Jonathan Leeman's Article on Government - #BigEva Serve Milkshakes to Starving People

Jonathan Leeman’s Article on Civil Disobedience and Governmental Guidelines

Hello there, this is A .D. Robles and you're listening to A .D. on the Fight, Laugh, Feast Network. It's been a minute. I've had a slow week when it comes to videos and content. So sorry about that. It has been quite a crazy week.

Hopefully, mostly good stuff, but some difficulties as well. Anyway, but I wanted to get to this video that I promised like two, three days ago, something like that. And it's about Jonathan Lehman's Nine Marks article.

Now, chances are, if you're a Christian and you've become a Christian recently or you've been a Christian for a long time, you have seen content from Nine Marks. It is highly regarded in evangelical circles.

I remember when I started my pastoral residency internship kind of thing, I quit my job where I was doing really well and I wanted to see if maybe I wanted to become a pastor. And I did this residency.

I was given a bunch of Nine Marks content, a bunch of printouts, a bunch of books and stuff like that. And it's very representative of, you know, church planting advice from Biggie, but that's what it is.

And Jonathan Lehman, he is the editorial director of Nine Marks and an elder at Chevrolet Baptist Church in Chevrolet, Maryland. Jonathan Lehman is very representative of Big Eva. You know, if you think of a big, if you think of Big Eva and you want to put it into a persona, I think that there's a couple of people that pop into mind.

And I think Jonathan Lehman is probably one of those people that could just could really be a good avatar, if you will, for Big Eva. And so I was very interested when I saw this because the title was a little bit provocative.

The title is, When Should Churches Reject Governmental Guidelines on Gathering and Engage in Civil Disobedience? This is an interesting title because it's kind of like, let me just say this, let me just say this at the outset.

I did not care for this article very much. In fact, I told my brother, I was talking to my brother who is an elder in a PCA church, and I said that if I was a professor and my first year student turned this paper in, this article in as a treatise on, you know, or at least an addressing of the issues when it comes to civil disobedience in the church, I would have been shocked at the quality of thinking.

And it's not about research. It's not about quoting scripture or the constitution, which it really doesn't do. It's not really about that so much. It's just about the level of thinking. This is a very childish article.

I mean, it's kind of embarrassing. I can't believe an adult wrote some of the sentences in this article. We'll get to that. But even the title itself, if you look, governmental guidelines. So if you reject guidelines, that's civil disobedience.

It's really not the case at all. Civil disobedience is when you reject orders, when you reject commands from the government. And that might seem nitpicky, but that's a really big deal. And you look, Jonathan Lehman strikes me as the kind of guy who chooses words very carefully.

I'm not saying he's a stupid man. I'm just saying this thinking is extremely childish. He chose these words very carefully. So what he's saying is that it is actually being civilly disobedient if you don't listen to the guideline, even just the guidelines of the civil governing authority.

That's bizarre to me. That is bizarre to me. And let that set the tone for this article because this is a very, let's just face it. This article embraces unbelief when it comes to what the role of the civil governing authority is and what your role is as a Christian, as a member of the body of Christ, as a member of a chosen nation.

Let's get into it because this is a very interesting article. What I'm going to do is I have a Word document here. I have it open and I'm going to put some tidbits on the Word document as I go. If I remember, maybe I won't because I've never done this before.

But let's dive right in. It begins, as the COVID -19 stay-at-home quarantines tarry, folks are getting restless. State governments think about pathways to opening up. The stock market leaps up 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?

Now listen to how he frames this next section. Ready? Listen to this. Yet a darker question sometimes follows. If the government continues to say we cannot meet, when do we as churches engage in civil disobedience by gathering anyway?

Just this week, I heard pastors in three separate conversations ask this question. Well, praise God for that. Praise God for that. This question should have been asked at the outset of this. I was asking this question at the outset of this.

And I'm not saying you have to do everything that I say, but this is a question that immediately jumped into mind as soon as I heard about these shutdowns and lockdowns and all of that stuff. That's the first thing I thought of.

Because we really need to figure this one out. We should have already known where we stood on this as we walked in. And praise God, there were some pastors that knew where they stood on this topic before the conflict came, before the problem came.

And that's where we really want to be. You want to decide ahead of time what your roles, what your responsibilities are. You want to decide ahead of time so that when the problem comes, you're not in a panic and you're not going to be swayed by, you know, emotional manipulation.

You want to be, that's why people practice. That's why there's so much training for soldiers. Because what they don't want, what armies don't want is their soldiers only making decisions for the very first time, having no muscle memory when they're in a panic, when there's fear, when there's emotions and anxiety.

That's the worst time to make quick decisions. No, you want to have practiced what you do so you have some muscle memory. Praise God, there were some pastors like that. My brother's church, he and kind of the lead elder there, they don't have lead elders, but you know what I mean, the main guy, the teaching elder.

They already knew. So they had a plan, they executed it, and it was good. Now they're starting to ask questions, but think about that. That's good. But praise God, I also have heard, you know, multiple, probably as many as 10 pastors in 10 different churches talk about, okay, what are we going to do if the governor says we still can't meet?

When do we start meeting anyway? That's a great question. But listen to how Jonathan Lehman frames that. He frames it as a dark question, or at least a darker question. And that's weird, man. That's, what this is called is poisoning the well.

What you're supposed to think is that this is a naughty question for a Christian to ask. This is not the right question, really, for a Christian to ask. There's something dirty about this question, and there really isn't.

This is something that is part and parcel of our scripture. This is something that we see again and again and again in the scripture. This is a totally legitimate question to ask. There's nothing dark about this question.

It is a solemn question, no question about that. But darker? That just, I mean, he's poisoning the well. It's very interesting here. Here's what he says. This is why he thinks this is a difficult topic.

He says, this is why it's a difficult topic from a biblical perspective. Both the government and the churches have a legitimate biblical claim on the territory of gatherings. You might call it jurisdictional overlap.

What? What? The government has a biblical claim on the territory of gatherings. Let's just go on. Governments possess authority, if for no other reason than to preserve human life. They are obligated by God to do so.

If temporarily banning all gatherings of a certain size accomplishes that, they should. 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. Our vertical obligation to worship God as churches creates that horizontal right with respect to other people and our government. And so what's being said here is a couple of different things.

I'm just going to put this over here in this section. Item one that I think is so interesting here. If temporarily banning all gatherings accomplishes that end, they should. What end? To preserve human life.

Governments possess authority, if for no other reason than to preserve. There's a misspelling here. Hold on. Sorry. I got distracted. I was just trying to make sure I read the sentence correctly. Anyway, governments possess that authority, if for no other reason than to preserve human life, they are obligated by God to do so.

And, and this is, this is where I say this is so childish because on the one hand, that's true. I mean, the Bible specifically says that the, the government is to reward. Uh, those who do good is to punish the evildoer.

There's numerous laws in the scripture, in the old Testament that talk about preserving life and punishing people who, who take life or threaten life and stuff like that. But this is like, honestly, like I would expect my child.

He's five to think at this level because it's true, but there's nuance here. We have to understand that like, yes, they have to preserve life, but the scripture gives us a wealth of information about what their authority is and what the limitations of that authority, uh, is to do it.

So we can't just say the government, if, if, if, if, if banning all gatherings of a certain size accomplishes that end, they should like, okay. According to who? I mean, that's not what the scripture says.

Does the scripture ever say that banning the worship of God is something that the government has the authority to do because they have the authority to preserve human life? No, there's limitations there.

There's limitations there. And so when he puts this out there, it sounds plausible because there's a, there's truth to it, but he's not giving you the information. And this is what I've been talking about through this entire thing.

We've been failed by Big Eva. They refuse to give us meat. Instead, they give us a steady diet of milk. And it's just like, we need to move past this thinking. Like I expect my five-year-old to think in this way, the government should protect human life.

My, my, my five-year-old should know that my five-year-old does know that. I mean, he knows that police officers are there presumably to, to keep everybody safe. Right. But, but, but if you never progress beyond that, you get articles like this, where all of a sudden banning all gatherings of a certain size is okay.

Where could you get that from the Bible? Here's what he 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. So there's a conflict here, according to Jonathan Lehman, of course.

And, and so what he says is, here's what he says. So he puts a Venn diagram up here. You can see that on the screen. He says, the picture, picture two overlapping circles. One's representing the church's jurisdictional obligation and right to gather, the other representing government's, government's jurisdictional obligation to protect life.

Our pandemical moment places a smack dab in the middle where these jurisdictions overlap. That, as I said, is what makes this moment difficult. So let's just, as is my practice with sometimes with these kinds of articles, let's just assume that he's right.

We need to figure out now who wins this debate, right? Because he's saying that, that there's an, there's an overlap in our jurisdictions. I don't actually agree with his argument here, but let's just go with it because that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to, I'm in a charitable mood today. I'm in a charitable mood today. So let's just go with it. Let's say that this Venn diagram shows you where we're at in this pandemical moment where this overlap of the church's obligation to gather conflicts with the government's obligation to protect life, presumably with no limitation, because obviously that's how we think these days.

Here's how he solves the conflict. You ready for this? This is, I, when I read this, I was, I was absolutely shocked beyond belief. Here's how Jonathan Lehman solves this dilemma. If the government has a reasonable argument to ban every kind of gathering in order to protect life, then churches should act the part of dutiful citizens and obey the government.

They shouldn't just quote, go along with the government by our own free will, as a friend of mine put it. They should positively submit. Submitting to it is submitting is to submit. Submitting to it is to submitting to God.

There's a couple of spelling errors in this article. Anyway, whatever. Uh, let's continue. Why should the government's authority come first? All right. Here's how he solves this dilemma. Ready? Why should the government win in this battle of jurisdictions that Jonathan Lehman has posited?

The government wins in his mind. Why, why should the government's authority come first? Ready for this? This is shocking because preserving life now, preserving life now allows for the freedom to gather later.

You cannot gather as a church. If you're dead, I've been thinking a lot about what to say about this. And I honestly think it stands on its own. I mean, this is, I don't think there's a better word than, than just childish.

Maybe sophistry. Like, I don't know that this is, this is embarrassing. That's why the government wins. Because if you, if you let the government win this battle, then you can worship later because you'll be dead otherwise.

I mean, it, it really beggars belief. It really does. Let's let's continue because I think that stands on, I really think my audience sees the obvious problem there. I really do. And if you don't see the obvious problem there, reach out to me.

Don't feel dumb. Don't feel embarrassed because here's the thing. Lots of us and myself included, we're trained and taught by people like this, who think about these issues at about one millimeter of depth.

So it's really not our fault that we haven't been trained to think deeper. But this is, this is, this is, this is embarrassing. You cannot gather as a church. If you're dead, Paul therefore tells us to pray for Kings and to lead and peaceful and to lead and to lead and peaceful and quiet lives and to lead.

And peaceful and quiet lives. What's going on with the spelling here? Maybe I'm just not reading this right. I don't know. Paul therefore tells us to pray for Kings and to lead and peaceful and quiet lives so that people can be saved first, peace and safety, then church work, at least typically catch that it's first peace and safety and then church work.

So I guess, you know, we, you know, you, you, you've read the, the stories, of course, of missionaries, you know, go into dangerous places and, uh, they get killed by cannibals or, you know, you know, all kinds of native pagans and stuff like that.

You hear the stories about like, you know, people going on mission trips and the parents, you know, they're sending their kids to mission trips and they, they, they say, well, is it safe there? Is it safe at the, where, where are you going?

Is it safe in, uh, in Ethiopia? Cause it's not safe here. We're definitely not going. I mean, I guess they're right. And I guess the missionaries that went to the native lands, they were probably wrong because it's really it's peace and safety first and then church work.

At least typically anyway. Yikes. If you were playing close attention, however, you caught my two qualifications. Now here's where he tries to pretend to not be a sophist, right? This is where he pretends to be a deep thinker, but this is get ready.

Buckle up here. He says, 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.

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. To be sure, determining what's a reasonable argument or a legitimate basis requires case by case judgments and Christians might disagree.

Stopping a pandemic, which kills more than 50 ,000 us citizens within a month strikes me as pretty reasonable. Well, here's how you, here's how you expose a sophist, right? You ask him to explain that.

So why does it sound reasonable to you? That stopping a pandemic, which kills more than 50 ,000 us citizens within a month strikes me as pretty reasonable. Now you might agree with that and that's fine.

That's fine. If you agree with them, what I'm after is why, why is that a reasonable reason to ban all assemblies, including the worship of the most Holy God and all economic activity outside of a few different sectors, right?

So you're banning livelihoods and you're banning worship, right? Worship, you know, assembling as a church and worshiping. Why does that sound reasonable for 50 ,000 us lives? And then whatever they answer, however, they answered that question, you roll it back.

Okay. Whatever your answer is, Jonathan Lehman, tell me why that would, would, or would not apply to 40 ,000 lives. And then you hear his answer. And then you roll it back again. Okay, great. Jonathan Lehman, tell me why, whatever your answer was would or would not apply to 30 ,000 lives.

And you can see where I'm going with this before you know it, you're down to a small number. And where is the principle line that Jonathan Lehman is drawing? Where is the meat here? That's what we need.

We need meat. We don't need pontificating like a child. Because the reality is that 50 ,000 souls is extremely. Oh, it's an extremely large number. Obviously everything's comparative, right? That's a, that's a, that's a sad thing.

It's an extremely sad situation to lose 50 ,000 souls. But if you think about a typical flu season, when people are, when sicknesses are going around and it takes out elderly and young and all of that stuff, we don't have to reduce this number by too much to get a typical flu season's death count in a month.

And so what I'm saying is if the government has the right to preserve human life, as you've said, it does. I wrote it down over here. Then why doesn't it have the right to preserve human life on the order of 20 ,000 or 15 ,000 or 10 ,000?

Why doesn't the government win that battle? Why is that not a reasonable argument? How could you argue against someone who said it's reasonable to ban assemblies to save 10 ,000 lives? There's no answer to this question because this is not how you do this.

Jonathan Lehman is thinking like a child. This is not how you solve the conflict, at least the supposed conflict that he posits up here about the government's obligation to protect life and the church's obligation to worship.

Let's continue. Second, the government cannot single out religious groups. If it allows sporting events and concerts and political conventions to meet, then it should not forbid churches from meeting.

If a government does single out churches, again, the church may have biblical warrant to disobey. Do you see the limp-wristedness here as well? Because this is an argument I've heard many times. Well, the churches are being treated the same.

That's actually false. The churches are not being treated the same. Alcohol stores are still open. You could still gather in an alcohol store. I did it the other day. I bought some, I bought some whiskey and there was quite a few people in that alcohol store.

Porn stores are open for goodness sake, for God's sake, let me just, let's not soften this. Porn stores are open in my town. Abortion clinics are open. So this is not true. I've heard this argument many times.

It's not true. The church is already being treated differently, but listen to what he says here, even if a government does single out churches, all Jonathan Lehman is willing to say is we might have a biblical warrant to disobey.

Let me tell you right now, this is not how we do it. This is not how Daniel did it. This is not how Paul did it. This is not how Peter did it. All of our exemplars, this is not how they did it. Let's continue.

I was going to be positive today. Let's continue this. One pastor asked me what he should do if he disagreed with the government's assessment of what is reasonable. Should they meet anyway? 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.

Yes, there is. The definition of submission is deferring to another judge making a judgment rather than your own. Still every authority on earth is relative. No authority is absolute except God's, which means we never surrender judgment to another human entirely.

And therefore we have to ask God for wisdom and rely on him in these tough cases of jurisdictional overlap. This is what bothers me so much about big even. There's so many things. I say this all the time, but it's like, it gives you, it puts you in this position of despair where you're like, it says like, ask God for answers and look, that's the right thing to do.

But then you have to get the answers he's given them to us. We don't have to read tea leaves here. It's not like this is a big mystery. I mean, I'm all for praying for wisdom. I'm all for praying for, for, for God, because we need to rely on him.

But the truth is though, we can't pray like an unbeliever. We have to pray like a believer. We have to pray like those prayers were actually answered by our God. And they are, we have a huge book of case law.

We have a huge book of case law that we can look to when these supposed jurisdictional overlaps happen. What do we do? How do we know what, who wins? How do we know who wins? And it's definitely not this stupid, stupid argument.

Well, we can't meet if we're dead. Therefore the government should win. What? Sophistry of the highest order. No, we, we ask for God for wisdom and we rely on God for wisdom, but then we go to that word.

He has spoken. Why are we praying as if he hasn't? Why are we praying like a, like a pagan would pray as if God hasn't spoken. And we need to figure out like a pagan and read the tea leaves. Guys, God's word is so meaty.

It's so meaty. We've got so much information on this particular topic. We even have information about the government's jurisdiction to preserve life. People have used this example. People gave me, gave me this example the other day.

They said, you know, in the old Testament, they had laws that said, if you had a house, you needed to put a fence around the house so that, you know, you could prevent people from falling off the house.

And it's like, yeah, absolutely. That that's definitely true. Right. But at the end of the day, the government, so the way it works is the government can do that kind of stuff, you know, say, okay, here's what you should do, but if you notice, there's no, there's no penalty attached to it.

If you didn't have the fence around your house, like the, the government doesn't go house to house and say, okay, let me make sure your fence. Okay. Your fence is fine. You know, your fence is fine. And if you didn't, you get thrown in the brig or something like that.

That's not how it worked. That's not how it worked. There were, there were penalties. If something happened, not like, like we're going to find you kind of thing. There's no fines like that in the scripture.

We, we, there's so much meat there. So even when it comes to governmental guidelines to preserve life, which the government does have the ability to give you those guidelines, we can't start throwing people in jail if they don't follow those guidelines, that's not how God's law work.

We have a big book of case law contra to what Jonathan Leeman says here. And there's lots of meat there. Lots of meat. Let's continue as such. The ultimate test comes on judgment day. 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 are correct pastor to lead a congregation, to overlook what I said in Romans 13, because the government was asking you to sin, those are high stakes.

That should make you nervous. It's not enough. You act according to your conscience. I assume areas acted according to his conscience. When he denied Jesus was fully God, there's eternal condemnation.

It's also important for us to make right judgments. My God, my God, where, where have we come to this place? We're pastors saying we're going to meet for worship in defiance of a government order, not to worship becomes something that you can compare to areas who denied Christ.

How have we come to this place where a respected leader is speaking in these terms, what has happened, what has happened here? He says my personal judgment, 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. So churches should submit to governmental restrictions on gathering for the foreseeable future.

Plus Christians should utterly exhaust all ordinary means of legal recourse before contemplating disobedience. And there's one more reason to obey the government's ban on gathering at this present moment.

I believe it aids our witness. It shows care for the community and love for our neighbors. It shows that we care about their good too, not just our own. My goodness gracious. That's the whole article.

That's the whole article because you want to impress the Pagans, so do what daddy tells you. You want to, you don't want to be like areas, the heretic. So do what daddy tells you. The government, the government's jurisdiction overrides the church's jurisdiction because you can't worship if you're dead.

I'm really grateful that so many of the martyrs didn't see it that way. So many of the martyrs, this is embarrassing guys. This is embarrassing. I think like, again, I wanted to talk about this article.

And, um, I think that most of you in this audience can see the problems with this instantly. This is not how we, we figure out jurisdictions. You see the, the fact, one thing you'll notice here is yes, he tips his hat to scripture a bunch of times, but there's no, there's no meat.

This is just the typical milk that you get from big Evo, Romans 13, without any exploration of the breaking of Romans 13, that, that apparently I guess Peter did, because that's what he says in the article, he says.

Um, that God's going to ask you, why did you disregard my Romans 13? And I guess Peter's going to say, well, you know, cause they were going to tell me to send. I don't think that that's breaking Romans 13 though.

Like, I don't think Peter, when he said we have to obey God rather than men was breaking Romans 13. God hasn't set up a system that requires us to break some of his laws to obey others. That's not how it works.

And that's a problem. That's a real problem with so much of the social justice, progressive Christian movement, which I include Jonathan Lehman in, and so much of what I'm seeing from Romans 13 folks.

There's a real idea that's floating around that says it's totally fine to break some of God's law to keep others. It's totally fine to love some of our neighbors, um, at, at the expense of others, like right now, what we're doing.

And this is something that I heard that Jeff Durbin was talking about. We're basically saying we got to love our elderly, right? And that's true. We do. But the way we do it is by banning the livelihoods of the young.

And that's not how you do it. That's actually breaking God's law to ban the livelihoods of the young and making, making it so they cannot work, right? That's actually breaking God's law. God never gave the government the authority to do that.

And so you can't love the elderly by hating the young. And it's the same with social justice. Like reparations is a perfect example of this. You can't love blacks, which we ought to, we ought to love blacks and Latinos and whoever, but you can't love blacks by hating the whites.

You can't break God's law in order to keep it. It doesn't work that way. And it's the same with this, like, like Peter was not breaking Romans 13. That's the whole point. It's not, God's not going to ask you, well, why'd you, why didn't you listen to Romans 13?

And you're going to have to defend yourself. Well, you know, cause I thought I had to worship. Where have, where have we come to this place where this milk is sufficient where this milk people find helpful?

I just don't get it. And this is the thing, this, you want to know how you solve conflicts of, uh, of authorities. Here's how you do it. Jonathan Lehman. This is, I know that this is complicated and difficult and takes work, but what you have to do is look to the scriptures.

This is what the people that, that framed the constitution did. They said, look, God, all authority comes from God. God's authority is absolute and he's chosen to work through people. And so you look to the scripture and you say, what authority has he given to the civil government?

What authority has he given to the church? What authority has he given to people and families and every authority have limitations on it. And we can look to the case laws to see what those limitations are.

And it's not, sometimes it's easier than others. Sometimes it's harder than others. Like the government has an authority to ban stealing, right? That's clear. The government has an authority to protect private property rights, protect your livelihood, protect your property, right?

But it can't use that authority and say, and therefore, if you steal, I'm going to cut off your head. Obviously we see that the case laws don't condone that. And so it's takes a little more work. It takes a little more courage to start looking into those case laws because some of those case laws, they're kind of icky to our culture today.

They might ruin your witness, but that's where the answers lie. Jonathan Leeman, I know you say there's no case laws we can look into. There are, there are, and there's exemplars. I don't hate you, Jonathan Leeman.

I don't hate Big Eva, but I'm calling you to a higher standard. We're sick of the milk. We're old enough now. It's time for some meat. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful. God bless. Don't forget to tune in next week on Thursday for AD on the Fight Laugh Feast Network.