A Pastoral Response to Theonomy | Theocast

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This is Justin. Today on Theocast we're gonna talk again about theonomy. This is the second of two episodes on that topic.

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Last week we sought to engage theonomy at a theological level. This week we're trying to talk more pastorally about our concerns related to theonomy.

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It's got a lot of fallout for the saints in the pew, so we're gonna identify some of those concerns and try to respond in ways that will be helpful.

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And again this week we are offering the Semper Reformanda portion for free, so we hope that you enjoy that.

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We hope that the episode in general is clarifying and encouraging for you. Stay tuned. If you'd like to help support

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You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast.

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Encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a confessional, reformed, and pastoral perspective.

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Even as John holds up his coffee mug that encourages us, yes, to rest in the Lord Jesus. He's done it all and that's why we're here.

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So your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reform Church in Springhill, Tennessee, and I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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We have met again to podcast today, John, and I know you're going to explain this more in just a minute.

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We're going to talk again today about theonomy. It's going to be a different podcast though than last week.

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Why don't you help the listeners understand how exactly that's the case. Yeah, for those of you that didn't listen last week, we'd encourage you to go do it.

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We're going to pick up where we left off last week and just, you know, the theonomists who listened to us, we understand that it was a general flyby and we tried our best to make sure that we represented all camps and all views.

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But, you know, did we deal with every single argument that has ever come out of the theonomist belief?

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No, and we understand that. We're trying to have a general conversation. What we're going to do now is talk more pastorally, and I would say in relation to the church and the kingdom of God as it relates to something like theonomy, last week was more theological, but if we don't apply it to our hearts and our minds and how we live now, then, you know, all it is is head knowledge and we don't want it to get stuck up there.

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One of the things that Justin and I were being very careful in how we worded this, when we think about some of the accusations that were presented to theonomists,

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I don't want to misrepresent them. This is where we're going to be a little bit more pointed. We would say that theonomy often can overshadow the gospel, where it becomes the predominant message.

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Justin, I don't want to steal your illustration, so I'm going to just ask you this. If someone were to say to a theonomist, define

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Christianity for me. The way I might frame it, yeah, the gospel ends up being obscured if theonomy wins the day.

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Here's what I mean. If you were to listen to a theonomist talk about Christianity and what we are called to, and you were to ask a non -believing person sitting and listening to that theonomist talk, what would that non -believer conclude

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Christianity is about? Is it about the forgiveness of sins, the imputation of righteousness, and eternal life through Christ alone, or is it about that and something else?

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That's big for me as a pastor. It is. That's not to say that there's more in the

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Bible than the gospel. There is. There's church polity, and there's law. But what ends up happening is the good news gets collapsed into that, that this is the good news.

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There's some clutter thrown on it. There's some obscuring of it. That's right. There's a burden, to use your word,

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Justin. There's a burden that's placed on the believer that the expectation is that there is this heavy expectation that we need to be a part of this social transformation that's happening, that we need to be in the civil sphere and really pressing in on our leaders to make these changes.

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That's expected of all believers to be a part of that. Correct. You are obligated as a Christian to be involved in the building of a

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Christian society broadly. I would argue that really matters for the saints in the pew, because that's a burden that we were never meant to bear in terms of the mission of the church.

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Now, when people hear us say this, Justin, it's like there's only two sides.

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We talked about this before. There's only red and green. There's no other color at all, no other option that's available there. What you guys are saying is that you don't care about holiness.

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You don't care about the infants who are being murdered. You don't care about your neighbor. That's right. It's like, no, it's not at all.

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No, and it's like God has given us a clear form and way in which we are to interact with the world, and it's not that.

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To then come over and just put that burden upon someone. I'll give you some illustrations.

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We'll get into this a little bit, Justin, in the two kingdoms. This is my feedback to my brothers and sisters who are theonomists.

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Sometimes we use tactics that are just not kind and loving, and we kind of press on people.

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For instance, radical to kingdom is a word that you use. We just throw radical on something. Yeah, R2K. Right, R2K.

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You're saying because you guys are radical to kingdoms, you're just sitting down in your bunkers, and you don't care about society, and you don't care about the innocent.

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That's not true. You're very insular. You're only inward -looking. You don't care about society. Right, and that's just not true.

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We do care. We do vote. We are called to be a part of this culture and a part of this kingdom, but we aren't the mission of it.

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That's the difference. Our goal is to live peaceably with our government because we have a mission that is outside of that government, and that mission is the advancement of God's kingdom, spiritually speaking, amongst the world.

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But to say that the mission, the expectation is that every tribe, tongue, and nation will be transformed into a

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Christian nation, this side of Christ's coming is, I think, a misrepresentation of what the good news of the gospel is.

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Sure. I think the last couple of introductory comments before we get to some of our responses to theonomy pastorally,

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I think that, again, not trying to be uncharitable, but I think that theonomy comes across as very this -worldly, if I can put it that way.

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It's very earthbound in terms of its emphases, whereas as confessional guys, one of the things that we embrace is the other -worldliness of confessionalism.

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We are not, and we'll unpack this more in a minute, our chief concern as pastors is not to turn this world into the

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New Jerusalem, but it is to prepare our people for the world to come. We'll talk about that more in a minute.

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Again, I just need to step in and say that doesn't mean we are absent -minded from this world.

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That's not what that means, or that we're not involved, or we don't care, or we don't vote. Let's get into it a little bit in terms of how we would engage with some of the arguments of theonomy pastorally.

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One of the things that I hear a lot, and you've alluded to this and we may have alluded to it last week, is, rightly, theonomists want to appeal to Scripture.

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They want to say that the Scripture is sufficient, and that God has spoken. It's His wholly inspired and errant word, and we're going to affirm all of that.

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Here's the instinct, though, in the reasoning of theonomists. They'll say, we clearly, as human beings in the world

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God has made, we need to know how to arrange civil society, and we need to know how to govern ourselves, and so God must have given us what we need to know in that realm in the

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Scripture. Where does God weigh in on statecraft? Where does He speak to civil government?

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We all agree He speaks there in the civil code of Moses, the judicial laws of Moses, and so are we going to be

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Bible people, or are we going to appeal to human reason? Is it going to be God's law, or is it going to be man's law?

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Is the Scripture sufficient, or is it not? That's a lot of times the way the rhetoric goes, to which we would say, yeah, the

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Scripture is absolutely sufficient, but the Scripture is sufficient for the purposes for which

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God gave it, and so we would appeal, as we often do as confessional guys, to our confession of faith.

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Chapter 1 of the 2 LCF, paragraph 6, this is on the chapter regarding the Holy Scriptures.

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I'm just going to read it and then maybe comment briefly. So the whole counsel of God concerning everything essential for His own glory and man's salvation, faith, and life is either explicitly stated or by necessary inference contained in the

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Holy Scriptures. So everything we need to know for our salvation, for our faith, and for our life, and by that we would understand our

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Christian life in the Church, right? That's what we're talking about, is revealed either explicitly stated or necessarily inferred from Scripture.

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Nothing is to ever be added to the Scriptures, either by new revelation of the Spirit or by human traditions. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that the inward illumination of the

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Spirit of God is necessary for a saving understanding of what is revealed in the Word. Amen. We recognize, this is the key here, we recognize that some circumstances concerning the worship of God and government of the

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Church are common to human actions and organizations and are to be ordered by the light of nature and Christian wisdom, following the general rules of the

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Word, which must always be observed. For the sake of time, I'm just going to say it this way. If we believe that, regarding the government of the

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Church, that the Scripture has not spoken exhaustively to everything we need to know to govern the

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Church, functionally and practically, day to day, week to week, but we must appeal to the light of nature, i .e.

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natural law and Christian wisdom, in order to do that in the Church, how much more so must we appeal to the light of nature and natural law in order to do civil government?

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If God has not told us everything that we need to know to govern the Church in detail, how much less so has

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He given us everything that we need to know to govern civil society in every detail? What is the

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Scripture sufficient for? That's the massive question. We're not trying to undermine the authority or the sufficiency of Scripture.

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We're trying to take the Scripture on its own terms, understood within the context of the biblical covenants and the biblical revelation.

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What you're saying is that Scripture is insufficient. That's true, and it's a very important theological position.

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We have to hold that position. It's sufficient for the purposes for which God gave it. It is insufficient for a whole host of things in the world that God has made, because God would have us appeal to natural law and the light of nature in so many arenas.

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This is a really bad illustration, but we were having problems with the internet for you, and the

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Scripture is not sufficient in helping you fix that. Well, sure. People have no issue in acknowledging that the

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Bible is not a handbook on modern medicine and would never look to it as such, but yet we appeal to it like it is a handbook for civil government.

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What we have to then say is that there's something else going on. We just think, we being those who argue from a theonomic perspective, that civil government is more important than medicine or nutrition or whatever.

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It's like, well, medicine is pretty important. Health care is pretty important, too, and the Bible doesn't speak to that exhaustively.

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It's just very interesting how you want to then appeal to it as though it speaks to civil government and civil society exhaustively.

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Yeah, I'll give you a comparison too here, Justin. In many ways, God is preserving a nation because that nation is bringing the

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Messiah. Of course. We talked about that last week. Absolutely. That's right. A lot of the civil laws that were given were given to preserve this nation from, one, polluting itself with other nations.

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Preserving the line of promise. That's right. That's why there's strict laws about sleeping with or marrying other nations.

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You and I can marry someone from another country. It's not a sin. That's a positive law. Exactly. The ways that people have used the

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Scripture to condemn interracial marriage is absurd. That's a great example.

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That's not what it was for, guys. Oh, as a matter of fact, in the church, Paul encourages the collapsing of this because in Christ there is no difference of race here.

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But in the civil law, there is because it was specific.

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There needed to be a way of tracking who the Messiah was. Yeah. We don't have a lot of time here, but I'll just give this as an example to, again, demonstrate that I don't think

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God ever intended the civil code of Moses to be binding on every nation state. There's a lot.

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It's uniquely situated to Israel. That's what we're arguing for. So thinking about the purposes of Israel and getting us to Christ and all that, like we've just been saying, think about the fact that the civil law of God, the judicial law of polygamy, actually assumes it.

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No theonomist is arguing for polygamy to be okay in the

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United States or whatever land in which you live. But reason with me for a minute. And slavery, by the way.

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Oh, sure. Let's just take the polygamy piece in Old Covenant Israel.

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So we notice that in many cases, in the instance of adultery, the death penalty is required.

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But notice that when a married man has relations with an unmarried woman, there's no death penalty.

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Why? Because the assumption is he'll marry her. Seriously.

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I mean, so again, it's like, all right, well, is that what God would have us do? Is that a reflection of God's immutable character, like the moral law is?

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Absolutely not. Because the moral law says don't commit adultery. Whereas in the civil law, there is provision for these things because God's purposes are different in the civil law than they were with the moral law.

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So that's important. What's the scripture sufficient for? Yes. And I think it's very sufficient in proving to us that we can trust who the

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Messiah is and was because of the pure line that was kept pure because of the civil law put upon them.

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And it protected them from losing this. And at times it could happen. There were times where...

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That's right. Now, when we go to the New Testament and you see this interaction, things change.

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You don't see any New Testament writer, including Christ, pressing people into this division of nations or in this division of upholding these same types of civil laws.

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You see the exact opposite of it. There is a people with a mission and that people within a mission are trying to live peaceably within a culture because they have something that's separate from what's going on in that culture.

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That's hard to hear, but it's true. And I'm going to add this, Justin, in God's civil law and the promises of the covenant with Moses, that there were promises of protection from persecution.

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Christ and his apostles say the exact opposite, that you can expect persecution for living a holy life.

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In the Old Testament, holy life produced protection. And blessing materially. That's right.

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In the New, it sacrificed death and persecution. So the two don't even carry over remotely.

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Right. And that's where we were talking about the typological pieces related to the Mosaic covenant and the uniquely situated elements of the

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Mosaic law and how it does or does not apply today.

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It's obvious that things change as we move from the old covenant arrangement into the new covenant arrangement.

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The geopolitical entity that was Israel is now the non -geopolitical entity that is the church.

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Can I just add one more thing to our episode that we recorded that came out last week or two weeks ago about who is offended by the gospel?

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The whole messaging and method of our life going forward is not triumphalism, right?

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It's the exact opposite. As you proclaim Christ and his holiness, you will experience persecution. You're not going to see nations transformed into Christians.

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You will know suffering and weakness. Let's talk a little bit more. One of our big concerns with theonomy is that it confuses the mission of the church.

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It confuses the mission of the kingdom of Christ on earth effectively. What we understand from theonomy is that an integral part of the mission of the church is the transformation of civil society and the establishment of the

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Mosaic code as the law of the land. We would say that we're not charged by Christ to do that at all in terms of the building of the church and the building of his kingdom on earth, which the church is that.

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The mission of the church effectively, from our perspective, John, you can jump in and correct me if you disagree, but is the preaching of the word of Christ and the administration of the sacraments for the salvation of God's people.

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That's at the heart of the mission. That's what it is. When we start adding a bunch of stuff onto that, particularly related to the transformation of society, the mission of the church gets watered down.

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It gets muddied. We've got the saints running around trying to do a million things that may or may not be inherently

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Christian at all, running around trying to do a million things that might not be inherently related to the calling of Christ at all in terms of the making of disciples, right?

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Not Christianizing the nations so that the nations are more Christian in terms of how they operate, but actually the making of disciples from every nation.

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That's the great commission, and that's what we need to be concerned with. Jon Moffitt There's one new nation.

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There's one new kingdom, and all pieces fit in that. That's the language that's being used. To add to what you're saying, the way the church should view itself is that we are the proclaimers of the kingdom of light to the kingdom of darkness.

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It's not that there are multiple little kingdoms all over all these nations that are now becoming…

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It is God transforming hearts and implanting embassies called churches inside of foreign nations.

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He uses words like ambassador, pilgrim. Why? Because we're being implanted in a world that is not ours, and that's not becoming ours.

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There's no language of that, that somehow it's becoming ours. We are longing and awaiting the return of Christ, because that's when we go home.

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That's when things are made new. The mission changes, Justin, where you realize there is an excitement for me.

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I start thinking about my brothers. We just had someone purchase a book from us in Australia, and I was just thinking about the reach of the connection of Christianity around the world.

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I've got brothers and sisters preaching rest in Australia, Korea, Africa, and all over the place.

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I get excited going, God's redemptive work is doing exactly what he said it would do.

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It's spreading to the ends of the world. Praise be to God. People are being saved, and one day we will all gather.

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But there's not a hope. You don't see this expectation in the disciples. A lot of the argument from theonomists,

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I'll go back to them, they're saying, but that's the early days. They understood this would take thousands of years. Their expectation is

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Jesus coming back at any moment. They had no expectation of thousands of years. You don't hear that in their voice at all.

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I think inevitably we're just going to go and start talking a little bit about two kingdoms here.

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I've got thoughts too. We would uphold a historical two kingdoms understanding that many in the

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Reformed tradition have upheld, where we understand there are two kingdoms in the world. There's the common kingdom that all men live in and are a part of, including

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Christians. That's established effectively by the Noahic covenant. Then you have the redemptive kingdom, which is established by the promises and the accomplishment of the covenant of grace.

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That is unique to God's people. In the new covenant era, the church is the redemptive kingdom in that regard.

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We are citizens of the world, the common kingdom, but our citizenship is also in heaven. We're citizens of the redemptive kingdom as well.

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This distinction between the common and redemptive kingdom is helpful. We would contend that the charge of God to us is not to pick up where Adam left off, like where Adam failed, and do what

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Adam failed to do. We understand that there is only one person who was the second Adam who could actually accomplish what

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Adam failed to accomplish. His name is Jesus. We are not, therefore, called by God to go around seeking to transform this world into the world to come.

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We are not, in other words, trying to turn Babylon into the new Jerusalem. What we are called to do is to love our neighbor holistically.

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Within the redemptive kingdom of the church, we are to preach Christ, administer the sacraments, and we are to prepare ourselves for the world to come.

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When Jesus returns, we will receive a kingdom, and it will be the

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Father's joy to welcome us into it. We are not ushering in the kingdom. We are not building it in that sense.

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We are receiving it. We are recipients of it, and we await its consummation with the return of Christ.

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That does not in any way mean that we are just like you said, sticking our head in the sand, batting down the hatches, and it's all going to hell.

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There's no point in trying to do any good in the world. That's absurd. We think that Christians, individual believers, should be involved socially.

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We should be involved politically. We should act in these various spheres in which we reside and have influence.

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The issue is, what is the institutional church called to do? What is its mission? What is inherently

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Christian and redemptive when it comes to our calling? That's the stuff that we want to be precise about so that the saints don't get it confused as to whether the preaching of Christ and the ministration of the sacraments and the

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God -gathered church or our social activity is more essential.

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Jon Moffitt Yeah, and I think proper expectation. Every epistle writer warns us about the persecution we're going to face and the opposition we're going to face.

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I was having a conversation with another podcaster a while back, and he defines himself as a post -millennialist.

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He asked me if I was an optimistic online list, and the conversation we were having was about, he said,

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Jon, don't you believe that… Justin Perdue Did you ask him if he's a realistic post -millennialist? Jon Moffitt Yeah, I didn't. Justin Perdue Post -millennial. Jon Moffitt But the conversation we were having was, he said,

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Jon, don't you believe that over time, as more and more people become believers, you're going to see cultures transformed?

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And I said, here's the problem with this illustration you're handing me, is that you're assuming people don't die, and that we're stacking

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Christians around the world, and that eventually the whole world will be a Christian. No, Christians have been dying, and they've been dying for their faith for years.

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This is why you and I talked about this, but there's an entire country that was heavily dominated by Christianity.

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It's a rare speck there now. Justin Perdue I think your point is well made, in that there are ebbs and flows in this.

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The expectation that the trajectory is onward and eventually the world is Christianized, I do not think the

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Scripture teaches. I think in terms of historically surveying it, obviously there's good where Christianity becomes influential on the level of human rights and all of that stuff.

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I don't dispute that at all, which again is why I think it's good for Christians to be involved socially and politically, but the institutional church is a different question.

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The UK, Britain, is the greatest example perhaps that we could give in terms of a society that had an established church, where every person of society was effectively baptized into that church.

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You had a monarch that was established by God in their understanding, so you had a theocracy in that sense.

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You're attempting to do statecraft like this. I think we can argue that there was some good in it for a period of time, and you look at it today, and now

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I think our theonomists, brothers and sisters, would come in and say, well yeah, it's the failure of the church that resulted in what

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Britain is today. I think what we would say is, we said this in the first pod, that the institutional form of the people of God in the

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Old Covenant was Israel. The institutional form of the people of God in the New Covenant, like people of God on earth in the

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New Covenant, is the church. It is not a geopolitical reality like Israel was. It's dispersed people from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

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So then the question is, as we survey the New Testament, how do the New Testament writers, how do the apostles speak about our engagement with civil society and our engagement even with civil government?

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There's not much ink spilled at all, John. The ink that is spilled primarily is

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Romans 13, to tell us that we're to submit to the governments that are over us because they're ordained by God.

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That's written in the context of the Roman Empire, a pagan government. That's significant.

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Then I'm thinking of passages like 1 Timothy 2 where we're told to pray for our leaders so that we may live quiet and godly lives, peaceful and dignified in every way.

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We should pray that our leaders would rule with justice and with equity and compassion and everything else so that we can live quiet and peaceful and dignified in every way.

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There's nothing wrong. Paul, even at times, you could see him interacting with civil governments, but you don't see that as commissioning of the church to do that.

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Even there, when he interacts with Agrippa and other people like in the book of Acts, for example, his word there is redemptive.

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The man goes and preaches Jesus. He doesn't go in and talk about statecraft.

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To the defense of the theonomist here, and I know you'll agree with me when I say this, they would use

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Matthew 28, go into all the world and preach the gospel and teach them to deserve all that I have commanded you. They would say that's what

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Paul was doing. He was presenting the gospel, and then he's going to present all that Christ has commanded. Part of that commandment is the law, which you and I would agree is the law, but not civil.

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This is where covenant theology is important because when you collapse moral and civil here, and this is probably the greatest passage

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I've seen most theonomists use, this is our call. This is what the Great Commission is.

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It's to take nations and teach them to observe Jesus. Let's just stop there for a moment,

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Justin, and I think we should deal with this because this is related to the church and the burden of the church and the advancement of the church.

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Are we really saying that the church is to go into a country and the goal of that is to transform that country, starting from the top down with the government and changing the way in which they do civil laws?

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Is that the expectation of Christ's commission? My answer to that would be, okay, that's what he says.

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Let's go to the New Testament and see if the apostles pick up on that, and they do not pick up on that.

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That is not their interpretation of that. If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called

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Faith versus Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at theocast .org

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slash primer. I'm sure the theonomist's response is like, well, no, you go and evangelize, and then where individuals become

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Christians, the society transforms. Okay, fair enough. But again, is the New Testament emphasis one of the transformation of civil society, or is the

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New Testament emphasis one of, here's what life in the church looks like, and by the way, the church will be persecuted and the church will be a counterculture?

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The assumption of the apostles is not that the church will have great influence and that the church will dominate.

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The assumption is the opposite, actually. Yeah, and Jesus, a Jew, telling the disciples the gospel goes beyond Jerusalem.

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That's what he's telling them, the gospel goes beyond them. The last thing that we're going to talk about here in just a minute is just Christians as pilgrims and the otherworldliness of confessionalism, and I want to get there.

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But I want to talk for just a minute about the burden part, because I think the things we've been talking about are related to this.

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We said one of our concerns with, go ahead. Yeah, before we do, this is to our supporters. We wanted to go ahead and make the second episode also, no, that's fine, also a part of today's episode.

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Normally, we would cut the podcast here and continue this conversation with our Semper Reformata folk, who are our monthly supporters.

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The folk. The folk. Been in the South 12 years now, and it's starting to rub off on me, and my kids laugh.

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Sometimes I'll have different words now that I've never had before. Anyways, part of that is a community of an app where we gather together, and then also a brand new, almost 20 lectures, sorry, classes full of lectures on TheocastU.

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That's a part of that. We want to go ahead and leave that a part of this conversation. We do this once in a while just to say thank you for those of you that are listening.

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Justin, take us into the next section for the next 15 minutes. For all the folk, for the entire

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Theocast fam, here we go. I want to speak for a minute about the burden part, because we said that pastorally one of our concerns with theonomy is that it places a burden on the saints that we were never meant to bear.

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Let's be real for a minute. Life in this fallen world is difficult in and of itself. We're fallen people living in a broken world.

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We battle the corruption of our flesh. We have a lot of responsibilities in our immediate spheres of proximity, like marriage, family for many of us, local church, our vocation, place of employment, sets of relationships that we have.

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There's a lot to navigate there. The battle, again, against our own corruption and against sin is heavy enough to carry around with us all the time anyway.

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What we're calling people to in the church is to trust Jesus in the midst of weakness and pain and suffering and to learn more and more to depend upon Him in the midst of that battle against your own corruption.

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To trust that everything that He has said is true. To trust that He is enough for the forgiveness of sins and for your righteousness and for eternal life.

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You're going to care for your brothers and sisters in the church and remind them of that reality on the regular. That's what we're called to.

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Let's be honest about this too, John. That calling in and of itself is enough to concern ourselves with.

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People often go through difficult things. People often struggle. But then if we come in and we say that not only all that other stuff that's been articulated up to now, but in addition to that, your calling and your obligation, if you are going to be faithful to the

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Lord Jesus Christ who saved you, is that you need to be very involved individually and institutionally.

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We need to be involved in trying to transform civil government, in trying to transform the society at large, in trying to persuade people in the public square that our world view is right and help people see these things.

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This is a part of the mission. If you are not doing this well, then God is displeased and people literally are suffering and dying and are doing poorly because you have failed.

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That is a tremendous amount of weight to bear. I don't think that we were meant by the

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Lord Jesus Christ to bear that weight. I think that we were meant to find rest in Him, and then the emphasis of our calling and our duty is then life in the local church, love of our brothers and sisters, and love of neighbor through vocation and just commonsensical spheres of influence that we have.

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If I've got interests in the political realm, if I've got interests in the societal realm, I'm going to use my talents, my energies, and my giftedness and all of that to try to do good in as much as I can, but I'm going to pill on my head at night knowing that faithfulness to the

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Lord Jesus Christ means faith in Him and love of the brethren and an ordinary life of faithfulness in the context of the local church.

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That is, I think, the emphasis of the New Testament. That's what I call my people to at Covenant Baptist Church.

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I know that's what you call the saints to at Grace Reformed Church, and I don't want to be putting weight on them that the

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Lord Jesus does not intend for them to carry around all the time. Jon Moffitt That's right. I'm going to take what you said and look at it at a different perspective.

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Justin, one of the things that I've noticed when someone starts to walk down the theonomic road is that their disposition towards sinners changes a little bit.

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What I mean by that is when you believe that the whole world should be governed by the civil law of God, then when you see a drag queen or you see homosexuality or any of that, you and I would look at that and our hearts would break because we're like, that's a person trapped in sin.

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They're a slave to sin. When Paul says, such were some of you, that's a powerful statement, which means the gospel came and freed them from their slavery.

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You're not who you used to be. If theonomy is what it says it is, that phrase will be gone out of existence eventually because there won't be people who were trapped in sin because they're dead.

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You won't have, such were some of you, the man who was caught in adultery and put out of his church and brought back in. He would be dead.

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Paul wouldn't tell the church to bring him back in because the civil government would have killed him. He would have put him to death.

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Justin Perdue To use old covenant language, for him to be laying with, to have relations with his stepmother, that would have been a heinous offense that may very well have merited capital punishment.

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Jon Moffitt Right. And we agree that it is... Justin Perdue Laying with his father's wife. Jon Moffitt Right. We agree that that's an egregious sin against our

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God. But we have been called to proclaim the law. You have violated this, and we have illustrations of this is a violation unto death.

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You deserve death, and I deserve death. We deserve death. Justin Perdue You've broken the seventh commandment, and therefore you deserve death, which is what the capital punishment under the last commandment is.

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Jon Moffitt That's right. As crazy as this sounds, people are like, well, you mean we should just allow homosexuality?

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We should allow drag queens? We should just allow this and this? Listen, it is not our responsibility to govern that.

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Justin Perdue To eradicate all of that from the world. That's not what we're called to do. Are we to condone it?

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Are we to approve of it? No. Are we to preach Christ to all men? Yes. Jon Moffitt Are we to separate from it?

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Absolutely. Such were some of you. Separate from it. We should be distinct from the world. First Corinthians 5 is useful here too.

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Paul says, who am I to judge those outside the church? We are going to take this deadly seriously in the context of the church.

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If you've got somebody living in hard -hearted, unrepentant, obstinate, ongoing sin, then we have mechanisms for that that are called church discipline.

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Those are restorative in aim. That's another conversation for another day. But Paul writes the way that he writes to the church.

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He doesn't write that way to the world. The understanding of the Apostle seems to be that there's going to be all kinds of stuff going on in the world that is not under the purview of believers.

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It's not under the purview of the church. Justin Perdue I know. I listen to my

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Reformed Theonomist brothers, and they're like, Jon, we believe the same thing you do. Heart of stone, heart of flesh.

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That has got to be pulled out. It's got to be changed. But then I get confused because I listen to you guys, and it's like this lambasting against the culture.

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I'm like, listen, what do you expect sinners to do? They're going to reflect the master they serve, which is

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Satan. Why are you shocked that sinners sin? I don't understand this. Jon Moffitt I would say

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Theonomists agree with us on the gospel, and they agree with us on conversion. They agree with us on a lot of things pertaining to the redemptive kingdom.

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Our plea is simply let's reason consistently in terms of how we try to think these things through.

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Let's pivot, if as confessionalists, of Christians as pilgrims, sojourners, exiles.

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We're not conquerors. We're not crusaders that are called to literally turn the world upside down via our obvious power and strength.

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In fact, we serve a God who works through weakness. Justin Perdue Sounds like Paul may have said that.

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Yes. What we preach is foolishness to the world. It's a stumbling block to the Jews, too. Yet God works through that to save.

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In particular, we understand that Christians in this world were living here, but it's not our homeland.

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We've been promised one, but we're not there yet. As we've said so many times on this podcast, what we need is nourishment and sustenance and protection.

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That's what the ministry of the church is for. That's what the ministry of the church is meant to provide. That's very important as we think about the redemptive kingdom of Christ on earth, these outposts of the kingdom of Christ called local churches, and what we're supposed to be doing there.

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We're supposed to be doing things via word and sacrament, ordinary means of grace, and all that. We're inviting people in to taste and see that the

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Lord is good. Then as people have come to the Lord Jesus Christ, we're protecting one another.

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We are being nourished. We're being sustained. The Lord is doing that through the preaching of Christ and the administration of the sacraments and what we do as a church.

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That's really important for us. I can't say this enough, at least from my perspective on this matter.

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We are not trying to turn Babylon into the New Jerusalem. We're not trying to make this world heaven on earth.

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We are aiming in the church to prepare one another for the world to come. That will be our new reality when the

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Lord Jesus returns. There is an unashamed otherworldliness in confessionalism that is, to me, obviously good and biblical.

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Jesus himself, in the writing of the apostles, is always dripping with new heavens and new earth.

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That's the assumption. That's what undergirds it. That's the lens through which they see it. I'll just speak personally.

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I trust everybody is going to agree with me. Everybody in my own local church does. One of my greatest challenges as a Christian is that I'm too earthbound.

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I think too much about the here and now. Even as a pastor, I think too much about the institutional church on earth.

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I'm not thinking enough about the end of the story. I'm not thinking enough about when the

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New Jerusalem comes down and faith becomes sight. I'm not thinking enough about that. I think that theonomy tends to only double down on that error rather than helping us think in more otherworldly ways and think rightly about our frames now and what we need now so that we'll make it there.

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Jon Moffitt That's right. Justin Perdue That's it. Jon Moffitt I go back to 2 Corinthians. Language, I think, is important in pictures and what

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Paul chooses to use. An ambassador, we've all understood the meaning of that.

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It's a representative of a leader in a foreign country.

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Justin Perdue Sure. You have no jurisdiction. Jon Moffitt No. Justin Perdue Like you said, you represent another power.

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Jon Moffitt 2 Corinthians 5. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. Christ the King, the

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King of a nation. He says, God making His appeal through us. You are in a foreign land and He wants you not in this foreign land anymore.

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He says, we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled, be brought back to God.

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What was the relationship in the garden? Peace and harmony.

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That has been separated. Even this whole language when he talks about pilgrims and sojourners, ambassadors, he keeps using language that's foreign to us.

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This is not natural to us. We should be seeing this. How many times in the

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New Testament you have Peter and even Paul who talk about the blessed hope of the new heavens and the new earth, that we are anticipating that which is to come.

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That's where our heart is. It's the end of time, meaning that they're expecting this to come soon.

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There isn't this elongated period where we're expecting this to be the transformation. It's we're preaching the good news of the gospel so that those who might hear believe.

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Then God gathers us together and we go to be with Him. It's a very different view than this long period of optimism.

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He says, look, the future of your life is suffering and death. That's the future of your life.

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There's no optimism involved. When that is finished, and by the way, he promises perseverance.

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I will persevere you through this. I just have a hard time listening to what the

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Theonomist says. I think it creates a distraction to where all of a sudden, we care more about what governments are doing.

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We care more about what individuals are doing and how they're not lining up with scripture. Instead of us being gracious and kind and patient and loving towards them, we become judgmental.

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We become condescending. In my opinion, we become a separatist. We separate ourselves from it in a wrong way where the world looks at Christ and is drawn towards Him because of His love.

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In this particular world, there's this ostracizing where we're being vulgar at times towards sinners when we should be drawing them with the light of the gospel.

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We're condemning them only with the law. I don't have a lot of pointed things to say other than, as you were talking, this maybe is a final thought from me and maybe not a profound one.

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The New Testament is very optimistic, but it's optimistic from an eternal perspective.

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It's new heavens and new earth optimism. That in no way is contradictory with the exhortation to love your brothers and sisters and do good to your neighbor.

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We ought not pit the two against each other. There's charge against guys like us who would not adhere to theonomy.

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We're not post -millennial or post -millenarian in our eschatology. Sorry for my stumbling there.

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We're not thinking that what we do is of no consequence and we have no desire, nor do we feel any impetus to go and serve people.

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Quite the opposite. Because we know that Christ is coming back and that every promise

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He's ever made, He's going to keep. We're going to seek to love our brothers and sisters and do good to all men, especially those of the household of God.

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Justin Perdue Well, that's it, Justin. I know we are on a time cap, so thank you guys for listening. We hope this has been encouraging for you.

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Please stay tuned. A couple of things. There's an article that Justin wrote in a journal. It's down below.

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Justin and I are actively working on getting a TheocastU class available that's much longer and much more deep and has a big syllabus involved.