Dr. John MacArthur has been the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California since 1969. He has given over 3,300 sermons and is a husband of over 60 years to his wife, Patricia. He is a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. His ministry has had an impact through the power of the Holy Spirit on millions and millions of people and he is here today to talk about his new book, The War on Children.
00:09:03.020Today, we are not merely contending with the normal accumulated evil of past generations.
00:09:07.760We're also living in a culture that has specifically targeted children for destruction.
00:09:15.900Why is it that it seems like Satan has always had it specifically out for children?
00:09:22.260Why do we continually see this kind of manifestation of evil?
00:09:28.340Well, because they're the most vulnerable.
00:09:30.500I mean, they're the least able to defend themselves.
00:09:35.580Satan goes after the weakest and children are the weakest.
00:09:40.140And the design of God was to provide protection for that in the family.
00:09:47.080Protective parents and protective grandparents and protective friends.
00:09:51.800And the basis of the family was going to provide the protection, the insulation for children.
00:09:57.460But in this culture, the family has been basically dismantled, destroyed, the attack on women, the attack on men, the attack on the family, the sexual revolution, followed by a homosexual revolution, as Romans 1 says, followed by the reprobate mind where you can't even think straight.
00:10:18.560All of that literally has caused this open assault on children.
00:10:34.920It's in the breakdown of the family where Satan has access.
00:10:37.580And it's in the cell phone, in the hands of the child, the corruption at a level that never has occurred in human history.
00:10:44.900So they're not only fighting natural fallenness, natural evil.
00:10:49.140They're fighting the culture, abandoning all of its normal protections and allowing assaults that children have never experienced in the Christian era.
00:11:03.620It's more like the paganism of pre-Christian history.
00:11:07.580You know, it's crazy to think that Obergefell, which attempted to redefine something that the law can't redefine, and that is marriage, happened in 2015.
00:11:20.820And as you mentioned, the sexual revolution has moved forward since 2015.
00:11:26.240Of course, it was happening long before that.
00:11:28.700But since 2015, at an astounding clip, I think most people, even Christians, can't even wrap our heads around how we went from love is love, how does it harm you for two men or two women to get married, to what we're seeing now.
00:11:46.040You mentioned how gender ideology has convinced us in the name of empathy and love to allow children to butcher their bodies because they supposedly believe that they are the opposite sex.
00:11:59.540How do you explain just how quickly we have traveled from the redefinition of marriage to the complete obliteration, attempted obliteration of biological reality that, as you said, is now showing up in the lives of young, young children who are being purposely deceived and confused by their parents and doctors?
00:12:22.920Well, I think it's because of the fact that the people who are the worst purveyors of Satan's agenda have so much power.
00:12:36.780And I'm not just talking about political power, but there's plenty of that.
00:12:41.120I mean, when you have the president say, if you're a transgender young person, you need to know I've got your back.
00:12:47.920Well, that's a bizarre statement to say.
00:12:51.800I mean, what I thought of when the president said, I've got your back, it was as if he's going to push him off a cliff into a disastrous oblivion.
00:12:59.820But if the politicians are protecting those people and if the media, the educational system, television, music industry, I mean, you name it, film, all of it is going to advocate for that.
00:13:16.260The tsunami of this corruption coming at children will escalate as fast as media can produce it.
00:13:27.320When you think about going back maybe five years, even with the Disney Corporation, there was still some sense of Disney means family.
00:13:37.640And now it's frightening to see what's happened.
00:13:40.520I was just yesterday at the largest hospital in L.A., and they're one of the leading places where they do this transgender surgery.
00:13:59.920What happened to the Hippocratic Oath of the doctors to protect?
00:14:03.640Yes. Yes. And that's a really scary part of this.
00:14:08.860A lot of parents are intimidated by these doctors who threaten them by saying, you know what, if you don't go along with what we say about so-called transgenderism, your child's going to commit suicide.
00:14:21.540Or we are going to remove your child from your home and we are going to ensure that this child is, quote unquote, transitioned ourselves.
00:14:31.400I don't think that we have ever seen something like this, and it causes a lot of, even Christian parents who hope that something like that, of course, would never happen to them.
00:16:32.060How did they do so much destruction to families, to children by taking them out of school?
00:16:38.600They did it by fabricating lies about the supposed danger of COVID.
00:16:44.560I think the toughest thing right now for Christians in this world is to get to the truth.
00:16:51.220The culture is not going to give that to you.
00:16:55.060Oh, here and there, there'll be a whistleblower.
00:16:57.940Here and there, there'll be somebody who's willing to tell you the truth.
00:17:00.780But there's a massive effort to build an entire society on lies so that people, first of all, are confused.
00:17:10.200And secondly, that they are made afraid.
00:17:12.380That the lies that they want to tell frighten you, like, you know, if you don't quarantine at home and stay at home, you're going to kill people.
00:17:20.420If you're not vaccinated, you're going to be the cause of somebody's death.
00:17:24.100If the kids go to school, they're going to pass on this illness and people are going to die.
00:17:28.820So that the extreme lies that we've seen happen are part of the fabric of how this thing is laid out.
00:17:39.360And I would just add, recently a new study was done.
00:17:43.920And the truth is that if you have transgender medication or transgender surgery, you are 12 times more likely to kill yourself.
00:17:57.460So that lie that if you don't let your child follow the feelings of this bizarre transgender movement, you're going to cause your kid to commit suicide is actually the opposite of the truth.
00:18:27.460Do you think that Christians have any responsibility in how quickly this revolution has gone?
00:18:39.340It does feel like to me, especially the Christians that have been elected to represent us in D.C., that when Obergefell happened, most conservatives, even people who consider themselves Christian conservatives, just decided, you know what, that's a lost cause.
00:19:44.660You have to step back one one step from the Christians and ask the question, have the churches stood up?
00:19:51.420You know, for the last 20 years, the evangelical movement has been bent on courting the world, bent on finding a way to connect with the culture.
00:20:05.400I mean, this is opposite of what the church is in the world.
00:20:24.380It's kindness and compassion that forces us to be honest.
00:20:27.900But when you have so many mega church pastors who largely influence masses of quote unquote Christian people who are only fearful that they might offend the world,
00:20:45.260It fails to fulfill its calling in the world.
00:20:50.960And I think you have so many of these churches trying to make connections with sinful people without offending them that we have failed to be honest about sin and righteousness and judgment.
00:21:07.920And I think this comes out in so many, many ways.
00:21:14.100Churches are afraid to identify LGBTQ for what it is.
00:21:20.440Many churches are talking about same-sex attraction as if it's something normal.
00:21:27.260Church leaders are talking about that as if it's a God-given design that you have those feelings.
00:21:33.700And, I mean, why would we cave in on that?
00:21:37.980There's a recent edition of Christianity Today, which through the years has been a flagship magazine where you could kind of catch up on evangelicalism.
00:21:46.660Their latest issue was all about LGBTQ and pronouns.
00:21:50.040So the evangelical church has failed to take a stand.
00:21:56.300You know, when COVID came and our church sued the state of California and city of Los Angeles because they tried to shut us down, we sued them to stay open.
00:22:31.500But literally, there were articles written, we're wasting our ammunition on COVID, which we ought to be storing up for some future battle of homosexuality.
00:22:43.440Well, I watched that fall on deaf ears.
00:22:47.760They didn't fight COVID, and many of them aren't fighting the homosexual intrusion either.
00:23:24.060How do we balance that reality, that biblical truth, that we know that the government cannot save us, that we cannot put all of our trust in princes and politicians, understanding that Jesus' victory is sure.
00:23:40.420While also understanding that politics have an effect on people, that policy really matters, that they can—it can lead to the greater slaughter of unborn children.
00:23:51.960It can lead to children being taken out of their parents' home because the parent won't call Jack Sally.
00:24:00.100How do we balance understanding that there has to be political involvement with Christians, and as you said, even with churches, with also realizing that at the end of the day, God is the one who is in charge?
00:24:14.000Yeah, well, first of all, Ali, you understand that Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.
00:24:21.240If my kingdom was of this world, my servants would fight.
00:24:32.180In fact, we conduct ourselves as good citizens.
00:24:35.360We should be the best citizens in a society.
00:24:40.060Now, the way that you live out your Christianity in a society is by your godly living, your righteous living, upholding truth and the word of God.
00:24:54.040And how does that coincide with politics?
00:24:56.960Politics, for me, politics gives me an opportunity to stand up for righteousness, to stand up for righteousness.
00:25:08.340So sometimes you've got two fairly bad options with candidates.
00:25:15.820You might say neither one of them is, you know, consistent with biblical righteousness, but I want to make the best choice I can.
00:27:03.500And if we're looking back at the ancient pagan world, you mentioned how when Christians burst on the scene in a world that was full of child sacrifice, the objectification of children, the sick, the elderly women.
00:27:19.340And how did that look concretely, tangibly when Christians changed culture and ended up changing the world because of their radical revolutionary view of human beings and specifically children?
00:27:33.640Well, I would say, first of all, it didn't go well because they were martyred.
00:27:40.360I mean, when you look at the apostles, they killed all the apostles, basically, with a few exceptions.
00:27:46.120In the early church, persecution broke out.
00:27:50.580But eventually, as the gospel began to find its way into the hearts of people in the first and second century, it began to change the culture dramatically.
00:28:03.820And historically, you can show where cultures began to abandon those, you know, just really vile pagan practices that were really the defining aspects of their religion.
00:28:17.580Sexual orgies, prostitutes who were priests and priestesses in these false temples, all of that began to go away.
00:28:28.140Within the first three centuries, Christianity had developed enough that it was having an influence on the culture.
00:28:34.520Even though it was kind of the Roman Catholic Church that sort of launched itself in the 300s,
00:28:42.660that church did have a moral impact on the culture because it did uphold biblical morality.
00:28:51.660Even if they didn't get the gospel right, they got biblical morality right.
00:28:56.680And they were a monolithic force for that morality.
00:29:32.420Orphanages, hospitals, homeless shelters, organizations that provided aid, resources to those who were considered less than Christians treated them with the dignity that they knew that they had
00:29:48.120because of this radical message of the equality of value of image bearers.
00:29:54.500And also the gospel that says that we are all equally dead and sin apart from Christ, and we can, by grace through faith, be made alive in Christ.
00:30:03.960I mean, that changes what you think of people.
00:30:07.260Of course, in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, how they measured value was not by your innate worth and not by your humanity,
00:30:14.300but in different ways what you could produce and what you could add.
00:30:18.360Christianity changed all of that, and I think people believe that we are going to be able to preserve the parts of Christianity that we like,
00:30:29.920for example, human rights, even when Christianity loses its entire influence here in the United States.
00:31:10.140When people accepted the Bible, biblical morality, they accepted the Bible as an authority.
00:31:16.080When leaders accepted the Bible as an authority, you had a divine, transcendent revelation of human behavior, what God would tolerate, what he wouldn't.
00:32:04.060If you're a man and you are saying, I demand to be considered a woman, the insanity of that on the surface is obvious.
00:32:13.160The simplest kind of authority would be, well, you could take a look at the biology and the DNA, and we could tell you you are a man.
00:32:22.240But when you reject every form of authority, even natural law, and then you reject biblical law, you get utter chaos that's completely out of control.
00:32:34.660Everybody is doing exactly what they did in the Old Testament, whatever is right in their own eyes.
00:34:43.540That means I've got to protect them from bad educators.
00:34:48.920You know, Psalm 1, don't sit in the seat of scoffers.
00:34:53.520You know, you don't put your kid in a school where Christianity is being mocked.
00:34:57.960So you're making an impossible situation for that child to go down the right path when somebody far more powerful than that child is pounding into their brain things that are not true.
00:35:54.880And protection means you have a father who is a protector and you have a mother who is a protector.
00:36:00.520In addition to that, the positive side is you want to instruct them in what is right.
00:36:08.080You want to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
00:36:11.260The book, The War on Children, starts out by dealing with the problem.
00:36:16.180But the bulk of the book is looking at what the scripture says about raising your children so that you can enjoy the fruits of that effort.
00:36:27.280And I don't think that any culture can stand against a faithful family that provides protection for their children and provides instruction in the word of God.
00:36:38.560And if you live it out, it's not this difficult.