April 6, 2021 Show with Phil Johnson on “Are Naive Christians Unconsciously Helping Pave the Way to Greater Waves of Persecution of the Church?”

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Are naive Christians unconsciously helping to pave the way to greater waves of persecution of the church?

Well we're going to discuss that question today with Phil Johnson one of my favorite guests of all time here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in fact

I still don't think anybody has beat him as far as being the most interviewed guest of all time on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Phil is the executive director of the media ministry for Dr.

John MacArthur. Grace to you and we are going to be addressing that theme that I just mentioned and it's an honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Phil Johnson.

Thank you Chris good to be here. And why don't you very quickly give us an update on how

Grace Community Church in Sun Valley California where you are a member of the church pastored by John MacArthur and where you also basically pastor a church within a church there.

Tell us how you folks are faring with all the persecution you've been receiving locally in California due to your refusal to shut down during the coronavirus pandemic hysteria mandates.

Yeah actually things are going very well we just had of course Easter celebration the

Friday evening Good Friday service which is always one of the biggest services of the year.

This year it was packed and we have several overflow spaces now because there's still a tent set up in the parking lot for people who want to meet outdoors.

There's an overflow space in the gymnasium and then several places outdoors where you can sit and watch the service on video and of course the 3 ,000 seat auditorium inside.

All of those spaces were full on Friday night. I honestly don't know where everyone was able to park but everything was packed full on Friday night.

It had to be one of the biggest attendances we've ever had for a single service.

And so I would say that all the stuff you've read in the news about Grace Church and our meeting and all hasn't done anything to grow attendance but attendance is as thorough and lively as it's ever been.

These actually have been the greatest days for the church. When the quarantine started, when the

COVID crisis hit, I think a lot of us looking ahead said this could be very harmful to the life and health of our church.

But the truth is this has been the most exciting and blessed year in the history of my 40 years at Grace Church.

Wow. Well there's Romans 828 going into action right there.

In fact, I know a number of churches that refused to shut down who have grown substantially in size because many people were tired of having the churches where they were members being so obedient to the secular authorities and keeping their doors shut and even going beyond what the secular authorities asked and certainly what they had the authority to do just out of some kind of expression of love in their minds to the community when

I think it's the exact opposite. The church is supposed to be expressing their love by ministering to the community with the gospel, with a call to repentance and discipleship and counseling and all things like that that go on in addition to meeting the physical needs of folks in the surrounding areas of the church.

So isn't it ironic that people... Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, the history of the church is dotted with incidents of plagues and pandemics that have crippled society.

This is not by any means... The first time and far from the worst plague that ever hit the world.

And the church has been there through dozens of those and in fact, one of the famous outbreaks of cholera in England was at the start of Spurgeon's ministry there in London.

He records how he just continued to minister to people and while health officials were saying, you know, it's dangerous to come into contact with people who are infected, he went and prayed with the sick and dying and just trusted the

Lord to keep him from, you know, getting cholera himself and survived that crisis and the

Lord blessed his ministry. And that's how the church has always responded until now in our generation.

And I think one of the problems is that you've got so many massive megachurches whose entire existence is not really to proclaim the gospel because they don't do that or they don't do it clearly, but they see the goal of the church is to gather the biggest possible crowd.

And so they'll use entertainment or any means they can to try to assemble a multitude and in the midst of a crisis like this where they can't meet, what do they have left to do?

Most of those churches have remained closed and as you said, all the churches

I know of that have continued to meet have experienced growth as a result because true believers who may be in churches that are either less than totally orthodox or less than enthusiastic about the gospel, those churches that have totally shut down, the few remaining believers in those churches have looked for other places to go and they've found that those who are still preaching the gospel and still devoted to the truth still have thriving congregations and the

Lord's blessed us. Any further threats or anything like that coming from governing authorities and the police department and so on?

You know, I think still, yes, there are hearings and lawsuits that probably will continue for a couple of years.

I'm not supposed to comment or give any opinion on the matters that are involved with the lawsuit, so I can't say a lot about it, but I know that there are still hearings.

The county hasn't backed off. The state government here in California has been notoriously rigid on the restrictions, except for the politicians themselves who find ways around.

They still get to eat in restaurants and things like that while the rest of us are under rules not to meet and not to go indoors without a mask and all that sort of stuff, but we've continued to meet and grow and, like I said, the

Lord has blessed us. Praise God. And if anybody wants more information about Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and also the ministry for which our guest,

Phil Johnson, serves as Executive Director, Grace to you, you can go to gty .org,

gty .org. In fact, I'm going to take this time to quickly plug an excellent book, a very important book for our time,

Coronavirus and the Leadership of the Christian Church, A Sacred Trust Broken. My personal physician is one of the authors,

Dr. Joel Yeager of Heritage Family Health in Newmanstown, Pennsylvania.

He co -authored that along with Dr. Daniel O 'Rourke, another physician, and Ernie Springer, who is the publisher.

And in fact, I've got to get a hold off the air, of course, of your mailing address, Phil, because the publisher would love for you to have a copy of this in your hands.

Yeah, thank you. I'll text my address to you. Oh, that sounds great. Well, we have a pretty heavy theme today, and I want you to answer the question.

Are naive Christians unconsciously helping to pave the way to greater waves of persecution of the church?

Yeah, I think there's no question that that is happening. You can see it in pretty much any venue where people exchange ideas and talk, mainly on social media, obviously.

The hordes of Twitter are full of professing believers, evangelicals, who are some of the harshest critics of those of us who continue to meet or continue to talk about preaching the gospel in the midst of what they see as a situation that really ought to shut us down.

The fear, which, you know, it's ironic, isn't it? The scripture says one of the things, one of the chief things

Christ died for is to deliver those who, through all their lives, struggle with the fear, struggle with the fear of death.

And so here we are in a situation where the media and our government and pretty much every major institution seems to be doing everything they can to prolong the crisis and maximize the fear, and it's disturbing to me that so many

Christians are playing along with that narrative and fomenting that scenario.

They believe that we really ought to be more fearful than we are. And, you know,

I think that simply opens the door for more and more persecution.

Persecution not only from official sources, the government, but from the world, and in the end, it turns out that some of the chief persecutors, some of the verbal persecution, comes from within the evangelical community.

Yeah, it is quite a disturbing scenario that we are facing where people very quickly, immediately believe in things they are taught and mandated by the secular media and by secular politicians and scientists, even those that are known to, for lack of a better term, hate

Christ and his gospel and his scriptures. And even though the

Christians who are bowing down to these mandates so quickly and the urgent call for vaccinations and other things, they know that these people also believe that a nine -month -old baby in the womb is not worthy of the protection of its own life from being murdered by the mother and the mother's physician.

They know that these same politicians and many of the same scientists will allow a man to be identified as a woman just because he feels like one.

I mean, we could go on and on with the insanity, and Christians who believe in the inerrancy of scripture are just immediately jumping on the bandwagon and siding with these individuals.

Yeah, it's proof of how influential the world can be and how worldly today's

Christians are. We've been indoctrinated by public schools, the media, the government, pretty much every means of communication, indoctrinating people to be gullible like that.

And what's appalling is how many Christians go along with it. We want to see evidence of it.

Look at the case of that pastor in Alberta who was arrested simply for meeting with his church and preaching.

Even though there hadn't been any cases of COVID in that church, there were, as I understand it, two cases in the church, two cases of COVID, and so they closed and followed the quarantine procedures while those people quickly recovered from the illness.

But the virus had not been a significant problem in that church, and so they decided to resume meeting and continue meeting, and the government actually sent policemen in, and they arrested this pastor, and he spent,

I forget how much time in jail, but it was several days, maybe a couple of weeks in jail because he was preaching.

It was definitely at least a couple of weeks or more. Yeah, and a lot of the talk on Twitter, even coming from fellow

Canadian Christians, in fact, I would say some of the Canadian evangelicals were the worst at this.

They focused their attacks on that pastor and said, shame on him, he should be obeying the rules, he's causing all of us more grief.

And the big argument was, how can you call this persecution? This isn't legitimate persecution.

This is punishment for disobeying the law. And they refused to see it as any kind of persecution.

Well, that clearly is going to open the door for a heavier and heavier hand from the government.

You already see it. This weekend, there was that viral video of another church in Canada where you perhaps saw it, a

Polish pastor chased a group of policemen and a health official out of the church, yelling at him.

I don't necessarily endorse his style, but I absolutely stand with him in saying, if we as believers don't resist this sort of illegal intrusion by government officials, it's just going to get worse and worse.

And I think so many Christians going along with it are actually opening the door for a time of persecution that they probably will regret.

Yes, and it is interesting that, quite providentially, the theme for the conference that you and I will be attending, where you will be one of over 20 speakers, the

G3 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, September 30th through October 2nd.

The theme is Christ is supreme over all. And really,

Christians are, I would have a hard time believing they'd be conscious of this, but they're really allowing governing authorities to have supremacy over Christ because they're allowing governing authorities in some places even to forbid

Christians from doing things they're commanded to do. Am I right? Yeah, no, that is exactly right.

It started with the fact that we are commanded to meet. I mean, that's the whole meaning of the word church.

It's a called out assembly, an assembly. It's not an online discussion group.

It's an assembly of the saints, and we're not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, even under government orders.

And, you know, we said this more than a year ago, look, if there's a legitimate health crisis, people are dying and the streets are full of bodies, yes, we can suspend the worship of the church for a definite time.

Just like if you're sick, you don't come to church if you have a contagious disease.

So the command to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together isn't so absolute that it means you should never, you're always in sin if you ever miss a

Sunday. But once it's gone for more than a year now, in fact,

I would say by the time it went for two months, and there weren't signs that people were dying in droves and groups like churches meeting were spreading the disease at a rate that was actually killing large numbers of people.

As soon as that was clear, it seems to me that there comes a time when the church has to assert its own responsibility to Christ and say, look, we have to obey

God rather than men. That's the biblical principle. We obey God rather than men. And there's an element of subjectivity in the question of how long?

How long do you obey a quarantine, and when do you go back to worship? It would seem to me that by any measure, once the church has been suspended for more than a year, you can see this just in the response of people.

People all over the world are coming back to church anyway, because you can't, as a believer, thrive and grow and progress in your sanctification the way you should and live a healthy spiritual life.

If you're deprived of all fellowship for months on end like that, it just seems to be common sense for anyone who understands the whole point of the church assembling and fellowship, and yet there is no end of people out there who self -identify as evangelicals who still fiercely and angrily believe that those churches that are continuing to meet somehow, they're the ones in sin.

What do you think is the root of that phenomenon? Because I know folks that are just as conservative as you and I, who are just as committed to reformed soteriology as you and I, to biblical inerrancy as you and I, who even may have openly despised the presidential candidacy and election of Joe Biden as much as you and I, and yet they are among these cheerleaders for all of the mandates that are being declared, whether they are legally declared or strongly recommended under the language or using the language that it sounds like a mandate anyway.

What do you think the root of that is? Yeah, I don't have a good answer for that question.

I've wondered about it myself. There aren't many like that. I do think the lines generally break down between those who are totally committed to biblical inerrancy and the authority of Christ over the church, typically are the ones who say, you know, the church needs to meet.

And it's people who are more pragmatic, who think the point of the church is to gather a crowd and influence the world by persuasion or whatever.

They tend to be the ones who think, no, no, no, we have to go along with this for the sake of our testimony and loving our brethren.

That's generally how it breaks down. But as you say, there are some whose theological opinions

I would normally agree with who, on this issue, have gone along with interminable quarantines and are perfectly content just to livestream church services.

I think it reflects a deficient view of ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church.

I'm willing to argue that anywhere. But you can see, for example, the inconsistency of thought in a group like Nine Marks, Mark Devers' group, who at first, they were extremely critical of churches who gathered to meet anyway.

And yet one of the core principles of what they've taught for years is the importance of centrality of the church and the fellowship and physical attendance at church.

That's still one of the doctrines they've stressed. And yet they spent weeks, maybe months, being critical of churches that were meeting over against the quarantine.

And then, ultimately, they decided, no, this has gone on too long. And they sued for the right to...

I don't understand, like I said, there's a degree of subjectivity and how long is too long and all that.

And so I can appreciate that. I can live with a bit of disagreement. But here we are, more than a year after the quarantine started, and those

Christians who are still content to sit home in their pajamas and drink coffee and livestream on TV and think that that's as healthy as going to church,

I just don't understand that attitude. I don't think that grows out of any sort of faith or devotion to Christ.

I think that's a worldly attitude. And I'm not ashamed to say that's my point of view.

There have been some closer to or right on the same spot that you and I are on on this issue, who have even said that that is not worship.

And gathering around a TV or computer screen, although is a beneficial aid at times, especially for those who are homebound, it is not a substitute in any way for worship.

And it really isn't. How do you respond to that level of critique over what's going on?

Well, I do agree with that. That I think, you know, livestreaming the church service,

I'm not opposed to that, because I think it serves a very useful purpose for people who are of necessity shut in.

And my dad, who died last year, was confined to an assisted -care living place for months.

And his only source of biblical teaching and Christian fellowship was the sort of online thing, plus people who came to visit him.

I appreciate that. You know, he sensed the need for fellowship and would have said that, but he could not get out.

And I think the church owes people like that all kinds of ministry, both in person and, if possible, make the worship service available online so they can watch it and participate at least on that level.

But, and I would say dogmatically, that is not a valid substitute for church.

It's not an option, if you're able to attend, to say, no,

I just don't feel like getting up and getting dressed this week, and so I'll watch the livestream on the internet.

That's, at best, a temporary, short -term substitute. It's better than skipping it altogether, but not much.

And after a year of nothing but online, you know, watching a service online,

I can't see how any Christian who genuinely understands the priority of Christian fellowship would settle for that as a permanent or even long -term option.

It's just not, it doesn't accomplish what the church is meant to do.

How do you use your spiritual gift if you cut yourself off from any kind of contact with your brothers and sisters in Christ?

You can't do it. Well, we have to go to our first break right now. If anybody wants to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages with more of Phil Johnson of Grace to You, the ministry of John MacArthur.

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Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Avino, and thanks for listening. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen.

And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the entire program is Phil Johnson, the president of Grace to You, the media ministry of John MacArthur.

And we are discussing, Are Naive Christians Unconsciously Helping to Pave the

Way to Greater Waves of Persecution of the Church? Our email address, if you have questions of your own, is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

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Phil, we have a first -time questioner, Andrew in Brooklyn, New York.

How does the modern church's compromise on critical race theory and intersectionality compare to the church's compromise on evolution and a literal genesis?

Yeah, you know, I think it comes from the same source, and that is a proud desire to have academic respectability, you know, so that if you watch the history of, just review the history of the evangelical church over the past 200 years, there's been a significant and always destructive tendency for leading evangelicals to think that if they don't go along with whatever academic theories or beliefs happen to be popular in the secular academy at any given time, then they sacrifice their influence with the world, as if our influence somehow is based on our own intellectual achievements or our intellectual aptitude, when in fact,

Scripture is very clear saying that God chose the weak things of this world to confound the wise.

The last thing the church needs to be doing is watching what the secular academy is thinking at the moment and trying to adapt our message so that it fits, and yet that sort of thinking has been a plague on Christianity for at least 200 years, and it's the thing that keeps dragging the evangelical movement into liberalizing ideas.

Socinian doctrines, you know, everything from universalism and unitarianism to neo -orthodoxy, all has in common this desire to fit in with whatever happens to be academically stylish at the moment, and right now what's stylish is social justice.

You can see that in every venue of secular discourse, not only in the academic world where those ideas have been there for 20 years or longer, but now even in popular entertainment, everything is about social justice and all the attendant beliefs that go with that, and so evangelicals in hordes are trying to jump on another bandwagon just at the very moment when it seems to me many thought leaders in the secular world have become tired of the cancel culture and everything is racist.

All of the ideas that are associated with social justice, it's a culture of victimhood, where victimhood is glorified and everything is blamed on racism.

I've written elsewhere that it's become almost the substitute for religion in the secular world, wokeism.

It has many of the attributes of a religion, everything from its own songs and rituals to things that you have to believe without question or you get excommunicated, canceled.

So, you know, I think of all the things going on in the evangelical community today, that is one of the most dangerous and destructive movements there is, this notion that somehow if we don't integrate the doctrines of secular social justice into our message, then we're going to lose our influence with the world.

My pastor, John MacArthur, has said in all his experience, you know, 50 years in Christian ministry, this is the most dangerous threat that the

Church has had to weather yet. Now, by the way, thank you for your excellent question,

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Something that is interesting, an interesting phenomenon. Why do you think it is?

I mean, some people might be listening, and they might be saying, what does critical race theory and intersectionality have to do with the main theme of shutting down of churches over coronavirus hysteria mandates?

Well, it does seem to dovetail. I mean, not always.

I mean, I know folks that are very opposed to critical race theory and intersectionality and all of those nonsensical, insane and dangerous and bigoted things that are under the umbrella of the woke movement and the social justice warrior movement, who are opposed to that and yet are right on the bandwagon with the mask mandates with the shutting down of churches with rushing as fast as you can to get a vaccine.

But there is, it seems an overlapping though, where there are many who have as much a part of their agenda, the pushing for these mandates as they are to promote the woke movement.

Why is that? That's the most common, the social justice agenda and the health mandates get married together and become a cause to fight for among evangelicals.

That would be the most common group. As you say, there are some who would reject the social justice agenda, and yet they're all in favor of the mask mandates and quarantine.

It doesn't often go the other way. You don't see many people who say, no, the church needs to meet.

We need to go ahead and worship and trust the Lord in the midst of any health crisis.

You don't see many people who say that and then say, and we're also in favor of social justice.

We want the church to meet and we're in favor of social justice. And I think the reason you don't see that very often is because people, evangelicals endorsing the social justice agenda and evangelicals who endorse the closure of churches for health reasons, all are driven by a similar motive.

And it's what I was just talking about in response to that question. It's a desire to gain some kind of influence or respectability or accolades from a secular world where these ideas are popular.

So whatever happens to dominate the secular mind at the moment is easily adopted by people who think that, you know, the church can't have influence with the world if we disagree with them, so let's agree with them as much as we can.

And they've lost the picture that the church is called to confront culture, not adapt to it.

But if you think, no, what we have to do is contextualize everything and adapt to the culture as much as we can, then you're going to be just as in favor of government intrusion into church polity and practice as you are in favor of the social justice agenda, because that's the price of respectability and approval from worldly -minded people.

What do you foresee being, I mean,

I know that you're not a prophet, I know that you're a very strict cessationist,

I know that you're not into extra -biblical divine revelation occurring in the 21st century, so I know that you don't know anything with infallibility, but do you have any idea or any biblically trained thoughts on what you see as a possibility for, or not only biblically trained thoughts, but even from what you know from history and from what you see going on in the world around us now, what you expect might be greater waves of persecution specifically for the church, especially here in the

United States and North America in general? Yeah, you're right, I'm a cessationist, but I have to say, over the years,

I think my predictions, just based on guesses and experience, have been far more accurate than most of the

Pentecostal prophets. But I don't claim any special insight or knowledge, and in fact, there have been some trends like this that I honestly did not foresee.

The social justice thing, for example, that was one of the planks and the platform of the emerging church movement almost 20 years ago.

They were big on social justice and parroting all the same things that you hear today from more mainstream evangelicals.

And when the emerging church movement died, I really didn't anticipate that mainstream evangelicals were going to pick up the social justice theme and make that the heart of their message.

So I didn't see that coming. I would not have predicted that the COVID crisis and the health quarantine would cause such a stark division within the church, within the evangelical movement.

I did not foresee that coming. So again, I don't claim any special insight or anything like that, but if I had to guess where government intrusion into the church is going to take place, it's going to be focused mainly,

I believe, on the issues of sexual perversion and gender preferences and all of those things, where already you're required by law in certain environments to recognize all different kinds of sexual perversions as normal, or at least pretend they're normal.

And you're required, at least by social convention, not yet by government mandate, but that's coming pretty soon,

I think, you'll be required to use people's preferred pronouns. And so if someone self -identifies as a woman, but he was born a man, it would be illegal to use a masculine pronoun in reference to him.

Already you can lose your job or whatever. And I think there's going to be an effort for, in fact, some of the politicians have already outspokenly stated this, that they believe laws about non -discrimination on the basis of sexual preference or gender identity, non -discrimination should be required by law, even in churches.

So the churches would be forced to hire transsexuals and homosexuals.

I think that's coming pretty quickly, and it already exists in some countries right now.

Grace to you, our radio broadcast is on the air in Canada and England, and both of those countries have pretty strict laws about what you can say regarding homosexuality, to the point where even if all you do is quote scripture saying that it's a sin for a man to lie with a woman, you can be fined or even kicked off the radio for discrimination against homosexuality.

The LGBT movement, I think, is therefore going to be the focus of the big wave of persecution that's really going to,

I think, sift the church and separate genuine Christians from people who are religious as a matter of convenience, for social acceptance or whatever.

Because once it's costly to stand for the truth, you will see who really believes it and who doesn't.

Yeah, I rarely agree, well maybe that's a stretch or an exaggeration.

I very often disagree, not all the time, but I very often disagree with Pastor Jeffers in Texas, one of the pastors that was most frequently featured on Fox News and other conservative outlets during the presidential race and even subsequent to that.

I mean, I believe he's my brother in Christ, and I just don't agree with all of his rhetoric or his discernment, especially when he was linking arms with some of the lunatic fringe

Word of Faith movement leaders, just because they were supportive of President Trump.

But he said something recently that I agreed with when he was being asked about the recent polls that church attendance, in fact all attendance in houses of worship across the board, has dropped dramatically.

In fact, for the first time in the last decade, something that is being participated by less than half of the population in America, in other words, prior to recently, and since they started taking these polls, more than half, the majority of Americans were churchgoers and also attendees regularly at their houses of choice.

But Pastor Jeffers, I think rightly said that, well, that's just nominal

Christianity, who are basically starting to live and act according to their true worldview and belief system.

They're just not going to church anymore because they never really believed to begin with, likely.

And I see a lot of validity in that. What do you have to say? Yeah, he's absolutely right about that, and it is one of the hidden blessings of persecution.

You know, we live in an era where there really is very little persecution. We're not accustomed to it. But if you look at the whole sweep of church history, the church has been persecuted far more than it's lived in peace.

And persecution has the beneficial effect of keeping the church pure.

But I absolutely agree with him that one of the reasons—it's actually a blessing,

I think, if half of the churches in America shut down, I wouldn't lament that. More than half.

More than half. Yeah, more than half of the churches in America are not truly

Christian anyway. So yeah, he's right about that. And I think the harsher the persecution becomes, the more—and the higher price you have to pay in order to stand for Christ, the more you're going to see, like I said, who really believes and who doesn't.

We have to go to our midway break right now, folks. So if you have a question for Phil Johnson, send it in to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Also, please use this time wisely and write down as much of the information as possible from our advertisers so that you can more frequently respond to them, even if it just means thanking them for sponsoring

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We need the finances that come through our advertisers to remain on the air. So please respond to them as much as you can.

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Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Phil Johnson after these messages. As host of Iron Trip and Zion Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey, pastored by Alan Dunn.

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