Friday, October 11, 2024

Part I

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Severe, But Not the Worst Case Scenario: Hurricane Milton Was Not as Tragic as Forecasted, But We Should Be Thankful For Those Who Warned Of Its Potential

Well, Hurricane Milton crossed the entire peninsula of Florida and it did leave a lot of devastation in its wake. But the big story is, and this is very strange, it tells us a lot about human nature. The big story is, it was not as devastating as some thought it might be. Now, that’s good news, right? Well, let’s just state, that is very good news. It is very good news that the death and devastation was far more limited than had been forecast. But we also recognize that those who were doing the forecasting had built in a certain amount of variation in their forecast itself.

For instance, they made very clear it makes a lot of difference whether you’re on the north side or the south side of the cyclonic pattern. It makes a very big difference, thus, if for instance, given the topography and the danger of, Tampa Bay’s very shallow body of water, it made a big difference if that was going to be at the north or at the south of the cyclonic structure. It turned out that the storm’s center went south of Tampa and thus the winds that primarily affected Tampa were blowing the water out rather than in. Now you look at that and you say, “Well, they were able to follow this storm. Why couldn’t they get that more accurately forecast? Why didn’t they have a more accurate understanding of where it was going to go? Why did they offer all these dire scenarios about Tampa?”

Well, it is because it simply is not yet within human ability to pinpoint exactly what these storms are going to do. And I want to back off for a moment and talk about why that’s the case. I think it’s important we recognize why it is the case. And that is because the variables are far too many for any human calculation. And so as you’re thinking about the behavior, the development, the speed, the velocity, the direction of these storms, a lot of this has to do with factors that simply require more calculations and more knowledge than human beings are capable of, and that incapacity would be extended to all human technologies at this point.

And there is an interesting dimension to our technologies that really should come to our attention here. Those technologies are a lot better at saying what did happen than what’s about to happen. Now, think about that. That’s actually huge in worldview significance. Our technologies are able with stunning accuracy to document what did happen, they’re in a much weaker position to forecast what’s going to happen. And so if you look at it and you just consider, say, the last 100 years weather forecasting, the advent of satellites, radar technologies, and all the rest, as you look at the history of the forecasting of these storms, the forecast concerning Hurricane Milton was stunningly accurate, stunningly accurate.

In times past, about the best they could do is say we think it’s going to head roughly northeast. There was a lot more specificity and a lot more knowledge, frankly, a lot more experience, a lot more predictability that was built into the models of forecasting that meteorologists and government officials were able to use. But when it comes to human nature, it is interesting that in the course of the buildup to the arrival of Hurricane Milton, you had government authorities, you had meteorologists, one of them crying famously on a Florida television station, forecasting massive death and destruction, unprecedented devastation, unprecedented deadliness of the storm.

And even as we now understand that there were a few people who were killed in the storm, some of them, by the way, in associated tornadoes that preceded the arrival of the storm wall, it does appear that some people were reached by the logic of those crying out about the danger coming, but others were not. And now, you have government officials worried that the next time they offer a similar level of warning, people will pay less heed because after all, the worst case scenario didn’t happen. So I want to say a word in defense of those who were crying out about the danger coming, and that is because had this storm passed just a bit to the north, it would’ve been absolutely devastating.

Rather than the waters being pushed away from Tampa, you could have had 12 to 22 feet of water pressed into the city. That would’ve been devastation beyond our imagination. We should be thankful that didn’t happen. At the same time, we recognize that even as the storm shifted south, it put more people in danger in those regions, all the way down from Punta Gorda down to Fort Myers. And so there were people who weren’t even expecting to be in the worst part of the storm, they found out they were in the worst part of the storm. And so our hearts go out to them. The good news is that the body of water such as is represented by Tampa Bay, wasn’t pressed inland. It makes that particular area dangerously vulnerable to that kind of development. That didn’t happen. But that’s not to say it won’t happen the next time.

So even as we think about this, we continue to pray for the people in Florida and in North Carolina and elsewhere reeling from these two massive tornadoes, even as in much of Western North Carolina, you have transportation, you have school systems, you have water systems that simply aren’t recovering very fast. Also in Florida, as of this morning, about three million people without power. And that’s a danger in and of itself, but it could have been so much worse. Why does human nature predict that we want to discount such a possibility the next time? It is because we depend upon our own experience to a degree, in this kind of situation, we should not calculate. We should not trust our own experience so much, because our own experience, at least the experience of many people around Tampa is, we survived this, we did okay.

The danger is, that the next time a similar storm is on a similar trajectory, that some of the same people will say, “Look, we actually did okay last time. They told us it was going to be awful and it wasn’t.” But you know what? You just look at the situation and you recognize, it well could have been. And next time, it might be. One final observation on this issue. We have to wonder what are the motivations of people? Why would people do this? And I can simply say, there is no wrongful motivation we can imagine on the part of government leaders for putting out warnings about a storm like this. They have nothing to gain by issuing a warning that is too extreme.

Instead, they have every responsibility to try to protect human life and to try to put safety assets in place, to try to put as much protection between the people and a storm. And the limitations of government are massive. And as you look at that, you recognize there is no incentive for them to make things worse than it is. But this is where we also just need to remember that as human beings, as evidence of our finitude, the reality is, we often learn what turn out to be wrongful lessons from our own experience. We tend to generalize it and believe, well, if it happened this way last time, it’s going to happen the same way next time. And of course it might. But then again, it might not.

Part II

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History in the Headlines: The Life and Legacy of Ethel Kennedy, Dead at Age 96

But next I want to turn, as we go into the weekend, into an obituary, and this is one of those obituaries that needs our attention. Ethel Kennedy, the widow of the late U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator Robert Kennedy, who was also recognized as the matriarch of the Kennedy political family and dynasty, she died just yesterday at age 96. Now, if you die at age 96, in the contemporary context, that means that most of the people alive in the United States were born after you probably passed from public notice. And Ethel Kennedy certainly didn’t pass from public notice, but there’re an awful lot of Americans today who have really no idea who she is and why her death is a significant historical milestone in the United States.

When we talk about political dynasties in the U.S., you look throughout human history, one of the first dynasties was the Adams family. You had President John Adams, and then his son became president. That was President John Quincy Adams. And then you can fast-forward in terms of a political dynasty all the way to the Roosevelts. And this would include the Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, and then his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The point is, the name was the same. It was a distinctive Dutch immigrant family name that became a part of New York aristocracy. The Roosevelt clan was very powerful.

But all that gave way basically to the Kennedy clan. By the way, after that came the Bush dynasty. You had two presidents, George H.W. Bush, and then George W. Bush as presidents. But the Kennedy family came with a particular kind of mystique, a certain kind of Hollywood quality, not to mention a certain Shakespearean tragedy as a theme. And thus, the Kennedy family has been at the forefront of much American political culture for more than a half century now. Ethel Kennedy, who died just yesterday, her father-in-law, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a true rascal on the American political scene. He was involved with organized crime, he was involved with alcohol running during Prohibition. He was involved with all kinds of things.

He was a part of the pattern of Irish immigration that led to the fact that even though he became a quite powerful person in the United States, he felt he was never able to crack the ice at the highest echelon. He was determined that his sons would. Joseph Kennedy and his wife Rose, by the way, Joseph Kennedy became the United States ambassador to Great Britain, to what is known formally as the Court of St. James. You have Joseph P. Kennedy, who was the patriarch of this entire family dynasty who was grooming his sons, that is especially his oldest son, and namesake Joe Kennedy. He wanted Joe Kennedy to become President of the United States. Instead, Joe Kennedy died in the context of a secret mission during World War II.

The mantle then fell to the next in line, and that was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress, then to the United States Senate from Massachusetts, and eventually he became President of the United States in the 1960 election. But he became President of the United States with an awful lot of help from his father. It was President Kennedy himself who, talking about his father’s contribution to the campaign, when faced with the accusation that his father bought the election, he said that his father had told him he was willing to do it, but he wasn’t willing to pay one additional dollar that was unnecessary.

If you can make light of that kind of charge as a politician, then you have some particular gift. And John Fitzgerald Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, JFK, as he has become known in American history, had an enormous amount of personal charisma, and quite frankly, an awful lot of dishonesty about his own situation, his own medical condition. He had a concocted history of sorts that was truly based in some of his experience, including his experience as the captain of a PT boat in the Pacific Theater during World War II. But he was the son of incredible privilege, who had been sent to private schools and then to Harvard, and he was the son of the U.S. Ambassador. He had unusual contacts and he was catapulted into political fame. Of course, he was also assassinated in November of 1963.

And at that point, the dynasty fell upon his next brother, and that was Robert F. Kennedy. And he was the husband of Ethel Kennedy who died just this week. And Robert F. Kennedy was, if anything, considered more ruthless than the Kennedys before him. He was compared to his father in terms of that ruthlessness. He was, at one point, legal counsel to the Senate Un-American Affairs Committee, and to the rather infamous U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy. But he eventually, once his brother was running for president, he became the campaign manager and then he became his brother’s attorney general. That is to say, he became attorney general of the United States when his brother was president. That is not possible now given changes in the requirements for these appointments, but it became a very big deal in the Kennedy administration.

And you also have the fact that once Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Baines Johnson, his vice president, became president, but he was opposed by Bobby Kennedy at many points because Bobby Kennedy did not consider Lyndon Johnson a worthy continuation of his brother’s administration. And so there was a form of something like political revenge when after the collapse of Lyndon Baines Johnson, he decided not to run for the Democratic nomination. In 1968, Robert Kennedy, who had been elected a senator from New York decided that he would run. And quite frankly, he almost instantly became an inevitable front-runner in the Democratic race. But then he was assassinated.

Ethel Kennedy was a Catholic young woman who had also been raised in privilege. She married Robert Kennedy even though she had an interest in John F. Kennedy, but John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline, and thus Robert married Ethel. And Ethel became a very important political force in herself once her husband died. And by the way, when he died, she was pregnant with their 11th child. That 11th child, Rory, a daughter was born after Senator Kennedy had been assassinated. And the family is, of course, marked by such tragedy that just became a part of like rather Shakespearean air that surrounded the name Kennedy, a lot of Hollywood aura as well. There was a fascination with Kennedy that frankly hasn’t been matched in any modern political dynasty or even a political individual.

Another of the brothers, Senator Edward Kennedy, would be elected to the United States Senate from Massachusetts. He would become a formidable figure in the senate. But even as he ran for president, he ran for the Democratic nomination against Jimmy Carter in 1980. It was clear that because of scandal and other reasons, he was not going to get to the White House. And thus it is rather ironic to recognize that it is a son of Robert F. Kennedy and of Ethel Kennedy who of course has been in the headlines recently because he has basically joined in support, having been a presidential candidate as an independent himself, he’s now joined forces with former President Donald Trump and with the active opposition of his family.

But here’s the big point in terms of the Kennedy family, the Kennedy dynasty was a fact. And the Kennedys became a big Catholic political fact. And John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic to be elected President of the United States. And the Catholic Church is really clear, for example, on the issue of abortion. And that became a big problem because you had the Democrats moving in a liberal direction. The Kennedys wanted to move in a liberal direction. And yet as Catholics, they seemed to be boxed in. So in 1964, a meeting was held at their Hyannis Port, Massachusetts estate. And with some liberal Catholic biblical scholars and liberal Catholic theologians, they concocted a plan whereby the Kennedys could come up with a formula that they were personally opposed to abortion, but they did not feel that they should bring their personal convictions on abortion into the act of legislation. That legislation was separate from morality. It is a fatal separation. It is a completely ridiculous argument.

But quite frankly, it became the argument of many. And even currently now, at least to some extent, at least has been the argument used by President Joe Biden. But even more recently, it appears he’s just stopped the personally opposed to abortion and just gone pro-abortion in every way imaginable. The death of Ethel Kennedy does bring to an end of generation of the Kennedys. It also becomes something of a coda on one of the sad and indeed tragic stories and legacies of American history. And it also shows the great culture shift that has taken place in the United States just in the lifetime of this one woman who, as a young Catholic woman, certainly knew and evidently, for all we know, agreed with the moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

But it would be that family that would take the lead in opposing those very convictions, for instance, on the issue of abortion within her own generation. And let’s just be honest, 1964, well, you can do the math, that’s already 60 years ago.

Part III

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Were Hurricanes Helene and Milton Seeded by the Federal Government? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay. Now it’s time to turn to your questions. And the first one I want to turn to is just really timely. It has to do with the two most recent hurricanes. It’s a pastor who writes in. And he says that over the last several years, he’s had to deal with some conspiracy theories within his congregation. He even says zany conspiracy theories. He writes, “Most recently, the idea that hurricanes Helene and Milton were actually manufactured and caused by the government is something I have heard from one individual.”

Now, I think this is important, and it’s timely precisely because I’ve heard some of the same things. Even President Biden responded to this very charge at one point in his public comments about Hurricane Milton. And I will state emphatically that I do not believe either of these storms was concocted by the federal government. And one of the reasons I firmly believe that is that there is no guarantee, let’s just state this, because if you have a conspiracy theory, you have to explain the origin and the purpose of the conspiracy. I do not believe that the federal government or the President, or you could even say the incumbent president’s party, the Democratic Party would profit by two devastating hurricanes. I don’t think it has made them look particularly good.

I also don’t mean that as a direct criticism, as if I’m pointing to any single thing saying this is where they failed. I’m just saying, this is not only a high risk conspiracy if it were to exist, it eventually falls apart because it becomes nonsensical. The other thing is that if you have a conspiracy theory, then you generally have to have some missing data. And a part of the conspiracy is to say, “I know what that missing data is, and I know what it means.” But in the case of these two hurricanes being formed, quite frankly, we pretty much have all the information we need just from even ambient ocean surface temperatures to understand why these storms became so powerful. You don’t have to have some conspiracy theory about planes seeding energy into these storms. The water temperature alone is enough to explain this.

Now, I want to be very careful. I’m not saying all conspiracy theories are wrong. Sometimes, it turns out that some of these things were right. We can look backwards in history and understand how some conspiracies took place and how some of them actually worked at the time. But here’s the point. It is a matter of just logical, rational thinking. And the Christian worldview dignifies this, that we should look for the simplest explanation for why something happened. And in the case of hurricanes, the simple information is pretty much fully available to us. And here’s where I want Christians to think, there’s a distinction between a conspiracy theory and understanding that people will manipulate a situation to their own advantage. And so those are two different things.

To say that, for example, politicians may seek to manipulate a situation or their response to a situation in order to make themselves look good or to gain political advantage, you don’t need a conspiracy theory for that. All you need is the dictionary definition of a politician. And I’m not even really criticizing politicians in this light because we want government to be responsive to human needs and in response to a hurricane and in preparation for a hurricane. I mean, I’ll tell you, I think very honestly, someone like Governor DeSantis in Florida, well, from the beginning of his administration, he’s just done a really, really good job on this. And people can say, “Well, he is doing a really good job to make himself look good.”

Well, I tell you what, doing a really good job can make you look good, but the people of Florida depend on the fact that he actually does a very good job. And if someone is coming to me with a life ring, if I’m in the water, I don’t really care at that moment what their motivation is. Just give me the ring and pull me in. Okay.

A similar question came in from a man just saying, do I really have any knowledge about weather modification? No. But let me tell you what. I don’t, in terms of any direct knowledge. But I can tell you that I have grown up in a situation such as in the state of Florida, that’s my native state, where there was active discussion about seeding clouds in order to make them rain, that is make them produce rain. And there was the idea that you could use certain metals or other substances to seed clouds so that they would be more likely to form water pellets, so those water pellets would eventually fall to the ground as rain. And so I am not saying it is insane to think the human beings could influence the weather. 

But you’ll notice there is no big corporation out there seeding clouds in order to produce rain even in a time of drought. So that at least should tell you, at this point, it doesn’t appear we’re very competent at this. And at the end of the day, I again just want to remind you the Christian worldview about the issue of scale. The issue of scale. And this is very clear, for example, in the Book of Job in the Old Testament.

The issue of scale comes down to this. We human beings are very, very small. We are very, very small. Nature, as God has made creation, is very, very big. You look not only at a hurricane, you can even look at the average thunderstorm and recognize it is beyond the control of any of us. Or all of us together, we are simply incompetent to have much impact on this. And you then expand that to the size of a category five hurricane. Who do we think we are to say we can do anything to influence the course of this storm? Frankly, the longer you look at that proposition, the more ludicrous it appears.

Part IV

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Is There Free Will in Heaven? If Yes, What Will Prevent Another Fall? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay. Another man wrote in a question, and this is just great. And it’s great too because I think I can answer it pretty quickly. This is a great question. It requires some Christian logic. This man writes and asks, “I still can’t find a satisfactory answer to this question, is there free will in heaven? If yes, what will prevent another fall?” Oh, this is great. And he also extends that to say, “If no, why did God not make things perfect in that way in the beginning of Genesis?” Oh, there’s such a great answer to this. And that is the fact that the reason there will be no sin in heaven, I’m not saying there’s no will, but I’m saying we have a perfected will. So in that sense, it’s not a free will and that we will not be free to sin. And that is because the promise of the gospel is that we will be glorified, we will be perfected in Christ, and thus our will will be perfected and glorified such that we will never want to sin, and we would never even consider such a thing.

And so it’s the glorification of the believer, that is the promise of God in the Scripture, that becomes so powerful in our thinking here. And then the question is, this is a smart question, if we’re not going to be able to sin in heaven because we’re glorified, then why did God not make things perfect in that way in the beginning of Genesis? It is because, and no one answered this, I think, better than John Calvin, the reformer, when he just made very clear, and I talked about this to another group about this just yesterday. It comes down to this. As Calvin says, “If we had been without sin and all of us, thus, were in the Garden of Eden, we would know and glorify and worship God truly as creator. And because of the provision God has made for us in the salvation accomplished by his son, we know and glorify him even now, not only as our creator, but also as our redeemer.”

The answer to the question, why did God allow the fall to take place? Why did he allow the fall to take place? And why did he, before the creation of the world, determine to save sinners through the atonement accomplished by his son? It is because it would bring him even greater glory and would bring his human creatures, the redeemed, even greater joy.

Part V

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Does Scripture Speak About Genesis 6:3 as a Hard Age Limit? If So, Does It Mean the Lady Who Lived 122 Years Contradicts Scripture? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Another question came in from a listener. When Genesis 6:3 says that our years would be limited to 120, is that a hard limit? If so, does that mean that the birth certificate of the French woman, and he mentions here the woman that I discussed on the briefing just this week, who lived to 123 is incorrect? Well, it’s possible her birth records are actually incorrect. I have no way of independently confirming them. But it does appear that at least the people in France thought she was really 123 years old. Looking back to Genesis 6:3, we interpret Scripture by Scripture. So it’s very important to recognize that very soon, even after this text, the Scripture itself tells us of those, especially the patriarchs, who lived for hundreds of years, and that’s all documented in Scripture. So in the case where you have a clear statement later that there were those who lived far more than a hundred years, then that tells us that when God was talking about 120 years, he was talking about a norm. But of course, the norm doesn’t even mean that most of us live to 120. That whole news story about that woman was because she was so rare in terms of living that long.

I think the best way of understanding it is that the intention there was to make very clear there is a definite limit to how long human beings can live. There’s a definite mortality. There is certainly an upper limit we are not going to be able to surpass. I don’t know exactly what it is. But you know what? I think even the record of this woman shows that it appears, even what we talked about on The Briefing just in the last few days about the longevity having been extended for a while and now just not becoming extended much anymore. I think it’s a confirmation of exactly what God tells us in Genesis 6:3. And I think that just underlines, again, our finitude. We don’t have that many days. We don’t have that many years. And that’s contrasted, of course, with eternity.

Part VI

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How Do Christians Find and Live Out the Calling God Has For You? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay. The next question comes from a young woman, indeed a teenager, very sweetly, writing from England. She’s asking about the word calling. And she says she knows that we as Christians are to find and to live out the calling that the Lord has for us. And she’s just basically asking, “How do you consider this? How do you find this?” And I find this to be a very sweet question. And I just want to respond by saying that we need to remember, as believers, that number one, God does have a plan for us, and there is a calling on us. Even just in terms of our salvation, that’s an effectual calling of us unto Christ. But I think there’s also a vocational calling in our lives. That doesn’t just mean a job, by the way. Vocation means the purpose we live out as a calling. It literally means calling.

And so I just want to say to this young woman, let me give you the good news. God is not going to call you to do something you don’t want to do. Now, I don’t mean that God’s not going to call you to do something you don’t want to do now. I mean that God in his sovereignty and by his Spirit and by his Word will make you want to do what he wants you to do. You’re going to find yourself consumed with an interest you’re not even sure where it came from, and you see a purpose you’re not even sure where it came from, and there’s an urgency you’re not even sure where it came from. This is just a reminder to us that God does have a plan for our lives. But don’t worry that you have to go dig it up in a hidden chest somewhere. God’s not hiding it from you.

And I would encourage you to talk to some of the saints, some of the fellow believers who know you best, and certainly senior Christians within your local church, and just talk this through. Because I’m pretty confident, I want to say to you, as I became more and more confident in my own life at the same age, that God is actually making his calling clear in my life. And it’s not mysterious, but it is glorious.