Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch. And in today's episode, we're asking the question, who killed marriage? This is a first for wake up look up because I'm combining two articles.

There was an article in The Atlantic looking at the rise in pornography among men and how it's leading to more singleness among men and then an article in The Wall Street Journal about how more and more professional and successful women are choosing to stay single. I'm combining them because I think they are connected. What the two articles are highlighting is that pornography is changing men. Increasingly, men are making the choice to relegate sexuality to something they do at home by themselves involving a computer or a phone, which then makes it so that they don't actually want relationship with women. They don't seek it.

They don't even do the kinds of things that women would appreciate, like, clean their house or iron their shirt. They're headed into a kind of uber masculinity where they surround themselves with only men because the original impetus for having a woman in your life has been erased. As a consequence of that, more and more women in their twenties and thirties are finding men to be irrelevant. Fifty one percent of women in this country between the age of 20 and 40 are single, meaning they're in no relationship at all. Forty eight percent of women in that age group say that marriage is not part of a fulfilling life.

Overwhelmingly, people in their twenties and thirties are deciding not only do they not wanna get married, not only do they not want to be in a relationship, but they have no use for each other. Men and women are dividing sharp more sharply in politics, on worldview, on economic view, on everything else. Women are becoming more isolated from men, men from women. It's going to have devastating consequences. We've covered some of those before.

Birth rate will go down. The tax rate will go down. There are some serious problems coming from our for our country that are being produced by pornography, by prolonged adolescence, and by a rejection of marriage. And here's what I want you to understand. The reason for this problem is pretty simple.

When we step outside of god's commands, when we step outside of god's design, we always wither. We never flourish. Listen. The lie that Satan told Adam and Eve in Genesis three was that God didn't have them in a paradise. He had them in prison.

And the true happiness was found outside of Eden and away from God, not in the garden and with God. It was a lie then, and it and it is a lie now. Adam and Eve eat from the tree, and they are kicked out of Eden. But as a consequence, their marriage withers, their children wither, and society withers. Does that sound familiar?

Yeah. That's what's happening in our culture. See, pornography and sex outside of marriage are linked. When we commodify sex, when we take it out of covenant the way the Bible has designed it, we are turning each other into a good that you can trade, a good that you can level up. We are turning each other into objects.

But the biblical view of marriage is not transactional. It's sacred. The bible uses the language of what god has joined together. Let no one separate. It is a divine, sacred act in which a man says to a woman, you have value.

You have worth. God says so, and I agree. And I'm not going anywhere no matter what. Within that commitment is the kind of covenant that values the personhood of each person in the marriage and affirms what God has said about them. Anything short of that has devastating results.

You know, the book of judges says that in the time of Israel where there was incredible moral decay, everyone did what was right in their own eyes. That is also a phrase that encapsulates our culture. But what we don't realize because the bill hasn't come due yet is how much that's going to harm our society and our culture. We must go back to God's design with men and women having intrinsic value and celebrating the value that each one has both inside and outside of the context of marriage. And I know you might feel like, well, what do you want me to do with that, Zach?

I can't push a button and save marriage on a societal level. No. That's true. But what you can do if you are married is work hard to have a marriage that portends to be something exciting and interesting to those around it. What you can do if you're a man is stop looking at pornography.

What you can do if you're a man or woman in their twenties or thirties is leave your house and seek meaningful relationships. Start with your local church with the opposite gender, romantic or not. Because when we lose each other's value, in the end, we only end up hurting ourselves. Hey. Thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up Look Up.

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