9 Marks Reacts to John MacArthur's Church Reopen Statement

Opening Concerns About Nine Marks and the Weekend News

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 this 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 want to 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, an 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, governments cause 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 megachurch.

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 a 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. 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 5 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.

John MacArthur’s Case for Reopening the Church

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 or 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 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, and 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, 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, you know, 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 like 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know? And of course, you know, MLK 50, our grandparents, I guess, are complicit in the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. And 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 has been, and Jonathan Lehman have been, you know, 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? Would you, what would you tell them?

How would you disciple them? And basically, Mark Dever was very uncomfortable with that and thought, and he said essentially, well, what do you mean? Like, has the desire or is acting on it? He really wanted to make that distinction to say that same people, 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 like most any sin. If someone said like, you know, 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 Dever 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 Dever 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 want to 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's 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 BDN Abhile 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. You know, 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.

Jonathan Lehman’s Qualified Defense of Church Restrictions

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, or 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 might, 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. And 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 the 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. 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 what I've heard coming from prominent pastors has not been that. It's been this kind of like, 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, 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.

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 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 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, one is on 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 certainly, they didn't have abortionists open.

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, 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.