9 Marks Reacts to John MacArthur's Church Reopen Statement

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're going to have a short episode, but a chalk -filled episode.

It's gonna be packed. We're gonna talk about Nine Marks Ministries. I'm gonna have to talk a little fast, because I don't have a lot of time, but some things that happened over the weekend.

John MacArthur released a statement on Friday about Grace Community Church opening up. He's asking other Christians to consider doing the same.

And Jonathan Lehman from Nine Marks Ministries responded on the Nine Marks website. And of course, this led to then

Mark Dever and Phil Johnson having a little bit of a back and forth on Twitter. And so I'm gonna talk about that.

Now, why do I want to talk about this? Here's the basic reason. I was given

Nine Marks material when I went to Southeastern for seminary. And a lot of guys, a lot of solid guys use

Nine Marks material. And I would say that I would recommend it. I finally read Nine Marks of a

Healthy Church a few, now it's, I guess, five years ago or so, six years ago, and people had really talked it up to me.

And when I read it, I was kind of like, that's it? But I think the reason I thought that was because I had grown up in a church with pretty good polity, church polity, meaning the way the church was structured, the way it functioned.

And for some people, this is revolutionary for them. They just never heard what the

Bible says a church should be or how a church should function. And so I know people that have been very benefited from Nine Marks Ministries and I thank

God for that, that's great. But the thing that concerns me and the thing that's concerned me for now a number of years, and it's little things here or there, it's like almost not enough to do a whole episode on sometimes, but it's like things that I'm just like, oh, that's not the greatest.

And now they're starting to accumulate and I'm not gonna remember all of them and I'm not gonna give a laundry list, but I think it's time for me to just say, we need to be very careful about some of the things

Nine Marks puts out on politics. And have a discerning eye at least, if we read stuff from Nine Marks on political issues.

Doesn't mean I'm saying their church polity stuff isn't good, I'm sure it is, but something's off.

And so we're gonna talk about that. And so it's in the interest of discernment. And honestly, if this gets back to people from Nine Marks, if this is something that, if you have a connection, this is something that you care about and you can pray for them or help in any way, that's great, that's exactly what we want.

Because I don't hate them or anything like that. Don't just wanna attack them. But some of the things that I've been seeing have not all been positive.

And so we do need to talk about it. Now some announcements, I wrote these down, so I wouldn't forget.

I talked to Russell Fuller, Dr. Russell Fuller earlier this week. He is starting a website, a platform,

I think it's gonna be called Theology Classroom. 250 bucks I think is what he told me he wants to charge per course.

He's gonna have like four or five courses this fall that he'll teach and then if that's successful, I think he's got 150 people,

I already emailed them, they're interested. Then next semester, he's gonna probably add more, add more professors, build something.

And this is, we've been asking for this. We've been wanting something like this. Seminary level education and for a good cost effective price you can do it from your home, you can do it if you have a job and you can start learning some of this stuff.

And he's given me some scholarships. So if you want to take one of his courses,

I can give you a scholarship but, but there's a catch. You are, you're gonna have to win the scholarship.

So I gotta be creative, I gotta think about how I'm gonna do this but I think we're gonna have some live streams in the next few weeks and I'm just gonna have some trivia or something, maybe like a question at the beginning or the end and whoever wins it gets a scholarship to Russell Fuller's class.

And if you don't want the scholarship then maybe I'll have an alternative or maybe you can give it to someone but we'll figure all that out.

So I want to announce that, oh, John Lewis, John Lewis, John Lewis's death. Some evangelical leaders have reacted to John Lewis's death and I want to do a podcast on it because it exposes something about evangelicals.

But I haven't had the time with everything else going on and honestly right now things are so crazy.

There's so many things, I can't even, the news cycle is so crazy that I'm like, well, we could talk about a lot of these things. So I do want to get to that but it may be just, it's gonna be outside of the news cycle.

It's gonna be late and I think we're gonna have to do a few more podcasts on history, to be honest with you. I'm finding that the history stuff benefits a lot of people because a lot of us weren't taught history and I think nature abhors a vacuum and what's filling the vacuum right now is this woke stuff.

And so we're gonna have to do some history stuff but I don't know if I'll get to that later this week but we'll see.

So those are my announcements. Okay, let's talk about the issue at hand here.

We're gonna talk about this blog that John MacArthur put out and excellent blog by the way.

It makes a lot of the arguments that, I know I've been making, I know A .D. Robles has been making, I know a number of people have been making from the beginning of this, whatever this is,

I don't even want to call it a pandemic because it's not really a pandemic but this crisis, I mean government's caused more of the crisis than anyone else at this point but I've brought up, we've done shows where we've talked about Daniel's example, we've talked about civil disobedience, we've talked about Romans 13, we've gone over a lot of this stuff and to see

John MacArthur now making the same exact arguments in his sermon yesterday and then in this blog piece as well, it's encouraging to me.

Now I know it's three months, three and a half months later, after maybe four months after we were saying, some of us were saying some of these things but every situation's different, every church is different and John MacArthur is a pastor of a mega church.

I mean they don't have the luxury of some of these smaller churches that can kind of get away with meeting and it doesn't cause a big ruckus.

I mean he's on some main streets there, he's gonna be noticed, right, with thousands of people meeting and so anyway,

I'm not saying that, I'm not an apologist for John MacArthur, I'm just saying that his situation might be a little different than your situation if you're a pastor of a small church who's listening.

I'm gonna play you what he said earlier this year and then I'm gonna read for you some clips from his blog just so we can understand what he's saying and then we're gonna get into Jonathan Lehman's response and then we're gonna get into Nine Marks a little bit.

So that's kind of the template for the episode that we're gonna do today. Let's start here, we're gonna start with the

April 24th interview that John MacArthur had with Phil Johnson and he gave some of the reasons for why they shut down.

The clear demand of scripture is to be subject to the powers that be because they're ordained of God.

Romans 13. And first Peter talks about the same thing, honor the king and those who are in authority over you.

God has set them in that authority. The Apostle Paul tells Timothy that we're to be good citizens that we're to live a quiet and peaceable life.

We aren't rebels, we don't start protests, we don't defy the government, we conform.

We're submissive to the government as basically ordained by God. So that was an easy call for us.

What would have made a difference would have been if this was persecution of the church.

If all of a sudden the government decided to shut down churches as an act of persecution against churches, we would defy that because now you're into Acts five where Peter actually says do we obey

God or men? You say we don't meet, God says we must meet. You say don't preach the gospel, we say we must preach the gospel.

So when the government gets to the point where it basically persecutes the church, the church has to take that persecution and still do what

God has commanded the church to do. The other thing that we talked about with the elders was if we defy this and if we say we're gonna meet anyway, we run the risk of exposing people to this illness needlessly.

And why would we want to do that? Because this is a health issue, this is a health crisis.

And since like any church, many of the people in our church are older, we wouldn't want to expose them to that.

We've only had, as far as I know, and this was up to yesterday, we've only had one couple in our church in the

Spanish ministry who actually got the coronavirus. But that couple, and not an older couple either, wound up in the hospital because it was such a virulent experience for them.

So we wouldn't want to say, well, let them come to church and mingle with everybody else and let it be whatever it's gonna be is gonna be.

That doesn't make sense. We wouldn't purposely expose our people. That's not caring for your people.

We wouldn't purposely expose them to that. And since we wouldn't have known, we just said, look, we're not gonna do that.

So that was three months ago that John MacArthur made that statement. But then last Friday, exactly three months after that video was recorded, he came out with this blog.

And he's asking people at the end of this blog, basically, and I did this, by the way, you can put your name on it, you can show some solidarity, open up the church.

There's some explanation for why they closed it. I'll talk about that in a minute. But here's his main thrust, right?

The church stands on biblical principles. They're subject to the will of God, his commands.

Therefore, they cannot and will not acquiesce to a government -imposed moratorium on our weekly congregational worship or other regular corporate gatherings.

Here's the key. Compliance would be disobedience to our Lord's clear command. So he's saying there's a command, we gotta meet.

And we can't just not meet because the government tells us not to. Government doesn't have that authority.

He says, so far as government authorities do not attempt to assert ecclesiastical authority, so that would be church authority, or issue orders that forbid our obedience to God's law, their authority is to be obeyed whether we agree with their rulings or not.

So he's saying outside of the church, yeah, we have to obey them. But inside the church, when its responsibility is given to elders, the government does not have the authority to usurp.

So he says, however, while civil government is invested with divine authority to rule the state, neither of those texts, Romans 12, 1

Peter 2, nor any other grant civil rulers jurisdiction over the church. The biblical framework limits the authority of each institution to its specific jurisdiction.

And this is something for most of my listeners, you understand this perfectly, because we talked about this from day one of the

COVID crisis. He says, the church does not have the right to meddle in the affairs of individual families and ignore parental authority.

So if your pastor wanted to come and spank your kids, pastor can't do that, it's not his job. Parents do not have the authority to manage civil matters while circumnavigating government officials.

And similarly, government officials have no right to interfere in ecclesiastical matters in a way that undermines or disregards the

God -given authority of pastors and elders, amen. Amen. He's saying there's spheres of authority, different responsibilities given.

And yes, obviously people are a member, you're a member of a family, you're a member of a church, you're a member of a nation or a state or an entity, a town of some kind, but you have different authority structures within each of those things you're a member of, that's what he's saying.

So a discerning church cannot passively or automatically comply if the government orders a shutdown of congregational meetings, even if the reason is a concern for public health and safety.

And we've said this, we've said, look, the government said, the government said anything, any rule the government makes, we're gonna take your guns, right?

It's always for the common good. It's always because we have your best interest. They always use those arguments. We know better.

It's because you're sick and you need healthcare. And we gotta flatten the curve, whatever the case may be, the government always is gonna say it's for the common good.

So he says, the church cannot passively or automatically comply with the government in order to shut down, even if it's for concern of public health and safety.

Our prayer is that every faithful congregation will stand with us in obedience to our Lord as Christians have done through the centuries. So after this, there's a section, you can go look it up if you want, where they essentially say, why did we shut down for like four months then?

We're saying this now, but why did we shut down? And essentially, you know what the bottom line is? The bottom line is what

I think, and I think it came out in the sermon yesterday from John MacArthur as well. We're all human, and our patience is running thin.

And we're realizing, okay, we're four months now into this thing. And some states have put more restrictions on and they've closed, and we're realizing the emperor has no clothes.

We're realizing this wasn't as bad as you said it was. The flatten the curve excuse doesn't work anymore, that reason, because we've already done that.

And now the hypocrisy is coming out, because we can see you're letting protests happen, but you won't let the church open.

So I think it's, so here's the thing, from day one, all the things John MacArthur wrote about on Friday were true.

The church had no obligation to shut down. And you know what I was saying back then, I was saying, this is discrimination.

You're letting abortion clinics and liquor stores and other, you're letting Walmart remain open, but the church has to close.

You're already making judgment calls here, and they're discriminatory. And you could see how the media was treating it, and we saw this from the beginning, but I think now it's just more so.

Now it's more pronounced. Now there's no end in sight, especially if you live in a place like California. You know,

I think initially a lot of people thought, okay, we're gonna just put up with this for a few weeks, even if we know it's wrong. But I think at this point now, people are starting to think this is a power grab, and there's no end in sight.

This is perpetual. And so do we wanna set a precedent that the government can just do this and we're just gonna roll over and play dead?

No, no, because Christ is Lord of the church, and the government doesn't have that authority to do that.

And so this is what John MacArthur does, and amen to that, glad he did it. I mean, look,

I was praying along these lines months ago that there would be some real men, some real evangelical leaders who would stand up, lead their church, lead, if they have a platform bigger than that, at least show an example to others.

MacArthur is doing that right now. And honestly, guys, there were hardly any people doing it, hardly any, even people that you'd talk to, and behind the scenes, kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

I agree, John, this isn't good. It's terrifying to stand against what you think is popular opinion.

We're gonna find out that it might not be popular opinion. I think that might be giving people courage now too to start standing up, because it's gone on for so long, and we're realizing, you know what?

The people aren't all on board with this. There's some scared people, yeah, but let me show you this. This was the reaction on Sunday.

Before the sermon, sermon hadn't started, music hadn't started, service was just beginning.

This is what the congregation did at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, where John MacArthur preaches. So you can see they're wanting this, they're needing this, and I mean, that's what

I've seen and heard from people across the country, and I mean, they're hungry.

They want to be able to go and worship. This is a necessary, it's essential, as he said in the sermon, it's essential that Christians are able to do this.

So that's the situation. I think there's more people than the media would want us to think that actually feel this way.

So Jonathan Lehman from Nine Marks Ministries, he's one of the, I think it's really him and Mark Dever at this point, and I should say this,

I thought Thabiti Anabwile was a Nine, he was actually a

Nine Marks fellow. I'm not sure what they called him, but he was one of the leaders of Nine Marks Ministries. I know when I was at Southeastern, every time they did a

Nine Marks conference, Thabiti Anabwile was there, and he was even introduced as from Nine Marks and that kind of stuff.

Well, you go to their website now and he's not there. His resources are there, but he's not there as a member or a teacher, whatever they call it, fellow at Nine Marks, and I'm not sure why that is.

Maybe someone knows and you can put it in the comments, but see, here's the thing. One of the things that I thought,

I thought Nine Marks is going down that social justice path, and they are, but I thought one of the main reasons was

Thabiti Anabwile. I thought, well, Thabiti Anabwile is there, and of course, when I was at Southeastern, he gave this speech.

You can probably still find it. I didn't dig it up, but he says at the end, he says, if pursuing justice makes you liberal, then

God is a liberal and he wants you to be a liberal, and it was something like that, and I was just like, oh my goodness.

And of course, MLK50, our grandparents, I guess, are complicit in the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.

He's done a bunch of stuff over the years now. You just Google Thabiti Anabwile and you'll come up with some woke stuff, and I always associated him with Nine Marks.

Now, maybe that relationship ended. I'm just gonna assume it did just because he's not on the front of their website, but I know

Mark Dever and Jonathan Lehman have been, in a softer way, pushing some of the same stuff, and off the top of my head,

I can just give you a few examples. I know it was back in, I think, 2015 at Southeastern. Mark Dever was there, and I remember someone in the audience asked a question about homosexuality and just said, what would you do if someone came to your church and they were homosexual?

What would you tell them? How would you disciple them? And basically, Mark Dever was very uncomfortable with that and he said, essentially, well, what do you mean?

Has the desire or is acting on it? He really wanted to make that distinction to say that someone with same -sex orientation can be a

Christian, and the guy asking the question was kind of like, I don't know. I'm just asking you if they're homosexual, and we wouldn't do that about most any sin.

If someone said, what would you do to disciple a liar? You wouldn't say, what do you mean?

Someone who wants to lie or someone who's lying? Or, what would you do to disciple someone who's a thief?

You're like, what do you mean? Someone who wants to steal, they covet, or someone who actually steals? You wouldn't make those distinctions, usually.

But we do with this because of a secular understanding, really, a psychological understanding, a

Freudian understanding of orientation. And so you saw Mark Devere kind of bringing this out, showing that he kind of believes in that.

And of course, Al Mohler does, too. And that was one of the earlier things I saw in Mark Devere that I'm like, that's interesting to me.

And since then, I know I had a friend who went to his church last year, and you can actually go online.

I think Reformation Charlotte even put this out there, but they did a whole class in identity politics for Sunday school.

And you can go look at the notes, and they're not coming from a conservative perspective, I'll put it that way.

Jonathan Lehman, I think, put them together. Jonathan Lehman also did a, earlier this year, I think, it was for the

T4G online conference, a whole series, or it was a lecture, I guess, but it was a long lecture, kind of like my podcast sometimes.

And it was like an hour and a half just on identity politics. And I did an episode, you can go look it up, go look at YouTube, and you can type in on the

Conversations That Matter channel, Jonathan Lehman, you can see where I responded. And it's not good.

And I'm not gonna go into detail about all that stuff, because I don't wanna give you the laundry list, but you can go do some of that research yourself.

I know Mark Dever has said that one of the big problems is single -issue voting, and basically people who just vote because of pro -life, and that we need to be more nuanced, we need to realize there's other issues out there.

So I'm about to show you some things. Not those things. I'm just saying these are things that I already knew about, and there's probably more

I'm forgetting, but there was just things that I was like, something's off, that's all I knew. There's some tweets Mark Dever's put out there, they're just kind of weird sometimes, and I'll sometimes respond to them, but they're not as overt as some of these guys.

The beating of Abuele was overt, but again, I guess he's no longer with them. So I want you to understand that this is where I'm coming from.

I have a suspicion, from the beginning, I have a suspicion a little bit. And now

I'm gonna read for you, we're gonna get into this, but I'm gonna read for you Jonathan Lehman's response. And what

I would consider, and look, Jonathan Lehman, if you watch this, man, I just, I would be more than happy to talk with you, but I mean,

I'm not in the big leagues, I doubt he will watch this, but I don't know what to think.

I kind of laughed at first when I saw this. I was like, really? And then at the same time, now

I'm sad. I'm really sad. This is a ministry that I considered, at one time, to be pretty solid. What are you doing?

There's a church that wants people to meet up for church, to worship God, and you wanna throw cold water on that? That's what it feels like.

We're gonna read your actual words, though, some of them, at least. So here we go. Here's Jonathan Lehman's response.

So it's like the next day, I think, Jonathan Lehman puts this out. Here's the Nine Marks Ministries' Twitter.

Before you follow John MacArthur, sorry, before your church follows John MacArthur's Grace Community Church and decides to gather in defiance of governmental orders, hold on, stop, and think with me for a moment.

And then they have a link. And so I pulled out some quotes from this. Civil disobedience may not be the only legitimate or moral course of action at this moment.

You get the impression when you read this article from Jonathan Lehman, he really desperately wants to almost play both sides of an issue, or all sides of an issue.

It's just like, it's hard to pin him down because there's a lot of qualifications in there. May not be, you know, there's a lot of mights, that kind of stuff.

Tentativeness. So what are the other options? Other than doing what John MacArthur clearly advocates, four additional things are worth mentioning in case you did read his piece.

First, it's true that MacArthur's church cannot meet, but Christ's church can meet, okay?

Right now, members of his church can meet outdoors. Along these lines, I appreciate

J .D. Greer's and the elders of Summit Church's decision to turn the 12 ,000 -member

Summit Church into hundreds of house churches for the remainder of the year, even if I would structure things a little different than him.

So he's saying J .D. Greer, J .D. Greer's doing a good job. J .D. Greer, in case you don't know, J .D. Greer shut down his church for the next year.

Well, not the next year, for the rest of the year. Who knows, maybe it will be the next year, I don't know.

But his church is shut down. They're not meeting at all this year. So instead, what they're doing, according to this article, is they're having these,

I guess, house church kind of things. Like, so there's very smaller groups and you can get together with a smaller group.

Now, that's not a wrong thing to do necessarily. It's not a bold or brave thing to do either, though, because you really are, look, if you really believe, and J .D.

Greer probably doesn't, but if you really do believe that this is government overreach and this is setting a bad precedent and there isn't really the threat that they're telling you there is, and you go ahead and you do this to avoid, if that's the only reason you're doing it, is to avoid breaking the law, it's not even the law, breaking the arbitrary restriction, then that just shows kind of what kind of man you are, in my opinion.

That's just showing you that you don't really, you don't wanna fight this. And look, he has the resources, more than most churches, to fight it, legally.

If he wanted to fight it. But he's not gonna stand up to them. So you gotta bully government. The government is the real rebels here.

These state governments, these local governments, they're the real rebels, right? It's not the churches. They're the ones in violation of law, of the constitutions of their states.

And yet, we're made to think like we're the ones that need to tiptoe and try to keep from breaking eggshells here.

So he's saying MacArthur could figure out a creative thing to do. Meet outdoors, do something else.

And look, some churches are doing. I mean, I know some churches are doing some very creative things. And there's nothing wrong.

Your congregation may be at a different place. You need to figure out a way to meet. I've said that from the beginning. You have to figure out something, right?

But you can be creative in that. And, but your goal should hopefully be to try to get back to normal.

The tone that's being set should be one of not fearing. Not fearing, obeying the voice of the

Lord, even when it's scary. Encouraging your church. John MacArthur struck a great tone yesterday.

I know my dad's a pastor. He's been preaching on this for months now. And I think he's doing a very good job when he brings it up. It's not just a defiant thing.

It's a fearlessness based on we love the Lord. We know the Lord. He'll protect us if we obey him, right?

That's what people need to hear. They need encouragement. There's been protests. There's been all sorts of crazy things this year.

And a lot of the, a lot of what I've heard coming from prominent pastors has not been that.

It's been this kind of like, this almost, it's almost like a call to unity that's like, well, we're unified.

No matter where you come down on these issues, these controversial political issues, you know, we're unified. And we should just not let these things divide us.

No, look, if you're doing that, you're taking a stand. You have no option now. You have to take a stand.

On the social justice stuff, you have to take a stand. You don't have the option of saying unity so we don't take a stand.

You don't have the option with the COVID stuff of saying unity so we don't take any kind of stand whatsoever. Your church probably needs to know kind of what direction you're going in.

What you think. You're the leader. You're the shepherd. You need to show them how you're thinking through this, but tell them not to worry.

That's, and I think MacArthur, that's what he's doing. I'm just, maybe I'm fanboying too much. I don't know. But I think that he did, he struck the right tone.

And said what people are hungering that want to come back to church. They're hungering to hear. Jonathan Lehman though, he wants to kind of tiptoe around these regulations somehow.

He says Christians have long worked to accommodate government restrictions on gathering both when those requirements have seemed far and when they don't.

So he's saying Christians can accommodate. We can accommodate this government. Imagine any tyrannical regime from history, from the 20th century and the early years of the tyranny and saying, well,

Christians can accommodate. Christians, we can accommodate this, you know. They want to take out our

Bibles and put mine comp. They want to take out our crosses and put the swastika. Well, let's think about this.

Is it a sin to have a swastika in your church? Is there a Bible verse against that? Is, you know, hey, you think

I'm making light of this? No, we think that's crazy because we're standing on this side of World War II.

On the other side, in Germany, in 1939, in 1940, they wouldn't have thought that.

These things would have been going through their head. Well, maybe we can let the government go this far, but no farther.

And then the government takes, you give a moose a muffin, they're gonna want more if you've read the children's book.

So, so Lehman's saying Christians can accommodate. Third, addressing this matter of what's wise or beneficial.

See 1 Corinthians 6 .12, I personally wonder if defying government orders for the sake of a pandemic is the most judicious opportunity to exercise those muscles.

The politics of LGBT tells us our churches may have more occasions to defy government requirements in years to come.

He's saying, you gotta choose your battles, this isn't the one to choose because we're gonna have another occasion. Now, that's fine if he thinks that.

I don't think that. And I'll tell you real quick, this is off the top of my head why I disagree though. And that's because I've seen

Republicans do this for years. They're, you know, they won't fight something and then they're like, this isn't the one to next fight.

And then they don't fight that one and then it's the next one and they don't fight that one. And pretty soon you wake up one day and the country's socialist.

And you have to draw a line somewhere. And this is pretty big, guys. This hasn't happened in American history where the, and people wanna bring up the

Spanish flu. There's several differences between this and Spanish flu. And one is the scale.

You have a federal government now that, and these regulations aren't necessarily coming from the federal government, but the federal government is very much driving or at least initially they drove the narrative that how bad this was.

You had Dr. Fauci out there talking about it. Then you have the media nationally trying to drum up a lot of fear.

And then you have state governments. This isn't even local. In some cases it's local, but you have a lot of state governments that are on, like California's a big state.

You think that maybe it's different in different areas of California. Well, not according to the state. They have a one size fits all approach to this.

And then during Spanish flu, and here's what I'll tell you. Spanish flu people were literally dying in the streets.

I mean, there wasn't any question this was an actual real pandemic. And it wasn't like those who did shut down for a few weeks.

And it was different every place you went, by the way. That's another thing. It was a localist approach. It was different depending on where you went, but they weren't shut down this long, even during Spanish flu.

But it wasn't like you had protests going on at the same time. It wasn't like you had all these other extraneous things open and people were just participating and going food shopping like they are today in the same way.

They weren't participating in going to liquor stores. And I mean, certainly they didn't have like abortionists open and it's not the same, it's apples and oranges.

And so this is a very interesting time in American history. This hasn't really happened. And if we were on the other side, if this was five years ago, and I told you this is gonna happen, what would you have thought?

You probably would have thought this is the time to fight. We gotta fight this. We gotta make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen. We don't want the government thinking they can just shut down a church, state governments.

No. And so my concern is if you don't fight now, this kind of an overreach, this unconstitutional kind of an overreach, then when are you gonna fight?

If you don't fight now, you are setting a precedent that will make it harder for you to fight. This isn't coming, this isn't like different waves, right, that hit you.

And it's like, well, we'll sit out this wave and we'll go for the next wave. No, this is actually an accumulated effect.

This is something that builds on itself. And it sets a precedent for the next time and the next time.

And it's conditioning people to look to government for things they should be looking to God for. That's what it's doing.

And as the church, as people in the church, you'd think this would be such a major issue. So if you wanna fight

LGBTQ incursions on religious liberty, et cetera, then fight this now.

If you don't fight this now, then you're gonna making it hard for yourself later on. You're not training your people to think critically or biblically, or even according to basic American civics.

So that's my mini response to that. I probably took too long, but let's keep reading here. Fourth, and this is my most wonky point.

He uses the word wonky, it's interesting. MacArthur draws a strict line between the jurisdictions of state, church, and family.

I too affirm the separate of these jurisdictions. Yet here's what we need to keep in mind.

These jurisdictional circles to some extent overlap whenever it's the same people who are bound by those distinct jurisdictions.

Right, and MacArthur, I don't think denies that, obviously. You're a member of your family, you're a member of the state, you're a member of, or the region you live in geographically and the government that oversees that.

And you're also, you're a member of what, your business, what did

I say, your family, your state, oh yeah, and your church, duh. You're a member of your church. So you wear these separate hats and there's different hierarchies, different authority figures.

Of course they all have a claim on you in some way. Of course there's responsibilities you have to each realm, in each realm.

And so, yeah, anyway, the examples he gives here, like one of the examples he gives, is he says, well, during the blackouts of World War II, like the church shouldn't have just said like, well, we're not gonna do it because government doesn't have any authority here.

Well, right, well, this is like literally, you're at war with another country and they could come and bomb you.

And if you kept your lights on, they could destroy the whole entire town. And you're trying to defeat them.

That would be within the basic purview of government. Government does not bear the sword in vain.

The sword, right? Protecting through the sword, war. That's within the government's jurisdiction.

Telling a church, though, how many people that they can have on a Sunday or whether they ought to wear masks or not, or whether they can meet, period, that's not within the government's jurisdiction.

And so I don't, the logic that he uses to me kind of defeats itself, but I don't wanna get too far into this because I would get a lot more to talk about.

I'm gonna finish this article. All that to say, he says, it's not immediately evident to me that a government's original orders back in March and now again in July are, in John MacArthur's words, an illegitimate intrusion of state authority into ecclesiastical matters.

One could argue they are doing their job of seeking to maintain peace, order, and preservation of life as hundreds of people gather, potentially infect one another and then scatter into the wider community.

So Jonathan Lehman's philosophy of government is it's the human flourishing thing, it's the common good thing.

I think it probably traces back probably to more of a puritanical understanding, but I don't think that that is the proper role of government.

You can use common good if you want, right? That's fine, but common good at the expense of individual liberties and religious liberty and the

Bill of Rights and these inalienable rights, that's not good. That's the problem, that's the point, that's the issue

John MacArthur's raising, in a sense. He's saying that government doesn't have this right, it's not part of its jurisdiction, even if it's for the common good.

So if Jonathan Lehman's saying, well, the government has the right to do this because of the common good, no, that's bad.

That is how socialism progresses. That is how you get a tyrannical government. They'll always say it's for the common good.

You need negative liberties, you need, and this is what the framers of the Constitution, that's why they're so brilliant. That's what they set up, to check government so government does not overstep boundaries.

Government can't just walk over a boundary because, oh, it's for the common good. It's within our, that's a blank check at that point.

So I found his response wholly inadequate. And so here's where it gets interesting.

Here's where it gets interesting to me. Mark Dever chimed in on this. I agree with Jonathan Lehman in his blog.

I would encourage a thoughtful reading of both blogs. And here's, I'm gonna be pointing out a whole bunch of hypocrisy with Nine Marks, with Mark Dever and Jonathan Lehman here.

I really thought this was a good cross -examination of Mark Dever here. Josh Cox, may I ask,

Mark, when Nine Marks became interested in response pieces to all, to the decisions of local autonomous churches, 2 ,000 miles away from you all,

I appreciate the church helps. This stuff, not so much. So he's saying, what business do you have doing this?

This isn't what Nine Marks usually does. Nine Marks doesn't just write responses to other churches and their decisions.

Why is Nine Marks all of a sudden taking a stand on this? So he says,

Mark Dever says, Josh, I agree with you, and we normally don't do this. Glad you've appreciated the church helps.

Grace Community Church website encourages folks to sign, so the statement was not merely about what they are doing. I was also asked a lot by others what

I thought. So this is where he gets into the trap. He says, he was asked.

People asked him to respond to this. People asked him what he thought about this. It's probably having people in his congregation say, hey, can we open up?

Look, John MacArthur's doing it. Can we do that? I don't know. Maybe he is opened up. I don't think he is. So he feels an obligation somehow to respond.

Now here's, he walked into a trap here though, because here's what someone else wrote.

Curious Pastor Mark Dever, you were asked to comment on the social justice debate, but you said that these issues can't be resolved on social media.

If that's the case, why do you think taking a stand against Pastor MacArthur is so important on social media?

And this is brilliant. This shows the problem with this whole thing.

Not only was Mark Dever asked to take a stand on the Dallas statement on social justice, he was in a

Q &A session with John MacArthur and Phil Johnson and Sinclair Ferguson and a couple other guys, and Al Mohler, right,

Lincoln Duncan. He was sitting there and he had a lot to say, but he dodged, he did not, he did not answer the direct questions from Phil Johnson.

Go watch it. He's very, and he acts almost like he doesn't really know what's going on sometimes.

Like, well, what do you mean we didn't sign the statement? And Phil Johnson's like, I just wanna know why you didn't sign the statement. Doesn't get a direct answer.

So he was asked on that issue, on the issue of social justice, to take a very clear stand.

Where are you, Mark? No, I'm not gonna give you a clear stand on that, but we will give you a clear stand, more so at least.

We will respond to this decision that John MacArthur made with Grace Community Church. That shows you something about him.

That shows you the priorities he has and 9Marks has. It's more important that the social justice issue, which is dangerous, and we've gone over it in this podcast, that is not apparently as dangerous as the possibility of churches opening up just because they're saying that Christ is

Lord and Caesar's not. That's more dangerous, or it's more of a priority.

So Mark Dever and Phil Johnson also had a back and forth. I'm not gonna read the whole thing to you. I'll summarize it just for the sake of time.

Phil Johnson brings up a statement from Samuel Alito, the judge on the Supreme Court, and Samuel Alito says you can't shut down for an extended period of time and discriminate against churches, right?

Mark Dever responds, what does this have to do with Jonathan Lehman's blog? Phil Johnson says, well, Jonathan Lehman said it's not, the government isn't, there is an illegitimate intrusion of state authority into ecclesiastical matters in this case.

So he's saying the government is within its rights to shut down churches. That's what Jonathan Lehman is saying.

Phil Johnson repeats that. And then Mark Dever's final response is, well, what

Samuel Alito's talking about is about US citizens under the Constitution. What John MacArthur and Jonathan Lehman are talking about are the conflict between biblically given authority to the state and the church.

So let me just try to clear this up for you. There's an extra layer of protection that churches have in the

United States because of the Constitution. John MacArthur makes it clear in his blog that the Constitution is drawing from the same principles that the

Elders of Grace Community Church are drawing from. And so there is a connection there. It's an extra layer of protection for the church.

And Mark Dever seems to just wanna, I don't even know why, it seems like a really weird objection to give.

Like, well, Jonathan Lehman's not talking about that extra barrier. He's talking about the biblical role of government, which apparently,

I guess, is like blank check for the common good. I don't know how you escape that in Jonathan Lehman's thinking if you're gonna be vague and your principles are that broad for what a government should do.

But it's kind of like a red herring. It doesn't actually matter because we live in the

United States. So it's just, it's a strange thing. It almost just seems,

I don't know. I don't know what Mark Dever's trying to do here. I'm not in his head, but it reminds me of guys who just, like, in seminary wanted to give objections or just to do it, just to talk, just to be like,

I don't know, to be nuanced. And when rubber meets the road for the practical person who just wants to go meet at their church, this makes no sense.

But it's a challenge to Phil Johnson. That's what it is. And so this is what

Mark Dever's doing. It's silly, in my opinion. Now, I wanna go, here's where your eyes will be opened a little bit, for some of you, at least.

Mark Dever and Jonathan Lehman have been on this road for a little while, and I'm gonna connect to Black Lives Matter to this, and I'll show you.

They've expanded the definition of pro -life, in my opinion. Mark Dever says, Black Lives Matter seems to be a wonderfully pro -life statement as well, in January of 2016.

Jonathan Lehman, in January of 2016, same day. Black Lives Matter, a glorious, life -affirming, and succinctly stated theological truth.

Is that what you think of Black Lives Matter? You think that that's what it is? Well, why is

Black Lives Matter pro -life? I'll let Jonathan Lehman speak for himself on this. Why is Black Lives Matter more torn up over black people dying than we evangelicals are, he asks, in 2016.

Saying Black Lives Matter is more concerned about people dying. So it's people, it's black people dying. The sad fact remains that not all

Christians view race relations within the church as a gospel issue, quoting Jarvis Williams, one of the critical race theory guys, formerly at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Jonathan Lehman's quoting him favorably in 2015. So race relations is a gospel issue, which again, every time you hear that word gospel issue, you need to start thinking, when people attach the gospel to things that aren't the gospel, does the gospel do something for people groups who are in conflict?

Yes, it does. But a gospel issue, part of the gospel, it is not.

But this could be another, I'm just, I'm surmising here, I'm trying to figure out why would you be on the

Black Lives Matter train? Maybe that's why, it's a gospel issue. Jonathan Lehman, again, on non -lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than 50 % more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police.

As use of force increases from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton, the racial difference remains roughly constant.

So there you have the disparities. There's disparities in crime, in the response to crime.

And because of that, Black Lives Matter, I guess. You know, that could be, maybe that's what he's thinking.

But this is my best shot at, this is what Jonathan Lehman has put out there publicly. So this is why

I think they can use, say Black Lives Matter as a pro -life issue. Both Mark Dever and Jonathan Lehman have done this.

All right? Now, I'm just gonna comment real quick on this. Again, we gotta be very careful about this.

And I've used this analogy before, but go to Nazi Germany, the Jews are getting exterminated. It's a Holocaust. And then say, well, you know what, animal rights.

Or you know what, the planet. Or you know what, healthcare is really bad in this town.

Or you know what, some people are discriminated against and there's a disparity. Or you would say, what are you crazy?

There's people dying over there. We know where it's happening. It's the same thing with Planned Parenthood.

It's the same thing. They're dying. It's a Holocaust. It's systematic.

Maybe it's even systemic if you wanna use social justice, one of the terms they love, social justicians love.

That's what's happening. People are dying, losing their lives with the intent to kill. It's a little different than, well, the police are a little rougher with this certain demographic without even giving the explanation for why that might be, just assuming it's racism.

Making that into a pro -life issue, in my opinion, is kind of disgusting. But that's what they're doing. Marching in Black Lives Matter protests.

Oh yes, okay. So Jonathan Lehman marched in a protest. And this is the protest.

I'm gonna show you kind of what this is. He says, couple people have asked how Faith That Works DC march was.

Super encouraging. Felt like a bunch of Christians marching around the single idea that black people are worth honor, worthy of honor and respect because they are made in God's image.

And he says, praying God would use this and other protests to change the nation's culture, police culture, and even the church's culture, that all would affirm the

God imaging and God -given glory of black lives. And if you're in DC, join us.

And this is the poster he posts on his Facebook, the graphic he posts on his, or sorry, on his

Twitter. So it's by Faith Plus Works. That's the organization putting this together on Sunday, June 7th.

And they march in DC, wear red and white. If just the peaceful demonstration.

So here's where it gets interesting again. Steve Meister asks, and this is on June 7th, right?

This is right after, I guess, this march. Jonathan, are your church services like ours still restricted, limited by state guidance?

So we're getting back to the John MacArthur issue here with the opening of Grace Community Church. So listen to this. He's asking, hey,

Jonathan Lehman, you guys still, you meeting? What's going on? If so, can you help me understand why you would defy guidance for a march but not a church service?

Or am I missing some key detail? That is a really good question. Think about it this way.

If the virus is really bad, if you really think it's bad, and you're not going to open your church up, why would you go to a protest for in support of Black Lives Matter or even just protest in general, any protest?

Why would you do that? Which is more necessary, church or a protest, political protest? Obviously church, especially if you're a pastor.

So that's the question he's getting. Well, what's his response? Thanks for the good question, Steve. The DC mayor is not applying her mandate to the marches.

Hence, she was not, she was at one yesterday. Now, if someone wanted to bring a lawsuit for the sake of inconsistency in its application to churches,

I wouldn't stop them. I wouldn't stop them. How about you bring the lawsuit,

Jonathan Lehman? Why don't you guys bring it? Here's the verses that came to my head when I saw this.

So the DC mayor's being an absolute hypocrite then. The DC mayor's discriminating against the church.

That's what's happening, blatantly. And apparently the

DC mayor doesn't think this COVID stuff is a real threat either. Or she thinks a Black Lives Matter protest is more important, but church isn't.

Some verses for you to think through this. Proverbs 20, 10, differing weights and differing measures. Both of them are abominable to the

Lord. DC mayor's decision of hers to let people do the Black Lives Matter protest, but they can't go to church, it's an abomination.

Different standard being used. Ephesians 5, 11, do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them.

Would we ever have known about this if it wasn't for the question? Jonathan Lehman's not raising a stink about what's happening what the

DC mayor's doing. He's participating in this protest though.

And I would argue, and I have argued that this Black Lives Matter movement is bad. And we'll get into why this is a

Black Lives Matter protest in a minute, but do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them.

We should be exposing this hypocrisy. Those who forsake the law,

Proverbs 28, 4, praise the wicked, but those who keep the law resist them.

It's time to resist the wicked guys. It's time to resist the wicked. Forsaking the law, that's what these governments are doing.

They're forsaking the law. It's time to resist them. That's what John MacArthur's doing.

But Jonathan Lehman seems to have a problem with that. Seems to think it's within the purview of the government to shut down churches.

They can do that. So he must think this is legitimate. This coronavirus thing is legitimate, but apparently going to this protest, this

Black Lives Matter style protest, type of protest, that's a priority.

He doesn't really believe it's actually that big of a threat, I guess. Or this protest is more important, but meeting for church, no, we're not gonna do that.

Not gonna do that. You know who might have more resources than other churches to fight this, to bring a lawsuit?

Probably Nine Marks Ministries. They probably have more resources than most little churches. They could probably be leading on this issue.

Or you wanna speak prophetically to the culture? We hear that all the time from social justice warriors. You gotta speak prophetically.

That's why they went on this march, to speak prophetically to the church, to the community. Speak prophetically about black lives.

So motivated about black lives being lost. You're not motivated about the Church of Jesus Christ being discriminated against.

You just admitted, Jonathan Lehman, that that's what's happening. That doesn't motivate you?

You have the resources more than a lot of places to fight this, to expose it, to expose the deeds of darkness.

This shows something about your character, perhaps. I don't wanna believe this kind of thing about someone who's at Nine Marks.

I don't, but am I given a choice? I don't see the other option.

Mark Dever posted this, a very general, but he says, normally peaceful protests express dissent.

Violent mobs suppress dissent. Is that an endorsement of peaceful protests? I'm not sure. But if it is, it's an endorsement while churches are closed, including his.

So by what standard is the question? Jonathan Lehman says this in 2017.

I want you to listen to this. Pastor friend just asked if a church should discipline someone who participated in Charlottesville March and refused to disavow and apologize.

Yes, yes. Pastor wants to know if a member of my congregation was in Charlottesville at this

Unite the Right rally that happened in 2017, should we church discipline him?

No hesitation on Jonathan Lehman's part. Yeah, yeah, that's what you should do. If you have a church member who had participated in a

Black Lives Matter protest, Marxist organization, let's say, led by them, should you discipline that person?

What do you think? What if they were vandalizing? What if they were ripping down some historical stuff? What if they were,

I don't know, calling for ungodly things like defunding the police? Disrespecting the members, and a real disrespect, real disrespect to those in authority over them for good, for good reasons, in authority over them.

Legitimate reasons. Should we just church discipline them? Yes. Or maybe should we talk to them and find out where they're coming from, and as elders, figure out the situation?

Maybe, you know, even Donald Trump, I think, was able to see this. There's people that support

Thomas Jefferson statue, his statue. There's people who support Robert E. Lee's statue.

They aren't bad people. They're not neo -Nazis. They just don't want our history ripped down.

He could make that distinction. Here's Jonathan Lehman, one size fits all.

Yeah, yeah, discipline that person. Discipline them. Listen to this. Sometimes, here's one from June 26th, so a month ago.

Sometimes, the can Christians say black lives matter because you know the organization combo reminds me of Halloween debates.

Did you know H has a pagan background? Me, I didn't till you said something.

I'm just here with my kids for candy. Is that okay? Good article, he says. Post an article by Jarvis Williams on black lives matter in the

Bible. He won't extend that grace to people he thinks might be white supremacists, though.

He won't extend the same kind of grace because he thinks anyone who would have been in that rally or been, they would have just been white supremacists and by, you just discipline them.

That's all you do. Now look, I'm not taking, I'm not saying that you don't discipline someone for, look, if someone's an actual neo -Nazi and they're unrepentant, you follow the steps of church discipline, yeah, you should do that.

If they're unbiblical views, you need to go after that. You need to confront sin. I'm talking about the different weights and measures

Jonathan Lehman is using here. He wants to go after people that were in that march or in that, whatever that was, but he won't go, but people in black lives matter.

He doesn't, he, ignorance is fine. Someone could be just ignorantly participating. I didn't know it was

Marxist. I didn't know what they were really after. And that, and that, and that should be fine.

Christians should, it's like Halloween. Some Christians fall on one side, some Christians fall on the other, whether you should celebrate it and we should just give grace to that issue, apparently.

Do you hear this? Do you see the hypocrisy of this? I sure hope so.

Here's the rally that Jonathan Lehman participated in. Now, I should say, this is the rally the day before.

June 6th protests. Protesters have draped the metal fence erected around the White House with murals, posters, memorials.

Got a guy waving an upside down American flag with BLM, a big defund the police mural on the street.

I mean, there's so many things I could have showed you from this, I didn't, but lots of profanity, lots of, I mean, it was the Black Lives Matter protests.

Well, here's the next day. This is the Faith and Works protest, right? And you can see on a few of these clips, and if you go online, you can find more,

Black Lives Matter signs all over the place. I can't breathe.

It's the same kind of signs minus probably a lot of the profanity. And they're doing a more peaceful march and they're singing hymns and that kind of thing.

But the Faith and Works organizations, hashtag George Floyd, hashtag Ahmaud Arbery, hashtag Breonna Taylor.

And you have David Platt is supporting this. They're singing.

You know, singing can really spread coronavirus. I don't know if you knew that, but according to the Gospel Coalition, but they were singing.

They had a whole, in fact, they had a whole printout that Faith and Works put out there, a singing printout for people. And I was trying to look into this organization.

I'm like, what is Faith and Works? Well, according to the ERLC, this is started, this was David Platt and Thabiti Anabwile.

It's their churches that are behind this. They started Faith and Works, okay? I don't know if that's true, but that's what the ERLC article said.

Here's some other information though. And I suspect that it probably is Thabiti Anabwile because they were retweet

Thabiti Anabwile a lot. Their June 7th statement is they thank everyone for coming out to the march with us.

We are very encouraged that so many Christians are thinking seriously about racial injustice and wondering how to take a stand in their communities. We'd like to encourage you in your journey.

Here are some concrete steps you can take as you continue to make your life, make your life your protest.

To make your life your protest. Is that remotely biblical? One, listen to the voices who have been speaking out against racial injustice across the nation, locally and in your churches.

Two, learn about the history of racial injustice in America and what others are doing to respond. Three, lead by example within your sphere of influence by sharing with your church, family and friends what you've been learning.

Discuss how corporately, corporately, you can fight against racial injustice, love mercy, do justice, walk humbly with your

God. All right, so these are like the steps to getting woke and being a social justice activist.

Make your life your protest. Now, they're retweeting Thabiti Anabwile quite a bit.

Here's one that his church was on the march and here's an interesting thing to me.

So this is where I think they wanna do corporate, corporately fight against racial injustice.

They're supporting the Ann campaign. I found a few things on this, but they really like the Ann campaign. Now, the

Ann campaign is led by two basically Democrat, political

Democrats, Michael Ware and Justin, I believe it was Justin Gaboney, if I'm not mistaken, that's his name, but look them up.

They are Democrat strategists, Democrat party strategists supporting pro -abortion candidates,

Barack Obama being one. They supported Barack Obama. They worked for Barack Obama. They agree at least enough to work with them with Barack Obama, all right?

That's the kind of thing that Faith and Works likes somehow.

They're supporting Jamar Tisby, Color of Compromise. So this is the organization that headed this protest up and this is the organization that Jonathan Lehman marched with from Nine Marks.

This is concerning to me, this is concerning to me because as soon as John MacArthur, literally within a day of John MacArthur putting up an article saying we should get back to church,

Jonathan Lehman's on him like a duck on a dune bug. He's on him, but yet he's gonna go to this protest and this protest, it's a

Christian version, but look, they have Black Lives Matter signs. They're hooked into the Ann campaign led by Democratic strategists.

I'm not seeing good associations here. They're okay going to that, but not going to church somehow.

I don't know how to justify this. I don't think you can. Church disciplines someone who went to the

Charlottesville rally, but if there's association with people who kill babies, who are okay with it,

I should say, and wanna protect the right of women to kill babies, abortionists to kill babies, then no, what are you talking about?

That's a just cause. We go and we associate with those people, that's fine, but not a rally where they're trying to defend,

I'm assuming here, I don't know, I'm not an expert on what happened in Charlottesville, but even if someone was ignorantly thinking

I'm just gonna support these statues, I don't want them being taken down. No, discipline that person.

Discipline that person. You see the problem? Yeah, I see it too, and this is concerning, and I think our prayer should be that they wake up at nine marks, that Mark Dever realizes, that Jonathan Lehman realizes this is what they're doing.

It's hypocrisy, and if not, guys, the best I can say, this is the best thing

I can say is if you wanna use their church polity stuff, you better be very careful with how you view their political stuff when they come out with political stuff.

Have a critical eye, have a discerning eye. I'll be honest, this is where I'm at,

I don't think I can use their stuff. I just don't, because if I do, and this is something you can disagree with me on, and that's fine, this is not in the

Bible that you have to agree with this, but I just think of a Christian who's new, who gets a hold of that stuff, and if you introduce them to it, and you have an endorsement on it, then that could be a gateway to getting into this other stuff, and you don't want that.

You could give a disclaimer, I guess, but you need to, at the very least, have a discerning eye when it comes to this.

So that's all I wanted to share on this whole issue. I'm concerned about the expansion of the pro -life issue.

I think when you have abortion mills killing babies in the thousands across this country, and I mean, millions, if you go years and so forth, and then you have the quality of life issues that are now being put into the pro -life category, that's not good.

That is how socialists progress, by convincing you that this is so important, that this is on the same level as murder, as actual, no, like actual murder, like premeditated, in the law, lawful murder, like the government's actually okay with it and funding it murder.

No, they're not the same, guys. They're not the same. And so I don't wanna wax long because I said we wouldn't go long on this episode, but yeah, thanks for listening, guys, and my heart is to help the church and help you all who are trying to navigate some of these things.

I hope at the very least it gives you some food for thought. Pray for John MacArthur's church. I'm sure there's gonna be a backlash against them for this, but stand with them, stand strong, and maybe if you can, just tell them that you support them on social media, write a letter, whatever.