What Are We Doing To Our Youth?

There is a disturbing trend among our youth.

Just last week, my little community here in the Annapolis Valley was shattered by the news that a 17 year old girl had taken her own life due to a series of mounting challenges which made her question her value and purpose in life.

This is tragic. Suicide has quickly risen to be the second leading cause of death among teens here in Canada. While teenagers and youth have always faced challenges and pressures, it seems as though there is a pervasive feeling of helplessness and hopelessness among the teens of today. I coach youth soccer every summer, and each summer my wife and I see the hurt of broken families and hopeless youth. We can hear them talking:”What is the point of anything?”

There are many reasons for this hopelessness. Our youth are subjected to doomsday scenarios such as climate change wiping out humanity in ten years. If you are a 15 year old and hear that there most likely won’t be a world left when you reach 25, that result is devastating. They hear about the theory of evolution, and the only logical conclusion to draw from that is that humanity has no meaning. We are all the result of a cosmic mistake in time, an act of random chance, and we are just like all the other animal species that have come and gone. We are here for a bit, and then we vanish into the history of the supposed billions of years that have gone by. If the youth hear they are just another animal and it’s survival of the fittest, the question becomes: Why should they treat each other with any respect at all? Bullying is on the rise, and it has become of the leading factors leading to self-harm and worse. With the introduction of social media and smart phones, the pressures have mounted and the stakes have risen higher. We are engaged in a battle for the souls of our youth, and even now we see them leaving the church in droves, launching themselves into a world system that is run by Satan himself.

There is one solution, a solution we as preachers and pastors and Christians must look at. We need to instill the amazing fact that we are created in God’s image back into our youth who are in the church. The first eleven chapters of Genesis are crucial in restoring hope for our youth, and for humanity in general. Sadly, what was once taken at face value (six literal days of creation crafted by the hands of God Himself) has been devalued into the lie the devil whispered to Eve in the Garden of Eden…”Did God really say…?”

And whether we want to admit it or not, we have fallen for that same method of attack from the evil one. He has successfully managed to plant doubt in the truth of God’s Word in even the church today. “Did God really say…Jesus is God?” “Did God really say…He created the world in six days?” “Did God really say…we are born sinful?”

Boom! Boom! Boom! These missiles of deceit from the evil one crash against the foundation of our faith and have successfully managed to undermine the authority of God’s Word as found in the sixty-six books of the Bible. It happens so easily and so subtly. To believe in a six literal day creation, for example, makes us the object of scorn. “Science has disproven this!” the world crows triumphantly…and we slink back from the scorn, and try to find a way to reconcile the world’s opinion with God’s timeless truth.

Are we really trying to reconcile a way of thinking from a world system that is under the control of the evil one to God’s infallible truth? Are we really trying to find a way to incorporate the ideas of God’s enemy the devil into God’s truth?

“Did God really say…?”

When we remove a six day creation from our faith and stop taking it as fact, there are many dominoes that fall. We create doubt in the validity of the Bible. After all, if we can interpret Genesis 1 in a different way other than is presented to us, why can’t we reinterpret the resurrection of Christ in a different way than presented? If the devil can convince us to question the opening verses of God’s Word, he can certainly convince us to question the rest of Scripture. Satan knows God’s Word better than we do.

Death came into the world as a judgment on sin. Yet evolution would convince us to see death not as a judgment, but as a natural part of the created order that God said was very good. God decreed that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:20). It’s very clear that death comes upon those who sin. If we remove death as a judgment for sin, we are left with a Savior whose death and resurrection means nothing in the salvation plan. Jesus bore our sin upon Himself and was treated by God the Judge as if He were us…our sin was imputed to Him, and He had to die to pay the price for that sin. If death isn’t a judgment, then Jesus only did what God intended all of us to do anyway and there is no paying the price for our sin.

If we remove Genesis 1-11 as literal history, we make Jesus out to be a liar. He drew upon Genesis many times in His earthly ministry and it is obvious that Jesus took it as literal history. Are we saying we know more than the incarnate Son of God?

If Genesis isn’t literal history, then we have no purpose in life. God made man and woman in His image. We have value as human beings. We are not just another species. In allowing the poison of evolution to creep into the church, we have diminished that to our youth. Our youth are confused. They want a solid foundation of why they matter. That starts in Genesis where God declared He made man and woman in His image. Adam was called the son of God…not an evolved being. By diminishing Adam’s historical role in the Gospel account (Genesis 3:15), we remove the special place God gave human beings in creation. We reduce human beings to nothing more than another in a line of evolutionary species that will fade away. We see the devastation of this thinking: human life has become disposable. Abortion is seen as a convenient way to cover up sin. That unborn baby? Made in the image of God and we have developed ways to destroy that image. Human euthanasia? Now governments are trying to greenlight murdering our citizens of all ages because they suffer from mental illness instead of caring about them as the image bearers of God and getting them the help they need. We live in a culture of death, and the church is not doing enough to stand up to the onslaught and say “No more.” In fact, in many cases, the church is aiding and abetting the evil one in his quest to destroy God’s creation.

Climate change has many youth feeling hopeless. But as Christians, do we remember that it is God who decides when the end of history comes? Human action will never bring about the end of humanity. Now, to be consistent, this isn’t a green light to simply destroy the earth how we want. As Adam was placed in the Garden to take care of it, so we are placed in this world to take care of it. This world is a gift from God that we are to be good stewards of. In this sense, we absolutely should decry the waste and the greed that is destroying God’s good earth. 

But to believe that the world will end in 10-15 years because of humanity? We know better. Human history will not end until our blessed Lord Jesus returns and then He is not coming to destroy. He is coming to make all things new. He is coming to remake the earth, destroy all evil and sin and death, and bring His beloved people to our eternal home. Until that day, we carry on our work.

The world is doing a good enough job destroying our youth. Please, church, let’s not assist the world in its work. Let’s teach our youth that Genesis is real, it is literal history, all life is precious, all people are made in the image of God, and that God is so good and so loving; but He is also justice and wrath against sin. Let’s point them to Jesus Christ as the only hope of salvation, as the One who says “Come to Me, you who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.” Our youth deserve rest. Our youth deserve to be kids. We should be shielding them from being sexualized and from the lies of the evil one…that they mean nothing in the overall scheme of things.

How do we do this? Through the pure teaching and preaching of God’s infallible Word. By blocking out all noise that threatens their minds. By leading them in family worship and catechism, giving them a firm foundation upon which to stand when they are confronted by the systems of the evil one in this world.

We must protect our youth.