Governmental Authority and the Church

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:37

And welcome to The Dividing Line. Rich Pierce here, and I am here to introduce you, our audience, to Pastor Rob Brunanski of Desert Hills Bible Church.

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And it is now Desert Hills Bible Church. That's right. And so your first time on The Dividing Line today.

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And I just want to welcome you. Please tell us a little bit about yourself for starters, and just give us a little introduction.

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Yeah, thanks, Rich. Appreciate you having me on the show. It's an honor to be here and looking forward to being able to just go through a few issues with your audience and pastoring at Desert Hills Bible Church, formerly

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Desert Hills Evangelical Free Church here in Phoenix, Arizona. We just recently changed the name and talk more about that a little bit later in the show.

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Graduated from the Master's Seminary 18 years ago. Can't believe it's been that long and got my

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MDiv there, went out to Southern Seminary and got a PhD in New Testament Studies at Southern Seminary in 2013.

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And have been here in Phoenix since 2011, pastoring at Desert Hills and just having a good time shepherding and watching

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God grow that church. And tell us a little bit about Desert Hills as a church. Tell us about just the focus of the church and things that are going on.

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Yeah. So at the church, our goal is to be relentlessly biblical.

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That's what we talked about our 50th anniversary last year. And so we just rigorously tried to apply

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Scripture to all of life, every area of ministry, every aspect of the church. And the church is, before all of the coronavirus pandemic craziness started, probably running about 260 in attendance a week.

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So a church and seeking to honor the Lord here in the Phoenix area, doing evangelism, doing discipleship and focus on expository preaching, preaching through books of the

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Bible verse by verse and explaining what Scripture means and applying it to life. So is Desert Hills a reformed church?

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I mean, evangelical free church doesn't necessarily click in with most people as being reformed.

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Yeah. Well, you know, I suppose there's as many definitions of reformed as maybe there are reformed people.

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But do we believe in the doctrines of grace? Do we believe in the five solas? Absolutely.

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You know, those are things that we uphold that if you were to visit Desert Hills, you would expect to hear from the pulpit.

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We just finished a series a few months ago on Ephesians 1, the opening of Ephesians 1.

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We're preaching through Ephesians right now and chosen in Christ and going over the doctrine of unconditional election and what

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Scripture teaches about that. And now we're in all the way in Ephesians 2 after four or five months in the book of Ephesians.

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So we're going really fast and we're going through the doctrine of total depravity. So this

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Sunday will be part four on that. I was going to do that last Sunday, but talking about people being children of wrath on Mother's Day, you know, that was, you know, maybe not the best sermon choice for Mother's Day.

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So we did a sermon on Hannah and a godly mother's example in her prayer.

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But this Sunday, we'll look at total depravity. And so we're going through these, you know, these doctrines and uphold a high view of God, a high view of His sovereignty, understanding that God alone gets the glory in our salvation.

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Now, I know you've put a presentation together for us today, but I want to harken back just a little bit.

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Last September, early October, before my wife and I came to Desert Hills, you did a series of sermons on social justice.

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I did. Yeah. And social justice was a hot topic until about eight weeks ago, when now, you know, the big topic is coronavirus and churches and those types of things.

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But yeah, we looked at social justice and the injustice of social justice. And, you know, we just examined it biblically.

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We looked at the tenets of it. We looked at what scripture says. And, you know, and it's a six -part series.

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You can get it on the Desert Hills Bible Church YouTube channel, for those that are interested in checking it out. And, you know, the end result of that is that the

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Bible doesn't call Christians to pursue social justice. The Bible calls Christians to pursue holiness.

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And the first century society that Peter lived in when he wrote 1 Peter was vastly more unjust, socially speaking, and probably in other ways as well, from our society today.

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I mean, if you think we have a wage gap today, the wage gap in first century Greco -Roman culture was massively more than anything that is going on in our country.

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And, you know, Peter's exhortation to those churches was to be holy and to pursue holiness.

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And he understood that there would be suffering that comes as a result of that.

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But the way that God is glorified and the way his kingdom advances is when his people, with hope, pursue holiness.

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And people ask us for the reason for the hope that is in us. And we can share that, even in the middle of an unjust culture.

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Amen. Well, I'm going to leave you to the presentation. Welcome to The Dividing Line.

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Your first time here, and we're looking forward to it. So I'm going to leave you to it. All right. I appreciate that.

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Appreciate that. So I want to talk a little bit about this, this afternoon, just the coronavirus and the impact that it's had on various churches.

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And this week at Desert Hills, we released a video on COVID -19 and Psalm 133, the importance of believers pursuing unity with one another within the church.

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And, you know, again, I'd encourage you to go to our YouTube channel, check that video out. I think Rich is going to link it in the description for us.

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So you can go and find that later. But in that video, you know, we talk about the importance of unity in the church, and we're going to talk about some of the issues that are going on as we do that.

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You know, I want to first of all say that these types of issues, we're talking about the way churches should respond to the coronavirus, not necessarily every individual believer.

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There are certainly believers that are vulnerable. You know, we have people at our church that are on chemotherapy, very high risk for COVID, and we encourage them to stay home.

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And there are certainly cases where that's a good thing to do. But one of the things that's important as we think about this is that pastors are called to be the shepherd of all of their sheep.

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They're not just called to be the shepherd of the sheep that agree with their perspective on this, whether that is to have a church service gathered or not.

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Pastors are called to shepherd all the sheep, and that should shape how the church responds to coronavirus and some of the government guidelines on whether the church should shut down.

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And so on the Nine Marks blog, maybe some of you have seen this lately, it's been going around a little bit.

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There's an article by Jonathan Lehman, the editorial director of Nine Marks. And the title of the article is,

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When Should Churches Reject Governmental Guidelines on Gathering and Engage in Civil Disobedience?

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One of my concerns with this article is that it has a tendency to disrupt unity in the church with people that have differences, because it prohibits all those

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Christians whose conscience would say that they should gather from gathering. And so it doesn't minister directly to those people who feel like, as they've studied scripture and prayerfully consider all that's going on, that they should still gather for worship.

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But there's a lot of issues with this article, and so I want to take a look at it. First of all, there's just a major problem in the title of the article.

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When should churches reject governmental guidelines on gathering and engage in civil disobedience?

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Well, first of all, governmental guidelines aren't laws. Governmental guidelines aren't binding.

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That is a government suggestion. It is a government recommendation from a governor or the president or, you know, the

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Department of Health, whoever it might be. And so if a church rejects governmental guidelines, it's not engaged in civil disobedience.

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That's not civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is defying a duly past signed law, because that law is contrary to the

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Word of God. It has nothing to do with guidelines. And so right off the bat, this article creates this false premise that if a church rejects guidelines, it's engaged in civil disobedience.

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At Desert Hills, we have continued to meet through the coronavirus pandemic.

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We haven't missed any services throughout this, and we're blessed to live in the state of Arizona.

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We've been very thankful for our governor who has given guidelines on how groups should respond.

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But he's also recognized that the First Amendment allows us and gives us the right to meet.

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And so the executive order we've in Arizona has not mandated that churches close.

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And so we have not closed. We've kept meeting, because we believe that that ministers to the whole body of Christ at Desert Hills.

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And we've encouraged those who are uncomfortable coming to the service because of a health concern or a vulnerability.

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Or, you know, maybe they're just more cautious about the virus, or they think that we should respond in a different way to stay home and do what their conscience dictates.

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And we've been open for those whose conscience would compel them to come to church and gather.

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And so we've been trying to minister to the whole body of Christ at Desert Hills. And articles like this really go a long way towards hurting that effort and towards hindering pastors from doing that by making it seem as if a church like Desert Hills, for example, is some kind of rebellious church that is out there just breaking laws and engaged in civil disobedience, when that is not true at all.

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Let's take a look at what Lehman writes here in the article. He says, as the COVID -19 stay -at -home quarantines tarry, folks are getting restless.

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State governments think about pathways to opening up. The stock market leaps a couple percentage points at the slightest whisper of a vaccine, and pastors have begun to ask each other, when can our churches gather again?

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Now again, most states that I'm aware of anyways haven't forbid churches from gathering.

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They've given guidelines not to. And so pastors, your churches can gather whenever you want, because your state hasn't told you not to.

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Now some states have, and thankfully we haven't had to deal with that. But obviously that would have been a question we would have had to ask in Arizona if our governor would have said that we legally can't gather.

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But we didn't have to deal with that. And so, you know, it's not civil disobedience. And if pastors are asking that of each other and they're in a state where it's just a guideline, obviously they can gather this

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Sunday if they are desiring to do that. Lehman goes on, he says this, yet a darker question sometimes follows.

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If the government continues to say we cannot meet, when do we as churches engage in civil disobedience by gathering anyway?

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Now the way this is framed is a bit concerning. You notice how he says a darker question.

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As if this is something sinister, this is something evil.

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Pastors wondering when they can meet if the government mandates that they can't.

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There's nothing dark about that question. There's nothing sinister about that question. There's nothing wrong with pastors looking to the word of God and saying, okay, the government says we can't meet.

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Hebrews 10 tells us not to forsake the assembling of gathering ourselves together. And so what do we do? That's not a dark question.

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And you can already see he's setting this up as a kind of a scare piece, using fear to try to dissuade churches from meeting.

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And he says, he goes on, he says, just this week I heard pastors in three separate conversations ask this question.

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Well, that's good. That's good. Pastors should be asking that question. Why this is tough.

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Jurisdictional overlap. Here's why it's a difficult topic from a biblical perspective,

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Lehman writes. Both the government and our churches have a legitimate biblical claim on the territory of gatherings.

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You might call it jurisdictional overlap. All right.

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So the government and the church have a legitimate biblical claim on the territory of gatherings.

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Now that is not supported that the government has a legitimate biblical claim on whether the church is able to gather.

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We might argue whether or not the government has a legitimate claim on whether other groups might be able to gather or might not be able to gather.

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We could look at Old Testament law. We could look at Romans 13 and other places and see if that is what indeed scripture says.

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But this is an interesting claim that there is this equal claim on the territory of gatherings between the government and the church.

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And he goes on, he says, governments possess authority if for no other reason than to preserve human life.

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And then he says, see Genesis 9, 5 and 6. And so let's see that verse. Does Genesis 9, 5 and 6 legitimately say that governments possess authority primarily to preserve human life?

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Let me read the verse. Genesis 9, 5, surely I will require your lifeblood from every beast.

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I will require it. And from every man, from every man's brother, I will require the life of man.

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Whoever sheds man's blood for six says by man, his blood shall be shed for in the image of God, he made man.

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Now is that passage teaching that governments possess authority if for no other reason than to preserve human life?

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Well, it doesn't seem like that's what the passage is saying. In fact, I think what the passage is actually saying is that governments possess authority to preserve rights, not life.

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And this is an important distinction that we need to make. This idea that the government exists to preserve human life is one of the underlying and subtle shifts and unbiblical shifts that underlies the social justice movement even.

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The government exists to preserve life. And if this is just broadly true, then the government has virtually unlimited power over every sphere of life if the government says that they're doing what they're doing to preserve life.

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Who could argue? But Genesis 9, 5, and 6 doesn't say that. It doesn't say the government exists to preserve human life.

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Why are murderers executed? Not to preserve human life because that's, why would you murder, why would you execute murderers if you're trying to preserve human life?

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Isn't that taking human life? See, that's justice. You're taking the life of a murderer because the murderer violated the rights of the person that he killed.

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And he killed somebody that was made in the image of God. He took away that person's right to preserve his own life.

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The government does not exist to preserve our lives. That is, you know, you take that to its logical extreme.

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That is a frightening thought that the state essentially just becomes our parents and they tell us anything and everything that we can't do.

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They make sure that we're always safe and nothing bad ever happens to us. And if we're hungry, they give us money.

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And if we need healthcare, they give us healthcare and the state becomes God. In fact, isn't it scriptural to say that God preserves human life?

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Isn't that God's role to preserve human life and to take human life according to his will?

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It seems like that's only God's prerogative. And so if we say that the government possesses authority to preserve human life, we're essentially saying that government is in the place of God.

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That's a frightening statement, Jonathan Lieberman. That is a terrifying statement. The government does not possess authority to preserve human life.

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The government has its authority to preserve our rights, our rights, not my life.

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That's my job to make sure that I'm safe, my family's safe, and ultimately

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I trust in the Lord for that. Lieberman goes on, he says, look, they're obligated by God to do so.

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No, they're not. They're not obligated by God to do so. That's just simply false.

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They're obligated by God to, Romans 13, punish evildoers. That's what the government's obligated by God to do, to punish evildoers.

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Well, how do we know who's an evildoer? You know, that question gets overlooked a lot in our culture today.

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Who's an evildoer? And a lot of times we just assume that, well, the evildoer is the person breaking the law of the government.

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Okay. So it's not illegal to murder a baby in its mother's womb.

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Does that mean that an abortionist, a baby butcher is a, is not an evildoer?

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Well, you say, well, that's, you know, that's just silly. That's, that's, you know, obviously an abortionist is doing evil, even if the law says so.

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How do you know that? How do you know that? The only way we know that is from scripture, right? Scripture defines who is an evildoer and who is doing what is right.

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And the government exists not to preserve human life, but to punish evildoers and to reward or encourage upright behavior in society.

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And, and the government doesn't always do that well. And we see that in the case of abortion.

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Actually, in our society, our government honors evildoers.

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It funds evildoers. And, and so it's not doing, and by the way, make no mistake,

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God is going to hold our political leaders who make those decisions and have the power to change that and don't, he will hold them accountable for that.

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And if we vote for people that promote those types of things, he'll hold us accountable for that as well, because we are essentially turning government's purpose on its head.

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Government exists to preserve our rights and to punish evildoers and promote those who do what is right.

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Again, according to God's word, not according to a government standard. So he goes on, he says, if temporarily banning all gatherings of a certain size accomplishes that end, the government should, they should do that.

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Well, that may, you know, we, we can argue about whether the government should or shouldn't do that, I suppose.

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But here, here's the issue with coronavirus. The government hasn't done that. They haven't banned all gatherings of a certain size.

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If you've been to Costco, you know that there are more than 10 people at Costco. You go to Walmart.

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If you, you know, you can drive by the liquor store, you can drive by the marijuana dispensary. You can drive by all these places that have been open throughout this pandemic.

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The government hasn't banned all gatherings. If the government were to say, you know what, you can't leave your house and that goes for everybody everywhere because of some pandemic, they may have a reasonable argument.

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If they, if they shut literally Costco pharmacies, they shut everything down. Maybe, maybe that, maybe there's a legitimate argument there.

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We could debate that, but that's obviously not what has happened in this situation.

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Now, Lehman goes on. He says, at the same time, churches possess a right to gather arguably as a property of a natural right to freely assemble, certainly as the religious right to assemble.

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Well, churches don't possess a right to gather. Churches possess an obligation to gather because God has commanded it.

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It's, it's not a right as much as it is a divine mandate. And you can't put these two things on the same plane as if the divine mandate to the church is equal to the government regulating people's movements in a pandemic.

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We've already seen that the government does not exist. The whole premise that the government exists to preserve life is false.

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And so you can't put these two things at the same level. He says, our vertical obligation to worship

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God as churches creates that horizontal right with respect to other people and our governments.

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And then he has this nifty little diagram of two circles that overlap. And he says, so picture two overlapping circles, one representing the church's jurisdictional obligation and right to gather, the other representing the government's jurisdictional obligation to protect life.

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Our pandemical moment places a smack dab in the middle of where these jurisdictions overlap.

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That, as I said, is what makes this moment difficult. You know, what alleviates the difficulty is when you recognize that the circle on the right, the government's obligation to protect life doesn't exist.

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Doesn't exist. And so the difficulty kind of evaporates in that situation.

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It's just gone because now you don't, and the left circle, the church's obligation and right to gather really could be simplified to the church's obligation to gather.

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That's, that's what we're dealing with here. The church's obligation to gather. And as I said at the beginning, the church has an obligation to gather.

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That doesn't mean every single Christian should gather every time the church meets. You know, if you're sick, you should stay home.

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Obviously, Christians who are in prison in persecuted countries, they're not sinning for not attending the local assembly.

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There are, there are providential hinderings to gathering that come up in life, but that doesn't mean that the church itself shouldn't seek to gather for those who are physically able to do so.

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He says, if the government has a reasonable argument to ban every kind of gathering in order to protect life, which again, hasn't happened in this pandemic, but he goes on, he says, then churches should act the part of dutiful citizens and obey the government.

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They shouldn't just go along with the government by our own free will. As a friend of mine put it, they should positively submit.

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Submitting to it is to submitting to God. Now, I know that sounds confusing.

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I'm just reading what it is. I think he means to write submitting to it is either to submit to God or submitting to God.

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Little grammar mistake there. Why should the government's authority come first?

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Lehman asks. Because preserving life now allows for the freedom to gather later.

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I was really hoping as I read this article that when I got to that question, why should the government's authority come first?

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I would find a Bible verse. There's no

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Bible verse. The reason is because preserving life now allows for the freedom to gather later.

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Now, I just want you to put yourself in another culture, maybe another context, maybe first century

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Christianity in the book of Acts. Would that statement make sense?

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Not gathering now because Rome might throw us in prison or kill us is what we need to do because if we get martyred, we won't be able to meet together as a church later.

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Do any of the apostles use that kind of reasoning? It's not biblical reasoning.

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In fact, I don't think the apostles would have any concept of what Jonathan Lehman is talking about here.

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He says you cannot gather as a church if you're dead. Now, the writer of Hebrews would like a moment of rebuttal.

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Look at Hebrews. If you have a Bible, you can look at Hebrews 12 or I'll just read it to you. Is it true that you can't gather as a church if you're dead?

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He says to it, he says here in the book of Hebrews chapter 12, he says, for you have not come to a mountain that can be touched and to a blazing fire and to darkness and gloom and whirlwind.

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And then he says in verse 22, but you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living

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God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.

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You can't gather as a church if you're dead. If you're dead, you're gathering as a church like no church on earth gathers.

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Because you're gathering around the throne of the son of God with all the myriads of angels and the saints that have gone before.

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I, you just don't see in, in scripture, this idea that we do what we do to make sure we're alive for church next

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Sunday. That's, that's very problematic reasoning. He says,

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Paul, therefore tells us to pray for Kings and to lead peaceful and quiet lives so that people can be saved.

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First Timothy 2, 1 through 4. He says,

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Paul, therefore tells us to pray for Kings because you can't gather as a church if you're dead. Therefore pray for Kings.

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That, that, the grammar doesn't even make sense on that sentence. I don't know what therefore, how that's supposed, that just seems like he's trying to pull a magic trick and, and, and slip a verse in there that's irrelevant to what he's talking about.

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He goes on, he says, quoting, talking about 1 Timothy 2, 1 through 4, first peace and safety, then church work, at least typically.

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Okay. So typically when? Typically where? Was that the apostle

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Paul's mission statement first, peace and safety, then church work.

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If you read through Paul's sufferings in 2 Corinthians 11, it doesn't seem like peace and safety were real high on his list of priorities.

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Nobody goes through the things that Paul went through for Christ, whose, whose first priority is peace and safety.

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You say, well, that, well, that, you know, Paul was atypical. Okay. Well, the first three centuries of church history then, was that not typical?

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The, the reformers, the, the sufferings that they went through, the dangers, you know, Calvin being in exile,

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Luther being in exile, is that, is, I guess I'd rather be atypical. If that's atypical, then, then

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I'd rather not be typical because those are the examples that we have, that we look up to as men who were strong in faith, men who, who said peace and safety are great if God in his providence gives them.

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But if he doesn't, church work first, gospel ministry first, peace and safety, we can pray for that.

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But because that makes gospel ministry at a, an earthly level easier in a sense, you know, if you're not running from the law, if you're not hiding in a cave, if you're not sitting in a prison, having been beaten, it's easier to go and evangelize people out on the streets.

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But peace and safety is not the priority, not even typically for the church.

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And I think as Americans living now, we have to realize this is an atypical moment in church history.

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This is not what is typical, what we've experienced in this country the last 200 years. It's not even what's typical for many

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Christians, if not most Christians around the world today. And so this is just concerning.

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This is turning everything upside down. It gives two reasons for civil disobedience.

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He says, if you were paying close attention, however, you caught my two qualifications. First, the government has to have a reasonable argument, a totalitarian state, which completely banishes the freedom of assembly probably doesn't have such a reasonable argument.

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So yes, that is true. A totalitarian state, that's an extreme example that probably is not necessarily helpful for this particular essay.

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One ground for civil disobedience then would be when it's overwhelmingly obvious to good sense and reason that the government has no legitimate basis for banning gatherings.

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Overwhelmingly obvious. Well, who makes that call? Who gets to decide what's, is that something that's only reached by consensus?

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I mean, there are a lot of things to Christians that are overwhelmingly obvious, like God created the world in six days, that the vast majority of people reject as not being true.

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Does that mean it's not overwhelmingly obvious? He goes on, he says, to be sure, determining what's a reasonable argument or a legitimate basis requires case -by -case judgments and Christians might disagree.

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And that's exactly right. That's why I think it's important for church leaders to shepherd their entire flock, those who want to stay home and those who want to gather, because Christians might legitimately disagree about this.

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And are you shepherding your entire flock when you lock the church doors and force half of your congregation to violate their conscience and forbid them from gathering?

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That's just a question to think about. Stopping a pandemic, which kills more than 50 ,000

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US citizens within a month, strikes me as pretty reasonable.

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Well, again, will churches not meeting stop the pandemic?

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There's certainly no agreement on that with scientists. There's no universal agreement on that.

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That's not overwhelmingly obvious. Second, the government cannot single out religious groups, which it has done through this in some places.

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It actually has done that. He says, if it allows sporting events and concerts and political conventions to meet, then it should not forbid churches from meeting.

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If a government does single out churches again, then the church may have biblical warrant to disobey.

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Again, the church is not a concert. The church is not a political convention.

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The government can have authority over those earthly institutions. The church is ruled by King Jesus.

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And so, the government really doesn't have that kind of authority over the church.

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Only Christ has that authority over the church. And he gives the ultimate test, final judgment, the ultimate test.

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One pastor asked me what he should do if he disagreed with the government's assessment of what is reasonable. Should they meet anyway?

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In the final analysis, there is no black and white answer when jurisdictions overlap that we can look up in a book of case law.

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Again, jurisdictions here don't overlap, but we've already covered that in detail. The definition of submission is deferring to another's judgment rather than your own.

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I'll have to think about that definition of submission, deferring to another's judgment. Submission seems to be deferring to another's authority.

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The issue of authority comes up with submission more than somebody's judgment or opinions. Still, not every authority on earth is relative.

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No authority is absolute except God, which means we never surrender judgment to another human entirely. And therefore, we have to ask

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God for wisdom and rely on him in these tough cases of jurisdictional overlap. And I 100 % agree, pastors should approach this with a lot of prayer and study of scripture and meditation on the word of God.

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All right, here comes the money part here in this section. As such, the ultimate test comes on judgment day.

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So if you're tempted to disobey, ask yourself, do you believe God will vindicate your disobedience by saying to you on the last day, yes, you were correct, pastor, to lead a congregation, to overlook what

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I said in Romans 13, because the government was asking you to sin. Will God vindicate your disobedience on the last day by continuing to meet when the government has asked you not to meet?

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Is it worth sinning by breaking Romans 13 to meet?

35:14

Those are high stakes, Lehman says, that should make you nervous. Now, remember earlier I said, this is an article based on fear.

35:21

This is an article based on fear. Those are high stakes that should make you nervous. Pastor, you should be afraid.

35:30

You should be nervous about meeting. You know, at Desert Hills, when I thought about whether our church should continue meeting through all of this, one, if not the primary reason that I voted to keep the church meeting was because of the judgment at the end.

35:52

I don't think I could look my brothers and sisters in the eye for at least 10 ,000 years of church history, for at least, excuse me, 10 ,000 years, the first 10 ,000 years of eternity, if I said, well, we didn't gather because it was dangerous.

36:11

I don't, I mean, how do I, how do I sit across from Daniel who prayed in front of an open window when he could have prayed in a prayer closet and got thrown into a lion's den for doing it?

36:24

How do I sit and look him in the eye and say, you know, we just didn't meet for three months because it was potentially dangerous.

36:32

You know, somebody could have died. How do I look the first three centuries of, of church martyrs in the eyes and say, well, you guys don't understand how dangerous it was in the year 2020.

36:49

How do I look the Lord in the eye and say, well, I, you know, you told us to gather not to forsake the assembling of ourselves, to be devoted in Acts 2 to fellowship and to the breaking of bread, to the

37:03

Lord's supper. But you know, the government said no, and so I was going to obey

37:09

Romans 13 instead of your other clear commands in scripture.

37:15

This is backwards. See, what he's saying here is backwards. It's, it's

37:21

Acts 4, whether it is right for us to obey you rather than God, you be the judge.

37:29

But as for us, we can't stop speaking about the things that we've seen and heard, even if we die, even if we die, even if we get thrown in prison.

37:37

And so I think what kept our doors open was the fact that it made me nervous to think about giving an account to Christ for closing them.

37:50

That made me nervous. Now, I'm not saying that every pastor in every context who closed their church should be nervous on the day of judgment.

38:01

I'm not speaking for any other church here other than the one that God has entrusted for me to be the shepherd.

38:07

I'm not in those churches. I don't know the circumstances. I don't know the decisions that are being made. I don't know those congregations.

38:13

I'm not, I'm not attempting to do what Lehman is doing and universalize the decision we made at Desert Hills as a mandate for everybody else.

38:22

God put every pastor who's over a church over that church and they'll be held accountable and they need to do it what they believe is right in the sight of God.

38:30

But for us, the day of judgment is one of the reasons we stayed open.

38:37

He said, it's not enough you act according to your conscience. I assume Arius acted according to his conscience when he denied

38:44

Jesus was fully God to his eternal condemnation. Okay. So, that's the equivalent here?

38:53

We're dealing with an area where Lehman says we might legitimately disagree as believers and then he's comparing people who disagree with him to somebody who was a heretic and denied the deity of Christ.

39:11

That is irresponsible, Jonathan Lehman. That is irresponsible. And that borders on slander, really, to compare people who stayed open to heretics.

39:25

That's not appropriate. Evangelistic witness, the last part of the article. My personal judgment,

39:31

I see no reason to think the government will single out churches and I believe it possesses a compelling reason to ban all gatherings in order to fulfill its basic function of preserving life.

39:41

Well, the government has singled out churches, so I don't know why he doesn't believe that they would.

39:47

But he goes on, he says, so churches should submit to government restrictions on gathering for the foreseeable future.

39:53

Plus, Christians should utterly exhaust all ordinary means of legal recourse before contemplating disobedience. Again, I, you know, my mind goes back to Acts 4 when

40:00

I read that. Did the apostles standing trial say, well, okay, we won't keep preaching

40:07

Jesus until we've talked to our lawyers and this has gone through the courts and we've exhausted every means of changing your mind?

40:17

They walked out of that courtroom and said, we're going to obey God rather than men and we're going to do it now.

40:23

You know, we're not going to wait for the courts to decide on this because the court of heaven has already decided on it.

40:29

And so, you know, there may be some situations where it's not as clear cut what

40:36

Christians should or shouldn't do in a certain circumstance. And maybe it would be wise to not throw yourself into unnecessary martyrdom and wait to work something through the courts.

40:48

But certainly, this is not something that is always true. And then he says, this is it, the last paragraph, and there's one more reason to obey the government's ban on gathering at this present moment.

40:58

I believe it aids our witness. It shows care for the community and love for our neighbors.

41:05

It shows that we care about their good too, not just our own. Now that, first of all, you're not going to change people's hearts by not meeting as a church.

41:17

That's a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. And we're told throughout scripture that the world is going to hate us, not to expect to be understood or accepted by the world.

41:28

And this is one more example of a way that the world will probably not understand believers as we gather together, because they'll think that we only care about our own good.

41:39

But let me just throw this out there. If the reason you go to church is primarily for your own good, your understanding of why you gather for worship needs to be matured.

41:54

We gather for worship because the King has summoned us into his presence as his people.

42:01

And praise the King, praise the Lord that when we do that, it is for our good. We do benefit from that.

42:08

But I don't wake up on the Lord's day and think, I better go to church this morning for my own good or to see my friends.

42:17

I go to church because I've been commanded to do that. And out of love for Christ, I want to be obedient to that command.

42:25

And that command may result in me feeling good at the end of church or depending on when

42:31

I live, what century, what country I live in, that command may result in me getting killed.

42:37

But I don't go to church and neither should you for your own good. Your neighbor who is not a believer won't understand that.

42:43

And we know that they're not going to understand a lot of things that we do as Christians. And that's okay, because they're going to see the hope in our lives.

42:51

And that hope will give us an opportunity, as Peter says in 1 Peter 3, to tell them the reason for that hope that we have.

42:59

Now, this article leads to another video that I want to mention.

43:06

I just kind of want to walk through this video a little bit with you. This video was put out by the

43:11

Evangelical Free Church of America. And three things to consider when regathering the church and COVID -19 response.

43:21

Now, a lot of people probably aren't familiar with this video. It's only had 2 ,000 views on Facebook. So it hasn't gone viral or anything.

43:28

And my intention is not to make this video go viral by any stretch.

43:34

But a lot of these things, because we came out of the EFCA. Yeah, Rich? Before you jump into that.

43:40

I'm not sure. Can you hear me well in there? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. You can hear me just fine. Along those lines, when you get into your late 50s, heading towards 60, you remember things.

43:53

And I have exhorted a lot of brethren to look up a video, a movie that was done during the 1980s, as I recall, the first time

44:02

I saw it, called The Printing. And this video chronicled the life of a number of believers in the

44:12

Soviet Union. Mm -hmm. And that there were government minders who overlooked approved churches.

44:22

And the pastors in those churches, those minders would tell them what they were allowed to preach on and what they were not allowed to preach on.

44:32

And so the sermon had to be approved by the minder. And of course, you can imagine what agency that minder came from.

44:40

Three letters, starting with a K, ending with a B. And yet there were also churches who would not submit to the minders.

44:50

They had to meet in faraway places. And during the movie, you'll see a church meeting in a forest.

44:59

Yeah. And when they drive to the place where the church is meeting in the forest, you can see the

45:07

KGB guys in the car watching from afar. They're keeping an eye on these people.

45:13

Eventually, many of these believers would be arrested, would be charged with psychological, they would be institutionalized because they're mentally ill.

45:25

And in during, while in the gulag, they would be tortured. These Christians faced these things because they would not submit to the

45:36

Soviet Union's imposition and oversight and minders.

45:44

And they faced severe persecution. And part of this was clandestine printing of Bibles.

45:52

Yeah. The main point of this movie is that, and having done offset printing in my past,

45:59

I can recognize the parts and what eventually they would build in someone's basement.

46:06

In a, remember something, if you had a house in the Soviet Union, you'd own that house. That was where they told you you could live.

46:12

Right. And so if you had a nice house, that was because they gave it to you. Sure. And many of these believers would risk their very lives, their homes, everything that they had by allowing a printer to come in and they would smuggle the parts into the home carefully so as not to alert the neighbors who would report on them.

46:34

Yeah. And they would assemble the parts of the printing press in the basement or an attic.

46:40

And then they would, here comes after they've set it all up, here comes the printer. And out go the

46:47

Bible smuggling out the back door. Right. All kinds of things. I remember the name of someone very famous during the 80s.

46:54

His name was Brother Andrew. Smuggling Bibles into the Soviet Union behind the

47:00

Iron Curtain. Right. Which doesn't happen, Rich, if it's first peace and safety. That's correct.

47:06

Then church work. Yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot of recent history that's being forgotten and swept under the rug in this.

47:15

So I didn't mean to torpedo you there, but I wanted to at least chime in on that. Absolutely. So as we go into the

47:22

EFC section here, I guess that is maximized. So we'll go ahead and let you do that part. Yeah. Great.

47:27

Thanks. Yeah. All right. So, you know, do we go to church for our own good?

47:33

And so this is an EFCA video. Not a lot of people have seen it. Just 2 ,000 views, which for a movement the size of the

47:40

EFCA isn't, you know, a huge number of views. And a lot of people probably don't know because they're not as familiar with the

47:47

EFCA. We just came out of the EFCA and are kind of in the process of leaving them right now.

47:55

And we have a couple articles on our website that talk about the reasons for that. And so if you're interested in some of the issues of social justice and the leftward drift of the

48:06

EFCA, you can go to our website, deserthillsbible .church, deserthillsbible .church.

48:11

And you can look up those articles on our blog. There's a couple of them there that explain why we have left the

48:17

EFCA and some of the issues going on there. But this video kind of encapsulates some things in the way the

48:22

EFCA thinks about church. And I think it is indicative of the way a lot of people think about the worship gathering on Sunday.

48:31

And so let's just watch a few minutes and I'll pause it and make some commentary here. This change that happened so rapidly.

48:37

I mean, the team, the leadership team at North Coast, and as you've been thinking, these things are, I mean, there's a lot of change that's had to take.

48:44

By the way, these three men here are not small fries in the

48:49

EFCA. On the left, Kevin Complin there is the president of the EFCA. And Larry Osborne is kind of the

48:56

EFCA guru on church planting and church health. And Eddie Cole, I'm not sure who he is.

49:03

His title there is executive VP for national ministries, but I've never had any interaction with him, so I'm not exactly sure who is, but I know who he is.

49:10

But Kevin and Larry are two of the highest up people in the EFCA. Place quickly.

49:16

You know, what have you, share with us a little bit about what have you done and what's that looking like and how's it going for you?

49:23

The number one thing we've been noticing is it's so different than we thought. I have, when I talk to leaders,

49:28

I'm always saying plan in pencil. And this has been really one of those times that we need to think like, we do not need to think like an architect with a blueprint.

49:39

We need to think like a coach with a game plan because the scoreboard. As a pastor,

49:46

I think maybe a better way to think is as a pastor with a Bible than a coach with a game plan.

49:55

You know, so just thought I'd throw that in there. Maybe that's a better analogy for pastors to think about. Changing over and over and over.

50:03

And I sometimes feel like every couple of weeks we've got completely different answers because we've got completely different facts.

50:10

Hey, Larry, I know you do a lot of coaching with pastors from across the country. You've got to be seeing this as the restrictions are being lifted.

50:20

A lot of us are just eager to get back to church. We're eager to get out and do about anything, but especially get back to church.

50:30

But I know in the middle of all this, we all want to do it wisely and we need to do it with a lot of intentionality.

50:39

And I know that you're one of the early voices that I've heard basically saying, hey, we really need to approach this with caution and care.

50:49

And you said in a conversation the other day— Just pause it right there. Maybe Larry is one of the early voices to say that, but it does seem like that's pretty much the dominant voice coming from everywhere.

51:03

So I don't know. But that seems to be more of a consensus than somebody who is riding against the tide here.

51:12

That there were three things that you have been thinking about that you're not hearing other people talk about a whole lot.

51:18

So would you mind to talk to us and tell us what those three things are? The three things that we began to think through—

51:24

I'll give them on the front and then go back at them— is quality, children, and worship.

51:32

So let me just walk through those. Quality. When we talk about a socially safe, distanced service, we're talking about a sucky service.

51:43

We all know that if you've ever been to a comedy in a theater and it's half full, it's not funny.

51:50

All right. So I'm trying to think of where to start with that.

51:59

Is that really how pastors think about worship?

52:07

Are we comedians? If you go to a comedy club and it's half full, the comedian isn't funny.

52:19

What does that have to do with worship? What biblical pastor who is taking seriously 2

52:28

Timothy 4, 1 and 2, I charge you in the presence of God and Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead and by his authority preach the word.

52:41

What in the world does a comedy club have to do with anything related to the church?

52:46

And then, you know, a sucky experience. What does that mean?

52:55

Is that what worship is? You know, that's, and I think that's what, you know, one of the things that's come out through this whole situation is that we have seen, maybe, you know, we suspected this for a while, but this has been confirmed that what worship is for a lot of Christians, nominal

53:15

Christians in our nation is an experience on Sunday that they go to, like they go to the movies.

53:25

And, well, we can't have it be sucky, to use his word, you know, not my favorite word, but, what about the early church hold up in a house while Peter was in prison, waiting his execution, having a prayer meeting?

53:43

Was that a sucky experience? I don't think they had the fog machine going and the lights and the, you know, the jam -packed building and all that kind of stuff going on.

53:56

I mean, you know, what about when Paul was in Philippi and he went down to the Riverside because there wasn't a synagogue and there was a handful of people there, mostly women.

54:07

That must have been a really sucky worship service, mustn't it have? It's amazing that anyone got saved at that service.

54:15

This is really revealing something going on in evangelicalism that is seriously problematic, because this is not somebody who's an outlier.

54:23

This is somebody who has massive influence in a denomination that has the name evangelical in it, and that isn't alone in this kind of thinking.

54:32

We know how horrible it is to speak to that service where everybody scatters. That's why we try to shrink them down.

54:38

I want to tell you, not only speaking to it or trying to lead worship in it, just being in it is, like, not a very good experience.

54:44

And we just flat out can't do a quality experience with that kind of separation.

54:53

You know, again, it's all about the experience. It's not a quality experience. Well, no wonder our neighbors think we go to church for selfish reasons, right?

55:07

No wonder our testimony for the gospel is hindered if we keep meeting during coronavirus, because the message we've been telling our neighbors is, this is a great experience for me, and I don't want to give up that experience.

55:21

You know, it's this kind of thinking that underlies the other article, and that underlies our culture's view of what church is and what

55:28

Christianity is. You know, I've preached to as few as three people in a church one time.

55:36

And honestly, it wasn't any more sucky than the times I've preached to hundreds of people in a church.

55:42

So, because, you know, the reality is when I get in the pulpit, there's really only one person that I'm preaching for, and his name is

55:50

Jesus. And so, you know, whether there's three people or 3 ,000 people is irrelevant.

55:56

You know, the audience that you're hoping to please, because the only one, the only sermon feedback that's going to matter is the 2

56:04

Timothy 4, 1 and 2 sermon feedback from Christ when you stand before Him to give an account for what you did.

56:10

And I don't think we see anywhere in Scripture where Jesus is going to say to any of His servants, you just gave them such a sucky experience.

56:19

You know, that's just such an unbiblical way of thinking about church and worship. It's very sad. What that also means, besides quality, is we got a children's problem.

56:30

And we're talking about all kinds of things as I hear the stuff out there. What are we going to do to kids to make them stay socially distanced and all that?

56:39

Well, here's the thing. Kids don't do social distancing, right? And on top of that, if you make them do it, all but the most introverted kid is going to call that the worst class they ever had in their life, and they're going to come out and say,

56:51

Mom, Dad, never send me there again. So this defines children's ministry today, doesn't it?

56:59

Children's ministry is essentially the Disney Channel for kids at church. Loving the

57:05

Word of God, loving the teaching of the Word of God, is something that parents have to teach their children to do.

57:12

I don't expect my kids to leave a worship service and think that it was like going to Disneyland or going to the movies and seeing a movie they like.

57:21

I am cultivating in them, hopefully, by the grace of God, a heart that loves the

57:27

Word of God. And trying to teach them that it's not your experience that's important.

57:34

It's hearing and obeying the Word of God that matters. And so here we see a massive problem with children's ministry being exposed here as well.

57:43

So it's just no win -win. Now, I have three grown kids with all young kids, preschool age.

57:50

And so in each of their families, once we get these smaller gatherings allowed, they're going to look very much forward to a play group at the park or whatever, but it's going to be made up of their friends they feel that comfort and trust with, which is very different than dropping your kids off when there's people you don't know where they've been or what they've done.

58:13

Now, on top of that, what I found is they'll go, well, what we'll do is we'll bring them into the service.

58:19

Oh, great. You already got a sucky service, and now you're bringing a bunch of kids who are going to be running around? That's going to really help.

58:26

And then they'll... Now, I don't know what's worse, the comment or the laughter from the guy who's supposed to be the spiritual leader of the

58:35

EFCA, Kevin Komplin, thinking that that's funny. Look at the

58:42

Old Testament gatherings to hear the reading of the Word of God. You know who was there? Everyone. Adults, old people, teenagers, young adults, children, nursing infants.

58:56

They didn't even have a nursery. And they stood for the reading of the

59:01

Word of God. I mean, imagine that, bringing your kids to church, making them be in the service the whole time and standing for the sermon, which, you know, at Desert Hills, the sermon is usually at least 45 minutes long.

59:14

So I can tell you from experience that standing that long is tiring, right? I'm the only one who has to do it.

59:21

But it's not an easy thing to just stand there for 45 minutes, especially if you're not the one preaching.

59:27

And in the Old Testament, they stood for hours and listened to the Word of God being read and taught and explained.

59:34

You know, this is just revealing. You know, we talk about this problem with young adults and that they want to, you know, when they get to college, they leave the church.

59:47

When you have this kind of mindset, they've never left the church because they've never been in the church. They're not allowed in the church because they would just turn the experience into one sucky experience, according to Larry Osborne here.

59:59

And we can't have kids running around the church. The church is, the worship service is designed by God for the family.

01:00:09

If you read through the epistles of Paul in Ephesians and Colossians, children are addressed directly in the letter.

01:00:17

Paul expected children to be present in the worship service. He didn't expect children to be off, you know, watching

01:00:25

Christian Disney somewhere in some other building of the church. He expected that they would be there. And by the way,

01:00:31

Paul puts children in chapter six of Ephesians, which means he thought they were still paying attention even at the end of the sermon.

01:00:38

That's the last chapter. It wasn't like, well, we got to hit the kids first because they're going to check out if we don't put it right up front.

01:00:45

It's there at the end. They're addressed at the end. And this is really just egregious.

01:00:52

You know, when we think about gathering as the people of God, that we would see children as an inconvenience, children as getting in the way of our experience.

01:01:03

Again, no wonder the world thinks that we're selfish in our gathering. And for me, this was the tipping point.

01:01:11

And I think for our team, the tipping point is this worship piece. We've known all along that there are three primary contagion environments.

01:01:21

You know, a lot of times 90 to 98 percent of the people who've died of this are from these environments, and they are senior care facilities, cruise ships, and choirs.

01:01:35

Now, I had known the choir piece, but I put two and two together and got eight, because I'd heard about the one in Georgia, the one in Washington, the different groups, secular and Christian groups, that they got together to sing, and there's 65 people in it, and 35 got it, and four died.

01:01:50

And I thought, wow, I never put together. Why? Put your head in front of your face and sing. You're spewing stuff everywhere.

01:01:57

So we either got to increase the social distancing, wear a mask. Plus, on top of that, no one wants to sing when they can hear themselves, unless they're a musician.

01:02:08

So I remember when I was at North Coast Church, where Larry's pastoring for EFCA1, maybe five years ago, in 2015, and my biggest complaint about the music was

01:02:21

I couldn't hear myself sing. I'm not going to sing for you, because that would eliminate the entire audience immediately.

01:02:30

I am not a good singer. But you know what? When I'm singing to the Lord, that's irrelevant.

01:02:36

I mean, I would like to hear myself to see if I'm at least reasonably on key, or to know that I am actually worshipping.

01:02:45

You know, it's not supposed to be some kind of concert venue where I can't hear myself sing and praise the

01:02:53

Lord, or I can't hear the person next to me. I mean, I love being in church, hearing my kids sing.

01:03:01

And I love that it's, you know, that our worship leaders have the sensitivity to turn the volume up to a level that we can hear them and not necessarily drown them out.

01:03:13

But at the same time, I can still hear the people in my row singing, you know, hearing my children sing, hearing the people behind me sing.

01:03:20

And, you know, sometimes the people behind me can really sing, and sometimes they sing like I do. But I don't care, because it's the worship of God.

01:03:27

It's hearing. I love to look around the church, you know. People maybe get weirded out by that with the pastor looking all over the place while they're singing and wondering what

01:03:34

I'm looking at. But I just like to experience the singing with the congregation. And, you know, so this idea here that, you know, we have to wait to regather until we can have the smoke and mirrors and the laser show, and it can be this incredible experience, betrays the idea that really we have lost what worship is.

01:04:00

Worship is not about me having a good experience. It's about me responding to what

01:04:08

God has done for me in Christ by His grace and obedience and in joy and love and coming before Him because He's commanded me to do that.

01:04:19

And unless I am providentially hindered, obeying that command, whether that means it's me and two other people in a duly ordained church with qualified church leadership, preaching the word, administering the sacraments, or whether that's a group of 5 ,000 people.

01:04:40

That's irrelevant. It's a response to a divine command. Well, this video goes on for another few minutes and it doesn't get any better.

01:04:48

So we'll just stop there. I won't torture you with the last four minutes of that video.

01:04:53

But I thought I'd show that because it's so indicative of the environment that we're living in.

01:05:01

And one thing it does is it really helps you to know how to pray for some of your Christian friends too, who maybe go to churches like North Coast or other churches in those areas where it's all about the experience.

01:05:12

And they don't maybe even recognize that. They don't see the problem with it. And one of the things that he'll go on in the video to say later is that it isn't where the discipleship happens is in the small groups, not in the big gathering on Sunday morning.

01:05:25

So they really got to get those going. And one of the things that we see is true church after church is that the church only takes the

01:05:34

Bible as seriously as it is taken in the pulpit. And I've heard this from people that, well, it's our small group that really takes scripture seriously.

01:05:42

And what I found is that those well -meaning people who I think genuinely love the

01:05:48

Lord don't really know what it means to take the Bible seriously because it's never been modeled for them from the pulpit.

01:05:56

And this is just one example. And what's, you know, I think what concerns me, what troubles me about that is it's not just some, you know, small video from, you know, one misguided person, but this is a video that is out there to influence thousands of churches throughout an entire movement.

01:06:15

And it's very dangerous. One other just quick thing I wanted to mention as we wrap up today, and, you know, that is apologetics in the time of coronavirus.

01:06:27

I just want to just talk about this just for a minute. Romans 1 tells us that the image of God is in us, that we are made in the image of God.

01:06:35

We know that God exists because we are made in his image. And the sinners reject that.

01:06:42

They willfully push that knowledge down. They willfully deny the existence of God.

01:06:48

And coronavirus has really given us a great opportunity to ask unbelievers penetrating questions about their worldview.

01:06:56

Because coronavirus should be the Darwinist dream. Who does coronavirus affect?

01:07:03

Well, it affects the elderly, the weak, the sick. Who is mostly unaffected by it?

01:07:09

It's the young, the healthy, the fit, people who are in shape, people who are exercising, people who have great immune systems.

01:07:17

So if you believe in evolution, why do you have a problem with coronavirus? Doesn't that fit your worldview, that this should actually be embraced as a good thing?

01:07:31

Because evolution is the survival of the fittest, so the species can continue to develop and evolve.

01:07:42

It's, you know, it's tragically humorous to see how people just betray their own inconsistent worldview in a situation like this.

01:07:53

And what we can do with the unbeliever on this is we can say to the unbeliever, why is it a bad thing that people are dying from coronavirus in your worldview?

01:08:03

In my worldview, it makes sense because people are made in the image of God and those who perish apart from Christ will be eternally condemned.

01:08:09

But the worldview of the unbeliever, where we're just stardust or just evolved cells who need to evolve to reach our potential, this seems like the

01:08:23

Darwinist dream. And so it's a great opportunity to really push on the unbeliever's conscience.

01:08:28

Why are you troubled by this? Doesn't your worldview actually say that this should be embraced, that this is a good thing?

01:08:39

Now, again, I'm not saying that this is a good, from a biblical perspective, we have an answer for why this is tragic and why we should seek to save life during this pandemic.

01:08:49

But the unbeliever doesn't have that. The unbeliever doesn't have any answers for that. And it becomes obvious that the unbeliever, as much as he tries to deny the truth of Scripture, betrays the fact that the image of God is indelibly imprinted on his heart and he can't get away from acknowledging who

01:09:11

God is and that he's made in the image of God, because he sees in this what we see in it because of our biblical worldview, a tragedy where human lives made in the image of God are being lost.

01:09:23

There's only one explanation for that. And that is that the unbeliever knows the truth about God, but suppresses that truth in unrighteousness.

01:09:32

And it only comes out when it is convenient for him. But he can't escape it. He can't escape it.

01:09:39

And so the coronavirus is a great apologetic opportunity. It's a great evangelistic opportunity for those that you know who are unbelievers, who are concerned about all the thousands of people dying.

01:09:49

And you can ask those that you work with or those that you know, you know, why does this trouble you? Why, as an unbeliever, as somebody who believes in evolution, why are you bothered by this?

01:10:00

And then we can explain why we should be bothered by it from a biblical perspective and share the gospel.

01:10:08

Rich, just want to thank you for inviting me on. Well, I want to thank you for coming in. We've been definitely blessed by your teaching today.

01:10:18

And I just hope that this goes far and wide, and we definitely want to have you back again.

01:10:23

So thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and start the music here. And we will, folks, we'll see you next week on The Dividing Line.

01:10:34

I believe James will be back. We'll probably be back on the Monday schedule, but we'll see how that works out. In the meantime,