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Once upon a time, a content creator looked out over his flock. Desperate for engagement. He cried out, Woke, woke! The global village rushes to his side and says, Where? Where is the woke? The content creator says, Look! Eowen pretends to be a man and slays the Witch King with her sword.

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I am no man.

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It's clearly a woke subversion of gender relations. The Global Village responds, that's not woke, that's J.R.R. Tolkien, a traditional Catholic who's building a world that is profoundly pre-modern in its understanding of men and women and society and social hierarchy. And so the Global Village retreats, leaving the content creator all alone. Desperate for engagement, he tries again. Woke, woke, he cries. The global village rushes back, says, Where? Where is the woke? He says, look, Sigorny Weaver is playing the hero in Alien, another clear subversion of gender roles. The Global Village says, that's not woke. She doesn't do anything that women can't do. She is a plucky, tough character. Why shouldn't she be a hero? And the Global Village retreats from the content creator, leaving him all alone. With no engagement, the content creator tries again. Woke, woke! The Global Village rushes back, says, Where? Where is the woke? Um, Interstellar? Um, Murph is played by Jessica Chastain when it could have been a man. And once again, the Global Village says, You have fooled us all these three times with your woke nonsense. The Global Village retreats, and the content creator is left all alone, twiddling his thumbs until adolescence comes out on Netflix. And once more, the boy cries woke. Woke! Woke, he cries. The Global Village says, What is it this time? Better be good. And the content creator says, Well, with knife crime, we expect a certain religion or ethnicity to be at fault. And it's not in this story. And the Global Village says, Yes, but it's really about adolescence more generally. And the content creator says, Well, no, it's it's about gender, and apparently men are entirely the problem. And the Global Village says, the men in this story are incredibly sympathetically portrayed, including the murderer himself. Are you sure you're not just the boy who cried woke? Like Andrew Wilson. So I watch the show, and it just goes through a typical feminine view. Or like Dan Wooden. Netflix is trying to use this piece of art as some type of psyop.

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Or like the Archcast. He is shamed for his temper. And in essence, told he should just bottle it up. This is not how men work. This is yet again a woman's solution to a man's problem.

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We are led to believe that this is woke nonsense that is corrupting our minds. And what is the global village to make of these calls of woke woke? Uh well, I think we can dismiss these calls of woke woke. I think we can dismiss them for two reasons. Uh, reason number one, there sometimes is an over-emphasis on social justice when it comes to storytelling that gets in the way of storytelling and that ends up corrupting the stories that people are trying to tell. One reason you might not want to cry woke woke is that you might want to keep your powder dry for instances where actually the epithet applies. Like, for instance, there are rumors that Meryl Streep might be playing Aslan in the next Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe if you're going to be panicked about certain casting decisions, uh, you need to pick your fights. But the boy who cries wolf, wolf, the entire time will not get anybody listening, even when there is a wolf. And when you see a problem with storytelling, a problem with Hollywood, a problem with Netflix, etc., etc., there can be problems, but if you're always crying woke, woke, then the global village will retreat from you and they are right to do so. Reason number one, not to cry woke, woke, at the show Adolescence, is because there might be a problem that you want to address, but why don't you address instances where this is indeed the problem rather than crying wolf when there is no wolf? Reason number two, not to call adolescence woke, is because it's not. It's it just isn't. And look, I'm gonna have to do a little detour, which is probably a necessary detour that we should do every time we use the word woke. And that is to do a little history of the etymology of the word. Now, to begin with, the phrase woke was a positive term applied to social injustice, largely racial injustice, and particularly the black community in America would use it to describe people who have become awakened to racial injustice. And to begin with, the word was an entirely positive word pointing out a problem that can be a real, real problem in this world. And so woke to begin with was about justice in society. But just as justice in society then became social justice then became something to be derided, so the word woke and becoming awakened to these injustice issues became something to be derided in itself. And that was because it was perceived that the use of the label woke was being extended into areas that were unwarranted. And the perception was that there were people claiming to be woke that were not just in the slightest. So woke went from being a descriptor of one particular instance of social injustice to becoming a phrase that was associated with hypocrisy. The sort of hypocrisy that is very interested in flying exactly the right kind of rainbow flag and putting exactly the right kind of pronouns in your bio and saying impeccably correct things on social media while not actually attending to true justice in the world. Woke then became seen as like the whitewash that Jesus warns against in Matthew chapter 23. The Pharisees of his day were far more interested in appearing righteous than actually being righteous. And Jesus said, that's like slapping on whitewash on a tomb. Inside there's dead men's bones. On the outside, it's gleaming in the Mediterranean sun, and this is the problem with hypocrisy. We can look good without being good. And this is how people started to understand the word woke, not as pointing out an actual injustice, but as projecting a false sense of righteousness out into the world. But now we are in an interesting situation. It's not just that woke is a word that's been stretched beyond its original meaning and perhaps lacks substance. The accusation that you're being woke is now itself an accusation that has been stretched beyond its original usefulness and now has no substance to it. There are people now crying woke, woke, when there is no woke. And there are actually three senses of woke that are contained within that word. There's the original sense of woke in terms of racial injustice, there is the hypocritical sense of wokeness that people fear, and then there is the accusation, woke, woke, um, when the accusation itself is baseless. Because look, imagine if the main character of adolescence, Jamie. Imagine if he was a different religion, imagine if he was a different ethnicity. Would the people who cry woke woke be happy if Jamie was a Muslim or if Jamie was a different ethnicity? Would they be happy with that given how the entire four-part series gives an incredibly nuanced, careful, and sympathetic depiction of Jamie. Despite all that Jamie did. You see, I think the people who've cried woke woke would not be happy at all if Jamie was uh their preferred skin color or religion. They would find a different reason to have a problem with adolescence, which goes to show that adolescence was an incredibly well-written piece that's not actually about ethnicity or religion. It's about something that goes deeper. It's about, well, it's in the title, isn't it? Adolescence. It's not about race or ethnicity, it's not about knife crime. Fundamentally, it touches on all these issues, but fundamentally it is about a universally human condition. And here's what I want to get to with adolescence: that adolescence is not talking about the black experience or the white experience or the white British experience or the Muslim immigrant experience or any of these things. Adolescence is about humanity, and we know this because the character who is named so often in this drama is Adam. Adam turns out to be a peripheral character, the the son of a police officer who plays no direct role really in the unfolding of the plot, and yet the name Adam is spoken often. As adolescence begins, the very first voice we hear is the voice of Adam.

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Morning, Dad. Um, how's that bad stomach again?

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Adam is leaving a voice note for his father who is eating an apple. Adam's father makes a big deal of eating apples.

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I don't think apples are good for my stomach acid or something. Why do you eat them then? Well, it's Tracy's idea. Instead of cigs, get through like six a day.

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And Adam is not doing what his father tells him to do. Go to school.

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Anyway, did Adam go in?

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Later on in episode one, Jamie's father, played by Stephen Graham, is really all at sea. He is lost in the chaos, and he says to one of the police officers, I don't know you from Adam, mate. It's the matter where you want to mean. I don't know you from Adam. When the world falls apart, it might as well be everybody who is Adam. As episode two begins, we look at a memorial and we hear the word Adam. Adam. Adam is the first word we hear in episode two. It's a word that we hear a lot in episode two.

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Adam. Adam. The albascum is also Adam's dad. Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam. Adam.

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The episode begins with the interaction between Adam and his father, and it ends with the interaction between Adam and his father. And again, as we finish with Adam, we also finish with death. We also finish with the memorial. Adam is being foregrounded in adolescence. And the central drama is about Jamie and his father, and it becomes obvious that Jamie's father himself was not fathered very well. And you start to ask the question, are the sins of the fathers being passed on to their children to the third and maybe even the fourth generation? This is a drama all about man. Man in its more ancient and universal sense. Some people think adolescence is pointing its finger at men and saying men are the problem. I don't see that at all. I think adolescence is pointing its finger at man and saying man is the problem. And that's right. Now I don't think adolescence is perfect by any means. I think it gets a number of things wrong. I think it's uh ridiculous how bad the school is. They certainly throw uh high school completely under the bus. Secondly, we don't really hear the victim's story at all, uh, kind of secondhand through her friend in episode two, uh, but I don't think that's sufficiently paying attention uh to the victim and her story. But perhaps my biggest problem is with the central conceit of adolescence that uh this kid in a stable family uh ends up going so catastrophically off the rails. Uh, when you read the stories of those who have been murderers in these situations, uh, their family backgrounds are not exactly like this. But I will forgive adolescence this overreach because I think it brings to bear this truth that we are all living in the world of Adam. We're all living in this world in which the sins of the fathers are passed on to the children and to their children's children, to the third and fourth generation. We are living in this kind of world in which you cannot fully protect yourself from this kind of evil simply by having the right family structure, by simply following the rules. We live in Adam's world, and in Adam's world, evil does burst in, and so I'm thankful to adolescents for teaching us that story. You might think the story of Adam is purely a bleak story to tell in this world, but it actually solves some of the problems that we began the video with. This whole crying of woke, woke, and the weaponization of the epithet woke is based on a kind of self-righteousness, isn't it? Those who use their woke virtues as virtue signaling are kind of involved in the hypocrisy that the story of Adam totally undercuts. Also, those who want to point the finger at others and say that they're the hypocrites, well, that can be a hypocrisy too, but the story of Adam undercuts that as well, because the story of Adam says we are all in the same boat, and that boat is a leaky boat. The world that is self-righteous and the world that is angry needs the story of Adam because we need to be told that we are all part of the problem, and there's no use pointing the finger at somebody else because three fingers are then pointing back at you. It might be a bleak story to tell the Adam story, but A, it's true, and B, it's incredibly useful in our age. When we're tempted to think that the bad people are out there and us over here, we are part of the solution. Uh-uh. Adam's story won't let us think that. Adolescence is a very human story. That's why it's such a hopeless story, because there is no second Adam in this story. On our sister channel, Reform mythologists Nate Morganlock and Thomas Thoroughgood speak about uh adolescence. I thoroughly recommend you go and check out their discussion of adolescence there. There, Thomas Thorgood says, this is an under the sun kind of a story. You know how in Ecclesiastes, the most hopeless book of the Old Testament, it says meaningless, meaningless is this life under the sun that we live. There are some stories that can be told of transcendence, and we love those stories, but there are other stories to be told about life under the sun, life within the human frame. The life of Adam, the life of selfishness and perishing and hopelessness. Adolescence is a brilliant story about Adam, about man, about hopelessness. At the end, the father and mother of Jamie wrestle with what they could have done differently, and the mother says, I think it would perhaps be okay to admit that we made some mistakes.

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Should we as a model?

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I think it'd be good if we accepted that maybe we should have done. I think it'd be okay for us to think that.

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And where you get to by the end of this story is the inevitability of the drumbeat of the sins of the father being passed down to the next generation and the next generation. And you get this admission that even though there feels to be this inevitability, nevertheless there's culpability as well. It so well describes life in Adam. Life in Adam, we are thrust into this world and the sins of our fathers do rest on our heads, and their choices do impact us. And this cursed, selfish world that is dying is our environment inescapably so. And we find ourselves passing things on from one generation to the next, to the next, to the next, and yet it is still okay for us to say there is culpability here. I think it's okay to admit that we have made mistakes along the way, and at the very end, Stephen Graham playing the father, confesses that he wished he had done better with his boy. Pain and suffering and strife and struggle and sin seems inevitable and it seems culpable in the world of adolescence, and I think that is a very true depiction of life under the sun. But that's why it's so hopeless. That's why adolescence is so hopeless. There is no God in this story, and therefore there is no hope in this story. There is only Adam, there is not the second Adam. So what hope can we give? I love the story in Mark chapter 10. It's been depicted in so many different works of art. People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. It's this scene of parents desperate to get their children to the source of beauty and truth and goodness and hope. Because parenting is hard and little children, they're so innocent. This is what makes the story of adolescence so compelling. You've got this kid who's in this in-between space, he's barely a teenager. He looks so young, he looks so innocent, and yet he's capable of such evil and monstrosity. And so I as a parent watch adolescence and I think I just I need to get my kids to Jesus. I need to get my kids to a source of something that is good and beautiful and wise and true and sane and enduring and hopeful. I'm desperate to get my kids to Jesus. I don't know. If you're a parent, are you desperate to get your kids to Jesus? Are you desperate to get them to the source of goodness and truth? As they do this, uh verse 13, the disciples rebuked the parents. You know, if the main thing you're being made to feel about your parenting is that you're getting it wrong, that spirit in this instance is represented by the disciples here, rebuking people. Jesus is too important for children, is the assumption of the disciples. And they think they are praising Jesus by saying, Jesus is too important for children, right? Um, Jesus turns that on its head in verse 14. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant, okay? Jesus accuses the disciples. He says, You're too important for children. And he means that as a rebuke, as a criticism. He's indignant. He is righteously ticked off at the disciples. You know, sometimes the representatives of Jesus can do the worst job of representing Jesus. But Jesus said to them, Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Children do not earn or perform or achieve. They don't audition to be part of the family. You know, the way into a family is never to audition for the family. You don't have to apply to the family. You don't have to run a race or do a test or lift a heavy weight. You never audition for a family. The only way into a family, well, there's two ways into a family, aren't there? You can either be born into a family or you can be adopted into the family, but both ways, it is the prior love of the parents that means you're in. You don't audition for a family, and you don't audition for heaven either. You don't perform for heaven, you don't achieve heaven. It's about the prior love of a father in heaven who sends his only son to adopt you into that family. And you are welcome, not on the basis of achievement or performance, you are welcome as a little child. The kingdom of God belongs to such as these. These are little children who Jesus is able to pick up in his arms. So these are really little children, okay? Toddlers maximum, okay? Is the kind of age bracket we're thinking in. Truly I tell you, verse 15, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them, and blessed them. I've been thinking about adolescence all week, and I've been thinking about this passage of scripture all week, because I love the word anyone in verse 15. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God. It's not just the disciples who are rebuked, who need to become like children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, it's the parents as well. The parents need to be reminded that their first task in this world is not to bring their children to Jesus, right? I actually found this so challenging and so liberating this week. As I'm thinking about adolescence, as I'm thinking about Mark chapter 10, my number one job is not to think of all the ways that I'm failing to bring my kids to Jesus, not to think of all the ways in which I could do better at bringing my children to the source of ultimate truth and goodness and beauty and sanity and groundedness and moral health. The number one thing I need to do is not to bring my children to Jesus. The number one thing I need to do is I need to get to Jesus. I need to be one of the any ones of verse 15. I need to be a person who becomes like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. I need to find myself in the arms of Jesus, in the love of the Father, in the blessing of the Spirit. I need to realize that I do not audition for this role in life, but I am found within a prior love. A love that holds me, a love that grounds me, a love that blesses me, a love that sets me on my feet, and then says, now, as a child, go and be a parent. Adolescence has no good news for us. It has a lot of truth for us, but it has no good news for us. It tells us that the sins of the fathers are passed on to their children, to the third and to the fourth generation. But the gospel of Jesus Christ says there is a second Adam. There is one who has lived our life for us, resisted all temptations, hammered out a true, perfect humanity in our name and on our behalf. He has gone to the cross to bear our curse, to bear our sins, to bear our wrath. And he is risen again so that he can now give us his spirit. And anyone who will simply come to him as a little child, we get his father as our father, his spirit as our spirit, his blessing as our blessing, and we begin life again as children. If you're a disciple, the first thing you need to be is a little child. If you're a parent, the first thing you need to be is a little child. And if you're feeling utterly crushed by the burden and guilt of being a parent in this age, and you think, how am I ever gonna raise children that don't end up like Jamie? Well, learn from adolescence, yeah, there are some things you are doing that are wrong. And I think it's okay to admit that. But then having admitted that, won't you come to the second Adam, the one who's lived your life and died your death and risen again to give you his spirit, and with him and in him become like a little child first, somebody who doesn't have the answers, but someone who is nonetheless blessed by heaven, so that you can pass that love on to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. How is the cycle broken? The cycle is broken at the cross of Jesus Christ, who takes the curse of the generations on himself, rises again to offer us his spirit that we might be born again into a new kind of dynamic, into a new kind of kingdom, in which we all come as little children, in which guilt is no longer the atmosphere, but grace is. That's how the cycle is broken. That's the answer to Adam, the second Adam. That's the answer to adolescence, to come to Jesus, and whether you are a disciple or whether you are a parent or whoever whoever you are, you need to begin again with Jesus. Let the sinking sand of adolescence show you what life in Adam truly is, and then flee to the rock of Christ. He says anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it, but he is the one who takes children in his arms, places his hands on them, and blesses them. I need to trust myself to this Jesus, I need to trust my parenting to this Jesus, I need to trust my children to this Jesus. Because the way of Adam has no hope. If you want to find out more about these two atoms, or if you want to find out more about the threeness of God, Father, Son, and Spirit, if you want to find out more about becoming one with Jesus, we've got a great course for you. It's called 321, go to 321course.com. Enter your email address, start a password, and you're in. We won't spam you, there are no charges, but you can discover life according to Jesus. Go to 321course.com and it's a great way for you to pass on the faith to others. If you're a Christian and your friends have got questions about Jesus, this is a great thing to be able to send to them and say, here is life according to Jesus. Go to 321course.com and please do all the great things like click like on the video. Have you done that yet? Uh share it with a friend, subscribe to the channel, and we'd love to see you on the next one. God bless.