Love Your Neighbor = Cancel Church

Shelter -in -place order day 10, self -quarantine day 10, day 11.

I don't know, all the days are the same these days. But anyway, I decided to trim my beard here in accordance with CDC regulation 62539.

It's much easier to wear your N95 mask when you have a lesser beard and I think it's going to become an issue of loving your neighbor.

If you're a Christian, you cannot have a beard longer than eighth of an inch. All right, all right.

Well, I'm not going to talk too much about this today because I heard that there is a video coming out tonight at 9am or 9pm

Pacific Time. So I'll be asleep when this comes out. But Doug Wilson's going to be addressing a lot of this

COVID Romans 13 stuff. And so either I'm about to get spanked or y 'all about to get spanked.

You know what I'm saying? Anyway, I'm looking forward to that very much.

A lot of Christians are supporting this whole idea of the government arresting pastors who hold church.

Some of the most ridiculous responses that I saw, one guy said that if his own elders would hold church, he would support their arrest.

And I just have to say, I mean, something has gone wrong here, man. Something has gone wrong.

And furthermore, let me just lay down the challenge. If you're one of these that thinks that pastors who hold their worship services against the order of the government to shut down worship services at your church, if you're one of these that thinks that that's a good idea, you're applauding it, you're supporting it, then do the brave thing.

Why don't you turn in your brothers that you know are currently holding churches against the order of the government?

You likely know men, colleagues of yours, friends of yours that are deciding to hold church anyway, and have church anyway, even though Caesar tells them not to.

If this is really a matter of loving your neighbor, and this is a lawful order that Christians must obey according to Romans 13, and these pastors are putting lives at risk, like you say, call the police.

Let them know they need to take your friends away. It's for their own good. And if you do not, like I know you won't, then you're displaying that you really aren't.

You don't believe this. You can say something all day long, but it's really just LARPing. It's really just posturing.

You see, you can tell what a man really believes by what they do, and not as much by what they say.

So there's the challenge. I want you to turn in your brothers for having an illegal worship service during this time of pandemic.

Do it. Or shut up. That's, I mean, those are your options, right? Do it or shut up.

It's kind of like the whole thing where there's a lot of pastors that are against abortion, but they don't really do anything about it, and I'm not one of these abolitionist types.

You know what I mean? I'm not one of those guys, but if you're gonna lay down the hard line, because what you're saying when you say something's a matter of loving your neighbor, then you are saying it's a matter of the law of God.

It's a deliberate disobeying of the law of God, and when you say that it's right for the civil magistrate to arrest pastors who have church on Sunday against their orders, then what you are saying is that what they are doing is evil.

It's wrongdoing. It deserves the wrath of God, because that's what the civil governing authority does.

It dispenses that wrath of God. It's an avenger. And so if your brethren, if your colleagues that are still holding church despite the order that has been coming down from on high that they cannot hold church, if they are doing evil, if they're putting lives at risk, if they are worthy of the wrath of God, then your duty is to help that along if you know about it.

And if you do know about it and you don't turn them in, then you're complicit, my friend. You're complicit.

Anyway, let's talk about something a little lighter, shall we? There's a couple things

I want to say. Yeah, there's a couple different responses to the whole video yesterday on Romans 13. One of the responses

I found actually kind of interesting is the response, AD, name one reformer from history that says that the government doesn't have the authority to shut down church in the time of an epidemic or pandemic.

I find that so amazing, because that's actually not how this works. That's actually backwards.

You see, I don't have to do that. First of all, I am not a historian, so I don't know the answer to that.

Second of all, even if there was none, that's not how we do this, because what we should be doing, the question that should be being asked, and I'll lay down this challenge as well,

I don't have to show you someone in history that didn't say this. What you have to do is show me from Scripture, from the

Bible, or from a good and necessary consequence that makes sense, that they do have that authority to shut down church and all of these things.

And as a point of order, when you look at the quarantine laws in the Old Testament, and you can see what they were all about, really, it was actually the religious leaders that would inspect and decide and do these kinds of things.

It was really more an issue for the church, so to say, itself. And so if we're going to apply the general equity of that, because I am

Reformed, and of course, the general equity of the civil law is what matters to me, you're going to do that.

Well, you're not going to find a general principle of the law of God that says that the state actually does have a say over whether or not your local assembly meets for worship on Sunday or not.

You're not going to find that. My thing is, that should be left up to the local assembly. That should be left up to the local assembly.

I think that's much easier to find in the law of God, a general principle, the general equity of the law of God that decides that, that it's more of a religious matter.

And so I can do that fairly easily. The challenge is for you to show me in the authority to arrest pastors who have church on Sunday.

I don't think you can do that. And if you can do that, then we can talk about historical interpretation and stuff like that.

But we don't start with historical interpretation. That's backwards. We don't do it that way. We don't have a magisterium that's equally authoritative.

So that's one interesting response. Another interesting response is essentially the whole, you're putting lives at risk.

You really need a passage of scripture to show you that it's loving your neighbor, that it's not loving your neighbor to put lives at risk.

That's an interesting response too, because it sounds really good. And you'll get a lot of likes on Facebook. If you say something like that, it's kind of a zing too.

And I, you know, AD Robles appreciates a good zing every now and then. So that's the response.

He says, AD, you really need chapter and verse on that? And it's funny because, okay, let's play that game.

Let's play that game. Cause I'll go with that. This is a very good opportunity to answer a fool, according to his folly.

Here's what I would say to that. Okay. Let's, let's say that you're right. Putting lives at risk is a matter of loving your neighbor as yourself.

And so therefore we should not put lives at risk to, in order to meet for church.

We don't need a verse for that. We don't need chapter and verse for that. This is just obvious, right? Okay.

So going forward, you better not meet during flu season.

You better not meet during flu season. Now here's what I am not saying before you get all uppity.

I'm not saying that coronavirus is just as deadly as the flu. Although when the data really comes out and we really see what's going on,

I have a suspicion that it might be, but even if it's 30 times, 50 times more deadly than the flu shirt, certainly we're not playing a numbers game here.

Right? So certainly, um, if 80 ,000 people can die in a flu season in the

United States and 120, 200 ,000 people die during the Corona virus outbreak, well, let's just not reduce things down to numbers, right?

Like you don't want to put 80 ,000 lives at risk by meeting for church, right? So every flu season, we should shut down worship services because after all, it's a matter of loving your neighbor to not put lives at risk during the flu season.

Flu season actually is worse because it doesn't only kill old people, kills a lot of young people and even children.

So, I mean, think of the children, right? So, so love your neighbor as yourself, shut down church every flu season.

Furthermore, actually, you know what we should probably consider doing is making sure that if you're going to have a communicant member of your local assembly, someone who is with the body and comes to worship services and gets administered the sacraments, you also, you know, you ought to have a flu shot and actually full vaccination.

You need, I want to see your vaccination records before you can become a member of this church, because if you're going to become a member of this church, you need to repent of your sin.

And part of that sin is putting other lives at risk. This is a matter of loving your neighbor, right? This is the law of God.

So if you're going to be a communicate member of this church, you're going to need to show me your vaccination records, because if you don't have them,

I'm sorry, you're going to have to be shown the door until you get vaccinated because we don't want to put lives at risk.

It's a matter of loving your neighbor as yourself. Part of repentance is agreeing that I'm going to love my neighbor, right?

I'm going to love my neighbor. And how could I possibly do that without getting my vaccinations in my arm, right?

There's no possible way to do that because not having vaccinations puts your lives at risk.

By the way, I am for vaccinations, but that's just a side issue. Also, you know what

I was thinking also, actually, that's actually not far enough because when you think about it, requiring people to come to the local assembly, a lot of these people don't live like right now, like a lot of people live way further than walking distance from their local church.

I mean, that's just how things are now. We have cars and a lot of people commute to church. It's not like it used to be back where there was a village and they had a local church they could just walk to.

And you know, it's very risky to get into a car every Sunday and drive. I mean, you're barreling down the street sometimes at 50, 60 miles an hour with only 10 feet of space between you going that way and the people going that way and people just trying to go about their business.

That actually puts lives at risk too. You know, if we're going to be loving our neighbor as ourselves, as consistent

Christians, consistently pro -life, then we ought to really embrace this whole idea of Zoom church, because this video conference church actually puts less lives at risk because you're not risking people's lives in the highway.

It's not just your life, right? I mean, in the car, every person you pass by on the street, even pedestrians for that matter, people that are riding their bikes just for a nice Sunday ride.

You don't want to put those lives at risk either. So I guess, okay, here's what we should do. Vaccinations required and close down the churches where we actually meet.

Zoom church going forward. I mean, listen, this is a matter of loving your neighbor as yourself, right?

So that's it. So let's be consistent here. Let's be consistent here. I mean, there's not very much difference, morally speaking, between 120 ,000 lives and 60 ,000, 80 ,000 lives, or even just one life.

If we could save just even one life through these measures, it's worth it because that one life is in fact made in the image of God.

And so if this is a matter of loving your neighbor, which it most certainly is, right? I'm just accepting that. Then, I mean, we just got to shut it down.

Video church going forward. So yeah, that's how I would respond to that.

There's another thing here that... So yesterday I said this.

I said that something like, do you remember a few months ago when half of us were suckling at the teat of the mainstream media all jazzed up about Russia collusion and it turned out to be false?

Only half of us were doing it. Half of us knew that the media lied. Now, we're all suckling at the teat of the mainstream media.

We all just assume that their stories are pretty much accurate regarding coronavirus and things like that.

And to be honest, why? Why are we doing that? Because we know they lie according to their agenda.

And we're just all just kind of suckling at the teat now. We just, well, we want more of it. We're desperate for it.

We want to see that corona coverage. And the reality is that the media lies a lot.

And they often lie without lying. Let me give you an example of a lie without lying. Coronavirus deaths.

The media is desperate to have as many coronavirus deaths as possible. And so if you have a grandmother and she's 99 years old and she's on death's door right now, she's going to die in the next week.

She dies because her organs are failing. She's 99, right? She's 99. They are going to be desperate to make that link to coronavirus.

And so coronavirus is going to check her. And if she has coronavirus in her system, then coronavirus killed her.

Then coronavirus killed her. Meanwhile, she was about to die anyway. And so it's a lie without lying.

She had coronavirus, or maybe she didn't. You don't have any idea of how they even gather this information. But it's a coronavirus death.

Someone kills themselves because they find out they have coronavirus. That's going to be a coronavirus death. Someone with diabetes dies.

They're on death's door and stuff like that. I talked about it. I have an uncle who's currently dying of diabetes.

If he catches the coronavirus and dies, that's going to be a coronavirus death. And so media lies without lying a lot.

They also lie while lying as well. But the reality is, and so somebody said to me, what's your solution?

What do we do? Here's what my solution is. Stop accepting the, you know, the, whenever, whenever people from on high tell you what you ought to do, take that with a tremendous, tremendous grain of salt, a tremendous grain of salt.

Make decisions that make sense for you and your most local context, your family, your church, your community with, with that, with, with the information that you have.

I think it's okay to get raw data from the, from the mainstream media, where you should always be wary.

Always is when the mainstream media starts taking that raw data and then telling you what the right thing to do is.

That's where all of the tricks and all of the lies come home to That's what they want. They want you there.

They want you seeing that big red number of 4 ,000, 5 ,000, 10 ,000 deaths. And then they want you to be nice and scared so you're pliable.

And so they can tell you what you should do. Instead of doing that, go to that scripture and do what you know is right for your family.

Because the scripture is the source of truth, right? The scripture is a source of truth. We don't know if the mainstream media is lying to us or not.

In fact, that whole scenario that I just gave you about lying without lying, we don't know if that's true or not. And that's the point. They want you confused as to what to believe.

And so therefore, you're very suggestible at that point. Anyway, hope you found this video helpful.