Debate! On Christians Voting Democrat - Responding to Defend and Confirm (Part 1)

Okay, well, let's jump into it today. Before I begin, let me just say that I only have two more days for you to pre-order my book, How to Defeat the Woke Church Movement. I will put the link in the description of this video.

Please consider pre-ordering, and we will take it from there. Now, I wanted to get into this podcast. So, I was actually interviewed for this podcast. It's called the Defend and Confirm Podcast. It was about a couple things, but one of the primary areas that we talked about was my contention that you should be able to be church-disciplined and confronted for sin for voting for Democrats in the upcoming election or supporting Democrats and things of that nature.

I thought it was a really good conversation. I thought the conversation went very well, and I made a very good case for being excommunicated if you don't repent from voting for Democrats. But unfortunately, the guys who did the podcast decided not to put it up.

So, do with that what you will. And they did their own episode of this podcast, Can Christians Vote Democrats? So, instead of having someone who strongly disagreed with their perspective, they decided to discuss it amongst themselves.

And so, what I decided to do is to do a response video to this podcast. It's about 40 minutes long, so I don't know if I'll do the whole thing. We'll see how helpful it is. I have not seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to interacting with it given the conversation that I had with Russell on video.

So, let's jump right into it without any further ado. These guys got some good production value, no question about that.

The Defend and Confirm Podcast and the Voting Question

Defend and Confirm Podcast featuring Russell Berger and Sean DeMars.

It's been a minute since we've recorded anything. Yeah. You have been traveling.

Yeah. Off doing some really big, important things. No big deal. But spent a week trying to finish two books on the prosperity gospel. One kind of medium length.

One that's going to come out through Crossway. Hey, he's got a book out coming out too. So do I. Please consider pre-ordering How to Defeat the Woke Church Movement. One thing I will say about these guys is that I like their style.

I like the questions that they ask Jonathan Lehman. They do strike me as sort of a Big Eva rebrand, if you know what I mean. But, hey, maybe I'm wrong about that. That is just my opinion. It's just how it strikes me.

Could be wrong about that. Who don't like to read. And then spent some time in Cleveland with the American Gospel Guys who are launching the AGTV app, which is basically a streaming service that they're going to be launching for like six bucks a month.

And it's going to have a whole bunch of good content. We recorded a roundtable discussion addressing pushbacks to the first American gospel. I don't know. A lot of people really liked it. And also did a little piece on cessationism.

So when the app comes out in November. I think that's right. Yep. Get it and go watch that material if you are a fan of the podcast. That's right.

Now I will say this too, but before we get into the nitty gritty. This is the guy that I spoke with, I think. I'm pretty sure. This is the guy that I didn't speak with. This guy, he wasn't available at the time.

So I only spoke with this guy. It was weird the way they had it recording. Because I wasn't able to actually see him while I was talking to him. Just because they have obviously very good production value.

So they had it figured out how to get the cameras to like look at him while I was talking. It was good though. It was still a good conversation.

The guarding the gospel. Yeah, that's right. It's exciting that that's coming up. Yeah. So we have been trying to produce an episode of this podcast answering some viewer and or listener questions. Yeah.

We basically put it out there. What are your questions? What do you want us to talk about? And I was surprised to see, I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. Right. More than one person asking the question, how should Christians think about other professing Christians who are voting in this election or in any election for Democratic Party candidates?

Yeah. Obviously, we know why that's being asked. We're in the middle of a very contentious election. Sure. Politics in general in our country has become more and more divisive. Yeah. So this is an issue a lot of people are wrestling with.

But Russell, we're not the general theology people podcast. We're the Defend and Confirm podcast. So why are we basically an apologetics podcast answering a question that has to do with voting?

It does feel a little topical for us, doesn't it? Yeah.

I think it's appropriate, but I would like you to unpack that a little. Do you know what I mean?

They like to unpack things. That's how you know they're on the Big Eva track. Oh, man. But let me answer the question because it's only fair. If I'm going to do this, I haven't seen it before. It's only fair for me to give my piece and my answer to this question before I critique their answer to this question.

And so here's how I think we should think about people who profess to be believers in Jesus Christ but are supporting Democrats. Let's just say Joe Biden. It makes it very easy. Here's what I think. I think that we should look at them as Christians who are sinning.

That is a sin. That's an intentional sin. You're planning on sinning, and then you go and accomplish the sin. And so we should confront that the way we would confront any sin. And so how that works is we would say, hey, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Christian, you shouldn't do this sin.

Here's why it's a sin because, you know, Joe Biden supports this platform. And if you go down the list of this platform, each point actually is opposite a lot of the times of what God commands. And so it doesn't matter if you're looking at his abortion policies.

It doesn't matter if you're looking at his transgender policies. It doesn't matter if you're looking at his welfare policies. They're all breaking the law of God in one way or another. And so you can't desire someone to accomplish sin on your behalf and stay clean yourself.

That's a sin to do that. It's a sin to empower someone to do sin. And it's not like there are any redeeming qualities to the Democratic Party. Some parties are just, they exist to essentially accomplish evil ends.

In fact, Jonathan Lehman, which is a friend of these guys who are on the podcast right now, Jonathan Lehman made that exact case in his article on voting. There are some parties that are just too evil, that you can't vote for them in good conscience.

In fact, he says that the Democratic Party, he kind of hints that that is one of those parties. He doesn't go as far as I would and say you should church discipline people, but he does say it's a sin to vote Democrat in pretty much every case.

And so that's kind of where I started in my conversation with Russell. I said, look, Jonathan Lehman says that some parties are just too evil to vote for for a Christian legitimately. I agree with Jonathan Lehman there, and I think that the Democratic Party has already met that threshold.

There's really no redeeming quality to the platform. Not true of Republicans. I'm not saying you have to vote Republican, but it's definitely not true of Republicans. If you look at their platform, there are certainly some things that I would say, nope, that breaks the law of God.

We shouldn't do that. But there are other things that actually are good. They're upholding a proper worldview in some regard. And so I don't think the Republican Party has met that threshold at all. I would love to talk to anyone who thinks they have.

That would be a very interesting conversation. I don't think it'll ever happen. But anyway, my whole point is that if a brother is in sin, we actually have a direct word from the Lord on how to handle that.

Matthew 18. If a brother is in sin, you go and confront them individually. Hopefully they can change just one-on-one. If not, you take some other people with you to kind of plead with them. If not, you take it to the elders.

And if not, they get excommunicated from the church. They're like a tax collector to you. Very basic, very simple argument. And I don't think that there's really too many ways to counter that. Let's see what these brothers have to say.

Unity, Holiness, and Matthew 18 in the Local Church

We've been walking through critical theory, contemporary critical theory, in all the ways that it's wrong. So we've been criticizing it pretty strongly. We haven't even really gotten into the fruit of critical race theory or identity politics.

But everybody knows that this stuff is a large part of our politics today. So I feel like we have a responsibility to not only help our listeners understand what's wrong with that stuff, but also to teach them how they can wisely and carefully interact with their brothers and sisters who may disagree with them on the very issues we're teaching them to think are wrong.

Amen. And so that's the whole point of this episode. Sounds good. So, Christians and voting. We want all viewers, brothers and sisters listening and watching this, to have a healthy biblical understanding of how they can interact with people who disagree with them within their local church.

So we are not telling Christians how to vote with this episode. That is absolutely correct.

Our goal is trying to help people think through striking the balance between preserving unity and not being unnecessarily divisive. And on the other hand, making sure that that unity is true unity with people who are genuinely Christian.

This is fantastic.

That's exactly what you ought to do. And that's why you have to approach sin issues in the church the way the Bible tells you to. Because if you don't do it the way the Bible tells you to, then that balance between unity and truth and all of that kind of stuff that he's talking about right there, that's how it gets all jacked up and twisted.

If you refuse to handle sin in the church the way that the Bible prescribes you to handle sin in the church, things get all jacked up. You either go too far trying to preserve unity, where there really is no true unity, or you go too far the other way and you become like a schismatic where it's like, nope, everyone who doesn't agree with me completely on every single issue is an unbeliever.

We all know some pastors that have done that kind of thing. I think there's far fewer than most people like to pretend because that accusation gets thrown around a lot. Anyway, but anyway, so yeah, he's exactly right.

And that's why when I confront, when I talk about how to confront sin in the church, you have to stick with the way the Bible tells you to do it. If some person doesn't do it the way the Bible says that you're supposed to do it, it creates all kinds of chaos.

It creates all kinds of confusion. So you're always safe with doing what the book says. That's why I started there. That's a very good point by Russell. Let's see where he goes with it.

Supporting and promoting and affirming ideas that are anti-Christian. It's a very tight line to walk. It's a tight line to walk and it's a difficult concept to unpack. So before we even get into where you need to land on this, think of this sort of like IKEA furniture.

Okay. Stay with me. Okay. If you've ever put together IKEA furniture or any kind of mail-order furniture, you get that instruction manual out and you find the English page near the back. Yeah.

It's going to tell you tools. Which it should be by the front, hey man? Obviously.

Okay. Tools you need to complete this installation. Yeah. And it's going to have your screwdriver, your Allen wrench, your washers, whatever it is. Okay. You have to have those tools. Yeah. If you lose one You're done.

Or your child grabs one and misplaces it, that thing's not coming together. That's right. This is the same way. Okay. There are a couple tools that you have got to have in your hand and think rightly about in order to arrive at the right answer here.

The right answer again being about how to preserve unity in the midst of political disagreements.

That's exactly right. Striking the balance between preserving true unity and not So not compromising the gospel. Not compromising the gospel, not being unnecessarily divisive. That's right.

Let me say this. A lot of people always will bring up IKEA furniture as this very complex, hard-to-do kind of thing. And I've got to be honest with you. I've never had that experience. I always find IKEA furniture very easy to put together.

And I'm not a very handy person. It took me six months to get this wall up back here. So I don't know. I always find that example weird.

So the first tool is really just understanding the importance of unity within the local church.

The Unity of the Church and the High Priestly Prayer

So how important is unity, Russell? I'm glad you asked, John. Wow.

Unity is I can guarantee that my conversation with Russell did not go this way. They did not have prepackaged questions that we agreed upon ahead of time to talk about, which is interesting because a little birdie told me, I don't know if this is accurate or not, but a little birdie told me that with the Jonathan Lehman interview that they did talk about the questions beforehand, at least most of them, which you can do that if you'd like.

I mean, nothing wrong with that, but that's probably why they didn't end up posting our conversation because it probably didn't go the way they thought it would go.

Central mark of the holiness of the church. Unpack that. Unpack that. It is how we reflect He just said this.

So sorry for interrupting, but he said unity is the central mark of the holiness of the church.

The character and the nature and the goodness of God and the gospel to the watching world.

Before you go on, let me just clarify. I know that a lot of people when they hear the word holiness, they only think about like purity, right? Not a lot of sin, right? But holiness in the scriptures really refers to being separated and distinct, right?

So as God's people, our holiness is we're supposed to not be like the world. So unity as an expression of holiness, the whole world is tearing each other apart, right? They're at each other's throats.

So we as Christians bought by Jesus, washed by his blood, and dwelt by the same spirit, we're supposed to be distinct from the world in the way that we love one another, serve one another, even in spite of our differences.

That's really good. No, I think that's right. I think that's Sean who said that.

But that's true. But the thing is the thing that sets us apart is the way that we handle things. So in other words, when we have a conflict in the church, nobody thinks that the church is never going to have conflict, that that's not what we're talking about here.

But when we have a conflict for the church, we don't go around behind someone's back and start backbiting them and start trying to undermine their character. Like that's not what we do. That's what the world does, but that's not what we do.

When we have a conflict in the church, we don't go and throw a hit piece out online trying to destroy someone's character. That's not what we do. That's what the world does. That's not what we do. What we do is we do it according to Matthew 18.

We confront it directly. We confront it with the word of God. Like we have a plan of attack, so to speak. We have a way that we're supposed to fight. And so what sets us apart as Christians, what sets us apart from the world is that we have the book, right?

We have the word of God and we follow the word of God. That's why Matthew 18 in this situation is so important in your local church context. It's absolutely important.

Man, that's where we get our word, sanctification, from. It's the separating of for a particular purpose. Jesus says in the high priestly prayer in John 17, the glory that you have given me, he's praying to the Father, I have given to them, the disciples, the church, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

So this is a beautiful picture of the way the church is actually mirroring the unity that God has in himself. We are reflecting the character of God and the love of God and the unity of God and we're doing it in a way that's supernatural.

That's very true. And I'm not saying that they're going to ignore this. I don't know because I haven't seen this. But that prayer also says, Jesus says, sanctify. This is what we're talking about, sanctification here.

Sanctify them through thy truth. Your word is truth. Thy word is truth. I'm trying to do the King James a little bit more. Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. So the way that we're set apart, the way that we're sanctified is through the truth of God.

Unless you make any mistake about it, Jesus is saying, lest you try to make any shenanigans with like fake prophets and stuff like that. The truth, it's your word. Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth.

That's part of the same priestly prayer that he's talking about the unity of the church, how you set them apart and all that kind of stuff. The way that it happens is through thy truth. That's why Matthew 18 is where I start.

Because if there's conflict in the church, whether it's for voting or whether it's you gave me the stink eye, Matthew 18 is where you start.

Way that is designed by God to serve as evidence, supernatural evidence of the truth and the power of the gospel to a non-Christian world. Yeah, that's right.

So that's what we're fighting for. And it's already been purchased for us. Paul is clear in Ephesians. He tells us that we have to fight to maintain the unity of the spirit. So it's something that we already have.

It was purchased at the cross. It's an objective reality, but it's not something that we can be complacent. Amen. Sean is 100 correct.

And again, I'm going to refer to the high priestly prayer that they brought up. One of the verses they didn't say is it's through the truth that this happens. So we have to maintain the unity that's been bought through the spirit in us and for us and all of that kind of stuff.

And the way that we fight for that unity is through thy truth. Thy word is truth. This is so important because the minute one person, one party separates from the truth, from the word of God, from the commands of God, everything gets all jacked up.

Everything gets all jacked up. I've got a situation in my life that's been ongoing for the last few years. And there's a brother who's told me to, not to my face, in an email, that you're like a tax collector to me.

I wish I never knew you, he told me. You're like a tax collector to me. And you might say, okay, well, that comes straight from Matthew 18. Well, it sure does. But the only problem is that he jumped every single step in church discipline.

He hasn't even had one conversation with me one-on-one where we could kind of hash it out and talk it and hear each other out. Not even one. He jumped from you offended me to you're a tax collector to me.

There's no harmony there. There's no harmony there. And there's no unity there. And the reason why there's no unity there is because he decided to go a different direction. He decided to handle a conflict the way pagans handle a conflict, not in the sanctified way, which is outlined in Matthew 18.

Matthew 18 has to be the starting point for how to deal with someone who is sinning in their vote. We also have to be careful though,.

Christian Conscience, Triage, and the Limits of Disagreement

Because you will often hear, so you look at scripture, look at the way that the authors of the New Testament in particular talk about the sin of division and divisiveness, and just how dangerous that is.

And on the other hand, they frequently point out the danger of allowing false teachers and false professors into the church and considering them brothers when there is no real unity there. So we have to be talking about, well, what are we unified in?

And what are the areas where we maybe aren't unified, where we don't have to necessarily agree that are more flexible? And so that brings us to our second tool that you need to have a right understanding of.

And that is a healthy biblical view of the freedom of the Christian conscience. I've heard you explain this really well.

Yeah. You wanna take a stab at that? Yeah. So let me jump in here and tell you how I think this relates, because again, it's not fair since we're not having a conversation right now. So I'll just tell you what I think and see where they go with it.

He's right, because at the end of the day, not every single thing is something that's worth dividing over. We don't have to agree on everything. I've already said that, they've said that. And so there has to be some kind of a balance there, right?

And some things do fall in the category of the freedom of Christian conscience. That's definitely true. But the thing is, though, that the kinds of issues that are at play when it comes to the vote that's coming up and the Democratic Party platform versus other party platforms, it's not small things that are matters of freedom of Christian conscience.

It's not at all small things. We're talking about worldview issues that attempt to turn God's worldview upside down. We're talking about basic things, like the reality of God creating men male and female.

That's basic. It's like you can't agree to disagree on that. There's no freedom of Christian conscience on that issue. We're talking about basic things, like should the most vulnerable among us be protected?

Should their lives be protected under the force of the law? Should abortion be outlawed and banned? Should you be able to kill babies with impunity? We're not talking minor issues here. We're talking issues about partiality.

God talks about the sin of partiality so much in the Bible. And we've got tax rates that are partial. We've got governmental policies that are partial. We've got all kinds of partiality that is promoted and attempting to be expanded by the Democratic Party.

We've got stealing, rampant covetousness. These are basic things that you can't agree to disagree on as a Christian. You simply cannot. And so while he's right, there are some things that fall under the category of Christian conscience.

The things that the Democratic Party platform is promoting are not those things. And so yes, he's right on a basic level, but let's bring this into the conversation about the Democratic Party platform, the Democrats Party platform.

And none of those things are really what we're talking about here. We're not talking about whether or not to put in a pool in our community or to resurface the basketball court. Like there's a right answer there too that I can bring someone to the scripture and tell them, you know, we shouldn't do either.

You know what I mean? With your neighbor's money, that's like, that's not right. But we could, that's something that I, okay, smaller issue, we can agree to disagree to a point. Let's see what these guys have to say.

Triage, First Importance, and Church-Level Disputes

I don't remember who I heard this from first. I know Al Mohler developed in the 80s. He talks about theological triage. The, you know, I'm a preacher. So I gotta stick with my alliteration and an alliteration that I heard from Juan Sanchez, a pastor out in Texas.

Juwan? Close. Is, you have first level, second level and third level issues, but I break them down as core, church and conscience. There we go. There it is. Core, church. Or you could say core, corporate identity, conscience.

So it would be the one, two, three. That's right. So right at the middle, the bullseye, you have the core issues. These are the doctrines that you have to believe in order to be a Christian. Right? So I remember there was a guy that I was trying to evangelize in our city and he identified as a Christian, but when I would have conversations with him, he would tell me that very obviously it's true that Jesus did not resurrect from the grave.

Okay. So that is what Paul refers to in first Corinthians chapter 15 as an issue of first importance, where if you don't believe that Jesus actually rose from the grave, you're just not a Christian. By definition.

By definition. You may like Jesus. You may call yourself that in some cultural sense, but you're not Christian in a way that either Christ or any of his followers would have understood that identity. And there are several matters of doctrine that are of first importance in that same way.

If you deny any number of things, you can just go read the Apostles' Creed. It does a good job of talking about those. So that's first level creed.

Right. And so those are doctrinal ideas that, I would also say the ethical implications of those that spin out from those doctrines. So we have authors in the New Testament telling us that the way you live your life is often evidence of whether or not you believe those things to be true.

Yeah. So what's interesting is if you do like a word study on doctrine, especially in like the pastoral epistles, it almost never refers to concepts that you must believe. It almost always is used in such a way as to denote what you believe and how you live in light of what you believe.

Exactly. You can never extricate the two. It's orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Right.

Right belief, right living. So you may have a confession with your mouth that all these orthodox things are true. That's right. And then you decide you don't like your wife anymore and you leave her and go marry a new wife.

Absolutely.

And you refuse to accept. So this is actually something that came up in my conversation with Russell here because he tried to catch me in an inconsistency by saying, you know, you put up with people that have different doctrines than you and things like that.

So clearly not everyone gets excommunicated for a sin and, you know, believing something wrong about God is a sin. But it didn't work on me, obviously. And one of the things that I told him at the time, and he had a very difficult time understanding this, at least that's how it appeared to me from my perspective.

But one of the things I said to him was that I have a lot of grace for people's exact theological formulations. You know what I mean? Like I've never called somebody an unbeliever for making a mistake kind of articulating the Trinity, for example.

You know, because, you know, at the end of the day, if we talk about the Trinity long enough, you know, you can get someone talking about the Trinity. There's a good chance you're going to catch him slipping up in a heresy of some kind, an official heresy of some kind.

But what I do is when I say someone's an unbeliever, like for example, I said this about Jamar Tisby. I don't believe his profession of faith. I think his profession of faith is clearly false. The reason why I do it is not so much that he's articulating heresies from James Cone, as evil as that stuff is, it's definitely evil.

Don't hear me saying that doctrine is unimportant. It's definitely important. But when I talk about Jamar Tisby, I can have a lot of grace for his particular theological formulations, obviously to a degree.

But what I'm doing is I'm looking at his behavior. How does he live based on his particular formulations from James Cone? And if you look at how he lives, he lives how you would expect a heretic to live.

In other words, he gets all angry when people forgive in the wrong situation. Do you remember that one time when that black kid forgave his brother's white cop killer and it was an emotional moment and he hugged her and he said, I forgive you.

You killed my brother inappropriately, but I forgive you. It was so beautiful, right? Because that kid understood the gospel of Jesus Christ so well. How can I withhold forgiveness if I've been forgiven from so much?

Everyone loved it. But Jamar Tisby was pissed off. He was pissed because that forgiveness has set the mission of the black church back 300 years or whatever it was. He was so angry. That's exactly how you'd expect a pagan to react because he's got a pagan theology and he acts like a pagan.

Now, not everybody who gets insights from James Cone acts that way. Not everyone who gets insights from James Cone acts that way, but some of them do. And so I told him, I said, when I could tell someone's an unbeliever, when I wanna disfellowship with somebody, it's not so much because, hey, I didn't articulate that one the same way you would.

Yeah, you don't believe in the sovereignty of God the same way I do. Those are all important things. But I look at how you live. I look at your behavior. And that's when you look at the scripture. In fact, the point that Sam just made is a point that I made in the conversation that we had.

I'm not saying he stole it from me, but it's a good point. It's a good point. It's like when you look at the scripture about how do you, the marks of a believer, it's not so much like you formulate everything the exact right way.

It's really more about what you do, how you behave, because how you behave demonstrates what your faith is in. That's why it's like that. You show me your faith by your works. Man, I'm remembering the conversation with Russell that I had.

It was a really good conversation. It's unfortunate that they're not gonna put it up.

Yeah. So that's showing with the fruit of your life that the things you claim to believe, you didn't truly believe. That's right.

Absolutely. So first level importance. Yeah. Second, the church level, or you can call it the corporate level, these are things that we just have to agree on if we're gonna do life together, right? Do life.

We're gonna do life. We're gonna unpack this. That means that we think you need to have repented of your sins and trusted and placed your faith in Christ in order to be baptized, okay? If we want to do church with people who disagree with us on that, right, who have a paedo-baptist, a covenantal understanding of that.

Our Presbyterian brothers. Our Presbyterian brothers. Man, we're just not gonna be able to do life together. You're gonna come to me with your brand new beautiful little baby boy or girl and oh, she's gonna be gorgeous and you're gonna be like, can you baptize her?

And I'm like, nope. And then you're gonna hate me, okay? Whether we're talking about matters of church government or issues of the sacraments or spiritual gifts, if you think you're a prophet and I don't think prophecy exists today, well, we may both end up in heaven together but it's just gonna be really hard for us to coexist as a church.

So we're gonna stop there. I don't think that that's related to what we're talking about here but that's a good place to stop because this has been 30 minutes. So I will do at least one more part of this.

We're only about a quarter of the way into this podcast. If you enjoy this, please let me know in the comment section below. I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.