times. If you require that every biblical solution for every 21^st century problem be spoon fed to us right out of the text, you want something that is not going to happen. Scripture says nothing about computer dating services. At the same time, we do not want to coming up with our own vanities, willy nilly, independent of the authority of the Word. That is the sure road to self-deception. We want men of Issachar, saturated in the Word, and attuned to the times.

THE GLORY OF YOUNG MEN

The glory of young men is their strength, but it has to be the kind of strength exhibited by the men of Issachar. John wrote to young men because they had overcome the wicked one (1 John 2:13). John wrote to the young men because they were strong, and they were strong because of the Word of God abiding in them (1 John 2:14). Again, they overcame the wicked one—but the wicked one is the father of lies. This is done, through faith, by exulting in the truth.

ONE OF THE LIES OF FEMINISM

Before addressing one of the most corrosive lies of feminism, we need to be reminded that the really potent lies are the ones that have a strand of truth running through them. Ardent feminists have argued for some time now that traditional marriage is simply a respectable form of prostitution. They advance this argument by making the (quite obvious) point that marriage involves an economic exchange, one that includes money for sex and sex for money.

Marriage is an economic institution, and that’s the point. Even our word economy comes from the Greek word for household. But prostitution is not an evil because it includes sex and money; it is an evil because of what it excludes—it excludes kids, and fidelity, and curtains, and mowing the lawn. Sex and money are supposed to be at the center of your entire life, not some adjunct to it.

THREE CHICKENS AND A COW?

Whenever someone starts investigating market realities and traditional marriage, it takes about five minutes before someone starts yelling about dowries, and bartering for brides. But our modern cyber system has simply relocated and distorted the monetary exchanges—it has not eliminated them. If you want to do any serious interacting on eHarmony, you will need, ahem, a paid subscription.

As the whole world knows, men and women are different. Since I have gotten you ready for this, let us talk about this in terms of the stark realities of supply and demand. Men and women are differently sexually, and one of the differences can be seen here. Men represent the demand side, and women the supply. In the older order, the order we have demolished in the name of liberating women (ha!), men agreed to give up their roistering ways in exchange for something his wife would then supply—respect, loyalty, sex, legitimate offspring, and a stake in the future of civilization. Because he had to surrender the rest of his life for this staggering privilege, what she was therefore supplying was a high-end luxury item. “Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord” (Prov. 18:22).

So instead of this, what has the sexual revolution accomplished? What has our vaunted feminist liberation done—all in the name of eliminating the commodification of women? It has not eliminated the commodification of women. What it has done is send the price crashing through the floor. What has abortion done? It subsidizes irresponsible men. What has ubiquitous porn done? It caters to irresponsible men. What has the expectation of sex by the second date done? It flatters irresponsible men. Hey! Where did all these irresponsible men come from? If our generation were the prodigal son, we are now at the point in the story where we are staring at the pig food, and all the painted ladies are off with some other good time Charlie.

And incidentally, we live in a time when more evangelical “thought leaders” will be offended that I spoke of women in terms of “the price” than have been offended by the actual damage that countless women have suffered through having their value directly challenged and denied. You can refuse to set a price on a woman in two ways, you know. You can deem her priceless—“Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies” (Prov. 31:10). Or, on the other hand, you might deem her priceless because you have run her clean out of the market in the other direction.

Now sadly, too many Christians participate in some or all of these compromises. But even those who do not participate directly in the overtly immoral aspects of it are still having to function in a market where all the expectations and prices have been dislocated. It is like the private school that has to charge for what the government schools are promising to give away for free.

I am about to mention that a young woman’s peak attractiveness and fertility happens in her early twenties, thus proving myself to be an incorrigible dinosaur. But let us say a woman wants to get a graduate degree or two, and then a successful career, and then, when in her mid-thirties, she wants the men to cluster around like they used to when she was 23, she wants something that rarely happens. Now she might be doing this because her thinking has been distorted by all the messed-up thinking the broader culture, or she might be doing this from necessity, because potential suitors are giving her space to “pursue her dreams.” But a godly young man should be willing to interrupt. He should be willing to mess up her plans. “I don’t want you to pursue your dreams. I wanted to ask if you would pursue our toddlers with a spanking spoon instead.”

IN YET ANOTHER PROPHETIC MOMENT

“A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men; it is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits. Also, domestic happiness is more necessary to them than to us. And the quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity, but this does not happen to those qualities of personality—women don’t really care two cents about our looks—by which we hold women. Thus in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate competition fill me with pity” (C.S. Lewis, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” in God in the Dock)

CHRIST THE TRUTH

Jesus tells us plainly that He is the truth. “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Young men are the ones who must overcome the wicked one, and they must do this by following Christ everywhere. They must realize that Christ is the truth everywhere, and not in some isolated spiritual realm.

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INTRODUCTION

It is the central duty of every Christian preacher to preach Christ, and to do so in way that cannot be confused with anything else. Our normal procedure for doing this is to work through a portion of Scripture, expositing it, then drawing out the applications, and then showing how those applications point to Christ and not to themselves. That is our normal procedure, and it is the good old path. But it is not the only path.

In this message, the text will highlight what I am going to attempt to do, together with you, over these three weeks. We will then look at our current diseased culture in the light of a biblical worldview, and then we will turn to look to Christ. The text will therefore be the same text for all three messages in this series.

THE TEXT

“And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do . . .” (1 Chron. 12:32).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

The Word of God is given to men, meaning it is not delivered into the Void. In order to understand the Word, it is necessary to understand how it applies, and that requires exegesis of the times. A preacher who understands the text only, and not the culture he is preaching to, is a preacher who understands nothing that really matters. He is a builder of bridges over chasms, but one who never makes it more than a third of the way across. The men of Issachar were wise, and they understood the times they were living in. They consequently knew what Israel ought to do. Because they understood the law, they knew what direction to go. Because they understood the times, they knew what their point of departure was.

MARRIAGE IN CRISIS

Now marriage is a creation ordinance, established by God at the beginning of the world (Gen. 1:27-28). The Fall did affect it, as it affected everything, but we must distinguish ordinary marriage, damaged and dented by sin, from what our current full-scale revolt against marriage is attempting. In our day, we are dealing with same sex mirage, we are dealing with the trans-lie, we are dealing with the pornification of everything, we are dealing the mainstreaming of pedophilia, and we are also dealing with the related crisis that this series of messages is seeking to address—the marked downgrade of marriage in conservative evangelical circles. This is evidenced by the nature of the misplaced priorities that are placed upon getting married by Christian young people and their parents.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age for “first marriage” in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women. In 1975, the year Nancy and I got married, it was 23 for men and 21 for women. Last year, in 2019, it was just shy of 30 for men, and 28 for women. And because the evangelical world is apparently a firm believer in “monkey see, monkey do,” the same trends are evident throughout the Christian world. When you factor in whythis is happening—meaning our culture’s contemporary revolt against maturity—the thing has to be considered a dumpster fire crisis.

THE VILLAIN OF THE PIECE

In the course of these messages, I am going to say some particular things that will rub the fur the wrong way, and this is going to happen because the evangelical world has generally imbibed a lot more of the world’s toxic unbelief than we think we have.

“Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are” (David Wells, God in the Wasteland)

So the villain of this particular piece is something I am calling “entitled egalitarianism.” This entitled egalitarianism has spread a form of soft feminism (called soft complementarianism by its advocates) throughout the conservative church. This neutering service manufactures beta males, and calls the end product Servant Leadership®. This approach flatters and manipulates young women the same way Emma flattered Harriet in Austen’s novel, and with similar bad results.

To put it another way, the assumptions of feminism are not just a problem for us when it comes to the specific questions of women being ordained, or serving in combat roles in the military. Feminism is a corrosive disaster across the board, in every aspect of human life, and the etiolated male response to it is the other half of that disaster.

NOT THE VILLAIN OF THE PIECE

The problem has been noticed and discussed by many Christians. And one of the most standard responses is to ask, sometimes in a loud voice, why the young men don’t get off the dime. Now there is a very limited place for this question, but we are dealing with a massive civilization-wide crisis, one caused by our endemic hostility to genuine masculinity. You have never encountered any form of true masculinity that our culture does not consider to be what they now call “toxic.” This is not a situation where all the young men mysteriously got cold feet for no particular reason. And besides, if the entire culture treats the young men with contempt, why on earth would the young women want to have anything to do with them? In a biblical response to the crisis, one of the things that we must figure out is how to respect the young men.

A CLUSTER OF PROBLEMS

Allow me to ruffle a few feathers without resolving anything just yet. This is simply to maintain your interest in the topic for the next two messages. Group standards can be dangerous—a guy who is not good enough for the best in your group is not good enough for the least? And the false chick flick doctrine of the “right one” is also a problem—that is not how we understand living in the will of God. Quite a few girls, and let us not leave out quite a few guys, do not understand what league they are in (Rom. 12:3). And we shouldn’t forget those parents who would care more about their kid finishing school than their kid avoiding sexual immorality.

But with all of this said, I do want to say that arranged marriages would result in a whole lot of sorrow, sadness and heartache. It would be a really bad idea. But it wouldn’t be as bad as what is happening now.

CHRIST AND THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER

Sons of Issachar don’t come from nowhere. They are a gift from God. And when they are given to us, they know what Israel should do. So successful marriages form in a particular kind of climate. Successful marrying-off is something that blessed cultures do. And so a climate conducive to biblical marriage is formed by a culture or subculture, not by individuals alone, and that only happens when Christ has given reformation and revival to a people. Try as you might, you won’t be able to grow orchids above the Colorado tree line.

This means we always come back to basics. Christ died and rose. Christ is therefore Lord. And this means that Christ is the Lord of all our sexual assumptions. Believe in Him. Trust in Him. Follow Him.

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