May 8, 2020 Show with Dr. James R. White on “To Meet or Not to Meet: That is the Question”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carwile, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 8th day of May 2020, and I'm thrilled to have back on the program once again one of my very favorite guests,

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and he's also one of the pastors at Apologia Church, and that would be alongside of Jeff Durbin, Luke Pearson, and Zach Morgan.

Today, we are going to be addressing a very controversial theme, to meet or not to meet, that is the question, and one church's decision to continue meeting weekly for public worship amid COVID -19, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my friend,

Dr. James R. White. It's good to be with you, Chris. Can you imagine what it would have been like trying to do the debates in New York in days like these?

Wouldn't have worked out too well. Yeah, you're right. I mean, we got enough criticism as it was.

In fact, most of the criticism I got was from evangelicals. I can remember the guy that owned the

Huntington Christian bookstore when I brought in flyers for the very first debate on Mary.

He looked down at them like I just had put a rat carcass on his counter. And he looked up at me and he says, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I said, excuse me? He says, in a day and age when we should be linking arms with our

Catholic brothers, you dare to have something like this. I said, well, number one, you can't even tell by the flyer if it's a

Catholic running this debate or a Protestant. And number two, both sides are represented. But anyway, it was weird to hear things like that from time to time.

But it's great to have you back on the show. One of the things I wanted to say before we get into our theme is that I've been watching your series on Manicheanism.

Okay, be careful, Chris. I know you're lying. No, I'm not going near any of the stuff that you told the children to leave the room over.

I'm just wondering, how is it that a major religion actually caught on and became popular that was started by a guy named

Manny? I mean, it's like, you know, if a religion was started by a guy named Scooter or Skippy, I was actually bursting out laughing when you actually said who the person was.

Because I thought Manicheanism was going to be involving some other word or name, but not

Manny. Well, obviously, it originated around Iran and places like that, so their names are going to be different than what we are accustomed to.

But no, actually, it grew very large.

I mean, Augustine was a Manichean here for nine years and was very attractive until the

Romans decided it was bad news. That actually helped it, as often happened in the past, happened to Christianity, too.

But it sounds crazy, because we are used to the background that we understand.

But if you live in a day where astrology was everything, the idea that that strange path up in the sky, those strange lights in the sky were actually light leaving the

Earth and going to the Moon and things like that, it had a real attraction.

And they basically argued that, unlike those Christians who say you have to believe first, we'll just convince you with our arguments first and then you can believe later on.

So, yeah, the history of religious movements in the world is rather fascinating.

It really is. Well, the reason we're here today is to discuss your, or should

I say the church, I almost said your church. Now, I don't know if you've ever had

Bill Shishko reprimand you, but every time I say that, and I still mistakenly say it in his presence,

I'll say something like, so how's everything going at your church? It's not my church. It's the church of the

Lord Jesus Christ. But at Apologia Church, well, first of all, before I even go into the theme, why don't you tell our listeners something about Apologia Church that may be unfamiliar with it.

Well, yeah, it's pretty unique. It was started about ten years ago,

Jeff Durbin and Luke Pearson. Jeff was a chaplain at a hospital for addiction and recovery, and the church that had sent him there sent him to start a church because there were a lot of these folks, you know, they'd hear the gospel from Jeff.

Jeff was very straightforward. He told the people at the church, or at the hospital, the only way

I can help these people is to introduce them to the gospel. It's going to have an impact upon them.

He had great success. They let him do it. But once the people would leave the hospital, where are they supposed to go?

Let's be honest, there's just a lot of churches that struggle a little bit to have those kinds of people in their midst.

And so it started off in a very, very unusual context.

The first Christian book that Jeff read after his conversion was a

King James -only controversy, which I'm not sure that's the first book I'd recommend to anybody, honestly, to read.

But he knew me from our outreach to Mormons out in Mesa, Arizona.

He had come out there as a very, very young man. In fact, he was telling me only a few months ago, well, about a year ago, that he had showed up one night out there to pass out tracts to Mormons, and he's wearing these plowed plaid pants, red, red, like Scottish red plaid pants.

And all I had to do is just turn around, and I just looked at his pants in whatever way

I do things like that. I'm not sure if you've ever seen me look at you that way, Chris. Actually, I did it pretty much every debate.

Or any time you see me, and you have a comment about my attire, just like...

Yes, yes, yes! Yes, exactly! Because I've never seen color combinations like that in my entire life.

And it causes migraines. But I did that to him, and he literally turned around, went home, and changed.

Without me saying a word. So he was a very young man at the time, and so I had a lot to do with being a formative aspect of Jeff's theological formation, shall we say.

And so I had been on Apologia Radio a few times, and then he started inviting me to come speak at Apologia Church, and I had done that numerous times.

And we still rent from other facilities. We don't have our own building. And as a result, meet in the afternoon on Sunday, Sunday afternoon at 4 o 'clock.

There's one fairly lengthy service. And so obviously we've grown and we've expanded.

That's the home of End Abortion Now, where we've seen literally thousands of children.

We had eight babies saved last weekend in our abortion clinic outreach.

Just amazing what the Lord has... And what is the number now of babies that have been saved total?

Well, thousands, literally thousands. Wow, really? Oh, yeah. It's just been fantastic.

I mean, it's so great now. Now we're starting to get pictures from years ago. So now the little children are growing up, and you start to get to see that type of thing.

And the Lord's done some amazing things. I'm not sure if you watched Jeff's story about his son,

Augustine. Yes. Just amazing things going on there. No, that was a miracle.

Oh, it's a total miracle. And out of obedience to being willing to adopt these children and to do these things.

So it's a... I never expected to be there, but the Lord had his own plans.

And so I ended up there in November of 2018. And it didn't take long before we realized that I was sort of already functioning as an elder.

So I became the fourth elder in June of last year. So I'm sort of the elder of the elders because I'm 16 years older than the next guy.

I'm really the older guy. But it's been great because the younger guys have so much energy, and that certainly helps me.

These guys are sold out to ministry. They're sold out to the people. They're just great brothers.

So, yeah, that's where I am, trying to keep up with the young guys.

In fact, Jeff texted me. Most of their communication is in text. He texted me the night before last.

Or was it last night? I forget what it was. Yeah, the night before last. And he's like, man, I'm almost done with this

LDS. We're doing this three -and -a -half -hour LDS documentary that we've been shooting for I don't know how long.

We went to the Sacred Grove last year and to where the Book of Mormon was published, did all this kind of stuff.

And this was obviously before COVID started. And he's getting really close. And he's like, hey, would you be able to do

Sunday? Because I've got to get this done. I've got to get this done. I'm like, yep, yep, that's what

I'm here for. That's what I'm here for. So I'll be preaching Sunday out of Philippians chapter 3. And I love doing that.

So I preach Sunday, Easter Sunday. And we had a good group there.

And I guess that takes us into our conversation and our topic. Yeah, but I just quickly, this is an abbreviated version.

I have to just quickly tell our listeners, can't leave them hanging about that miracle. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, sure.

I'm sorry. I didn't want to take away from everything else. But, yeah, it's hard not to give all the background information.

Not that that's not public. It is. But basically there was a chain of simply supernatural events, people praying about a situation that arose where we had a woman approach us who knew of a situation where there was a woman who was going to have a baby.

It was going to be a special needs baby. And this had already been determined by the ultrasounds that this was going to be possibly a real severe situation with this child.

But she wasn't going to be able to keep this child. And if we didn't act within a certain amount of time, the state would be taking the child and placing the child in some type of a situation.

And through amazing context, Jeff and his wife, who

Jeff is a grandfather. He's 16 years younger than I am, but he's a grandfather.

And so, you know, he's a grandfather. It's hard for grandparents to go back and be changing diapers and especially to have a special needs child that would be extremely intensive in what would happen with that child.

But help me with it. I'm sorry. I've already did the dividing line for an hour and a half. Help me with the name of the disease.

For some reason it starts with a C. Thank you. Spina bifida. It doesn't have a C anywhere in it. That's the problem. They have the ultrasound of the spine outside of the spinal, outside of the body.

Literally extending outside the body. Right. And this was supposedly one of the worst forms of spina bifida.

Yeah, yeah. It was real bad, real bad. And it was going to be. They had the suite ready with the doctors for the.

Because as soon as the baby is born, straight into surgery. The month's worth of surgery is before he can even be able to come home and so on and so forth.

And we were all set up for it. We raised the money. Once he decided to do it, we raised the money for the adoption,

I think, in about eight hours, if I recall correctly. I put it on my social media accounts. About eight hours we raised the money for the adoption.

And so just all sorts of stuff. Even his name. It was amazing how all that came together.

And then I was one of the first people to find out about this. Because Jeff left the room when the baby was born and walked outside to get air and called the elders,

Luke and Zach and I. So I was one of the first people to hear this story. And I'll never forget it.

He's like, guys, he's perfect. And we're like, well, yeah,

I'm sure he is. He's like, no, he's perfect. There's nothing wrong with him. He starts describing the doctors who are just flipping the baby over and they're looking at the ultrasound.

And they're going, this isn't possible. And they're literally checking the mother's name band.

Right. Are we in the wrong room? They, to this day, have absolutely positively no explanation whatsoever.

But when that baby was born, he's perfectly fine. Praise God. Nothing, no spinal bifida.

And how, you know, God can do anything. He knits us together in the womb.

And in this situation, it was, you know, here you have a grandfather and grandmother with baby grandchildren.

I mean, you know, they're little babies themselves saying, we are willing. Think about this.

Jeff was prepared to have to catheterize this child until teen years.

Wow. That's what you're talking about. And they're willing to do that. And then the baby comes out and the baby is absolutely perfectly well.

Nothing wrong with him whatsoever. Praise God. And you can see that video somewhere.

Probably Apology at Church or Apology at Studios. Apologyatchurch .com is the website for the church.

There was a couple in the congregation where I was first saved and first a member, where Mike Gadosz was a pastor in Amityville, Calvary Baptist Church, which no longer exists because it merged with First Baptist Church of America and became

Grace Reformed Baptist Church. But at that Calvary Baptist Church, there was a young couple who were told, were urged by their doctor to get an abortion because the baby she was carrying would certainly be an asexual dwarf and likely severely brain damaged.

They refused to get the abortion. The baby was born completely normal. Now, whether or not that was a miracle of God or some kind of really horrible mistake on the doctor's part, but whichever way the

Lord worked in that situation, it was truly amazing. Yeah. But Apology at Church has never ceased to meet even after the, excuse me, the coronavirus pandemic broke out and became global news.

And all over the world, people began hearing from their governing authorities that they had to cease and desist from public gatherings over 10 people.

And in fact, I always was thinking, I can't tell if this is a command, a demand, a requirement, or if it's just a suggestion.

It was very ambiguous the way the wording was. But you folks, when you heard about this, did you have a meeting and say, was it like an instantaneous thing that we're definitely not going to stop meeting?

Or did it take some discussion? Oh, no, it took a lot of discussion. And because it happened over a couple of weeks, you had the situation getting worse and worse.

And there was a tremendous amount of confusion, obviously. As you said, is this a command?

Is this a suggestion? Does this have the force of law? When it first started happening, immediately our thinking is, okay, is this a legal thing?

Is something being cited from the legislature or some emergency powers as something that would actually make this a legal thing and to where you're going to drag everybody off and stick them in the hooscow if you show up for church.

And obviously, one of the first things I want to point out is when this first started happening and we started seeing that we were one of the few churches left in a city of millions of people that was still meeting, we talked about and I talked about to my fellow elders the fact that however we handle this, we need to make sure that people understand that we believe that this is what the individual elders of a congregation need to be dealing with.

We are not trying to tell other congregations that they are right or wrong in how they're handling this.

We're not trying to put ourselves out there as some, this is going to make us special or anything else.

The reality was that from the beginning, we felt that the numbers in Arizona were not going to be reflective of numbers elsewhere, first of all.

And it is important to recognize that we made this decision within the context of living in a state with a

Republican governor, not the most conservative Republican governor, but still a Republican governor. And in a city that,

I don't think you've ever been to Phoenix, have you? I've never been to Arizona at all. Okay. You can get in a car in the far northwest valley and start driving on a full highway at 65 miles per hour, and an hour and a half later, you'll still be in the valley.

You'll be in the southeast corner of the valley, but you'll still be there. It's extremely spread out.

Extremely spread out. It's massive. And so we don't have any meaningful public transportation because we are so spread out that it would be meaningless.

You can't get anywhere that way. So we have a lot of space here, basically.

And so it's not like being in Manhattan, or even Long Island for that matter.

There are more spaces between houses and all the rest of that stuff.

And so we looked at the information.

We tried to look at the information. But from the beginning, we felt like things just don't quite add up.

And so there was that aspect of things. We listened to what was being said by the governor.

And when the shutdown order came, which came like about an hour or two hours before Sunday evening service, we didn't know about it until the middle of the service.

And I showed it to Jeff as soon as the service was done. But then we started digging into it, and the reality was that the governor had left a tremendous amount of leeway.

There were numerous protected behaviors, which included constitutionally protected rights to worship.

And so it was never like it is right now in California or New York or Oregon or Washington, the big leftist states, where you had that specific statement.

That was not said. There was a suggestion of not having more than ten people gather, but there was no mandate that said we are going to come and get you if you do.

That was left, as in I think in most places, to a public type of pressure.

You start hearing the constant love your neighbor. And I remember when

Jeff did a series of sermons specifically on that subject in regards to how to apply

God's law and the application of God's law and things like that. Love your neighbor, love your neighbor.

So we're used to hearing love your neighbor. We're not used to hearing that from the government. And when the government starts using, starts quoting from the

Bible, I remember somebody else who quoted from the Bible out of context, too. And so from the beginning we were like, well, yeah, love your neighbor, but this looks like it could really cause a tremendous amount of not just disruption but long -term damage that could have real, not just economic impact on people, but, man, this could cause more death down the road than it would in the short term.

This does not seem wise at all. And so we're looking at all that stuff, but then you have to combine that with the fact that we have a real strong commitment.

Remember where Apologia came from. A real strong commitment to the need to gather as the body for worship.

And, of course, we do include music in worship, but worship is especially the proclamation of the word.

The sermons at Apologia tend to be a little long. Jeff goes longer than I do. But when you only have one service, you sort of have to make up for what you can't do otherwise.

In fact, I knew that you were serious about joining Apologia Church even before you became an elder there, when you started to change the way you pronounced it.

Yes, yes. Well, I had always had fun with the pronunciation because it should be

Apologia, but, yeah, no, there's only so far that joke. Jokes can only work so many times, as you know.

So I decided to let that one go, even though I can still read Greek appropriately.

I like the way you said, as you know, to me. Well, everybody's always said you could go out on the road if you wanted to, but you well know that certain jokes, they're great the first time around, they're pretty good the second time around, and by number three, they're starting to smell like yesterday's socks, so you just sort of move on from there.

So anyway, but we have a strong commitment to the gathering of the body, and one of the things that is different about Apologia than a lot of other places is we have the

Lord's Supper every service. It has been a commitment for the church from the start, and I had just done a series of sermons in November, December on the

Lord's Supper, and so to just, you can't do that online.

We actually heard about people trying to do the Lord's Supper online, and then, of course, the liberals were doing it with Skittles and Pepsi and all the rest of this kind of insanity, but you know, you can't, that's something that requires the fellowship of the saints, and so we looked at what was being said.

There wasn't anything that said, no, you can't do this. We just suggest you don't do this. We obviously started doing things differently.

We asked people not to shake hands, not to hug, which is really hard for our group because we shake hands and hug a lot, and even me.

Yeah, that's a pretty remarkable development on your end. Yeah, that's a remarkable development. And then, you know, we immediately started thinking about, well, what do we do about the

Lord's Supper? Now, another thing that should be mentioned, I am one of the oldest people at the church.

Okay, I think there might be two people, two other guys,

I think, that are older than I am. So this is a very young congregation, and, in fact, if you listen to a sermon, you will hear, as one person put it, age -appropriate vocalizations because it's a family -integrated church, too, so there's no nursery.

And so we have one family that has 10 or 11 kids. We've got a couple eights and nines.

We've got a lot of children, and almost all homeschooled. A few in Christian schools, but almost all homeschooled.

A huge homeschooling group. And so we realized that, you know, we need to take some steps here.

And so what do you do about the Lord's Supper? Because we already had somewhat of an advantage.

We come forward to receive it. We take it. We walk forward and receive it instead of having it passed around.

And so that's helpful, actually, in this situation, because passing one thing around from person to person is really rough at this point in the game.

Yeah, my friend Bob Cameron, who is now with the Lord for eternity, he pastored an

Orthodox Presbyterian church that originally began as a Reformed Episcopal church. And his was the first, other than when

I was a Catholic, of course, his was the first evangelical church that regularly practiced the

Lord's Supper that way. Right, right. Well, I've always liked it because biblically, when

Paul says, when you do this, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Well, I'd like people to be able to see that I'm doing that.

And so getting up and being active rather than passive, I think is great. I think it's wonderful.

And it also takes the temptation away from an unbeliever. When you're passing a tray right in front of him, he may not want to be embarrassed, and he takes the elements anyway.

Right, because we do guard the table, and we explain that beforehand.

And, by the way, and this started after I suggested it, but we also ask that if you are under discipline from a like -minded church, that you not partake of the table either to honor the discipline of other local churches.

So we do that as well. But that did give us an advantage because what we do is we have the line form in the back.

Luke and Zach are back there with big old honkin' jugs of hand sanitizer.

And everybody gets their hand sanitizer and then comes forward. And so they're approaching the elements with freshly sanitized hands.

And we say, hey, if you touch it, you take it. So please, you know, parents, if you have young children who've made a profession of faith, they partake of the supper, please get the bread and wine for them, et cetera, et cetera.

And so that's how we've handled the supper issue as well.

Can you imagine Peter at the last supper saying, hey, pal, touch it, you take it?

That's right. Yeah, leaning back on somebody, there was no social distancing going on, nor could there be at a table that was actually only about four inches off the floor.

So, yeah, I get it. But, you know, that was an advantage that we had.

What we also did is we expanded where the bread was. So it's more flat to where you can just touch one piece of bread instead of, you know, sort of digging a piece of bread out of other pieces of bread.

So we did also change what we were putting it in so that it was easier to do along those lines.

So we tried to put some thought into it to, you know, because, look, the reality is what a lot of churches are facing is you've got a lot of differences of opinion, you've got a lot of very frightened people, you've got people all over the spectrum in each of our churches, and every church has to try to deal with those realities and keep everybody going the same direction at the same time.

And so that's what we were doing. What's interesting was we lost our place to meet as a result because we were renting from a church that decided they didn't like what we were doing.

And that was how long ago? Well, that's a good question.

It's been about a month and a half, I guess. We got kicked to the curb basically on a

Monday without any warning, and somehow it just so happened that someone that you and I both know, his church likewise was still meeting over on the other side of the valley.

I mean, apology, I normally meet on the east side of the valley. I'm a west sider, so I've been driving a long ways to be a part of all this.

This church is actually farther north than I am on the west side of the valley, but they have continued meeting.

And so I was like, so do you all have a Sunday evening service? No. Oh. Hmm.

And so within just a few days, which is not easy to do because you've got insurance, all the rest of this stuff you've got to take care of, we managed to move from a

Monday getting kicked to the curb to a Sunday meeting at another location on the other side of the valley where we've been meeting.

But that ends at the end of May, and we're not sure where we're going to be meeting starting the first of June right now. That's one of the problems in not owning your own building.

Obviously, we're sort of looking around going, unfortunately there's going to be a lot of buildings available in the near future, and I'm not necessarily sure if it will be church buildings, but sadly there's going to be a lot of businesses that are opening up again and everything else.

We should be able to find a place to be able to meet, because I can assure you at this time of the year in Phoenix, during the winter we do meet in a park for Christmas, which is really nice, but that ain't going to be happening in June.

It's already hit, well, my home thermometer showed 110 .6 yesterday, so that gives you an idea of what it's like in Phoenix right now.

So yeah, we're not a small church. We had a really big group on Sunday.

I'd say we had 75 visitors on Sunday. I think the word has gotten out a little bit that I think there are a lot of people that want to go to church, and they want to sing, and they want to hear the word preached, and stuff like that, and they found out, oh, there's still some place to go, and so we had a lot of visitors on Sunday.

We had two cups left for the Lord's Supper. We were sitting there.

Luke and I help with the supper and moving the trays when people come forward and stuff like that, and we were sort of looking at each other like, oh, are we going to make it?

We had two cups left at the end. So yeah, we've had really good turnout.

Obviously not all of our people have been coming, partly because when you have ten kids and it's a 30 -minute drive each direction, that's a problem, partly because of concerns, and we don't have any problem with that.

I fully understand that. We've extended, you know, tried to make sure everybody understands.

We're not trying to exclude anyone, but we are convinced that it is important for the church to meet.

We believe that there is something very important, that the gathered body is important.

We recognize there would be situations where this would be appropriate. If this was the plague, we are not saying everyone should get together and die together of the plague.

We're not saying that, but COVID -19 is not the plague, and anybody who says it is is just really overly panicked, and I think the numbers at the end are going to show that.

And if this was London during the Blitzkrieg and there was an air raid coming, no one's saying, well, we all need to be in one place so one bomb can take us all at the same time.

We're not saying that. We're saying that it seemed to us, and it has continued to seem to us, that there is some major overreaches going on, and we are very concerned, especially now, that the state seems to be saying, oh, okay, you'll do what we say, all right, we'll let you get back together, but only about 10 % of you at a time, and you can't sing, and you can't have this, whatever you call this,

Lord's Supper, Eucharist, whatever thing, whatever thing you all do, you can't do that either. And we are concerned in light of the direction that people are going, the direction that our societies are going, that we have basically, as a church as a whole, has said to the government, whatever you say, we'll go along.

And we're concerned that that is going to be utilized in a very negative fashion.

Yeah, and we have to go to our first break. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please, as always, give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

USA, and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we're going to be right back. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

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today. Thank you, Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, for your faithful support of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

This is Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially.

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

Lord Jesus Christ. And, of course, the end for which we strive is the glory of God.

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

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This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our

Sovereign Lord, God, Savior, and King, Jesus Christ, today and always.

When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the

New American Standard Bible were among my very first sponsors. It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries.

We are discussing to meet or not to meet, that is the question. And one church's decision to continue meeting weekly for public worship amid COVID -19.

And James, I don't know if you have experienced this, but this issue among like -minded people theologically is next to music,

I think the most divisive issue I've ever witnessed. People very often are saying, if you are on one side or the other, the opposing view, those that embrace the opposing view on whether or not to meet, are very, very involved, very much involved in deep sin here.

Well, yeah, and I've said to my brothers, I said there's going to be pushback and there's going to be a cost to pay, because especially given the choice we made, those that do not choose to do so would see that as some type of condemnatory thing, no matter how clearly we say otherwise, or how anybody who would listen to the sermons that have been preached, you haven't heard anything whatsoever from apologia about, you know, we're standing fast and everyone else, you haven't heard any of that.

That's just not what we've been doing. And in fact, the vast majority, except for last

Sunday's sermon, has just been a continuation of the series that we were already doing.

We had gone to a brief... Jeff has been in Matthew for a very long time.

We all like to make fun of how long he's been, especially in Matthew chapter 24. But we had stepped out for a little while to do something out of Philippians, just simply for some balance for the congregation.

And we've been continuing that. I mean, that's what I'll be doing on Sunday. Now, on this past Sunday, Jeff did preach a sermon, a sermon to Governor Ducey of the state of Arizona.

And it was challenging. There was nobody asleep. And like I said, it was very, very well attended.

And I actually hope that it got through to the governor. I think it would be a useful thing. And when I posted the links to it,

I said, I hope you will think this through rather than feel it through. Because I think that's one of the real issues here is there's just so much in the way of emotion.

My biggest concern about how all of this has been handled, not just in the church but in government and everything else, is we live in a day of such emotional fervor.

And we live in a day where people think that experiencing emotions is the same thing as thinking carefully about something.

And the reality is that, for example, I think it's already been demonstrated that when you flatten one curve, you need to realize a couple things.

First of all, that curve, what's shown on the screen, only goes so far in the future.

What's going to happen after that? And what is the relationship of that curve to 1 ,000 other curves, 1 ,000 other curves of other diseases?

I saw an article yesterday about someone saying that in light of what has happened with the lockdowns, there's going to be a tremendous increase in tuberculosis transmission and death.

Most of us are not even thinking about outside the United States, but the impact that our economic disintegration will have upon other nations as to mortality rates and things like that.

People just don't realize that curves do not exist in and of themselves. They are connected intimately to so much else.

And instead of thinking only six months down the year, down the road, what about a year, two years, five years, ten years?

I think I'm not going to drag you into this, but I have seen a tremendous lurch to the left in the response globally of nations and governments in regards to this situation.

I am very skeptical about government authority. History shows that when governments are given powers, they never give them back up again.

And I am reminded of the cartoon of two older folks sitting in a library that says, the one saying the other, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, and those of us who do study history are doomed to sit here and watch everybody else repeat them.

And that is sort of how I feel in this situation because, well,

I won't go any further that way. I just will say that there was a development, it seemed quite quickly, of an orthodoxy on this subject.

It was just simply assumed that the phraseology of love your neighbor was sufficient to cover everything.

And what it missed was it was drawing a line around a subset of neighbors rather than all neighbors.

And almost any time you just simply simplify a biblical phrase rather than going, okay, what does that mean?

Obviously, love of neighbor is an overarching principle that has to be applied in many, many difficult and complex situations.

Once it turns into a slogan that you can put on a bumper sticker, it almost always loses its divine intent and meaning.

But I realize that an orthodox position did develop, and the question is going to be, let's say we are able to finally, six months from now, and I'm not even certain that this is the case, but six months from now, able to meet, can you see various states asking that churches voluntarily not have holiday celebrations?

I think that's a logical thing to expect, and if it happens in 2020, why wouldn't it happen in 2020?

Because of the size of the crowds being larger? Exactly, yeah, yeah. I can see that happening, and I can see certain governors who go,

I just don't, do you really need to do this eating thing, this supper thing? Do you really need to do that?

I mean, let's not do that. And the fact is, a lot of the mainstream churches would go along.

They wouldn't have any problem with that. They don't have any type of idea of obedience to a command anyway.

It's just something we did that was traditional, and so why not? And so all of these are things that, of course, we've been thinking about.

We're not going to sit here and claim, hey, we saw this coming and you didn't. No, we didn't. We've simply been looking at the situation as it's been developing and trying to follow a particular principle that would say, actually, this is the time when our people need exposure to the word of God and encouragement in one another more than ever, not the other way around.

Like I said, if we had indication that this was something like the plague, this was

Ebola mutated or something like that, then obviously that would have to be taken into consideration.

But the facts say otherwise, and they have said that from the beginning.

And if people were willing to listen and go somewhat against some of the, well, the mob, to be pretty honest, there has been a mob, and yes, churches are influenced by mobs too.

And I think a lot of people are starting to go, hey, wait a minute, because think about it. When it first started, it was supposed to be a couple weeks.

You know, Ted Cruz self -quarantined for 14 days, so 14 days.

It's a couple weeks. You're going to help out. You're going to show how you want to love your neighbor, 14 days.

And then 14 days passes, and it's 21, and 21 passes, and it's a month. And no, the curve's not flattened yet, and this, this, this, and this.

And the narrative changed rather rapidly. And we were left going, well,

I'm glad we sort of stuck to our guns because we haven't gone down that road, and we don't find ourselves in a situation now of having told everybody, yeah, we're going to do this, and then going, well, now we're not going to do this.

And, well, why? What's changed? Because the narrative, the public narrative has remained as negative as it possibly could be.

And we have to go, unfortunately, to our midway break already. I'm sorry, folks. I know that it gets annoying with a lot of ads, but it's the only way we can remain on the air is through these advertisements.

We don't make nearly enough in donations to remain on the air without them.

So please be patient and write down your questions for Dr. White, and write down the information provided by our advertisers, too, so that you can patronize them and help us keep on the air by pleasing our advertisers.

And, Dr. White, I'll have you thinking about the obvious text that those who are conservative biblical inerratists will quickly bring up to you and others who are gathering,

Romans 13, 1 to 2. And when we come back, we'll have you discuss that for a little bit.

And the email address for questions is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

We'll be right back. When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the

New American Standard Bible were among my very first sponsors. It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio audience have been sticking with or switching to the

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James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries and the Dividing Line webcast here. Although God has brought me all over the globe for many years to teach, preach, and debate at numerous venues, some of my very fondest memories are from those precious times of fellowship with Pastor Rich Jensen and the brethren at Hope Reform Baptist Church, now located at their new, beautiful facilities in Corham, Long Island, New York.

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that's hopereformedli .net, or call 631 -696 -5711, that's 631 -696 -5711.

Tell the folks at Hope Reform Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island that you heard about them from James White on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said, Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read.

He who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Chris Sorensen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio here.

I want to tell you about a man I have personally known for many years. His name is Dan Budofuco.

Dan is a personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer, but not the type that typically comes to mind.

Dan cares about people and is a theologian himself. Recently he wrote a book titled

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Or email me for Dan's contact information at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly changed our way of life, bringing so many uncertainties.

When will it end? Why do disasters like this happen? How do we deal with anxiety, fear, and the like?

Well, join us each Friday on the program Iron Sharpens Iron with your host, Chris Arnson, and Pastor Joe Jacobs as they explore

God's Word for answers to this and other of life's related issues. Tune in at firstloveradio .org.

That's firstloveradio .org. Each Friday at 1 p .m.

Pacific, 4 p .m. Eastern. That's Iron Sharpens Iron on firstloveradio .org.

Fridays, 1 p .m. Pacific, 4 p .m. Eastern. To hear what the Bible has to say about pandemics and how we should respond.

Hi, this is John Sampson, pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona. Taking a moment of your day to talk about Chris Arnson and the

Iron Sharpens Iron podcast. I consider Chris a true friend and a man of high integrity. He's a skilled interviewer who's not afraid to ask the big penetrating questions while always defending the key doctrines of the

Christian faith. I've always been happy to point people to this podcast knowing it's one of the very few safe places on the internet where folk won't be led astray.

I believe this podcast needs to be heard far and wide. This is a day of great spiritual compromise, and yet God has raised

Chris up for just such a time. And knowing this, it's up to us as members of the body of Christ to stand with such a ministry in prayer and in finances.

I'm pleased to do so, and would like to ask you to prayerfully consider joining me in supporting

Iron Sharpens Iron financially. Would you consider sending either a one -time gift or even becoming a regular monthly partner with this ministry?

I know it would be a huge encouragement to Chris if you would. All the details can be found at ironsharpensironradio .com

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Call Linbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402.

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That's liyfc .org. Hi, I'm Buzz Taylor, frequent co -host with Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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Before we return to Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries and our theme today,

To Meet or Not to Meet, that is the question and one church's decision to continue meeting weekly for public worship amid COVID -19,

I just have a couple of important announcements to make before we resume that discussion.

First of all, please mark your calendars for this Monday Dr. Kurt Daniel returns to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for Part 3 of his discussion on his monumental 900 -page hardback book

The History and Theology of Calvinism. And keep in mind folks, if you want to write this down, the first six people that write in excellent questions via email that get read on the air and answered on the air will receive a free copy of this very expensive book.

That's The History and Theology of Calvinism, this Monday, May 11th, 4 -6 p .m.

on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and that's Part 3 of our discussion on this book. And we have

Every Other Day in May booked as well with excellent guests, so try to listen as often as you can this month.

And folks, I hate doing this, it makes me feel very uncomfortable, but it's something that needs to be done.

We are in urgent need of your donations and advertising. We lost,

I hope it's just temporary, but we lost our two largest advertisers because their businesses have been really negatively affected by the coronavirus hysteria.

So please help us make up for that lost income by going to www .IronSharpensIronRadio .com, click

Support, then click Click to Donate Now. You can donate instantly with a debit or credit card or you can mail in a check via snail mail made out to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to the address that appears on your screen when you click

Support. And please never siphon money away from your regular giving that you're accustomed to to your local church in order to give to us, especially during this time when many churches have been hit really hard financially because they're not permitted to have public gatherings and therefore many people aren't giving or they're waiting to give, and many people in the churches have lost their jobs, they've lost their livelihoods because of the hysteria going on.

So please don't siphon money away from your church to give to us and please don't put your family in financial jeopardy by giving to us.

Those two things are commands of Scripture. But if you do have extra money above and beyond your ability to obey those two commands, and money that you're saving by not going to sporting events and concerts and movies and fine dining and theatrical performances and Bible conferences, well, please use some of that money and help us out if you love the show.

And I want to thank all of you who have been responding to my SOSs for help, and one woman in particular who

I have never heard from before since this program first launched in 2005, never heard from her, and I'm waiting for her permission to at least give her first name.

This wonderful woman in Texas has broken all records in regard to financial donations to Iron Trump and Zion Radio, and I am just so thankful for her and hope she continues to be blessed by this program for many years to come.

Also, folks, if you need help finding a Bible -believing church, please send me an email.

I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the world, and I can possibly help you find a church. I've already helped people in all parts of the planet find churches near them.

So send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com and put I need a church in the subject line.

And that's also the email address where you can send in a question to Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, chrisarnson at gmail .com

chrisarnson at gmail .com And as I was saying before the break, as you probably remember,

James, many people who hear about churches like yours will automatically bring up Romans 13, 1 and 2.

How is Apologia Church not violating that? Well, like I said,

I mean, just on a technical level, we could say we looked very carefully at what was being said, but at the same time,

I'll tell you straight up, if the government had said you shall not meet, we would have found ways to do that, but we've done it underground.

The reality is Romans 13 is, of course, talking about the Roman Empire, which was an evil empire and was promoting ungodliness and allowing the murder of, well, not unborn children, but born children.

For example, that was their form of abortion back then. So it is definitely a statement made within the context of an evil government, but the reality is that that government very quickly began seeking to stop the church from meeting, and they never understood this text to include obedience to the government in that case, because you notice that rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior but for evil.

Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise in the same. So this is not saying you get to let the government determine what is good and evil.

The church is still determining what is good and what is evil. When the government decides that what the church is doing is evil, now you have a serious problem, and God's judgment is going to be upon any nation that does that.

God's judgment is upon the Chinese nation today. There is no question about that. But God's judgment moves in different ways, and we can see around the world, but let's think about our

Chinese brothers. Are these non -state sanctioned churches that they've been dynamiting and everything else, are they violating

Romans chapter 13? Now, some people might say, well, no, because Chinese are evil. What so is Rome? So what has not been thought through in any meaningful fashion by just simply throwing

Romans chapter 13 out is what is it talking about? Is it limited in its application?

What was the historical context? What does the rest of the New Testament say, for example, when you do have clear instances of persecution and the government deciding that, and this is exactly what happened in the

Roman Empire, and this is where I have for months been seeking to get

Christians to think about how we deal with Caesar, because not just because our society is paganizing, back to the days of Caesar, but it is in many, many ways.

But because this is an issue of sphere sovereignty, what is...

There's just so much here. What is the sovereign area of authority of the state?

What is the sovereign area of authority of the church? Because God does establish the state. The state is a proper and good thing, but it has limitations on its authority, and there are certain things it's supposed to be doing specifically protecting from evil, not promoting evil.

And so, unfortunately, let's just be honest. I'll be straight up front here. I came from a fundamentalist background, and there was no discussion of these things.

There was no, you know... Every fundamentalist church

I was ever in had an American flag up front. I don't know if you've seen them, Chris, but there's this...

Actually, it's on my screen right now. I have the preacher clips at FakeSermon on Twitter.

I don't think this guy likes Christians as a whole, but he especially doesn't like fundamentalists. But I've just been stunned at how many of these guys have, like, patriotic bunting on the pulpit.

And it's serious. I mean, on the pulpit itself, red, white, and blue, bunting on the pulpit and stuff like this, and I'm just like, really?

What is this? I had never seen that in the fundamentalist churches I went to when I was a young person.

I would have thought there would be more Ruby Ridge types. I don't know, but I see it all the time.

But the reality was, there was always an American flag up there and all the rest of this stuff, and that's what

I was raised with. But there was never any discussion of the church as an authoritative body because of the fact that we were so split from one another that there was no idea of the church as the church.

The church was just this one entity which is independent from all other churches, and therefore, you know, it's just us.

And there was no idea of the idea of the sovereignty of the church.

And so because of that, a lot of people just haven't thought through this, and so Romans 13 is an easy jumping place to go, well, whatever the state says.

But it's like, well, that's not what Paul did. That's not what the author did. That's not what the apostles did. That's not what the early church did.

And that's not what our brothers are doing in China right now. Have you thought through what it means?

And I don't know if you read it. I hope you did. I need to find it again because I want to reread it. But there was a letter sent by Chinese pastors to the

CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, about two years ago now. And one of the pastors, as we know, has been thrown in prison for nine years.

He was one of the people that may have written it or certainly signed it. It was a beautiful letter that recognized the authority, the authority of governing authorities, said we would be your best citizens, except you need to recognize that there is an authority above you.

And then they went into this beautiful presentation of the lordship of Christ, king of kings and lord of lords.

And we're all going to stand before him. And he has revealed his law. And it is the requirement of the state to live in light of the fact that they are not the final authority.

And when they try to make themselves the final authority, they're rebelling against God and they'll bring God's judgment. I think most of the pastors who wrote that letter are currently suffering persecution in jail in communist

China. Were they wrong to do that? I do not believe they were wrong to do that in any way, shape, or form.

And so on a technical level, we can simply say, yeah, our governor here never said that you cannot do that.

So that's the technical level. On the level of principle, the issue, again, comes to where do you draw the line and we have to be the ones who make that decision to not me, not you.

And that's where I think a lot of people say, no, no, no. We can't trust the church to make that kind of decision.

We need to let elected officials make that kind of decision. And I think that's probably, unfortunately, a majority view of most

Christians, is that the church is incapable of making that decision for herself, that we have to depend upon the state.

That's tragic. That really, really is. Like I said, there would be times that it would be appropriate for the church to say we are not meeting.

In times of war, times of a plague, true plague, whereby meeting, you're going to make sure that everybody that meets dies, which is not the case in this situation.

But we recognize, but that needs to be our call, not the state's call. That needs to be those who

God has placed in positions of authority. I just don't think that... I think we have such a pathetic ecclesiology in evangelicalism today.

And I'm just saying that in general, because I'm thinking back on the fact that I was in seminary before I was ever to the point of going, you know, when

I look at the New Testament, there's all this stuff about a plurality of elders, and I had just accepted what

I had been told. I didn't think it through, and churches are some place you voluntarily go to, and if you don't like it, you go to another one, and Americanized views of the church are extremely sub -biblical.

And so it doesn't shock me whatsoever that in this situation, that instead of going, well, yeah, obviously, the church has to determine what is worship, what is constituent worship, what is the proper ways of doing so in light of these challenges, et cetera, et cetera.

The idea is, no, there are experts. Dr. Fauci knows better than you do type of thinking.

And I guess we shouldn't... I shouldn't be surprised, but that is what we're facing.

And so I think we have a lot to learn from the early church. I think we have a lot to learn from how the early church struggled with its relationship with Caesar.

Caesar only grew in the demands that he was making upon all

Roman citizens, including those in the church, and the demands that Caesar made resulted in Christians being viewed as unpatriotic.

They were viewed as being against the rest of culture and not doing what was good for the cultural group.

And that's happening right now. That is happening in our situation. And we weren't prepared for it.

We should have been, but we weren't. And that's why I've been talking for a while about what it means to offer the pinch of incense upon the altar.

That's something that we, as individuals, need to be thinking through, as heads of family need to be thinking through, those who are in positions of leadership need to be thinking through for our churches.

Where does it get to the point where when we say kurios, which is the

Greek word for Lord, Caesar, the Christians in Scripture say Jesus kurios,

Jesus is Lord. According to Paul, you can only say that truly by the Holy Spirit. Jesus is

Lord. But Caesar demanded that the citizens say Kaiser kurios,

Caesar is Lord. And the Jews couldn't do that. And they had already worked out a political arrangement with Rome at that point.

And that helped protect the church at first because the Romans couldn't tell the difference between Jews and the Christians at first.

They all carried the same sacred text. But eventually they figured that out and that's what they used to identify

Christians because they could not say Kaiser kurios. And many died because they would not say

Kaiser kurios. Before it gets to the point where it's real obvious, say it or die, how do we recognize where Caesar is asking us to offer that pinch of incense today?

Where is that line? And if we are working for a major corporation and we are told that we need to sign a celebration card for same -sex marriage, is that Caesar saying, offer the pinch of incense?

Can I do that? These are things that instead of watching Netflix, we need to be thinking about in our families, in our own minds, to know exactly how we're going to respond to these types of things.

We have a listener named Scott from the

Kuma Reformed Bible Church in Kuma, New South Wales, Australia.

And he says, I'm so glad you're doing a show with Dr. White and I love the topic. It is certainly relevant here.

How much do you think this media -induced crisis has exposed our worldly presuppositions in the church?

In many places, the civil magistrate has forbidden public worship and we've barely raised a squeak of protest.

In my mind, two things stand out from our indifferent response.

We have accepted the lie that the corporate church life is not an essential part of Christian life.

And we have accepted the world's assumption that everyone should be healthy for at least 75 years of happiness and then quickly and peacefully die.

So deeply have we accepted this presupposition of the necessity of good health that we are ourselves fearful of catching the disease and this fear overrules the fear of God.

After all, God wouldn't want us to be unhealthy, would he? Well, you know, the fact is that we do live in a very coddled age.

Most of us have never seen real pandemics. None of us can even begin to understand what it was like to live in Europe during the

Great Mortality. They didn't call it the Black Death. They called it the Great Mortality, where in some cities 75 % of the people were dead.

That's the new numbers that I think are more accurate than what I was taught back in seminary. And so it has only been in the past 60, 70 years that we've had the kind of modern medical science that we now trust far more than we trust

God. What has been exposed is that the Church is extremely individualistic. The idea of the corporate body, the idea...

And we knew this, and I had pointed this out, though I didn't see it with the clarity that I see it now.

I had pointed this out because, you know, you've read a lot of Church history,

Chris. You've turned it into funny songs, but you've read a lot of Church history. And so you know that one of the most horrible things that could happen in the past was to be cut off from the

Lord's Supper. So Calvin, for example, at one point, stands in front of the table blocking the libertines who have swords from access to the

Lord's table. People in our Western society today, and I would consider

Australia, New Zealand to be a part of all of that, even though they dominate in rugby and soccer.

We won't talk about that. But the people in those societies today can't even understand.

Why would... Just go down the road to the other church. Well, A, they couldn't. And B, there was such a more...

such a greater appreciation of what the table represented. And it never crossed their minds, well, we're just going to go to the

Lord's Supper ourselves. They'd never thought about that either. That was the supper that was important to partake in.

And they were willing to draw swords about it. So what has changed? Well, we have a very, very, very individualistic perspective.

And the meeting of the church in worship was something that was extremely special to the people.

And yes, it was dangerous to go to that. We don't understand what it was like to live in the day of Martin Luther, where a woman had to have ten live births to guarantee that one would make it through to maturity.

We don't understand what it was like to have the plague coming back every few years to the city.

We would never have built the civilization that we have today if we had run and hid in our houses the way we have in this situation.

Any family that sent a child to a university was exposing that child to all sorts of diseases for which they had absolutely no cure.

I mean, up until the 1800s, you'd bleed people to try to make them better. I mean, we weren't even close and yet, how did you get educated to become an engineer, to write music, to do all the things we've had to do to build a civilization?

You had to live a risky life. We don't live risky lives anymore. For the past number of years, what's been the big motto in Western society?

Safe spaces. We have to have safe spaces. Well, life isn't overly safe, actually, and the idea that it should be is something that is extremely modern and,

I think, extremely dangerous because the result seems to me to be that a lot of people are looking to a very dangerous source to provide them that safety and it isn't

God. It isn't the Church. It's the state. And it's a state that is becoming more and more secular and more and more opposed to the

Lordship of Jesus Christ. We're heading back to the situation that the early Church faced and the reality is we don't know what they did because we don't think history is important anymore.

We don't consider their wisdom when we're making decisions for ourselves.

And that's... I don't even know what to say about that, but that's where we're facing. So, yeah,

I think what's been exposed has been the individualism. You know, you can just go church shopping anytime you want and, hey, if we don't meet, that's no big deal because worship is just how

I feel anyway. It's not the corporate body. It's not directed at God. God can accept my worship wherever I am.

Well, there are truths in those statements, but they cannot be turned into axioms that transcend the limited application that could be made of them.

And I think we're starting to see that. I think people are starting to realize, well, you know, for a few weeks, okay, but it's never just a few weeks.

It always gets extended out. And my concern is, what if there's a quote -unquote second wave?

What if there's a COVID -2021? And even more importantly than all this, what if this new, hey, if it's good for the community, becomes the very type of mantra that we read in 1984?

It's frightening that it's almost like that book is being used as the playbook in Western society today.

But what happens when our proclamation of the gospel is identified as being as evil and dangerous to the community as the

COVID virus is? That's the question. And we have a listener who is actually going to be, hopefully in the not -so -distant future, an advertiser on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

We have Sterling Vanderwerker, owner of Royal Diadem Jewelers in Greensboro, North Carolina, a dear brother in Christ.

He says, Dr. White, we have struggled with the issues of obeying the government in my business, retail jewelry, and have had several difficult conversations and contentions on the issues of the

Romans 13 application. What single issue would have prohibited your church from meeting?

I'm assuming he means on your part, not a government issue, but something that would make you and Jeff and your fellow elders decide to at least temporarily stop meeting.

Well, I think if there was strong evidence that what we were facing was something like the plague, that would have meant that we were pretty much dooming everyone who showed up to an agonizing and horrible death, then we would have dealt with it from that perspective.

We did not see that as any type of possibility in reality. But I do believe that there needs to be preparedness, and I won't go into details about this, but I've spoken to a number of elders in churches around the

United States, and there are many of us who are prepared to go underground. It will not be nearly as easy to do as it was in the

Soviet Union because one of the things that's been incredibly concerning to me,

Chris, has been the utilization of digital tracking, the use of our cell phones, and then in South Korea, there were people who were leaving their phones behind when they would go out, and so now the government is actually attaching trackers to them, wrist trackers, so they can be followed wherever they go by the government, and they can't be taken off because they had dared to leave their cell phone at home.

That kind of, you know, now we have satellites overhead that can read license plates on cars.

That kind of technology we've never faced before in trying to go underground.

The church in China has certainly discovered that that is the case, and I don't have the answers to all that, but I know that if the government were to say you are not allowed to meet, if they did not have a reason that was validly based upon life, for example,

Ebola, the plague, then we would try to do that by other means.

Not in mass groups. You can't. But the house church would reemerge, and that would be something that would simply necessarily need to be done, and that would be very, very dangerous, very, very dangerous, as our brothers in China have discovered.

I'm not sure what the Roman 13 debate in the jewelry business would be.

I didn't follow quite exactly what that is. I guess because they are being forced to shut down because it's not...

No, there's no question about that, and that the problem is a business that is in the realm of Caesar.

It's not the church. It is a business. That is being under the heel, and so in that situation, at least in the

United States, we can try to elect people that will be wise enough not to do this, but let's face it.

There was almost nobody that raised an objection when this happened.

It happened so fast. The narrative was so completely controlled through all of the media, and I just simply have to point out, what was it?

Five days? A week? And all of a sudden, you have that massive, the largest spending bill ever imaginable in human history takes place, and there's almost no opposition to it, and then when you look at it, it has funded every wacko, crazy thing that could ever be imagined, and we all sit here and go, wow, that's strange.

That couldn't have had any planning to it, and if you do stop and go, that seems really strange.

Trillions of dollars. You know, people do lots of weird things for a thousand dollars, let alone a trillion dollars.

None of us can even imagine how much money that is, but if you say anything about that, we're going to say you're a conspiracy theory wacko, and I'm just like, whoa, wait a minute.

From a Christian perspective, money and power. Romans 1. Yeah, hello?

What's going on here? But no, you're not allowed to say that. You're not allowed to even question that. Yeah, but the problem is, yeah, business?

Yeah, yeah. This is, like I said, Pastor Durbin preached a sermon last

Sunday, love your neighbor, and that was one of the things he was talking about, that there had been a survey that had come out here in Phoenix that said 25 % of the businesses that are closed will not be reopening.

They can't. They're done. And it's ridiculous that someone like Sterling would have to shut down, because rarely do you have more than five people at a time in a jewelry store.

Right, right. No, right. No, this was, I honestly believe that this was very much, has a tremendous political component to it, and if you had told us in November of 2019 that we would voluntarily allow this to be done to us, that we would voluntarily spend more money in one month than we had spent on almost all of our foreign wars except World War II in one month, and that in the process we would make a large portion of the

American populace dependent upon the government, unemployment would be beyond the record of the

Depression in the 1930s, we all would have gone, what are you talking about?

Unemployment is the lowest it's ever been. This is awesome. This is great. And then we literally took a societal 45 and put it to the temple of our culture.

We pulled the trigger, and we did it voluntarily. And everyone's talking about, well, we need to just flip the switch back on.

It doesn't work that way. Economies are not engines.

You don't just simply put the key in and turn it again, and it just takes off. I wish it were that way, but that's not how it works.

Well, we have to go to our final break. It's going to be a lot quicker, and I just want to plug Sterling's website, royaldiadem .com.

Love you, brother. Thanks for joining us. And we're going to be right back after these messages, so don't go away.

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Welcome back, and Dr. White, for one question, I'm going to break the stride from our theme, just because our listener is

Roman Catholic, and I hardly ever get Roman Catholic listeners, and it's not a hostile question either. So, this is from Pete, who is the editor and general manager of Catholic Exponent in Youngstown, Ohio, and he says,

What light can you shed about certain lines or passages in the Bible that have had their legitimacy questioned based on apparent discrepancies in manuscripts, such as Matthew 17, 21?

This kind of demon does not come out except by prayer and fasting, or the last 11 lines of Mark 16, dealing with Jesus' appearances to the apostles.

Also, isn't there a dispute about 1 John 5, 7, with some versions referring to 3 testifying to Christ in heaven, the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? I think he wrote the

Holy Father. There you go, a Catholic again. While others refer only to testimony on earth from the

Spirit, the water, and the blood. Yeah, I wrote a book about it, and I think all of those are definitely addressed in the

King James Only controversy, because I go through those textual variants.

What's interesting is there isn't really all that much disagreement between Roman Catholics and Protestants on the original text any longer.

There was in the past, and great battles were fought, but I'll just be honest with you,

Rome lost. And while at the time of the Reformation, Rome insisted on the supremacy of the

Latin Vulgate, that is no longer the case. And on a scholarly level, the

Roman Catholic Church recognizes the supremacy of the Greek manuscripts over the Latin, and Roman Catholic scholars are involved in doing textual critical work along those lines and things like that.

So what was referenced there is called the Comma Iohanium, 1 John 5, 7. That is an edition that came into the

Latin text in about the 5th or 6th century and was added to the printed editions of the

Greek New Testament in around 1521 by Desterius Rasmus.

It was not in his initial one, and it wasn't in, as I recall, the initial printings of the

Complotentium Polyglot, which is a Roman Catholic production. But the Longrenium Mark, Mark 16, 9 -20, the

Percupaea Adultery, the Woman Taken in Adultery, John 7, all of these are

John 7, 3, 3, 8, 11. Those two are the longest variants in the New Testament.

There are, like I said, numerous books on this particular subject that you can read, that will give you the history of the text in the

New Testament. And it is important, I think, that we have what the

Apostles wrote, not what someone 1 ,000 years or 1 ,500 years after the Apostles wrote, what they thought they should have written.

And that's why it's been such an encouraging thing that over the past number of decades there has been tremendous work done in collating manuscripts so that we now have more access to earlier manuscripts and wider number of manuscripts than we've ever, ever had before.

Many of these manuscripts are now being made available online. You can examine them yourselves if you want to, though not many people can read them.

Those who can are able to verify the accuracy of the printed edition that we have. And we have earlier and earlier manuscripts.

The papyri that were discovered just over the past 100 years have pushed us back into the second century as far as having fragments of the

New Testament, which is far earlier than any other work of antiquity. I have, if you look up James White, New Testament Textual Reliability, there's a number of videos on YouTube of multiple hours in length where I go through all of these things and can do so with more background information than I can in this context.

But yeah, it's a good question. And I hope you didn't mind my little joke, Pete. But Pete actually asked if you're giving books away today.

He wants the King James Only controversy. But I'll tell you what, we're not giving away books, but I will personally purchase a copy from Alpha Omega Ministries and have it shipped to you.

So please give me your full mailing address in Youngstown, Ohio. Thanks for joining us, Pete.

I hope you join us very often. We have Sal in Loganville, Georgia. Will they stop meeting?

I guess this is an apology at church when he says they. Will an apology at church stop meeting if even one person becomes ill with coronavirus?

And he says, please keep our associate reform Presbyterian denomination in your prayers. Our Presbyteries throughout the

South will be meeting virtually next week to discuss this very issue. Well, see, the problem is, how do you...

When people have asked this question to me before, I was like, how do you prove where you got coronavirus from if you did?

I mean, you could be walking by somebody and get that. You don't know, quote unquote, where you got it.

I've been really... It is important to recognize that there was a secular corral, a group of people who like to get together and sing, that met at a

Presbyterian church up in Oregon, I think it was, back in January. It was not a church choir.

It had been presented as a church choir. It was not. It was not the church's choir. It was a secular group. They just used the building because, well, it's easier to do that way.

And they passed... Somebody had COVID -19. They passed it around during that period of time, even though they washed their hands and things like that.

So I get the concern about that. In that context, it was fairly easy to figure out where it came from.

But the reality is, you don't know where most people are getting this. And it was announced only yesterday,

I think, or it may have been today, by Governor Cuomo, that, I believe it was sixty -sixth or two -thirds of the cases came from people who were sheltering in place.

So the reality is this stuff's going to go around. And this is not a theological statement

I'm making here. And it's going to make me very much hated by everybody in the audience.

But could we just for a moment consider that maybe it's time to think about taking care of ourselves better and being healthier in our lifestyles and in actually working on having a strong immune system?

It just seems to me that when you look at the numbers, it's either very elderly people, which is understandable because you're going after the respiratory system.

But who are the younger people who are dying from this disease? They're almost always people who have complicating factors.

And what's the majority contributing factor to the complications? Being overweight. The fact is, we have the science in front of us as to how we can be healthier people who are less susceptible to things like this.

But we don't do it. We just don't do it. We're not disciplined enough to do it.

And you know me, Chris. You got to know me right when I made a decision to stop.

You know that in the 80s when I was in seminary, like a lot of seminary students, I let my body fall apart.

I was focused on my studies and I was not disciplined. I'd have pneumonia every single winter.

I'd have pneumonia. And finally in 1993 I said, this is enough. And I got in really good shape.

Then you remember the, I'm not sure what you call it, the weightlifter years. Both you and I were hitting the weights and getting ripped and shredded and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And then I realized, you know, my mom died of a heart attack and everybody in my family dies of heart stuff.

And so I did two hours on bike this morning while I was studying.

I've lost 14 pounds during the COVID -19 thing. And not because of COVID -19 but because I have been very, very focused upon that.

So I know no one wants to hear this, but God made us with an immune system. And it is the most amazing thing to study it sometimes.

It is fascinating. But it needs, it's not helped when we reach for the 47th

Oreo. Okay? And we've known that for a long time. But it's almost like, well, let the doctor have a drug for me.

Let's not go that way. Let's not go that direction.

Let's think about it from that perspective. Sorry, that sermon was free. And no one would pay for it anyways.

But the reality is, I really, really, really, really think, and I say this to my fellow ministers,

I see a lot of videos online amongst the fundamentalists. They actually, they literally make that a badge of honor.

That they're morbidly obese. That's a good way to die. That's a good way to die. Everybody in my family dies of heart stuff.

Take care of that. And by the way, I do need to do a little bit of damage control here.

I do have quite a number of lovely Christian friends who are fundamentalists.

I know, I know. But not the people on the IFB list. This is a different group.

Trust me. These are the King James only guys that are using poor language and everything else, and they're ranting and raving.

I'm not talking about the group. These guys are KJB only as well, but I hope they don't use some of the language that is used.

And ironically, most of them that I know are thin. That's interesting. Well, there you go. People are that way genetically, but some of the rest of it,

I have to really work at it. It takes discipline. And by the way, can I plug one of your sponsors?

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That's ptlbiblerebinding .com. That's right. Jeffrey is an artist, and he does a tremendous job.

I'm not sure how many of his pieces I've got now, but this is going to be the coup de grace.

This is going to be the pinnacle. Wait until you see it. You'll be amazed. We have

Grady, a very faithful financial supporter of this show in Asheboro, North Carolina.

He brings up something that you already mentioned, so he must not have been listening at that time or something. He says,

Do you think the Lord is using this to get us ready to go underground, and do you think this will purify the church?

Well, we hope and pray that the church will glorify

Christ in all things. Purification is obviously one of the key issues. I am concerned.

We won't know the numbers for a couple of years, but I have to ask the question two years from now, how many churches that existed and celebrated

Christmas of 2019 will not exist at Christmas of 2021? That's the question that I would ask, and the reason would be why.

Not only the economic depression that we have brought upon ourselves, that's going to be a key issue.

Obviously, churches that were already struggling, there's nothing that their people can do. They're going to go out of existence, but what about the long -term damage to just the idea of the necessity of gathering?

If we don't talk about why that is a special time of meeting in the

Spirit's power, encouragement from the Word of God, the partaking of the

Lord's Supper, the visible seeing of baptism, those ordinances given by the wisdom of God to His people, if we don't start considering those things to be precious, then we will take the baubles of the world that are offered to us and to replace them.

And I just wonder in December of 2021, if we look back, what the numbers are going to be.

How many fewer churches will be in existence? I would love that there be more, as long as they're healthy, as long as they're really committed to what they're doing.

But I'm just wondering, in light of the secularization of our culture, if that trend will not be in a major direction downward.

Okay, we have a final question that's obviously intended to be a joke. Ted from Moundville, Alabama says,

Which event does Dr. White think will occur first? The discovery of a

COVID vaccine or the completion of a series on Ken Wilson's dissertation? But we are out of time, folks.

And don't forget about ApologiaChurch .com ApologiaChurch .com and also

A -O -M -I -N .org A -O -M -I -N .org Dr. James R. White, it's always a joy and a fascinating journey through a two -hour program with you.

I look forward to your return very quickly. All right, thanks, Chris. God bless. And I hope everybody remembers for the rest of their lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater