Theonomy & President-"elect" Biden

I would say if the authorities didn't want us involved in the public square, they ought not to have crucified

Jesus in the public square. Use humanistic principles. The same idea. I would say that. Same answer.

I would say, what's the problem with stardust bumping into stardust? In the cosmic picture, none.

There's no problem. In the cosmic picture, it won't matter. No, Mr.

President, you are not protecting reproductive freedom. You are authorizing the destruction of freedom for one million little human beings every year.

I'm sorry, my friends, but I am tired of seeing Jesus presented as a weak beggar.

He is a powerful savior, and the gospel is not a suggestion, it is a command.

Ola, don't you sympathize with that? I sympathize with every single human heart wishing to know the one true and living

God, but I believe there's only one way that that can happen through Jesus Christ, and the gospel is about repenting of sin, not celebrating it.

Threshold of an amazing adventure. We will explore the spiritual abyss.

You have not experienced this before. Look on my affliction and deliver me, for I do not forget your law.

Plead my cause and redeem me. Give me life according to your promise. Salvation is far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statutes.

Great is your mercy, O Lord. Give me life according to your rules. Many are my persecutors and my adversaries, but I do not swerve from your testimonies.

I look at the faithless with disgust, because they do not keep your commands. Consider how

I love your precepts. Give me life according to your steadfast love. The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.

That's Psalm 119, 153 to 160, y 'all. Welcome back to another episode of Apologia Radio. Everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome.

I'm Jeff, may you call me the Ninja. That is Luke the Bear right there. What up? You know, we could just literally just read that whole psalm for this whole show.

Psalm 119 could just be the psalm we read for the show, and say, can you still currently sing that, given your theology?

Or would it be stunted, and would you have to toss out a bunch of that? Reinterpret it and re -envision it.

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Coherent, easily accessible, all of that. So welcome to the show, everybody. We have a very important show for you all today.

So much is happening in our world. And we know you guys are probably just as on edge as we are trying to figure out what are the days ahead going to hold.

My goodness, so much is going on. So we thought we would start this discussion today at Apologia Radio talking about the

United States election of the president. And let's do that by also bringing in our guest.

We have a guest today, one of our good friends, one of our heroes. We love him so much. And we've had him before.

We're going to have him to join us to talk about this election stuff. But also we're going to be responding today to Nine Marks.

Nine Marks, a fairly recent podcast on the issue of God's law.

And we wanted to do this a couple weeks ago, but it's been a busy time of year for us. And so we wanted to have Dr.

Sandlin on with us. So we're going to talk about both those things today. I think you'll be really, really loving today's episode.

You'll benefit a lot from today's episode because we're going to dig into some important stuff. So let's welcome on to the show once again

Dr. Andrew Sandlin. Thank you, guys. It's great to be on. I appreciate all that you do.

You guys are just great. So keep it up. Thank you, brother. So first question is how are you enduring the lockdown?

Well, as we were talking before we started, our illustrious governor, who's a

Democrat, by the way, it looks like he's flexing his muscles even more to sort of increase the lockdown in a number of counties, not my county, but adjacent counties.

So we do live in a very deep blue state. If you don't believe that, check the voting totals from the election last

Tuesday for California. So it's a bad state to live in. I live in a very conservative, you know,

Trump county, but counties nearby are ultra liberal, which is why so many people from California are moving there,

Jeff and Luke, to Arizona, which is probably part of the reason that Arizona, by conventional standards, apparently went for Biden.

So that remains to be seen. Remains to be seen. And there's all kinds of fraudulent stuff they're working through right now.

But if you could do us a favor, Dr. Sandlin, if you could just stop them from coming here, that'd be really great.

We'd appreciate that very much. I'd like to do that. You could definitely come here. Yeah, we would definitely like you to come.

But it is amazing, though, if you think about a lot of these people that sort of get crushed in Democrat -run cities with the taxation and just the poor management and the lawlessness and all the rest, they go, man,

I got to get out of here. I can't afford to live here anymore. It's awful. Let me go to one of these conservative states that are so much nicer. And then they come here and they vote for the same people.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make a lot of sense at all. I just realized something. We don't have my screen plugged in.

So you can talk to Andrew for a second while I plug my screen in, and Isaac, you can make sure that it's up for me. Oh, I was, speaking of the blue state that you live in, it was hilarious to me that the night of the election literally the moment the polls closed in California, they were like, it's blue.

Blue! They hadn't even counted yet. Yeah, they do the same thing for Hawaii. As soon as Hawaii comes online, no one even waits for Hawaii.

They're like, blue! But the craziest thing, Dr. Sandlin, is if you look at the electoral college map, not all of it is accurate, by the way, at all.

And by the way, if you didn't know this, the media doesn't call the elections. There's actually a constitutional, there's a way this is done by law in terms of states sending their electoral college peeps to the college and convention thing and giving their officials certified results.

And so if you didn't know it, believe it or not, CNN, Fox News, AP, ABC, MSNBC, all those things, they actually don't call the election, and nothing they say really matters.

What matters is the electoral college. That's right. So I'm not sure why that is news to us, but apparently it is news to us because some people hold big celebratory things saying,

President -elect, President -elect, before the votes are counted and everything is done, because CNN says, because they say.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Isaac, are we up? Are we online? We're good. We're good, okay.

So I'll make sure I can at least show stuff. So let's talk about the election for a minute. So I wanted to at least do that today. We're in a holding pattern right now.

If you watched Sunday evening service from Apologia Church, you know that the four elders, we all came up and we addressed the congregation and spoke on what's most important for us right now as we're working through these things in our own nation.

We talked about the law of God. I talked about the fact that, look, this past week, even with the status as it is, if your soul was crushed and you're just completely just shattered over all this, then maybe your idolatry was exposed.

We don't have hope in human governments as ultimate or any one political leader or anything like that at all, and so I really try to challenge the church on, where's your hope?

Our focus should be on Christ and God's kingdom, and the church has endured persecution and difficulties over the ages, and we always conquer and we're always victorious because the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.

We are leading the all out assault on the world with the light of the gospel, and the gates of hell won't prevail against it.

With that said, we are not in here wearing

Trump shirts and MAGA hats and cheering for Trump. However, I hate communism.

Amen. I hope that's been clear over the years, and if it wasn't, maybe you can take that as a sound bite.

I hate communism. It is disgusting, deplorable. The system that is propagated and promulgated by the

Democratic National Convention and Democratic Party is a system that turns coveting into a virtue that prizes theft.

It is the party of death. It is the party that hates God's law, tries to distort gender, all the rest.

We can go on with a list of all the deplorable, abominable parts of the

Democratic platform. So do I want to see it go that direction? I don't. I know that President Trump has his own issues.

The Republican Party has its own issues. However, I certainly don't want communism to kick in in 2021 officially.

Right. And so, just know, from our perspective here, we don't want to turn into idolatry the

Republican Party or Donald Trump or anybody during an election. We can't allow ourselves to be anxious and fearful when

God may be judging our nation. God's in control. We can rejoice in Him always.

However, we're in a place right now where the election has not been called. This whole president -elect conversation that's taking place nationally through all these liberal media companies, don't buy it.

Don't buy it. It isn't true. Nothing's certified. It isn't true. You have court disputes taking place.

And I know that I'm giving the dump right now. YouTube is telling our listeners that the AP has called it.

Oh, yeah. Just so everyone knows, the AP's already called it. That's what YouTube's letting everyone know. Yeah, so...

By the way, you can't say anything right now without getting just stepped all over by the powers that be on this issue.

I mean, they've literally, they won't allow you to even do anything political right now. We can't.

Completely shut down. We can't do any pro -life ads right now. We can't even do any pro -life ads right now on Facebook because they've shut down the ability to do any political ads right now during the next two weeks.

They are stifling the conversation. I even gave a coded message yesterday. I even took screenshots instead of sharing something.

Screenshots and gave a coded message to say, look, this thing is not called yet. There's a court battle going on.

And by the way, this is the thing that's sickening to me about all of this in terms of your hypocrisy is spilling over.

And it's amazing that you can't look at your feet and see that you're standing in it. It truly is. Back in the year 2000, you're old enough to remember this.

And of course, Andrew, you remember this. 2000, I remember the election between Gore and Bush.

And I remember that they called it for Gore. And then, oops, lo and behold, there's a problem.

Bush is winning. So they went through 36 or 37 days of court battles and recounts.

They did four total recounts and Bush won every single one of them. I have to say,

I was like, oh, I remember that. And I went back this week and I listened to Al Gore's concession speech.

And I thought, dang, what an honorable man. I would die to have

Al Gore right now. I thought to myself, what an honorable man. If you guys get a chance, don't do it now, but later go watch

Al Gore's concession speech after all the court stuff happened. He said, honorably,

I don't completely agree with this, but we're a nation of laws. That's how this is done.

And he was like, I will uphold this because that's how our nation works. And I was like, he's a really honorable man.

What is blowing my mind here is that people are acting today with such hypocrisy to like, no, it's been called.

CNN called it, AP called it, CNN, they all called it. It's like, hold on. In 2000, when the

Democratic guy was going through the court process to try to make sure that it was legit and there was a recount and all the rest, everybody in the country held back and said, yeah, we want this to be a legal election.

We want to make sure every vote counts. We want to make sure it's done right. And so everyone held back and was like, all right, let's find out what happens.

And they got through all the court stuff. They challenged it all. And then the Democratic guy goes, you know, you're right.

This is how our system works. It was a recount. And so there we go. And then Bush became president.

Now we're at a place where all these major media companies are calling it saying he's the president elect. What does that even mean?

He's the president elect, but we still have numerous states that didn't even have their votes finished.

They weren't even done counting yet. Fox News calls Arizona a blue state that it went for Biden before they even had the votes counted even close.

And that's still going on today. We're still counting votes in Arizona still. There's fraud, widespread fraud in a number of states.

There are sworn testimonies that are actually, these testimonies, it's the penalty of perjury.

I mean, you're talking about risking even 10 years in prison for giving these testimonies. You've got a 240, 236 page thing right now of all the sworn testimonies of people who saw fraud.

That's in one place. That's crazy. You've got, check this out. I'm going to show you this right here. President, where'd it go?

Where'd it go? Where'd it go? Where did it go? There you go, Donald Trump. Okay, check this out, guys. President Trump, just a couple hours ago, three hours ago, he tweeted this, all caps, by the way.

I don't know why it goes for all caps, but it does. Quote, report, Dominion, by the way, if you don't know what that is,

Dominion is the system, the voting system software thing in these battleground states.

Okay, so that's what Dominion is. And so as Dominion deleted 2 .7

million Trump votes nationwide, data analysis finds 221 ,000

Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden, 941 ,000

Trump votes deleted, states using Dominion voting systems switched 435 ,000 votes from Trump to Biden.

Now, this is a president of the United States of America, and look, I don't care what you think about Trump or Biden, they are able to have their day in court.

They've got lawyers working on this. They've got eyewitness testimony. They have people who are analyzing this data. I gotta say,

I just don't believe in this case that the president is gonna share this, is gonna put this out there if he doesn't know and hasn't been informed.

By the way, some of this has already been proven anyway, so why are we disputing? But this is just large, these are heavy numbers.

If it is the case, this goes to the court system, and it's proven that there was fraud, and they're able to show the fraudulent ballots, and they kick those ballots out, and he goes over, my friends, he is gonna have another term as president.

Now look, am I being a prophet saying it's gonna happen? No, I don't know what's gonna happen. Look, Biden can very well officially get certified the way it's supposed to, as an ex -president of the

United States of America. He can become president, and then we're on our way to communism and a lot of judgment. But look, if it flips, if it flips,

I think we all need to be prepared for difficult days ahead. Before the election happened, on my way home,

Fry's Electronics, big electronics store at the I -10 area, massive store, the day of the election, actually, no, before, they were boarding up all access to windows and everything else all around the store in preparation for the riots and the looting that would break out.

It was happening all over the country, right? Now, here's my question. All this went down,

Biden was called president -elect by the media, not officials, not certified, and yet, weird, that's weird.

Did you see any rioting or looting from any Trump people? No. Any conservatives you hang out with, Christians? No. Out in the streets, like, rioting?

No. You didn't break a window? If anything, we were... You threw at least one brick. If anything, we were loading our magazines.

Yes, that's true. No. No, yeah. But you didn't throw even one brick? No, not one. Not one? Uh -uh. Are you sure? Positive. Okay. All right, not one brick came from any...

I don't even know if anybody threw a brick, and it's weird, because I didn't get the thing from Soros that told us where they're stationed, where he was going to drop the bricks off.

I missed that notification. But, isn't it weird? All these stores across the country are, like, boarding up their stuff, and they're worried about what's going to happen in the election, but, weird,

Biden's called by the media, and it's so strange. You don't see any of the conservatives or Christians out there throwing bricks or rioting or looting.

It's odd. That's weird. But let me ask you a question. Do you think, if the courts work through this, and they show the fraudulent stuff, they prove it?

I'm not talking about NUN. They prove it, and they kick out these votes, and these states flip to Trump, and then

Trump is now, again, another four years? Do you think there's going to be rioting and looting? You betcha.

You better believe it. Bet your bottom dollar. That's an old person saying right there. There's going to be riots, and there's going to be looting.

And so, very interesting times we live in right now. Listen, it could go either way right now. This stuff has to be proven in court.

But man, oh man, is this going to be interesting. Well, you know what's important about proving yourself in court?

What's that? Is having two to three independent lines of witness. Oh, that's right. Is there a book somewhere that talks about that?

I think so. There's a book about that, isn't there? Yeah. Hey, by the way, you can thank the

Christian Worldview for all the checks and balances that were put into this nation to actually work through issues like this.

And you can thank the Christian Worldview for the thing like cross -examination, and listening to all the witnesses' testimony and making a judgment.

Yeah, that all comes from God's law. Boy, it'd be good if we had that today and those principles today. So anyway,

Andrew, your thoughts on the current situation? With respect to the election, right?

Yes, sir. Yeah, I think you guys made some great points there. I mean, every legal vote should be counted.

And I think you're right. If somehow Trump were to end up winning the election,

I think there would be massive rioting on the left because they've bought into the cultural

Marxist idea that they are the elites, and if for some reason they cannot express their elitism politically, then something's wrong with the system, and the system has to be burned to the ground.

I mean, that's essentially what they believe. I think we also, we said some negative things. Let's remember that the president was not the only issue on the ballot, and that on the whole,

Republicans, and I agree with you guys, they're not perfect, but generally far superior morally to the

Democratic Party, did generally very well otherwise. In fact, picked up a number of seats in the House. They were supposed to lose seats.

It looks like they're likely going to retain the Senate. That's not 100%, but likely going to retain the

Senate. The judiciary's in a better shape. On state levels, the

Republicans did very well, so this certainly was a mixed election like most, and even if it ends up that Biden is in the

White House, which no Christian or conservative could ever want, but if that happens, the case is certainly not lost because Jesus Christ is still on the throne, and in addition, we do have a system that has checks and balances, and Biden will be held in check, certainly on domestic policy, so it's good to remember all of these factors, and though the presidential election is vitally important, and I'm in no way diminishing that, there are other elections, and for the most part,

Republicans did pretty well. Yes, and that was one of the interesting things, Dr. Sandlin. I'm sure you noticed this as well.

I'm pulling a video up here. I need everyone to see this in a second here, so okay. The differences between some of these elections, this was a peculiar aspect of this election.

You had everything down ballot in many places, Republican, Republican, Republican, but all of a sudden, also there was

Biden elected as president in that same area or that same state, so what's weird about that is some people, one person said, it's like the coattails didn't match the coat, right?

How are people voting in this area for all Republican down ballot, but they voted for Biden as president?

Strange things happening there, but I wanted to show everyone this. Why does this matter?

Well, here's an example of why this matters, and it's something we've been saying for a long time. We've got a lot of people watching right now, so welcome to Apologia Radio.

If you're here for the first time, we're glad you joined us. Why is it important? Well, we want four more years of mercy, to be honest with you.

A Harris administration, which is really what we're talking about here, is the fast track to communism, the fast track to hardcore, pipe -hitting socialism.

It's not questioned. We know how radical she is, how

Marxist she is, her tendencies. It's just out in the open. She does not care to hide it.

It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the brazen attitude these people have towards these wicked worldviews, but what's interesting here is we've said in an abortion now for a long time, it's the duty of the church to implore all of our legislators to reject the fallacious opinion of Roe from the 1970s.

Not only can it be demonstrated to be fallacious in terms of calling what's in the womb potential human life, it is guaranteed beyond a shadow of a doubt, a fact biologically distinct from the mother, and it is human life from the moment of conception.

Unique. So it's fallacious in the first place, but our system of government says that the

Supreme Court does not legislate. It is Congress that legislates. They create law.

The Supreme Court gives opinions. They interpret. They try to show. It is up at that point to people to go, you know, that is constitutional.

That's right. We need to legislate based upon that opinion. It is right. It's constitutional. All of that.

Now, Roe is declared, and all of a sudden we got into this weird space where we thought,

I guess that means it's law. It isn't. Congress hasn't created a law about abortion, and what's amazing is you have states like Arizona and Idaho and other states who have on the books abortion is murder, considered homicide, and there's jail time for it, okay?

Now, Roe doesn't affect that. Now, here's the thing. The pro -choicers and pro -aborts, they've argued, oh, we've got

Roe. It's law. It isn't. It isn't, and we've been saying it's not because we know what the Constitution says and how our system of government, our republic works.

Here's the problem. The pro -life industry has gone off the attitude, the belief system, the declarations of the pro -aborts and said, you know,

I guess we've got to overturn Roe. No, we don't. No, we don't. All we have to do is, as states, reject a fallacious court opinion that kills humans and uphold our state law.

Reject Roe. That's what we've been saying. It isn't a law. States, flex your sovereignty. Now, here's the problem.

If Roe was undone tomorrow, you're still going to have now abortion legal in the states.

Why? Because the pro -life industry has created legislation in the states saying, well, you can kill the baby, but you can't kill it after 18 weeks or 24 weeks.

Guess what? That just made it legal in the states. Why? Because you assumed Roe was law. Why don't we know the

Constitution and how our system of government works? And by the way, do you know what in Arizona is so beautiful at this moment?

Marijuana. Now, don't get me wrong. Let me finish the thought. When I say marijuana is so beautiful, let me tell you why.

We had on this ballot, which I think was highly convenient, put the marijuana recreational legalization on the same ballot as Biden.

Who do you think those people are going to be voting for? So, very good strategy. But anyway, we had the legalization, full legalization, recreational marijuana.

It's already legal here medically. And guess what? Here's the thing. We voted in Arizona to legalize recreational marijuana.

We can all smoke up now and you get to grow three plants. I know, three. Three. Three. You get three plants.

You excited? You got your little seedlings? Yes. So, here's the deal.

In Arizona right now, it is going to be legal to smoke up. You can carry, which by the way, there's some benefits to that in terms of lessening taxes and impact upon the citizens and non -violent crimes.

Should they be punished in jail is a big burden upon the community. But anyway, all that's a different discussion to have.

Here's the deal. Guess what? Guess what? Arizona legalized recreational marijuana. Here's the problem.

There's federal law against marijuana and court cases against marijuana.

And you know what's amazing? Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, all said to the federal government, you pound sand, we're doing what's right for our citizens and we're going to vote it in.

And the federal government goes, hey now, I've got federal law about that. And then the states go, we're going to smoke up.

That's it. Now watch this. I'm going to prove to you right now and I'm going to do it through the mouth of Joe Biden that we need to in the states criminalize the issue of abortion and establish justice for the pre -born and reject

Roe. Flex our state power and sovereignty and protect our citizens in the womb and say no to Roe.

Reject it. Here's why. From the mouth of Joe Biden. Check this out. This is Joe Biden doubling down on protecting

Roe vs. Wade. Listen to what he says here. I wanted to obtain my degree and start a career before starting a family.

Having access to birth control and safe reproductive health care was imperative in making that true for me.

So considering the new Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, what are your particular plans to protect women's reproductive rights in the

U .S.? Alright, so pause there for a moment. Very important. What she's saying basically is while I was in college it was nice to be able to have birth control and be able to kill my baby.

Reproductive health services meaning it was great to have the option to crush my little boy or girl's head in the womb, to have them chemically burned and injected with poison, to have their legs and arms pulled from their body.

It was so nice to have that service available to me while I was working through college so that I can have what

I wanted. I can have the ability to have sex freely and I could do it in a way where I didn't have to have a child that I had to take care of.

And so it was nice to have that. So if Amy Coney Barrett comes into the Supreme Court and they undo

Roe, whatever will we do? Mr. Biden? Now here's what he says.

Number one, we don't know exactly what she will do but the expectation is that she may very well move to overview over rule

Roe. The only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation making

Roe the law of the land. That's what I would do. Wait. Wait a second.

He actually got something right. Wait a second. They know. They know.

What do they know? They know what every person who's studied even Constitution 101 should know.

And they know what apparently the pro -life industry doesn't. And that is this.

Roe is not law. And so what does he say?

If Barrett works with the Supreme Court and they strike down the court opinion of Roe, he says, well then what we need to do is actually make it law.

Because it isn't law. And they know. They know it's not law.

And so Christians, we should be working A. to save lives at the abortion mill. Go to endabortionnow .com

to get free training and free resources to do just that. Thousands of lives have been saved doing that. And Christian, you need to be in the public square saying

Roe isn't law. Roe isn't law. And someone says, yes it is. Say, not according to Biden.

Not according to Harris. Not according to the Constitution. What are we going to do if Roe is done? We'll have to actually make

Roe, we'll have to make abortion legal by law. Right? Because it's not. Which means all the states right now like Arizona that have a law that says it's against the law, it's still against the law.

Right. It's still against the law. And every abortion mill is a criminal organization killing the citizens of that state.

Which is why Walt Blackman is putting in a bill in Arizona to criminalize abortion in the state of Arizona.

It's weird though because it's like I'm saying criminalize but it already is a criminal act. Technically. Under state code.

And he's just basically pointing to it going yeah that. He's strengthening it. That. And let's make it stronger.

And let's make it, let's make it better. That's what we're doing right now. And you can do that across the United States of America. Go to endabortionnow .com

guys to sign up or to go there to give. Give at endabortionnow .com. Help us. We've got a big fight ahead of us.

Luke, I'll shut up. Do you want to say something? Uh, no I think, I think that's it. Uh, any, any, anything you want to add to that?

Dr. Sandlin? well, the, certainly believe strongly in states' rights, the overturning of Roe, which of course

I would support. Nonetheless, it's simply going to put this back in the states, back in the states' election anyway, which is what you pointed out that they could do right now.

So, not much more to say. Yeah. Well, everybody, I wanted to show you this really, this is kind of a funny tweet from, not funny,

Phil Johnson. A little terrifying. Yeah, check out the screen here. Phil Johnson says, I can't imagine why anyone would ever question the integrity of an election in the

USA. And he, this is a, this is the Gateway Pundit. It's an article from the Pundit.

Um, charges filed against trans elections judge, quote, Erica Bickford in Allentown.

I'm going to click on that real fast so you guys can see it. This is something else. This is something like the, that nightmares are made of.

Charges filed against trans elections judge Erica Bickford in Allentown, Pennsylvania, including tampering with ballots.

Um, real name is Everett Erica Bickford charged with two election code violations, including prying into ballots.

Check this out. That, that would have been considered obscene, unlawful.

You'd have been cast out of most communities. Yeah. In the, in, in the sixties, seventies, we've come a long way, baby.

Here's a person who's a, a what? Election judge in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

This person is the stuff of nightmares, friends. This person's, what, what, what is he?

What is he? 90 years old. I, he's wearing lipstick. He got no teeth to speak of fingernails polished and he's wearing a clergy collar with a flower hat.

And man, we are in trouble. That's who's doing the election pencil.

Okay. All right. Well, I would say, uh, you need to have a moral framework and, uh, you know, who, who do you want running elections?

Do you want to put someone in an election who literally looks like they got dressed up for Halloween? Uh, I mean, this is, this is, this is like a, that I'm sorry,

I gotta be straight. I gotta speak against evil as evil. This is something that's like a poster child for a horror film.

It's an abomination. It is an abomination. And this is the person you're putting in charge of an election or as a part of election.

This person has no moral compass to speak of. And this person is now being put in charge of voting.

And you're wondering why things are going the way they are in our country. Well, I think that's a good article to take a look at from a film.

All right. Let's get to it now. So, uh, here we go. Nine marks. You said very highly recommend nine marks.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have stuff in our church membership manual from nine marks. Yeah. Yeah. So back in the day, loved them.

Great stuff. Right. And I haven't been keeping up with them. So, so, but, you know, first say as a foundation, we've used stuff from nine marks before, really appreciated them.

Uh, I used to actually send people to the site and say, these are the things you want to look for in a good, solid, healthy church. I still would.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven't had any issues. Good stuff. Good stuff. Um, recently, uh, they had episode one 47 on the appeal and the errors of theonomy, uh, with T.

David Gordon. This is by Jonathan Lehman. And, um, yeah. So they, they did a little conversation about theonomy.

We are what you might call modern day Puritans. Uh, we hold to much of what they taught and they thought, uh, as a matter of fact, uh, the early founders of the

American experiments, the descendants of the Covenanters, the Huguenots, the

Puritans, the Pilgrims, all of them, uh, they had a particular perspective about the future.

And they had a particular perspective about the law of God. Um, and you can see that worked out in the fact that the world, the biblical worldviews in the atmosphere, it's what created and established really good justice in this nation.

It wasn't a utopia, but I think when John Jay, our first Supreme court justice was writing out case law in the

United States of America and referring back to God's judicial law. Uh, I think he did a good thing.

I think, I think it was a good thing. Uh, Dr. Stanley, help us here for new listeners. What is theonomy?

Help us understand what is theonomy and why is it evil? Well, so the denotatively theonomy just means

God's law. Uh, presumably all Christians, if it were explained to them would be theonomists in that sense.

Um, but when we use the term theonomy today, it's, we're not just generically returning to God's law, which itself would be great, but to biblical law, it's important to make that distinction because a lot of people will talk about natural law.

And even some of the founders did, although in my view, many of their views of natural law were based on the, the mosaic law.

But when we talk about theonomy today, it's really equivalent to what I'd call biblionomy, the authority of, uh, of biblical law.

I don't understand how any Christian can believe the Bible, the authority of the

Bible in every aspect and not hold to some sort of biblionomy, the authority of God's law.

Unfortunately, uh, the church today has become utterly pietistic, which holds that the faith should apply between my two ears and maybe in the family and to a degree in the church, but not anywhere else.

And of that, the New Testament is authoritative and perhaps not even all of that, but the

Old Testament, the mosaic law, for example, is not authoritative. Well, the problem with that is

Jesus and, uh, the apostles, writers in the New Testament did assume that the

Old Testament was authoritative, unless of course certain specific aspects of it were set aside, like the ceremonial law, for example, but the, the moral law of God, including how it's to apply in politics and elsewhere, they would have just assumed and did assume.

So theonomy equals biblionomy, the authority of biblical law in all of life.

That, by the way, is the standard of righteousness, not just for God's people, but for everybody.

Right. You know, Paul says that, yeah, Paul says that in Romans 3, 19, 20, if you read that, the law of God, he says there, the law of God speaks to everyone, so everyone will stand guilty before God.

So the law of God binds everybody. So the whole world will have their mouth closed. The whole world, he says, that's what language.

Yeah, that's right. The whole world. Exactly. So it wasn't just for Israel. Exactly. And you do see in, in the, in, in, in God's law, say in Leviticus, 18, 16,

I believe. Go check it out, guys. You'll see the God actually, when he tells people, say on the even example of like bestiality and homosexuality, he says it's because of those sins that he's uprooting those other foreign nations.

So he's actually judging them according to the law that he says is an abomination. Right. He's judging those foreign nations according to his stipulated standards.

He doesn't have one standard for Israel and one standard over here. He actually judges and uproots them, and he displaces them on the basis of his own laws, his own holy character.

Now, here's the thing I want to ask before we start playing this, and we're not going to get through the entire thing today, guys, but just at least a start to this conversation.

Andrew, you're going to hear in a moment now, when they start to talk about this, they talk about it as though this is some new movement of people believing in God's law as the righteous standard that people should look to today, even in a judicial context.

And we would be general equity theonomists ourselves. We don't think you take the law of God and you drop it down on society.

That's not what I believe. But, Andrew, is this new? Is this a new movement of people trying to do something neat and cute and popular?

Is theonomy new? That's not just wrong, Jeff. It's embarrassingly wrong.

Historians would know that. Whether you agree with theonomy or biblical law at all, and if you don't, that's fine.

You make that choice. But what you can't assert is that historically this is somehow innovative or new.

The fact is a large number of Puritans, English Puritans and American Puritans, a large number of them,

Scottish covenanters and others, believed in the authority of biblical law or bibliotomy.

So, okay, we may be wrong. I obviously don't believe we are. But this is not some new thing that was developed over the last 40 or 50 years.

Yeah, yeah. And I always find that interesting when people make that claim about theonomy. They'll say, oh, no, Greg Bonson popularized this.

He wrote Theonomy and Christian Ethics, and it created a big controversy. You know, it really came from there.

I'm like, well, you know, you also got Rush Dooney you got to throw in there as well. But you need to look at the fact that throughout

Christian history, whenever Christians came and evangelized a nation, and that nation came to obedience to Jesus Christ and trust in Jesus Christ, are we really suggesting that they weren't going to God's law in terms of their judicial system to say, what does

God say is just to do in this situation? Go ahead. The reason this was controversial,

Jeff, is because the church has apostatized so far from the authority of God's law that when people like Bonson and others brought this to the fore, they were just uncomprehending that it was new.

Well, the problem was that the new idea, the new idea, the innovative idea, is that God's law is not authoritative in society.

That is an apostasy from what was held certainly by people on this shore and in England and in much of Europe for that matter.

Exactly. Even those that want to say, well, our law is based upon English common law.

Well, where did English common law come from? English common law, that's right. Exactly. A good reference point that we often point to at Apologia because we have a church on the island of Kauai, when missionaries went over to the

Hawaiian islands in the 19th century, 1820, when they made their way over there and started evangelizing the people on the

Hawaiian islands, within 20 years, over 90 % of the Hawaiian islands were professing faith in Jesus Christ.

And within 20 years, they had a Hawaiian kingdom constitution. Just get this.

Go look it up yourself. The Hawaiian kingdom constitution, 20 years of missionary work, over 90 % of the islands professing faith in Jesus.

And it says in the Hawaiian constitution, it says that no law of the Hawaiian kingdom will be at variance with the laws of Jehovah God.

Amen. That was the 19th century, guys. And that's not unlike what we see throughout

Christian history when the gospel is victorious over a nation and a people, and the question is, how shall we live?

What shall we do? And by the way, guys, that's true of almost any of the

Bible -believing Protestant churches, even those we would disagree with, Armenian, Lutheran, some

Anglican. On this point, they're virtually, and I mean not the liberals, but I mean before liberalism, all of them agreed.

Wesley was an Armenian. He believed in the authority of God's law. Martin Luther, despite the fact I think he was very confused, he believed in the authority of God's law.

So this modern idea we're going to kick God's law to the curb, that really is an aspect of apostasy. Yeah, and let's go ahead and start playing it now.

We'll go ahead and get into it, guys. Just stop me whenever you want. We're going to do our best to try to get through as much of this today as we can.

I'll just say before you start, if Mark, Debra, or the other two gentlemen happen to hear this, my encouragement would be please do your homework before you do a show on this.

Because like we said, we have a lot of respect for Mark, specifically in Nine Marks, and I'll be honest, when

I heard this, I was like, wow, this is bad. Like it's really bad. So I just want to throw that out there before you start anything.

Okay, here we go. ...to the topic of theonomy. Now, if you had asked me a year ago,

David, hey, what's the deal with theonomy? And I've been like, I think a couple of theology eggheads back in seminary talked about Greg Bonson, but nobody really pays much attention to that.

Whereas these days, I'm like, okay, this seems to be catching the wind a little bit. I wouldn't say there's a major interest in it, but there is something of a minor interest bubbling up.

Now, Jonathan, for people who are listening, you don't... I'd really like to talk about that just for a moment here. Praise God. I think apologia has had a huge impact in this area in terms of challenging people to say by what standard.

The myth of neutrality, saying Jesus says, you're either with me or you're against me. We've been promoting that.

You've got Doc Sandlin, all the work that he's done over the years. You've got Gary DeMar. You've got these giants that have been doing this for a long time, and there's a lot of fruit of this now.

You've got Doug. You've got all of our boys over at CrossPolitik. It's having an impact, and here's why it's having an impact.

I'm talking to my brothers over here at Nine Marks. Here's why it's having an impact, because we're living in a time where people are noticing the cultural abandonment that's taken place, noticing the fact that these issues of justice matter.

And by the way, if you peruse Nine Marks, you're going to see some stuff about social justice. People are noticing, like, it's not really good that the church hasn't been salt and light in these areas, and there are issues of injustice that we need to address.

And the question is, by what standard? So many people are saying, man, there's a lot of chaos out there. There's a lot of challenges, and it doesn't seem like the modern evangelical church in the

West has any kind of response that's coherent. I mean, it's sort of olly olly oxen free.

Like, every man for himself, like, what do you think? What does she think? What does he think? Which way should we go here? Whereas many people,

I think, are actually saying, well, wait a minute, look here. In Deuteronomy 4, God says about His law in verse 5,

Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who when they hear all these statutes will say,

Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the

Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon Him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today?

You know, many Christians are seeing that and going, God calls His law, they're good. It's not just a curse upon fallen people, it's good.

These are righteous statutes, good statutes. And then reflecting on what Jesus said, and then I'll shut up here and kick it over to you,

Andrew. Reflecting on what Jesus says, Jesus says, Love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

And He says all the law and the prophets are built upon love for God, love for neighbor. All. All. That would include all that stuff about cross -examination of witnesses, upholding victims' rights, proper punishment for perpetrators that will actually bring justice for the victims.

That is all about loving God and loving neighbor. Andrew? Yeah, no, here's the problem.

You really touched on it, Jeff. But whether at Nine March or elsewhere, and many good, well -intentioned people, if you believe that the faith should apply in the individual life, in the family, and at most in the church or maybe

Christian schools or Christian colleges, and then we put up the walls, if I say you believe in that, you're not going to be interested in Biblical law applying in society.

And that's why it's opposed. But anybody who believes the faith should apply outside the church, if you're a

Protestant, you're going to be interested, at least, in Biblical law, because Biblical law, in the

Bible, clearly, applies in every aspect of life. However, if you want to limit the

Christian faith inside the church, and of course it should be practiced there, but not just there, if you believe it should be limited there, you're going to say, well, no, we're not really interested in Biblical law in the wider society because it wasn't designed for that.

So you're precisely correct that if you look at culture, and culture is going to hell in a handbag, and cultural

Marxism is everywhere, and abortion is pervasive, and on and on, and homosexuality and so on, and you're going to say, well, does

God have any opinion on this? And you're going to open up the word, you're going to say, well, it looks like He does, and His law is not just for the family and the church, but wider, you're going to be very open to the idea of theonomy or biblionomy.

And this is a real division, by the way, not only in the church, but in the Reformed church, as you say, these are

Reformed brothers, correct? Of course they are. Yet nonetheless, they tend to be on what

I would sort of call the pietistic wing of the Reformed church, the wing that believes in Reformation in the church, and we do want

Reformation in the church, and apology is a part of that, but not only in the church. If we believe in the

Lordship of Christ in all of life, we have to be open to the idea that His word applies in all of life, and that is where God's law comes in.

Yeah, absolutely. I just want to say first, it's so good to see Andrew's face, because usually we only have him on a phone call.

That's right. We get to see his face. Well, now your listeners are going to go down way, way down now that they've seen my face.

Actually, we have a record number of listeners today, I think, but the other thing I was going to say is we know this from experience.

Typically those who, even solid Christians that oppose theonomy usually end up mocking theonomists, or they end up literally mocking

God's law. Like, that's ridiculous. Why would you want ... That's what we have. This is how they start off this discussion, by just mocking, kind of dismissing, kind of laughing it off.

Like, oh, is this still a thing? I thought this was dead a while ago. When I hear stuff like that, that's immediately like, okay, you didn't even study this.

Yeah, you're in a small bubble, and you should know the Puritans are alive and well. Here we go. Anything about theonomy, but they do know their languages, you're just talking about God's law.

What's wrong with God's law? Well, yeah. Let me ask you that, David. I heard somebody say, well, every

Christian's a theonomist, because we all believe in God's law. Is that true, or is that a bit broad -stroking, broad -brushing it?

Yeah, it's sort of like, you know, my students often ask me to explain something in terms of its etymology. And as we know, in Greek, for instance, because I teach

Greek here, when you add prepositions to the front of verbs, unless they're traveling verbs, you don't just add the definition of the preposition of the verb.

You can change it entirely. So if you take a simple verb like lombano, receive, and you put it in the middle passive voice, and you add the preposition soon in front of it, and the preposition ante, you get soon ante lombanatai.

And that's the word that appears in Romans 8. The Spirit helps us in our weakness.

How soon with, anti, against, and be received, how that becomes help is, you know, who knows.

So, you're asking, the point about theonomy, it should have been called sononomy, or moseonomy, because it wasn't just divine law that they were proposing.

They were proposing that the mosaic law given to the peculiar Israelite theocracy should be the law of other nations, right?

So they weren't just saying that humans should follow the divine order established in creation and reveal, that they were saying that civil governments should model themselves after the

Israelite theocracy and that governed hers. So, we don't care about the name. Theonomy could be a perfectly good abstract term that means our recognition of the divine order in his creation and our submission to it, but that's not what theonomists mean.

They mean that the mosaic law, even the civil laws of Moses, right, are to endure forever.

And so it rejects... Well, Psalm 119,

Psalm 160. The sum of your word is truth and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.

Now, how that plays out, you see in Scripture, brothers. You do see it in Scripture.

It enduring. What? The mosaic legislation. How? Well, I mean, this is,

I think, is apparent to all of us. It's in the text. You always see that the apostles assume the continuity of the law of God unless, of course, they have divine revelation to show how something is done differently or has changed or fallen away because it's no longer necessary.

And it's always the assumption of continuity with respect to the law of God. In terms of the mosaic legislation, well, you have the apostle

Paul talking to Timothy and he says you're not to muzzle the ox while it treads. He just quotes it like it's just assumed.

Come on now. That's right. You're not supposed to muzzle the ox while it treads. Now, brothers and sisters, that is animal husbandry law from the mosaic legislation.

Yeah, and Jeff, that's a good example, as you said, of general equity. We don't really, today we don't really use oxen, at least most of us don't, but Paul was taking that general equity, the principle, saying the principle applies actually in the church also.

So if he does that in the case of this particular animal husbandry law in an agrarian society, he's really saying any society, in principle, any society should be governed by the general equity of all of these laws in the mosaic legislation.

And by the way, they were wrong about the idea that this is only about mosaic legislation. Those who hold to the authority of biblical law hold to all of the

Bible as authoritative. We don't simply hold up the mosaic law and say, well, that's authoritative, but we don't really care that much about Isaiah or Matthew.

That's false. We believe all the Bible's authoritative. That's right. I feel like this is a bit of a straw man too because it's almost like he's, he doesn't come out and say, but it's almost like he's implying that the mosaic law came from Moses.

Right. Not from God. It's like, yeah, that mosaic law, where did that come from? That didn't come from Moses.

Yeah, and a good point. In talking about this, he talks about like a peculiar people, this peculiar nation of Israel.

They had this mosaic legislation. You know, I think we should just go to it and read a passage like Deuteronomy chapter four.

What did God say he was doing when he gave him those righteous statutes? He said he was doing something that was supposed to be their wisdom in the sight of the peoples.

The pagan nations are supposed to see these righteous statutes and they're going to say, whoa, a nation with righteous statutes like this.

They were supposed to like long for that kind of liberty and that kind of true justice. And here is, listen, here is the all -knowing, all -powerful eternal

God telling you this is justice. This is righteous. This is protecting victims.

This is how you do it. And brothers and sisters, people are still raping in 2020. People are still stealing in 2020.

They're still lying. They're still perjuring. They're still abusing. It's still happening today. So the question is, is this, how shall we then live?

And by what standard should we actually apply righteous rules and statutes to the current sins and crimes that are still happening?

Are you supposed to just do it by your own human wisdom? Or do we say, no, God has actually spoken to what is just here.

Yeah. And Jeff, they're never consistent with that because almost all of them, at least if they're reformed, and these brothers are, will say, oh, we believe in the abiding authority of the

Ten Commandments. Well, wait a minute. That's in the Mosaic legislation. Right. So what right have you today to say we'll take these ten words, the

Ten Commandments, we'll elevate them, but the rest of it will kick to the curb? Right. Well, nobody in the Bible ever would have said that or assumed that.

That's right. So there's a remarkable inconsistency here. Yeah, and brother, you brought up a good point there in terms of the Ten Commandments. Everyone, if you say right now, hey, you know,

Ten Commandments, that abides for today, I'd say, thank you. You just gave me the entire Mosaic legislation because Jesus says, love for God, love for neighbor is what all the law and the prophets are based upon.

Love for God, love for neighbor. And you see that in the Decalogue. You see that in the Ten Commandments. You see love for God.

Don't have a God that looks like me. Don't make God that looks like me. Don't have a God in my sight. You should not take my name in vain.

Love God, love God, love God. And then love neighbor is don't lie to them. Don't commit adultery. Don't murder them.

Don't covet their stuff. Oh, we're seeing love for God, love for neighbor. But what's amazing in the Mosaic legislation is that God speaks to what is just to do if someone violates love for neighbor.

For example, if they steal, the right just penalty if they steal is

ABC, depending on what they've stolen and was it applicable to business, that kind of stuff.

But you also have, what if they do murder? So God says, you should not murder. Is that abiding today? Yes. He says, here's what you do if they do murder.

Here's how you're to handle it in a way that protects the victim, the victims in those cases and also brings justice in that area.

You see, this stuff is still happening today. So the question I have for these brothers who are questioning these things is what's your response to murder today or to rape today or to sexual perversions today?

What is your response? Good job, Jeff. If not God's law, then what? Yes. And they'll always come back with, well, sociological law or the

Roman Catholic natural law, which is a wax nose. I mean, Hitler believed in natural law. Sure did. Or judicial or latest leftist judicial law from Harvard Law School.

So really, what they're saying is it's not just we're wanting to kick God's law up to the curb. Law is inescapable.

Civil law is inescapable. So what they're really saying is we will prefer man's idea somewhere else rather than God's law.

They don't like to admit that, but in essence, that's what they have to say. Yes. And I'll end on this point here.

In terms of the assumption of continuity you see in the New Testament, a couple things. I'll just throw them out fast.

We're not going to spend a lot of time on this today. A, I gave you one, Paul and Timothy. By the way, that's post -cross, post -resurrection, post -ascension.

Okay? So timing here is important. The Apostle Paul, Jesus has accomplished atonement. Everything is done and behind him.

He's reigning and he's on his throne putting his enemies under his feet. And the Apostle Paul says to Timothy, you're not to muzzle the ox while it treads.

There's a righteous principle of doing what? Feeding people who work for you. But that's animal husbandry from the

Mosaic legislation, friends. That's right. And Paul just assumes it. I'll give you another one.

Paul says, in that same context, he says, don't receive an accusation against an elder unless it's based on the two or three witnesses.

Hey, guess what? Brothers and sisters, he's quoting from the Mosaic legislation in terms of judicial law and receiving accusations.

He wasn't talking specifically there about elders in the church, but Paul applies it there. Yes. That shows the whiteness of the authority of God's law.

Yeah. That shows you that that general, the general equity of that judicial code still applied after the cross, after the resurrection, after the ascension.

And the amazing thing is watch this. Paul just assumes it like you're supposed to know this.

And he says, and he assumes it in the sense of going, not saying, well, now we know that whole thing is done and defunct and it's over and that awful law was just overbearing, but I like these tidbits over here.

We'll pull these over. He does it with animal husbandry law. He does it with judicial law in terms of how to handle accusations in the courts.

The Apostle Paul just assumes it with kids. In Ephesians 6, he says, children obey their parents and the

Lord. And then he quotes from the Decalogue, honor your father and your mother. It's the first commandment with a promise. Hey, wait a second.

I thought all that just defunct and over and gone. He's just assuming it, kids. You're supposed to know this. Also, in terms of the death penalty, the

Apostle Paul, after the cross and resurrection and ascension, when he's on trial in Acts 25, he says, if I've done anything worthy of death,

I don't object to dying. Hey, wait, has that changed? Has the atonement of Christ and his resurrection changed

God's standard for what is right in terms of even the death penalty? Paul says, if I've done anything worthy of death,

I don't object to dying. In other words, there are things in the New Covenant that are worthy of the judicial penalty of death.

Paul says, and if I've done anything, then I don't object to dying. Why? Because it would be righteous for you to do so.

Now, of course, he didn't, but you even have the death penalty affirmed there. You've got a number of examples here we can show where they're pulling from judicial law, animal husbandry laws,

Ten Commandments, and I'll give you another one too to just consider. In terms of the festivals and everything else, well, the

Apostle Paul tells them, here's how you're supposed to see it. It still abides today that what you're doing, what it was trying to teach you is still a principle today that abides in terms of the festival.

You're not to go around wiping out the leaven now. He says, you're supposed to purge from yourselves the leaven of malice and wickedness.

So it's still, what that was trying to teach you, it still is there today, but you're not doing it in the old way.

Now you're not doing it in the ritualistic way or the dress rehearsal way. It's still there.

We still have a priest. We still have a temple. We still have blood sacrifice. It's just completed.

And all these righteous principles abide. They're not all just dropped on us. And guess what?

I'm eating bacon today, baby. And someone says, well, how can you say, because this is where people get jammed up. They go, yeah,

I see that. You're right about that. It's God's righteous standards and all the rest. So what are you saying?

We need to do the dress code thing and the animal stuff. No. Why? Well, because the

New Testament gives you divine revelation that tells you what that stuff meant and how it is no longer done that way.

For example, Ephesians 2, the apostle Paul talks about the holiness code and talks about how that was supposed to be this dividing wall.

It was supposed to teach the people of God separation, holiness, but it's no longer there any longer and Jews and Gentiles are brought together in one body.

And so, no, I eat animals today. Why? Because Jesus told me to. Because Jesus said so.

And the apostle Paul says it's no longer applicable in the same way. Ah, this is important though.

What the holiness code was doing in dress rehearsal form for the Israelites is still applicable today to the believer.

Separation from sin. Not engaging in syncretism. Not blending with the pagan cultures and adopting their practices and being like them.

Not being unholy like them is forbidden. What they were doing in ritual and dress rehearsal form because of Christ and the indwelling of the

Holy Spirit of God and the law now written within me is no longer necessary. But guess what?

All of it is still in principle true. So, Andrew, if you could speak to that because those are the issues

I think come up a lot with people. I was hoping you wouldn't ask me, Jeff, because in the last 10 minutes you've given a veritable theonomy primer.

I mean, you've said everything substantively I think that needs to be said. So I will just point out, rather than going over what you said, which is,

I mean, I obviously endorse, is sort of turning the tables on those like you're from Nine Marks and elsewhere that are the strong critics of theonomy and asking them, do you really believe in the authority of the

Word of God in total? Now, if they say, yes, but we interpret it differently, well, the question is, as you pointed out,

Jeff, the New Testament itself, the New Testament writers did not interpret the Old Testament differently than what you did.

But it is interpreting. They did interpret it differently from what the, you know, the non -biblical law folks, the non -bibliotomy folks are interpreting it.

So therefore, what we're really saying is though they affirm the formal biblical authority, and I'd never accuse them of anything otherwise, they do in their hearts believe that they believe in biblical authority, they really don't in their practice.

And I think as things become more apostate, and I don't, I'm post -millennial, but I mean in the short term, things might get, particularly like you pointed out in a

Biden administration, short term, things might get worse. Christians more and more will crave a word from the

Lord. What is the word from the Lord? Not just reading my Bible every day, not just hearing a sermon on Sunday, but is there a word from the

Lord about homosexuality and how it should be dealt with? Is there a word from the Lord about property and society?

Is there a word from the Lord about healthcare? How should healthcare be paid for? Is there a word from the Lord about how children should be protected?

How children should be raised? Is there a word from the Lord about the environment? About how we should treat the environment?

Is there a word from the Lord on all these things? And the answer is, yes there is. It's in the word of God.

We can't read around that and simply think that God is interested only in baptism and the

Lord's Supper, vital though they are, He's also interested in these other matters. I think

Christians that have a heart for God as they see what's going on in culture will crave this message and they are right to do so.

Absolutely. That's good. The distinction made in chapter 19 of the Westminster Confession, and Mark, I'm not sure if it's chapter 19 in the

London Baptist or not because the chapters are not always in sync with each other, but in the chapter on the law of God, at least in Westminster, one and two deal with the moral law and then sections three and four deal with the ceremonial and the civil law in arguing they both have been abrogated together with the state of those people.

And theonomy disagrees with that and it lumps the civil law in with the moral law. Bonson often writes moral hyphen civil law.

So instead of seeing them as separate categories as the reformed traditions have, he sees the civil law as a part of the moral law.

David, you refer to Bonson? And for good reason. For good reason, there's a moral aspect to the civil law that God gave.

For example, the Apostle Paul appeals to that. Is it a moral aspect to require two to three witnesses?

That's from God's judicial law. Is it moral to ask that? Apparently the Apostle Paul thinks post -cross and post -resurrection and ascension that it's still a moral question.

All of that is moral. There's a moral aspect and character to all of those statutes and they were supposed to be seen as righteous.

I mean is righteousness a moral category? Because God calls them righteous statutes. So there is a moral character.

And by the way, this business with referring to the Westminster Confession and London Baptist talking about it passes away with those people.

No, there's more to it than that. They're going to get to that in a moment here. Except for the general equity is required.

And that's what we're talking about. I've never met anybody except maybe some Hebrew, what do you call them?

Hebrew roots people who are talking about dropping this stuff down like the Mosaic administration on society.

I wouldn't recommend any of that. But we're talking about historically, the Westminster divines and those who would even be considered theonomous today, they were talking about general equity.

The peculiar aspects of the Mosaic legislation, we're not arguing that people should go and start putting railings around the roofs of their houses.

Because that's what the Mosaic legislation says. But we are telling people God's law demands that you protect and preserve human life and you do it on your property.

So if you have a well or a pool, look, the principle there is you protect and preserve human life on your property.

So you better do it around your pools and wells and if you've got wires exposed in your house that can shock and kill somebody, you better do something about that.

You preserve human life. We don't tell people to take the Mosaic legislation exactly as it was given then and just drop it on modern society because it wouldn't make any sense.

Also, in terms of muzzling your oxes, how many of us own an ox? I think I got rid of mine two years ago.

I don't know. I mean, seriously, we look at that and we say, how did Paul do it? He talked about it in terms of paying pastors for working.

But the principle, guess what? It applies outside the church as well. Do you think God's going to hold somebody responsible if they're an employer, if they're an unbelieving employer and they've got someone working for them and they don't pay that person for working for them, is

God going to apply not muzzling the ox to the unbeliever? You better believe he is. It's a wicked thing not to pay somebody for their work and so of course that's going to apply outside the church.

Andrew? No, that's exactly right and I heard him say there, if I'm not mistaken, that theonomists strongly disagree with the

Westminster Confession and London Baptist in 1904. Well, that's very odd. Greg Bonson was an ordained minister in good standing in the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church which holds as a standard the Westminster Confession and he held very strongly to 1904.

Now, they may disagree with his interpretation of 1904, but to this day to say that he doesn't really believe that is false and it's actually slanderous.

I think they did it unintentionally, but it's actually slanderous. Right. Yeah, he has actually, by the way, and you'll be able to pull him at Bonson U when we get it up, you'll be able to listen to his lectures on the

Confession as well and what he says about that. Can you spell that and just tell us who that is? Yeah, Greg Bonson, B -A -H -N -S -E -N, so it's

S -E -N, not S -O -N. He passed away about 14 or 15 years ago,

I know. No. No. No. He passed away in 95, so they're a little off there.

So, I mean, guys, look, I know we make mistakes, but, I mean, he's been gone for a while with the

Lord and it's just things like this where it's like, look, I know we're going to slip here or there, but there's a lot of misrepresentation here and just it shows like you just, guys, brothers, you just haven't done your homework.

He had some heart troubles, so I think he died a little bit on the young side. He wrote about a 940 page book called

Theonomy in Christian Ethics that was sort of like the encyclopedia of theonomy.

It was the strongest argument for the theonomic approach. And does it remain the kind of main source, main resource?

I think so. Yeah, I think so. Now, I... It's one.

It's one. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you really want, I mean, honestly, to be honest,

I mean, it's just an interesting It's excellent. Theonomy in Christian Ethics is excellent. But, I mean, if you want like some expanded stuff, you've got to go way beyond Bonson and there's plenty of stuff out there.

I wouldn't agree with everything Rush Dooney wrote, but Rush Dooney's Institutes of Biblical Law and stuff he wrote sort of unpacking the judicial case law and showing the moral character of it and all the ways that we would apply it today when you look at Rush Dooney.

You know, then I'd say if you look at the history of the Christian Church, there's just no end to examples of Christians who wrote on this. I mean, I'll tell you what, man.

Go spend some time. Look, if you're Presbyterian and you have Presbyterian tendencies, go read the

Covenanters. Any one of them and ask them how they would have thought about God's law in modern society.

I mean, if you're Presbyterian, these are like the king, hero Presbyterians. How did they feel about Theonomy?

Is your perspective like theirs was? I don't know. I think it's important to ask these questions. Yeah, and John Murray before that, his book on Christian ethics and so on, and going back to the late 19th century and certainly going back, as we indicated earlier, to the

Puritans. So the idea that nobody knew of this idea of the authority of God's law in society and in politics somehow until Greg Bonson wrote

Theonomy and Christian Ethics, that's just an irresponsible assertion. Just a couple eggheads just roaming around Westminster.

Right. Didn't have anything better to do than to write 900 -page tomes on Theonomy. No, I'm sorry, he's wrong about that.

Yeah, that's very wrong. You mentioned the Westminster Confession 19 and then in that fourth paragraph.

In fact, I have it in my notes because this is what I've been hearing pop up. It reads,

To them also, as a body politic, he gave sundry, referring to Israel, sundry judicial laws which expired with the state of that people, not obliging any other now further than the general equity thereof may require.

So those things have expired, not obliging us now except for what general equity requires.

And I heard this one individual say, well, I'm a general equity theonomist. Do you know what he would mean by that?

What does that mean? Well, I don't know what he would mean by it, but in the 18th and 17th centuries, it was a common enough expression and general equity meant not specific to any particular people.

So things like regard for your neighbor's person and his property that you find in French law, you find it in British law, you find it in American law,

German law, and so forth. And how did it get there? Yeah, that's fascinating,

Jeff. His definition of general equity is correct, but his derivation from that is false.

I mean, general equity, the body politic Israel, as a covenant of people, expired, but the general equity, that is the truth of the law, that's what continues.

What he wasn't saying there, what 1904 wasn't saying there is, oh, let's look at, we would today, like he said, France or Australia or the ancient

Roman Empire, let's just see kind of what they had in common with the Bible. That's not what 1904 was talking about.

Yeah, and I think it is interesting when he refers there in that specific point there to French law, British law, I just have to point out what should be obvious to all of us, how do you think it got into French law?

We talk about like regard for your neighbor's property, all that stuff that would have been in French law, British law, common law, how do you think it got there?

What do you think those Christians were doing when they were legislating? They were just sort of on their own wisdom saying like these things?

What do you think they were thinking about? What was being preached to them? What were they referring to?

Where were they getting these statutes from and these rules and these general equity principles? They were getting them from God's law.

It didn't exist in a vacuum and I just want to say this, look, I mean there's tons of cultures all around the world that have all kinds of really crazy legislation and atheistic cultures do not build righteous statutes.

They don't. And in history you have any number of examples of people who deal with say even the crime of theft in ways that are totally wicked.

Either killing the person for theft or cutting off their hand and maiming them for life, for stealing a loaf of bread or what have you.

I mean there are a number of examples of pagan societies that are not simply through natural law coming up with righteous legislation.

And so the question is where do you get it from? Because I have that question to press on the believer today who wants to say

I don't think we need to look at God's, his disclosure of what it has just to do with a thief.

I want to say, okay, so we've got a couple options today. You've got people saying things like God's law says and you list them.

What was stolen? Was it for business? It basically is you pay it back and then it's double.

So you make the person whole again. And so you've got God's stipulated standard. Then you've got other cultures that simply say look

I think you should cut their hand off. Maim them. How dare you steal. So we'll make sure you never do again.

We'll cut your hand off so you can't. Or you've got somebody who might say kill him. Kill him. Or in our culture today we say he stole from you.

All right. Let's put him in a cage. How much is that going to cost? A lot. A lot. And allow him to be raped over and over again.

It's just utterly God's law is I can assure you much more humane than man's law. Clearly. Goodness gracious.

I mean think about it and Andrew's exactly right. There are consequences of putting men into these cages and image bearers have gone into cages for long periods of time.

But you ask the question the guy stole something he goes in the cage today according to American cultures stipulated statutes.

And we say all right he stole something it was worth a thousand bucks. All right so put him in the cage.

How much is that going to cost? Well it's going to we got to pay the enforcement officers you got to pay for the cages the electricity you got to pay for his food you got to pay for his health care possibly a sex change operation.

Oh that's going to be a heck of a lot of money. How much did he steal? A thousand bucks. We're looking at about a hundred K maybe or so.

And you're going to pay for it. Well how are we going to get that money? Well we're going to force the community around wait quick quick question on that what did the community around the crime what'd they do to participate in the crime?

Oh nerfing. Nothing. But you're going to take money from them to pay for the thousand dollar theft.

You're going to put him in a cage health care food have him watched electricity all that stuff.

Right for how much for the thousand dollar theft. Great. OK. How much is it going to cost? Oh loads. OK.

How are you going to get the money from the community? Property taxes. We'll figure out some way to do it.

What if they don't want to pay you? Well then we'll put them in jail or we'll take their stuff by coercive force.

Oh OK. So we're now we're going to have all of society paying for this man's crime. Do you see the point here? So my question is this.

If God's law says this is the just penalty for theft. You've got a myriad of options today.

My question is. You're one voice amongst a bunch. I say

God has spoken on this as to what's just what protects society what protects and upholds victim rights. And there's a number of other options.

My question is to the person who rejects God's law today in terms of his stipulated statute as to what's righteous there. What standard are you going to your own wisdom because lots of people are doing that.

They're all doing it. They know theft is wrong because they're made in God's image. But they don't all handle the just the justice issue the same way.

They handle in very different ways. So my question should we cut someone's hand off today and says no that's excessive.

Who says it's excessive. Who says it's excessive. I just think it's excessive.

Oh so it's your opinion. You got no argument with them. You know how I can say it's excessive. Here's how I can say it's excessive because God says in his law.

This is the justice that should be due for theft. This is the justice due for this crime.

That's how you should handle it in society. And I think that's a very safe place to be because my position is this.

Thus saith the Lord. And most everyone today is just living as a law unto themselves and we are reaping the rewards from that mindset.

Do you know the. Oh so many examples. I mean incest bestiality. We could go right down the line.

People say well everybody knows incest. Well everybody knows this wrong. Well first everybody doesn't.

But if they did why would that be. It would be because it's the authority in the authority of God's law and biblical law and not even natural law.

And you could go right down the line Jeff you're absolutely right. Understanding God's law recognizes we take these out of the realm of the arbitrary and put them in the realm of foundationally absolute.

How we apply them. Yeah there may be some question about that. But foundationally they're absolute in God's word.

So one person here Emily is watching right here she made a comment she said I agree that what apology is saying that the laws of God outline in Old Testament still have important relevance.

But if you agree this to a extreme point you agree with this extreme to an extreme point where Old Testament laws become more important to the new covenant.

I think sorry just moved up there. Yeah. To the new Old Testament laws become more important to the new covenants.

Emily I maybe you just came into the chat here. Maybe you're just getting into this but I just would say respectfully to your sister you just you don't seem to be sort of in the same conversation as us because no one here believes that or teaches that that we believe we're in the new covenant and we believe that in the new covenant

God promised in the Old Testament Jeremiah 31 31 he said that the new covenant blessing he'll do is to do something different that he didn't do before and that instead of writing his law on stone tablets outside the people of God he would write the law within them.

Which law? The known law. His given law. It'd be written now within them and he says in a new covenant he does something different where it wouldn't be on stone tablets out there it was

God he was going to clean sprinkle clean water on people remove hearts of stone give hearts of flesh that were soft and he says in Ezekiel 36 he'd put his spirit within people and cause them to observe his statutes that by the way is in Ezekiel 36 that's in the context of the law of God they knew the known law

God's statutes would be written within people so actually what I'm saying is the new covenant actually gives us the empowerment of the

Holy Spirit of God with his law written within us with the now a new desire to do it and accomplish it now new covenant believers have the ability to love

God's law rather than despise it love God's law and do it rather than the

Old Testament person who was still in the flesh with stone tablets outside of themselves very different context the new covenant is more glorious because now we have the ability with the

Spirit of God to love God's law and statutes if I wish people understood that it's so right if anything the law of God has a higher role even in the new covenant than the old covenant because of the reasons that you mentioned so far from saying we're going to kick

God's law aside and the new covenant brought to its very highest form I think more people need to understand that getting getting away from the old covenant and of course the new covenant has replaced the old covenant doesn't mean getting rid of God's law that's a completely separate issue yeah also one thing

I just would challenge Emily on maybe you missed it earlier in the conversation here the Apostle Paul in the new covenant assumes the abiding validity of God's law down to details like animal husbandry and he applies them in the new covenant so it just maybe maybe you're just jumping into this conversation we'll we'll try to give you that grace one what is to one more moment here and then we'll finish up these are principles of general equity that is to say they are not specific to Israel they are general so it may be for instance that in some of the specific laws given to Israel we see reflections of general equity and so if your ox gores another person's ox you see the principle of general equity of respecting someone else's property is reflected there but if there's a certain sacrifice or some other requirement at that point that would not be general but specific

I wasn't I wasn't wait a minute he's made a big I don't think people see what he did there yeah yeah yeah just very suddenly kind of said he he cited the specific case about the ox and you said it said well there might be some cases but he that's arbitrary to say in some cases this the general equity applies but in all cases it doesn't so if he's going to take it in that one case as he should why wouldn't that lead him to say well we probably should take general equity across the board right well also

I think he brother if you watch this you just granted the theonomic principle position and that is to say that like look that is clearly a principle that is righteous that you would say

I'm going to respect and honor that law today but I don't take the specific mosaic legislation in all the ways that it was presented there and I don't drop it on society today

I take the general equity which you recognize is valid and possibly even appropriate today so I are we done

I think I mean what I'm confused who did was he saying that was he defining general equity as in something specific to our time and not the general principle from the old

I was a little confused it was a little confusing how he was describing general equity there that's what

I was gathering what he was doing is he was citing that Pauline text he had to he had to come to grips with it and so he cited that as an example well yeah that's an example of general equity and that would apply today but then he didn't leave that did not lead him to an implicit question is which would be well if that general equity applies today shouldn't all of it right apply today in the same way and that's what he refuses to do right there's the inconsistency and so we just in challenge me to think about it we'll go another 30 seconds conversation with a

I think a theonomist recently in which he asked me if I believe putting people to death for bestiality and the implication seemed to be that he would so is it just all the judicial laws and under the

Mosaic Covenant that a theonomist would continue to okay that's a good place to end and we'll get we'll try our best to get back to this good place to end let's let's have a real conversation here guys if you got kids around just be cautious with this part but let's just let's be straight let's just have straight talk serious talk let's stop pretending let's be real today bestiality is a thing it's a thing it's it's happening a lot fairly recently in Arizona history there was a man who was a firefighter in a

Mesa or Gilbert he was caught in his barn someone stumbled upon him while he was in the middle of engaging in something horrific with an animal in a barn a firefighter now he was caught and he was actually punished today in Arizona he was punished for the crime of doing this with an animal but the question has to be asked because lots of people you know

I mean I mean farm porn is a thing is it simple today it should be seen as a crime today should we allow as a community and as a society we should we allow human beings to copulate and to do these things with animals is still a sin and a crime because God says it's an abomination and it's a criminal act and you know it's amazing in the

American civil system in the states you can still find that it is against the law in the states where do you think they got that from and in almost every other

Christian influence culture Jeff not just the United States that's right this idea that well it's decriminalized today how dare anyone ever think it should be a crime or for most of human history in virtually every

Christian influence society where there may not have been the death penalty per se there was a civil penalty so the notion that these people were all just rubes is just utterly false this really was a part not just Christian revelation but in Christian society yeah and I do have a sincere question okay because we're we are we're reaping it all now the rewards of our culture engagement brothers and sisters but let me ask you a question not very long ago in the

West and I would say just say in in any United States of America homosexuality was seen as both a sin and a crime bestiality was seen as a sin and a crime and there were statutes dealing with that as a crime in this country now that got released and relaxed all over the world and now we live in a society where little eight -year -olds are being put on medication to stop them from actually getting through puberty we've got people today who think that it's okay to castrate teenagers and little children who decide they don't really feel like a longer we've got a sin just strutting down the streets you've got naked naked naked as a day they came into the world men parading down city streets near you with little children while along the sidelines of these parades you've got people today doing the raunchiest most disgusting deplorable acts in public you've got people celebrating their sin like Sodom in the streets of America today and I just have a question how we doing how we doing we say that it shouldn't be seen as a sin or a crime or maybe it's maybe a sin but not a crime any longer how we doing how's your how's your society doing when you've abandoned

God stipulated statutes as to how you should actually look through the sexual ethics of your nation by the way also adultery should be seen as a crime of course any number of things incest of course but we need to talk about these things because here's the deal look we just we need to get our heads out of our bubble and realize there's a whole world around us that's engaging in things that God says are sins and crimes and they're destroying the world and I want to say this

Ecclesiastes chapter 8 says that because this sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily the hearts of men are emboldened to do wickedness when

God's when justice isn't done and done swiftly people are emboldened to do wickedness and boy twenty twenty in North America is such a great example of that brothers and sisters people are emboldened to do wickedness why also you got people to go in and out of jail in and out of jail in and out of jail in and out of jail in and out in and out why because there's no justice anyways they go in there to get trained they call they call prison systems and jails criminals do school or college because that's where you go to get educated to be a better criminal out there and they go back and forth and back and forth my high school sweetheart girl that was seen through high school she was raped on her bathroom floor during her birthday party the guy got six months six months confessed to it done signed sealed and delivered six months in jail for raping a girl on her birthday party is that justice is that justice we had a guy come to apology at church very early on we found out later and we blocked and prohibited him from being around us because he was threatening people we found out that he was engaged in the most heinous acts against a little girl that was his stepdaughter for years well he he raped this child for years and he served a decade yes a decade in jail and then what did he do when he was released he was running a rampage in the streets of Gilbert trying to threaten members of our church he was unsafe he was unstable and so I just think these are questions that need to be answered and God's law

I believe provides the righteous answer Andrew thank you for joining us today final thoughts brother yeah

I will I was gonna say this God created man in his image and when he gave biblical law it wasn't meant to be oppressive it was meant to protect man from things that would harm him

God knows what man is like better than we know what we are like therefore when he says don't commit homosexuality he's saying don't harm yourself don't commit adultery don't harm yourself don't worship false gods don't harm yourself don't steal don't harm yourself you see

God created the hardware and the software and he knows how the system breaks sin breaks the system and therefore

God's law all of it is the operating system and if we if we operate within the operating system and don't violate it things go well with us if we break it if we break the law then we are harmed

God's law is not oppressive God's law is a means of liberation yeah and we all believe that God's law can justify nobody it never has it never will but God's law is also good here's my challenge to anyone listen to this show right now go read

Psalm 119 and ask yourself can I affirm this under the new covenant do I believe it good challenge to do

Andrew where can people go to get more from you brother they go to Christian culture .com

written solidly also Doc Sandlin written solidly .com thank you guys for having me on and for letting me promote

CCL I appreciate you so much we appreciate you brother look forward to having you on again sometime soon yeah we'll have that we'll have to continue this because there's a lot more really great there's a lot more yeah we didn't even have to touch it we'll get into more brother thank you

Dr. Sandlin everybody thank you for watching right now here at Apologia radio get more at Apologia studios .com

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is where you go that's Luke the bear peace out I'm Jeff the common ninja will catch you next time right here on Apologia radio.