My own plans are made.
While I can, I sail east on the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws.
And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”
— Reepicheep
—
From LibertyBelle, on Lindsay Clancy:
“I don’t stand with Lindsay Clancy.
No one should.
We need to talk. Let’s call it:
CONSEQUENCES 101
If Lindsay is found either not guilty or not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility (insanity) the implications and consequences will touch the lives of women and children in the worst possible way. The precedent that it sets will be one we’d never be able to walk back before it cost a child their life.
A verdict of “not criminally responsible” does more than determine what happens to this one defendant, in this one courtroom.
It sends a message about where society draws the line between mental illness and personal agency.
That distinction matters.
👇🏼THE CONSEQUENCES FOR WOMEN:
For generations, women have fought the argument that female biology makes us less rational, dependable, or capable of handling enormous responsibility.
Right now, women can command troops, carry weapons, become judges, fly airplanes, practice medicine, and lead nations.
Yet those same women now argue:
- Women are fully equal, fully competent, fully fit to command a military, a country, weapons, courts, and nuclear codes.
AND - If a woman commits a heinous act, her she cant be held accountable because her hormones are to blame.
You cannot have it both ways.
Institutions notice. Insurers notice. Hiring managers notice. Other mothers notice.
Meaning because you wanted to virtue signal and support Lindsay’s claim that her hormones overwrote her ability to make a conscious choice: jobs that put women in charge of other people’s lives become high risk: Police. Military. Judges. Pilots. Teachers. ER doctors. Presidents.
Not because women are incapable.
But because culture and the law just announced that a subset of female biology can override their judgment.
Employers do not have to hate women to avoid that liability.
They only have to be rational.
The opponents of women in those roles will no longer have to say “women are weaker.” They can say: the legal system itself says her biology can cancel her agency, therefore hiring women for those roles isn’t worth the risk.
You cannot demand equal authority and simultaneously reject equal accountability by using a sex-specific excuse for the worst possible conduct.
LET ME BE VERY CLEAR:
The greatest danger isn’t what that contradiction could eventually mean for women.
But what it will mean for children.
👇🏼THE CONSEQUENCES FOR CHILDREN:
We’re already seeing copycats and women “inspired” by Lindsay. These women who are unhappy with their lives and roles as mothers are paying very close attention to this cases outcome.
Don’t give these women a way to escape accountability.
Future defendants will exploit it
Defense attorneys will reach for it.
Families will hesitate to report it.
Children will lose their lives.
And their juries will be told compassion means looking away from their small bodies.
Compassion can never require us to look away from the victims.
Cora.
Dawson.
Callan.
….and Patrick
Women:
THINK before you don your pink t-shirt and shout “same Lindsay!”
You think you’re hurting the patriarchy by showing solidarity in some way, with a woman who murdered her babies.
In reality, you just willingly closed the lock on shackles you put on yourself.
Once you realize it, it will be too late and you will have no one else to blame.
CONSEQUENCES.”
I would take issue with the feminist underpinnings of part of this post, but it’s exactly right in terms of the legal and social consequences of claiming that women do not bear any responsibility for their actions. To many modern women want it both ways: They claim to be able to do everything a man can do, and yet they also want to evade accountability in ways that men would never get away with. If a man raped a woman and tried to excuse himself based on his hormones (say, high testosterone), that would never be considered a justification for his crime. But in the Clancy case, many women are claiming she should not be held responsible because of her postpartum hormonal state. How can men take anything women say seriously if women jurors end up acquitting Clancy? Why should men continue to grant women rights and protect those rights if women are going to weaponize those rights to destroy any sense of justice and whatever is left of our civilization?
What’s at stake in Clancy’s trial is whether or not women are responsible agents. To deny they are is to infantilize women and deny them a key element of adult human dignity. To affirm they are responsible agents is to say that Clancy deserves the death penalty. And she does in fact deserve to be executed.
We do not need to know anything about Clancy’s mental state, the drugs she was taking, what voices she may have heard, etc. in order to know if she is guilty. We only need to know if she did in fact strangle her kids. Since no one disputes that, she is clearly worthy of death.
—
Many women defend Clancy because they are also child murderers, albeit in the womb.
—
Frederick DeBoer on the evils and contradictions of therapy culture:
“In the place of rules devised by moral philosophy and religion, therapy culture has erected others, such as
- You, your feelings, and your goals are always preeminent and in any conflict supersede those of others
- You are entitled to total and complete emotional safety at all times, and this entitlement supersedes the rights and desires of others
- Simultaneously, you are a totally, existentially, permanently fragile being
- Since there is nothing that can be endured or recovered from that is not injustice, the concept of resilience is itself an expression of injustice
- That which makes you feel better is that which is right to do
- In any conflict between any two people, there is always one guilty abuser and one blameless victim
- You argue, they gaslight, you have self-respect, they are narcissists, you are still growing, they are toxic, you have boundaries, they have limitations, you hold space, they stand in the way of your growth
- Your own behavior is always a trauma response, and thus not your fault; the behavior of others is always freely chosen, and thus responsibility-bearing
- Any of your behaviors is merely one small step on your journey, and you are still in the process of becoming yourself, any behavior of others you don’t like is constitutive of their very being and cannot change
- Wanting and not getting, for you, can never be an expression of the basic reality of existence, but rather is always evidence of crime, abuse, mistreatment, pathology, injustice
- Everything you feel, do, and are is valid, always valid, until the end of time
You’ll note that this is not just bad for those who must live alongside someone ensconced in therapeutic culture, but presents utterly unattainable goals to that person, ensuring that they will never graduate out of therapy-as-way-of-life. The point is to heal and grow so that you don’t need therapy anymore, after all. That idea has essentially no presence in therapy culture.”
—
An old baptism thread:
When the sacrament of baptism is administered properly:
All baptisms are believer’s baptisms, even when the one baptized is an infant.
All baptisms are infant baptisms, even when the one baptized is an adult.
1/3
Covenant infants normatively have faith, eg, Psalm 22:9-10, so their baptisms are not exceptions to the principle, “believe and be baptized.”
Adults who convert must become like little children to enter the kingdom, as Jesus says in Matthew 18:3-4, so adult converts are really baby believers/newborn disciples. When an adult is baptized, it’s still a form of paedobaptism.
2/3
All that to say: There is one baptism. Baptisms of infants and adults are objectively identical. At whatever age we are baptized, we all share in the same baptism.
3/3
—
“I think one of the great handicaps that blacks and other minorities face across the country is that they are systematically mismatched with universities in the admissions process.
That is, if Harvard feels that it must have X percent of blacks, and if the pool is such that they can’t get X percent of blacks at the same level as the rest of the Harvard students, they’re going to take those blacks who would have succeeded in some state university and bring them to Harvard, where many of them will fail.
MIT is a better example. The average black student at MIT is in the bottom 10% of MIT students in math. But he is in the top 90% of all American students in math, because MIT students are so phenomenal in mathematics.
Something like one-fourth of all the black students going to MIT do not graduate. You’re talking about a pool of people who score at the 90th percentile in math, whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school.”
— Thomas Sowell on affirmative action
—
Viral post on X (I’m not sure who originally posted it, but it’s good):
“If Lindsay Clancy is found innocent because hormones made her emotionally unstable, women better be very careful celebrating that verdict.
Because the law loves PRECEDENT.
From that day forward, every job application is going to have a new question:
“Are you currently hormonal?”
“Well, I’m a woman.”
“Thank you. I think we’ll be going in another direction.”
You can’t carry a weapon anymore. No female police officers. Sorry, but we cannot hand a loaded gun to somebody whose legal defense might eventually be, “My hormones were acting up.”
No more high-stress jobs, either. No air-traffic controllers. No surgeons. No nuclear-launch codes. One bad hot flash and boom, Canada is glowing.
And women definitely can’t be judges. How can you decide whether somebody else is emotionally stable when your own gender just established in court that hormones can make you kill three people?
No female politicians, either. You can’t be trusted to run the country if, according to your own argument, your endocrine system occasionally takes over the government.
And custody hearings are going to change overnight.
The judge will say, “Ordinarily, children belong with their mother. However, according to the Lindsay Clancy precedent, she may be only one hormone away from a Netflix documentary. The children go with Dad.”
Dad doesn’t know their shoe sizes, the pediatrician’s name or which one is allergic to peanuts, but his testosterone has never been successfully used as an insanity defense.
Feminists spent a hundred years saying women are not hysterical, irrational creatures controlled by their biology and one defense attorney walks into court and says, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury… have you considered the uterus?”
You cannot demand equal authority and then ask for discounted accountability.
If women want equal rights, great. But equal rights come with equal wrongs.
Otherwise, that glass ceiling is about to become a padded ceiling.”
—
Whether you are male or female, your sex comes with a set of instructions. In essence, in Scripture and in nature, God calls us to obey our sex. Masculinity and femininity are not arbitrary nor are they cultural constructs. They are realities deeply rooted in God’s design which he intends for us to live out as men and women.
—
Interacting with Grok to produce notes on Tim Bayly’s Grace of Shame book, dealing with the sin of effeminacy:
In The Grace of Shame, Tim Bayly (with Joseph Bayly and Jürgen von Hagen) treats effeminacy as a distinct biblical sin—malakoi (“soft men”) in 1 Corinthians 6:9—rather than merely a style or a prelude to homosexual acts. 
The authors argue that older English translations (KJV, NASB) correctly kept malakoi separate from arsenokoitai (“abusers of themselves with mankind”). Modern translations that collapse the two into one phrase about “men who practice homosexuality” hide a category of sin that Scripture names on its own. Effeminacy, they say, is not identical with homosexual intercourse; it can exist without it, and it is itself condemned. 
Core definition
Bayly’s most direct formulation is that effeminacy is the denial of the manhood God decreed. It is “a sexual sin even when it is committed by a man who is all alone.” A man sins by “playing the woman”—emotionally or physically—whether in bed or out of it. The sin is not something a man can put on and take off like a garment; it is a betrayal of the sex God made him. 
They repeatedly contrast “soft” and “hard”:
- Soft men will not inherit the kingdom.
- Hard men take initiative and responsibility, say no to lust, carry weight for others, and live as fathers.
- Softness in bearing, dress, manner, music, passivity, and refusal of masculine duty is the issue, not merely a particular sexual act.
The book insists the problem starts long before the bedroom (just as adultery starts in the mind). Cultural “gayness,” limp-wristed or womanish presentation, certain clothing and music, and an identity of softness are all included under the heading. The authors also apply the same logic in the opposite direction: “hard women” who refuse the softness and receptivity written into female bodies likewise rebel against how God made them.
Bayly does not offer a tight, exhaustive checklist of every gesture or garment. He works from the Greek term, from Calvin’s comment that malakoi are known by “effeminate bearing and dress,” from Deuteronomy 22:5 on clothing, and from examples of passivity versus initiative. The pastoral point is that the church has stopped naming this sin, thereby robbing men of the shame that should drive them to repent of both the identity and any acts that follow from it.
In short, the book defines effeminacy as a man’s refusal to live as a man—softness of character, role, and presentation that denies the sex God assigned him—whether or not it ever issues in homosexual intercourse.
The book treats effeminacy as a failure of self-mastery over lust, not merely a set of mannerisms. Softness and “playing the woman” weaken a man’s ability to refuse disordered desire; that refusal is part of what God requires of manhood.
Bayly’s clearest statement is this:
“What happens when a man gives himself to effeminacy and playing the woman? Not being able to say no to his lust, the effeminate decays until he finds himself in bed with another man. A man giving himself over to softness is well on the way to giving himself over to bedding another man.” (p. 64)
Effeminacy therefore functions as a first step toward homosexual acts. It is not identical with those acts, but it trains a man in passivity and indulgence so that he cannot resist when lust intensifies. The authors compare it to adultery: neither sin begins in the bedroom; both begin in the mind and in a habit of yielding.
The positive counterpart is explicit. True manhood is not a physique; it is:
“taking initiative and responsibility for others. It’s saying no to our lusts and pleasures. … In a word, it’s fatherhood.”
A hard man governs his desires; a soft man is governed by them. The book also insists that the lusts themselves are not morally neutral. Same-sex desire (“men burning in their desire toward one another”) is already evil at the level of the heart; it is not an amoral “orientation” that only becomes sinful when acted upon. Effeminacy and unrepented lust therefore belong together: one is the character that cannot say no; the other is the desire that then goes unresisted.
In short, Bayly relates the two as cause and fruit. Effeminacy is the habit of softness that leaves a man unable to refuse lust; unchecked lust then pulls him toward the next sin listed in 1 Corinthians 6:9. Repentance, on this view, must address both the identity of softness and the lusts it fails to mortify.
In The Grace of Shame, Bayly does not treat masculinity as a personality type or a gym aesthetic. He treats it as obedience to the sex God made. Effeminacy is the refusal of that obedience. The contrast runs through the book as soft vs. hard.
Bayly’s summary of manhood is the pivot:
“The real essence of manhood ….is taking initiative and responsibility for others. It’s saying no to our lusts and pleasures. … It’s taking weight on yourself, and carrying it for other people. In a word, it’s fatherhood.”
Masculinity is therefore initiative + restraint + burden-bearing. Effeminacy is the opposite: receptivity where a man should initiate, indulgence where he should refuse, and lightness where he should carry weight. That is why the book calls effeminacy a sexual sin even when a man is alone: he is already living against the grain of the body and calling God gave him.
How the two relate to lust
Masculinity includes mortifying lust. Effeminacy is the character that cannot. Softness trains a man to yield; yielding then pulls him toward the next sin on Paul’s list. The book’s claim is not that every effeminate man is a sodomite, but that giving himself to softness is “well on the way” to bedding another man because he has already stopped saying no.
What the book is not saying
It is not equating masculinity with cruelty, stoicism, or “toxic” swagger. Jesus and John the Baptist are the models of “hard” men: they were hard in duty and truth, not hard in the sense of being impossible to please or lacking compassion. Nor is femininity itself a vice. A woman living as a woman—soft in the sense of receiving and bearing life—is obeying her creation. A man living that way is rebelling against his.
So the book’s contrast is simple and severe: masculinity is a man occupying the place God assigned him; effeminacy is a man vacating that place and playing the woman instead.
Matthew 11:8 is Jesus’ second question about John the Baptist:
“But what did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.”
The Greek is en malakois — “in soft [garments].” It is the same word family as malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6:9, the term Bayly translates as “effeminate” / “soft men.”
How the verse functions
Jesus is ruling out two false pictures of John:
- A reed shaken by the wind (unstable, crowd-pleasing).
- A man in malakos clothing (luxury, court refinement, softness). John wore camel’s hair and a leather belt, ate locusts and wild honey, lived in the wilderness, and ended in Herod’s prison. Soft clothing belongs in palaces; John’s life belonged in the desert and the dungeon. The contrast is not merely fashion. Older commentators routinely read “soft raiment” as an emblem of luxury and effeminacy—fine linen worn for ornament, the dress of men who live for ease rather than for a hard word from God. How this fits Bayly’s contrast The Grace of Shame uses John (and Jesus) as the type of the “hard man.” The book’s chapter on what effeminacy is looks at them specifically. John is the opposite of malakos: • coarse rather than delicate • austere rather than indulgent • unyielding rather than pliable • a preacher of repentance rather than a courtier Bayly’s line is that John and Jesus “had their manhood and they never took it off.” Soft clothing in Matthew 11:8 is the visible sign of the life Jesus says John did not live. The same softness of character, when it becomes a man’s identity and bearing, is what Paul later names among the sins that exclude from the kingdom. So the verse supplies both the vocabulary (malakos) and the living example: masculinity here is not a costume of toughness, but a life that refuses the palace’s softness—luxury, ease, and the refusal to bear a hard word. Effeminacy, in the book’s terms, is choosing the other side of Jesus’ contrast.
2 Samuel 11 is the narrative that shows what happens when a king stays in the house instead of going out to war.
“In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.” (2 Sam 11:1)
Right after Matthew 11:8, the juxtaposition is sharp. Jesus says those in soft clothing are in kings’ houses. David is in the king’s house at the season when kings belong in the field. The first failure is not Bathsheba. It is absence from the post. He sends others to bear the weight and keeps the palace for himself.
The sequence Bayly’s categories already named
The chapter then walks the path the book describes for lust and softness: - Idleness, then the look. Evening, rising from his bed, walking the roof—he sees. Adultery does not begin in the bed.
- Inquiry instead of refusal. He does not turn away. He sends and asks. He is told she is Uriah’s wife and he still takes.
- Inability to say no to lust. Once the desire is indulged, he cannot stop. Pregnancy forces the next sins: deceit, drink, and finally Uriah’s death.
- Cover, not repentance. He tries to make Uriah go home so the child will look legitimate. Uriah will not. The hard man will not enjoy his wife while the ark and Israel are in tents and his lord Joab is in the field (11:11). David, the king who stayed home, now uses the battlefield to hide what the palace produced. Uriah is the foil: loyal, self-denying, present at the war David abandoned. David has the throne and the roof; Uriah has the field and the integrity. In the book’s language, one man is carrying weight; the other has laid it down. Softness here is not silk David is not wearing women’s clothes. The softness is dereliction of masculine office: the king who will not go out when kings go out, who takes what is not his, who will not mortify lust, and who then spends other men’s blood to protect his reputation. That is the same logic Bayly uses for effeminacy—refusal of the place God assigned, failure to initiate and restrain, lust unrefused until it flowers in the act and then in violence. Nathan will later say, “You are the man.” The story does not treat the lust as a private orientation to be managed. It treats the whole chain—staying home, looking, taking, lying, killing—as one rebellion that begins when the king chooses the house over the battle.
—
A sermon on 2 Samuel 11–12
Brothers and sisters, the Word of God is not a soft pillow for the flesh. It is a sharp sword. And tonight that sword is aimed at the throat of sexual sin—and at the heart of every man and woman who has ever tried to manage it, hide it, or rename it.
Open your Bibles to 2 Samuel 11.
David—the man after God’s own heart—the anointed king—the sweet psalmist of Israel—stays home when kings go out to war. He rises from his bed in the evening, walks on the roof of the king’s house, and sees a woman bathing. And the text is blunt: “the woman was very beautiful.” He inquires. He sends. He takes. He lies with her. She conceives. And then the cover-up begins.
Uriah the Hittite is summoned from the battlefield. David tries to get him drunk and send him home to his wife so the child can be passed off as his. Uriah will not go. His loyalty to the ark and to his brothers in the field is greater than David’s loyalty to God. So David writes the death warrant with his own hand and sends it by Uriah’s own hand. Uriah dies. Bathsheba mourns. David brings her into his house. She becomes his wife. A son is born.
And the chapter ends with these devastating words: “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”
Do not rush past that sentence. The man who had slain Goliath, who had refused to lift his hand against Saul, who had written psalms of pure devotion, has now become an adulterer and a murderer. And the Lord saw it all.
The Fire of Confrontation
Nathan the prophet comes. He does not come with a gentle pastoral conversation. He comes with a story that cuts like a razor. A rich man with many flocks. A poor man with one little ewe lamb that was like a daughter to him. The rich man takes the poor man’s lamb and serves it to his guest.
David’s anger is kindled. “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!”
And Nathan turns the blade: “You are the man!”
That is the word of God to every sexually compromised heart in this room. You are the man. You are the woman.
You who look and linger. You who click and stream. You who fantasize and justify. You who have taken what does not belong to you—another man’s wife, another woman’s purity, another soul’s dignity—and then tried to manage the consequences with lies, with silence, with religious activity, with “it was just a season,” with “I’m only human.”
God is not impressed with your excuses. He is not fooled by your private justifications. He is not softened by your tears that never reach repentance. The same God who sent Nathan to David still sends His Word to us. And the Word says: You are the man.
Sexual sin is not a private weakness. It is high-handed rebellion against the God who made the body and who designed the marriage bed. It is theft. It is violence against the image of God in another person. It is contempt for the covenant. And when it is covered rather than confessed, it multiplies. David’s adultery produced a corpse. Uriah’s blood cried out. The sword would not depart from David’s house. The child of the adultery would die. Absalom would rise. Tamar would be violated. The consequences of sexual sin never stay in the bedroom. They bleed into the household, the church, and the generations.
Do not tell me you can play with fire and not be burned. Do not tell me your private habits are “just between you and God” when God has already declared that He sees, He hates, and He will judge. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The soft-pedaling of sexual sin is the beginning of destruction.
The Mercy of Restoration
But the story does not end with judgment.
David’s response is not defensiveness. It is not self-pity. It is not “I was under a lot of pressure.” It is four words that still shake the universe: “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Nathan answers: “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”
That is the gospel in a single sentence. The same God who confronts is the God who forgives. The same God who exposes is the God who covers—not with the thin blankets of our excuses, but with the blood of a greater Son than the one who died in David’s house.
David’s sin was real. The consequences were real. The child died. The sword came. Yet God did not cast him off. He restored him. He gave him Solomon. He kept the covenant. He put a new song in his mouth. Psalm 51 is the fruit of this confrontation—brokenness that leads to cleansing, confession that leads to joy, a clean heart and a steadfast spirit.
This is the pattern of true restoration:
Exposure without excuse.
Confession without self-justification.
Reception of forgiveness as pure gift.
Walking forward under the discipline of a Father who loves too much to leave us in our sin.
Brothers and sisters, if the Spirit of God is pressing this text upon your conscience tonight, do not harden your heart. Do not negotiate. Do not delay. The same Lord who said to David, “You are the man,” is the same Lord who says to every repentant sinner, “Your sin is put away.”
Come clean. Name the sin. Forsake it. Flee to the blood of Jesus Christ, the true and better David, who never stayed home from the war, who never took what was not His, who never covered His tracks with murder, but who was Himself murdered in our place so that adulterers and murderers and every other kind of sinner might live.
The fire of God’s holiness burns against sexual sin. The mercy of God’s covenant burns brighter still. Choose this day whom you will serve—the secret lust that destroys, or the open grace that restores.
May God grant us the courage of David’s confession and the joy of David’s restoration. Amen.
—
A meditation on 2 Samuel 11:
The Word of God is not given to tickle our ears or to make us feel better about ourselves. It is given to cut us open, to expose the thoughts and intentions of the heart, and to leave us without excuse before a holy God. Tonight we come face to face with the sin of David—adultery, lust, and the murder that followed—and we will not soft-pedal it. We will not call it a “mistake,” a “moral failure,” or a “private struggle.” The Bible calls it sin. And sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.
David, the man after God’s own heart, the anointed king of Israel, stayed in Jerusalem when the kings went out to battle. He rose from his bed in the evening, walked on the roof of the king’s house, and looked. He saw a woman bathing. She was very beautiful. And instead of turning away his eyes, as Job did (Job 31:1), David fixed them. He inquired after her. He sent messengers. He took her. He lay with her. She conceived. And then the cover-up began.
Uriah the Hittite, a faithful soldier, was summoned home. David tried to get him drunk so he would sleep with his own wife and the child could be passed off as his. Uriah would not do it. His loyalty to the ark and to his brothers was greater than David’s loyalty to God. So David wrote a letter, sealed it with the king’s seal, and put it in Uriah’s own hand—the letter that ordered Uriah’s death. Uriah was placed in the front line. He died. Bathsheba mourned. David took her as his wife. And the chapter ends with these words: “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.”
The Sin Exposed
Do not miss what happened here. It began with the eyes. Lust is not harmless. Jesus said that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28). David looked, and he lusted. Then he took. Then he covered. Then he killed. Sexual sin never stays sexual. It always demands more. It always requires deception. It always produces blood somewhere.
Men, listen to me. You who sit in these pews with clean hands and dirty minds—you who think your secret glances, your private screens, your wandering eyes are nobody’s business but yours—God has already written the verdict. You are the man. You have taken what does not belong to you. You have treated another man’s daughter, another man’s wife, as an object for your pleasure. You have despised the covenant of marriage that God Himself established. And if you have gone further—if you have acted on that lust—you stand under the same condemnation that fell on David.
Women, do not think yourselves exempt. The culture that markets sensuality, that trains young girls to display themselves, that treats modesty as oppression—that culture is not neutral. It is the enemy of God. And every woman who participates in it, who courts the gaze of men not her husband, who treats her body as a commodity rather than a temple of the Holy Spirit, shares in the guilt.
This is not a light matter. The seventh commandment is not a suggestion. “You shall not commit adultery.” The penalty under the Law of God for adultery was death (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22). God has not changed His mind about the seriousness of this sin simply because our age has. The same God who struck Uzzah dead for touching the ark is the God who saw David on that roof. He is the same God who sees every click, every stare, every secret fantasy in this room tonight.
The Judgment Declared
Nathan was not yet on the scene in chapter 11. But the judgment of God was already at work. The child of the adultery would die. The sword would never depart from David’s house. Absalom would rise in rebellion. Tamar would be violated. Amnon would be murdered. The consequences of sexual sin are never confined to the bedroom. They destroy households. They destroy churches. They destroy nations.
Do not deceive yourselves. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap corruption. You may hide it from your wife. You may hide it from the session. You may hide it from the world. You will not hide it from God. He will bring every secret thing into judgment (Ecclesiastes 12:14). And if you die in that sin unrepentant, you will face the second death, the lake of fire that burns forever.
There is no such thing as a “private” sexual sin. Every act of lust is an act of rebellion against the God who made the body for holiness. Every adulterous thought is high treason against the King of kings. And every attempt to cover it is a further declaration of war against the Holy One of Israel.
The Call to Repentance
David’s story does not end in chapter 11. But chapter 11 stands alone as a warning. The man who would not turn his eyes away had to be confronted by a prophet with a parable that left him no escape. “You are the man!”
That word is still spoken today. If the Spirit of God is pressing this text upon your conscience, do not harden your heart. Do not make excuses. Do not say, “I am only human.” Do not say, “Everyone struggles with this.” Do not say, “I can manage it.” Confess it. Name it. Forsake it. Turn from it with the same urgency with which you would flee a burning house.
There is forgiveness with God. There is cleansing in the blood of Jesus Christ. But that forgiveness is not given to those who continue in the sin. It is given to those who hate it, who turn from it, who cry out for a clean heart and a right spirit. David would later write Psalm 51 because Nathan’s word had done its work. The same word must do its work in us.
Men and women of God, put away the evil from among you. Guard your eyes. Guard your hearts. Flee youthful lusts. Honor the marriage bed. Fear the Lord. For the God who saw David on the roof is the same God who sees you tonight. And He will not be mocked.
May God grant us the grace to hear, the courage to repent, and the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom. Amen.
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A meditation on 2 Samuel 12:
The Word of God does not leave sin unexposed. In chapter 11 David sinned. He looked. He lusted. He took. He lied. He murdered. And the Lord saw it all. Now in chapter 12 the same God who saw sends His prophet. Nathan does not come with soft words or therapeutic counsel. He comes with a parable that leaves the king without escape, and then with the direct, unyielding declaration of the living God: “You are the man!”
The Confrontation of God
Nathan tells the story of the rich man who had many flocks and the poor man who had only one little ewe lamb that was like a daughter to him. The rich man took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for his guest. David’s anger burned. “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die! And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and because he had no pity.”
Then Nathan turns the blade: “You are the man!”
That word still cuts. It is the word of God to every sinner who has taken what does not belong to him, who has treated another human being as an object for his pleasure, who has covered his tracks with lies and religious activity. You are the man. You are the woman. There is no hiding place. The God who searches the hearts and tries the reins has already rendered the verdict.
Nathan continues: “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your care, and gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if that had been too little, I would have given you much more. Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.’”
Notice the language. David did not merely “fall.” He despised the word of the Lord. Sexual sin is contempt for God’s law. It is high-handed rebellion against the God who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” and who required death for those who did. God has not changed His standard because our culture has. The seventh commandment still stands. The holiness of God still burns against the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh.
The Confession and the Judgment
David’s response is not self-defense. It is not blame-shifting. It is not “I was lonely” or “I was under pressure.” It is four words: “I have sinned against the LORD.”
That is true confession. Not partial. Not qualified. Not mixed with excuses. Full ownership before the face of God.
Nathan answers immediately: “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”
Here is the gospel. Forgiveness is real. God puts away sin. The blood of the covenant covers. David would not be executed under the civil law as an adulterer and murderer. Grace is greater than sin.
But do not miss what follows. Forgiveness does not cancel all temporal consequences. “Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child who is born to you shall die.” The sword would never depart from David’s house. Evil would rise from within his own family. His wives would be taken before his eyes. The child of the adultery would die.
David fasted. He lay on the ground. He pleaded with God for the child’s life. On the seventh day the child died. The servants were afraid to tell him. When David learned the truth, he rose, washed, anointed himself, changed his clothes, and went into the house of the LORD and worshiped. Then he ate.
This is the fear of God. David submitted to the judgment of God without bitterness. He did not accuse the Lord of unfairness. He worshiped. That is the mark of a heart that has truly been broken and restored. Many today want forgiveness without consequences, grace without discipline, restoration without the rod. That is not the religion of the Bible. The Lord disciplines those He loves. Temporal judgments remain even when eternal condemnation is removed.
The Sovereignty and the Mercy of God
After the child’s death, David comforted Bathsheba. She bore a son, and he called his name Solomon. And the text says, “And the LORD loved him and sent a message by Nathan the prophet. So he called his name Jedidiah, because of the LORD.”
Jedidiah—“beloved of the LORD.” Out of the wreckage of adultery and murder, God brings the son of the promise. The line of the Messiah continues. God is not frustrated by the sin of man. He overrules it for His own glory and for the fulfillment of His covenant.
This is the God we serve: the God who confronts, who judges, who forgives, who disciplines, and who still accomplishes His purpose. He is not a sentimental deity who winks at sin. He is the holy Lord who requires repentance and who grants mercy only on the basis of blood.
The Application
Men and women of this congregation, hear the word of the Lord. If you are living in sexual sin—lust, pornography, adultery, fornication, any form of impurity—you are the man. You are the woman. The same God who sent Nathan still sends His Word. He still says, “You have despised the word of the LORD.”
Do not harden your heart. Do not make excuses. Do not say, “I can handle this.” Confess it fully. Forsake it completely. Turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood alone puts away sin. Submit to whatever temporal consequences God in His wisdom may appoint. Worship Him in the midst of the discipline. And trust that the same God who brought Solomon out of David’s ruin can bring good out of your repentance.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Soft religion will not save you. Sentimental preaching will not cleanse you. Only the holy God who confronts sin and then puts it away by the blood of His Son can restore a sinner.
May God grant us the courage to hear “You are the man,” the grace to confess “I have sinned against the LORD,” and the faith to receive the word “The LORD has put away your sin.”
Amen.
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Evie Solheim on the impact of social media on intersexual dynamics:
“Will marriage survive the internet?
It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our everyday lives. Yet here we are more than halfway through the 2020s, and it’s fair to say the digitization of our social lives has drastically unsettled the relations between the sexes. As scholar Patrick T. Brown recently wrote, “At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way has the burden of proof.”
Yes, the battle of the sexes is as old as civilization itself. But digital technology has introduced a new and disorienting dynamic. It turns humans into avatars. And avatars don’t fall in love or find God or have children. They exist in your phone, as pixels to be rewarded with likes or screamed at with comments, depending on the situation.
Take, for example, the horrible case of Lindsay Clancy…After five weeks of testimony, a jury of nine women and three men is deliberating whether Lindsay Clancy is guilty of three counts of first-degree murder or shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was not in her right mind when she killed her children. Meanwhile, in a dark twist, Clancy has become a TikTok sensation.
Hundreds of women gathered outside the courthouse wearing pink to support her in August. “Any one of us who have dealt with mental health, anxiety, depression, postpartum—I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair,” the event’s organizer said.
It’s not too surprising, then, that the grisly case has become a flashpoint in the never-ending battle of the sexes online. “The Lindsay Clancy contagion has shown that the majority of eligible women are no longer fit to be mothers and wives. In fact, it’s utterly dangerous to procreate with these women,” an anonymous poster claiming to be Gen Z wrote on X (his post received more than 1,000 likes). Support for Lindsay Clancy has been floated as a litmus test for a man to use when deciding to date a woman…
And there’s the rub. The internet algorithm rewards posters who make the boldest claims that offend the most people. The more these bad ideas and false claims are ridiculed online, the more visible they become, and the more people they have the potential to influence…
But this feedback loop can be seen among misandrists and misogynists alike. Recent research published in the journal Current Psychology suggests that most individuals overestimate others’ susceptibility to social pressures and underestimate their own. We tend to think that other people shouldn’t doomscroll, but that we can handle it. Without realizing it, we imbibe information designed to confirm our worst biases—whether that’s a belief that all men are secretly abusive or a belief that all women are secretly evil.
There are lots of ways to divide people—race, religion, and political affiliation, to name a few. But the most basic divide is gender. Marriage bridges this divide. But the bridge is crumbling: researchers predict that as much as a third of young people today will never marry. A 2024 analysis of data from 20 developed countries by The Economist found that the “attitudes of young men and women are polarising,” especially in the U.S.
Posts that tell men to avoid marriage lest they unknowingly marry a murderer and podcasts that tell women to avoid marriage because all men are cheaters exemplify the kind of messaging that some young people are bombarded with every day. When womanhood is flattened into Lindsay Clancy and manhood into Andrew Tate, it becomes difficult for men and women to like each other, let alone love each other.
When men and women treat existence as a zero-sum game, everyone loses. Difficult as it is to detach from sensational outliers amid a constant barrage of extreme cases, it’s a matter of existential urgency. The future of the human race depends on us learning to see each other as humans—not as avatars—once again.”
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From a December ’25 post:
Consider the following lengthy quotation in support of Christian education:
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There is probably no more important duty than that of the education of our children. The future success of the Kingdom of our Lord is, to a great extent, dependent upon the successful education of covenant children in the knowledge of our Lord and in a biblically consistent world and life view. The following quote from Robert Lewis Dabney is particularly pertinent in this regard:
“Seeing the parental relation is what the Scripture describes it, and seeing Satanhas perverted it since fall for the diffusion and multiplication of depravity and eternal death, the education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God — this is his task on earth. On the right training of the generation now arising, turns not only the individual salvation of each member in it, not only the religious hope of the age which is approaching, but the fate of all future generations in a large degree.”
The duty of education is (from the biblical perspective) a parental duty.
According to Scripture, children are a gift from the Almighty God and thus are a sacred trust. Therefore, the Lord requires that parents provide all that their children need! Parents are required to feed, clothe, house and protect their children and prepare them for adulthood. Dr. Norman Harper states this very clearly in his book Making Disciples: The Challenge of Christian Education at the End of the Twentieth Century:
““The authority and responsibility of the training of children is delegated primarily to the parents. It was to the parent that the command was given: “…provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, KJV).”
The duty of education is therefore a family responsibility. The family is the fundamental unit of society under God, and it is the duty of parents as led by the father to prepare their children to function righteously under God’s rule in all spheres of life (Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18-25; 18:19; Psalm 127:3-5; Ephesians 6:1-4).
In order for this task to be successful, education must be distinctively Christian; i.e., based upon God’s revelation of His Truth in His Word (Psalm 36:9; Exodus 20:16; John 17:17; John 14:6; John 8:32). Education is a necessary task for equipping children to glorify God in work and worship that is according to His Word. Thus, Christian education is necessary and essential for a godly use of talents (Psalm 78:1-8). This responsibility cannot be abdicated by parents, for God holds them accountable. Parents may delegate this responsibility to surrogate parents who meet biblical qualifications while retaining the responsibility of education and the authority over their children.
The modern concept of children belonging to the state is anti-Christian. The responsibility for educating children does not belong to the state and therefore the state should not usurp this responsibility from parents. Robert Lewis Dabney comments very lucidly on whose responsibility the education of children is:
“Is the direction of the education of children either a civic or an ecclesiastical function? Is it not properly a domestic and parental function? First, we read in holy writ that God ordained the family by the union of one woman to one man, in one flesh, for life, for the declared end of “seeking a godly seed.” Does not this imply that he looks to parents, in whom the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result? He has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately, not with either presbyter or magistrate, but with the parents, which, of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority. This argument appears again in the very order of the historical genesis of the family and State, as well as of the visible Church. The family was first. Parents at the outset were the only social heads existing. The right rearing of children by them was in order to the right creation of the other two institutes. It thus appears that naturally the parents’ authority over their children could not have come by deputation from either State or visible Church, any more than the water in a fountain by derivation from its reservoir below.”
The state is assigned a ministry of the sword in the execution of justice against evildoers (Romans 13:1-4). The state is not assigned the duty of educating our children. It is highly questionable whether it is wise for Christian parents to send their covenant children to a school system operated by the state which is openly or otherwise hostile to the Christian faith. It is inconceivable that Abraham would have sent Isaac to the Canaanites to learn about the world God had created. Christian parents who send their covenant children to state schools to learn about God’s world (science, etc.) and God’s activities (history, etc.) should seriously consider whether it is possible to equip their children to function responsibly in this world under God according to His Truth when their children are subject to prolific falsehoods and open hostility (Psalm 1:1-3; Exodus 34:12-16), whether it is possible to send their children to public schools (which are to a great extent dominated by Humanism) and at the same time fulfill their duty to rear their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:1-4).
Some educators believe that covenant children must not be shaped by a non-Christian religious educational institution:
“The choice is between a Christian religious education and a non-Christian religious education. If this is true, there are no material circumstances that can justify a Christian parent in giving his child an education that is man-centered and thus dishonoring to God. Would you send your child to a Buddhist shrine to worship because it was nearer your home or because it was already paid for by the state? Of course not! Then we can say with equal certainty that we cannot send our children, in the most formative years of their lives, to be shaped religiously by a non-Christian religious educational institution.”
…..The ideal situation would be for Christian parents to have their covenant children educated in a thoroughly Christian atmosphere. Such an atmosphere would certainly include a thoroughly Christian curriculum which recognizes all truth as God’s truth and teaches nothing as true in subject matter contrary to God’s revealed word. It would also include Christian teachers who love God and seek to convey God’s truth as well as demonstrate a concern for the spiritual well-being of their students. It would as well be an atmosphere in which the Scriptures are regularly consulted and prayer is regularly offered….”
Who wrote this? Doug Wilson — after all, it quotes Dabney, not once, but twice? Cornelius Van Til? Actually it comes from the PCA’s position paper, “Education and Parental Responsibility” from 1987. Yes, the PCA.
The report continues:
“Churches and Presbyteries should consider how they might encourage parents in the task of providing their children with an education that is consistent with biblical Truth and that will prepare them for effective service for God’s Kingdom in all spheres of life. Churches should seriously consider providing thoroughly Christian and biblical schools for their covenant children as well as many other children in their respective communities. If necessary, the church should assist in providing the means by which a parent can educate his child, whether it be through establishment of a Christian school or financial assistance to the parent to provide for a Christian or private education elsewhere.
Undoubtedly, many problems with respect to adolescent rebellion in covenant children can be partially attributed to the schizophrenic world view that is absorbed where church and family embrace a wholly different world view than that which is promoted in the public educational system.
The need for quality education in our modern, technological society is paramount for all of our young people. The public schools have failed to truly educate our children in two fundamental areas. First, they have often distorted reality by insisting on a radically secular and Humanistic world view. Second, they have often failed to provide the basic skills needed for a young person to become a productive member of society.
This is nowhere more evident than in our major cities where an enormous drop-out rate of often above one-third demonstrates the ineffectiveness of many school systems. This substandard education points toward the creation of a permanent underclass of functionally illiterate adults who will emerge alienated from a society which has not provided them with equal access to opportunities for the future. Such a felt need provides the PCA with a unique opportunity in its strategic concern to evangelize the great metropolitan centers of North America. We have the opportunity open before us to truly penetrate the urban culture by providing quality Christian education at reasonable cost. Our suburban and exurban churches can establish a true bridge of friendship and understanding by becoming partners to the urban church, providing personal and financial resources for the nurturing of all of our children.”
The entire position paper is worth reading: https://pcahistory.org/pca/digest/stu
dies/2-128.pdf
It’s unfortunate so much of the PCA has not followed its own position paper on this issue.
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