November 10, 2025 Show with Levi Secord on “Servant Not Savior: An Introduction to the Bible’s Teaching About Civil Government”

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You know, both those on the left and the right are often accused of viewing the civil government as savior, perhaps pursuing a government to act as savior, but today's guest, returning guest to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Levi Secord, will act upon setting the record straight in his new book,

Servant, Not Savior, An Introduction to the Bible's Teaching about Civil Government, is our topic today.

And Pastor Levi Secord is an author and founding pastor of Christ Bible Church of Roseville, Minnesota, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Levi Secord.

Thanks for having me, Chris. Well, as we always do, give us a brief description of the church where you serve as undershepherd, the

Christ Bible Church of Roseville, Minnesota. Yeah, we launched in February of 2021, so the tail end of the pandemic, and we really launched at least in part because we were dismayed by how so many churches were responding to different issues, whether it be government overreach at that time, which, of course, the book addresses, and then also wokeness, social justice, all of that that was raging that we can all remember as bad memories or bad dreams from back then.

And so we are a baptistic church. We're a member of the SBC and the North American Baptist Conference, dual affiliated.

We are reformed, generally, or like I tell my congregation, we are broadly reformed. By that, we mean we stress the sovereignty of God, but not just in salvation, as some

Reformed people do, but God's sovereignty over all of life, right? That's the Reformed position. God is sovereign over everything, every square inch, as Abraham Kuyper put it.

And so we're baptistic, we're Reformed, and we are seeking to live out the vision that Christ is

Lord over all. Yes, it is interesting that every Calvinist church believes that God is sovereign over all, but for some reason, they shy away from, many of them shy away from actually applying that belief to the teachings and activities of everyday life in the congregation.

Yeah, we've been taught, and I address this in the book, in the first chapter in particular, we've been taught to compartmentalize our faith.

And so we can talk about a big God, as it were, when it comes to religious things, but we then at least act as if He isn't that big

God in the quote -unquote non -religious areas. Now, of course, I don't believe there really is such a thing as a non -religious area of life, but God's sovereignty covers everything.

If there's an area that God is not sovereign, then He is not God. Amen. Amen. Well, for those of you listening who would like to visit

Christ Bible Church of Roseville, Minnesota, perhaps you live in that area, perhaps you're going to be traveling through that area on vacation, or perhaps you have family, friends, and loved ones that live in that area, go to Christbible .net,

Christbible .net, and God willing, we'll repeat that information later on in the program.

As you know, Pastor Levi, there have been other books written, which are in print, about a

Christian approach to civil government. What was it that you had in your mind where you said, you know, there are some really great books out there addressing the issue of the civil government.

There are some really horrible ones. I have some ideas that I believe are not fully expressed in any of these volumes available, and I would like to make my own contribution.

What was the compelling factor that led you to believe that and do that? The pandemic, government overreach 2020 -2021, the shifting foundations in Western society has forced a lot of us to go back to foundational questions.

And the idea of the importance of Christianity to civic life is gaining traction, not only in the church, but outside of the church with public thinkers like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, and others, noting that Christianity has had a, as I would put it, a sanctifying effect on culture and government and has made the world better.

And as I looked around at a lot of the books, recent books being published,

I found that most of them either ignored Scripture. I mean, there's one prominent one that clearly takes pride in that it's not a work of theology and exegesis.

It's a work of historical philosophy and whatnot. And I think that's the reason why it goes so off base.

And others just kind of wave at Scripture, talk a little bit about it. And I thought there really was a missing gap here that we want to be people of the book.

So we need a deep dive into what does the Bible actually teach about this realm of life, Sola Scriptura?

What is the highest authority? What does it say? Does it say we shouldn't talk about this area as Christians?

What role does the church have? And my main goal in the heart of the book is 10 chapters where each chapter is a sustained exegesis of a passage of Scripture that addresses this area of life to show that, one, if we want to preach every word of God, that it's there to preach the whole counsel of God, to equip the man and woman of God for every type of good work, which it is, then we have to touch on this area.

And if you're preaching through the Bible and you completely ignore this area of life, as much of modern evangelicalism has, you're failing at your job as a pastor and a theologian, because the

Bible has a sustained theme and message for the realm of the state. So that was kind of my goal, that in the literature there was missing sustained exegesis.

What does the Bible say about this area of life? So the heart of the book is 10 chapters of really important verses on what the

Bible says about the state and how it's interspersed in there too, how those passages in particular have shaped the

Western tradition of government. And then the last couple of chapters, I then try to systematize that, to put it into a system.

Well, what then does this look like? How should this then be lived out? And I do think the American version of the founding was the pinnacle of Protestant and biblical political thought.

I think they had a few blind spots, and I touch on that in the book, where they could have improved.

But I think they had reached the pinnacle of political thought according to Scripture, and we need to try to return to that.

Well, I'm going to read a very compelling endorsement for your book by Stephen J.

Wellam, who's been on this program. In fact, at least one of those interviews was with you, and he's always a great guest.

Stephen J. Wellam is professor of Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and he says of this book,

In a time when Christians, especially in the West, wrestle with the changes wrought by a growing secularism, the need to think clearly about the relationship between the state and the church is crucial.

In this introduction to political theology, Levi Secord provides one of the most accessible and helpful presentations of the proper relationship between these two spheres.

Working through the entirety of Scripture, Secord helps answer many of the questions

Christians are asking today. This book is highly recommended, and that's a very powerful commendation for this book.

Why don't we start briefly, before we give a summary of all of the chapters in here, why don't you start off by giving your own thoughts on where you believe from your own observation and experience.

Most evangelicals, or many, I should say, many evangelicals are off the mark when it comes to the way they preach, teach, and behave in light of the civil government and the

Holy Scriptures. I think the main way that people err is to believe the dictates of secularism, that the church shouldn't talk about this area of life, that the church should remain quote -unquote neutral.

And to an extent, this is built upon, it's a distortion of a truth, right? The church is not inherently

Republican or Democrat, obviously, but that doesn't mean we're neutral, right?

The name Democrat, Republican means nothing to us, but the moral policies behind both parties are either objectively right or objectively wrong according to the dictates of Scripture.

And to anyone with any shred of a Christian worldview knows that the political left in our society today is anti -Christian, it is anti -Christ, it is wicked through and through.

And so I like to say to people, we don't have, I wish we lived in a time in which we had two viable parties, but we really only have half of a viable party right now because the

Republicans just want to seem to do everything the liberals do, just slower and whatnot.

But at least they have allowed Christians still a seat at the table that we try to inform and shape them and try to get some policy gains in the right direction.

But there very well could come a time where we say, peace out, bye, we're done with you guys as well. Because our beliefs politically come from our theology.

And so I think the number one error that people make is that the church has nothing to say about this. And this is really a recent phenomenon.

Again, you can go throughout church history and there was no thinking, no broad thinking that the church should leave this area of life alone until like the last 50 to 75 years with the rise of secularism.

You go back and you read the Puritans, you go back and you read the Reformers. They had a political theology and they got it from Scripture.

It's only recently that we've said, oh, the church can't talk about that area of life. And what has happened? Well, the church has neglected that area of life.

It's gotten increasingly worse. And so it is important that we talk about this and we reason from Scripture because God has spoken and where God speaks, we must obey.

And then as a church, it is our job as prophets to speak the word of the Lord to the culture and to call rulers, citizens, everyone to repentance and faith.

Do you think some of that has to do with the fact that there are evangelicals who know enough about church history to know that there have been many times in the past where the

Christian involvement in government has turned disastrous? And even people that we would view as our brothers and sisters in Christ have been dragged off to chopping blocks to be beheaded or to be burned alive or to be tortured gruesomely.

And there perhaps is an overreaction to that where a fear of returning to something like that, some kind of nightmarish, mishandled theocracy is…we think if we stay out of it completely, the realm of government, other than voting and let the unregenerate handle all the business of politics, we somehow feel…wrongly feel safer.

I think that's true. So I think one of the ways that secularism has won this debate, at least in the interim, is they've painted all religious involvement as bringing with it oppression in the state.

And there certainly are examples of that in our past. But as I point out in the book, and I point out whenever anybody wants to listen to me, which is not as often as I would like probably, but what are the most oppressive and blood -stained governments we've had over the last century?

Every single one of them has been atheistic. Starting with the French Revolution, perhaps? French Revolution, I talk about that in the book.

Every communist government is intentionally atheistic, and they've killed hundreds of millions of people. If you think that the magisterial reformers' governments were tyranny, then you're going to have to invent an entirely new category for communism and all these other atheistic governments that are just trampling on our rights.

And so where secularism is losing the debate right now culturally is that it's very clear that secularism can't maintain the freedoms that we've inherited in the

West, because the freedoms we inherited in the West came from the Christian view of state and government. And as that has been eroded away, we are slipping back towards tyranny.

We see it in Europe all the time. People who speak out against the dominant ideology, or even if they do it from the

Bible, are being put on trial and threatened and thrown in jail. You send the wrong tweet in Great Britain. Great Britain, of all places, right now.

You can be thrown in jail for a tweet. Freedom of speech is going away. Why? Because Christianity is going away.

But this is now forcing people to return back to Christianity for that foundation. And so in my book,

I am a Baptist. I'm not a magisterial reformer. I believe the magisterial reformers had a lot of wisdom that we can pick up on, but we can also learn where they messed up throughout history.

And so in my book, I offer a vision as we walk through Scripture and then synthesize it. I offer a vision for how a state can be

Christian in one sense, how a government can be Christian without getting into that tyranny. And I think that's what the founders were trying to do.

I don't think they envisioned a world in which America would not be Christian culturally. So that's where they had some blind spots.

But they, the state constitutions, all of these things pointed towards Christianity. But they also left a lot of room for limiting the power of the state for freedom of conscience.

This was a really big idea for the American founding, the freedom of conscience, that the government shouldn't violate that.

I think that's the vision we need to get back to at the founding is Christian foundations. And as people like Al Mohler have said, to have a

Christian confession of some sort, a knowledge of the Christian God and the Constitution, have that, and then also limiting the state.

Because there's the other problem we're realizing now in some reformed circles is an overcorrection. They see the failures of secularism, which

I agree, but they are now turning to the state in a different way, saying if we just make the state very, very

Christian and make it enforce Christian doctrine on everyone, that that's going to fix all of our problems.

It's not going to fix our problems. It's going to make things worse. Now, do you have specific examples of that that it has attempted to bring about?

Examples of what? The Christianizing of the states? Oh, yeah.

I have that in one of my chapters in the book. You have all of these founding documents, whether it was the covenants for the colonies.

Even to this day, all 50 state constitutions recognize the divine in some fashion.

They don't necessarily do it Christianly anymore. But the further you go back in our history, the evidence is all over there that it was

Christianity that was the assumption. It was Christianity that was being pushed. There's a wonderful book by Mark David Hall, very accessible, called

Did America Have a Christian Founding? He lays out from primary sources. Yes, Christian this, Christian that,

Christianity all over it. And then they wanted to make sure the federal government didn't form a state church.

And that is what they were trying to limit because they had seen the abuses of that in Europe. My fear is that right now some in the reformed camp are ignoring that wisdom that our founders had.

Like, if we can just make the state reformed in that sense, right, in Christian reform and enforce that doctrine, that we're going to fix all the problems of secularism.

I just don't think that's the solution. And one more thing to rectify right at the outset.

There are many people, both on the left and the right, who misunderstood what the separation of church and state really meant.

They think that that is in the Constitution, which it's not.

The Constitution only guarantees that the Congress shall not establish a religion, but was not, and I'm not a historian, but was not the understanding of the separation of church and state really something to further reassure

Baptists that the new government being formed would not interfere in the personal religious freedoms and religious practices of Baptists or anyone.

And I believe that phrase came about during communication between Thomas Jefferson and Baptists in Rhode Island.

Am I off base with that? Yeah. So Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptists spoke of a wall of separation.

Is that Danbury, Connecticut? Yeah. Sure. Danbury somewhere. And that wall of separation, because Baptists, even in the colonies, were persecuted by the state churches in the

United States. Sometimes we forget that about our own history. But if you read, again,

Mark David Hall's book is wonderful on this. If you read very early on in the founding era, they moved away from church establishments even at the state level and religious tests for people to serve in office.

And they did so not for secular reasons, as we're told, that the government should be secular. But the arguments that were made, as Hall points out from primary documents, were that the church would be better off and the gospel would spread better if the state leaves the church alone.

So that the gospel is actually freer to go do its job if the state leaves it alone. And so the motivation of the founding fathers to limit the establishment of the church was not for secular reasons, but for the benefit of Christianity and the people.

And that's something we need to remember. I think there's a reason why the cultural decay and rot of America has been much slower than where there were established churches in Europe.

It's because the gospel was more free here by not being or having established churches.

Well, we're going to go to our first commercial break, and when we come back, we're going to be discussing our

God -given rights. And if you have a question for Levi Secord on his book,

Servant, Not Savior, An Introduction to the Bible's Teachings about Civil Government, please send us an email at chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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And we are now back with Pastor Levi Secord, and we are discussing his book, Servant Not Savior, an introduction to the

Bible's teachings about civil government. And please remind us of what are our

God -given rights that are perhaps being stolen from us, or perhaps

Christians are even in ignorance, letting them be taken away from them, and so on.

Yeah, so in the first chapter of Exodus Jesus, we begin in Genesis chapter 1.

And in Genesis 1, we see the—well, really 1 and 2— we see the idea of God has created us with certain rights.

Again, none of these ideas are original with me. These have been developed over Protestant and Christian thought for a long time.

A great book that dives into this, again, we mentioned him already, Tom Holland, his book Dominion, How Christianity Changed the

World. He's an atheist historian, right? So the idea of self -evident rights or self -evident truths or whatever were not in Western thought until Christianity, and he writes about how the ultimate seedbed of this in Western thought is

Genesis, Genesis 1. And so in Genesis 1, we see that all men are created by God. He breathes life into them.

This means that life is a right. Now, when I speak about rights, I'm speaking horizontally between humans, not vertically between us and God.

God is the potter. We are the clay. Before Him, we don't have those rights. But before each other, we do.

God gives us life, and no one can take life without justification as given by God, Laodicea's Word.

This is why he has to give the sword to the state to punish evildoers. They have the right then to protect life by taking life.

But a right given to us by God is life. The next one, which I'll backtrack in there, that's clearly being violated by things like abortion.

Every Christian should be against abortion. Every Christian should want the abolition of abortion.

We can debate as to how to get to that abolition. That's something we should want. Next, you have liberty.

Man was created in a state of liberty, that he was able to commune with God freely.

This is religious liberty in particular, that there was ultimately in the garden no mediator between God and man.

That mediator eventually comes through Christ. But we see throughout the ancient world that the state, whether it's

Pharaoh, whether it's Caesar, whether it's whatever, all across different ancient governments, that the government would try to be a mediator between God and man.

We don't find that in the garden. In the garden, man has direct access to God, and we see through the new covenant of Christ that that mediation now comes through Christ and Christ alone.

Whenever the state tries to play mediator, the state is effectually trying to replace

Christ. And the third major freedom you see in the garden is the freedom or the right to property.

We are created to the right of the fruits of our own labor. God tells Adam to go work the soil, and he is then commanded to eat the fruit of his labors.

And so the right to private property is not the right to any property, but it's the right to the fruit of your own labor.

And this is intrinsic, that when you— Paul uses this to talk about pastors, right, that we are the muzzled ox, or don't muzzle the ox, that you should get the food or your sustenance from where you work.

This is hardwired into creation, that God has created us with a right to our own property, and to steal that is to violate someone's right.

And this is why we have the commandments we do in the Ten Commandments. Don't murder, right? Don't steal.

Okay, we have a listener in Endicott, New York, named

Jewel. And Jewel says, there are many conflicting and combating views of church and state and how

Christians are to interact with the civil government. Some of them include

Christian nationalism, which is not a monolith, and also theonomy and Reconstruction, also not monolithic, and just your old run -of -the -mill

Republicans, and so on. What are the flaws that are inherent to any of these views, and do you favor a view that might not have even been in my list?

Yes, so, I mean, it depends on who you're talking about. Like she said, each camp has its own sub -camps in it.

So there are members of the Christian nationalist camp, like Stephen Wolf, who I would be wholeheartedly against.

And the ironic thing about Stephen Wolf is he primarily relies upon natural law. And then you have people who

I call pretty much Christian secularists, and they also rely on natural law.

And you're like, well, you guys are both pointing to natural law but reaching the complete opposite conclusions.

This is one of the reasons why I'm very hesitant to rely on things like natural law. And then you have other

Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson, who's a theonomist. So he believes that the Word of God, and he's more of a general equity theonomist, that the

Word of God, as it reveals the general principles of justice in the Old Testament and the Old Covenant, should be used as a foundation for law.

I'm very sympathetic with Doug on that. Doug's version of Christian nationalism

I am largely in agreement with, with a few disagreements, particularly over blasphemy laws and things like that.

I think he goes too far. So in my book, I argue for what I think is a

Baptist version of how we can use

Scripture in proper formation of government. And I call it the sanctified state. So it's the state operating in its sanctified form as a servant, as the title of the book suggests,

Romans 13. The state is God's servant. And so the state should recognize its master, who is

God, the Christian God, not a generic God. But then it also, as a servant, recognizes that it's been given a specific job.

Its authority is only to do that job. And that job does not include enforcing personal beliefs or personal speech, for that matter.

And so for me, I call it the sanctified state. I argue for it in the last section of my book. It's basically a

Baptistic version of what could be called Christian nationalism, but I don't really like the term because of some of the baggage associated with it.

And it's very difficult to judge things according to labels because I've had people who have been my guests on my program claiming to be representative of all of those labels that Jewel listed, and they have had very, very different views from one another.

Exactly. So I'd often say, well, it depends on what you mean by that. If I get to define it, sure, then I'm for it.

Yes. And in fact, there was even a debate recently. Two of the debaters were my friend

Jeff Durbin and Doug Wilson, who have many similarities, and they were debating with each other on the abolishing of abortion movement rather than what was

Doug's term for it? Smashmouth incrementalism. Right, right.

So you could have people who are very close in many things, but disagree on some crucial areas of the

Christian life and aspect of the civil government. Let's move on to Utopia Lost, and I don't know if that was a play on words on your part, referring to John Milton's book

Paradise Lost, but tell us about that section. So if you're going to form a

Christian view of anything, you have to start with creation, as we did, and then you have to incorporate the fall. Creation impacts all of life,

God's design, purposes for all things. You have the command to subdue and have dominion over the earth, which implies government.

But then you also have to factor in the fall. How does sin impact the government? Because again, if you go throughout world history, and you see this particularly on the political left today, that we think that we can return to Utopia, return to Paradise Lost.

Yes, that was an attempt at being clever. And we think we can get there through governmental power.

And this is what Karl Marx promised. We would reach the workers' paradise through endless bloodshed, and we'd finally overcome all this economic oppression.

You can look at any major world empire that tried to rise up and take over the world, and it brought with it, it often promised some paradise, some return to Eden, and it often then just brought hell on earth, because the state can't save us.

The state has a limited role. And again, this is part of the hesitancy of why I felt like this book was needed.

We're seeing again and again people who would call themselves conservative Christians, and they rightly see that secularism is terrible, it's failing, and it's leading to abject tyranny.

I agree with their diagnosis. But a lot of them then want to say, well, if we just give the right kind of power and centralize that power in the state, that that's going to fix all of our problems.

And I feel like we've lost our ever -loving minds. Because the state, we've tried this, people have tried it throughout world history, and it's not going to bring you what you think it's going to bring you.

And we see this in Scripture, as I pick up later in the book, is that there's this picture of world empires that try to promise to bring the kingdom, and they do it, and they try to conquer the world, and they're pictured as beasts in Daniel and in Revelation.

And these beasts are at war with the true kingdom of Christ. And we need to be very careful as we look at our current problems, which there are many, and they're serious, and we need to deal with them.

We can't cast out all of the wisdom of generations past. If we think that we can return to a magisterial form of government, a remarriage of the church and state, and that we're not going to have any of the problems that the prior generations had,

I think you're naive. We do have a question from Carmela in the

Bronx, New York, and Carmela says, I know that you're a pastor in Minnesota.

However, the election recently of a notorious communist mayor of New York City has made the news globally, and I was wondering if you had any personal reflections on how this could have happened in a constitutional republic and what you think the outcome of this will be.

That's a wonderful question. So Minnesota has got its own set of problems politically as well that are very close to New York's.

I think there are several observations we should make. One, Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the

Western tradition of government because the Western tradition of government is fundamentally Christian, and so we have to just face that straight on.

We're seeing it across the West, across Europe, that Islam is a threat to the

West, full stop, and we need to do something about that. Second, these major metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, et cetera, they keep electing very deep blue policy.

To me, electing a communist isn't anything new. There have been plenty of communists who didn't call themselves communists who ran these cities for a long time, and you get what you vote for in a republic like ours, and so you have a bunch of communists who voted in the communists.

I'm not surprised it's not going to go well. It hasn't been going well in these cities for the last 50 years.

We've only had blue mayors and city councils, and the question is at what point does either these cities collapse upon themselves or do they finally hit rock bottom and repent?

I don't know. I've been told that cities like San Francisco have now started to come back from some of their craziness and are starting to do law and order again while remaining blue, and so you're starting to see some signs of recognizing reality, but the good thing about sin is that it doesn't work, and so these guys can keep trying to do this.

This time communism will work. It won't work, so eventually people will learn. It's just how deep do we have to go down the rabbit hole before they do?

Yeah, it's always a bizarre, mysterious circumstance when you have a leftist public official who is also professing to be a

Muslim, and you have to draw a conclusion. Is he lying about being a leftist or is he lying about being a

Muslim because they are incompatible ideologies? There is no such thing as a leftist government that practices

Sharia law, for instance, so I have even asked folks because I didn't see, other than snippets of the

New York City mayoral debates, I did not see or hear anyone ask

Mamdami if he, in good conscience, intends to swear an oath to the constitution, which by law he has to do if he wants to enter into that position as mayor in January of next year, and people have said to me, well, according to Islam, there is a thing called taqiyyah where you can lie to infidels, so it doesn't even matter if he takes an oath.

We don't have to believe it. So any thoughts on that?

Because it is quite a bizarre phenomenon. Yeah, no, there is that provision in Islam.

Yeah, so they lionize lying if you're going on infidels and trying to take over their country, so it's to be expected.

But again, I expect that his reign in New York will not go well.

Yeah, and you only have to wonder, I guess time will tell, whether he's truly a leftist or truly a

Muslim. There have been people who even were trying to insinuate that Barack Obama was really masquerading as a leftist and was really a

Muslim, and I find that very hard to believe. Yeah, very hard to believe.

So anyway, before we go to the midway break, do you have anything to add about that section of the book that you'd like to address before we move on?

You have to get your foundations right if you're going to build the structure right, so you have to begin at the beginning.

I mean, you cannot ignore the first three chapters of Genesis if you want to understand what the

Bible has to say about anything, but particularly about the state. And I feel, again, some of the reform thought,

I just finished reading a book on this, a recently published book on this, has completely ignored Genesis chapter 3 in its view of government, and you do that to your own peril.

And I guess we could start before we go to the midway break because we do have time for you to give, at least begin giving an outline about the civil government being a servant of God.

Yes, Romans 13 is the quintessential text that summarizes the role of government for the

Christian worldview. And it speaks about the state being God's servant.

Caesar is God's servant for your good. And man, we could unpack a lot on that.

Like, this means that government is a good gift given by God, that anarchy is objectively bad.

You don't want to live in a world with no government. That's not good. Another text will balance out that you don't want to live in a government that's tyrannical either.

We'll get to that. You've got to put the whole Bible together. But Romans 13 establishes this fundamental reality.

The state is to serve God. It is a servant. It is fundamentally a servant of God.

And if we can't start there with our Christian view of the state, we don't have a Christian view of the state. It serves

God. What does that mean for how it should function? And that's what I try to unpack out of the book. Now, when

I've evangelized police officers, I have told them that they are, whether they realize it or not, a form of minister of God because they are actually in a role of bringing about the will and purposes of God.

So was I off base, am I off base in saying that as I evangelize them? No, no.

So some translations will say minister. One of the words used there is deacon. It's the same word for the office of deacon.

And so they are a minister. And this is, again, reflected in our Western tradition. All across Europe you have prime minister.

We in the U .S. are elected officials, public servants. This is not how the ancient world or most of the non -Christian world view people in power, not as ministers, not as servants.

This is a uniquely Christian understanding. And so what that means is as a minister or a servant, you have a specific job given to you, and you also have a master who you're accountable to and who you must obey.

And so when Paul calls Caesar a servant of God, he is saying that, one, Caesar is not

God as he claimed to be, and Caesar is accountable to God to do his job. And we have to go to our midway break right now.

If you would like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarenson at gmail .com,

chrisarenson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say you oppose the beliefs and teachings of your own pastors on these issues.

Well, we would want you to remain anonymous because we don't want to publicly have your church being critiqued without your pastors here to defend themselves.

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And perhaps you're even the pastor yourself who disagrees with his fellow elders or his denomination or what have you.

And there may be many other reasons, but if it's a general question, please give us your first name, at least, city and state and country of residence.

We'll be right back, so please do not go away. I'm Brian McLaughlin, president of the

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Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland, who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed,

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Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

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Welcome back. Before I return to my captivating conversation with Pastor Levi Secord on his book,

Servant Not Savior, an introduction to the Bible's teaching about civil government,

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And we have Rudy in Kalispell, Montana. And Rudy asks, would you be willing to lay out briefly a summary of things that the

Republican Party and even our president are pushing forward in our country that are on both sides of the issue of being in agreement with what you're talking about today and violating what you are talking about today?

Oh, violations, easy. Motion pill, IVF. In vitro fertilization.

What? In vitro fertilization. Yeah, IVF. Those things are clearly against the biblical ethic.

And President Trump is really gung ho in favor of IVF. I was talking with a member of my church about this yesterday.

I think Trump is a blessing in many ways. I mean, you think about a Harris presidency, how terrible that would be in so many different ways.

But Trump, I don't think is conservative. I think Trump is a pragmatist and an anti -establishment guy.

And so sometimes that means he crosses over with conservative principles. And yet.

And sometimes it's just common sense when he does that. Yeah, right. To be conservative right now is to inherit common sense.

So but yet, as far as actually implementing conservative policies, he's the best president we've had at least since Reagan, if not better than Reagan.

So, I mean, you're talking 50 years, 75 years, top two president.

So, I mean, so we got to take some of the good with the bad on that. He does seem to want to shrink government in some ways.

He still wants to spend us in the debt. I'm not really sold on the tariff policy, but I'm willing to give him some leash before I fully form my opinion on his tariffs.

Those are going to be good or bad. But he does, on the positive side, protecting religious liberty, which

I think is huge. The rejection of the insanity of transgenderism, which is also huge.

And I think his right idea of peace through strength is good for the entire world.

So there's a lot of things to praise him for, too. And his selection of justices have been largely really, really well done.

And when it comes to Republicans being divided as they have been starkly divided over the issues of America's intervention in the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Israel and Gaza, you have polar opposite ideas being pushed forward.

I have for a long time been libertarian leaning in my views of government and my thoughts on these things, where I think that we should be refraining from going overseas to cure the conflicts over there.

When we ourselves have people in our own country who are really in need of help that are actual citizens.

I'm not an expert on these things, but do you have any thoughts on which side? And of course, it's not necessarily a black and white issue.

You have a spectrum of thought on these things. But any thought on which side do you think is more biblically faithful?

Well, which side of which? On government, United States intervention on things going on overseas, like Ukraine, like Israel.

And here's where it's going to be hitting more home is if troops are sent to Nigeria because of the persecution of Christians.

You know, there are even Christians who would say, no, that's not our place to be over there doing that.

Any thoughts on all of that? Yeah. So I think I addressed some of this in my book, that when you understand the doctrine of sphere sovereignty, sphere sovereignty limits the government as to the width of which it has authority over.

So it doesn't have authority over the church. It has a specific ministry. But even within that understanding of sphere sovereignty of the state, it has a specific ministry.

But it's also located by the boundaries of its jurisdiction. So the

Minnesota state government doesn't have authority over residents of Iowa. The U .S.

government does not have authority over the residents of Ukraine or Russia. These are kind of self -evident.

So the idea of America first is, I think, kind of, if we want to use the terminology, a self -evident truth.

The American government should be American first. The Mexican government should be Mexico first. The Great Britain government should be

Great Britain first. But that doesn't mean, then, that you can do anything you want that you think will benefit your country because you still have to obey the moral laws of God.

You can't mistreat your neighbor because you want to benefit your own people. So you still have to behave righteously within that America first agenda.

And I do think that if you have allies who you have agreements with, that you do have a duty to honor those agreements.

So I'm kind of of two minds of this. I think America has gotten too interventionist, and we shouldn't be fighting everyone else's wars.

And I think Trump is right on that. The fact that we defend the whole world and then they tear us to death is absurd.

And the other countries have been taking advantage of us, and we shouldn't allow them to do that. I am with him on that.

But I'm against some of the other America first people who are like, well, we shouldn't have bombed Iran. That we were doing that just for Israel.

No, we weren't. Iran's been threatening to blow us up, too. And we've given them decades to not make a nuclear bomb.

I think the peace through strength initiative of a surgical strike, taking out their nuclear program, and not putting boots on the ground is exactly the

America type first paradigm that we should have. Our enemies should fear that if provoked, we should do something.

For targeted strikes to protect Christians in Nigeria, I would be for. Okay, we have

Bobby in Hartsdale, New York. And Bobby says, do you think it is very dangerous to have the interpretation of the old covenant scriptures as dispensationalists do that lead them to believe that the

United States must always be on the side of the modern state of Israel?

In order to receive the blessings of God. I, for one, agree with the host of this program,

Chris Arnzen, that the modern state of Israel is not a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

I do not know where you stand. And he is right, by the way, that I don't believe that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Yeah, I'm not dispensational. And so my support where I think

America should support Israel comes from political realities. And the realities that I think Islam is a far greater threat to us than anything else.

Now, that does not mean that Israel as a government hasn't done anything wrong. Of course they have. I mean, even the biblical

Israel, people are like, should you blindly support Israel? Well, I've read too much of Old Testament Israel to realize that you should blindly support them.

They got exiled for a reason. Every nation can sin. And so what does it look like to that?

I think the blessing that's given to Abraham, bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.

I think quite literally we are told in Galatians 3 that that offspring is Christ.

And so your blessing and cursing as a nation comes to how you treat Christ and his people, Christians, not the nation state of Israel.

So nations who persecute Christians like Nigeria are going to receive judgment from God.

They are going to receive curses. And we see that worked out, I think, some in the book of Revelation as well.

Yes, and I would have to conclude having heard what you said earlier, though, that viewing

Israel and supporting Israel in ways we can makes perfect sense strategically in the

Middle East, where there are so many people calling out for the death of America, that at the same time you don't believe that we should be sending billions of dollars over there and intervening militarily.

No, no. I think some of your point that you said earlier, the fact that we export so much foreign aid while our own country is suffering in so many different ways.

And we all know this. A lot of this is money laundering schemes. You don't get to be like Nancy Pelosi was in the

Congress for 40 years and come out a multimillionaire on accident. And this is repeated over and over again on both sides of the aisle.

There's a lot of this foreign aid and stuff that goes to different NGOs. It's just an elaborate theft from the people.

And so that really does need to stop. So I think we can support our allies without writing blank checks and going into debt.

And that's one of the things I've appreciated about Trump is he looked at NATO and other words like you guys have to pay to defend yourselves.

You have to pay your fair share. Let's go do that. And I think I think if we did that, drew back some of our other support, that would really that would really solve a lot of our problems.

Well, enter now into your section on law is king. That should send shutters up the spines of a lot of evangelicals who, for some reason, view that word law as a dirty word.

But go ahead. Okay, so that's basically the the idea of Samuel Rutherford that kind of transformed

Western political thought and was really picked up in the American colonies. There was this debate within Protestantism, particularly in Great Britain, of whether the king was the law or the law was king.

So does the king get to make the law, and therefore he's the highest authority, or does the king have to submit to the law? And Rutherford argued that the law reigns over the king.

And that example, I think, is laid out in the book of Deuteronomy. Yes, this is covenantally located in the Old Covenant, but the

Old Covenant is part of what we read about in First Timothy. But this is written down for our instruction, for our good, us who've living in these last days, that we might learn certain things.

So it's not an aberration. There is application as we work it across the covenants to us today that the law, as it comes down from God, the government's job as God's servant is to execute his wrath, that is his morality, that is his law, on evildoers, to be his avenger.

And so we have law, written law, given to us in the Scripture, and you could call it creational law or natural law.

We could argue about that as well, but that's off another rabbit trail, that the government's job is to enforce that law.

And that law is eternal and unchanging above the state. The king has to submit to the law.

And so the law is king. So we have that today. We are a nation of laws, not a nation of kings, not a nation of presidents or Congress.

And as we talked about with the new New York mayor, right, like that you swear to uphold the Constitution.

Where does that come from? That our elected officials are underneath the law, but no one is above the law.

This is a distinctly Christian and Protestant idea. Rutherford was a

Westminster divine. He helped to write the Westminster Catechism of Faith, and he was making this argument from Scripture, and I believe he is correct.

The law is higher than our elected officials. And so when an elected official like Tim Walz of Minnesota was violating the laws of the land during COVID lockdowns, and we talk about submitting to the government,

Romans 13, that you should submit to the authorities, or in 1 Peter, to every human institution.

But what authority is higher? Tim Walz or the written law in the Constitution? The Constitution is higher than Tim Walz.

So who should I submit to? Tim Walz or the Constitution? According to our form of government, the Constitution is higher. So I'm not violating

Romans 13 when a lower magistrate is rebelling against the authority higher than them, if I choose to obey the higher authority versus the lower.

Okay, we've got Phoebe in Darien, Connecticut, who says,

Do you think it is outlandish to believe that the United States should never permit someone to run for any political office in our 50 states that have an ideology that violates the

Constitution, as Mamdani has being a communist? I think it's perfectly legitimate.

You have to take the oath of office to swear to uphold and defend the Constitution from enemies, both foreign and domestic.

And so if an elected official is an enemy of the Constitution, and we would have to be able to prove that case, right, then they should not be able to hold office according to our form of government.

So we probably shouldn't even let such individuals run for office. We should probably make them swear that before they run.

Right, yeah. Let's see, we have Lillian in Conway, Arkansas, who asks,

Are you trying to point out how both the extremes on the left and right violate

Scriptures in regard to the civil government in your book? I would say my primary target is the left.

I think that is the primary main threat. And I think what we have as humans, as we tend to do, is we identify real crisis problems.

And then I think on the right, we have some people overcorrecting. And so I wanted to offer a thoroughly biblical view that I don't believe is an overcorrection.

We want to return to our founding principles, return to our biblical principles, not undo them.

The solution isn't that our founders got it wrong. Our problem is that we've abandoned those principles and we need to return to those first principles.

So I am definitely not saying that we have equal problems on both sides. We don't. The main problem is the political left.

It's secularization. It's wokeness. It is those things. And in response to that problem, some people are behaving poorly.

But to their credit, I do want to say this, like to their credit, the church has abandoned this realm for so long and refused to teach on it, that the only voices who were teaching on it for a while were not the only voices, but some of the loudest voices have been the ones who aren't thinking as clearly.

Now enter into the very controversial area of rendering unto

Caesar, which there is definitely not harmony and unanimous thought even amongst

Christians in the understanding of this. Oh, so that chapter, that's one of my favorite passages.

If you want to understand the government, that's where I think we get the idea of severe sovereignty from. So if you understand the

Greco -Roman form of government, what Jesus is doing there, again, this is a trick question brought to him.

Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? And as I point out in my book, earlier on in the

Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is asked whether or not they should pay the temple tax. And he says they don't have to.

But then he miraculously provides for the coin anyways. So they're bringing him this question because they're hoping he's going to say, no, you don't have to pay this tax.

And then they can bring Jesus to be tried for insurrection. But if he says yes, because it's a trap question, then he loses support among the people because the

Romans were very oppressive to the Jews. So what does he do? Well, first he tells them to take a coin out of their pocket, and they are carrying this coin with them.

And that coin has an image of Caesar on it, and under it, it says that Caesar is a son of God.

And so the Jews, the pious Jews, hated that coin so much because it violated the

Ten Commandments, right, image, blasphemy, that they were able, that Rome made a special coin for the

Jews that wouldn't have the image of Caesar on it. But these guys are carrying it. So these guys are already in Caesar's pocket, as it were.

So Jesus exposes their hypocrisy by asking for the coin. But then he says, you know, whose image is on this, Caesar's?

And he says, give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. And we look at that and we're like, well, that's not that controversial.

But if Jesus doesn't avoid the two sides of the trap, if he's just saying you should pay your taxes, he hasn't avoided the trap at all.

But what he does is he says, well, this belongs to Caesar because it has his image on it. But also, there are certain things that don't belong to Caesar.

And if you know Greco -Roman government at all, Caesar didn't agree with that. Caesar claimed to be divine. So Jesus affirmed paying taxes while also undermining the very foundation of Roman government, that Caesar is divine.

He says, some things don't belong to him. It belongs to God and God alone. And so he draws a border around Caesar's authority, saying that there are certain things that he has a right to and certain things he doesn't.

And this is what we call sphere sovereignty, that there's a border or sphere of authority that the government has.

And there's also things outside of that that the government has no right to. There's also a sphere of authority for the church and for the family, that God has designed these institutions with specific ministries and specific authority and responsibilities within their sphere, not to whatever power they claim.

A father can't claim more authority than God has given them. A pastor can't claim more authority than God has given them.

And a king can't claim more authority than God has given. Now, in that day that we shudder to think about, when the pendulum swings back to the left and we have a

Democrat in the White House and the majority of the

Senate and Congress being occupied by leftists, and there is a return to the taxpayer funding of the murder of unborn children, taxpayer funding of the brainwashing of children with homosexual ideology, and on and on we could go.

Is it ever right or wrong for a

Christian to say, I'm not going to help fund that? That's the most satanic activities that I can think of.

So how would you respond to Christians who are in that dilemma, which is all of us? Well, if you're commanded in Romans 13 to pay your taxes to Caesar, which they use for demonic things, including demon worship in their temples, right?

Then I don't think you're morally responsible for what the government does with your money. Now, if you're voting to support those things, well, that's on you, then you are morally culpable for that.

But I don't think if you buy something from someone and they make money off of you and they take that and use it for something evil, that doesn't make you morally responsible for it.

But I do think there is a place, and Francis Schaeffer talks about this in his book, A Christian Manifesto, which was really helpful to the writing of my book.

There is a time where Christians can think about civil disobedience and saying, we're not going to pay these taxes because for this reason.

But if you're going to do that, you need to do it recognizing the consequences that that would bring, and you need to be willing to pay those consequences in protest.

That is part of the civil disobedience tradition of Protestants. If you're going to civilly disobey, you need to be willing to pay the cost for it.

And this is a good segue to enter into your segment on obeying

God, not men. Yeah, Acts chapter 5, Peter's brought before the

Sanhedrin. And the Sanhedrin, over the entire episode, they arrest him.

They escape from prison. They arrest him again. Tell him, you can't preach Jesus. And Peter says, the very same

Peter who would write later to submit to your governing authority, says, what do you think? Should we obey you or should we obey

God? And the clear implication is we're going to obey God. And what we often miss on this, because we interpret everything through our own cultural lens, is that we think the

Sanhedrin is just a religious court. Well, the Sanhedrin, if you remember, were the very same people who had put Jesus on trial.

And they had the judicial authority under the Roman system of government to punish civil crimes as well, just not use the death penalty.

So the Sanhedrin is not strictly just a religious institution. It can enforce civil laws as well.

It has its own guard and soldiers and all of that underneath the jurisdiction of Rome. And so this is not just a religious trial.

This is a civil trial that Peter is put on. And he chooses, he tells them point blank, we are going to disobey you.

And so we remember that when, on all these commands in Romans 13 and whatever, it says we obey or we submit in the

Lord. Well, that qualifies our submission. If we're not submitting to the Lord, then we don't submit to the state.

If I have to choose between the two, I choose obeying God. And then also the command to give to Caesar what belongs to him, both in Romans 13 and in Matthew 22.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Give everything that we owe to Caesar in Romans 13. That if you don't actually owe obedience to them in this area, you don't have to give it.

That's not a sin. If Caesar claims something that isn't his, you don't have to obey him.

Yes. And in many areas, it goes beyond.

We don't have to obey men when there is a compulsion to commit evil.

We must not obey. Yeah. I talk about the three categories for civil disobedience in that chapter that have been worked out across Christian history.

When the government is giving you a righteous command, which it has the authority to do before God, you must obey.

If you don't, you're sinning. When the government gives you a command that by obeying it, you would sin, then you must disobey.

So you have no freedom in those two situations. To not do what you must would be to sin before God.

There's that third category where the government commands something that's either outside of its authority or whatever, but that by obeying it, you're not necessarily sinning yourself.

You are free, as Jesus says from the temple text in Matthew 17, you are free to disobey.

You are free to make the choice, is this worth disobeying over? So Jesus says to his disciples, you don't have to pay that tax, but so as to not cause an offense, why don't you go ahead and pay it?

And so there's a freedom there. We can decide, is this issue worth disobeying or not?

If it makes me have to sin by obeying, then you have to disobey because you have to obey God over man.

Well, we're going to our final break right now. And if you do have a question of your own, I urge you to submit it immediately because we are rapidly running out of time.

ChrisArnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back right after these messages. This is

Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially.

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

Lord Jesus Christ. And, of course, the end of which we strive is the glory of God.

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe ten minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior. Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.

Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. That's gracechurchatfranklin .org.

This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our sovereign

Lord, God, Savior, and King, Jesus Christ, today and always.

I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession, we embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's Word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our

Triune God. We are also devoted to living out the one another commands of Scripture, loving, encouraging, and serving each other as the body of Christ.

In our worship, we sing psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every

Sunday. We would love for you to visit and worship with us. You can find our details at trbccarlisle .org.

That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, we'll see you soon.

Attention all Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listeners. There is no doubt we are living in difficult times.

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Puritan Reformed is a Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church. We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in Scripture alone.

Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image -bearing prophets, priests, and kings.

We teach families to worship together as families. Puritan is committed to teaching the whole council of God so that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

We sing the Psalms, teach the law, proclaim the gospel, make disciples, maintain discipline, and exalt

Christ. This is Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed in Phoenix, Arizona.

Join us in the glorious cause of advancing Christ's crown and covenant over the kings of the earth.

Puritan Reformed Church. Believe. Build. Fight. PuritanPHX .com

I'm Dr. Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Coram, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jansen and Christopher McDowell.

It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Coram who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word and to enthusiastically proclaim

Christ Jesus the King and His doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island, and beyond.

I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love as I have.

For more information on Hope Reformed Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.

That's hopereformedli .net. Or call 631 -696 -5711.

That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Coram, Long Island, New York that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is Brian McLaughlin, president of the SecureComm Group and supporter of Chris Arnzen's Iron Sharpens Iron radio program.

SecureComm provides the highest level of security systems for residential buildings, municipalities, churches, commercial properties, and much more.

We can be reached at securecommgroup .com. That's securecommgroup .com.

But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

God's pleasure when he ran. He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God.

I sensed that same God -given pleasure when ministering the Word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a Savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to Him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the

Bronx, in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.

That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's Word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

God bless you. And folks, please never forget that this program is also paid for in part by the law firm of Buttafuoco &

Associates. If you are the victim of a very serious personal injury or medical malpractice anywhere in the

United States, please contact my very dear longtime friend and brother in Christ, Daniel P.

Buttafuoco, attorney at law, at 1 -800 -NOW -HURT, 1 -800 -NOW -HURT, or visit

Dan's website, 1 -800 -NOW -HURT .com, 1 -800 -NOW -HURT .com.

Please tell Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, that you heard about his law firm,

Buttafuoco & Associates, from Chris Armsen of Iron Trip and Zion Radio. I also want to remind all men in ministry leadership that my next free biannual

Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastor's Luncheon will be held Thursday, March 5, 11 a .m.

to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, which is in Perry County, Pennsylvania.

My keynote speaker for the second time is my longtime very dear friend,

Dr. Conrad M. Bayway, pastor of Kabwata Baptist Church of Lusaka, Zambia, Africa.

He is also the founding chancellor of African Christian University, and he is an author and a very highly sought -after conference speaker globally.

If you would like to attend this free Pastor's Luncheon, if you are a man in ministry leadership, whether you're a pastor, elder, deacon, parachurch leader, send me an email to chrisarmsen at gmail .com

and put Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line. Please include your name, the name of your church or parachurch organization and its location, and the number of men who will be joining you.

And that's all absolutely free. Not only is the lunch free, and not only is your opportunity to hear and see

Dr. Conrad M. Bayway speak in person absolutely free, but every man in attendance will receive a heavy sack, possibly even two heavy sacks, of free brand -new books personally selected by me and donated by generous

Christian publishers all over the United States and United Kingdom, all absolutely free.

So send me that email to chrisarmsen at gmail .com. Put Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line.

By the way, the night before the Pastor's Luncheon, Wednesday, March 4th, at 7 p .m.,

Dr. M. Bayway will be preaching at the church where I am a member, Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

That is open to everyone, men, women, and children. And for more details on directions, go to the website of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle at trbccarlisle .org,

trbccarlisle .org, and Carlisle is spelled

C -A -R -L -I -S -L -E. I hope to see as many of you as possible at both of these events.

Well, we are now back with our guest today, Levi Secord, author of Servant, Not Savior, an

Introduction to the Bible's Teaching about Civil Government. We are now entering into the subject,

Thus to All Tyrants. And it is often overlooked that one of the very reasons that we have a

Second Amendment is to prevent the rise of tyranny. But if you could continue, Pastor Levi.

Yeah, so Six Semper Tyrannis, another slogan from our founding.

Now, Thus to All Tyrants is actually ironically today, the state flag of Virginia has a picture of a tyrant being crushed by Lady Virtue, which is something we should probably get back to, particularly in the state of Virginia.

The idea here comes from Revelation chapter 13, where drawing on the beast imagery from the book of Daniel, you have the four beasts who represent the four different kingdoms who rise up and oppose or try to conquer the world and oppose and oppress

God's people. We see in Revelation 13 that they come to a pinnacle in one form or another.

Whatever view you have of Revelation, there's a picture here offered in Revelation 13 of a beastly state, a tyrannical state that opposes

God's people. And so what you have here then at the end of Revelation or towards the end of Revelation 19,

Christ comes down, he crushes the beast, he defeats all of his enemies. And so we know that there's an expiration date on all tyrants.

And that expiration date is Christ's return in the fullness of his kingdom.

But Revelation 13 is important as we work out a biblical theology of the state, is there is this potential,

Romans 13, for good states and Revelation 13 for demonic states because behind the beast in Revelation 13 is the dragon of Revelation 12.

And so your government will either serve Christ or it will serve the great dragon, the great serpent.

And we have to factor that into when we're thinking about the state. It can be really good, it can be really bad.

Yes, and it is just terrifying to see and hear the voices on the left who are really voices of tyranny, ironically and falsely claiming things for themselves, like using slogans like the rule of law and things like that, things that they violate habitually and constantly.

But do you think that those on the right who are firm believers in the

Second Amendment often shy away from connecting it to one of the very purposes that we have, the

Second Amendment, is to be a bulwark against the rise of tyranny? I don't think so.

I think that's pretty well understood in conservative circles. I mean, you look at Canada, you look at Great Britain, Australia, etc.,

places where they've confiscated the firearms from the citizenry. How is that going for their other rights?

It's not going very well. I heard someone somewhere put it this way, a government that can't trust its people with the firearms is a government you shouldn't trust.

So if they can't trust you to actually be a citizen, you probably shouldn't trust them to rule you. Yeah, and it's always amusing to hear left -wing politicians trying to convey the idea that the

Constitution only guarantees our rights to own certain guns to go hunting.

Yeah. Well, we're entering now into another one of your sections, possibly maybe the last one we have time to cover today.

We only have seven minutes left in today's program. But the King of Kings. Yeah, Psalm chapter 2.

Psalm chapter 2 is a messianic psalm. It speaks about the nation's raging, God laughs at him.

And what is God's response to the nation's raging? He says he sets his king, his son, on Mount Zion.

And then after the enthronement of Christ, which I believe is, of course, forward -looking.

It's prophetic. The enthronement of Christ, I believe, is the ascension. The ascension, the Son of Man comes to the right hand of the

Father. The enthronement of Christ. But then God turns and he speaks to the leaders of the nations, the kings, the rulers.

Not just the nations as in people groups, but they're rulers. And he says, kiss the

Son, serve God while you have time. And so the problem I have with some of my fellow

Baptists is they completely neuter that into only in eternity. But God is warning the rulers of this age that they have a limited amount of time in which they can kiss the

Son. That is, pay homage to him, bend the knee to him, and serve God through him in which they can be saved.

And so that time frame at the end of Psalm 2 is now. Christ is enthroned. He's been set on Mount Zion, Revelation 14.

The Lamb is on Mount Zion looking down at the nation's rage with the beast, and they've been given a warning.

You have a time in which you can repent. So what is the obligation of the rulers of this age right now?

They do need to bend the knee to Christ and submit to him. They must kiss the Son. That command is in effect today.

That's not just an Old Testament thing, and it's not just in eternity in the new creation.

Right now it says, Revelation chapter 1, that Christ is the ruler, present tense, of the kings on the earth.

He has authority now. They need to recognize it. So in some form, I believe particularly in the founding documents, a nation should actively recognize

Christ as its king, as its master. Hey, man, well, in the time that we have left, please summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding this topic today.

Two things. Two things I want. We need to have a robustly biblical political theology.

That's the heart of this book. Most of the book is dealing with Bible passages. It's not just political philosophy.

It's not just political theory. We are rooting this in Scripture. And I write at an accessible level for pastors and lay people.

You want to be biblical in your worldview and in your political theology. This book is a wonderful foundation for it.

Take the time. Take the time to read it, buy it, share it with individuals. I've been told by those who are experts in the field, like Steve Wellman and others, that there's not a lot of books like this out there.

And so that does stand out in that. Second, if we need to learn anything from what happened to Charlie Kirk in his life in ministry,

I think the one thing we need to learn is that we've been sold a lie that in order to reach people, we need to ignore connecting

Christianity to politics. Charlie Kirk is most likely the most effective evangelist, particularly to young people that we've seen in generations in this nation.

And how did he reach them? Not by ignoring the political realm, not by ignoring the controversial problems, but by reasoning from the

Christian worldview into the very questions our people have today. If you let Christianity out of that secular cage to address all of life, we will reach more people.

And so if you have a good biblical foundation for your political views, this is not contrary to the

Great Commission. This is not undermining the church's mission. It is furthering the church's mission.

And it will be a bridge to preach the gospel to people. And so the church has to regain that vision.

And again, the funny thing is, is unbelievers are realizing Christianity's need in the political realm, and the church is being slowed to pick that up.

Now, most people get books today on Amazon. Do you have any other website or source where you'd like them to purchase the book?

No, Amazon's the best place to get it. Servant, not Savior.

Yes, that's Servant, Not Savior, an introduction to the Bible's teaching about civil government by Levi Secord.

And by the way, his last name is spelled S -E -C -O -R -D. And it has been a joy having you on the program today.

And before we run out of time, do you have any events or anything coming up at the church where you serve that you'd like to inform our listeners about?

Nothing presently on the horizon. We just had a conference back in September addressing how covenants shape all of life.

I believe I talked to you that briefly at my last appearance on your show. Yes, yes. I just had a conference out in California teaching some pastors about the biblical worldview and political theology.

Well, once again, if anybody wants to keep up to date on any of the activities of Christ Bible Church of Roseville, Minnesota, you can go to their website,

ChristBible .net, ChristBible .net.

And I want to once again remind all of you men in ministry leadership to make your plans early to attend my next free

Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheon. So many people who have not attended previous luncheons have said to me,

I just wish I knew earlier. Well, now you've got no excuse because the event is not until March 5th of 2026.

So if you are a man in ministry leadership, please reserve that date on your calendar.

And keep in mind, folks, we have men habitually, every time we have these, traveling from very far distances.

They're that good. We have people traveling regularly from North Carolina, from Virginia, from New York, both upstate

New York and Long Island, New York, from New Jersey, even from Georgia. We even had a brother driving all the way from Texas once to attend.

So I hope that you can attend. And send me an email if you'd like to register to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And I want to remind you, I want you all to remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater