Moral Obligation

The Loaded Question About Moral Obligation and Public Outrage

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton. And with me are.

Michael Bierman.

David Kassin.

Andrew Hudson.

We had an interesting question that we had sent in to us and we waited till Dave was in the studio with us because we knew he would have the spiciest takes.

Yeah.

So we'll go ahead and read it now. As a Christian.

I want his Anglican takes.

Oh.

Well, are you saying English food is not spicy, sir?

World renowned for it.

Kill him.

We got to make it to the question.

Great opener. As a Christian, do you not feel a moral responsibility to speak out about the genocide happening in Gaza? Children are starving while Israel blocks humanitarian aid. How can that possibly align with Christ's teachings?

Would you feel the same silence if it were your own kids? Also, where is your voice when families are being torn apart by ice? And by this, he's talking about the immigration, the immigration enforcement.

These are real lives being shattered. I'm genuinely curious how you reconcile these tragedies with your faith. And we'll start off with Michael and the spicy takes hit later.

Okay.

So it's hard to convey this in, you know, reading it out loud, but Christian is in parentheses. So as a so-called Christian, quote unquote Christian, do you not feel a moral responsibility to speak out about the genocide happening in Gaza?

I have no moral responsibility whatsoever to speak out about moral genocide in Gaza. None whatsoever. I have no burden on me about that at all. The fact that there are a lot of people being killed in Gaza I would say, yeah, that's a bad thing.

Am I morally responsible to say something? Meaning am I, you know, if you ask me a question about it, I'll talk to you about it. Do I need to go around saying things all the time? Do I have that moral responsibility that my job, if I have a mic on a podcast, if I have a pulpit to preach from, if I have some sort of social media presence, am I supposed to be walking in it?

Do I have a moral responsibility that if I don't go around talking about how bad genocide is, whether it's Gaza, well, what about the genocide of Christians in Nigeria? What about the genocide in Yemen?

What about, you know, what about all these other,.

And then Ukraine?

Yeah.

So you could just replace Gaza with a score of other horrific ongoing tragedies today.

Okay.

Now, why is Gaza being picked out? Well, this questioner thinks that this is the current thing, right? The shirt says, I support the current thing, right?

The current thing is the gospel to these people though,.

Right?

Yeah, whatever the current thing is, it's the gospel, and you have to be on the right side of the gospel. This is your virtue, this is your salvation.

You must proclaim it, otherwise you're immoral.

So why is Gaza the thing to talk about? Because the media told me so, right? So as, now, so not the Bible told me so, but the media told me so. The media told me this is the most important thing. So why aren't Christians, you know, virtuous?

Why aren't they moral? Why aren't they talking about the most important thing? Well, listen, genocide, the wholesale slaughter of humans by humans and for unrighteous reasons and unrighteous means and so on, yeah, guess what?

That's evil, that's bad. Okay, if you ask me a question about it, sure. Do I have more responsibility to go around all the time talking about whatever the problems are in the world? No, I do not. I am under no obligation at all.

Children are starving while Israel blocks humanitarian aid. Yeah, they're blocking humanitarian aid, and I bet they're probably blocking some other things too. You know, it's kind of like, you know, there are all sorts of horrific things that happened in war, okay?

And sometimes soldiers, armies, they kill families, they kill children, they kill pregnant women, war is awful, okay? And also sometimes the enemy straps bombs to children and pregnant women, and they go kill soldiers, okay?

And sometimes humanitarian aid smuggles in all kinds of things that some nation state doesn't want smuggled in. And so they're blocking humanitarian aid. People are starving and dying, and they would rather have it that way.

I'm not justifying what they're doing, I'm just explaining it. And it's unsurprising to me. And it's awful, it's horrific, it's war. Children are starving while Israel blocks humanitarian aid. How can that possibly align with Christ's teachings?

Well, it doesn't. But there seems to be an assumption here that for some reason, because I'm quote unquote a Christian, that I need to be on Israel's side.

Or that you automatically are.

Yeah, that is coming through in this.

But the political state of Israel, like a whole lot of other nation states, is full of bad actors, full of evil men doing evil things for evil motivations. And there is nothing special, holy, protected, or biblical about the political state of Israel.

I mean, there's nothing for me to say in defense of the nation state of Israel. They're not my responsibility. I have no obligation to them.

To clarify your statement, you're saying that the modern nation of Israel has no connection to Old Testament or Old Covenant Israel?

Not unless they become a Christian nation.

They just, they happen to share a name.

Yeah, they share a name. If their leadership bows the knee to Jesus Christ as Lord and says, we're going to, hey, you know, we think that he's the most important person ever. And we think that he is the king of all the rulers of the earth.

And we wanna kiss the sun and as judges of the earth, submit to his rule and reign. Then I might have something to say. It's like, you know, I'm glad to hear that they've confessed that. And if they live inconsistently with that, then I might feel some need to say something to someone around me to help clarify the situation.

But I have absolutely no burden to bear for the political state of Israel nor for the genocide happening in Gaza whatsoever. If evil things are happening, those are evil. If tragic things are happening, those things are tragic.

I'm curious, I'm genuinely curious, why does the questioner think that he or she or anybody else is so wholly apart from the situation has any moral obligation to say anything about it? Where are you getting that burden from?

Where are you getting that guilt from? What's going on? Well, he says, so he goes on. Would you feel the same silence if it were your own kids?

No.

Different.

Yeah, because that's different. Because families exist. They're a thing. Nations exist. They're a thing, right? Like neighbors exist. Those are real. I actually, I really have neighbors. There's a passage in Proverbs chapter three that talks about not defrauding your neighbor.

Why?

Because he lives next to you for safety, right? Neighbors are a real thing. Nations are a real thing. Families are a real thing. And I have an order of love, order of Morris. I have a responsibility hierarchy of responsibility to my wife, to my children, to my church, to my extended family, my neighbor, my nation.

I have responsibilities to these folks and I will have obligations that attend those. But what of people who are not my neighbors? They could be my neighbors if I live there. I don't, you know, they may look different from me and still be my neighbors.

If they look really different from me, they're definitely not of my family, but they could be my neighbors. I could, and I would have responsibility to them if I live next to them. If we chose to be in, choose to be under the same responsibilities, then yes.

But they're not my responsibility. I don't have any connection to them. I'm not saying I don't, I'm not saying that I am unmoved by news of tragedy or that I would say it doesn't matter that people are dying.

I'm not saying it doesn't matter. It does matter. I know it matters to God, but I also know that that's his responsibility. It's not mine.

I think this questioner may ask or respond to that. It sounds like what you're saying, because it doesn't affect me, I don't really care.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's outside of your,.

The realm of your responsibility.

Your responsibility, your God-given responsibility, it's outside your realm.

But what does that language care? That taking care of something is taking responsibility for something. I take care of my wife. I take care of my kids. I take care of my church. I take care of my neighborhood.

I take care of my citizenship, my obligations.

I take care.

Why?

Because I am responsible. I have one Lord, praise God. I have one Lord, and he's told me what I'm to care for as a steward. I am his slave, he is my master, and he has told me how to care for my stewardship that he is entrusted to me.

If I don't have that one Lord, then I have a thousand Lords, all telling me I must care. I must care. I must care. And that is a, wow, that's a lot of enslavement. But I have liberty in Christ because I'm only to care what he wants me to care for.

Now, it may be that he somehow puts me in a position where I need to care about things I don't care about yet. Saying that, please hear me carefully, it's not that I have no feelings whatsoever about horrible things that happen.

If I hear about a horrible tragedy has nothing to do with me, well, I feel bad. Oh, that makes me feel bad. Does that mean that I now need to take responsibility for it somehow? And go about and parade and talk about it?

No, I don't have that burden. So when it says, also, where's your voice when families are being torn apart by ice? These are real lives being shattered. So it's interesting to me, it says, would you feel the same silence if it were your own kids?

Your own kids, also, where's your voice when families are being torn apart by ice?

Now, this is a different scenario. It says, one, it was way over there. It's a geopolitical, it's something on the other side of the world. And it's something that is completely outside your sphere of influence.

Now you have a scenario where it is your next door neighbor or maybe a couple doors down on the same street as you, going back to that example that you care for your neighbor, what about them? Now it's in your neighborhood, it's almost in your house.

It's supposed to be closer to home, right? But notice that there's a expressed concern about families. There's an assumption that there is a higher priority of relationships within families, that families will be torn apart seems to be in the voice of the questioner, a bigger issue than other things.

This isn't neighborhoods being torn apart, it's families being torn apart, an indication that families are more priority, which is what I was just saying earlier. There is a difference if it's my kids versus somebody else's.

I'm required to care for my kids in a way that I'm not required to care for others, okay? Now, the question about, well, what about families being torn apart by ice? Well, you know what? If I hear a story about that, I will feel sad.

Oh, I would feel for children who are being taken away from their parents. And if their parents are being sent back to whatever land they came from, because they came here breaking the law and defying the law and brought their kids here,.

Then

Get the kids back as quickly as possible to them.

Yeah.

Get their kids in that position.

Yeah.

To me, that doesn't make any sense at all. Get the whole family together and put them back where they came from.

Including the children.

Yeah, including, obviously. Obviously, the government has no business taking children away from parents just because the government disagrees with the parents on some level, right? Now, if the parents are indeed endangering the lives of the children, then that's one thing, okay?

But if the parents have made a choice that is not endangering their children, they're actually, the parents made a choice to try to do something good for their children. They think it's terrible living in one of these countries that is full of impoverishment and bad policies.

I wanna get my children to a land of prosperity, okay? And they think that they can get it. Well, you know what? The United States government disagrees with your choices. All right, so what are you gonna do?

You're gonna take the kids away from the parents and raise them as orphans in the United States and then send the parents back to some other country? That doesn't sound right. I think it's terrible. I think it's terrible that Child Protective Services break up families because the child wants gender-affirming care surgery and the parents say no, and then Child Protective Services break up the family and take the children away from the parents.

I think that that's a shame. I think it's a shame that feminism destroys families, that feminism teaches women to divorce their husbands and destroy families and take children away from fathers, and that the society that is nurtured by feminism treats fathers as the enemy of children.

I think that abortion destroys human lives. I think that's terrible. Now, the question is, the question is, these are real lives being shattered. Yeah, that's happening all over the place. But the first part of this question has to do with, don't you feel like you have a moral responsibility to speak out?

Where is your voice? That seems to be the question.

I'm gonna put this to all of it, but don't we have a moral responsibility to care for the poor, defend the innocent, rescue the dying, AKA abortion? Do we not have a responsibility, a moral responsibility to speak out, to make sure our elected leaders know what the word of God says?

Even going to city council meetings or going to our state capitol and talking to our representatives, do we not have a moral responsibility to that? Why wouldn't we have a moral responsibility for the families on our streets?

So Sorry, devil's advocate a little bit, but that is throwing that one out there for you guys as well.

The Church, the Magistrate, and the Agenda of the King

So the scriptures talk about the church as the pillar in support of the truth and that the magistrate is there to punish evildoers and praise doers of righteousness. How does the magistrate know who are the evildoers and who are the doers of righteousness?

Well, they should listen to the king of all the rulers of the earth.

Yeah, they're sovereign.

They're sovereign. Even as David's sitting upon his throne, my Lord said to my, the Lord said to my Lord. So there's somebody over the king or somebody over the magistrate and the church is to speak to the magistrate and say, hey, this is what righteousness looks like.

Hey, this is what evil looks like. You should praise workers of righteousness and you should punish workers of evil. And so the church should be informing the magistrates of what that is. Even as we preach and evangelize and make disciples of all the nations, we're teaching everyone how to bow the knee to Christ.

Yes.

So that, but okay, in that vein, this is not the same thing as, here is a particularly tragic scene. I must now speak to that particular tragic scene and be dictated to by whatever is highlighted as the thing to care about in this moment.

Whatever the media now says, this is the most important thing for you to care about now. And then I'm required to now say something about it. That the agenda is not to be set by the framers of tragedy.

The agenda is set by the king. So it's not that, this list of things that are mentioned, you know, ICE, Gaza, these are talking points from somebody from a leftist perspective, say these are the issues that you should be concerned about.

Somebody from another perspective would say, unless you're talking, unless you are constantly coming out and preaching against abortion and standing on corners with signs, you are unrighteous. This is the only issue that we need to be caring about.

Everything else pales in far comparison. And if you're not out there hollering with the sign, there's something wrong with you. You don't love Jesus. You're a hypocrite. Okay, now I've heard that before.

Oh yeah.

Okay.

I go to abolition day, it's always freezing cold.

Well, it's February of the year.

Always 14 degrees of the 60 mile an hour wind.

It's cold.

I go to abolition day, okay. I'm in support of the absolute end of all manner of abortion, full stop.

Yeah, end it now.

Yeah, end it.

I'm totally for that. But the guys who get up there and preach, basically get up there and say, and condemn everybody for not doing enough and say that our country is under the covenantal judgment of curses of God, that Oklahoma is being cursed by God because we have not done enough as Christians to fully get rid of it.

And until we get rid of abortion, we're going to be living under the deuteronomic curses of God.

That's always a topic that gets...

Corporate guilt. Corporate guilt.

Corporate national guilt.

Yeah, well, and statehood guilt even, right?

State guilt.

Because now the thing is, what is it? What is it? It's not end abortion now. It was free the states. Used to be called free the states. And now that row got overturned. Now it's...

End abortion.

Abolishing abortion or something.

Yeah.

And so, okay, like, all right. When I listen to them talk about that, it's like, you know, I'm just kind of reflecting on the matter. It's like, you know what? Of course I'm against abortion.

Yeah.

And I'd be willing to answer any question anybody gets. And I'm willing to go... I'm willing to talk to my magistrates about that. And I won't even go out of my way to do so. And you know what? I have absolute freedom and liberty to do so.

And it may be that I'll make a special effort of it. I have the freedom to go do that. I have the freedom to tell my kids about it. But you know what? I am not under condemnation. I'm not under condemnation.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Listen, I do not stand condemned because I'm not always going about with a sign and a bullhorn decrying every evil that I've heard about this last week.

This kind of goes into, in the modern era, both like the left and kind of the neocons absolutizing in moral terms every single political issue. So to go back to your question earlier, Dave, the devil's advocate question, you cited scripture about the poor and needy and the dying.

And I would say that an order of Morris still applies even in that situation, right? So you would say, what are you doing with your entire street? In that case, for us, the order of Morris is call ice on the street.

The issue would be that it is better for our children. It is better for our church. It is better for our state. It is better for our nation that tens and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants no longer stay in our country, have our houses, occupy our land and businesses that we can own in place or our children can own.

That's still gonna be applicable. That order of Morris is still gonna be applicable because we're going to be worried about our children first, our church members, our community, which means people who are Americans, who have this land as their inheritance and not foreigners.

So if we had ice come down our street again, this has happened before, if I have anything to say to my magistrates about the issue, if I'm gonna write a letter, if I'm gonna speak to somebody, then it's going to be like, you know you need to keep those families together, right?

Right.

You do know that, by everything that is righteous and good, you should keep those families together. It is not good for children, immigrant children to be, and you're not very good at keeping up with immigrant children.

You lose hundreds of thousands of them.

Thousands.

Of them.

Which, that wasn't ICE, that was a different organization, right? With Biden?

Yeah, well it was a different administration, but.

Was it still ICE?

Yeah.

There's connections all over the place.

Customs and border security.

Yeah, but the point is, you don't keep up with these children and they all end up being trafficked. So, don't separate them. You know, there's a whole lot of wickedness that comes from being an idiot.

Stop doing that. Keep them together. They don't belong here. They broke the laws. It's not good for them to be here, like you're saying. But, you know, handle it correctly. And in like manner, okay, so let's say we had a bunch of, oh I don't know, Somalis come in and decide that they're going to colonize Oklahoma City.

Okay, there's going to be someone from the leftist cults. They're already very much loud and proud in the Oklahoma City government. They're gonna be like, you know, this is wonderful. We get to show how virtuous we are by giving special consideration for the Somalis to have everything they want.

Because we want them to be here because they show how virtuous we are, right? So, we're gonna be pro-Muslim and pro-Somali culture and we're gonna really, really celebrate them and then if anybody complains, then we'll know who the enemy is.

Those are the enemies, right? Because you are the moral enemies of all that is holy and good. But at that point, if, let's say, Islam with its Quran, with its laws, with its absolute dedication to, there's only the land of peace, that's Islam, and then there's the land of war, right?

And it's all or nothing and they've got a place and a foothold, I will definitely speak out against that evil. I will definitely say, you know, look, we don't need to give our city over to a cult. This is a really bad idea.

This is a cult, this is a wicked cult and it's high time for it to go away,.

To quote Christopher Hitchens, right?

It's a wicked cult and it's high time it goes away. That's my opinion on Islam. And the leaders need to know that this is wickedness and this does not need to be here. This would be terrible for everybody.

Yes, I'll speak out about it. What happens if that, what happens if, you know, we start looking like Dearborn, Michigan? One of the reasons why Dearborn, Michigan looks the way it does is because people left because the leaders wouldn't listen, wouldn't do the right thing.

Righteousness is not being done. Then you get to be a big pot of wickedness.

Bye.

You know, the beauty of federalism, we can leave.

We can go to a different state.

We can go where there's freedom. And all these people that are packing up and moving and leaving all over the U .S. are doing things that are righteous. They are leaving places of wickedness where there is no reason and leaders aren't listening and they're getting up and they're moving someplace else and saying, you know, we're not gonna do this anymore.

And at great expense, both socially and economically.

Yeah, absolutely. But let's remember that our, one of the great Christian virtues is running away.

Bravely, bravely run away.

Bravely running away. Sir Robin, that brave, brave Sir Robin ran away. But yes, but this is how the pilgrims first came over. Like, what are they doing? Running away from the persecution. We wanna be able to.

See, I always thought they were running at the Indians. That's the way I thought of it.

Oh, really?

Yeah, the English at home weren't, they're kind of softies. We need to go, we need to go right at the Indians. But maybe I was taught by a different history teacher than you guys.

Yeah. Wow.

Probably, probably so.

I just think that the Vike wrote this question.

Yeah.

I don't know why I'm thinking about the Viking word for anybody that wasn't like them was scrailing. But anyway, no, but the whole idea was we want to raise our families and worship God in the way that he has told us to without being killed because we're not abiding by these tyrannical laws.

And so they ran away.

Okay.

Well, you know what? It's gonna keep on happening. Can't kill all of us. I mean, you can't stop all of us. And we're just gonna keep on living, keep on living for our Lord. And we do need to contend for what is right.

We do want to see righteous cities. We do want to see righteous places. We want to explain, hey, this isn't right. Let's do this over here. So we do have obligations, yes. But to impose upon me or any Christian, you have an obligation to use your voice and to care and be burdened by evils that do not touch on your order or more.

They do not touch on what should concern you. No, it's kind of like gossip, honestly. Like someone comes to me, starts telling me all this, this mess between them and someplace, someone else, all this drama and this backbiting.

And I'm like, you know, at some point he's like, you're doing a party here. You do know this is none of my business, right? You know, I understand that you're hurting and I understand that there was some wrong done, but you do know that it doesn't have anything to do with me, right?

You're gossiping. You're gossiping to me about all this. It's like, you know, shouldn't you go get right with this person? And shouldn't you seek a genuine mediator based on what you've already said? You need to go talk to this person instead of talking to me behind their back.

And then you need to go find somebody who can make this right as a mediator or a magistrate. Like, what are you doing? So that's like a low level example. But when somebody is coming to me and saying, you need to be gravely concerned and burdened and talking about all the problems in the world today.

It's like, no, I don't actually. Number one, there is somebody who is in charge to the minute level who is gravely concerned with this issue and his name is Jesus Christ. He is King of Kings, Lord of Lords.

He's the King of the rulers of the earth. And you know what? This does concern him. This is an issue that I believe that Jesus Christ is fully cognizant of and he hates wickedness and he hates evil and he sees it perfectly.

And I think he's going to take care of it. And I think he's going to judge wickedness. And I think he's going to put it all right. And you know what? I trust him because he's the shepherd and I'm just a sheep.

And I do not have to carry around the burdens of a shepherd at his level.

Christ the Shepherd, the Day of Judgment, and Refusing Manufactured Guilt

Yeah.

I mean, the writer of this question would not have that same view. I mean, God's not doing anything, so we have to do something, even if there is a God. And the framing of this question, this individual knows what's important to us.

Kids are very important to us. So, talks about Israel and Gaza, mentions starving children. Talks about ice, mentions families, children being broken up. So, pulling on those heartstrings, what we would say is that for the most part, when it's someone else's kids, especially on the other side of the world, that's not my problem.

It's not my responsibility. It is not a responsibility that God has given me. So then the next question would be, well, what about when if it's your kids? Then I care.

Yeah.

Because that's been placed in my care by that sovereign Lord who is in charge of everything. And that's not hypocritical.

That's right.

It's like saying,.

I am not to be, but why don't I care about the way in which, let's say, a family in India is running their finances? About how many rupees they have in their bank? And are they actually using their money wisely in feeding and clothing their kids?

Or are they drunks, and they're spending all this money on alcohol? And for some reason, this becomes clear. Am I supposed to care about that? It's like, well, that seems to be a minor issue, but it's about children.

You know what? Why am I not concerned about that? Because I'm supposed to be concerned about the money in my household, how I'm using my budget, how am I taking care about my kids? I'm using a family illustration because of the children, but also in the expanded, that the same people who want to push globalist burdens on everybody, so that everybody's burdened by the same globalist burdens.

Everybody's flying the same flags and worried about the same thing and lockstep with all this nonsense.

So we can use move global resources to help on these global problems because we're all in this together.

It's like, yeah, they talk about families, but they're using that as a rhetorical device. They don't actually care about families any more than they care about nations. Because as soon as you admit that families are a thing, the nations are a thing.

So that's why they don't like families and they don't like nations. Like, we don't need those things.

We're global citizens.

Yeah, exactly.

So

Child is the child of the village.

So it takes a village to raise a child, doesn't it?

Yeah.

It's a rhetorical device. It's a rhetorical device to try to gain a response. Well, how do we reconcile these tragedies with your faith? So evil is evil because of who God is and what he says is evil.

And God is going to judge all wickedness at the great day of judgment. And he's going to handle it so well that all the saints are going to applaud.

And all the sinners are going to screech, gnash their teeth.

Gnashing.

Gnashing and weeping of teeth. And it's going to be perfect. He's going to handle it so well. And this is why we leave room for wrath. Leave room for vengeance. Leave room for it. Vengeance is the Lord's, he will repay.

And I don't have to be wrathful all the time. I don't have to go day in and day out and be wrathful about every perceived injustice that I see in the world today. Why are the leftists, why are the communists in America painting their head blue and green and pink, piercing themselves, cutting themselves, destroying the figure of their face and their body and howling in rage and in hatred over every perceived offense in the world today?

Why are they going nuts? Because there is no day of judgment that they believe in. Justice will never be done. Justice will never be served.

Why?

Why did they tear down all the statues? Because they're trying to judge the dead. These dead men did evil things. We must judge them. And they know there's no resurrection from the dead. But as Christians, we know there is.