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Foreign. It's Monday, June 15, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Really big news last night, but we're not exactly sure what the news is. The bottom line in terms of the announcement made by Pakistan, made by Iran, and made by the United States of America, is is that some kind of formal agreement has been reached. The document is not available to our eyes at this point. It's not available to the public. It's not absolutely certain that there is a document itself that is in final form. But there were some very clear statements made by political leaders. One of the most important of the statements came from Shabazz Sharif, the prime Minister of Pakistan. He's identified as the lead mediator between the United States and Iran. He said, quote, following intensive talks, we are pleased to announce that the peace deal between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran has been reached. In his post, it was actually all in caps, the word reached. He went on to say, quote, both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon. Okay, so there's a lot here, but the fact is, we really don't know all that is here until we see a document. When it comes to this kind of agreement, the agreement rides on words, and the words take shape in a document. And of course, we're talking about a document that has to be written in at least two different languages. And so here we're talking about the fact that Iran and the United States are both involved in this. Pakistan. So we could have three different languages involved in terms of this agreement. It is interesting to see that the prime minister of Pakistan described this as a peace deal, a peace deal. And he went on to say that it would have immediate effect, the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon. Subsequent media reports indicated that the agreement, however it's styled and whatever it is eventually called, will be signed on Friday. There is to be some kind of ceremony, presumably in a place like Geneva. Clearly, we don't know a great deal about this. It was very important to President Trump that the announcement be made yesterday. He had indicated that Sunday, which was, of course, his 80th birthday, and it was a day of a great deal of attention. The president said his goal was to have an agreement finalized and signed over the weekend. That's not going to happen. It's going to be signed, according to press reports, on next Friday, but you're going to have what is at least declared to be an immediate cessation of military activities between the United States and Iran. And the big issue here is that there are two other countries involved. One of them is Lebanon. The agreement calls for a cessation of military action by both sides in Lebanon. And of course, that's primarily been Israeli activity. But we're also told that it basically is something that, in the words of President Trump, is going to avoid the annihilation of Israel. So that's a very interesting comment made. And all kinds of things are going to have to be made plain here. We're going to have to look at actual text, and we're going to have to look at this over time. Furthermore, it is an agreement that's going to lead to another period of negotiation, because this agreement doesn't include any kind of final settlement on the nuclear weapons issue, the nuclear materials issue, the fissionable material there in Iran, because that was a lead part of why the United States and Israel undertook this action. And so there are all kinds of things the US And Israel had hoped for. Regime change is at the very top of that list. That hasn't happened. Well, it hasn't exactly happened. I mean, you do have the former supreme leader debt and a new one in place. But what is also clear is that in Iran, it's a very fluid situation, and the political and military leadership are not always on the same page, or even for that matter, they don't appear sometimes to be even close to being on the same page. And as a matter of fact, going into the final hours of the negotiations, before the formal announcement came from the Pakistani prime minister, the there were those who thought that the Revolutionary Guard and that leadership might prevent any kind of agreement from ever being announced. But it has been announced. And at least officially, the Iranian government has said that it is real and that it is committed to it. The cessation of hostilities and the immediate thing is twofold, and that is the statement that the Strait of Hormuz is going to be opened. And that's because you had the Iranians shut down all traffic. It was basically an action in violation of all international rules, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. And then you had the United States creating a naval blockade. It was more than naval, a military blockade that prevented Iran from either sending or receiving materials through the Strait of Hormuz. The bottom line is we're talking about a body of water that carries about 20% of the world's oil, so about 20%. Many other things, too, in terms of liquid petroleum, other forms of energy and you're also looking at the fact that this is not the kind of thing that can happen without a complete upset of the international economy. And that's something that, frankly, it did not appear that either Israel or the United States had expected. So let's just review a couple of things. We don't know the actual text. We don't know what comes next. We do know there's a 60 day period and the outcome of that is going to determine, I guess, whether or not this thing picks up again. But we are looking at the fact that Iran's military capabilities have been seriously eroded. And so when the president of the United States, when Donald Trump comes out and says, we destroyed their navy, we destroyed their air force, true or false? Well, abundantly true. Abundantly true. Now, many of those assets were pretty dated, but they were still deadly. And so that's a very significant achievement on the part of the joint Israeli American action. On the other hand, it's not just the effort against Iran. It's also what Russia has learned with its invasion of Ukraine. More on that we'll be talking about this week. Just to put in a little footnote, that conflict has now lasted longer than World War. War won. That's a huge story. We'll talk about it later this week. What we're talking about right now is this apparent agreement between the United States and Iran brokered by Pakistan. It's not exactly clear how Israel factors into this equation. That's going to be another big question. But the Iranians have made very clear that if there is sustained military action from Israel, they'll consider it a violation of this agreement. Now, why did Iran do this? Well, we're looking at the fact that Iran's military leadership and its political leadership quite diffuse from where it was before this conflict. And so when you had the death of the supreme leader, his own son is now supposedly in that role, but he hasn't been seen in public. And so we're just looking at all kinds of statements being made. It is clear that the leader of the Revolutionary Guard is in a big political position. But then again, you have political leaders in terms of the official government. So you've got at least three different sources of political power. And that just counts the big ones in Iran, there are others. It all goes back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And basically it's fair to say that since that time, the Iranian regime there in Tehran has been at war with the United States of America. That's one of the true things that the Trump administration has stressed. During all of this, it's not an immediate pretext. It is a long standing challenge with the immediate danger of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. President Trump has said categorically, and by the way, every president of both parties since 1979 has made the same pledge. That's not new. The military action. President Trump was justified because of that very established bipartisan commitment. But once again, we are just reminded of the asymmetry issue. Because Iran has options. The United States doesn't have the United States. It has a democratically elected government. Political pressure can be brought on the United States. It is the world's biggest military superpower. And in terms of relative military assets and power, the United States could destroy Iran several times over. But the United States is also a part of an international community with an international morality that doesn't allow the United States to take the kind of actions that Iran has taken. So you have an asymmetry there. We're not talking about an equal part moral footprint here. We're also talking about the fact that Iran, though a smaller and weaker nation, it also has a very unique geopolitical location on the map. It has an enormous amount of leverage, not only in terms of the Gulf, but in particular the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf. We're talking about a massive story that is unfolding. We're going to have to be watching all this very clearly. The political dynamic in the United States is going to be very interesting. And frankly, over the course of the next 24 hours, we could see a real focus or refocusing of this series of issues and events here in the United States. Okay, now I want to shift to the biggest news here in the United States. And of course, we have the President's birthday. We have the mixed martial arts going on at the White House last night. There are all kinds of things that are unfolding. But we'll save that for later. Right now I want to look at the big news as of last Friday. It is a redefinition of wealth and economic energy in the United States. And that is because what took place last week was the largest initial public offering of any American corporation ever. Headline in the New York Times, SpaceX IPO. That's initial public offering makes Musk. That's elon Musk, the first trillionaire on Earth. The subhead colossal AI offerings are likely to follow. So we're talking about OpenAI and Anthropic also planning IPOs or initial public offerings. This is when you have a private company take itself public in terms of the stock market. And so you have an initial offering and that's handled, frankly, kind of orchestrated in terms of the entry into the market. And it can be a success or a failure. And that's measured in nearly purely financial terms. In this case, it was a big win. Here's how the New York Times began the story. SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and artificial intelligence company, capped the biggest ever initial public offering by rising 20% in its trading debut on Friday, turning the world's richest man into the first trillionaire and setting the stage for fast growing AI companies to reach the stock market in a once in a lifetime bonanza. Okay, so I won't get too deep in the numbers here, but the numbers are really interesting. The biggest number here, of course, is trillion, as in trillionaire, the world's first trillionaire. Another report in the New York Times said, quote, SpaceX shares opened up 11% from their initial public offering price of $135. Mr. Musk's net worth, which comprises his stock in SpaceX and his electric carmaker Tesla, as well as ownership stakes and other ventures including the brain implant company Neuralink and the tunneling firm Boring Company, stood around $1.1 trillion. As the Times notes, Mr. Musk, 54, was already the world's richest person. He claimed that title from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in January 2021. That was after a surge in the value of Tesla shares. Okay, we are talking about a giant story here. We're talking about financial figures that are really beyond our imagination. It's almost impossible to quantify a trillion dollars. So we're talking about so many billions of dollars that you need a new category. And so when you're talking about $1 trillion, you're talking about something that, quite frankly, is hard to imagine even when you are used to working with big numbers. And that's because we're talking here about personal wealth. Now, it is personal wealth on paper, but insofar as wealth is calculated, well, that includes the paper. And so we're looking at someone whose net worth is now over a trillion dollars. It also means, by the way, and this is in economic terms, perhaps a bigger issue. It means that Elon Musk, or the companies that Elon Musk controls, comprise or control about 3% of the American economy. 3%. Now, the first thought you might have is that, well, that leaves the biggest portion, 97% out. Yes. But when you look at someone like John D. Rockefeller and you look at his massive wealth in his time, he controlled no more than 1.5% of the American economy. So we're talking about doubling the economic portion controlled by one man and his related companies from 1.5% to 3%. And now we're talking about the number that human beings have never associated with human wealth before. Trillion dollars. And so you can come up with all kinds of things like $1 bills going to the moon and back, and the moon and back. You can talk about all kinds of things. You can talk about the fact that when you look at that kind of wealth, it's larger than many, many countries. Many countries. And it's larger than the American economy was for many, many years. The other very interesting thing is that Americans are paying almost instant attention to this, but it's not an instant story. And behind this is actually a very huge story, big developments. And so you are talking about the fact that what Elon Musk has accomplished through SpaceX and its related enterprises and technologies, it's really unique in American history. It's unique for the fact that he has an entire network of satellites of communications ability up in orbit. It's because he is able to launch both small and extremely large payloads into space. It is because his rockets do take off and the boosters can land on their own, land standing up and be reused. We're talking about the kind of technology that is of a scale more advanced than that of previous space programs, and especially particularly the space programs undertaken by NASA. Now you have to put all these things in their historical context. And so when John F. Kennedy talked about taking a man to the moon and bringing him safely home, in terms of the American manned space program, that was a giant thing. It was a momentous thing. It required all kinds of the concentration of national energy became a major patriotic concentration. And of course, it did happen. And then you had, after that, the space shuttle, you also had the space station. But the fact is that all of that has been transcended by the technology that emerged in the digital age. And you also have the fact that government sponsored space programs fell behind. Now, here's something just to keep in mind. We are talking about massive programs that never were entirely government. So even when you're looking at NASA, NASA didn't create all the factories, it didn't create all the companies and the technologies. It came up with the master plan and it orchestrated it. It still was largely a government directed endeavor, but taking the next great leap. And that's exactly what SpaceX intends to do. You are talking about a company that has existed now for a fairly long time, a lot longer than most Americans realize, but has now reached the point that it is more advanced than the US Government in so many of these technologies. And frankly, it has proved the fact that when you set this loose in a, in a free market economy, you can have visionaries like Elon Musk who will come along and just build things that other people had not yet imagined. And that's the big success story here. And with Elon Musk, it's multiple successes. And so just for the sake of time, we'll say Tesla and SpaceX. There are other things, as we said, there are other major components of his wealth. But this raises a host of other issues. And this is where you hear a lot of cultural conversation. So for example, there's just a lot of conversation about the fact that there now is a trillionaire, and that's likely to be followed by other trillionaires. You also have a front page article. Here's the headline article by Patricia Cohen. Also this one appeared in the New York Times. I mentioned that because it's such an influential newspaper. And here's the headline. But Billionaires Billions are Increasing Faster Than Ever. The subhead Musk Trillionaire Status shows in real time the density of wealth at the top. All right, so there's an implication there, and the implication there is sometimes made explicit, such as by, say, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, and those on the political left who say no one should ever be a billionaire. There simply shouldn't be a trillionaire. There shouldn't be this concentration of wealth. Well, all right, you know, from a Christian perspective, there are a couple of things we're going to have to unwind here. Number one, we do believe in private property, and that's made very clear in Scripture. We believe that for a Christian, or in the Old Testament, for a child of Israel, for a Jewish person, for a Jewish family, for the Jewish people, there was to be a sense of stewardship and responsibility. But the fact is that the very basis of the explosion of our economy that took place, especially as you look at the Industrial Revolution and beyond. But before that, just look at the Reformation and its impact on banking and the expansion of the idea of work and vocation and a return on investment and the good stewardship of Christians involved in all of these endeavors as an extension of Genesis 1, taking dominion, that created a revolution, a revolution not only in theology, a revolution not only in terms of what became known as the Protestant Reformation, but a revolution when it came to modern economies. And if you're going to create a situation in which you Recognize private property and the right of persons to own private property. And then you come up with a plan that says, well, a flourishing economy should incentivize investment. It should also incentivize investment in new ideas and innovation, innovative new technologies. It should reward risk. Now of course, risk also brings the opportunity that you don't get rewarded, you get punished by the market. And even when it comes to someone like Elon Musk, he said several ideas that didn't go so far. But when it comes to something like SpaceX, you know, most Americans just might think he kind of, you know, snapped his fingers and it happened. That's not at all the case. And so when you look at a Christian worldview perspective, you hear people say, well, no one should be a trillionaire in a world of income inequality. No one should have the concentration of this kind of wealth. But of course the obvious question to that is, well then what would be the appropriate upper limit? And by the way, there is no doubt that Elon Musk is driven by a financial incentive. And you know, it becomes very clear, for example, front page article in the Wall Street Journal, US War Machine leans on SpaceX. It is for the good of the United States and our allies in a very dangerous world. It's a matter of fact that it's a good thing that Elon Musk came up with these technologies and he really did in so many ways lead them personally. He certainly took the financial risk and he also came up with many of the ideas and technologies. Now that doesn't mean that unrestricted wealth is in itself a good thing. It does mean that in a Christian understanding of the economy, if you take away reward for investment, if you take away reward for risk, if you take away reward for invention, if you take away the freedom in a free market, then quite frankly you're entering into an area of government controlled, or you could say elite controlled economies and that can't go well. But you also are looking at some legitimate questions in terms of the responsibility of having that kind of, of wealth. But then again, the headline in the Wall Street Journal about the fact that the U.S. department of Defense, the national war machine so leans on the technologies of firms like SpaceX. Well that tells you. Well that in itself seems to be something of a patriotic endeavor. But I want to mention something else that very few people seem to have noticed. The Wall Street Journal deserves credit for bringing this to national attention. Jimmy Sonny writing a piece to entitled Vindication for Young Elon Musk. It goes back to the year 2004. So that's 22 years ago. 23 years ago, there was a Senate subcommittee meeting on Capitol Hill asking the question, what would America now do without the space shuttle? Okay, the space shuttle had then been grounded. And of course, there were several deaths. Fourteen astronauts had died and two disasters. The question is, where would the space race go from here and how would it happen? Elon Musk was already involved. He testified before that senate committee in 2004. That's 22 years ago. And he had very bold ideas then. He said that what the situation was at that time was a dark age for human space flight. Quote, one costly government program after another that failed to reach the pad, as the article says. The public's drift from space, Elon Musk argued, wasn't the apathy of a tired people, but the disappointment of a hopeful one. Okay, get this quote. It sounded in 2004 like a man with a grievance and a half built rocket. He had made the same case the summer before in one of his first Capitol Hill appearances at a 2003 hearing on commercial spaceflight. There he borrowed a concept from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Creative destruction. Space, he pointed out, had barely improved since Apollo. Okay, so let me just go down. He wanted to get private firms in the position of innovating. SpaceX was the firm he had in mind. And. And of course, now you look at the fact that SpaceX is really way ahead of virtually everyone else, and that is to the benefit of the United States and our space program and not only that, to other nations. I mean, Ukraine using Starlink and all the rest. It's just very clear this is a much bigger story than people thought. All right, so all that is least part of the story. But finally today, I want to get to another issue. I wrote a piece for World Opinion this morning entitled Mass Verbicide. In New York, the subhead state legislature moved to replace mother and father with gestating parent and non gestating parent. You can't make this up. The New York legislature has decided to update language in this bill. It now goes to the governor for either signing or not signing. I want to remind you that C.S. lewis once decried what he called verbicide. He defined that as the murder of a word. He saw this as a great crime. And that's exactly what the state of New York is here proposing. This subversion goes, by the way, but beyond motherhood, because they want to replace mother with the term gestating parent. Okay? The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal noted that the effort is part of Legislation which is intended to purge gendered language from state family law. The fact is, however, that it really denies the natural family, which is predicated upon the fundamental truth that God made human beings as male and female, that God himself, the Creator, assigned marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and assign the task of being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth with children to that married couple. Henceforth, the male parent is the father and the female parent is the mother. This pattern has been assumed and unconfused through most of human history. Until now, that is. Okay, so the gender subversives and the ideologues are determined to subvert creation order. And one of the ways they do this is through what C.S. lewis called verbicide. It's basically the subversion of language. They worked hard to redefine marriage, even using marriage for same sex couples, and having the complicity of the Supreme Court and national government. And it's more than that. You also have other things. So now you have the suggestion that in New York State law, when it comes especially to custody issues, children, children's welfare, etcetera, you're not to have mothers and fathers. You're not actually going to have females and males. You're going to have gestating parents and non gestating parents. Okay, so the gestating parent here is, by the way, inescapably female. That's just the way it works. And the non gestating parent is male. Now wait just a minute, wait just a minute. If you have a same sex couple and there are two women and one of them is actually carrying the baby, that presumably is the gestating parent. You could have a female member of a same sex union who is not a gestating parent. Also not the gestating partner. This is moral insanity. It shows up as linguistic insanity. But linguistic insanity is just the sign of how bad this is and how bad it is in terms of a pointer towards the future of our society. By the way, if you have a male same sex couple, neither of them can be gestating. It's just a mess. Okay, so even at this point in modern technology, if you're going to have a baby, you have to have a biological female and a biological male. And regardless of what you call them, one is the mother and one is the father. The mother is the biological female, the father's the biological male. That's just the way it works. A group in New York known as the New York Family Court Advisory and Rules Committee suggested some of the change in language quote, substitute existing gendered terminology in the state's family court law with gender neutral terms. Of course, this isn't morally neutral. Words like mother and father would disappear entirely. The state will try to locate, quote, alleged parents for child support. With mothers and fathers gone, all that is left is the gestating parents and non gestating parents. But that distinction can't bear the load. It's moral insanity. Now, let's be very clear. The transgender ideology is central to this entire project. For these are the people who are telling us that women can now have prostate glands and men can menstruate. So we're talking about multiple levels of insanity. Now it's insanity which could quickly become New York state law. The Roman Catholic bishops in New York, bless their hearts, released a statement accusing the legislators of action that will further muddy what is true and good. Now, they're right, of course, but they seem to miss the point that muddying what is true and good and subverting the entire moral order is the central goal of the entire project. The goal of this insanity is nothing less than the collapse of truth, creation, order, marriage, morality and civilization. Verbicide is the next step. But it is not where this leads, and we all know it. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, go to sbts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing. Sam.