Understanding the Modern Polygamy Movement

We have with us today for the first time, Pastor Joel St. He has become a friend. I've known him actually for a few years, I suppose, because he started coming to the men's retreats that we do. And he runs the Future of Christendom Conference.

Futureofchristendom .org is the website if you wanna check that out. If you live in Pennsylvania especially, you should definitely check it out. He is the pastor of the Independent Reform Baptist Church in Morgantown, Pennsylvania.

And we're gonna talk about polygamy a little bit today. Welcome Pastor Joel St. Thank you for being willing to talk about this.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So this is kind of an interesting topic I have never delved into in depth, but I'm looking forward to it because I think I explained before we started recording, and I want everyone else to know this.

When I was in my early teenage years, I stumbled across this fringe website that argued that Christians should have more than one wife if you're a man. And now I have to qualify that because of all the advances since my early teens, they're not really advances, they're regressions.

But now, who knows, maybe there's a website arguing that there should be multiple lesbian relationships and all kinds of arrangements that we can't even begin to imagine. But at the time I stumbled on this website that said, men should have more than one wife.

And they made some compelling arguments, I thought, that I hadn't heard before, some of them from scripture. And I've since rejected the logic that I came across, but you showed me some websites where guys who are advocating this sort of thing are trying to make their way into evangelical circles.

And this is something I think most of the audience would assume is in Muslim and Mormon or fundamentalist Mormon communities. So to start off, you've been working on this, how deep and influential is this thinking?

How big of a problem is it in the church, the Christian church?

Yeah, John, I think it's a bigger problem than what we think. Without going into it too deeply, I found some people who are even slightly prominent in some circles who are privately embracing this idea that the Bible teaches that it is legitimate.

And this is the key right here. It's legitimate for a man to have more than one wife. And they go to certain passages in the scripture in order to do this. But I think we've got a bigger problem here.

As a pastor, I look out of my congregation on a Sunday morning, and I hope and trust that no one, none of the men there or women actually have a porn issue. But the numbers, John, say that porn is a big problem in Christian circles.

And I've been wondering for a long time how this is gonna manifest itself. And I think I found out how it's going to manifest itself. It's this idea that it's not only, well, what's happening is that the polygamy people or polygyny people, they're attacking the folks that say one man, one woman.

They're saying this is a made up doctrine by some Christians who, you know, for whatever reason. And they say things like, well, God said, you know, be fruitful and multiply, which I find as a interesting argument because if there was ever a time to have more than one wife, it would have been at the beginning of creation.

That's the time to really be fruitful and multiply. Hey, Adam, here's a, I don't know what, we have 14 ribs, however many, right? God did not run out of ribs. He took one rib, he made one wife for Adam.

If there was ever a time to argue, be fruitful, multiply, we need more wives, that would have been the time. In addition to that, I mean, you know, pretty much men being born to women is pretty much one to one, pretty much the case.

Now there's some websites out there that are advertising things like, polygamy websites like, hey, two girls for every boy. The math, I'm not a mathematician here, but if it's one to one, as it was in the very beginning, we can't do two girls for every boy here.

We can't get our theology from the beach boys, which is where it seems to be coming from, the Corsaic stuff, two girls for every boy. Now let's get it from the scriptures, from the beginning, and Christ, when he goes to discuss marriage, he goes back to the beginning, Adam and Eve.

And for this man shall, and he talks, as Paul did, for this man shall, this Corsian man, leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, not his wife, shall cleave to his wife. And the two shall be one.

And this is a problem for the polygamy people, because how are you one flesh with all these different wives? I don't know how that works. They try to make it work, they can't do it. Now what they wanna do is they wanna say, well, it's never condemned.

Yeah, it is. Kings, for example, were not allowed to multiply wives. And also, church leaders were not allowed to have more than one wife either. Now I wanna address that a little bit here. And, okay, I'm taking off here, John.

You can cut me off anytime here.

That's fine.

But I wanna address this. Okay, you've got a church, let's say Titus there in Crete, and he was dealing with some very difficult people, as Paul describes, extremely difficult people. And he talks about the husband of one wife for church leadership there.

Now, what they say is, well, that's just, well, there's a couple of things I've run into. One of them is that what it really means is the husband of a wife. Well, what are you gonna be if you're not a husband of a wife?

That's a crazy argument. He needs to be a husband.

So wait, well, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but does that mean that single people can't be church leaders in that, if you interpret it that way? I would think it would be, I don't know.

That's what some of them try to do.

Okay.

They use that word mia, you know, so he has to be a husband of a wife. Okay, well.

Calling Jesus.

Yeah, would not have qualified there, for sure. But then what they do is they say, well, that's, and this is the bigger argument that I've run into, is, well, that's just for the church leadership. That means that someone else can have more than one wife.

Okay, you can't do that either. Because if you're gonna do that, then you're gonna say, like Paul says, not given to wine. Well, I guess then if you're not a church leader, you can be a drunk, not a brawler, right?

Well, I guess if you're not a church leader, you can pick fights and you can be a brawler. No, everything that he says there is a qualification for good, honest Christian men. So you cannot use that argument.

Plus, think about this. If you're trying to build a church, you have a pastor, he's a husband of one wife, he's not gonna be a pastor there forever, he's gonna grow old, he's gonna move on, whatever. Where are you gonna get your future leadership from?

Well, you're talking about Crete, you're talking to Timothy, you're not talking about a seminary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where we can go for a lot of good, qualified seminarians. Just kidding, you've dealt with that extensively.

No, you're gonna get your leadership from the church. Well, if everybody's a brawler and everybody's a drunk because they're allowed to do that because they're not church leadership and everybody's married to more than one wife, where are you going to get your future leadership from?

You're just not going to have it. So this applies as example to everyone else and that's exactly what Paul says to Titus, be an example. So the prohibitions that Paul lays out there are an example and they apply to everyone who names the name of Christ.

You know, there was an article years ago that Nancy Piercy shared, I can't seem to find it now, but it was intriguing. It was from, I think, a secular publication, but it made the case that monogamy was the genius of the West.

In other words, all the energy that men would use in pursuing, you look at like a tribal society, let's say, and in pursuing multiple women and fathering all these children that they might have, or maybe they don't father them, the wives just take care of them, but that energy was instead in Western societies, and we're talking really Christian societies here, channeled into producing beautiful art, houses, inventions, and accredited monogamy with the reason for this.

That was the main difference between societies and Western society having monogamy. There was loyalty, commitment. A lot of these nurtured virtues that then built society up instead of left it in sort of a pre-modern state.

And so I think even secular people at some level, if they're thinking straight, recognize this was an advancement to not have multiple wives. But the guys who are arguing this wanna say that we would be better off.

I even remember Glenn Beck once on his program argued, and he wasn't saying for like right now, present day, but he was saying for not that long ago, we're talking the 1800s, I guess the mid -1800s, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and these guys, that it was good for them to have multiple wives at that point because circumstances were their group was gonna die out, their religion was gonna die out, and so to advance the religion, they needed this.

I'm wondering if that's the same argument being brought up now is like the Christianity's going away, we're losing it to the left. I don't know if these guys are arguing from the right side of things politically, but hey, if we have more kids, then the math works in our favor.

Is that the main draw card or what is it?

That is certainly one of them that I've run into, but that just doesn't work at all either. First of all, I've read a little bit about Joseph Smith. Some people believe that at one point he had as many as 70 wives.

Now, what kind of religion do you have if you have to multiply wives in order to sustain it? And again, think about the math again here, John. If men and women are born pretty much one to one, and let's say he has half that many, let's say he has 35 wives, are there not 34 men who are not gonna have a wife at all?

And in the end, what you're gonna have is you're gonna have to have wife swapping. You're gonna have to have women sharing. You're gonna have to do that. If one guy is marrying tons of women, what are the other guys going to do?

Think about it. Now, there's another flaw on this as well that I just wanna point out. And that is, I mean, again, not to have anybody's eyes glaze over here, but think about this. Let's say one guy marries five women and they each have five children, let's say.

And so one guy says, look, I have 25 children. Wow, isn't this one? Well, what's the difference between four other guys? Let's say they all marry one, one to one. In other words, it's the amount of women.

They can still have 25 children. You are not adding anything. You're not marrying multiple wives there at all because the other guys that could have married them doesn't have any children. And they argue this all the time.

And I don't know if these folks are like that. John, I don't know if they're that seriously mathematical.

The production of children does not change in this scenario. Yeah, I see what you're saying.

It doesn't. But they'll make that argument all the time. And you can't, and you cannot do it. You can't. And I don't, again, I don't know if it's a math problem. Some of these are pretty smart people.

I don't get it. But they make the argument all the time.

So what about the patriarchs? Because I know they're the ones brought up the most because you don't have examples in the New Testament, positive examples of people that were authors of scripture or leaders in the church who were polygamists that I know of.

But if you go back to the Old Testament, then you find Moses had multiple wives, so did Abraham, so did Isaac, so did Jacob. What do you do with them?

Yeah, so let's start here with, well, Moses is an easy one. There is no way you can prove or demonstrate that Moses had multiple wives. It cannot be done. He married a Midianite woman. And when you, Calvin, for example, studies this.

And Calvin, what he does is he, because they say the Cushite woman there, I think in the Numbers 11.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's a couple of things going on there. First of all, we don't know if his first wife was still alive at the time or not. We just don't know. We do not have any positive statement that he had more than one wife at the same time.

But getting back to Calvin, John Calvin, what he does is he quotes a scholar who's really studied it, and he makes a connection between the Cush people and the Midianite people, and saying this could have easily been his original wife.

So again, you don't have a positive case here at all for Moses having more than one wife at a time. You could try, but you can't do it.

Well, you often hear, especially in the social justice circles, that he added, and they say Ethiopian woman, who was black, and this is their argument for, I guess, interracial marriage, and nations are more than just monolithic people groups and that kind of thing.

Well, and then actually, you know what? The main argument they make, the main reason they bring it up is that because Miriam, I think, is, right, and Aaron too, they're chastised for condemning this that they were just a bunch of bigots didn't want Moses in an interracial, but I don't see that in the text.

But if what you're saying is true, it's definitely not in the text.

No, no, it's not. And if you wanna go ahead and say, well, look, it was a Cushite woman, and therefore he shouldn't have married her. Well, if the Cushite woman and the Midianite woman are the same person, then you can't, Midian was also a son of Abraham, for example, through Keturah.

So you can't even make that argument that it was this cross interracial.

Use a different text.

Don't use that one.

Go someplace else. That's not the right one. Now, I wanna talk about, I wanna talk about, Jacob is always the big one. People come up with Jacob all the time. I wanna talk about Jacob, and I wanna talk about Abraham.

First of all, Jacob and Abraham were both one woman men. When it came to having relations with other women, it was never their idea. It was not Abraham's idea to take, that was Sarah's idea, to take Hagar.

Never Abraham's. He was not this lustful guy checking out Hagar. She's pretty nice. No, he was a one woman man. Same way with Jacob. And the polygamy, they really hate it when I say this, but Jacob was a one woman man.

He loved Rachel. He never, ever, we know this from the text, he had no interest in poor Leah. Now Laban, see the father of polygamy is a really bad guy, and it's Laban. Laban is the guy, and Laban was into money.

He was just a bad person. You remember, for example, when you read the, without going into it too deeply, when Abraham's servant goes to get a wife for Isaac, Laban is, it appears as if he's not really all that into it, but then he sees how wealthy, all these gifts that Abraham's servant has, and Laban is really interested in this.

Now he's interested. Laban is the guy who introduced Jacob to polygamy. Now, we see that we had some problems with conception and so forth, and then Jacob goes into the handmaids and all this kind of stuff.

Never his idea, though. He ever, we only know he ever only wanted one woman, and that was Rachel. And some people, there's some people who say, well, that was, I've seen some symbols like Jacob's tent, right?

And it's a symbol of a roof, you know? And there's Jacob in the middle, right? And there's two women on each side. Read the passages. It was war. It was battle. It was women trading mandrakes out in the field for Pete's sake, for Jacob that night.

You know, and you wanna think like you're gonna be in charge, you know, Mr. Polygamist. You know, you get to do whatever you want. Well, that's not the picture that we see there with Jacob. We see Jacob, or Rachel and Leah, negotiating over who gets Jacob that night.

And not only that, I wanna get back to Laban for a second, that really bad guy, because he chases, you remember, he chases Jacob down. Jacob realizes that he has a problem with Laban. Jacob collects all of his children, everything, both wives, handmaids, and he takes off.

And a lot of people don't realize this, but when Laban and Jacob get to yelling at each other, Laban's like, why did you leave? And Jacob says, you've changed my wages 10 times. Laban says, well, if you ever abandon my children, or if you ever take other wives.

Oh, look who's against polygamy now all of a sudden, Mr. Polygamist himself. Okay, so he's introducing polygamy because it's an advantage to him. But when it's not an advantage to him, now he hates it.

Laban is your original polygamy pusher, and he is a really bad person.

Yeah, that's fascinating. And it is, when I have seen positive depictions, it is like they're all in harmony and peace, and obviously that's not true at all. And I don't know of any example from the Bible where that's true, but yeah, what about Abraham?

Yeah, in the case of Abraham, of course things really went south there as well, because he never, again, it wasn't his idea to go into Hagar, it was Sarah's idea. And even that being the case, he loved Ishmael.

And he said to God, oh, that Ishmael would stand before you because he loved Ishmael. Well, why not? Why did they get thrown out? Well, it's because, and we know the reason why. They had a party for Isaac.

Sarah looks over and sees Hagar mocking the whole thing and says to Abraham, hey, we can't have this. And then Abraham goes to God and God says, yeah, you gotta cast out the bond woman and her son. You gotta do this.

Where did this start from? It started from rivalry. This is not a good beginning here. But the polygamists are gonna do better. They're gonna do better than Abraham and Isaac and Job, for example. And this is another thing to bring up here.

I've interacted with some of these folks and they seem to have a problem with the idea of, well, let me back up a little bit. Their idea of adultery is relations with another man's wife. In my experience, they seem to have problems with the idea of relations with another woman who's not another man's wife.

And I've challenged some of them on this point. And they seem to be confused on it. Some of them seem to believe that relations with a woman who's not another man's wife is not actual adultery. Might be some sort of fornication, something like that.

In fact, in a podcast I did recently, I challenged them on the idea that Paul is saying that don't you understand that if you have relations with a harlot, you're one flesh with a harlot, Paul. In Corinthians, right?

And doesn't one of the guys, the only one that responded to that when I brought that up said, ah, now Paul's not talking about adultery. That's not adultery. All righty then.

He's talking about sexual relationships broadly.

Clearly it's adultery, but that's what they have to do. And that's, I mean, another person interacted with me, said, you know, it doesn't really matter what God did at the beginning. You know, one man, one, that doesn't matter.

And my response is, that's the kind of attitude you have to have if you're gonna be a polygamist. It doesn't matter what God did. That's got nothing to do with anything. There you go, that, there you go.

There you go.

You're probably a more holy man than I am. I don't know if you've ever seen, and I don't know if I've ever seen a whole episode myself, but have you ever seen a portion of like one of those, those shows where it's like, it's a contest, like the Bachelorette, I think used to be one.

Yeah, so I have to qualify this for my audience. I've never turned that on or had any desire to watch that, but I, I'll just throw my grandma under the bus here. My grandma used to watch one of those shows when I lived with her.

And I walked in a few times, more to mock it, you know, this is the most crazy, ridiculous thing I've ever seen. But I remember this one little clip of, of this girl. I think it was sort of the Bachelorette, I think it was the show, right?

And it was multiple guys. And she, and they filmed this over the course of, I think like a few days. It's not that long of a time period. And she says to the camera, I never thought it was possible to love multiple men, but now I know that it is.

And I'm thinking, love? I mean, you've been there, how, 48 hours? I mean, what is this, a week tops? And you're now saying you love multiple people. Obviously the word to her is much more shallow.

Than it is to me.

I don't think it is possible. I don't think, like, I think you can care for people, sure. But the one flesh that Paul's talking about, the union that's supposed to be accompanied by sexual intercourse and so forth, but obviously it's much more broad than that.

It is, it's emotions, and it's responsibilities and obligations. It's, there's a complimentary nature to this relationship. There's things we don't even understand that Paul says are mysterious. I don't think you can have that with more than one person.

And maybe that's just my gut speaking there, but I know I couldn't conceive of my wife having that with another man. And I know she couldn't conceive of me having what I have with her with another person simultaneously.

You can have a sexual union, I suppose, but that's not, that could be very shallow. That doesn't accompany all these other things that are supposed to accompany that covenant relationship. So anyway, I bring that up to say, these polygamists who want to tout the fact that they have two or more wives, I just don't, I guess I'm saying, I think they're liars.

I don't think that they can love them equally because I can't even think of examples in scripture where that's the case.

No, that hasn't happened. I mean, this woman who wants to love more than one man, she sounds like one of these love is love department. You know, what is love? Why is whatever I say is in the moment, which is one of the craziest, goofiest things in the world ever.

Yeah.

You mentioned honesty here, and this is something that I've run into a little bit here. I'm very familiar with a case where a man was trying to convince his wife that he should go out and get another wife.

And I'll tell you, John, it was really hard to watch because while he's talking to his wife and trying to convince her that it's legit for him to have another wife, he's alienating the wife he has. I mean, think of the irony here.

And I saw, I watched it. And John, it was hard to watch. I mean, as a pastor, you see some, as you know, you see some stuff that you'd rather not see. And this was certainly one of them. And I wanna talk about the honesty here.

There were a couple of interactions that I observed. One of them was this, when the wife asked the husband, you know, why do you wanna do this? I'm not kidding here. He came up with some reasons. Well, help around the house and companionship for you.

And, you know, just generally help with the kids. And she goes, oh, it's all about me, right? Nothing, nothing for you. It's all about me. Oh, come on. Oh, come on, come on, stop it.

You can get a maid, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pay a maid, Filipino maids. I mean, there's all kinds of maids you can get. You don't have to go to even the Philippines. Come on now. It's all, and she said it, she called him out. She said, oh, it's just all about me, is it?

Now that's just, that's just dishonest. Come on now, we know exactly what it's about here. But that, but he was willing to say that to his wife as if, well, I need another woman around here for you. It's all for you, sweetheart.

And yeah, and how's that going to work? I mean, think about it. How's that going to work? Another woman bossing your kids around under the same roof? That's going to work out, is it? If you think that, you know nothing about how women look at their own children and who gets to tell them what to do and who does not get to tell them what to do.

Yeah.

Well, that is the justification every man uses when they bring home a toy or anything that they know their wife isn't going to like. They always try to frame it like, don't you want me less stressed so I'll be more accommodating to you?

Well, this will help me. This new, you know, F -150 or new gun or whatever it is.

It's for you, sweetie.

Yeah.

It's for you. And in that same interaction, you know, the wife at a different point asked her husband, he said, what, you know, what do you... And this was even more painful. Asked her husband, what do you want?

What do you want in a wife? He said, well, I want someone who loves me, loves the kids, is going to support me. And she says, well, hello, here I am. I'm here now. And he had nothing to say because we know what this is about.

And for a lot of them that I've run into, it's like, well, I'm a real guy with this great sex, you know, sex drive. And you know, I'm like the man here. And I want to address that a little bit. I think there's two guys in scripture.

I mean, there's a lot of like real men in scripture.

Yeah.

But there's two guys that I just respect an awful lot. And these are, I mean, I just think they're huge guys. One of them is Mordecai. Mordecai was willing to go up against the king, most powerful man in the world at that time, not the king so much, but the king's guy, Haman, over not bowing to a guy who was a Haman, who was an Agagite.

Now God had said he was gonna have war with Amalek from generation to generation. And we're told that Haman was an Agagite. And I believe that's the reason why Mordecai would not show him respect. We're specifically told he was a descendant of Agag.

Mordecai put the entire nation there in Persia at risk, if you will, over what we would call a technicality. But he was a real man. He was a real man of God. He believed God and he was a man. We don't know if he was married at all, but another guy that I, he was a man and that's Daniel.

There's a man, there is a man. And I'm describing a man now as a man who does the right thing at the cost of his own life. He's gonna do the right thing no matter what. And Daniel did that on more than one occasion.

Now Daniel was a eunuch. Daniel can't have a wife and yet he was a real man. So these ideas of, well, I'm a real big man and I can handle more than one wife because I'm this real sexy guy. No, you know nothing about real manhood.

If you think it's sex, you know nothing about manhood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe the James Bond version of what a man is you can just fulfill sexual appetites and then leave in the next minute and never see the woman again is influencing people to think that that's, but behind that, I think there is likely a Darwinian type idea here because I know I've heard, I don't know how many times I've gone to museums, IMAX theater, places where you watch like a science show and it could even be about animals, but often I've heard it ascribed to humans that men are built in such a way or designed, well, it's funny because evolution can't design anything but they always ascribe these personality traits to this force that's chaotic.

But supposedly evolution has designed men to have multiple mates and for women to nest and to not do those kinds of things. And so they try to take cues from the animal kingdom wherever they can and then bring them into the human world.

And maybe sometimes they'll say things like we've, civilization has tamed and advanced men and that's maybe a positive or negative thing, but it does strike me as something that's very evolutionary. Like the whole foundation of that thinking is that we're basically animals and the slave of our desires, our impulses, I guess, our vices even, and that women just have a different set of vices than men.

But as we've degraded more, I don't know if you've noticed this, it seems to me that women seem pretty open, like the more they go into a direction of depravity, they're very open to multiple men. Put that in your evolution's pipe and smoke it, it doesn't seem to match.

Now, I mean, we're kind of off on a bad start here. When we say we're the most advanced, we say as human beings, right? We can talk, you know, we enjoy music, enjoy humor, we're the most advanced. All right, how about us most advanced people go back to the people that are not, or the beings that are not advanced to try to figure out how to be advanced?

Right, that's a good point, yeah.

I wanna do a Homer Simpson, don't, I mean, come on, come on now, what are you doing? And that's a mess anyway, I mean, I miss my tail that I supposedly used to have. I mean, you know, you got, you're holding two bags, you're holding the toy.

Where's my tail? Come on, that's advanced, I want my tail back. Okay, I never had a tail, all right. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth in seven day, six day, whatever, six day.

That's why I don't think the carnivore diet is right either, I mean, because that's a whole evolutionary thing of, you know, in the beginning we used to just eat meat and then we got to civilized and started eating berries and fruits.

And like good grief, it's the opposite actually.

Yeah, you were in a garden where there was trees, like you just take off, pluck off the fruit or whatever.

Right.

But now the thing of it is, is that, you know, the sex drive in men is a building drive. If we will do as God says and not fornicate, then we will build, a man will build, look forward to his wife, he'll build a house, he'll build a business looking forward and that drive is there for a reason and to control that drive is a great and godly and good thing.

And what the polygamous will say is, is that, well, that drive is there, it's meant to be fulfilled. No, there are times when that drive is meant to be controlled and I can't see the polygamous saying that at all.

Yeah, yeah, real man actually can control his, he's a master of it, as Paul said, he mastered his own body and I think of it like a dam in a way, like what do dams, they generate hydroelectric power, there's so many benefits from having a dam and that's, I think our social mores.

For the last, I don't know how many thousands of years, at least centuries in the Christian civilization and in Western European countries, we've been able to harness that energy and now the dam is breaking and it's breaking because of homosexual marriage, it's breaking because of general infidelity.

Just recently, I don't know if you saw, you probably don't care because you're in Pennsylvania, but New York last week, I think it was, or the week before.

I did see this.

Did you see it?

Yeah.

They decided to, it was kind of an archaic law, I suppose, just because it wasn't enforced, but they had a law that adultery was still illegal and you could be punished for it. The last person, I guess, who, I think they got off on a technicality, but in 2010, there was some case in New York where someone tried to impose that and they just, the legislature voted to eradicate that law, so we don't have that law, that protection doesn't exist for women anymore.

Good job, New York. Now, adultery is perfectly fine. It doesn't matter, the circumstances. I mean, it's bonkers, but that's breaking the dam, in my opinion, and what happens, the city gets flooded, you don't have any hydroelectric power anymore, everything's a mess, it's muddy, it's chaotic, and look around you and that's what society is becoming.

So, yeah, I mean, we're of the same mind on this. I wanted to ask you, though, because the most powerful justification, and it's not, I don't think it's actually a justification because nowhere in scripture do I see polygamy argued as a positive thing, nowhere, but the idea that the defensive measure that, well, it's not technically a sin, that's the strongest argument I can see that the polygamists have to try to justify what they're doing.

It's not, which is, you never wanna be there, by the way.

Like, I never wanna be like,.

Well, it's not technically a sin what I'm doing. Like, that's, you know, that's not an affirming standard and we're called in Philippians 4 to put our minds on affirming things, good, right, truthful.

So, here's the question. When Nathan, was it Nathan, I think? When he comes to David and he confronts him in 2 Samuel and he says, if you didn't sin with Bathsheba, God would have given you more horses, more, I think, money, more, there's a bunch of things, and more wives.

What do you say to that? Because it sounds like he's saying it's not, God would never grant something to someone that's sinful, right? He's not the author of sin.

Right, right, yeah. A couple of things. Paul says there, in the New Testament there, he's talking to Marcel and he's saying that there are certain things that God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.