Four headlines tell the story of six babies, three boys and three girls, and demonstrate the cultural confusion of our day.

Two headlines celebrating the births of a son to Boris Johnson and another to Anderson Cooper.  Johnson is the Prime Minister of England, not married to the mother of his latest child, and the father to an unknown number of other children. Anderson Cooper, an anchor for CNN and a partnered gay man, relied on surrogacy as babies still require a mother.

That reality brings us to the story of the third baby boy. His biological mother continues the court battle in the U.K. to have his birth certificate changed to align with the delusion of her own dysphoric understanding of herself as a man and not a woman.  She is raising her son to believe she is his father, not his mother.  To this point, the court has resisted conceding on the point, but the U.K. allowed a woman to legally be identified as a man and thus finds itself in a conflict created by the culture’s desire to accommodate gender dysphoric people by suppressing the truth of biological reality.

Now, to the headline about the three baby girls: “One of Britain’s first gay fathers is now expecting surrogate triplets in October with his daughter’s ex boyfriend.” If the math on that is hard to figure, consider for a moment the reality these three girls are being born into and the people by whom they are going to be raised. Their parentage includes an unnamed mother, again a surrogate, three men, one of whom is the former boyfriend of the daughter of one of the fathers. All of them reside together in the same house.

Do you remember when we were told that it doesn’t matter who a person loves and it has no impact on anyone else so why should a culture or country limit the definition of marriage in any way? This is why.

The failure of each and all of these individuals to acknowledge God’s design is resulting in a generation of children who will be raised by them, making generational the suppression of the truth the apostle Paul describes as “plain to everyone.”

If you want to understand God’s good – in fact, very good – design for human life and flourishing, read Genesis 1-2. Created in God’s image as distinctively male and female human beings, God gives the man and the woman to one another in a covenantal union we call marriage. Marriage is defined by God, not by us. And marriage is given by God for reasons that go way beyond the fleeting feeling of erotic love.

God gives marriage for a variety of reasons but first on the list is that marriage is an eternal reality between Christ and the Church. Marriage here and now is given by God as a glimpse, foretaste, representation and reflection of the indissolvable union of Christ to His Bride, the Church. Marriage is, therefore, marked by holiness, forgiveness, and sacrifice along with joy unending.

Additionally, God gives marriage for the blessing of mutual affection, the birth and nurture of children, and the ordering of society.  That’s why we read the aforementioned headlines with such grief. The layers of confusion, delusion, anarchy and generational rebellion are many.  What will these six babies be raised to believe about themselves, sexuality, relationships between men and women, the ordering of the home and God’s sovereignty over it all? Even if they are raised with all the advantages afforded them by affluence, what kind of ideas and ideals will be cultivated in their hearts and minds?

And, of potentially greatest concern to Christians reading this, how will these six children influence the children born into committed Christian homes where God’s design is honored? I’m thinking here of the babies born in just the past few weeks to couples in my own church – and yours.

I’m recalling here the encounter Moses had with God prior to the giving of the 10 Commandments. Let the Word of God from Exodus 34 sink in – to the 1000th generation.

The Lord said to Moses, “Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. ² Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. ³ No one shall come up with you, and let no one be seen throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze opposite that mountain.” ⁴ So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone. ⁵ The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. ⁶ The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, ⁷ keeping steadfast love for thousands,^[a] forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

What generation are we – and what of the generation even now being born?