Friday, February 28, 2025

Part I

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Why Don't We Trust Professionals Anymore? Christians Need to Rethink Our Cultural Distrust of Authority

Are we experiencing a widespread failure of trust across American institutions, professions, authorities? That’s one of the questions raised by a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. It appeared just in yesterday’s print edition, “Why We No Longer Trust Doctors Like We Used to.” That’s something that requires a little bit of thinking. Perhaps we can make some fruitful progress in just trying to understand, is there something going on here, and if so, what? What does it mean? How should Christians look at this kind of decline of trust in a profession?

First of all, as we look at this article by Claire Ansberry, we understand that it’s pretty well documented that patients these days do not look to doctors as the same kind of authority figures as had been true in the past. They look at physicians as influential figures, authority figures to a degree, but there has been a widespread erosion of the basic institutional and professional trust. Let’s ask the question why? In large part, this reflects a massive shift, indeed a revolution in the relationship between patients and doctors. As you look back to say just even the 1950s and the 1960s, physicians, usually dressed in a white coat, represented absolute medical authority. And then there was a massive shift.

What was that shift? The shift is demonstrated, for example, in what’s known as a patient’s bill of rights. Nothing like that had existed before. It was a massive redefinition of the relationship between physicians and their patients. Going back to the classical age of the physician in authority, physicians, doctors often made decisions without really consulting the patient at all. The idea of informed consent is a remarkably modern notion. Nowadays, we look at the morality of the relationships that exist in professional medicine and it’s inconceivable to us that physicians would act on behalf of the patient, or it was at least claimed and presumably true that physicians were acting on behalf of the patient’s best interest, but without much reference to the patient at all.

There were other complications to this, including the fact that there was no standard moral principle that required a doctor, for example, to tell a person diagnosed with a terminal disease that the disease was terminal. There was no weighing of medical options that involved the participation of the patient or of a moral agent, like a family member, on behalf of the patient. We now take that for granted. But even as that shift is a part of the background here, the other big shift is technological. If you were to go back just a matter of decades, if you wanted information on a medical matter, you had to ask a medical professional. There was no other place to go. You might go to a library and look at a medical textbook. That’s not likely, and furthermore, that’s not the way most Americans even understood how they would obtain medical information. You go to a doctor, the doctor is the authority.

And now of course, you have the internet, and this is a big complication in modern medicine. Physician colleagues and friends of mine tell me that this is one of the major irritations and complications they face. Patients often come to a meeting, an appointment with a physician and they tell the physician what their problem is. They’ve already mapped out their prospective treatment plan. The doctor is sometimes just handed a sheaf of printouts, or at least, handed effectively a self-diagnosis. Oftentimes, people assume that what they read in an internet site or what they perhaps are sent in terms of some kind of digital information, that it comes with full authority. It looks like it comes with authority.

And then of course, we all had the experience of, say, looking at a news story and a website on our smartphone, and the next thing you know, suggested articles come up, telling you, “Eat eggs,” telling you, “Don’t eat eggs,” telling you, “You should avoid broccoli,” telling you, “You should eat broccoli.” And of course, it gets a lot more complex than that. Getting right down to the fact that in the same edition of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, a medical group had to publish a full-page article about a quack treatment, simply saying, “There is no medical evidence behind this at all.” The reason they put that article in the paper is because they felt their professional responsibility required them to do so. They’re in a position to say so.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle in the entire equation. In moral terms, in worldview terms, we often find out what we really believe and who we really trust, what we really understand to be an authority in a specific situation when we are in a moment of urgency. Let’s just shift the context so much. Let’s say this is not so much about a pain in the knee as it is about a gunshot wound. The location is not in a physician’s office in suburbia, it is in an ER in an urgent medical center. The authority shifts there almost immediately. When you walk into a crisis situation, you walk into an urgent situation, such as in an emergency room, the physicians and the medical team will ask some basic questions, but then you are pretty much in their hands.

That’s not to say there is not consent to care. That’s pretty much required by the time you reach that contact with a medical team. But on the other hand, there is the presumption that this is an urgency and in an urgency you need the professionals to act professionally. You need doctors and physicians to act on their particular expertise. All that just reminds us as Christians that sometimes we say, “This is how we understand the authority structure to work.” But when an urgency takes place, it turns out we don’t trust our own instincts so much. When there is blood coming out of a wound, a leisurely look at websites and a Google search is not the most appropriate response. You get to a medical center, you trust the medical professionals.

All of this is simply to say, there are big worldview implications here for Christians. What is a rightful authority? How should we defer to rightful authority in the right situation? How do we avoid undue trust in an earthly authority? These are huge questions. It comes down to all the professions by the way, and these days that’s not just, say, ministry and theology and medicine and law. It also has to do with every professional specialization. Frankly, when it comes to a lot of technological matters, it is interesting that you don’t have so much informed consent as you have just a contract to fix the problem. That just shows us that we’re not altogether consistent in how we even look at these situations.

But the Scripture is clear that Christians understand the powers that be. We understand that there is such a thing as learned expertise. We understand that there is such a thing as truth over against error and there are true professionals, and yes, there are quacks. It takes discernment to understand the difference. But here’s a basic issue for Christians: We don’t devalue authority. We just don’t. We don’t devalue scholarship. We don’t devalue the professions. We don’t take them as sometimes the professional idols they are presented to be. But we do understand, and a crisis will reveal, that in the pattern of life in a fallen world, we do need people who have specialized expertise and specialized knowledge, and for that matter, as Christians understand, even a specialized calling with particular gifts. We do need to recognize that authority when it is rightful and when it is needed. I’ll say in that context, if you doubt what I say, trust me on this.

Part II

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Fear Not Asteroid 2024 YR4: NASA Reports Earth Will ‘Most Likely’ Avoid Collision with Catastrophic Asteroid

All right, speaking of expertise and the collision between, say, modern headlines and biblical truth, let’s consider a headline that appeared in Wednesday’s print edition of The New York Times. This should be received with relief. “With All Clear, NASA says Earth Will Dodge Asteroid.”There’s the headline, and I know this is keeping you up late at night, but this article based upon the news report coming out in NASA tells us that we really don’t have to worry about utter destruction coming by an asteroid known as YR4. It’s identified as, “A space rock with a heightened chance of hitting earth in 2032.” The article continue, “But fear not, NASA announced on Monday that it posed a threat no longer. The odds that the asteroid would smash into our planet have dropped to nearly zero.”

One NASA engineer said, “I knew this was likely to go away as we collected more data. I was sleeping pretty well.” This is an article about the potential end of life as we know it, and end of life as we know it predicted as soon as a collision that could take place between this asteroid and Planet Earth in the year 2032. Just over the last several weeks, scientists have reevaluated the data. They’ve come back and said, “Fear not,” they don’t think this is going to happen. Again, the formal name of the asteroid is 2024 YR4. We are told that days after sky watchers, “Reported their observations of the asteroid on December 27th 2024, scientists calculated that it had more than a 1% chance of striking Earth, the only large asteroid known to have an impact probability so big.”

That’s just back at the end of 2024. Now we’re being told with new data it doesn’t look like it’s such a threat after all, and the numbers really began to drop. We are told that back in 2024, early estimates of the trajectory of the asteroid, “Showed it could possibly slam into or explode in the air over large metropolitan areas including Mumbai, India and Lagos, Nigeria.” I continue, “But the day after the 3.1% forecast, the odds that 2024 YR4 would slam into Earth began to drop to 1.5% on February the 19th, and then to 0.3% the day after.” On Monday afternoon of this week, we’re told that NASA shared the all clear, saying that the probability had dropped to 0.004%, one in 25,000 chance. According to one expert, that’s wildly too high still, “The newest estimate is even smaller, a one in 59,000 chance.”

What’s going on here? There are all kinds of objects in space, and some of them may come close to Planet Earth and some of them have undoubtedly hit before. There are plenty of pockmarks on the earth demonstrating the impact of asteroids, but we are told over and over again, “It just might be that one of these asteroids will end life as we know it.” Is that true or false? Well you know it could be that an asteroid could have an earth-altering effect, no doubt about that, Christians shouldn’t doubt that. But as to the end of the world, it’s not in the hands of an asteroid. And furthermore, there is a coming, there is an impending end of the entire universe, but it is not going to be because of an asteroid that just freakishly hits the earth as a matter of chance. It’s going to be by the plan and purpose of God bringing judgment upon the entire cosmos.

You look at this and you recognize there are a couple of things here you just can’t miss. Number one, we are afraid of an extinction event. Number two, we’re not that afraid. This is on page A20 in the print edition of The New York Times. Very fearful, very urgent? Maybe not so much, page A20. But you also notice that we just feel like we need to calculate the odds, and thus we want a number. We want 3.1. Or we like better 0.000059. We like the number saying the risk is small. We are more concerned about the warning that the risk is large. But you’ll notice, you’re talking about just a matter of weeks. The asteroid has not changed its trajectory. It’s just a matter of judgment and analysis on the part of human scientists. I’m thankful for them.

Going back to our previous conversation, I want to respect their expertise. And by the way, there’s no questioning about their expertise here. They’re telling us right up front, “This is a changing number.”. But you contrast that with the fact that God’s word is really clear about an impending catastrophe and most of the world goes by without any concern about those warnings whatsoever. By the way, the chance of that taking place is exactly 100%, on biblical authority. We know it. But that’s not making any page in the New York Times. Which is just to say the secular world feels instinctively and rightly that some kind of disaster is coming, they just fear it from the wrong source. It’s not a rock they should be concerned about, but the rock of ages.

Part III

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What is the Significance of 40 Days in the Bible? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 11-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Now we turn to questions. I’m going to start out with a question from an eleven year old, a very perceptive eleven year old. The question is this, “When we were reading the Bible recently, I noticed that Moses mentioned fasting for 40 days when God was preparing the 10 Commandments. I know Jesus was tempted for 40 days, and Noah’s Ark floated for 40 days, and Moses,” and I would add the children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years. Then comes the end of the question, “What is the significance of the number 40 in the Bible?” Again, this is a very perceptive child. I’m impressed by the question. It is a question that, by the way, pretty comprehensively puts together the big uses of 40 in the Bible: the temptation of Christ, Moses fasting before the giving of the 10 Commandments, 40 days of Noah’s Ark floated, and then the children of Israel wandering for 40 years.

What is common to all of that is preparation, commitment, and dedication and consecration, which is preparation. So, the 40 days waiting for the floods to recede, the 40 years waiting for God to fulfill his promise of the land he had promised to his covenant people, but after their wanderings in which they had to prepare by learning hard lessons, and by the way, also by a generation dying and a younger generation taking its place by divine judgment. 40 days in preparation for the 10 Commandments: We know what Moses then did not know, and that is that the 40 days of preparation would point to 40 years of leadership, as he was God’s instrument to lead the children of Israel right up to the land of promise. Again, love this question coming from an eleven year old. An eleven year old who knows enough Scripture to ask this question is a real encouragement to us.

Part IV

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What Pastoral Counsel Do You Have for Christian Parents Who Have Children Who Come Out as Homosexual? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

I received a number of letters just in the last few days, asking about a specific area that’s hard to talk about but necessary to talk about, and that is the fact that you have so many Christian parents who have children who’ve come out of the closet, so to speak, and identify as LGBTQ. In a very excruciating letter, I heard from a mom, and she was divorced from her husband because her husband came out of the closet and now has a relationship with another man after an adulterous affair, and this mom has teenage children. “The older,” she says, “is pretty much able to handle this, and now having reached age of 18 can make some decisions on her own.” By court order, the fifteen-year-old boy is to spend time with his father, but his father’s, let’s just say, companion is looming there on the horizon. The mom is asking, really, what to do.

In this case, let’s just deal with both of them as pastorally as we can, on the basis of biblical truth. Number one, the question about the parents of adult children, presumably here, who have come out of the closet. The question, what pastoral counsel would you give to Christian parents when they have a son or daughter come out? How do the Christian parents hold onto their faith in the inerrancy of God’s word and respond to their child in a way that is godly-wise and helpful? One of the things I know in so many years of doing this is that so many faithful Christians answer their own question in their own way, whether they recognize it or not. These parents clearly affirm the gospel. They are Christian parents who affirm the inerrancy of the Word of God, and that means that all of God’s promises are true. But we are not promised unconditionally that our children will walk with the Lord. That’s a very hard thing, but it’s true even in the Scriptures.

We are certainly told to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but we are not able to keep them from going into sin, even into identifying with disbelief, or even into, say, an LGBTQ identity. And in this case, the parents have responded rightly. They pray for their child, they bear witness to the truth to their child, but they also ask the question, “How do we support other parents in a similar situation?” And they go on to say, “Sometimes these things are not discussed at church out of a sense of shame.” That’s where I just want emphatically to speak to Christian parents. You bear no shame in this. This is something that should be a pain, a struggle, a prayer concern that is shared by members of the family of faith who love you and know you. We’re not able, in our own wisdom to know how to negotiate all of these things. We need the local body of Christ in faithfulness under the authority of Scripture by the power of the gospel to help us to think through many of these things.

Part V

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How Do I Counsel My Teenage Son to Honor His Homosexual Father as His Father Without Condoning His Father’s Homosexuality? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

That takes me back to the letter, the question that came in from this struggling mom, what in the world does she do, especially with this fifteen-year-old boy who has to go visit his dad by court order? She asked, “How should I counsel my son, who is a minor, to respect and honor his father, yet stand firm in his moral convictions against homosexuality?” Brilliant question. Great question. I think, once again, the answer’s implied in the question. This mom is undoubtedly doing even what she asked about here, and that is encouraging her son to respect and honor his father as is appropriate, and also to stand firm on his convictions against homosexuality.

One of the horrors of this modern culture of sexual liberation and personal autonomy is that a fifteen-year-old son is put in the position with his own father of having to ask these basic questions and negotiate how he stands firm for what he knows to be right and true, and still shows love and respect to his father. This father has undermined love and respect in terms of moral authority. That’s clear. That’s also something that is warned about in Scripture. We, as parents, must set the right moral example. If we set the wrong moral example, our children should not follow that bad example. The danger in this is at least a part of what’s reflected in Scripture, warning that the sins of the fathers are visited upon subsequent generations. At least a part of that has to be the moral confusion that the Father has set himself.

I just want to say, I think all Christians sympathize immediately with these parents whose child has come out of the closet. We sympathize immediately with this mom and with these two teenage children in the case of a husband and father who is in direct rebellion against God’s word. Sin comes with consequences. And some of the consequences are exactly the painful quandaries that we see in these letters. By the way, I received several this week of a similar sort. That just tells me once again, we need to pray for one another as Christians. We need to hold one another up. We, as Christian parents and as Christian Church members, we need to hold up parents who are struggling in this kind of way. And we need to hold them up and encourage them to stand fast for what is true and what is right and what is good.

Even earlier this week in The Briefing, I talked about this father who was supposedly an evangelical pastor who just realigned his entire theology based upon the fact that his son and evidently both of his children came out of the closet. That’s exactly what we are not to do. I’m very thankful that the Lord has given us not only the revelation of his word, but also the communion to the saints, that is to say, and the communion, the fellowship of Christians in a local body, where we can encourage one another through these things and hold one another up and help one another to think through these things, as difficult as they are. We continue to love our loved ones, even as they sin. But we do not love their sin and we do not realign our loves or our theology in order to just come to terms with their sin.

Part VI

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Is It Sinful to Not Want to Have Children? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Here is another question. It’s a big one. It’s an urgent one. I hope that in thinking about this question we can help to clarify a very important issue in the biblical worldview. A writer asks, and this is a young woman, “Is it sinful to not want to have children?” This young woman says, “I’ve been a Christian my whole life, grew up in the church, baptized at the age of 12. I do my best to be consistent in daily Bible reading, meditation on the word and prayer, and try to live a godly life and follow Jesus.” And she says she knows the Scripture says that children are a blessing and we’re commanded to be fruitful and fill the earth. However, this young woman, I appreciate her letter, says, “I’ve never at any point in my life wanted to have children either naturally or by adoption.” She says it’s never been her heart’s desire to have children.

In this case, I’m thankful that an age is given. The age is 22. I just want to say, at this point in your life, recognize you’re at a very early point of your life. I want interject here. I’m going to pray. And I think many listeners will be praying right now that the Lord would work in your heart to make you want what he wants you to want. That’s an important thing. We as Christians can pray for one another. I do not think it is right for a young woman not to want to have children. But there’s a real caveat here, and that is, remember that children are given within the context of marriage. So, in this case, when we are told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, we are told that as a man and a woman in the context of marriage. So, it is the marital union that is to be the source of those children, at least in the main. We also do believe in adoption, but still in terms of married couples.

The question of marriage is even prior to the question of children. And that means we really shouldn’t be talking about children outside of marriage. But here’s the other part, I don’t think we should be talking about marriage outside of the intention of children. I just think that’s biblical. It is interesting, at the end of this letter, it’s sent by email with the question. I read this, “Getting married was a heart’s desire of mine, and God blessed me with an amazing Godly husband, but even now that I’ve been married for two years, I still have no desire to have children. Am I sinning?” I’m not going to go into the details mentioned after that. I’m simply going to say, the avoidance of children inside a healthy marital relationship is, I believe, sinful. I believe it is avoiding what God has commanded married couples to do. It is trying to separate the goods of the conjugal relationship, enjoying the union, without the fruit of that union, which is children. That doesn’t mean that all married couples are given children on an equal basis. The Lord gives children.

But in the context of this letter, it’s about avoiding children by birth control or contraception, wondering if that’s legitimate for a married couple without reference to ever having children. I just want to say, I think God gave us the goods of marriage intact, as a whole, and we are to receive those goods as one comprehensive gift. You asked the question very honestly and straightforwardly. I want to answer it, and I’m also going to pray that the Lord will lead you to desire what he wants you to desire in the union of the goods of marriage. I pray that you and your husband together will show the glory of God in every way, even as I pray that same thing for all of us as believers.

Part VII

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Do We Have Gendered Souls? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, let’s end the questions for this week with a big one. I’m going to have to deal with this concisely, but I think I can. It is sent in by a listener who says that he’s taking a Christian doctrine class at church. The topic this week was about theological anthropology. The class is using Herman Bavinck as a text for reference.”During our discussion of the body and soul dichotomy, the question was posed as to whether or not our soul is gendered.” This listener says, “I contend that it is, but have no proof text. “My daughter,” he says, “is a freshman in college and is taking the class as well.” So, he’s asking on behalf of both himself and his daughter. I think that’s fantastic, by the way.

Let me just say, I think this is one of those questions in which we have to be careful, because as the listener says here, “There is no particular proof text.”. But I think in the context of Scripture and biblical theology, I think his inclination is right. I think it is impossible to separate our gender from our souls. You look at a biblical text such as the one that says, “In the age to come, there’ll be no giving and taking in marriage.” But, I think in a way that’s completely consistent with the creation of human beings in God’s image as male and female. It doesn’t just say for this age. There’s nothing in Scripture that speaks of the erasure of the distinction between men and women even in the age to come.

And even as we have the continuation of identification, rightly as brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, it appears, at least to me, given any contrary evidence that that continues in the age to come. But some of this is still a mystery. We admit that. And we affirm that when all things take place, it will be to the maximum, ultimate, infinite display of the goodness and the glory of God. But I have no biblical evidence to suggest that that will be in any way contrary to what is revealed in the order of creation in Genesis 1, “Male and female created he them.” I’ve got nowhere to go from there.