Lex Rex | Navigating the Classics

Welcome to Navigating the Classics. I'm John Snyder, and with me today is

Steve Crampton and Chris Green. And some of you, if you've watched some of our

Whole Council podcast, you'll be familiar with Steve. He pitches in and helps a lot, and Steve, we're grateful for that.

You're very busy. And Chris might be new to you, so I'm going to ask Steve and Chris to introduce themselves.

And then with these special podcasts, we're going to look at a book that may not normally be looked at, even by those that would normally read

Puritan books, you know. So if you have read some of Owen or, you know, John Flavel, Richard Sibbes, Thomas Watson, and you really appreciate them, that's good.

But there are older books, pre -Reformation, and there are some

Puritan books that are kind of a hard go. So in Navigating the Classics, we picked some of those, and we tried to give an overview.

What were the arguments in the book? Why are they beneficial? How are they beneficial? What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the book?

And today, we're going to be looking at a book by one of my favorite authors, but this is not my favorite book of my favorite author, all right?

This is my, probably my, it's on the least side, all right? It's on the, it's down the list, but it's an important book.

Lex Rex, or The Law and the Prince by the Puritan Samuel Rutherford.

So we'll get to that Rutherford and to this book in a minute. So Steve, why don't you give us just a little introduction for those that have not met you before?

Sure. I mean, primarily, let me just say, I practice public interest law for a

Christian firm, basically defending Christians and their civil rights in the context of government overreach.

So, unlike you, perhaps Lex Rex kind of strikes to much of the core of what

I do professionally. Chris, we haven't met you before, so tell us about yourself, your, you know, educational background, what you do now, and how'd you get to Christ Church?

Sure. So I'm a law professor at Ole Miss University of Mississippi School of Law. I've been there since 2006.

I have a law degree from Yale and a philosophy PhD from Notre Dame.

So I came here after finishing the PhD, came to Mississippi. I found Christ Church basically looking around for like -minded churches, places that had a

Reformed Baptist approach to the Scriptures. We had loved the kind of preaching we had heard at a church in Indiana when we were going to grad school, and we really, we just fell in love with your preaching,

John, as the reason we kept coming. But we've been, you know, coming here for 15 years, been on the on the board of MG for some number of years, goes by in a blink.

But I teach the law. I'm currently engaged in writing a book about the history of certain concepts in the 14th

Amendment from 1215 to present day. So I've been digging through this stuff from Magna Carta in 1215 up through,

I'm currently digging through the War of the Roses in the 15th century, but the background to the

Rutherford stuff is very much in the top of my mind, and I'm noticing all these precursors as I'm doing that work.

So it's really historically, you know, titanically important work, and it's, you know, if you're gonna understand law, you got to understand where America came from.

And America was initially a Puritan settlement, and Rutherford's thoughts were really central to how they thought of themselves.

So as I teach American law, Rutherford, he's, you know, you're not gonna tell, you know, secular law students to read it, but it's gonna be in the background.

So it's been, you know, part of part of what I do as a law professor. The ideas in it have been there all along.

So, Chris, when did you first come into contact with the book Lecture X? I think I first heard about it,

I was doing a year -long mission project after I graduated undergrad, and I was planning to go to law school, and I was with a group, and we had all kinds of theology that we were reading, and somebody had a reference, saw a reference to Rutherford, and a buddy of mine said, oh,

Rutherford, now, you know, that's your guy, the Lecture X guy, because he thought, oh, you're going to law school, surely you've read

Lecture X. That was the first time I'd heard about Lecture X, but a few years later,

I probably, I think when I was in law school, I was buying books at a terrifying pace, and at some point

I saw a Lecture X in a used bookstore and picked it up, and read through it at some point, and later, you know, looked at it in much more detail, met, you know, met some more people who were in a more fiercely

Scottish tradition, people who toss around phrases like lesser magistrate all the time, and you realize,

I need to, I really need to look at this carefully if I'm gonna understand how my friends thought a little bit better, but it really is a titanically important work historically, so it's, so I've been, yeah, it's, you know, ever since I've started thinking seriously about theology and about the law.

If you were to give us a one, kind of one -sentence summary of the content of Lecture X, what would it be?

So Lex is the law, Rex is the king, the king is subject to the law, and in certain circumstances, in principle, sometimes it's okay for other people besides the king to resist the king's unlawful actions.

That's what I would say. May I throw in there too, John? The subtitle that we have in the

Common Edition, The Law and the Prince, is really, I think, a bit unfair. As Chris translated it just a minute ago, we talk in the

U .S. constantly about the rule of law, right? Meaning that all men, even our presidents and leaders and so forth, are under law, and it seems to me fundamentally that's sort of the principle that Rutherford was trying to capture here in that title.

Oh yeah, and the reason that is such a common American phrase is really, it's not just Rutherford, but it's a kind of, the

Rutherfordian tradition has become just part of the air we breathe. So it has a subtitle,

The Law and the Prince, it's got a bunch of other subtitles too. So Lex, Rex, or The Law and the

Prince, a dispute for the just prerogative of king and people, containing the reasons and causes of the most necessary defensive wars of the

Kingdom of Scotland, and of their expedition for the aid and help of their dear brethren of England, in which their innocency is asserted, and a full answer is given to the seditious pamphlet entitled, and then it goes and gives a whole bunch of details about this fellow.

The seditious pamphlet, yeah. So it is a very, very specific context, but the principles he talks about, especially the biblical explanations, going through the biblical material, really have enduring significance.

But there's no question, there's a lot of context you can read just at the title. By the way, we don't do titles like that today.

Why is that? You know, you don't... I was thinking that's, you know, family worship for Elizabethan man.

You know, that's really pretty exciting. Well, I want to give an introduction to who

Rutherford was, because I think that it's a good safeguard. When we look at Lex Rex, there are certain personality types, there are certain, you know, intellectual types.

Some people love politics, and love the principles, and love history, and so Lex Rex is just like, you know, it's like a drug, you know, like this is right, this is good thinking.

And then others are, you know, disinterested in that, and I'm generally in that category, where I think, well,

I appreciate that Rutherford wrote things that were helpful here, but I'm more interested in other areas. But I think that if we understand a little bit of Rutherford, though it's not always the case that the character and experiences of an author, you know, affect how we approach a book.

You know, I've never read a mathematical book, you know, my Algebra 2 book in high school.

I didn't know who wrote it. I still don't know who. I don't care who wrote it, you know, it's just algebra. But with a book like this,

I think it is really beneficial for the believer to understand the Christocentric heart of this thinker, and the grip that Christ's majesty has upon this man, and the cost that he pays to honor the

Lord personally in his home, through tragedy in his church, and even in the larger national, you know, down at Westminster with the assembly.

When you see that love to Christ constrains Rutherford in each of these areas, and through all these seasons of life, then when you read

Lex Rex, it prevents us from becoming men who are enamored with certain legal principles, but without the king at the heart.

And I think that will hold us on balance as believers. I'm speaking to a believer, obviously, you know, the unbeliever may admire

Lex Rex's principles, but they don't understand that at the heart there is a person, there is a king.

So, let me give you just a quick introduction. I think it was probably 30 years ago that I started noticing

Rutherford's name, and I probably noticed it first with men like Spurgeon.

And Spurgeon, sometimes I think he was the, you know, he was the blurb writer for books before he was the grandfather of it, you know, like, this book is the greatest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, how many books did you recommend? So, I remember reading him, and there's a quote inside, this is a copy of Banner of Truth's Letters of Rutherford, and here's a quote from Spurgeon.

What a wealth of spiritual ravishment we have here. Rutherford is beyond all praise of men.

Like a strong -winged eagle, he soars into the highest heaven, and with unblenched, unblinking eye, he looks into the mystery of love divine.

There is to us something mysterious, all -creating, and superhuman about his letters.

So, when I read that, I'm like, well, I've got to go buy these letters. And I also noticed that other people were recommending

Rutherford. Particularly in their journals, they were quoting him. So, these were people from other theological traditions.

Hudson Taylor, Amy Carmichael. And when you find a person whose writings are quoted across denominational lines and through the centuries, and it's not just that someone's using him as an illustration, but in their personal journals, what he says about Christ sustains them, then

I think, well, okay, I want to know why that man has an enduring quality in his voice.

And so, I picked up these letters, and I started to read them, and I was unimpressed.

I thought, well, these are letters, and they're letters, you know, 400 years ago, and he's writing to the, you know, the

Marquis of such -and -such, and the lady so -and -so, and I think, you know,

I mean, they're not terrible, but they're not second to Scripture, you know, like some of the people said.

Then I read a biography. Now, this is an old copy, but this is my favorite biography for Rutherford.

It was actually given to me by Anthony Mathenian, and it's the life of Samuel Rutherford by a man named

Andrew Thompson. I think the easiest way to get that now is print on demand. I think it's out of print. That I found to be the most helpful.

It's a simple biography, but at the last quarter of the book, he devotes to giving significant quotes from Rutherford, so not one -liners, which there are many.

Rutherford's so quotable. There are many Rutherford quote books. The Loveliness of Christ by Banner of Truth in that nice little like leather soft red edition.

I give that to everybody. I mean, it's just so helpful, but I like this because he gives paragraphs of quotes, and it kind of gives you more context.

When I read the life of Rutherford and saw what he went through, and then when I read what he said about Christ after that, then

I went back to the letters, and I started with the letters where he's traveling from the south of Scotland, a place called

Anworth, where he was pastoring up to Aberdeen, and as he travels, he spends the night with Christian friends along the way, and he's basically going to be put under house arrest there for preaching and writing in a way that it offended the monarchy and the powers that be.

So as he's making his way to jail and leaving his people behind, and a hireling is going to be placed behind him in his pulpit, which really bothers him, he begins to write letters, and these...

well, he's written before, but these are the letters where I started because it's when he realizes he's going to jail, and then in the about two years that he's in jail in Aberdeen under house arrest, it's a season in Rutherford's life where God will not let him preach.

He's not allowed to preach, but he can write letters. So providentially, he is allowed to express things about Christ that he's learning in an extraordinary season of suffering, but also an extraordinary season of grace.

Rutherford writes about this time and says, the nearness of God at times was so great he had to ask

God to restrain himself. God, I can't take any more. Then he writes and says, I'm in danger of having two

Christs. There's Christ, and then I'm tempted to make a Jesus of the experiences

I'm having here. They're so sweet, and I don't want to do that. I don't want to idolize the gifts of God's nearness.

And so he also describes it as being... he said, I'm in the suburbs of heaven. He said,

I'm like a child looking over a wall into the great... the New Jerusalem eternity, and it's like I can peek and almost see it.

He also said that if someone would have told me how much of Christ a man can experience in this life as a good

Presbyterian, he said, I would have said they were crazy, but he said, I have tasted this, and he said, everything

I experienced of Christ before prison, it was like a child learning their

ABCs. So when you read his letters, if you're having a tough go of them, pick up where you notice in the letters he leaves

Anwith, and he's on his way to jail, and read the letters in prison, and I think you'll find them particularly helpful.

Now let me mention just a little bit about his ministry. In 1627, he becomes pastor of this little country church in the south, in the lowlands of Scotland, a place called

Anwith. It's picturesque and beautiful. The ruins of the building are still there. You know,

I've walked everywhere I can there so that I know that I stood where Rutherford stood at some point, and now it's just, you know, there's no roof left.

It's just the stone walls, and everything else has rotted away, and now there's, it's become kind of a cemetery where there's graves all through the church and all around it.

Rutherford becomes pastor there, and he's a very diligent pastor. He mentions that he wakes generally at 3 a .m.,

and in the first couple of hours of the day, he's reading, and worshiping, and praying, and then the remainder of the morning, he's studying and writing, and then in the afternoon, he begins his long journeys, you know, to the different members' houses all around.

It's a rural area, so long walks, and one of my favorite quotes by Rutherford is, he says, these hills witness to the fact that I labored in prayer as I walked.

I labored to bring on a fair meeting betwixt Christ and my people.

So it's not just the brain of Rutherford. It's that sweet dependence on Christ, you know, as well as being ruled by Christ heart and mind.

After about nine years of pastoring, he so offends the political powers that he is placed, as I mentioned, under house arrest, and then he writes those letters, and I think the best edition of the letters is the one that Boehner has put out, and this is really the one that's most popular now, and that is put together by Andrew Bonnard, who also did the memoir of McShane, because Bonnard writes about a 40 -page sketch of his life, and it's not academic, but it sure is heartwarming, and then he organizes the letters.

365 letters. You can read one a day. Well, let's think a little bit about his ministry.

He was not considered a great orator. His voice was not a beautiful voice. He was not, you know, an impressive man to walk in, and he's in the pulpit preaching, and maybe like a

Spurgeon, you would immediately be thinking, wow, this man is really gifted for this, but his sermons were penetrating, especially when he would turn to the topic of Christ himself.

A famous quote is from an English merchant, a businessman who's heard of Rutherford.

He's doing business in Scotland, and so he stops by to hear Rutherford preach, and he hears Rutherford and two other

Scottish Puritans, and this is how he describes them. The first pastor, he said, showed me all my heart.

That's pretty classic Puritan, you know, searching the soul. The second showed me the majesty of God, he said, but Rutherford, the third, showed me the loveliness of Christ.

Rutherford did pass through terrible times of suffering. In the first couple years of his ministry in Anwerth, he was often grieved at the cold -heartedness of the people, and as he's trying to minister to them, he also goes through a lot of suffering personally.

He talks about his young wife and he, they have two children, they both die, and so they lose them to disease, and then his wife enters into a long season of a painful, slow death.

His mother moves in with him. She has a painful, slow death. He talks about the fact that, you know, hearing his wife or his mother groaning in pain through the night, you know, the doctors couldn't do anything more for them, and he said life became bitter.

They die. After they die, he said he has one joy in life.

Children are dead, my mother's dead, my wife is dead. My only joy is I do get to preach

Christ, and then he said Christ came. I had a garden with one rose growing in it, and Christ came and sent a winter blast that withered my rose.

In other places he said Christ came and cut my one rose and took it, and what he means is he was removed from being able to preach and then moved to Aberdeen.

After about two years in jail where he writes these letters, and providentially that's what he's known best for, he returns to Anworth to pastor.

He's so happy to do that, and then the Scottish Church authorities say, actually we want you somewhere else, and they put him at St.

Andrews University, St. Mary's College there, and he becomes the chair of theology.

He won't go there, he says, unless they promise that he can still pastor, so he co -pastors with another

Puritan named Robert Blair. He's there for about five years, and then the

Westminster Assembly is called together, and the Scots are allowed to send advisors, not delegates.

They don't get to vote, but they get to come and advise. So he goes down, and for about four years he's in London, and he's there.

He's writing and things. He's remarried. He and his wife have, I think, seven children. Eventually that young wife dies.

All six of the seven children die. Rutherford goes back after four years down there, and he returns to pastoring in St.

Andrews. He becomes the head of the university there, what was combined and becomes

St. Andrews, and then he gets himself in trouble again as political climate changes.

The Puritans are out of favor again. The Scots are out of favor, and he gets in trouble with his writings, and he is told that he is being summoned to London to stand as a criminal for what he's written, and he makes that famous statement, you know, go tell your king

I won't be appearing in his court. I'm dying. I will soon appear at a higher court where few of his kind ever reach.

You know, he's not going to heaven. I'm going to see Christ, and I'll be with him. Let me give you two quotes by Rutherford before we jump into his book.

One is what he said about his church when he saw that there seemed to be a reluctance to really grab hold of in the early days of the beauty of Christ.

He said this, Christ Jesus, so boundless, so incomparable in his excellence and his sweetness, and so few take him.

Oh, you poor, dry, dead souls, why will you not come and bring your empty vessels and your empty souls to this huge, fair, deep, and sweet well of life?

When he was dying, after the, after, you know, his political opponents are sending him a police officer to say basically you need to make the trip to London.

Then he's visited by his pastoral friends, and his fellow pastors come in, you know, and they want to say goodbye to their friend, and he says to them, you know, the

King is coming. Do all for the King. Preach for Christ. Pray for Christ.

Labor for Christ. And then he says this, now would to God that all cold -blooded, faint -hearted soldiers of Christ would look again to Jesus and his love.

And when they look, I would have them look again and again and fill themselves with the beauty of beholding

Christ. And I think that really sums him up, and I think that that's why

Lex Rex is so extraordinary, because it's great political theory, but it's by a man whose allegiance rises higher than any earthly politics.

Well, Chris, why don't you just jump in there and take us through the background and the main points of Lex Rex?

Sure. So, okay, how you always have the question with background, how far do you want to go back down?

So, like, okay, well, first there was the Magna Carta. So, one thing that's striking, that I've noticed as I've been doing reading for my book, even the, it's sort of almost like a pun or a, you know, little mini poem, the words

Lex and Rex rhyme. There's this fellow, Henry of Bracton, and so this is kind of the generation after Magna Carta.

This is somebody writing in the 13th century under Henry III. Henry III has this rebellion that leads to this kind of first constitution for England, doesn't last too long, called the

Provisions of Oxford. But around that time, there are these people rebelling against the king, and their argument is the king's acting unlawfully, and Bracton's the, no question, the preeminent legal, we have a better treat it, we have a better understanding of 13th century law than we do of, like, succeeding centuries of the 14th, 15th century, because Bracton exists.

And he has this statement that the power of the king is the power of the law. He's writing in Latin, so, and he makes a bunch of,

I'm told by people who know the Latin better, a bunch of sort of rhymy, poetic statements about the rhyming of lex and rex.

So this is 400 years before Rutherford, but people who know the tradition of once in a while the

English will rise up against their king, they're gonna know this pun. So I think there's no question that people are gonna recognize this

Bracton influence. Bracton himself is kind of cagey about whether he supports the folks that lead to the

Provisions of Oxford or not, but it's in the intellectual environment.

Calvin comes on the scene, of course, the Reformation comes on the scene in the 16th century, and at the very end of Calvin's Institutes, Calvin has this description about law and the

Christian, and he has this phrase, obviously not English, but I think he writes in both

French and Latin, but the lesser magistrate, and he says sometimes a political community will organize itself in a way that has some powers given to one person or one group of people and other powers given to another.

So he looks back, this is Reformation obviously, around that same time you have the

Renaissance, much more interest in classical influences, they're looking to places like Greece and Rome, and he says, well, you know, look at Sparta, look at Rome, look at Athens.

Sparta, they have a king of Sparta, but they also have this office, the ephor, and I have no idea what the ephor does, but it has some powers that the king doesn't have.

Rome, when it's a republic, even after it's an empire, they sort of have retained some of these outward forms, but they've got the consul and the tribune.

The consul has certain powers and the tribunes have other powers. Athens, they have a

Senate doing certain kinds of things and the demarche doing other kinds of things. Calvin, in the

Institutes, looks back to those and he says, under certain circumstances, somebody who is not the top most prominent official in a government can nonetheless have power to resist the assertions of authority by the person who is the most prominent.

Just because you're the most prominent doesn't mean you can tell everybody what to do in every circumstance.

Okay. Calvin doesn't say a whole lot in that brief chapter.

It's the very last chapter of Calvin's Institutes. If you've got a copy, you can go, you find it very easily.

Chris, let me just interject right there, too. Somewhat like Rutherford, it seems to me Calvin has become so caricatured in history, right?

Both for his Reformed theology, but also in this context of the lesser magistrates.

And when you read the Institutes in context, he goes to great pains, somewhat like,

John, your intro about Rutherford, to set forth very carefully the exposition of Romans 13 and how we owe obedience even to wicked rulers and so forth.

And this is kind of the last resort, right, before you get to the lesser magistrates. So I just want to throw that out there, that there's so much misunderstanding in the history of resistance to lawful authority.

And Calvin was such a warm -hearted, pastoral - minded fellow, and again, you look at his own historical experience in Geneva, he was the last guy that would actually kind of take up arms and so forth.

So he should also, I think, be considered in that context of God -first, you know, resistance as a last resort.

And it's very clear, if you just look at Calvin, it's very clear, it is going to depend. So he's not saying, as just a general matter, any lesser magistrate, just because you're some kind of magistrate, therefore you have the authority to resist any unlawful exercise of power.

You know, a county sheriff can't just go under just any circumstances where he thinks the federal government's doing something unlawful, and,

I mean, they do lots of stuff that's unlawful, but there are certain officials who have authority, and certain other officials who don't have authority, under certain circumstances, to resist it.

So the contingency, the extreme to contingency of the political arrangement, it's very obvious in Calvin.

He calls them, in the translation at least, that I've got constitutional defenders of freedom.

So again, like you say, a limited class. Yeah, so, okay, so Calvin is saying this, he's just saying a few things like that.

You have a fellow, James Buchanan, one of probably, I don't know if there's millions of James Buchanans in Scotland, but there are quite a few.

And actually, the addition of Lex Rex, that, so we're, I think, all probably looking at a 1982 reprinting of it, but that's reprinting of some sort of 19th century version that actually includes a dialogue by Buchanan as an appendix.

Okay, so James the sixth of Scotland, when he was, which he was at the time, okay, so a lot of details about why on earth he's gonna come to England.

But Mary, Queen of Scots, is removed from being Queen when

James is very, very young. His father dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances, perhaps killed by people in league with his mother.

Anyway, because of that, because his father dies when he's very, very young, he has a very long regency period, a very long period where he's not in charge, he's just a baby and a boy.

His tutors have a huge amount of influence on him. One of his tutors is this James Buchanan fellow, who sets out the doctrine, which is,

I think, fairly commonly accepted among most Scots at the time, that under certain circumstances it's lawful or even required for subjects or lower officers in the

Scottish government to resist their king. James hears this and,

I mean, he actually disagrees with his tutor, a little bit like the tutor is telling him that people are gonna be able to resist him.

So he comes up with the idea of the divine right of kings.

This is, you know, during the Reformation, you have lots of people who are reacting against the more feisty

Protestants with similar kinds of doctrines. There had always been people who resisted, people resisting them, by saying you should never, ever rebel against a duly constituted highest authority.

And James develops, you know, he explains his view that he has authority directly from God.

Okay, so the big dispute that Rutherford is gonna have with his opponents, the first thing that he talks about,

I mean, probably the first fourth of the treatise, where does political authority come from?

Does it, and of course, everything we have comes ultimately from God. He's the primary cause of all events, but we have secondary causes.

Okay, so we've got, you know, the secondary causes of physics that hold books together. You've got the secondary causes of, you know, chemistry of biology, secondary causes of sociology.

You have the secondary cause of law. Okay. James says he has authority directly from God.

God has told me that I'm a king, and all of you people, everybody else, what they're supposed to do is just recognize that, rather than confer authority on the king.

So, one of the first businesses of the treatise is gonna be looking carefully at where exactly authority comes from.

Okay, so James VI of Scotland comes up with this view, in kind of reaction to his

Tudor Buchanan. In 1603, James becomes

James I of England, when Elizabeth dies. Okay, so he is, you know, suddenly comes down to England.

England, in the meantime, has been coming up with their version of Protestantism.

Okay, so Henry VIII rebels against Rome. Edward VI comes up with a very fiercely

Protestant Book of Common Prayer and materials that we would like a lot.

Mary then comes in as a Roman Catholic, burns all the initial Reformers, and then

Elizabeth comes in and is somewhere in the middle, certainly closer to Edward than her father,

Henry VIII was. But the Puritans, you know, the term Puritan initially is, what do they want to purify?

They want to purify the Church of England, purify the Book of Common Prayer, get rid of all the extra

Roman Catholic errors that they see still remaining.

Okay, so James I, when he's James VI of Scotland, I mean, he's still

James VI of Scotland, after he comes down and becomes James I of England, but when he comes to England, he begins to...

So he's, you know, the story of the Church of England, the monarch is the head of the church. Okay, so he's the head of the church, he has this new theory that he has divine right of kings, he's getting the kingship directly from God, rather than through the people or through the law, through Parliament or anything like that.

He then decides, he has certain views about what the liturgy of the

Church of England should be. 1625, he dies and his son,

Charles I, has...so Charles I always says, I'm just trying to do what

Elizabeth was doing, I'm just enforcing the Elizabethan settlement. And almost everybody else says, no, you're not, you're doing this in a way more

Arminian way, way more including a lot of objectionable

Roman Catholic elements to it than we think.

But Charles I, he decides, so he's got this

Church of England mechanism. So one of the things that the

Church of England has is bishops. Okay, so they got an archbishop of Canterbury, who's kind of in charge of, you know, he's under the king, but you know, kind of the king is the head, the archbishop is the main, you know, kind of actual head of things.

And then you've got all these bishops. And eventually...so

these guys are the stewards. So James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II, the four steward kings of England.

And the stewards decide, we're gonna take this English system. Okay, so England finds themselves with this king, they've taken down from Scotland.

And Scotland then finds itself with this church hierarchy imposed on it by the

English people under, you know, under the head of their supposedly Scottish king.

Okay, so Charles decides, you know, we're gonna send some bishops up to, we're gonna make sure that the

Scottish Church has bishops too. And the Scots do not like that.

So no bishops. So may I interject here? Okay, you've got that whole dynamic too, it's really remarkable.

We could do this in, I suppose, several different podcasts because of the complexity of the history, but the

Church of Scotland, founded in simplistic terms with John Knox, right?

And the whole Presbyterian system, anti -Roman Catholic in virtually every respect, anti -bishopric, generally speaking, and that whole unifying of Scotland and England with James I and James VI, that you've got these tenuous relationships politically, and again, theologically.

So there's such a dynamic here, and I would suggest it's no surprise that Lex Rex is written by Rutherford, a

Scot, as opposed to the Englishman. So all that backdrop here with the interplay of Scotland and its church system versus England and Anglicanism being somewhat of a hybrid to begin with, you know, a lot of folks would say it's kind of Roman Catholicism -lite and so forth, it's playing into the whole dynamic.

Yeah, so Archbishop Laud comes in, and he's a fierce Arminian.

One of the things he does under Charles I is, well, we got to get all these anti -Arminian writings condemned, and we got to get the people who wrote them locked up.

So because Rutherford had this, I mean, just very fiercely, everything he writes has a fierceness and vividness to it.

He was a Scot. And in the context of his letters from prison, it gives it just an absolute intoxicating beauty and really spiritual helpfulness.

Some of his other writings are not as immediately spiritually helpful, but you can tell it's definitely the same guy with the same fierceness.

It might be useful to, the way I explain it to my kids, kind of what are these ecclesiological differences?

So how should the church be organized? How many levels of office in the church do you have besides elders?

Okay, so what are elders exactly? That's a question. But roughly speaking, you've got the

Congregationalists who say we should have local elders in a local assembly exercising authority over just a group of people who can assemble together at the same time in the same place.

The Presbyterians add elders who have authority over a group of congregations locally.

Okay, so you got the Congregationalists, you got the Presbyterians, and that's where Rutherford is, that's where the

Scots in general are, that's where Knox was.

Lots of people end up in the Presbyterian camp. The Anglican Church adds a level above the local elder board of bishops.

Okay, and then they also add an archbishop. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has not just bishops, but cardinals and the

Pope in Rome, of course. So you can kind of think of it as kind of four gradations of how many levels of middle management do you have?

Do you have any middle management? But this is the big dispute. And it comes to a head,

Rutherford's thrown in jail, but in 1638 Charles says, no, you know, he initially is kind of hems and haws about how much he's going to impose on the

Scots, but in 1638 he says, no, you've got to follow the Book of Common Prayer, this is how it's going to be.

There's a famous story about, he goes into a church, and I can't remember how old the girl was, picks up a stool and chucks it at the fellow.

You're not gonna make me listen to a Roman mass. So the

Scots, at that point, they say in 1638, they say, so the

Scottish Parliament, they get together and they say, Charles, we acknowledge you as our king.

We are not attempting to depose you. And then ten years later, they're gonna be very upset at the

English when they do put him to death, generally. But this stuff you're doing about putting bishops in charge of our local congregations is illegal.

It's unlawful, and you're not allowed to do it. They get together and huge numbers of Scots adopt this thing, the

Solemn League and Covenant, 1638. And then they have a short war that basically

Charles tries to win but doesn't, the Bishops' War. The first Bishops' War.

Yeah, the first Bishops' War, the second Bishops' War, the first, second, and third

English Civil Wars. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.

But basically, what Rutherford is doing in the book is saying that what we did in 1638 was lawful.

Which, by the way, is somewhat an example of the doctrine of the lesser magistrates. Here are these guys, respectfully, as they would say anyway, checking the authority of the king, who they say overstepped his bounds.

Yeah, so they say they were properly elected. So lots of stuff at the end of the book is going to go into lots of details about exactly who is allowed to summon the

Scottish Parliament, how frequently they, you know, what they can do once they're summoned. But basically, 1638, you have some military defeats for the king.

The king realizes, I'm gonna need some more money if I'm really gonna defeat these folks. The king, at this point, has not convened a parliament in England since 1629.

Okay, so there's a bunch of history of what's going on with Charles I in England. So he only becomes king in 1625.

So Parliament had gotten upset at James for a lot of things he had done, but they get really upset at Charles.

And a lot of the things that Parliament has to do, they do right at the beginning of someone's reign.

So they vote them traditionally, tonnage and poundage for life.

All these complicated names for taxes. But they don't do that. And they say, hey

Charles, you know, you're gonna have to give us some concessions if you're gonna get enough money to govern the country.

1628, you have the petition of right. But 1629 is the last Parliament for 11 years.

And then some people call it the 11 years tyranny. By the way, it's a little bit contrary to our general approach in Congress and the present.

There's what they call the honeymoon period, where you pretty much get almost anything you want as the new president, right?

And then the contention begins. But here it was quite the opposite. So one thing that's fascinating, just in terms of history, looking at England versus France.

So France, they have this gap in the meeting of their states general, essentially their Parliament, between like the 1610s and 1789.

Okay, so they're going for like a hundred and a hundred and seventy some years between meetings of Parliament.

Essentially that's what happens between 1629 and 1640. The King says, I don't have to have, I don't have to call a

Parliament. I can come up with other ways of getting money. And then there's a bunch of legal disputes about, you know, ship money and the night's gaze.

Can he just tell people to loan him money? A bunch of disputes. Eventually he decides, I've got to call

Parliament in 1640. So they have, he initially calls a Parliament called the short

Parliament of 1640. They don't do what he says. So he says, I, you know, heck with you. You know, dismisses them.

Decides, discovers he still does need money. A few years, a few months later, still 1640, he calls the long

Parliament. Okay, and these, these are gonna be the people, 20 years later, the same people, the same people elected in Parliament of 1640 are gonna be the people to call back

Charles II and leading to basically the unpleasantness at the very, very end of Rutherford's life.

But Parliament comes in. They are just as recalcitrant, probably more recalcitrant than they even were in the 1620s.

Eventually they decide, hey King, we're not gonna allow you to have an army through a bunch of political troubles.

Just, it's not obvious in 1640 that there's gonna be a war. But as the negotiations go on, war is gonna break out.

Okay, Parliament is gonna decide, we have the authority to come up with our own army. So Parliament is assuming executive authority that it never had.

So in 1644, so that's the year that we're writing it, they've decided we're gonna reform the

English Church along new lines. They call in all the best minds to do this.

And I think there's no question Rutherford was, was the top, one of the, probably the top

Scottish mind and certainly in thinking about certain of these issues. So he's in, in London, 1644, the

Westminster Assembly is starting its work of deciding what the Church of England is gonna look like. The war is, so there's armies in the field.

Okay, so Marston Moores is, is I think a few months before this, has a, it's an important parliamentary victory.

It's not, not final. That's actually where Cromwell starts becoming prominent as a leader of cavalry.

So, so he has a huge cavalry charge and it shows a certain decisiveness in battle that is eventually gonna cause him to be able to win a whole bunch more military victories, including over the

Scots, and, and take over the government. But 1644, we got armies in the field, bunch of people saying, this should never have started, and Rutherford says, well, let me give you an explanation why we were right six years ago when we resisted the king.

Let me throw in there, Chris, in this, just an extraordinary time, it seems to me, in world events, really.

So the king summons the Parliament because he needs money to fight the Scots. But the

Parliament basically throws in with the Scots and then has them over for what is also, I think, a historic gathering, right?

The Westminster Assembly, and Rutherford is there, and the Scots are working with Parliament, now basically against the king, and you've got the outworkings of the whole

Reformation mindset, right? Starting with the revolutionary thinking about God and theology and, you know, soteriology, the whole thing is just so explosive, really, for world events.

So the outworkings of that, in my view, you've got to...we talk in Mediagratia about the fundamental work of rethinking

God biblically, well, there's rethinking the Church biblically, right? The whole structure and so forth, and that in itself almost ineluctably works itself out in rethinking civil government biblically as well.

So there's such a mix of deep rethinking of everything in life that's going on here, and Rutherford is right smack in the center of it all.

So, remarkable times to be writing a work like this, and it's no theoretical treatise.

This is his life, his Church, his country at issue, right? Absolutely, absolutely.

So, you know, in the meantime, the Thirty Years' War is waging in Europe, so between, you know, 1618 and the

Peace of Westphalia in 1648, just massive, massive bloodshed between Protestant chunks of Europe and the

Roman Catholic chunks of Europe. One of the big questions that people are fussing over, it's actually the issue that triggers the beginning of the

Thirty Years' War in 1618 in Prague, the Roman Catholic Pope deposes a ruler.

So they say, so the Pope in 1215 and in the Fourth Lateran Council has this long description how,

I'm allowed to decide that a ruler isn't sufficiently Christian and call for subjects to rebel against against him.

1570, the Pope issues this edict saying, I know all you people in England have sworn oaths to support

Elizabeth the First, but you don't have to keep those, you can go ahead and rise up against Elizabeth.

So there's all these questions about when is it licit for the people or for authorities like a church or the

Roman Catholic hierarchy to call for someone to be overthrown.

One important name in the intellectual environment is this fellow Hugo Grotius, and he's, you know, this is somebody who is permanently important in the law.

So the Supreme Court, they'll quote him or cite him on international law quite regularly, basically invents international law in a treatise in 1625.

So this is seven years into the Thirty Years' War. He has a doctrine that says it's never okay to resist constitute authority, it's never okay to disagree with what the head of a local area has said.

And he's saying like, look, we've got to come up with, he's a Protestant, but he says we've got to come up with some way to avoid constantly trying to overthrow each other.

And Rutherford actually at some points, he has a snarky side. Putting it lightly.

Yeah, so you know, not as snarky as someone like Luther or something, you know, you can get these Luther insult generators that, you know, has thousands of them.

You could go through and search for kind of snarky things he says about this Maxwell fellow. But one of the things he says about Maxwell, John Maxwell, he calls him the

Popish prelate, although he's not Roman Catholic, he's Protestant, but that's the term he uses for Maxwell.

One of the snarky things he says is, well, he's just ripping off Grotius. And as an intellectual, with intellectual concern rather than kind of polemical concern,

I look at it and I think, well, why didn't you just respond to Grotius? The reason he didn't respond to Grotius, just directly, is

Maxwell had just issued in 1644 this treatise, you know, in English, telling all the people supporting

Parliament, hey, everything you've been doing since 1638 is just completely contrary to Romans 13 and 1

Peter 2, and the way monarchy was seen in the in the Old Testament. So that was the treatise that everybody's reading, and he goes through just,

I mean, point by point, through Maxwell's... I mean, you read his preface, and I mean, you really, it is not a particularly appealing advertisement for reading the rest of it, because,

I mean, it's a list, it's almost all of the preface. Rutherford's preface is a list of 50 things that are very, very specific, wrong about Maxwell's treatise.

And you can kind of understand, you know, his point with some of those, but unless you have Maxwell's book right next to you, you're just not going to understand.

But he's writing for people who do have Maxwell's book right next to them, and he says, okay, you know, that was appeared just now, here's the next thing, you know, set it side by side and go into those details.

So he's, yeah, there's a lot of context that you gotta dig through to get to.

One more thing with regard to that reference to Maxwell as the popish prelate.

Obviously intentional and meant to smear him, but it does seem to me to capture, too, some of what is going on in this whole cataclysmic time period, where the

Protestant movement ultimately, certainly simplistically in the Roman Catholic view, can be reduced to the question of authority, right?

And the Roman Catholic view, with their hierarchical system, just aligns like a glove fitting over the hand with the monarchical, the

Pope is the ultimate authority for the Roman Catholics, the King is the ultimate authority for Maxwell in England, and they love a simple monarchical one -final -word sort of system.

And the whole notion of Protestantism, where we step back and say, wait, it is not inappropriate to question and take everything back to Scripture sort of thing.

So I don't think it's wholly unfair for him to refer to him in that way, but it just casts the background, right?

The backdrop for what he's arguing here is, in I think Rutherford's view, fundamentally he sees the danger of Roman Catholicism and really the attack against the entire

Reformation, the whole body of thought that he's standing on, is embodied and encapsulated in Maxwell's treatise.

Yeah, and he wants to be consistent. So he's taking certain things that the the

Protestants had done and saying, look, if you really follow through on these, you're gonna have to do a lot of additional things.

And really, I mean, so I mean, we're all, you know, Baptists, and we kind of, we think of what our position is, even with respect to people like the

Presbyterians, the most common folks in Scotland, say, look, if you really take seriously the, you know, the regulative principle that you're supposed to get rid of any kind of biblical, get rid of any kind of unbiblical office or unbiblical ceremony, you're gonna have to get rid of the infant baptism.

And you're gonna have to get rid of, you know, because it really doesn't seem, you know, the way the pastoral epistles treat eldership, like you're gonna have more than just a congregation making leadership decisions about elders.

It's gonna be a local congregation. So, I mean, we're all inconsistent to some extent, but the force of the argument is, hey,

Protestants, you know, once you take certain steps and say you're not just completely subject to one ruler for the, you know, all of Christendom, you've already divided up power, and if you're gonna divide up power in different countries, dividing up power within a single country is, in principle, no, not really any different.

Well, with that background and all the complexity that's occurring, both religious and, you know, political power struggles, you know, we think of James's statement about divine right, his sons following kind of that trajectory, but going further, being more offensive to Parliament politically, as well as to the nation religiously at times, the

Puritan element, you know, the idea of no bishops, no king. Hey, if we don't have a bishopric, then the king, how will he exercise, you know, what will be the arm of the king in this significant arena of religion at that time, especially how will the king really rule if we don't have the church under control, and the church under control is going to require bishops who are faithful to James or Charles.

So, with all of that going on and understanding that background, we need to jump into what are the main thoughts and the main points of Lex Rex itself.

So, you know, some people might think, oh, you know, Rutherford, he's just, he's never read Romans 13 or 1

Peter 2, the very first page of the treatise. He mentions the two of those.

Obviously, the submission to the authorities, submission to the emperor, and ministers sent by the emperor is very central to how he's going to think.

He's not gonna explain those passages themselves for a hundred pages or so.

Yeah. What is he starting with? He's starting with the rules for kingship under the Old Covenant, and here it's very interesting, the general hermeneutic or interpretive approach he takes.

I think it seems like it's common ground to both Rutherford and his opponents that when we look at the way that Israel organized its kingship, we're supposed to extract the general principles of it.

So, there's certain things that are clearly inapplicable. So, Deuteronomy 17 is the most straightforward teaching in the

Old Covenant about, you know, what they would do if they had a king. So, these are rules for a hypothetical future kingship, and that's one of Rutherford's big points, is it is hypothetical.

But, for instance, one of the rules in it is you may not put a foreigner over you who's not your brother.

Well, obviously, the English aren't supposed to find, you know, some

Israelite, a Jewish person, to put on their own throne. And, you know, this isn't saying like, oh, there's some sort of racial demand that every nation, you know, find its brother not a foreigner.

What they're doing is taking the civil law, and they're abstracting up to figure out what that civil law says about the enduring moral law.

So, the way they're going to say it in the Westminster Convention in the 1640s is the moral law is continuing to be binding.

The ceremonial law is not. Ceremonial law points forward to Christ, and once Christ has come, we don't have that.

So, you know, Mark 7, 19, Jesus declares all foods clean, okay. And then, the

Westminster Convention talks about the judicial law. I think we would probably call the civil law as well.

It says the judicial law for the nation of Israel is not binding except insofar as the general equity thereof.

Basically, the way I would understand that, I would say the general equity of the civil law is the information that the civil law gives us about the moral law.

Yeah, the application really of the moral law. Right, right. And so, when we look at Deuteronomy 17, we're taking it very, very seriously because, obviously,

God would never tell Israel to do something that would violate the moral law. The enduring moral law is going to be, was applicable at the time of Deuteronomy 17, and it's going to be applicable 400 years later when they actually do have a king, okay.

But, you know, so, you know, rather than looking, you know, just at Rutherford, there's a lot of context, but he appeals over and over to Deuteronomy 17.

I think it would make sense just to look at Deuteronomy 17 itself. When you come to the land that the

Lord your God is giving you... By the way, you're starting in verse 14. Verse 14, yeah. Deuteronomy 17, 14. FF, I'm following.

Okay. When you come to the land the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it, and then say,

I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me, you may indeed set a king over you whom the

Lord your God will choose. Okay, so, just out of those two phrase, you may indeed set a king over you whom the

Lord your God will choose. One of the big disputes that,

I mean, lots and lots of discussion of the details of exactly how those two parts work together, and how they work together with Saul and with David, and then,

I mean, later there's a kind of a reestablishment under Joash, following Athaliah's takeover of power.

But you have these times where kings are specifically set over the nation of Israel.

The anointing of these people takes place at a different time.

Okay, so we were talking a minute ago during the break about Charles III.

He has this coronation ceremony, and there's one point where they have an anointing of the king.

May I just say, for those that aren't familiar, Charles III being the current king. Yeah, current king of England. He became king as soon as his mother died.

He wasn't anointed to become king before then, but he had been king, and the way that I think it's

Alfred the Great put together all these ceremonies in the in the 8th century or whatever for the kingdom that became the king of England, the kingdom of England, he put an anointing in it specifically in imitation of the way the

Israelite kingdom was organized. So one of Rutherford's big points is the anointing itself, when

God picks David or picks Saul, I mean, picks David's house, and Joash is, you know, everybody understands

Joash is supposed to be the king, but that's different from actually becoming king. And you can tell this really just looking at 1

Samuel, the way that it works with Saul.

You remember he's running off looking for his lost sheep or goats or something, and runs into Samuel.

They think, oh, where are we gonna find our sheep? Oh, there's a prophet, Samuel. Let's talk to Samuel. They talk to Samuel, and Samuel annoys him, and he doesn't say,

I hereby make you king. He says, you will be king. Saul goes home, and they say, oh, you know, did anything interesting happen while you were off looking?

Oh, we met a prophet. Oh, what did the prophet say? Well, he said the sheep had been found.

Okay, he doesn't act as king at that point. It's only later,

I mean, it's the next scene in 1 Samuel, only later that he actually becomes king. He only exercises authority, starts doing the things that...he

starts doing the job of the king, which is, I mean, protecting and defending his people, again, and supplying public order within the nation.

David, of course, as well, there's a long, long gap. He, you know, Saul is rejected as king, but he is still king.

So when David is anointed, that's different from him actually receiving authority as king to issue decrees and have people doing the job of a king, which is defending

Israel, defending the nation against outside, you know, all enemies, foreign and domestic, as it were.

That's the way the American language would put it, but defending Israel against foreign enemies and supplying public order within Israel.

Which is really a significant distinction, as we see in Rutherford.

But, you know, when you're just reading through Scripture, you don't stop and think too much about, well, wait a minute,

David anointed king, but when does he really become king and exercise those royal prerogatives?

But it is enormously significant in the context of this kind of discussion, right? And outside Israel, we have examples like that, too.

We have Jehu, who's anointed before he comes in and takes over the northern kingdom, we have a king of Syria that is anointed before he goes in and take over, and that's different.

Those are, you know, actually possessing authority and being told by God that he will exercise authority are different things.

And this is a bell that Rutherford rings many, many times.

There is some repetition in there. Yeah, but it's repetition, you know, in different contexts.

One thing, I mean, it really is just a magisterial tour de force about thinking very thoroughly and biblically, as biblically as he can, given his perspective, given the arguments that he has available to think through.

He really just wants to think through as many details as he possibly can, look at it, look at all the counter -arguments that he can, from whatever perspective he can, to make sure that he's considering, you know, he's squeezing the scriptures of every last drop of insight that he can about the nature of political authority.

Let me just throw in there, too, Chris. I mean, you mentioned some of the critics as if maybe he hadn't considered some of these seminal biblical passages.

But the truth is, it is an extraordinary work insofar as its scholarship and the depth of his command, not only of Scripture, but it's written in four languages, ultimately, right?

You've obviously got the English, but he's always referring to Latin, he goes to the

Greek, he goes to the Hebrew. It's just remarkable what a command he has.

Historically, I don't know of any authority that he overlooks. And you know, he didn't have

Google at his fingertips, and the resources that we have with the smartphones and devices, it's just extraordinary.

By the way, I mean, among others, of course, he cites Plato and Aristotle, whom he calls somewhat in the Spurgeon -esque way of describing

Rutherford, the flower of nature's wit. He actually cites one huge classical influence in the background here is

Cicero. Yes. So Cicero has this phrase, I'm gonna butcher the

Latin, but Salus Populi Suprema Lex, the welfare of the people is the supreme law.

Critical. Yeah, at one point Rutherford says that this is part of the twelve tables of Roman law.

I think he's wrong historically about that, but it's a very well... So basically, the

European intellectual scene starts getting really obsessed about Cicero. So Cicero is around the time of the fall of the

Republic. He opposes Caesar in certain ways, and then gets, anyway, a bunch of Ciceronian stuff.

But this principle that what government is supposed to do is promote the welfare of all people within the realm, everybody acknowledges that.

Essentially, what people like Charles were saying was, well, I get to decide what's in the welfare of the people.

And he would use that kind of phrase as like, well, I get to override any positive law that Parliament has established.

I said, well, you know, Parliament says that, but really the supreme law is the welfare of the people, so I get to decide that.

But Rutherford, you know, very much doesn't disagree with the welfare of the people being the supreme law. And it's, you know, this is all over, really, beginning of the late 1500s.

It's just all over European intellectual thought. So you've got classical influence.

You've got a very, very detailed look at the Old Testament. And, you know, we'll get to what he says about the

New Testament. One very important episode that Rutherford highlights is this episode with Uzziah.

So we, most, I think, most people remember Uzziah chiefly from remembering when he died.

So Isaiah 6 begins, in the year that King Uzziah died.

And, you know, our study Bibles usually have a footnote saying, okay, this is BC 740. So you've got to anchor, like, okay, this is 18 years before the northern kingdom is going to be destroyed by the

Assyrians. It's, you know, 160 -some years before the southern kingdom is destroyed.

Uzziah is one of a series of kings who are, I think, usually classified as mostly good.

Sometimes you'll, you know, find the list of the kings of Israel and Judah in the back, and they'll sometimes be indicated, you know, well, there's, you know, there's

Josiah at the very top. There's Hezekiah right underneath that. There's kind of Asa and Jehoshaphat, who were earlier, kind of below there.

And then there's this kind of next tier of mostly good kings, most of whom start out very well, do some very important things, and then end in ways that are quite unfortunate.

Okay, and one of those is Uzziah. So what happens to Uzziah? I think I'll just read from, this is 2

Chronicles 26, 16. This just, you know, begins with a with a beautifully concise warning.

When he was strong, he grew proud to his destruction. Four. So this is

Uzziah. He was unfaithful to the Lord as God and entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense.

But Azariah the priest went in after him with 80 priests of the Lord, who were men of valor.

And they withstood King Uzziah and said to him, It's not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the

Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense. Go out of the sanctuary, for you have done wrong, and it will bring you no honor from the

Lord God. Then Uzziah was angry. Now he had a censer in his hand to burn incense. And when he became angry at the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead in the presence of the priests in the house of the

Lord by the altar of incense. And Azariah the chief priest and all the priests looked at him, and behold, he was leprous in his forehead.

And they rushed him out quickly. And he himself hurried to go out, because the Lord had struck him.

And King Uzziah was a leper to the day of his death, and being a leper, lived in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the

Lord. And Jotham his son was over the king's household, governing the people of the land."

So one question Rutherford has is, well, if you took what

Charles was saying seriously, if you took what Maxwell was saying seriously, God should have struck the priests with a plague.

Because they were the ones, the lesser magistrates as it were, telling the king, this isn't for you to do.

So the Kingdom of Israel had a separation of powers within it. It was very, very different from the

American separation of powers, the English separation of powers, but it was a separation of powers between king and priest.

And of course, you know, we're looking at this not just to understand politics, but Christ is both prophet, priest, and king.

He's the only one who has all of these offices together.

He's the only one we can trust with having all these offices together. Just because you're a king doesn't mean you can tell the priests or the prophets what to do.

So the Uzziah episode is extremely important. Basically what

Rutherford does, he takes the Deuteronomy 17, he takes the history of the kingship.

When Samuel makes Saul king, he lists a number, he gives a description of what the king will do, that the

Maxwell grocious types, they said, oh, this is establishing a normative guide if the king wants to take all your sons and daughters and have crazy high taxes.

He's allowed to do that. He has a right to do that. So that's one of the things. But basically every time he's coming up with these arguments, he'll run through all of these and think, well, what does that biblical passage say about that matter?

And he's, you know, I mean, I guess if we had a drinking game, it wouldn't be with anything.

Seriously, if we had like a coffee drinking game, you could have a, every time he says Uzziah, take a sip of your espresso.

But there's a lot of Uzziah references. So I don't know, some folks are like, yes,

I want to have some stogies and beer. But if you, there's an awful lot of references to Uzziah.

A lot, yeah. I mean, that repetition. And if I can go back to, Chris, I mean, you started in Deuteronomy 17.

I don't know if you want to return there or not, and even if we don't, but the examples of the anointing versus the actual empowerment and vice versa, where the role of the people becomes such a critical question for Rutherford, and he would elevate it and say, you're not a king until, as with David, you enter into a covenant with the people sort of thing.

And again, contextually, you've got the whole Scottish and English history with its own constitutional background, and that fact that the king doesn't just assume absolute power.

I mean, it's clear that he is limited in the English system, right?

And it sort of begs the question, scripturally, does he have to be, or can he just assume, as James would have argued, the divine right of kings kind of thing?

That's right. When David is anointed, when Saul is anointed, but it's very clear with David, David does not just walk in and assert his kingship directly.

I mean, he very pointedly has the opportunity to.

Okay, so the way that lots of kings behave, when they get the person they're trying to depose in their sights, when they get the person they think that they are properly situated to replace in their sights, they kill them.

Maybe a Jehu sort of. Yeah, that's how Jehu does it. That's how William the

Conqueror does it, killing Harold at the Battle of Hastings. That's how Henry VII does it, killing

Richard III. That's how countless numbers of... If you look at the

Northern Kingdom, it's got 10 separate dynasties. Every single one of which was founded by somebody who killed the last king from the predecessor.

None of whom, by the way, are listed in those godly king lists here. Yeah, yeah. So you might remember, you know, the

Southern Kingdom has some good kings of various levels of goodness.

About half of them are terrible. But the Northern Kingdom, every single one of them is terrible, including

Jehu, who's used by God as an instrument to punish the house of Omri and Ahab.

But it's just very clear from how David behaves that it is one thing to be told that you are the man for this job, and another to actually assume it.

What is involved in assuming it? It is not perfectly clear what exactly the people have to do to make someone a king.

We don't want to read... So this is a 17th century document. Rutherford is not a radical leveler.

So the levelers in the 1640s, they come in and they say, we need to have suffrage.

We need to have voting that is much more widespread. We shouldn't have any property requirements.

We shouldn't have any... I mean, they're trying to level a lot of distinctions. They say, you know, they sound a little bit like Americans of the 1820s.

All power comes from the people, and unless you get your power from a vote, a specific vote with ballots, telling you that you have authority, you can't exercise authority.

We don't want to read Rutherford anachronistically as some sort of radical proponent of democracy.

He's not saying that the people have to vote for a king, but the people are the ones over whom the king has authority.

And by recognizing the king's authority, or giving the king authority, by having that relationship of...

So a lot of times at the Times, they'll talk about the reciprocal duties of allegiance and protection.

By giving allegiance to the king, they become entitled to the king's protection.

And by protecting the people, the king becomes entitled to their allegiance. And this is, you know, when

Saul comes in and starts doing the job of the king, protecting them, that's when people start having to obey him to the extent that he's not acting unlawfully.

And doing so willingly. Yeah, and they do it so willingly. Right, right. It's not something... So the world of the

Old Testament, you know, people who don't actually read it carefully might say, well, it's just, you know, dog eat dog.

And there's this famous line from the... It's attributed to the

Athenians going to Sicily. So there's this line, the strong do what they will, and the weak endure what they must.

So you might think, well, it's just this, you know, barbaric, prehistoric, Stone Age nonsense where people are just fighting and just taking power.

That's not what's going on in the Old Testament. That's never... You know, kings of England, sometimes they take power violently and illegitimately sometimes, but they never on their face say, oh, yeah, what we're doing is just doing the things we can do because we're strong.

Might makes right. Might makes... Yeah, it's not a might makes right view of the world. And it's not, you know, it's also not the king just hearing from God or getting, you know, having a divine anointing that authorizes him just on that basis to go tell people what to do.

It's through lawful procedures, lawful... Just the law of the people submitting to the king under certain circumstances, but not every circumstance.

I think that's exactly right. And, you know, John's been preaching through the primacy of the moral law, one might say, in our own church services.

And it seems to me that that's another theme that sort of pervades Romans 13, as well as the treatment here of the king's...the

limits on the king's authority in both Old Testament and New, although, again, the examples are much more poignant and well -drawn out in the

Old Testament. But that there is a limit, clearly, right?

If all power is from God and the king's power is delegated, which clearly it is, then implicitly that means there have to be limits, right?

So I think Rutherford's foundation here is so much stronger than Maxwell's, ultimately.

And the difficulty comes, in my view, how you apply that, and as you were saying too in the

Old Testament examples, it's far from really explicit in every point. You just have to kind of infer a lot of principles from what we have played out in the actual examples.

Yeah, that's right. We don't have any, you know, explicit... It's not a black letter kind of situation.

There's not an official pronouncement from...God doesn't, you know, send a prophet to say, what my priest did here was proper.

And they have to infer, like, well, what's going on with this...you know, it's not a word, it's just the leprosy that Uzziah gets.

But I think it would be good, you know, we can look at the New Testament, and the two key passages, of course, are

Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, and see what his, you know, what about those,

Rutherford? And the basic point that he makes, it's pretty simple, it's just the difference between singular and plural.

So Romans 13, starting verse 1, let every person be subject to the governing authorities.

It's plural. Good. Okay? For there's no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

Those that exist have, you know, the plural. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what

God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. Okay, now, your translation in verse 2 is plural, mine is singular.

Oh my goodness! So whoever resists authority, but it's still sort of a generic authority, not the authority.

Okay, well, this is interesting. So we should say you've got the NAS 95, which is at the...certain

people very concerned about different versions of the NAS. This is the

English Standard version. Yeah. Rutherford does make the point about the plurality of the authorities.

And I think rightly so, and yeah, that becomes, again, another major sub -theme throughout this treatise, right?

Whether the king alone has that kind of authority from God, or do the lesser magistrates, the judges, and so forth, also enjoy that authority?

I should say, you know, even if it is singular, you can understand. So if you're out, you know, so you're in Rome, and you're looking at the authority around you, well, in one sense, you might say, well, who is the authority?

If you're looking for a person, you might say, well, the authority is the emperor. That's a bad guy.

Okay. In the 17th century, people would say, like, if you had a dime for every time these

Anglican folks supporting the Stuarts mentioned that Romans 13 was written when

Nero was emperor, you know, you could be rich. But if you're looking at authority around you, just as a quality, well,

Nero has some of it. His officers have some of it. And then, you know, later in the sentence, you know, the plural,

I think, thing comes in. But his point is, well, okay, the people of Scotland are supposed to be subject to the governing authorities, or the authority, however it's distributed.

Some of it is in this Stuart king, and some of it is in the Scottish parliament. So the lesser magistrates have an element of this as well.

And this is, I mean, even clearer, it's explicitly made in 1 Peter 2.

So 1 Peter 2, this is verse 13 and following, be subject for the

Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.

In Romans 13, it talks about the same thing. You have this standard of good and evil, which exists, and the secular authorities are supposed to enforce.

But it's very clear, you know, if the governor comes to you and says, well, you know, it's time to pay your taxes, the tax rate is this, you're not supposed to resist that governor.

But it's, oh, but the emperor said it was seven and a half percent, not eight and a half percent. You have to obey the governors as well.

And if the governors have authority to say that what the emperor has actually said is unlawful, it's going to also be, it's going to be a question.

It's going to be a contingent question whether the most prominent person has in fact behaved lawfully in giving orders to subordinates.

Of course, this is a world where you've got people hundreds of miles away. It's going to take a considerable amount of time just for information to get back.

So you have an inherent plurality. Between London and Scotland, you have the same obvious delay that is going to produce, you have a multiplicity authority just by technological imperative as much as anything.

But basically, Rutherford is going to give that explanation, that you have multiple authorities.

So if you're trying to explain why it's wrong for the Scottish Parliament to disagree with King Charles in 1638, you're going to have to do something other than just appeal to these things that explicitly have references to multiple authorities.

One big element of how Rutherford thinks about the

New Testament is to talk about flight from authority.

So a point he makes over and over, he says, if the authorities tell you to turn yourself in and you say no, but run somewhere else, that's disobeying them.

And it's not perfectly clear in Luke 13, but it, you know, so Luke 13, some people come to Jesus.

Pharisees don't come out too well in a lot of the New Testament, but these are some okay

Pharisees. So Luke 13, 31, at that very hour, some

Pharisees came and said to Jesus, get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you. And he said to him, go and tell that fox, behold,

I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow. On the third day, I finish my course. Is he fleeing

Herod like the Pharisees told him to do? Not perfectly obvious, but in Nazareth, he's a mob attempts to throw him off a brow.

Are they governing authorities? Not perfectly clear, but he does not have a problem with leaving.

And in Matthew 10, he says explicitly, if they persecute you in one town, flee to the next.

And then you have the example of Paul, you know, so Paul in Damascus, he goes right after his conversion, and the authorities in Damascus, I think it actually says the governor of Damascus is looking for Paul, and he sneaks out and is let out through a basket.

Dramatic fashion, yeah. So it's obvious just looking at the New Testament, what is their attitude toward the

Roman Empire? They're not running around attempting to overthrow it, but they also are not afraid to disobey its commands in response, in obedience to the command to preach the gospel to every creature, which they're given in Matthew 28.

And also they're willing to do so even though they don't have specific commands. So sometimes

Paul is very upfront, he's like, yeah, you know, arrest me. But sometimes he's not. That's right. And he doesn't, there's no indication that he has a specific command to leave

Damascus without turning himself in. No indication other than the general thing in Matthew 10, you know, that they're supposed to leave particular cities and go particular places.

But the early church didn't have a problem saying, I'm going to flee.

This is part of obeying the command in Acts 5, we must obey

God rather than men in certain circumstances. Didn't you take it, some of Maxwell's argument seems to have been, okay, you can flee, but what you can't do is actually take up arms.

And even, you know, we get into the defensive war kind of discussion here. And so Rutherford goes the extra mile again in looking, for instance, at David.

I mean, taking Goliath's sword, that isn't exactly just fleeing and taking no thought of a defensive taking up of arms.

I mean, literally, it was taking up arms. So there's that whole kind of sub -argument here too.

Yeah. So there's a bunch of gradations that people might try to make.

So fleeing and prevent, you know, doing things actively to prevent the government from doing things to you.

Taking defensive measures. So, you know, if you flee, you know, what can you do? Can you build yourself a fortress?

Okay. Can you, you know, put sharp sticks on the outside so that if people try to attack you, you know, they'll run it.

So there's kind of, you know, defensive measures that are like just purely a barrier, you know, defensive measures that might be painful to overcome.

Defensive measures about, you know, picking up a sword, you know, defensively and, you know, actually going out and using it to, you know, somebody comes to arrest you and picks up a sword.

Can you defend yourself? And these are questions that are still difficult questions of self -defense in both kind of domestic law, just the law of self -defense, and also the law of international war.

So the law is about preemptive self -defense. So there's a war raging in Israel right now.

A big, huge question. In 1967, the Six -Day War, they know an attack is coming, but Israel preemptively does it.

So there's all kinds of, I mean, it's a whole branch of ethics of, you know, when exactly is preemptive war allowed?

When is defensive force allowed? And Rutherford, over and over again, he says, this is a defensive war.

Charles is the one who started it. You started it. Yeah. Notwithstanding that, you're still acting against, when you're using force, really, anytime you're using force, you're using force to prevent somebody from attacking you.

It's not just to retaliate against an attack in the past. And the illustration

I always used to use when I was explaining this frequently in my philosophy days, somebody who's run out of bullets, okay?

So somebody who is shooting at you, maybe shooting arrows at you.

You see somebody coming at you, and he's got a bunch of arrows, and you've got a bunch of arrows too.

He shoots an arrow at you. You're like, ah, he's attacking me. He shoots another, ah. And you think, well,

I got to, you know, it's either kill or be killed here. I can take an arrow, and I can take him down before he shoots another.

What if he's just shot his last arrow, though? So you've got an arrow coming at you, and you could shoot the guy.

At that point, it's just retaliatory. So if it's just based on what he's done in the, if it's purely based on what he's done in the past, it's not actually defensive force.

You're not preventing him from attacking you further. You're just retaliating for what he's done in the past. And there's rules about international law about when retaliation as such is allowed.

But any time you're using force, you're acting in light of future things that somebody else might be doing.

So if people from Scotland are going to prevent the English army from imposing their bishops or doing whatever they want to do, they're acting against a future thing.

They're not merely acting in response to something in the past. So Rutherford doesn't get into that a lot, but he does repeatedly emphasize this is a defensive war.

One thing to remember in general about Rutherford's treatise, it's a very limited thesis.

So Calvin never said that just any lesser magistrate can at any time resist any unlawful authority.

Rutherford is not saying that just any Scotsman or any person or any official can resist any unlawful authority.

He's just saying in principle, it's possible for there be a situation where sometimes you can resist the authorities that are set above you.

Whether the 1638 situation was an instance of that, you've got to get a whole bunch of Scottish history, which he will do at the end.

But it depends on the particulars what kind of wars you can wage.

I think the analogy that's implicit in a lot of the talk of defensive war is just between boundaries between countries and boundaries inside a country.

So if you're a king of England, that doesn't give you authority to tell people in France what to do.

Nobody would think people in Paris have a duty to obey the king of England just because he's the governing authority.

He's the governing authority of a limited realm. Well, the

Scots say, literally within Britain, there's the boundary between England and Scotland.

But the Scottish, they say, yeah, he's the king of Scotland too. But within the sphere of governmental authority in Scotland, there are these boundaries.

It's just as real a boundary. It might be a little harder to discern as the English Channel. And if you step across a boundary illegally, you're going to subject yourself to the permissibility of defensive force against that, even if it means assembling an army.

And in fact, I think one of the principles, again, that kind of undergirds his argument is he refers basically to natural law and the right of a man to protect himself and his family.

And when you're invading my sphere, I have every right to resist, at least in some comparable fashion, as you say, whether it's, you know, lethal force and so forth you can get into.

But that is universally acknowledged, at least at Rutherford's time.

Today, we have disputes about natural law and so forth too. But it, you know, there's a simplicity in that argument that sort of carries through and everybody will go, well, of course.

And he often cites the extremes of Charles taking up the band of bloodthirsty

Irishmen that are coming and literally invading our people. So there is, as you say, that theoretical side that he's talking about maybe someday.

On the other hand, they're living through the actual war, the English Civil War and so forth, that is waging and raging all around them.

That's right. And they, so everybody would acknowledge there's a natural right of self -defense. If there is no government, you're going to have to do that yourself.

The question is the extent to which, when you've got a government, people have either explicitly or implicitly given up their natural right of self -defense.

And the Stewart argument, the Maxwell argument, is you've given it up to the extent the government says.

Absolutely, really. Yeah, in terms of self -defense against the government, you've really given it up entirely.

And Rutherford's point is, no, there's nothing in the establishment of a government that has affected any kind of alienation like that.

And he even goes so far as to say it is impossible for one to cede that absolute authority.

It is inherent in man to retain the right of self -defense. Yeah, if the government is attacking you with sufficient illegality and sufficient immorality, they simply in virtue of that fact have returned you to a state of nature.

So if you have the right of self -defense in a state of nature, you would have it under the extreme circumstances in which the government returns you to one.

I don't know if there's anything else in the book itself that we want to get into.

I just want to mention, I found it amusing, one of the questions, and I didn't write down which one it was, about two -thirds of the way, three -quarters of the way through, asks the age -old question, what is the best form of government?

And one would think, Rutherford, being a Scotsman and all, would say, of course, monarchy, but he doesn't actually say that.

And so he is keenly aware of the limitations of the monarchy, especially when they assume an absolutist sort of approach to rule and brings in some of the principles, again, that our founders,

I think, built off of and the notion of checks and balances, obviously not his language, but the idea that one man,

I think Calvin said something similar, vested with a more or less absolute authority as a sinful fallen creature is a very dangerous thing.

And so there's a lot of that, maybe we should, this is a transition moment to talk about the legacy of Lex Rex and how others have built on Rutherford's work.

One other thing I just want to say, I think this was somewhat historical, contextual, and so forth, but the fact is

Lex Rex was never formally refuted, right? They wanted to burn it, not actually answer his argument.

So it's a curious sort of historical oddity as it fell out.

That's right, that's right. So we can, so, you know, this is 1644, we can kind of just, you know, get a little more of the historical narrative.

The English are at this point, so in the subtitle, it says, you know, are the

Scots justified in coming to the aid of their English brothers and helping?

So the English and Scots work together in the First English Civil War. The Scots actually capture the king and then give the, so this is

Charles I, give the king over to Parliament. Then some people in Scotland decide, wait a minute, you've taken the king captive?

He's not going to act as a free agent at all? I thought what we were trying to do was get him to behave, to be king in a proper manner.

Some Scots fight on behalf of Charles I in the Second English Civil War.

I mean, I guess it's, you know, there's, it's Scots versus English then. Then in 1649, the

Parliament decides, well, you know, we think that Charles I is guilty of treason, he's guilty of high treason, which traditionally is treason against the king.

And a bunch of people say, how can the king be against himself? So they say, well, it also includes treason against the state.

So in 1649, they put him to death. And Parliament, the English Parliament, at that point says, and you know what, we don't, we don't want to have a monarch anymore.

It's useful at certain times, and this is no longer one of them. Rutherford, when he talks about what's the best form of government, and he says, sometimes it's monarchy, sometimes it's not.

And the English Parliament says, we think it's time for it not to be.

So if you go around it, our family visited England last summer, a year and a bit ago, and you go to lots of places, and they say, oh yeah, you know, in 1649, they destroyed a bunch of basic artifacts of the monarchy.

All the current stuff is just from 1660. So Charles is put to death, then

Charles II, a bunch of Scotsmen say, oh well, we've never wanted to get rid of, we never wanted to get rid of the king.

We've got a new king. It's Charles II. Charles II actually then fights alongside certain

Scots in the Third English Civil War. And if you look at the history of the

Scottish folks, I mean, it is, I mean, at a distance of several hundred years, it's perhaps more amusing than it was at the time.

But very, very, very sharp disputes among, so these are among people who, all of whom want to fight on behalf of Charles II against the

English, but some of them say, we should not have been fighting against the

English on behalf of Charles I, and all those people who did have got to be excluded from the army.

And Rutherford, he's in the party at that point that wants to, I mean, a bunch of all the

Scots want to fight against the English, but he wants to do so without the assistance of the people who fought on behalf of Charles I.

So, it's the kind of attitude that makes it difficult to win a war when you're excluding people on these kinds of grounds.

But it absolutely fits with his just fierceness in pursuing the right as he sees what the right thing to do is.

Short story about the Third English Civil War is Cromwell wins huge decisive victories, both on September 3rd, so September 3rd, 1650,

September 3rd, 1651, and then unites all three, you know,

Cromwell's in charge. He works with Parliament, gets upset with Parliament not dissolving itself and calling another

Parliament, so leaves. And then we have other things, these Cromwellian Parliaments, and it's interesting.

Cromwell is, I was in England one time just reading this massive biography of Cromwell and somebody came up, this is in Cambridge where Cromwell was from, he was one of their heroes, like, oh,

Cromwell, he's just a good guy, a bit of a tyrant. So I thought it was wonderfully charming that someone could be a bit of a tyrant, but also be seen as a good guy.

There's a lot more religious liberty under Cromwell than there is at any other time. Cromwell is, he's an independent, so a lot more like us than like the

Presbyterians, but he is in charge, he's a very decisive ruler, just he's able to set things up and like, yeah, you have religious liberty, you can discuss what you want, you know, as long as I'm perfectly confident that I can defeat you people in battle, which

I am, it's not going to be a problem.

But when he dies in 1658, leaves his son, who is just nowhere near as able politically or militarily, he actually has a son -in -law,

Ireton, who is really very, very talented, that initially in the 1640s, a lot of people think could succeed

Cromwell, he actually dies in, I think, 1651, at some point during the

Irish campaign, during which, of course, Cromwell does things that cause him to be remembered quite, quite, quite, quite poorly among the

Irish. But siege warfare was desperately brutal in the day.

At any rate, Cromwell dies in 1658, there's no good solution about what to do next, the army tries to take over, but that's not a good solution, you don't have any good leader of the army.

Eventually, the Scots say, well, you know, we were fighting for this Charles II person, and some remnants of the long parliament, they say, well, let's pretend that all this stuff, all these new parliaments didn't really happen, let's get the remaining members of the long parliament to call back

Charles II. And Charles II says, oh, great, great, great, I'd love to be king, makes a bunch of promises that end up not being fulfilled to the likes of people like Rutherford.

So Rutherford at this point, and everybody knows that this book is the leading intellectual justification for what kicked us all off in 1638.

Charles II, rounds up all the regicides from 1649 that he can, a bunch of them run off to America.

If you go to Yale, a lot of the tours like, oh, these are where the regicides came, and one went that way, and we named a road after him, and one went this other way, we named a road after him.

So you got the three regicides that came there. They dig up Cromwell's bones and execute him, saying he was the traitor.

So when Charles II comes back in, in 1660, this becomes -

Public enemy number one. Public enemy number one. Rutherford is dying, and he says, well,

I'm going to meet my judge, and adds a little snark.

The comment about, I'm going to meet a judge, I'm going to someplace, meet someone that you're not going to meet, it has this kind of, it's an odd cocktail of both his really,

I mean, just sweet longing to be with Jesus. You read his letter, I mean, he's just, it's just so, so beautiful, so spiritually helpful.

But then he adds in this little snark, which is, it was part of the time that it was, you know, they were fighting about things that they really cared about.

They cared about whether the gospel would be able to be preached in a pure form, without distractions, and without formalism that caused people to have false assurance.

It was really, it was, this is a deadly serious matter. But Rutherford is off the scene, and everybody knows the ideas at this point very, very well.

So there's not, there's just no hope of eradicating Rutherfordism. No putting my genie back in the bottle.

But they certainly can get, you know, the bulk of the nation in the 1660s thinks, yeah, we really, we were, we went overboard in trying to completely run things on a kind of a fiercely biblical model.

There's just too much disagreement among the different parties that didn't like Charles to really have any consensus.

If Cromwell had somehow been able to live for 60 years past taking power, he could have, might have been able to establish a culture that would have been stable, but five years was nowhere near enough.

And then in 1683, you've got, so Charles II, he has many children, but none of them with the queen, unfortunately.

And his brother is set to succeed him. There's a big fight about, so the

Whigs, so the Whigs are basically the Puritan party. The Whigs and Tories are the two big parties.

The Whigs attempt to get James II excluded from the succession, but they fail.

And in 1683, with James II about to, it's clear

Charles II is not going to survive that much longer. James II is getting ready.

So this is an explicit Roman Catholic getting ready to take the throne. Charles II is, everybody agrees, he's kind of a cryptographic.

He takes Catholic rights on his deathbed in 1685 from his brother.

That's when the last book burning happens in England. And among the books that they cast into the flames is

Lex Rex. It's been illegal to have it, but they think, oh, let's see if we can find some people with copies and burn those.

The James II administration is terrified about the idea that if the king acts unlawfully, sometimes it might be okay to resist him.

So very much, this is part of the idea. I mean, right off in 1685, you have an initial revolt against James II, just saying he's an illegal king.

It's illegal to have anybody who is submitted to Rome administering a church that is founded on the principles that it is.

1689, or really 1688, Rutherfordism is a very, very big part of the resistance to James once the, a bunch of details about 1688.

But you have a bunch of bishops who are told to read a statement, they refuse to, and then you have the trial of the bishops.

So it was June 30th, 1688, the acquittal of the bishops. And when they acquit the bishops, a bunch of James II people like, okay, looks like the lesser magistrates are starting to speak.

And there's, for very, very, very complicated reasons, James II's daughter is married to this fellow,

William of Orange, who is in the Netherlands. So he's called the stadtholder.

And he is interested in becoming king of England, mostly so he can put together a coalition to oppose

Louis XIV. So whole bunch of very, very, very complicated politics, and double crossings.

Actually, Winston Churchill has an ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, that behaves in,

I mean, Churchill, when he tells us his history, he actually writes a biography of this fellow and puts as happy a face as he can on it.

But there's double crossing with, you know, wheels within wheels within wheels of the double crossing.

But William III comes in, he comes, he actually lands on the 5th of November, which is the anniversary of the

Guy Fawkes plot from 1605. But he comes in and asserts authority to displace

James II on the base of James II acting unlawfully. And Rutherfordism is a huge, huge part about that.

So the Whig view of government really becomes the established doctrine in 1689.

So a lot of Reform Baptists, of course, you think, 1689? I remember that year. You know, if you're going around to Reform Baptist churches and you see a four -digit key code around the back, it no longer will work for our church.

But your first try probably should be 1689. Because when

William III comes in, suddenly you get a lot more religious liberty.

So the Second London Baptist Convention, it was written 1677. But it wasn't safe to publish and, you know, put a whole bunch of names subscribing to a confession in 1677.

You got to wait until you get William III around.

He's not a Baptist, but he's allowing the Baptist to get together. And that's when Rutherford comes out.

And hence the historical term for that ascension, the

Glorious Revolution. Yeah. So that gets established without any fighting because James realizes he's not going to fight.

He heads off to Ireland. And there are some battles, but nowhere near as violent as the 1640s.

But then you've got America. So you've got, so America, you know, what is

America? So a lot of these folks, the basic political outlook of these folks, at least,

I mean, there's differences among different parts of America, but especially the people who come to like Massachusetts in the 1620s.

What are they coming to Massachusetts to do? They're trying to do in America what their friends were trying to do under the

Stuarts and trying to prevent further erosion in the Elizabethan settlement, but also saying, oh, well, if we go to America, we can really set up things in a fully biblical way where we're taking all of the practices of Rome or Rome's descendants and getting rid of them if they're

So in 1689, they're very happy. So, you know, in the 1640s, when, you know, there's a bunch of people who, you know, in America, they're paying attention.

There's a very big difference between Massachusetts and Virginia. So in the 1640s, when the

Puritans are on the ascendancy in England, whole bunches of people leave England and head to Virginia.

So Virginia, you know, the team mascot is the Cavaliers.

Well, those are the people fighting against the Puritans in England. So you have a very different mix of attitudes in Virginia and Massachusetts, but the kind of general wiggery of the

English folks. General wiggering in the future. Yeah, really, it spreads through all of the

American political culture. So a lot of them call themselves American wigs. So, and if you look at the

Declaration of Independence, a bunch of the stuff in it is basically

Rutherfordian. So when they say, so he has a statement that makes several times, all men are born free.

And what he means by that is people don't come out of the womb born to be king.

There are people who come out of the womb with a hereditary claim based on contingent legal arrangements with a claim to be king once their father dies, but there aren't people who are natural kings.

So when Jefferson says people are not born naturally wearing saddles or spurs, you know, natural slaves to be ridden or spurs to be natural masters, it's very similar to what

Rutherford is saying. And, you know, of course, Jefferson doesn't follow through on those principles. Thomas Paine, he's not,

I would say, not a friend of our way of thinking. I mean, he's fiercely atheistic, but one of the things he says, he says, in America, the law is king.

Not quite the same thing that Rutherford, but there's like people who heard that, no question they would say, ah, in America, Lex is

Lex. Okay. So he said we shouldn't have a king at all. You know, the king should just be the law.

But lots of people take that view. But if you look at the argument of the

Declaration of Independence, all people are created equal, i .e. the king can't simply in virtue of being born a king.

The rest of the argument is essentially the 18th century version of Rutherford's argument from the 17th century.

And they make explicit what was implicit in Rutherford's teaching that the people in America have the right to alter or abolish the government when it becomes destructive of the ends of government.

That's right, right, right, right. So really remarkable document. Yeah. So if you really want to understand the

Declaration of Independence, you've got to understand at least something of the Rutherfordian water in which everybody is swimming at the time.

So, you know, so one question sometimes our kids ask, well, why was it okay? You know,

Romans, you read Romans 13 and you think, why exactly was it okay for us to revolt against King George?

The Declaration of Independence doesn't have scriptural citations for all these things, doesn't go through lesser magistrates, doesn't go through all of the terminology.

But if you know, the better you know Rutherford, the better you'll be able to understand the argument that Jefferson is putting together.

Jefferson, you know, he comes up with a lot of beautiful language, but really he's working in an environment where he knows he's got to tailor an argument to people who are far more biblically committed than Jefferson is.

So it really is a far more Rutherfordian document than probably

Jefferson would have done himself. I'm not sure if, you know, there's a bunch of fascinating studies about his first draft and the final thing.

I don't know if, you know, if specifically there's elements. But in the environment, this is what makes

America. And our current system, our current constitutional system, where we've got certain powers given to the executive, legislative, and judiciary, certain powers given to primary executive officers and subordinate executive officers, certain powers given to the federal government, certain powers given to states and local governments.

That is based on the reason that you have a system where one of those authorities can legitimately claim to disagree with another without being, without cutting itself off from the system.

That's a Rutherfordian thought. And you'll find people in the 1790s, just in the very first earliest cases of judicial review, they say, well, in America, we don't believe in this passive obedience.

Passive obedience was, it's kind of a funny term to unpack, but it's basically the Stuart doctrine that everybody has to obey the king.

The king is the only one who gets to decide whether this is sufficiently unlawful for you to rebel.

So we have judicial review. Legislature passes a statute, judges can say, well, you might've thought it was constitutional, but it's contrary to our best view of what the constitution means.

That is a form of, I don't know if a lesser magistrate, another magistrate saying that in this circumstance, we have authority to say that you've acted illegally, acted contrary to the constitution.

And, you know, as in the 1640s, there's going to be all kinds of contingent questions about exactly who has jurisdiction over what, who is, you know, what powers do we have?

How, you know, how clear a case does it have to be to say something's unconstitutional? That kind of question. Exactly.

And if I may bring it up right to the modern day, I mean, again, in a lot of ways, this is not so theoretical for me.

I have clients that are in jail right now for opposing the laws that permit the slaughter of children in the womb, right?

I have others who have been penalized civilly, not criminally, for quoting

Romans 13 and then asserting a right to, if circumstances were such, to take the law into their own hands when, again, the government does not enforce laws against murder.

And then there's the other side, as Romans 13 is so explicit about the role of government, right, to reward the good and punish the evil.

Certainly a pretty compelling argument could be made today that our government does precisely the opposite.

We reward the lawless and penalize the lawful. And so the question sort of starts to take on some flesh and bones about when, if ever, is it appropriate to resist actively, and perhaps with force of arms, a government that's out of control?

Steve, I think that question is a great way for us to kind of narrow our focus some, from the big picture of the historic and intellectual things that were occurring when

Rutherford wrote, even the national and international application of those principles, which are all important.

But what about the believers? And what about believers in our particular day?

And so I do want us to kind of bring it down into some more particular application.

And I think we have to be clear that just because our authorities that are ruling over us at whatever level are perhaps completely ignorant of the fundamental principles that Rutherford pressed.

I mean, obviously, they've probably not read Lex Rex, they've not heard of Lex Rex, but they may be ignorant of the fundamental principles that they should not be ignorant of.

Just because of that ignorance, that doesn't give us a right to kind of mockingly reject their authority.

Even the fact that they are not believers doesn't give us a right to treat them with disdain and rebel.

But there are times where the believer must, through careful, prayerful, biblical wisdom, must respond in a way that the ruling powers that be are going to find it's a bit rebellious.

And of course, there are thousands of ways to look at that. So, let's think of three areas that we can just kind of talk about in our application.

There's the civil response of the believers. There is an individual or personal response of the believers, and there's some overlap there.

And there is what we might call an ecclesiological response of the churches in the land.

So, civil response. Your whole adult life has been devoted to believers taking a stand in a way that gives push back to moral decay in a nation.

And we belong to a nation, which we're very grateful for, that still allows, they still offer us this means of, in a sense, standing against the rules or the choices of our leaders in a way that is appropriate.

And Christians, we feel, should take that opportunity in the right way of making a civil response to unjust action.

So, I mean, what would you say in that category? You know, how do you explain that category to people that may not agree that it exists?

You know, one of the principles that I think overrides everything in our lives is loving our neighbors as ourselves, right?

Well, there's certainly that civic application of that principle in the context that we find ourselves in America, where failure to speak out, maybe to address your congressmen and women, to even take cases to court, where you're not doing it for selfish reasons, but you're doing it because we were discussing in the break how

Paul would sometimes stand up for his rights, sometimes not, and it's not easy to take a universal rule here, but where to do so is to help your neighbor and reestablish a principle, a rule of law, that will protect not just yourself in your given particular circumstances, but others.

Classic example. We just had a lengthy discussion this week regarding street preachers and the basic right to proclaim the gospel in the public ways.

It's no surprise to you that worldwide you see a real kind of wrenching of and removal of that right, and even in America, more and more, when you speak out and proclaim certain biblical truths, they are deemed absolutely off -limits, offensive to the sensitivities of our citizenry today, and you're not even allowed to proclaim what the

Bible says. At the same time, some of those folks, they're looking to be as offensive as they can.

Precisely, they think, I want to be able to assert my First Amendment. Or the thought that being offensive would be the most direct route to effectiveness.

It sometimes is the most direct route to a court case, but that can't be our goal.

I think we have examples in Scripture there. Let's say one basic principle for applying that is civil response of rejecting immoral laws or immoral choices in our government, local or national.

I think one of the driving motivations would be, I am thinking of someone other than just me.

When you're pressing a case for a person who is presently in jail because of the way that they stood against abortion, which we feel is a very wicked freedom in our country.

You're pressing the case, but you're not just doing it because Joe's in jail, and Joe's not with his family, and Joe's losing income.

It's not just Joe. There is a principle, and there is something larger than the individual, and so the civil response is for an individual, but it's for something larger.

Let's take it down to the personal level because you mentioned Paul. There's a blending at times between the two.

When we think about personal responses to unjust authority or to immoral exercise of authority, so this could be a president.

It could be the Congress. It could be the judges. It could be the local government. It can be your employer, your boss.

What do you do? I think there's why we can't certainly give 100 steps to take, so we have to give principles.

I think one principle is the question, what's really at stake here?

Because there are some things that are at stake which are of lesser importance, or at least they should be to us as believers, and there are some things that are at stake which may not be easily recognizable immediately in the situation, but if you'll calmly kind of step back and not have an emotional reaction to a situation, so let's say at work, you step back, and the authority at work has done something.

You step back from self, and you look and say, okay, what's at stake here? If it's only my personal preferences, even if it's unjust treatment,

I may as a believer see that there is a larger thing at stake, and that is my opportunity to witness to a higher governmental authority,

Christ Himself, so I belong to the higher king. My citizenship is a kingdom that will never end.

I'm also an American, and I'm also under this local employer or boss. When the local employer or boss makes my life difficult,

I can claim my rights. Maybe I shoot above my local boss, and I go to his boss, and I get this taken care of, but in doing so, would

I forfeit my opportunity to show people that while I do value my personal rights in this situation,

I gladly lay them aside without complaint in order to show that there's something so much greater than me getting treated rightly.

I think our sense of personal honor is a highly motivating factor, and just the outrage that we have, or that everybody has, when they're insulted.

That's not something, if you look at Paul, you look at the New Testament, look at Acts, Paul really,

I mean, he just delights in insults to the extent that it allows him to have a platform to explain the gospel.

I mean, he's like, yeah, everybody thinks this gospel is offensive, of course they're gonna insult it.

If I've got a better platform, I am just seeking, not my honor, I'm seeking the honor of King Jesus.

But you look at, oh my goodness, what will set things off in a workplace?

And I mean, I've experienced this myself. I find myself far, far more upset about somebody insulting me than doing things that, you know, pragmatically might be far, far more important.

So I think not being motivated by, and I'm really just, I mean, talking about things that, bad motivations that I have personally, being motivated by anger, being motivated by having been insulted, that's a very, very powerful, but those are motives that shouldn't, to the extent that we can mortify them, that I can mortify them,

I've got to just extirpate them from the way I think about relating to authorities.

That's not to say the authority, I mean, authorities, you know, should, I mean, showing honor to those whom honor is due, that's one of the

Romans 13 principles. And I think there are lots of constitutional principles about government, it's being a serious constitutional problem to dishonor people, to insult people.

But to the extent that that's my personal motivation, it is highly unlikely to do any good, except insofar as God draws straight lines with crooked sticks.

It's a way to be a yeah.

I think that, let's think about Paul. So Paul is a

Roman citizen. Paul is a Roman citizen by birth, even though he's

Jewish. He's not a Roman citizen by purchasing it, as we see others are in the

New Testament. And so, you know, he's a bit of a, it's a bit of an elite level in that Jewish world, and especially as he travels the

Roman empire, taking the gospel to these cities, he has rights that not everybody has that he meets.

And he can call upon those rights at any point, but he so rarely does.

We might not even notice that he has these rights if it weren't for Philippi, and then later in his life toward the end.

At Philippi, he is unjustly grabbed and beaten and thrown into prison. No due process.

Well, you can do that. You can do that to a lot of people, but you cannot do that in Philippi to a

Roman citizen. So you can mistreat some people, but you don't mistreat the Roman citizen. And Philippi is a

Roman colony, and so, you know, that's a certain level of privilege that not every town enjoyed.

And so, you know, they're under scrutiny. If Paul says, your Roman colony mistreated a

Roman, you know, then the local leaders, they're in hot water.

So he's thrown into prison. They find out he is a, you know, they find out he's a

Roman citizen. So they've done it all wrong legally, and he could really make their life miserable.

So they try to shoo him out quietly, and he says, no, we're going to do this publicly. Why is this the first time in the book of Acts that we hear

Paul claim his right as a Roman citizen? And I think the answer is that in other places, being willing to be beaten to the point of being left for dead, he chooses that as the platform to share the majesty and the realities of Jesus of Nazareth.

He takes that terrible cost that unjustly is laid on him and pays it to bring the gospel to them in a way that can never be forgotten.

That man was beaten and left for dead to tell me about Jesus. When he could have, as a

Roman, we could all be in jail. So at some times, he uses the suffering, which when he writes to Philippi, he says, it has been granted to you.

Faith has been granted to you. That's a gift from God. You couldn't believe on your own, and suffering for Jesus.

Those are both gifts from God. So sometimes he sees it clearly. This is God's choice that I be mistreated, and I will use this as the billboard to show the gospel in a way that can never be forgotten.

Well, other times, Philippi, he claims his rights, and I think that that has to do with the greater benefit.

What's at stake? Not Paul's pride or Paul's comfort, but he's about to leave a city which has just really mistreated a person for telling them the gospel.

How will the people he leaves behind be treated? So he's going to be leaving, and he lets them know, you have mistreated a

Roman, and I have not pressed this to your great disadvantage. I think it sets a different atmosphere in Philippi between local authorities and the believers.

Their man didn't press the authority. These are people that we mistreated the

Roman with, and so it's like don't press that. One example from the 18th century, the revival men, the

Calvinistic Methodists, they were called. So forget the denomination Methodism. So in the 18th century, the great awakening that occurred there is called the evangelical revival.

So you have men like Whitefield and Rowland and Harris who were Welshmen.

We don't know much about them usually. In Wales, there was pretty violent opposition, and mobs were often gotten going by local magistrates.

So local magistrates felt loyalty to the Church of England. Now all these revival men were

Church of England men, but they were presented in public opinion and gossip as anti -Church of England.

There were even books written against Whitefield saying he actually was in the pay of the French because his preaching was undermining local stability because you're attacking our church, and that's the other great stabilizing factor.

We have monarch and we have church. So our local church, which everybody, 96 % of the people in the early 18th century throughout

England and Wales, 96 % are Anglican. Only 4 % are dissenters, Baptist or Presbyterian congregations.

So you're starting this upheaval in society to make us weak so that the

French can march back in. So the local magistrates, out of a personal kind of nostalgic attachment to their state church, they oftentimes got the crowds riled up, and the kind of the thuggish guys in town would be given free ale.

They got drunk, and then they were pointed at the Methodists. Go get them, and they would attack and throw rocks and rotten fruit and beat people gathering to hear

Whitefield preach. Well, over and over it occurs, and the Calvinistic Methodists, the

Anglicans preaching in the revival, never pressed their opportunity to take these people to court and get them in trouble because it is against the law.

Until one time in Wales, it got pretty bad, and they decided we will press our rights here, but the reason was not

Whitefield or Harris or the other men thought, you know, I'm tired of having rotten fruit thrown at me when

I preach, so I don't have to have it. I could press my rights, and then everyone else would be scared of mistreating me.

So that was not it, but they pressed the rights because they saw that there was an increased violence in the crowds stirred up by local sheriffs or local lords and ladies, and we need to go ahead and check that for the sake of the churches by saying, hey, we have a right to take you to court, and you will be in trouble for this because it's not legal for you to do this to us.

So, you know, what's at stake? Personal rights or the good of the church or the reputation of Christ?

Yeah, a lot of very similar questions. I mean, there's just no clear -cut, categorical answer.

In the, just the missionary movement in various parts of the British Empire. So when you show up,

I mean, Spurgeon talks about this a lot in his sermons. He's talking about, I mean, he's excited that the gospel is going at different places, but he knows that all of these people have a big question.

To what extent are they going to rely on just British forces of arms in requiring people at various places in the empire that, you know, the empire has all kinds of different levels of amounts of authority.

To what extent are we going to attempt to get the gospel to be spread or have the freedom to be spread through force of arms?

And some, you know, very, very difficult questions. So if you look at just the 19th century history, it is...

Yeah, Hudson Taylor in China is an example. The Boxer Rebellion and how he chooses not and feels it was a great error, though well -meant, it was a great error to lean on Britain to protect the missionaries because when the

British armies left, when the British Navy leaves, you know, the local Christian missionary is despised.

You know, you're not representing Christ, you're representing Britain. And Britain came and squashed us, you know, for your sake.

And now they're gone and we hate you. We won't kill you, but we hate you and we hate your gospel. Yeah, so it does take biblical wisdom to know when am

I standing for the sake of the honor of Christ and the good of others and when am

I standing for my own personal preferences? Because it is easy as a believer for us to not think through those things honestly and to say, well, because they're mean to me at work, because my school has kind of, you know, because I'm religious and I go to a certain school and then

I suffer some kind of consequences of being Christian. Well, they're against Jesus, so I have to stand for Jesus.

No, you're really standing for yourself. So like you said, it takes a lot of honest self -examination and it takes a lot of wisdom.

I would say a general test for any of us would be this. Am I keenly interested in Christ being pleased and honored in every area of my life?

Am I as keen in every other area as I am that Christ in me, that Christians be treated right at my work, at my college, and in my town, you know?

And if I'm super zealous about me having my rights protected at work, but I'm not so zealous about Christ's rights when

I'm sitting in front of my television at night, I think that we're self -deceitful and that is always a possibility for all of us.

So, you know, it's good to ask your honest Christian friends who will be honest with you, you know, do you think this is wise?

Will this lead to the honor of Jesus? Or should I allow personal hardship in order to show the world there is something that makes me so deeply happy, some person that you don't know.

Any religion can bark against the government and complain, but only the believer who is so happy in Christ can say right is right and wrong is wrong and you have done wrong, but I am so happy in the

King and in a kingdom that cannot be shaken. I'm not going to press my rights in this situation, but other times

I must. And I mean, I don't know if we're going to end with quoting the sands of time are sinking, which is based on Rutherford's stuff, but I mean that is what we've got to have.

Keeping our eye on the ball is just absolute prescription for sanity with respect to everything going on in the world.

Yeah, what's at stake? Understanding just how temporary all of this stuff is, that we're not looking at the bride's eyes, not her garments, but her dear bridegroom's face.

Looking at Jesus instead of the gifts that he gives to us, the good things that we have from Christ, the good things we have from a relatively, and in certain ways, good civil government as much wickedness as it is.

I mean, we have a lot of corruption here, but so much less than certain countries. I mean, it is mind -boggling how corrupt so many governments are, and having the blessing of that is great.

Having the opportunity still to send the gospel forth is great, but that's just all our garments.

That's just gifts that we get from Jesus. I mean, that's not Jesus. He's so much more important than anything he does through us or anything he gives to us.

Yeah, I think another motivation that we have to be careful with, and this goes hand in glove with the confusion of my personal rights with Christ's honor.

Since I'm a Christian, if I'm mistreated, it's easy to think, oh, it's Jesus, and I have to stand up for Jesus.

It reminds me of pastoring a little church before I came to North Mississippi some years before, and we had a group of older gentlemen that lived right next to the church, and then there was the church, and it was a rural church.

So, you know, there's a lot of grass around the church. We had, you know, a number of acres, and there was just a thin strip between the edge of the church and then the edge of these three older bachelors.

They were all probably in their 70s, and they were all lost, so I would, as the pastor, I would go visit these old men, and they had no interest in Jesus, and part of their complaint was, you know, well, we know those people at that church.

They're mean, etc. You know, and I'd say, well, you know, really, that's not the question. All right, so let's go back to you and Christ. Well, these old men, their little driveway, they had their three little old men cars, and they were in the driveway, and it's kind of hard to get out of your narrow driveway, so what they would do is they'd make a

U -drive. They'd cut through about 30 foot of church grass into the church parking lot and then go out.

Well, when it gets wet, you know, when a lot of rain comes, then we'd have these ruts in the church yard. Then comes the deacons meeting where the deacons were so upset, and their personal fury, their feeling of insult was that this is

God's grass, and we must protect it. So I said, actually, guys,

I have another idea, and this is the reason I didn't last very long. So I said to these deacons, who in a sense meant well, but I think they were misguided.

I said, guys, here's what. I think this is a better way to handle it. I'm going to go talk to those men. They go, that's good.

You go tell them. I say that because we're believers in Christ and how

He's treated us, we want them to know that not only are they free, because what they voted to do was build a fence, not only are they free to go through our grass, but we want them to make use of our grass when it's better for them, and because we're

Christians, and we're not selfish, and oh, they got so angry, and I said, and I'm going to tell them, you, you, you, you talked about it, and you want them to use that grass, and I said, and I will also mention that when it's wet, it makes it really difficult to mow our grass if there's these big ruts, so if they could just be aware of that, you know, so that was,

I didn't have any authority as a Baptist pastor to tell the deacons that I called for the vote. I was the only vote.

I voted yes, and then I went over and told, and I went over and told the old men that you might be surprised, but those old men over there, they'd love for you to use that grass, because they're

Christians, which of course, I think was a bit deceitful, so I need to repent of that. All right, so one other area before I want

Steve to talk to, so I want to say one more thing about the personal, and then Steve, I want you to talk to us about an ecclesiological response.

The personal, sometimes there is the fear of failure, of future greater difficulties if we don't stand against present problems, so okay, so there's a moral slide here.

Stand against it now, or it'll be worse later, and that certainly is something we don't want to be, you know, the frog in the boiling pot.

All right, but then under that general umbrella, I find that other things get shoved under there that probably shouldn't have been under there, not for the believer, and that is if I don't stand for my personal comforts now, then next year or my children's lifetime or my grandchildren, their personal comforts might be taken away, but we say it in a very religious way to make it sound noble, so let me get, you know, lose half our following.

In COVID, there was a lot of reaction against masks. I asked one of our friends who's a pastor, and I won't give his name because I didn't ask his permission, so I sent him a text, and I said, is

COVID really throwing a lot of like, you know, grenades into the church, you know, where people are kind of disagreeing, and we didn't really have much of that at all, but is it doing that to you?

He said, man, he wrote back in his text, greatest masks, greatest persecution the church has ever suffered, you know, obviously it was tongue -in -cheek.

I called another pastor friend of mine. Are you guys having a lot of division? I hear of churches having a lot of division during COVID.

He wrote back, and he said, man, my entire week pastoral labors is devoted to this problem because he said half the people in the church want to get on the crazy bus, and he said the other half are driving the crazy bus, so he's actually a very funny guy, so during COVID, masks were required, and I want to be very specific so as not to get everyone angry.

When masks were required for going into a business, okay, so the poor business owner, he can't help what his government has said, so he's got to put a sign up, and he's expected to do it.

All right, so you look, you walk up, and there's this sign. You have to wear a mask. I hated masks, you know, personally, so uncomfortable, but I felt for the poor businessman.

I thought, so if I was that guy, the law of love would say, why don't I wear a mask without complaint, so I'll walk in without saying, this is stupid, you know, why do you got that sign up?

Why don't you stand against tyrants, you know, so I thought the poor guy just wants to survive COVID without going belly up and bankrupt, so I put the mask on.

I come in and act like it's not a problem. Well, some people felt the argument was this.

No, that was stupid because if you let the government tell you to wear a mask, which the person felt was clearly governmental overreach, so whatever your view of that, then the next step is they'll take your

Bible, and I thought, wait, wait, wait, so fear of a possible outcome, does that legitimize any old rebellious attitude in the present moment, and I think that it takes a lot of wisdom, but sometimes we don't.

That's a wrong response because we belong to the God who is ruling over other things, everything, and He's allowed us to be requested to wear a mask at Walmart.

That doesn't mean that tomorrow morning they'll take the Bible away from my grandchildren, kind of a thing, so you have to be careful.

Perspective is just so important. You gotta see all this stuff in light of God's sovereignty, knowing more history, and so the fact that so many of our friends know about three minutes of history.

You just think of a guy standing in front of a hill, a small hill, and he's like, this is a hill?

Does nobody see this hill? I can't understand why nobody's feeling that, and like, yeah, okay, we see it.

Back up historically and see the bigger picture. It doesn't mean that that's not important, but put it in perspective, and then you see the

Himalayas or the Rockies next to it, and you think, oh, okay, it is an important thing, but let's put it in its perspective, and that is helpful.

Well, Steve, what about ecclesiological responses? Did you want to jump in? Yeah, I just wanted to say, too,

I mean, the whole idea of seeking a multitude of counselors as you...

Not on the internet. Not on the internet. As you alluded to earlier as well, the interest of Christ here, and you risk at that point being completely marginalized, labeled as either litigious or, you know, just out of your mind, and so you have lost the potential audience, perhaps, that you were trying to reach in the first place, and it is difficult, though, because the bright lines aren't out there.

At least most of us can't see those bright lines, right? They become very fuzzy at points, and so, yeah, to be on our knees and seeking the

Lord... And, you know, one practical thing. I joked about not listening to the internet to get... I mean, because we tend to just pick who we know will agree with this, so, you know, the echo chamber, but I remember during COVID asking people in other cultures, how are you responding to your nation's choices to COVID in a way that you feel is the highest road for spiritual good?

One of the guys I asked was Jeremy Walker. So, how are you responding to this? You know, and it was interesting to see their lockdown in that situation was much more enduring and strict than ours here in Mississippi, and so he envied us, but how do you...

What's your attitude? What's your heart? How are you expressing love to God and to man during this?

And it was helpful to hear other cultures where we could talk to people that we trusted.

So, ecclesiological response. What would that be? I mean, it seems to me, as Calvin pointed out, often

God gives us wicked rulers and adverse events because of our own wickedness, and of course, secondarily, maybe even primarily, to drive us, bring us back to Him, and so it seems to me one of the first things we need to do is look inwardly.

What have we been doing that would anger our Lord? Should we not seek, as I think you've shared the example on a whole council podcast,

John, I think it was 1651, wasn't it, where the pastors came together because of downward spiraling in their own nations and didn't rail against the leaders out there, but rather got on their faces and sought the

Lord and repented of their own sins. Yeah, it was a pastor's convention, so they wrote up what are the sins of the ministers of the land, which they felt must have some part in the guilt that's bringing judgment on the entire land.

Yes, you know, Van Til said somewhat famously, culture is religion externalized.

Well, we can turn that sort of back around too and say, okay, when culture is falling apart, what does that say about our own inward religion and our relationship with the

Lord? And so, as we see our own walls falling down culturally, shouldn't we, as the church, be leading the way back to the

Lord on our knees, on our faces before Him, and maybe calling together church conferences to repent and call out to the

Lord? And earlier, we were talking about 1

Timothy 2. What are we supposed to do with respect to rulers? Well, first of all,

Paul says, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are at high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

This is good and it is pleasing in the sight of God the Savior, God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

We shouldn't be known as people who are, you just think of the opposites of these characteristics, loud and boisterous and complaining.

We want to be quiet and peaceful. We do have a gospel, which we, I mean, the overarching thing going on in history right now is the spread of the gospel to the nations, and that gospel is going to disturb people, but we want the gospel to disturb.

We want Jesus glorified in the gospel to disturb people, not just us.

And I would say if the American church writ large were writing that passage, we would put that as last, not first of all.

We try everything else first, and then, okay, if that doesn't work, then we'll go. Yeah, and if we pray that we'd be able to lead a quiet life, oh, and you know, quiet life, well,

I guess we got to be loud and got to just be as annoying as we possibly can.

And we've, I mean, we keep setting new records about just how annoying and boisterous we could be.

Yeah, so salt and light, definitely, even when it's costly, but salt and light in a way that is in harmony with the

King, that we're trying to be a picture of His light and the impact of His holy salt, you know, so we're exposing and restraining sin in the culture as God is using us as His tool, but if our attitudes are counter

Christ's attitude or counter, you know, the Apostle Paul is such a good example because he goes into so many wicked areas that have no interest in the

Messiah, but still, even though there are strong and costly stands that he makes, never is his attitude at odds with the attitude of the

King that he's representing. So, in some ways, I mean, we've said this at church many times here, in some ways, we, the believer, will be as unlike a mere conservative who's railing because life is getting changed and I don't like these new changes, so a true believer may share a lot with a conservative, you know, you may share some values with a liberal, but you share a lot with the conservative, but you are as different from him as he is from the liberal because you're not taking a stand for the old way of life and our rights and what about me and what about my kids, you're taking a stand for the rights of the

King Christ and that changes how you stand. A lot to think about.

We hope that you found this helpful. Thank you, Chris and Steve for introducing the big picture of what was going on and then what

Rutherford pointed out and how that's had an enduring impact in our view of right and wrong and rulers and responses to rulers.

If you want more material that you could read about Rutherford as a pastor and his, just his life or some of the devotional books that have been done by him or taken as, you know, collections of his sermons, we'll put some information for that in the show notes.

Teddy will make sure that's there for you. Banner of Truth and Reformation Heritage Books have both published a number of books either about Rutherford or by Rutherford and one of the most exciting things in the history of the universe is that Reformation Heritage Books is now putting together the complete works of Rutherford and so that,

I don't know that that's ever been done and so, I mean, most of that's going to have been translated out of Latin, so I hope

I live long enough and then they're going to stick it down in my casket and I'm not giving it to somebody when

I'm dead because I want something in the afterlife. I got some questions for Rutherford, so I got to have the works.

We'll close with a hymn that's attributed to Rutherford. Actually, he didn't write it. Anne Cousin, who lived from 1824 to 1906, wrote it.

It's called The Sands of Time Are Sinking, but she basically took straight from his letters whole lines and just put him, he's so poetic, it was very easy to move from his prose to a hymn.

So, I'll read the verses we have. I think there's 12 or 14 verses in the original. We just have six in our book.

So, let me read them. The sands of time are sinking, the dawn of heaven breaks, the summer morn

I've sighed for, the fair sweet morn awakes. Dark, dark has been the midnight, but day spring is at hand and glory, glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land.

Looking forward to eternity with Christ. The King, capital K, the King there in his beauty without a veil is seen.

It were a well -spent journey, though seven deaths lay between. The lamb with his fair army doth on Mount Zion stand and glory, glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land.

O Christ, he is the fountain, the deep sweet well of love, the streams on earth

I've tasted, more deep I'll drink above. There to an ocean fullness his mercy doth expand and glory, glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land.

With mercy and with judgment, my web of time he wove. And when you think of the suffering he went through, you know, how he can just, he glories in the fact that God was ruling over all those.

And I, the dews of sorrow were lustered with his love. I'll bless the hand that guided,

I'll bless the heart that planned when thrown where glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land.

My favorite verse is the fifth, the bride eyes, not her garment, but her dear bridegroom's face.

I will not gaze at glory, but on my King of grace, not at the crown he given, but on his pierced hand.

The lamb is all the glory of Emmanuel's land. I've wrestled on towards heaven against storm and wind and tide.

Now, like a weary traveler that leans upon his guide amid the shades of evening, his life is coming to a close.

While sinks life's lingering sand, I hail the glory dawning from Emmanuel's land.

So wonderful believer that God saved and fashioned and gave a great mind to.