Lawlessness: The Spirit of the Age

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Lawlessness: The Spirit of the Age

It’s easy to condemn David and Kathy, but realize—you are not unlike them!

Meet David Stocker and his wife, Kathy Witterick, the Canadian parents who think they are raising a “genderless” child.

I say think, because in reality the gender of their baby is readily observable, as obvious as the rays of sun that beam through the window and announce the arrival of each day. Nevertheless, David and Kathy refuse to disclose, even to close friends, the sex of 4-month-old Storm. “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now,” the couple wrote in an e-mail to friends when Storm was born, as a “tribute to freedom and choice in the place of limitation …” (emphasis mine).

By not revealing the gender of her baby, Witterick writes, “I am saying to the world, ‘Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s(he) wants to be?!”

Sadly, baby Storm isn’t their only child. David and Kathy have two other children, both boys, both of whom are in the process of “deciding” their gender. Five-year-old Jazz wears his long hair in braids, sports a sparkly pink earring and has a favorite pink dress, which he loves because it “really poofs out at the bottom.” Kio, his 2-year-old brother, is apparently gravitating toward being a “girl” too. When the boys go out in public, their father blithely admits, “Jazz and now Kio are almost exclusively assumed to be girls.”

To this couple, nature’s laws determining gender are irrelevant—the sex of their children is a matter of choice, not biology.

Unsurprisingly, this family lives a lifestyle defined largely by rejecting laws and standards. Rather than send the children to school, for example, Kathy has decided to practice unschooling, an educational philosophy that advocates learning driven by the child’s curiosity. There are no report cards, no homework, no textbooks and no tests.

To Kathy and her husband, their attempt to raise genderless children is a mark of freedom.

To most people, however, such a decision marks the blatant rejection of a basic and obvious law of nature.

Since this story broke a few weeks ago, a groundswell of anger has built toward David and Kathy. Across the world, parents, child psychologists and behavioral experts have criticized and sharply rebuked the couple for imposing their radical, liberal views on their children, and for sabotaging the future emotional and psychological health of Jazz, Kio and Storm. This criticism, of course, has merit.

But consider. Isn’t their decision to raise a “genderless” child the product of our culture of lawlessness? Their decision is an extreme example of a mindset that most of humanity—perhaps including you—subscribes to!

In our age, moral relativism—the belief that deciding right from wrong is a matter of personal choice—prevails. There is no absolute authority recognized in morality; no clear, widely accepted standard of human conduct and behavior. True freedom, we are told continually, can only be achieved by unshackling ourselves from traditional standards of human behavior and living what is essentially a lawless lifestyle.

Of course, there are laws that—like the rays of the sun that tell us it is day, or the physical features that tell us the sex of a newborn baby—reveal the truth. Through the pages of the Bible, God outlines a multitude of wonderful and explicit laws—laws that tell us how to have successful marriages and relationships, how to raise stable and happy families, how to manage our finances, how to establish successful governments and systems of education, commerce and health. In many instances, God’s laws governing human conduct are even manifest in the material creation.

But like David and Kathy, how often do you reject those laws and choose to live lawlessly?

Consider homosexuality, a practice that, as the Apostle Paul wrote, is exposed even in the physical realm, by nature, as unnatural and aberrant (Romans 1:26-27). Yet much like David and Kathy rejecting the law of biology, and the obvious physical features identifying the gender of baby Storm, countless millions reject the law and even the physical evidence condemning homosexuality, and choose to embrace this unnatural, lawless, lifestyle.

The attempt to raise a genderless child is shocking, and probably a little more extreme than we are accustomed to seeing. From God’s perspective, however, it is a heinous though entirely unsurprising product of the more pervasivescourge of lawlessness besieging humanity!

When it comes to the issue of lawlessness, one of the most important questions we can consider is, Where did mankind’s abhorrence to law come from? Put simply, man’s tendency to reject law is the result of his mind being influenced by the devil, the evil spiritual being the Apostle Paul says is the “god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). God did not create this devil. Rather, he came about as a result of a specific action, which you can read about in Ezekiel 28. Here, we learn that the great archangel Lucifer was “perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” The moment “iniquity”—which means lawlessness—was found in Lucifer, he became Satan, the enemy of God.

From this moment, lawlessness became the defining characteristic of the devil—and today it is the defining characteristic of the world he rules!

When it comes to David and Kathy, it is easy to self-righteously condemn this couple for making such a despicable decision. But while the notion of raising a genderless child ought to invoke sadness and disgust, we must remember: In God’s eyes, every man cut off from Him and under the influence of the lawless devil is lawless just as this couple is!

Truly, to the contrite and reflective person, such lawless behavior is a shocking and sobering glimpse into his own heart. Moreover, it might also stir the mind to seek to learn more about the origins of this destructive culture of lawlessness, how to overcome it, and how to find and enjoy true freedom within the law.

If this is the case for you, then don’t hesitate—go right now and read the second chapter of our free book Mystery of the Ages.