Friday, February 14, 2025

Part I

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What Does the Super Bowl Say about the Culture? Objective Truth, the Spectacle of Sport, the Power of Advertising, the American Draw to Nostalgia, and Gambling

Well, several days ago you may remember that a big game was held known as the Super Bowl, and it is one of the major fixations of American popular culture. It has become a major economic engine, not only when it comes to professional sports, but when it comes to the culture at large. Perhaps you might want to know that it is the day in the United States, indeed, we are told in North America, when the largest number of avocados are consumed. And they’re consumed, of course, mostly as dip. And it turns out that Americans have a ravenous appetite for avocados mostly on one weekend. But you know, let’s be honest, avocados aren’t a major worldview issue. So that’s not why we’re talking about the Super Bowl today.

I want to go back before we end the entire week and think about some of the worldview issues that were involved. Now, obviously you could talk about sport, you could talk about human excellence, you could talk about human striving, you could talk about the training and the preparation, you could talk about the strategy. You could talk about the rules. It’s very interesting. It’s a rules-based universe. The rules may be controversial, the rulings may be controversial, but the fact is people actually do believe in absolute truth when it comes to the measurement of whether or not a first down was earned. It turns out to be objective truth. That objective truth was looking pretty bad for the Kansas City Chiefs for a lot of the night, and it didn’t end the way they expected, and the Philadelphia Eagles added another Super Bowl trophy to their cabinet.

But the reality is I’m not mostly interested in this as a game. I’m not mostly interested in it even as football. I am interested in it for what it says about the culture. So one of the things it tells us is that the attraction of a spectacle is a deeply human thing. A spectacle draws a crowd. And indeed, there’ve been people, pretty sophisticated cultural theorists in the 19th and 20th centuries who have suggested that that’s one of the most powerful powers that there is, the power to draw a crowd. And of course, that comes right down to say the 2024 election cycle. Which candidate could draw the bigger crowds? What draws a crowd? Well, to be honest, boredom doesn’t draw a crowd. No, a spectacle draws a crowd. And as the Roman Caesars understood, the Roman emperors well understood that if you can add some real physical combat and something that looks like a war, it looks like battling armies against one another. It looks like gladiators on the field, you just might have a bigger crowd, you just might be talking about football.

But all right, in worldview terms, I think what wasn’t really discussed but needs to be are some of the worldview issues. For one thing, you have the Wall Street Journal remarking, “Super Bowl ads look to avoid culture’s hot buttons.” So a shift in this Super Bowl from previous Super Bowls, at least even gaining the eye of the Wall Street Journal is you know, these companies really don’t want to get deeply involved in culture war issues. And thus, that was pretty evident in the commercials. There was really very little hard-hitting messaging in the commercials. One of the other interesting things you had as evident in the advertisements is the fact that when you’re watching something like the Super Bowl, you know that it’s the most expensive advertising opportunity when it comes to anything televised like that.

And so you want to know what is this telling us about the culture? Well, the culture tells us we like heartwarming stories. Americans love to see the Clydesdale that was said to be too little to be on the big team pulling the wagon, and instead it pushed a barrel all the way into, I’ll just say the establishment. One of the most talked-about commercials was the Harrison Ford commercial for Jeep. It was thick with nostalgia, it was thick with symbolism, it was thick With Harrison Ford, even to the point of Harrison Ford kidding openly about his name as he was offering a Jeep commercial. It was thick with American heritage, thick with cowboys, thick with the wild, wild west, thick with Jeep. And it really leaned into very venerable American themes.

But the most shocking commercial was one for breast cancer awareness, and it came with an incredible amount of messaging. The thing I want to remark about it is that when it came on, I was absolutely struck by the fact that something like that would’ve been considered pornographic and would’ve been forbidden to be on the air just a matter of a few decades ago, maybe even just a couple of decades ago. But now that commercial which was aired by the pharmaceutical company, Novartis, it just went on, and it went on, and it went on. You just have to wonder how many people were having, just something of us say, education, when it came to that commercial. A lot of young eyes watching that. It came laden with messaging. And we all just need to say out loud that a lot of the messaging was not really about breast cancer, it was about something else. It wasn’t subtle. And this reminds us that advertising does tell us a great deal about the culture.

You see, the advertisements, because by the way, advertising is such a strong barometer because it is so calculated to reach people making decisions about purchases. So, at least a lot of people putting a lot of money into this kind of commercial believes that this is the kind of thing that will gain the attention and perhaps even the economic activity of the people who see it. That’s why it is such an x-ray of the culture.

So on the one hand, what does this tell us? It tells us that Americans are sentimental. It tells us that Americans are well, Americans have a weakness for nostalgia. Not all bad. It tells us that Americans, at least in terms of this particular Super Bowl, appear not to want to see culture-war messaging, but it also tells us that the definition of pornography in this culture has been defined way, way down.

The other big thing we need to talk about in the Super Bowl is the fact that it was an unprecedented opportunity for gambling, legal, and illegal. Now, we’ve talked about this, and of course the first thing we have to talk about is the fact that most Americans, or at least many Americans, don’t seem to think that this is even a major moral issue. And without going into an extended argument today, we do understand as Christians, it’s a major moral issue. Civilization doesn’t come to an end when someone buys a lottery ticket, but you understand that’s a part of a larger structure that actually leads to the impoverishment of many homes, and strategically is directed to more impoverished communities. There are vulnerable sectors of the population when it comes to all forms of betting, and you know what caught the attention of a lot of people about betting on the Super Bowl this year?

The vast increase in legal betting, or at least betting on legal platforms undertaken by 18 to 22-year-old young men. The explosion of betting among college-age young men is a very troubling social phenomenon. Craig Carton ought to know. He, as the Wall State Journal says, speaks from experience. “He’s been down the dark road of gambling addiction. He knows that it never ends well.” So this is someone very much in professional sports world who actually did time in terms of some of the activities related to gambling. On the other side, he is someone who wants to speak very candidly about the dangers of gambling. The article goes on to point to the troubles, “Mr. Carton’s, troubles began before betting on sports was legalized, so he never had access to the online apps while he was gambling. If he had, he says he, ‘Would’ve been a problem gambler a lot earlier than I did.'”

Craig Carton in this article by Matthew Hennessey of the Wall Street Journal, goes on to say, “We have an epidemic on our hands.” Now, here’s what follows, and this is so important. “The fastest growing segment of the population that’s now gambling legally are young people, 18 to 22 years old.” I’m going to put a footnote here. I’m going to insert this. There are some young women who are included in these numbers, but the vast, vast, vast majority of these 18 to 22 year olds are young men. It’s really a young man problem, 18 to 22. Carton continues, “They’re gambling now more than any group of people has ever gambled, and the majority of them are just not responsible or mature enough to handle winning decent amounts of money. They’re certainly not capable of handling losses.” That’s just an alarming statement. We have an epidemic on our hands, but it’s an epidemic among persons, young men in particular, college-age young men who are particularly vulnerable to this kind of activity.

Here’s something, it’s not in the article, but trust me, it’s thoroughly documented in the literature, and just about every parent of a teenager, young adult male, is going to know exactly what I’m talking about. Every man, I guarantee you, is going to know what I talk about. And that is the fact that one of the later achievements of maturity for a young male is the drawing into accurate perspective of a cost-benefit analysis. That is something that comes late. It’s sometimes described as a young male risk analysis deficit. Or another way of putting this is one dad related to me when I was speaking at a church, he said, “You know, if I get a report that one of my teenage kids has jumped off the porch roof saying to friends, ‘Hey, look at this,’ I don’t think there’s any risk that it’s my daughter. As for the boys, which one was it?”

Just moving ahead on this, the numbers aren’t even fully available yet. The increase in gambling in this Super Bowl was so significant that we don’t have adequate analysis yet. You’ll notice that Craig Carton goes on to say that “This generation of young men is gambling more than anyone has ever gambled before.” That’s an incredible statement, and it’s backed up by the fact it’s published in the Wall Street Journal. And as I often point out, if anyone knows how to count dollars, it’s the Wall Street Journal.

Carton, by the way, in this interview goes on to point out, there are other problems. It’s all kinds of problems no one wants to acknowledge. And as someone who’s been associated with professional sports and gambling, he comes back to say, “when people tell you that, for instance, athletes aren’t gambling on their own sports, they’re lying.” Here’s what he says. “Players are gambling on their own sports. They’re gambling on other sports, they’re doing it through straw gamblers, friends, cousins, brothers, moms, dads.”

His point is this, you can count on one thing, they’re doing it. Matthew Hennessy of the Wall Street Journal concludes with these words. “That’s dispiriting and bodes ill. Maybe the top executives at the sports leagues think they’re clever enough to keep the action on the field separate from the action in the sports books. Maybe they think that with a little creativity and a lot of focus, they can do business with the online apps while keeping their games clean.” He then concludes, and don’t say you didn’t see this coming. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Part II

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The Right Kind of Sentimentality of Valentine’s Day: In a Culture with a Twisted Definition of Love, It’s Important to Recognize and Celebrate Love’s Right Expression

Okay, it’s time to turn to questions, but I want to make some mention of the fact that today is Valentine’s Day, as if you hadn’t noticed. And my wife and I have noticed, especially perhaps this year, that even before Christmas came, many retailers were putting out Valentine’s Day decorations and items. That’s weird, but that does tell you something. It tells you about the commercialization of Valentine’s Day, and that leads to what can only be some pretty heartbreaking observations. Look at how much of the Valentine’s energy is directed at something other than let’s just say heterosexual marriage, or let’s just say, marriage.

Look at how little of this is directed at a typical Western civilization recognized sequence of how love and marriage and sex are to come together in a sequence. Notice how little of this has to do with even a definition of what love is, and instead, a celebration of what is so horribly confused and often corrosively corrupted in our society. The growth and indeed the explosion of cultural attention to Valentine’s Day points out how many people really miss that kind of love? They yearn for love, romantic love, yes, but they in an unspoken way, undoubtedly yearn for other dimensions of love as well. Christians understand that’s inevitable because of how God made us, and the vocations to which God called us.

But you know, there’s something else in the midst of all this, and that is that when you have a society that’s growing increasingly secular, it can handle things, it claims, on its own. It can supply its own definitions, it can manufacture its own meaning. But you’ll notice how hollow all of this comes when you look at the cultural celebration of Valentine’s Day. There’s something very sweet about a child writing a valentine to a mom that’s just really sweet. His mom, her mom. There is something sweet about husbands and wives married for many, many years, having celebrated many Valentine’s Days, remarking to one another with great joy and comfort. “Well, here’s another one.”

However, you have to wonder if there’s not an inverse relationship between the experience of authentic love and the celebration of a holiday like Valentine’s Day. I’ll just state the matter clearly. I don’t think that the explosion of interest in Valentine’s Day is because of an explosion in the experience of love. I think it’s because of a deficit in the experience of true, lasting, committed love, and especially love outside the covenantal commitment of marriage.

So as we watch all this going on on Valentine’s Day, we recognize that much of it is simply a deep and increasingly expensive, increasingly obsessive commitment to try to feed a hunger that is real, a desire that is real. And a hunger and a desire for a sense of meaning and an experience that goes far beyond anything even intimated in most cases by any conversation or celebration of Valentine’s Day. But I want to say to those who are Christians who understand the importance of marriage, the reality of love, the goodness of the fact that God calls a man and a woman together, and the rightness of calling that experience, and that power in the right sense, and in it’s capable sense, love. To those of you who know that, and to those who hunger for that, happy Valentine’s Day.

Part III

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How Do We Teach Our Daughters About Accepting Chivalry? – Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, now let’s turn to questions. I’m grateful for all the questions sent in, and always surprised by some of the questions that come. Sometimes, by the way, I answer questions implicitly rather than explicitly. And I haven’t talked about this before, but many listeners to The Briefing raise really important issues. They ask a question about something that’s a big issue, and I’m going to discuss it on The Briefing, so I make sure that in that discussion, I try my best to answer that question as I’m talking about that issue. So even if your question isn’t read out loud and it’s not answered in the context of say, one of these Friday programs, the reality is your question’s still important. And as you listen to The Briefing, I think in many cases you’ll actually hear the answer as we’re talking about one of the big issues of the day.

Okay, well now let’s turn to questions as questions. So maybe this question, it just came in. It sounds particularly apt for Valentine’s Day. It’s written by a young mom with three little girls under the age of four, and moms being moms, I really respect this. Moms being moms, they’re planners. They’re looking ahead. And she’s looking ahead to when her girls are not under the age of four. She says that she and her husband, “already talk about how to teach them respectful interaction with boys in today’s culture.” She then says, “I would really like to teach how to accept chivalry, like allowing boys to hold doors open for them. My husband brought up a point I hadn’t thought of. He’s concerned that our girls would appear spoiled to many modern young men. His concern is that chivalry has become a foreign concept to many modern young men, even Christian men. And they may view a girl waiting for the door to be held for them as acting like a spoiled brat rather than acting like a young lady.”

Wow, there’s a lot there, and a lot of good insight from both the father and a mother here. And I want to go to Dad’s point and say, yeah, there may be some who would think that these girls are representing a feeling of entitlement as they wait for a door to be opened for them, know, etc, etc. Or they wait for, the young man waits for the young woman to enter a room before he enters a room, that looks like an entitlement. And you know what? I would simply say this, and I really do mean it. I would not want my daughter to marry a young man who saw that expectation as being spoiled. I would want her to marry a young man, as indeed my daughter did, thanks be to God, who would treat her in that way out of his own commitment.

I also want to say that when you’re dealing with boys, you understand none of this comes naturally. It all comes by an enormous amount of investment by parents, first on the front line, in teaching them how they are to relate to young women, and teaching how a man relates to a woman, and fulfill certain duties, indeed, to a woman. And there are certain duties a man owes to all women in terms of protection, in terms of social treatment, you know, etc. And it takes a church sometimes, too. Let’s be honest, that’s a part of what it takes, is a subculture. And I think this is one of the powers of the Christian congregation in which you have parents together, some of them are going to be families with boys, some of them are going to be families with girls, a lot of them are going to be families with both, and a culture like that needs to be developed and honored.

But my point is, boys have to be taught. None of this is natural, it’s going to have to be taught, and it’s going to have to be taught both ways. And so I would say to the mom here who wrote the question, you should talk, I think honestly with your girls, about the duties that women owe to men, and the duties that men owe to women. Now, the harder thing here is the duties that men owe to women. And that’s the primary issue here. It’s the primary issue in society and frankly, our society’s at war with the idea that there are inherent differences, and that there is any kind of order to those differences. Our response as Christians is, you bet those differences are real. And those differences do imply duties.

So teaching both young men and young women those duties and helping them make that clear is just really, really important? And so you say, well, what are you talking about the reciprocity of duties here? Well, let’s just say that etiquette, if you’re just talking about even as etiquette or social custom requires duties on both sides. For a young man, the duty of opening the door for a young woman. For a young woman, the duty of waiting for a young man to open it, both graciously. Both, we hope, so naturally, that they’re not thinking about it. But let’s be honest, at least in the beginning, especially the boys, boy, you’re going to have to make them think about it. 

Part IV

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How Do I Help a Younger Believer Understand His Depravity? – Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, sometimes one thing just leads to another, I just pick up a piece of paper. Here’s the next one, and this question, however, does have connections.

This is written by an older Christian believer, a man, about a younger man he’s trying to help. He says, “My question has to do with a younger brother in Christ who’s trying to grasp the nature of his own human depravity. Our church is offering a theology course” That’s a great thing, I’m encouraged by that. “Of which he is a participant, and he shared that he struggles to grasp the true nature of salvation from sinful depravity. He says this because he never had a falling away prodigal son experience his life. He grew up in the church and generally has walked the straight and narrow most of his life. So now he asks, ‘How do I know that I’m truly depraved if I don’t have some ugly past that other believers may have to prove their past dead self?'” The older man says, “I find his question to me challenging because I know he is desperately deprived of righteousness in the sight of God, whether he is a prodigal or not. How can I handle this explanation in a pastoral manner?”

I really appreciate the question, and I think it really points to something we need to think about for a moment. And so I would say number one, if I were an older man talking to this younger Christian man and he’s questioning whether he really truly sees himself as sinfully depraved, and you know I’m going to lean into this, totally depraved, that means that every part of him is depraved, his will, his imagination, his thought. That’s what total depravity means, the totus of the individual. It doesn’t mean we do every bad thing we possibly could, thanks be to God. But it does mean that every part of us, including both the intellect and the will are set against God. But I just want to say I don’t know exactly how an older woman might have this conversation with a younger woman.

In general terms, everything I say is going to apply. But in specific terms, I just want to say that one of the things as an older man you can help this younger Christian man to see is that even if he didn’t have a prodigal period and he didn’t fall away, he hass committed just about every sin you can imagine in his heart. And that’s where the Scripture just nails us. The Scripture nails us. Jesus nails us in saying it’s not just about the externals, it is about the heart. “As a man is in his heart,” the Scripture says, “so is he.” And without going into detail, I just think it’s really, really clear in any honest young man that in his heart he has committed every sin imaginable, and is entirely dependent upon the grace of God, even for the ability to come to terms with the knowledge of his own sin. He should be thankful that by God’s grace, he has been kept from the actual committing of some of these crimes in the body.

The Scriptural term is sins committed in the body, and he’s been spared some of those consequences. But the reality is that that is also a sign of God’s grace and mercy. He is in no less need of a savior than someone who has spent the rest of his life in prison in felonious crimes. And we know that. But we also know that we have to keep saying that to ourselves. That’s one of the reasons why we need to keep singing songs that remind us of our sin. We need to keep hearing the Scripture condemn us our sin. We need to keep our dependents ever conscious before us of the Holy Spirit convicting us of sin. And so I’ll just say to this older brother, I really am thankful you’re in this young Christian’s life. I’m thankful you’re in a church that has a theology class that’s talking about Biblical truth in this manner.

And I would just say that I think this conversation, an older man with a younger man in Christ could be a remarkably short conversation. Have you not committed every single one of these sins in your heart? And if you don’t answer this carefully, you’re committing a sin when you deny it.

Part V

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How is Jesus Christ at the Right Hand of God If He Had to Pay an Eternal Debt for Sin? – Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, I received a question, this one from a young Christian father. And boy, do I appreciate the sensitivity and the depth of this question. He’s wanting to be able to explain the gospel plainly to his children and be assured of his own salvation. And, so he’s been thinking about the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ. And he gets to this, he asks, “What I often get hung up on is this. If we would be banished to an eternity of damnation in hell, and that is the righteous penalty of our sinfulness without Christ, how is it possible that Christ is able to be the right hand of the Father now? It almost seems like an odd cheat code or loophole per se, that Christ, even though he and God knew from the start” You mean not He and God, but the Father and the Son, “knew from the start that Christ would eventually go through and experience the pain, judgment, and separation from God, in the end would still end up in heaven with God. How can this be if the true penalty of our sins is eternal separation from God?”

All right, I appreciate this young father’s question, and we could talk about this for months, but I’ll simply say that rightly understood, and for the sake of time, I’m going to have to summarize this as best I can, and that is that it was the Father’s good pleasure that the Son should be sent, that he sent his only begotten son. It was the Son’s obedience to the Father’s sending that brought him to the point of being born as a baby in Bethlehem and then living a sinless life, and then his obedience went all the way to the cross where on the cross he bore the full penalty, paid the full penalty, bore the full wrath of God, poured out for our sin. And then on the third day, the Father raised him, vindicating him by raising him from the dead, and receiving his sacrifice as paid in full.

So just for the sake of time, I want to say that understanding that rightly, you come to understand that even as by the miracle of the gospel, our sin is imputed to Christ by the Father, and Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us when it comes to bearing sin. Jesus says, “The sin bearer did not do so disobedient to the Father,” but rather as the Scripture explicitly says, “as obedience to the Father.” Therefore, Paul says in Philippians Chapter 2, “God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name, that in the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”

Jesus Christ, the Son did not sin. We sinned. He bore our sin in obedience to the Father. Therefore, the Father has highly exalted him. So that explains how Jesus, though bearing our sin, is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. It is because of his absolute perfect obedience.

Part VI

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Is Cross-dressing for a High School Theatrical Play Sinful? – Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, just in conclusion, sometimes we get questions that could only be asked in this way. Well, in very current times this is the only way it works. Very modern times, very recent times. This is a mom of a fourteen-year-old teenage girl. Homeschooling mom, and this young girl is in a Christian homeschooling group, and they’re in a co-op practicing for a spring play. Here’s the problem, the girls outnumber the boys, and so some of the girls were going to be asked to play boys’ parts, and this is a mom saying, I just don’t feel really good about this. I don’t think my daughter feels really good about this.

And the mom says this. “I told my daughter that I did not see dressing up as the opposite sex for a drama play as a sin, but that since her conscience bothered her, she must not ignore it, and talk with the drama teacher.” Well, and this ends happily, but I just want to point out that there was a time when such a thing might have been safe in this society precisely because the gender lines were so clearly drawn. It was understood that this is a girl playing a boy’s part. There was no confusion about the gender or the sex. This was common in medieval plays, and you look at it and you go, the difference is, that is not simple now.

Now it comes with all kinds of things, and we cannot even see a play without thinking about all those things. And I just want to say, I know as a mom, you’re proud of a 14-year-old daughter with this kind of conscience. I think in this case it’s rightly directed, and I’m thankful for a drama teacher and others who understood that as well. My guess is when you got this kind of gender imbalance, you’re going to have to find a different play.