Divine truth is the sword we wield. Countless theories, philosophies, and worldviews have been raised against the knowledge of God. The natural man knows God exists and that he is righteous and good. He also knows he has fallen short of God’s glory. Instead of turning to his creator in light of this knowledge, he runs away and works to suppress the truth he knows (Romans 1:18).

When Jesus walked among us, he did not take arms against his enemies. He did not hire a political strategist or form a coup. His weapons of war were much different, and as believers, so are ours. Though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. Our weapons are spiritual and have divine power to destroy strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). We have several defenses in our armory but only one offensive weapon: the Word of God (Ephesians 6:10-17).
Divine truth is the sword we wield. Countless theories, philosophies, and worldviews have been raised against the knowledge of God. The natural man knows God exists and that he is righteous and good. He also knows he has fallen short of God’s glory. Instead of turning to his creator in light of this knowledge, he runs away and works to suppress the truth he knows (Romans 1:18).
In suppressing the truth, he builds his fortresses to buttress himself against God’s word. His complex interwoven arguments of naturalism, paganism, and other false religions cannot save him. Instead, they cut him off from the source of life.
In walks a Christian who has been set free from his self-destructive self-delusion by the Holy Spirit, and he is carrying a sword. It is the same sword that the Holy Spirit used to set him free.
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Written by David J. Ayers |
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Like contraception, abortion boomed. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were 198 abortions for every 1,000 live births in the United States. At the high-water point in 1984, there were 364 abortions for every 1,000 live births, and that number never dropped below 300 for 20 years from 1976 to 1996. There were over 44,500,000 abortions between 1973 and 2015, and many more since then. And dismal as they are, these statistics increasingly underestimate the number of abortions.

The latest abysmally low birth rates from North America, Europe, and Asia continue to alarm business leaders and policy makers, as well they should. In Europe, only France is within spitting distance of replacement level fertility. Italy’s has tanked so low as to be the subject of a highly publicized meeting between its Prime Minister and the Pope a couple months ago. Every part of North America, even Mexico, is below replacement. Asia is just as dismal or worse, with a huge majority, including all of our top trading partners — except the Philippines and (barely) India and (maybe) Vietnam — lower than replacement. Some have plummeted close to one baby per woman. When even the BBC touts headlines like “’Jaw Dropping’ Crash in Babies Being Born,” and the Economist devotes an entire issue to “The Baby-Bust Economy” just last month, well, we have a problem.
Yet for decades, many of these same hand-wringing elites and policy wonks have been pushing contraception and abortion with the intensity of engineers shoveling coal into speeding trains. And not just to help married folk space, delay, or limit childbearing. No, they want every adult to be able to have sex with as many people as they want, as often as they wish, regardless of marital status, without having any babies they don’t choose.
They want Every Adult to be able to have sex with as many people as they want, as often as they wish.
Since at least the 1960s, separating sex from procreation has been almost an obsession. In the United States, our largest political party is radically committed to this. In recent years, climate activists, including some celebrities, have even talked as if having babies is grossly irresponsible. We have “BirthStrikers,” and “anti-natalists” who wish they’d never been born. We even have the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement,” the subject of a recent article in the Atlantic they listed as a “must read.”
And now? The chickens have come home to roost.
Let’s look at how contraception use exploded in the 1960s, naturally leading to abortion-on-demand — these two together being the fraternal twins most responsible for our deepening Demographic Winter. We will focus on the United States, starting with contraception.
Not even counting voluntary sterilization, contraception has been around for a long time. As a PBS historical piece covered, condoms, sponges, cervical caps, diaphragms, douches, and even intrauterine devices all existed at some point in the 1800s. But they weren’t reliable, were often “messy and awkward to use,” embarrassing to obtain, and women didn’t like the fact that it was men who controlled condoms. Then along came “The Pill” in 1960. As that PBS documentary put it, “The Pill … was female-controlled, simple to use, highly effective, and … separated reproduction and contraception from the sexual act. The Pill could be taken anytime, anywhere, and without anyone else knowing.”
The Pill & the Sexual Revolution
Most analysts of the 1960s sexual revolution have identified the widespread availability of “The Pill” as a key element and cause of this movement.
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As fate—or perhaps providence—would have it, Darby’s premillennial eschatology and the stark intensity of his heaven-earth dualism caught on not just in Southern England, but in America. Reshaped in the hands of other ministers, theologians, and popularizers, his ideas and those of his Plymouth Brethren colleagues would in due time change the trajectory of American evangelicalism and the nation’s culture. The ideas presidents kicked around in the Oval Office can be traced back to his work.

A century ago, dispensationalism was the most dynamic force in American Christianity. Generations before Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels took America by storm, millions fervently believed the rapture could happen at any moment. The signs of the times seemed to say as much, since according to the dispensationalist reading of Revelation, plagues, wars, and a one-world government headed by the Antichrist would come as soon as Jesus spirited his people away to heaven. 
The institutional empire of nonprofits, colleges, and parachurch organizations built by Dwight Moody and his protégés grew in part out of this expectancy. So did the ministries of innumerable premillennialist evangelists, including the aging Billy Sunday. It is what drove sales of that landmark piece of dispensationalist scholasticism, the Scofield Reference Bible. Most important of all, belief in Christ’s imminent coming drew many thousands to burgeoning Bible colleges, serious-minded prophecy conferences, and missions agencies. These institutions inculcated the movement’s theology in a vast army of pastors and interested laymen, who disseminated it to their readers, followers, and congregants. While dispensational thought involved far more than eschatology, all this cultural momentum came from apocalyptic speculation and the scientific aura about its inductive, literalist approach to the Scriptures. A betting man might have put his money on dispensationalism swallowing the nascent Fundamentalist movement whole. 
A betting man would have backed the wrong horse. To be sure, other cultural and theological forces like covenant theology also had significant numbers of adherents in the interwar period. But as Daniel G. Hummel shows in his invaluable new book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, neither liberalism nor covenant theology proved to be the movement’s undoing. It was instead dispensationalism’s own vast cultural appeal. By the turn of the twenty-first century, one could hardly find an evangelical theologian who took traditional dispensationalist ideas seriously. What remained, Hummel writes, was “a movement with no vested national leaders, a scholastic tradition with no young scholars, [and] a commercial behemoth with no internal cohesion.” Dispensationalism was dying.
Which is why the story Hummel relates badly needs telling. Magisterial studies like Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse, Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, and George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture left unexamined the depth of dispensationalism’s impact on the broader evangelical movement, and the roots of dispensationalist theology lay outside the purview of these studies. Hummel, by contrast, takes the reader back to Plymouth, a midsize port city on England’s southern coast that birthed the nonconformist sect known as the Plymouth Brethren.
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