Macarthur & Shutting Down Worship

The Church as the Gathering of the Called-Out Ones

I thought a better thing to do was actually to play the concise thoughts from Pastor John while he was on Fox News and so I pulled up the clip here and let's go ahead and play that right now.

Is defying Governor Gavin Newsom's new coronavirus restrictions, hosting indoor in-person services at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles County. Pastor says he's apparently been warned he could face fines or even arrest if he carries on and yet he does.

Pastor John McArthur joins us live to talk about that. Pastor, good to have you with us.

Thank you, Shannon.

My pleasure.

Okay. Let me start with this headline, a piece written by a doctor. He says churches could be the deadliest places in the COVID -19 pandemic, says the combination of singing in close quarters and decreased ventilation is nothing short of a Petri dish or cell plate for viral growth.

So just addressing that, this is really, really important and it's one of the things that Pastor John has pointed out publicly in these news shows and radio interviews and of course during his message, this issue related to the spread of COVID -19 is very important.

Now Pastor John argues that early on they took precautions and they closed down the gathering of the saints on the Lord's day because they were being told that this was going to kill millions of people, there wasn't a lot known about the virus and so they were trying to take precautionary measures to love their people.

That's what they did.

Okay.

Now, of course, as the data has come in on COVID -19, things have to be seen in a different.

Light.

This is so vitally important and if you guys are in a place where you're undecided on this and you're just not really sure and there's still fear surrounding the virus, people with compromised immune systems and the elderly, all that is known now, but the information now is here and it's consistent.

The data shows us that COVID -19 is on par with, on par with, it's not the flu. I've heard people even saying it's just a mild flu. Well, I would say that depends on who gets this thing, so that's really not accurate.

It's not a hoax. It's a real thing. It does hurt people. It definitely kills people. But we know now details about this virus, knowing who it discriminates against, and we know that it is on par with other sicknesses, other viruses, other illnesses that we have to actually contend with on an annual basis.

Now this is, I think, this is a linchpin sort of a thing and this is where I hope we can all consider this in terms of consistency. When you think about COVID -19 and all that we know about this virus now, when I say it's on par with other viruses and things we deal with on an annual basis, I think consistency matters here because we live in a fallen world.

We live in a fallen world and we are constantly facing diseases, things that can kill us. All of us are going to probably go out today and drive in our cars and there's a danger of getting into a car accident, either being killed ourselves or killing somebody else in the process.

This is a fallen world. We don't live in the eternal state and so we're going to be dealing with things like this on an annual basis and so we have to use wisdom when we're facing down things like this on a regular basis and ask the deep questions like, is this the Spanish flu?

Is this like that? Is this the black plague where we're talking about losing more than 50 of the human population? Is this something that affects everybody indiscriminately? It takes down children, teenagers, young adults, elderly, whoever gets it, it's going to affect you the same.

Is it like that? And the answer is no. Like Pastor John's going to point out here in a moment, you have over a 99 survival rate with this virus. We know that now. That's a fact. Over a 99 survival rate.

It's not diminishing the seriousness of the virus itself and what it can do to impact.

People.

It's to say consistency matters. If you give the government the right to tyranny over the people, to destroy families, livelihoods, businesses, which it has done and is doing, I am actually, I'm not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I can see which way the wind is blowing.

And I know that when you have businesses closing down, people losing jobs, at a certain point money runs out, free money will run out. And at a certain point, we're going to have to face the reality that all these businesses are closed.

All these people are out of work and we're going to have to face the economic ramifications and consequences. And so we have to ask the question, if it's on par with things we deal with on an annual basis, then why are we shutting down the world?

And why are we destroying businesses and families and livelihoods? And why are we closing down the most essential thing, which is the worship of God? And people say, no, you can just be the church. This is where I want you to add into this.

People will just say, this is the argument, and we'll extend this and get into John's discussion here. They will say, no, we're the church. And the answer is, okay, yes, but we need to get down and dig down a little further.

There.

What does the word church mean? Well, it comes from a word, ecclesia, and that word is essentially, it's the gathering of the called out ones.

Right.

The word itself, ecclesia, that word within it is the context, is the definition of gathering. So yes, we're the church, but if there is no gathering, if there is no assembling, that's not what the church is.

Now, are there instances where we're going to have to work out in a fallen world? How are we going to actually gather and do the worship of God in the midst of the black plague where we're losing half of the human population?

Yeah.

Wisdom would dictate that we figure things out, but in a situation where you're dealing with a virus that's on par with the other viruses we deal with and contend with annually, you got to ask the question, is this wise?

Is it wise to destroy the world for something that 99, more than 99 survival rate number? Is it wise to destroy all of the economy because of something that's over a 99 survival rate? My answer is no.

And Pastor John addresses that. He says, no, this isn't what they said. We're not talking about what they said. And now they're making a decision as elders over the people of God saying, this is the most essential things.

You're not going to tell us that we can't worship and sing to Jesus over something with a 99 survival rate. You can't do that to us. We're going to obey God rather than men. I stand with Pastor John MacArthur here.

He's a hero.

Now, here's, I'm going to say this and I'm going to move it over to you. This is so important. Pastor John is a hero of the time right now. He absolutely is. And we need to praise God for him. We need to support him.

We need to send money if necessary. If this thing gets difficult for them, we need to do what we can to support the hero of our time. But it's very important for us to acknowledge all of the small congregations that no one ever even heard about pastors who faithfully gathered anyway.

They examined the data, they thought through the consequences and they thought through biblical principles of wisdom and they said, we're not going to stop worship. We're not going to stop baptisms and we're not going to stop singing.

We're not going to stop the Lord's table. We're going to continue to gather and, and come what may. And there are brothers who faithfully led their churches, uh, through this pandemic and they never shut down.

And guess what? No one's ever using their names. No one's going to talk about them. And I want to say to those men, praise God for you and praise God for your faithfulness. Jesus knows. And we need to praise God for, for all these faithful men.

And right now, especially pastor John, who's, who's all over the news and right in the midst.

Of this.

And they're talking about things like shutting off water and shutting off power and throwing them in jail. And they're talking about fines of up to a thousand dollars a day, all kinds of things. And pastor John is saying essentially go pound sand.

We're not stopping.

The Biblical Command to Gather for Worship

So, yeah, no, I, I completely agree. I think there is a command clear in scripture that, uh, the church is to gather that we're not to neglect, of course, coming together.

Right.

Um, I think for every pastor, of course he has to make, there's an element of judgment, as you said, when it comes to, uh, specific circumstances. Um, but in this situation, um, I think a church needs to be faithful just based on, of course, what we know this to be.

Right.

Um, the only thing that's kind of been a little discouraging for me to see when it comes to more prominent, let's say pastors, because like I said, there's been faithful men throughout this whole, um, ordeal, uh, smaller churches.

Maybe they don't have much of a name compared to like MacArthur. So he's the one that's kind of out in the front, which is great. Um, but there's a lot of pastors too that could also take a stand that could be a huge example.

But I'm seeing inconsistencies when it comes to their willingness to, to break up the church in a time like this. And the arguments they're using to have, you know, either like a multi-site or home gatherings or a video feed, uh, the arguments they're using are the arguments that they were condemning prior to COVID.

I don't know if that makes sense, but, um, it, that, that's to me, it's, if, if you think that there is an issue as a pastor and you think that your congregation is not going to be safe, then yeah, you make the judgment call as a pastor to protect your congregation.

But when you're using argumentation that is inconsistent with argumentation you used before, then I think there's something there that is prompting you more so to make the decision rather than just the safety.

It could be, of course, the public ridicule, whatever it be.

We got that. We, we never, we never stopped worship. We never closed down. We didn't, we never halted the gathering of the saints. We even had to move out of one of our locations that we're renting from now to go to one of the only other churches in the Valley that was still gathering for worship.

And we met there. It's 45, it's a 45-minute drive away. It took a long time. Our church still showed up. It was, it was difficult for us. We never stopped the normal experience and command of worship at Apologia Church.

And that was, of course, difficult.

God has blessed it.

He's blessed it big time. We've actually grown as a church through coronavirus, and believe it or not, we really have grown as a church. People are coming to Apologia Church as a result of coronavirus and sort of the stand that we took, which was surprising to us.

It was surprising to us, but I want to say that early on, we were ridiculed. People told us that we hated our neighbors, that we were going to kill people, that we're guilty of murder. That was the charge made against us.

We're guilty of murder. We're hating our neighbor. We're showing that we have a shameful testimony to the world. So we were ridiculed for it from the very, very beginning. And we just continued to speak in service and on this show about the biblical principles that we were meditating upon as pastors in terms of how we approach the situation.

We weren't approaching it saying, I was born a free man, I'm a die-free man, and I'm going to resist everything. We were saying, here are the biblical principles, this is what God commands, and here's how we need to wade through this in terms of what we know about the virus.

And all we said at the time was, even knowing then what we know now, nothing's changed, is that it would be inconsistent of us because what it would mean for us as pastors is we'd be shutting down worship by a decree of the government for something that we're going to face annually.

And what we said was, this is just one of the arguments we had against it, is we aren't closing down the worship of the living God for something that we face on a regular basis. I am not giving them this as a principle or pattern saying, you can tell me as a pastor to shut down the worship of God just whenever you please, just because you view something a certain way.

I have the ability to use my God-given mind and the wisdom of Scripture to analyze the claims of the government in light of Scripture and say, that's faulty reasoning, that's not wise, and my answer is no.

So from the very beginning, we were telling the government to go pound sand. And we had a message delivered to the governor of the state of Arizona pleading with him to do his duty before God to reopen the state of Arizona, and that blessed some people, a lot of people hated that we did it.