Christ or Chaos | EP 14

Cornerstone Church

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The church, I think, has given up a big part of their role in theonomy, because when you say theonomy, you're talking about not just applying it to believers' lives, the third function of the law.

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You're saying this should be for society, like we want the state of New Jersey to look Christian.

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Correct. And by that, we mean informed by the whole word of God. Right. And welcome to Tearin' Down Hot Places.

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My name's Joe Gormley, average Joe, please. Pastor Tim, I mean, Pastor Jeff, and Pastor Tim.

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And seriously, it's kind of funny, it sounds like every week we start off by laughing, but it's because we're just chatting.

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We've been talking ahead of time. We talk a little bit ahead of time, and that's kind of what happens, but today we're talking about something some of you may have never heard of.

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It's a really cool old word, it's called theonomy. What is theonomy?

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Theonomy. Theos is God, and nomos, the law, so it's

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God's law. And the question is, how does God's law, the law of God, Deuteronomy, the whole

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Pentateuch, apply today, and should we be applying that to the church and in society?

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So is the law of God still the law, should it still be the law of the land? Did you say Pentateuch or Pentateuch?

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I read it a lot. It's like when you read things, I don't know if I pronounced it right, people don't say that word.

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So that's a Greek word, right? Yeah. Pentateuch. Pentateuch. It's Old Testament, so you'd think

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Hebrew, but it's Greek. But I heard that Greek scholars talk in a

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Greek dialect that modern Greek people can't understand, and they don't really know how it sounded, but they just made it up and they want to talk to each other more than they want to talk to Greek people.

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That's actually such a good point, yeah. We think we're so like official in our pronouncing, it's like, that was never that way, like how would you know?

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So I'm not correcting you, I mean, I just never heard that, so that's kind of neat. I probably said it wrong. Pentateuch.

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Is that how you say it? That's what you said. That's what I said. Is that how you say it? I always heard Pentateuch. As long as you sound confident with it.

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That's the key. You sound confident. Is that what you do? Okay. So anyway, we're talking about the law. The law of God.

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Right. So the law of God would say you need to build a parapet around your roof.

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Should that be the law of the land today? What do you think, Joe? Well, it depends on the arc of your roof, right?

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So you might have to apply modern architecture, right?

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If we go back to what the law intended, right? We have a big word for that, too.

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What is it? I can delete this little blank screen.

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No, this is good. Watch you struggle. You said it in the start of the video.

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General equity? General equity. Oh, yeah, yeah. There you go. So the Westminster Confession, which was written in the 1600s, right?

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1650s -ish? Yep, yep. It says that, with regard to the law, that we are to apply the general equity of the civil and the ceremonial laws.

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Right. So what was moral in the Old Testament law is still moral today. Nothing changes there.

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Right. Right and wrong is still right and wrong. Right. Isaiah 520 says people will try to flip that upside down, but God's law stands.

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What about the civil laws and the ceremonial laws? Right. There's still a general equity that we need to learn from, even if we don't apply it in the same precise ways.

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Yeah. Well, that's why I have to put salt on my sidewalk, because I'm liable for someone who might walk on my sidewalk and slip.

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Just like in ancient days when I had a flat roof, I had to have a parapet, which is just a fence. I had to put up a fence there because I was liable if someone's hanging out on my roof and they fall off.

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Right. It's like reckless endangerment. And so the Bible morally has taught us that you don't just have like a three -story building with no rail.

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Like if a hotel didn't have a rail and somebody fell off, is that hotel? Of course they are.

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You've got to make it safe. Yeah. And that's actually a biblical law. So you're applying theonomy there because we've learned these things from the

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Word of God. Now, the question comes in, how much is in the law of nature? So because these things are not against each other,

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God reveals through logic. And so a lot of the early founders of this country relied a lot more on natural law than upon the written specific revelation.

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But we would argue that there's no distance between what God says in writing and what he's written into nature.

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But they were all steeped in the Bible. And they were. That's what people don't realize. Yeah. I mean, they all knew it backwards and forwards.

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Even guys that you wouldn't call Christians, and I don't think it's slander to say that Thomas Jefferson probably wasn't a

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Christian. Probably not. He wrote a Bible. He wrote his own Bible. But he was faithful to it, except he ripped out all the miracles.

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Right? Well, I read a book by David Barton called The Jefferson Lies. And that's one of the five stories in our culture about Jefferson.

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It's not true? It's not. There's a much more nuanced answer as to what he was doing there.

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And it wasn't as against Christianity as they make it sound. Oh, so I may be slandering him by saying he wasn't a

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Christian. No, he may or may not have been a Christian. I think Barton seemed to be arguing that he very well could have been. But it's a book that thick called

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The Jefferson Lies about whether he actually was the one who impregnated the slave girl and all these kind of things.

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In any case, everybody loves to tear down the founders. Anything they can find.

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Slaveholders, all these different things. But I was trying to build them up because they are so steeped in the culture.

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Not only were they steeped in the Bible, literacy rates were, there was a quote from,

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I forget who, in that time period that said, it was hard to find anyone that was illiterate in that society, even at the docks or wherever you might think that people didn't need to be well read.

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Everybody was well read. You couldn't enjoy the media of the day, which was newspapers.

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You couldn't enjoy it. These guys spoke at a high level too. Right. Well, so these men, and this is where you were coming from on this, they were steeped in the

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Bible. So they were biblically literate and they were informed by their culture where they would hear

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Sunday sermons. It was in how they thought because it was just in the air that they breathed, in the water that they drank.

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It was everywhere. Biblical Christianity was informing the whole crafting of the

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Bill of Rights. All of these rights really are deriving from biblical principles. There was a little prayer meeting that happened 30 years before the

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Declaration of Independence. What was that little prayer meeting? I think Jonathan Edwards had something to do with it.

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Oh, you're talking about the Great Awakening? Yeah! The Great Awakening! Little prayer meeting. Yeah, just a little bit.

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How did that do to our, what was that? So, when Whitefield preached across the continent, well, across the colonies, he preached something like 18 ,000 sermons.

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I think it was something like 80 % of the colonialists had heard him preach.

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1730 -ish? Yeah. Early 1740s and then, yeah, for another 25 years.

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And then Jonathan Edwards is pastoring and leading the revival there, and you have so many different revivalists preaching the gospel.

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So the early believers had this amazing reawakening and turning toward the scripture, and it was back into the word to a born -again evangelical religion.

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But what they discovered there too is that the teaching of the

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Reformation, it begins with John Calvin and then Pierre Verret really takes those political ideas into the

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Reformation, and John Knox brings them to Scotland. And these

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Presbyterians from Scotland who immigrate to the United States have a political ideology, a theology, the

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Black Robe Regiment, believed in freedom and taught what ultimately resulted in the

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American Revolution. So this country is born out of the First Great Awakening and out of the

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Black Robe Regiment preaching. Wait a minute, I heard that the Revolution was sinful because it was just about a 10 % tax increase.

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They should have sucked it up and obeyed Romans 13. No? It was about a tyrant, which was the king,

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King George, and the tyrant was more and more oppressing the people, and what they did is they actually obeyed their local magistrates, and that's what's called the

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Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, which comes from the last part of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, and the 100 aphorisms, the last five are about political theology, and he talks about lesser magistrates and how if you have a tyrant, then the local magistrate needs to stand up on behalf of the people to resist that, and that's what happened in the

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Revolutionary War. You have lesser magistrates, so these colonial governors all coming together as those who are recognizing tyranny against the people and interposing on their behalf to rescue people from tyranny.

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There's a constitutional attorney who goes around the country talking to lesser magistrates, teaching local sheriff offices how not to violate constitutional rights.

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So good. Her and her husband, who's a former pastor, go around the country. Her name's Christian Hall, if anyone wants to look her up, she's awesome, and she's teaching these guys how to obey people's rights, how to obey the

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Constitution, because she believes that by strengthening the lesser magistrates, you really strengthen everything.

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And the lowest magistrate is what? The individual? The family? The individual and the family, yeah.

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So you told me before we started recording that Doug Wilson, what did Doug Wilson say? Okay, so in line with theonomy,

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Doug Wilson recently was on the Tucker Carlson podcast, and he said, so Tucker said, well, if you're going to implement

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Christian nationalism, which is not theonomy, we can get into that, why it's not exactly the same, but if you're going to institute

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Christian nationalism, the people who are Christians are going to be worried. What are you going to do? How are you going to convince these guys that Christian nationalism is good for them?

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Doug Wilson said, pagans will have more freedom under Christian rule than pagans will have under the rule of other pagans.

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And that's what we have right now. The reason I ask you to repeat that, because whether or not you like the term Christian nationalism, and it's debatable whether that should be used, this country was built on Christian principles, and with it came freedom.

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Now in 2020, it's ruled by many pagans. Phil Murphy in New Jersey is a pagan ruler.

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What did he do to our church? In 2021, we were forced to be locked down, and we were disobeying that civil command, because this is like an authoritarianism that comes from paganism, because, and this

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I think I learned from Wilson too. We've got to get him on here. If you don't have

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God over the state, the state is your God, it's the highest authority. And so these pagan rulers, they think there's no restraint on them, there's no moral authority over them, they do what they want.

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So they command us to not meet. Well did you know this, and I've shared this,

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I heard through the grapevine, it's not verified, but the Mount Laurel police chief had wanted nothing to do with enforcing that command.

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So here we are on Sunday's meeting, freely, openly, it's because a lesser magistrate, the sheriff, had told the officers, look, don't borrow trouble, just don't go by, don't mess with them, you know, leave it alone, try to keep a distance.

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You know, I don't know what he specifically said, like, don't go within a hundred miles of a church right now, like, don't bother them.

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It was because his instruction was not to stir up trouble. And we weren't like, we weren't like trumpeting, oh, we're, we're doing civil disobedience.

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We're saying we're here worshiping, come what may, you know, we worship, but we weren't trying to create a publicity stunt.

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And so we flew under the radar. But part of that is the doctrine of the lesser magistrates. Yeah. Well, I was,

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I, I was surprised when there was only one church that I knew of that had gone against that.

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And because they were the only ones that made the news, shame on me for being so cloistered.

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But there was a guy down in Berlin, in fact, it was Solid Rock Baptist. Yeah. Because that was all over the news.

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Someone just nominated them to be a red, a blood red pastor. Let's go. So I got to try and reach that guy.

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We love that. I was just there a couple of days. For some reason, we like that, that church. Yeah. That's good.

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That's good stuff. Yeah. So what do you think? Do you think, Tim, do you think younger people would be interested in, in theonomy?

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Do you think they'd push against that? Do you think that they're, I think the natural reaction is to push against that because you don't want to be under some sort of law.

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I don't like rules. I don't want to keep rules. I don't want to be under any rule. But and I think that was my natural reaction too.

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But like once you give your life to Christ and you start looking at the Bible, you actually start to love the law of God, you love the word of God and you realize how it's good for us.

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It's a guide for us. It's loving towards everyone around us to keep these laws.

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So I think that's where the breakdown is. They don't realize how important it is and how good it is for, you know, not only for the individual, but good for their family, good for the future generation.

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It's just all of it is good. That's how I feel. That's how I feel. Read Psalm 119.

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It's not about the New Testament, although there's a general equity about it's the word of God.

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So you love it. But he was, David was writing about God's law. He loved the law.

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Who does that anymore? Who loves God's law? And it feels, it feels even seeing that like, wow,

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David loved the law. Like it seems like even like Christians can say, oh, we're not under law anymore.

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We're under grace, which is true, but still the law is good. But how much pain could we avoid by loving

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God's law? Oh, unmeasurable pain. I mean, you can't even like measure how, how much pain everyone, you would, you would really save a lot of pain.

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And that's why I love the law. The law is good. If we can get people to love the law, I think that the world would be so much better.

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And that is probably a high place that needs to be torn down. Hatred of the law.

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Yeah. Hatred of the law. Hatred of the law. Why do you hate it? You don't even know why you hate it. You're afraid to even see what the laws are because you know that something is wrong and you're living against God.

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Right. Yeah. But even for Christians, I think it's like sensitive, like, oh,

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I don't know about the law. I don't, I don't want to keep the law, but the law is good. There were three functions of the law.

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I love to remind people of this because it's important because we've lost it, right? So we only talk about the first function of law, which is it's a mirror that shows us our need for Christ.

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It's a tutor that brings us to Christ and exposes our sinfulness. Yeah. It's so useful. That's the first use.

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The second one relates to theonomy. It is for the restraining of evil in society.

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So it's a civil like safeguard. It's guardrails that to keep a certain level of peace and decency in the land.

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It tells us what is right and what is wrong. What should be outlawed and what should be allowed. Right. And then the third is for the life of the believer individually to be trained in righteousness and to know how to live and what to do.

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So there's still this general equity, even in the ceremonial laws, the dietary laws.

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We're not under law, but we're guided. We learn things from this. Yeah. We should spend time in the law.

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Do you think the average Joe Christian is afraid of sharing that because they don't know how to defend parts of the

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Old Testament? Oh, very much so. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like that famous clip from the old

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TV show where the guy who's playing the president shames the Christian girl because remember, he goes on and on.

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Well, do you, you know, eat shellfish? Do you have mixed fibers in your clothes? And just, that's like the old cartoonish picture of it.

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I love, so I tell you what, I think the cure for some of those folks that you've met that don't love the law, the cure is to just go through court a few times and to have your rights violated a few times in our country is getting pretty active at violating people's rights.

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So, I mean, I think the time is right. Because the law is steadily departing from the biblical model of what is right and wrong and creating actual laws that are against God's word.

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Right. So, like we've talked about. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's leading to chaos. Absolutely. Because the standard is just whatever's popular.

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So now you're, our so -called leader, President Biden is going to run on the right to kill babies.

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Like, what kind of world are we living in? Right. Somebody, oh man. Somebody who's probably watching this podcast was railing on me about voting for Trump because how could

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I do that when he's, you know, been with a porn star and he's done all these sexual sins and I said, tell you what, if Joe Biden is going to ban pornography,

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I'll vote for him. Wow. Bold claim. Even if he's going to keep advocating for abortion? Well, you know.

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You keep coming up with these overstatements. He's trying to get RFK in there. That's all the states.

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We've got to be strategic, man. Joe, I think you're overstrategizing just a little bit. But your point is, it's not about Trump.

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It's not about a personality. It's not even about a party. Right. It's about the party platform and what they're standing for.

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It's about what they can do and what they are enabled to do. Right? Right. Yeah. That's a great point.

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Trump, because of the way that our laws are being worked right now,

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I'm not going to say that they're constitutional because they're not, but right now, the abortion decision is in the hands of the states.

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The feds are out. Yeah. The feds are done. I don't even know why Trump talks about it. And that's where Trump wants to leave it. Yeah. Just leave it at the states. I don't know why he even talks about it anymore because there's nothing he can do.

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But unless they were to come out and say, hey, we're going to make a federal law that says this.

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Now, legally, constitutionally, they're not authorized to do that, except they are authorized to defend life.

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And so they've got to come out and defend life. They couldn't do that, but they're not going to. They're not going to. So the reality is, if I was to vote for Biden because he was going to get rid of pornography,

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I wouldn't be supporting abortion because they're not going to do that.

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Right. And there need to be decency laws in our culture because we care about people.

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We love people and we love little children who are going to be exposed to drag queens in a library. Well, I mean, the devastation of pornography is just out the window.

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Oh, yeah. I mean, people don't talk about it with any kind of shame anymore. There's no shame.

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Oh, yeah. Everybody does it. Well, they celebrate the lowering of teen pregnancies and the out -of -wedlock births.

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Some of those seem to be correcting. It's not because the culture is becoming more moral. Right. It's because young men don't even seem to have a use for young women anymore because they have this little image on a screen.

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And that's what's actually causing the reduction. I've told some young men if they want to have the most beautiful life in the room, all they got to do is two things.

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Stay off the video games and stay off the pornography. Wow. That would do it. Amen. Right there. Amen. Did you borrow that?

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The average Joe, he comes up with this like gold. And then later he says... I'm a big believer in Christian plagiarism.

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Yeah. No, I don't know if you did borrow that. I don't know if I did. At some point, you just forget. I probably did. I borrow 90 % of what

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I say without realizing it. I just repeat what's true. Hey, when I'm sure if you did come up with something that was gold, you'd want other

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Christians to repeat it. You measure it. You measure it against this. And then if it's true, you repeat it.

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That's all. Very good. I agree with you, Joe. I agree with that, too. Now, Joe Biden, by the way, should have been out in 84 for plagiarism.

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Everybody forgets about that. Oh, yeah. But he wasn't plagiarizing a Christian. He was plagiarizing a European politician who gave the exact same speech that he gave.

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Yeah. You guys know that? I've heard about that. Yeah. Anyway, enough about Joe. All right, so we're on the subject of theonomy.

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Yeah, let's talk about theonomy. What else? What are some laws in the

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Old Testament that should be applied in our culture today? Yeah, the question is going to be, well, homosexuality right off the bat.

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We have to have, we have books, laws on the books that said it's a violation of God's law, and therefore it's a violation of our laws.

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When did sodomy laws go off the books? Gosh, I think they're still on there in some places. Some say it's maybe, but yeah.

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But I think Obergefell is when the culture said, okay, it's legal.

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Well, the interesting, what a lot of people don't know either is the culture also, from a secular perspective, had it outlawed.

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The American Psychological Association, up until DSM IV, which is their fourth version of their diagnostic bible, right?

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Diagnostic Statistical Manual. You were considered not illegal, but you were insane for doing it, for participating in it.

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It was a psychological disease to participate in homosexuality. So what many people don't realize is that the law, whether we're talking about theonomy, the law of God, which teaches you right and wrong, or even the moral, or just the law of the land, which should just be a base standard that should not be that hard to keep, like don't murder, don't steal, things like don't sodomize.

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Well, there's a pedagogical function to the law. Big word. What's that mean?

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Teaching. So when Obergefell overthrows the standard definition of marriage for all time and all places, all of a sudden, now after Obergefell, which legalized same -sex marriage, now the rate at which people identify themselves as homosexual has skyrocketed.

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So how does the law affect that? Well, it teaches, if your government is saying this is good and right for you to do this, and you're just a kid growing up in a public school, and you're just hearing this everywhere, every teacher's beating that drum, so you have that teaching element, and then you have the law itself is now legalizing, quote -unquote, same -sex marriage, which our friends call same -sex mirage.

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It's not even actually marriage because it's a mirage. There's no exer connecto.

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There's no complementarity that happens there. It's basically a, quote -unquote, joining of two mirror images of themselves.

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It doesn't even correspond. There's not actual marriage there. So it's not marriage. But the point is, ever since the law has redefined what marriage is, it's actually affected the culture, the people, and the children, especially, who are being taught by the law.

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So their moral compass is fashioned by the law to some measure. So we say, well, what business is it of yours what people do in their own bedroom?

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Okay, granted, I'm not after, like, a surveillance state. I don't want somebody, what

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I wouldn't do for my neighbor, as in, like, go see what's going on inside his room, I don't want the government doing to the neighbor.

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I don't want a surveillance state figuring that out. But if they go out on the public street and flaunt and advocate for things, there has to be a standard, or else you lose your society.

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You lose a standard of right and wrong in society. The theologians that talk about theonomy the most always say, by what standard?

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And their implication is what? There has to be a standard. There always is a standard.

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The problem we have now, though, is in a quote -unquote democracy, because we're not supposed to be a democracy either.

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We're a republic. A republic requires a standard. And we had a standard in this country.

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It was the Bible. Now we have no standard, so you can't have a republic. Republic, right.

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And democracy, demos, is people. And cruci from the rule. I don't think it's cruci, but it comes from that root.

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But democracy is rule of the people. So you have all of the people, whoever can get the majority, gets to rule and determine.

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But what standard is it? If the people have become more and more corrupt, then it's just what's ever in the mind of an individual and who can get the most people to agree with them.

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That's actually not a standard. It just makes the individual. Whatever is right in their own eyes. So you go back to the book of Judges, and it's basically mob rule.

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It could also be called, let's destroy the minority. Yeah. Right? Well, that's what ends up happening.

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Once the communists were able to gain the upper hand, and the communist revolution was successful in the

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Soviet Union, what did they do to Solzhenitsyn and all of those who dissented?

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It's to the prison camp. Send them to the gulag. So, Tim, we talked a little bit about the moral components of law, that all laws have a moral component.

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Do you think most people realize that? Do most people realize that?

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Because there could be laws in a society, maybe, that aren't, have to do with morality. Moral law is very important.

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I think maybe we don't promote that enough. Morality is good.

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I think there's people out there that are really hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and they need to hear there is a better way of living.

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This is the way it's supposed to be. And living under Christ, they will be satisfied with that.

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Do you think there's ever... I can't think of any law that doesn't have a moral... What laws don't have a moral component?

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I think they all do. Something. Like a red light. I don't want to kill people. Right. I guess so.

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I don't know. I think the issue here is people say, you can't legislate morality.

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How can you not? Everything is, what's right or what's wrong? What should the state do?

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I think there's a misunderstanding of what's right and wrong sometimes. When a law comes in that it's okay to exterminate a baby before it's born, that's not a good moral law.

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Your morality is a little off. But maybe they're thinking for the morality of protecting the mother.

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Maybe there is some sort of underlying morality. It's just misplaced. Do you think that maybe they realize that we can't legislate their subjective morality?

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We can't come up with a law that it's, well, if sometimes... Yeah, it can't be from their worldview that actually is consistent.

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If you're a postmodern and there's no absolute truth, you can't legislate morality because everybody's view is privatized.

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Wait a minute. You're telling me these people are consistent? Consistently... Irrational. Because at that point you have descended to complete absurdity.

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And these are the same people that say the Bible is subjective. Your whole view is subjective and you want everything to be subjective, but it's not.

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And we're back to the point where I'm going to start saying that circular reasoning is good too, which

29:10

Jeff knows I believe that. Oh yeah, because you're a preceptor. I'm more of a classical evidentiary apologist.

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It's true, though. But I see a role for presuppositional apologetics. I know you do. So what's the circular comeback?

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Well, in presuppositional apologetics, you don't give way to the idea that there's a neutral position.

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You say, this is the Bible. It's true. That's where I'm starting. Because the atheist or agnostic wants to argue, well, you can't start there.

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We have to first prove that the Bible is true. Well, no. It proves itself to be true. Because your highest authority is always the thing you go to last.

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So when you dig down and dig deeper and deeper and deeper, what do you get to? And you can't reason because if you want to bring up the

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Bible, they'll immediately say, we can't bring in the Bible into this. We can't bring religion into this. Why not?

30:10

Why can't we talk about this, but you want to talk about whatever you want to talk about? They've convinced our school kids, and they convinced me as a school child too, that we didn't start out with the

30:21

Bible. We didn't start out as a Christian nation. And I hear pastors even saying that, which really makes me sick.

30:29

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the nation itself had the establishment clause, right?

30:35

The Congress shall not establish a religion. But as we've said a hundred times on this podcast, the states did have religious establishment.

30:47

They had established religions all over the place, and that was the standard by which we had a republic.

30:54

So back to your other question. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there's freedom. Tim, what's another law in the

31:00

Old Testament that we should exegete and see how we can apply it to this culture? Another law in the Old Testament that we should apply?

31:07

How about eating fish? Can we eat fish? Should we outlaw fish eating? Or no? I'm not even prepared.

31:13

Shellfish. I meant shellfish. Shellfish and bacon. How would that go over?

31:19

Some things in the New Testament talk about the Old Testament. So like Jesus, with the dream that Peter had, has made all things clean.

31:30

So he says, what I have called clean, don't call unclean. So there are things that were unclean for a time that are now clean.

31:39

So some things change. But the moral law of God, I think, still stays the same.

31:46

So there were silly, well maybe not silly, but there were particular laws that Israel kept to be different than the other nations.

31:53

And maybe not eating shellfish or pig. So it wasn't a law that was in there because that was

31:59

God's nature to hate shellfish and pig eating. It was in there just for the

32:07

Jews. I believe so. And like you said, to mark them as a distinct people separate from the nations.

32:14

That they're not going to do like the nations. Even the mixing of fibers was just representative of keeping themselves distinct and pure and holy.

32:22

And of one part, kind of like, not divided. But holiness is separate. And it's distinguishing them from the nations as God's chosen people.

32:32

Yeah, like Leviticus, if you look at it, it'll say don't mark your body or get tattoos. But like you said, in the same section will be like, don't mix the blending of fabrics.

32:44

So then you can say to your grandma that is telling you, you shouldn't get tattoos. Can I get a tattoo?

32:51

Well, I can say, well, is this a polyester blend? You know what I mean? So it's the same thing, the same logic.

32:57

If you're saying that tattoos are wrong, then you probably have to say that. And you've got to dig into the context.

33:02

Because I think that what was happening with the tattooing was marking for the dead. There was a correspondence.

33:07

There was a necromancy involved in that. I'm not for tattoos. I think just keep your body like God made it.

33:14

Right. I believe that too. But that's not the reason why. That's not the reason. So I will clarify. I don't like tattoos either.

33:20

I'm not getting tattoos. My fiance doesn't like tattoos. She's not getting tattoos. I heard they're addictive.

33:26

Yeah, maybe they are. And expensive. And expensive. There's probably many moral reasons not to get a tattoo.

33:32

Maybe going to Leviticus isn't the right scripture to go to. But even humility and things like that.

33:39

Yeah, it does seem like it has a spirit of pride attached with it often. Not necessarily every case.

33:45

Sometimes it's a memorial to someone. You know, you've lost a loved one. But often it's decorating in such a way that to me it comes across as being just prideful.

33:59

Like, I don't know. And again, this would be an area of conscience. Like, I've never preached in the pulpit.

34:04

Like, you should not get tattoos. But it's Romans 14, 23. If to me it's sin, then for me

34:11

I wouldn't do it. Matter of conscience there. There are areas where I think we're often thought of because we believe in the law of God and the consistency of the word as being narrow and dogmatic on everything.

34:26

But that's actually not the case. How about some civil laws that we have in our culture that are from the

34:35

Bible? What are some of those? I think of Deuteronomy 19, 15. I think of due process, the

34:42

Fourth Amendment. You need two or three witnesses to establish anything.

34:48

But our culture hates that. Hates that. Yeah, and sadly I've seen our evangelical culture seems completely disregarded when they're prosecuting a case or something too.

34:58

So many of the laws that have formed our jurisprudence in America came from the Bible.

35:03

The right to appear before your accuser. So in the same room, the person who's accusing you, and be face to face.

35:11

That's a biblical, theonomic standard. And there's laws just for Christians too.

35:19

We're not supposed to sue each other. As a Christian, if you're a believer, there's a process. You talk to the believer directly.

35:27

Then it's Matthew 18. And that Matthew 18 came from the two or three witnesses of Deuteronomy 19.

35:32

Right, right. And Jesus kind of added some Christian... Yeah, he applied it to the church and specified.

35:40

So then you've got to go to the church. Well, first you go to the individual.

35:46

Then you bring another witness, a brother, sister, or Christ. And then you go to the church. What's the church's role in theonomy then?

35:55

Well, the church, I think, has given up a big part of their role in theonomy. Because when you say theonomy, you're talking about not just applying it to believers' lives.

36:03

The third function of the law. You're saying this should be for society. Like we want the state of New Jersey to look

36:09

Christian. Correct. And by that we mean informed by the whole word of God. Right. So the pulpit needs to be a place that has a prophetic voice to the governor.

36:20

And say, no, you can't do this. This freedom to read bill, which was to allow teachers and librarians to introduce pornographic things into the students' hands.

36:33

This is something that the pulpits need to speak out against. So that there's an outcry, a public moral outcry that shapes the laws of the land.

36:42

So we need to talk about these things. Not just the preacher, but then every Christian calling their senators and being involved.

36:49

Would it help if people knew their Bible better when the preachers are calling out to the people? Oh, it definitely helps.

36:55

You can't hurt, right? Yeah. Know a little bit more of the word of God is a good thing. I mean, you know, it's almost like I say when we talk about witnessing.

37:05

And Tim, you do a lot of outdoor witnessing. You know, you talk to a Catholic or a Jew who, they should know their

37:13

Bibles. You should be able to refer to things in their Bible. I often tell them, you just need to read your Bible.

37:19

I'm not even going to waste my time. You know, it is like, it's interesting, like some people just claim to have a lot of knowledge.

37:26

They're agnostic, whatever it is. They consider themselves wise, but they haven't read the most popular book ever.

37:35

Yeah, ever. Most printed, most distributed, most translated. So it's hard to even have a conversation if you can't even talk a little bit about the

37:44

Bible. That's a great point. That's a great point. How can you even consider yourself educated if you haven't studied the

37:51

Bible? Not read, because everyone will say they read it. How many of those people do you think actually read it? Oh, I've read that whole book.

37:56

I read the whole thing. I did it in eighth grade over summer. Yeah. No, you didn't. Over the summer in eighth grade?

38:02

Yeah, right. I think you have better things to do in your mind. Yeah. I mean, that would have been a great thing, but that's not what happened.

38:08

So I think that's about all we can get into without going deeper.

38:14

We can always do another subject, another episode on this. And folks, if you're out there and you're watching this and you thought

38:21

Theonomy was great, and you want to hear more, maybe you want to send in questions about, hey, how about this law?

38:28

Is this something the government should do or shouldn't do? Is there a general equity for this law?

38:34

Is there not? We'd love to hear those. We also want your Blood Red Church nominations.

38:41

And we do have a nominee. We have another nominee, but I didn't. I kind of alluded to it earlier. But we've got to see if we'll get them to come onto the podcast.

38:49

But that's all I've got. You guys got anything else? That's it. I think maybe the viewers might have some questions on what we were talking about.

38:56

I mean, Jeff used a lot of big words. Big words. And if they're like me, they don't have maybe as big of a vocabulary and maybe they have some questions that they want to punch into you and we can address it next time, right?

39:08

Podcast at CornerstoneSJ .org. That's it. Well, until next time.