James White on Romans 13, Covid Reactions, and Not Living by Lies

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a very special guest today, Dr. James White with Alpha and Omega Ministries.

00:08

Dr. White has been an influence of mine for many years actually. He may not even know this, but I remember back even probably about,

00:16

I don't know, eight or nine years ago when I had some Mormons in the area that I lived.

00:22

We're very aggressive. They even came into the church for church services with their elder badges and I went out and I met with them for hours.

00:29

I remember the first meeting we went in circles and then I decided to do some homework. That's when I read Letters to a

00:35

Mormon Elder. I still remember walking in with my Greek New Testament, my

00:40

Book of Mormon facsimile for the original one, my modern Book of Mormon, and then

00:45

Letters to the Mormon Elder right on top. I walked in and they saw that and I'm pretty sure

00:51

I'm still banned in that area. Anyway, thank you so much for your work, for your books, for all the material.

00:59

It's been inspirational and it's been helpful for me. Well, great. It's also good to know that I'm quite that old.

01:07

I wrote that book in 1989 -ish, somewhere around there as I recall.

01:15

It's been a while. Out of curiosity, do you remember what month you finished it in 1989? This is important.

01:22

Was it summer, fall? No, because at one point, actually, it might have actually been in the early 90s because I made reference to a record temperature in the letters because the letters obviously were to a fictional

01:41

Mormon missionary, but they were based on what was really going on. I made reference once to summer in one of the letters.

01:51

I also made reference to our setting our all -time record high, which was 122 degrees on June 26, 1990 as I recall.

02:03

It probably would have been the fall of 90. I was alive, not to date you too much. There was a question there for a moment whether I even existed.

02:10

I did exist. I was probably a few months old or a year old. Anyway, we have an important topic that I've asked you to talk about because I notice you've been pretty vocal on Twitter and on your program about concerns over a bunch of things, but the

02:25

Equality Act and some of the COVID lockdowns, immunizations, masks, things that you're not really going along with, you're concerned about.

02:36

Of course, you've kind of taken to task Christians who use Romans 13 and other passages to try to justify church complicity,

02:47

Christian complicity in these things. I was hoping just kind of at just a simple level for people who are trying to understand this,

02:55

Romans 13, 1 Timothy 2, praying for leaders, 1 Peter 2, submitting yourselves like Romans 13 says, these all seem to indicate that Christians have a duty to submit to the government.

03:08

If the says something like you need to lock down your church for an indefinite period of time because of a health risk, why would that be wrong?

03:17

As Christians, we're supposed to submit. You've given some good answers. I was hoping you could kind of walk us through your rationale.

03:24

Well, a lot of this is coming out of the fact that I am a pastor in a church.

03:33

I've only been in two, I guess three churches in my adult life.

03:40

Very young, I was at a very, very large Southern Baptist church, had 20 ,000 members.

03:45

You can never find any more than 7 ,000 at a time, but it had 20 ,000 members and listeners. Then I went from there to a

03:53

Reformed Baptist church where I was for almost 30 years. Now I'm one of the four pastors at Apologia Church.

04:00

Apologia is well known for taking very strong stands on especially the issue of the unborn and starting an abortion now.

04:12

We've literally seen thousands of babies saved outside abortion mills from death over the past number of years.

04:21

When all this started, we immediately had a lot of discussion amongst the elders concerning the fact that we believe it's extremely important for the people of God to meet, for the people of God to be instructed from the word of God.

04:38

And shock of all shocks, anybody who's read the London Baptist Confession of 1689 knows that there is a very strong and full doctrine of the

04:49

Lord's Supper amongst Reformed Baptists. Not so much amongst

04:54

Southern Baptists, but certainly amongst Reformed Baptists. That first church, by the way, was Southern Baptist Church.

04:59

That's where I was originally licensed. It was good that you got out.

05:05

I'm just saying. Well, I still have a lot of good friends in the

05:11

SBC. It's sad to see what's going on, but not surprising to see what's going on. In fact, let's be honest, what's going on in the

05:19

SBC is going on to a lesser extent amongst Reformed Baptists, Presbyterians, OPC, PCA, it's everywhere.

05:30

It's universal. There's no place to run to hide, to be honest with you. We don't do conspiracy theories on this show.

05:39

It's everywhere. So anyway, we immediately were going, all right, well, what are we going to do?

05:47

If our state says you can't meet any longer, or if they start restricting what you can do in your services, you can't have the

05:57

Lord's Supper, because you remember there was all sorts of stuff like that going on. No Lord's Supper, no singing, all this.

06:04

We looked at the numbers early on and came to the conclusion as a group that unlike what you saw on MSNBC, this was not the

06:13

Black Death. This was not the plague, and that in fact, it was tracking with a lot of other things that we deal with on a regular basis.

06:24

So we made the decision that we were going to continue to meet, continue to sing, continue to minister the

06:34

Word of God. The only changes we made, and we're still doing one thing, we come forward to receive the

06:43

Lord's Supper. I'm going to get to Romans 13, but this just gives you the background. We come forward to receive the Lord's Supper at Apologia.

06:48

I really enjoy that. I like getting up and testifying to everyone there that my trust is completely and totally in the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ.

06:58

I think it's wonderful. So we have deacons or sometimes one of the elders at the back, and when you get in that line, and we have over tripled in size since COVID, because so many people have no church to go to.

07:13

We were one of the only churches in the fifth largest city in the United States that we're still meeting and preaching a gospel message.

07:24

So we've got a long line of people now, but we have hand sanitizer in the back. And so we call it the blessing of hand sanitizer, because we come up and you take the bread, you take the cup, and so that's what we've been doing.

07:39

So that really started us having to think through a lot of the relationship.

07:45

My other fellow elders who had started EAN already were down the road a bit from me in having thought through these things in regards to Roe v.

07:53

Wade, law in regards to abortion. They've been involved with stuff in Oklahoma.

07:59

We've been involved with a law that has been introduced into the legislature here in Arizona to abolish human abortion.

08:09

So they had already done a lot more thinking on these issues than I necessarily had, but I had to start working through these things myself.

08:17

And of course to do that requires you to look at Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, and also to look at Jesus's interaction with the state, with the lesser magistrates in his experience there in Jerusalem and Judea and Galilee, to look at John the

08:41

Baptist and his relationship, and as well as the early church. And early church has sort of taught church history for well longer than you've been alive.

08:50

So that all sort of came together at one point in time.

08:58

And so the Romans 13 issue didn't seem all that different to me until I started seeing how people were utilizing it.

09:06

And so only a few weeks ago we used our new studio to do a study where we went through the text and emphasized the reality that what is stated by Paul is that the authorities ordained by God are meant to punish evil and reward good, to encourage good, and to punish those who would do evil, and that we are being submission to such

09:40

God -ordained authority. And of course no one, I guess there probably are some

09:47

Christian anarchists out there someplace, but I've not run into them. Very clearly

09:52

God is a God of order. There's order in the church. But the first thing that this forced Christians of the past, and of course

09:59

I've studied this stuff in church history and how the early church interacted and all the rest of this type of stuff, is to understand the concept of sphere sovereignty, which you cannot say three times fast.

10:09

Sphere sovereignty, and that is something that is, let's be honest, almost never heard of in Baptist churches, or it hasn't been until recent times.

10:21

I never heard it as a kid, or growing up, or going to Bible college as a good old

10:27

Southern Baptist boy at a Southern Baptist Bible college. A sphere sovereignty? What in the world is that?

10:32

Because we were at peace, in essence, with the state. The state left us alone.

10:38

We had freedom of religion. The state didn't really care too much. It started to change a little bit after O.

10:44

V. Wade. And let's be honest, the church was way behind the curve on O.

10:50

V. Wade. And the whole issue of, but we really hadn't, we hadn't been pressed to think about these things.

10:57

We hadn't been pressed to think about the idea that the church has a sphere of sovereignty.

11:03

I think for a lot of Baptists, they're just like, no, we don't. And when you think about it, what's in almost every

11:12

Baptist church up at the front, over in the corners? Dusty, but they're over in the corners with gold braid on the fringes.

11:20

Yeah, flag. An American flag and a Christian flag, right? Yeah. I've seen it all over the place. And... That's just Christian nationalism.

11:29

That's what that is. Right, exactly. I was raised in that mindset that you've got that sphere over there, and this is our sphere over here, and this is the spiritual stuff, and that's the governmental stuff, and never shall the twain meet.

11:48

And very rarely did the church with any prophetic voice say anything to the state. Here's the problem.

11:54

In Romans chapter 13, Paul specifically uses the phrase, to do good, ta agathon, the good, to do good.

12:07

Now, if you ask, if you just step back away from all the debates and go, for Paul, what is

12:16

Paul's primary source for defining what the good is? Because it's then contrasted with doing evil, ta agathon.

12:25

But the good, where is Paul thinking that is to be defined?

12:32

And it's obvious. I mean, you don't have to even think about good works. You don't have to go over to Romans chapter 8 and say all things work together for the good.

12:42

Those are different categories. When you're talking about law, and when you're talking about punishing evil doers and rewarding those who do good, where's

12:54

Paul going to get that? Well, he's not getting that from Nero Caesar. He's not getting that from the

13:02

Roman ethical writers of the preceding century, as interesting a read as they are, and he would have known them.

13:11

That's one of the things that made Paul special, is he was well aware, given his upbringing and his education, what they had said.

13:20

No, Paul is going to derive that from the scriptures, from what

13:25

God has said in his law. And part of the problem is that most evangelicals,

13:31

I'm just going to throw this out here, I'll defend it, most evangelicals are antinomians. They just go, ah, we're not under the law, we're under grace.

13:39

And as far as justification is concerned, that's all true. And you can never earn God's grace.

13:46

You can't merit anything from God. All of that's true. None of us have ever kept the law. All that's true. But be right in the middle of talking about just my faith.

13:54

Remember, in Romans chapter 3, Paul says the law is good. And he says to Timothy, the law is good if a person uses it lawfully.

14:02

And so the law is a good thing. The law defines for us what is good and what is evil.

14:09

And in Romans chapter 13, he is describing the state that is doing what the state is supposed to be doing.

14:19

Now, the problem is, there's never been a state that has done that perfectly. We should strive to inform a state as to how we can have

14:30

God's blessing. Because I spoke at our pro -life rally when we announced this legislation we're trying to get through abolishing human abortion in Arizona.

14:41

And I started off back in the, this was before you were born, but back in the 70s when we moved here, there was just broadcast

14:49

TV. And one of the channels, channel 10, every hour their station ID went like this.

14:56

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. K -O -L -T -V, channel 10, Phoenix. That wasn't a

15:02

Christian station. No, it wasn't. Oh my goodness. That's a different world. That was the

15:08

CBS affiliate. That was the CBS affiliate back then. And every hour, blessed is the nation whose

15:14

God is the Lord, Psalm 33. And that section, when you go there, there is a blessing on the nation whose

15:25

God is the Lord. But as Proverbs says, sin is a rebuke to any nation. So these are realities.

15:32

These are truths that we are to be communicating to the state. Do you want

15:37

God's blessing? Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. But sin is a rebuke to any people. They need to know what sin is.

15:44

They need to know who the Lord is. And that's just not, you know, there was allegedly so many

15:52

Christians in government for so long that we just sort of got used to that idea that, well, they already know all that instead of speaking prophetically and clearly to government as to what its role is supposed to be.

16:07

Romans 13 is rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.

16:12

Really? Tell that to the Christian church in Victoria, Australia today.

16:19

Because as you probably know, the state of Victoria, and there's

16:24

New South Wales, Victoria, there's different states in Australia that are sort of similar to what we have in the

16:32

States, but different in other ways. They are about to pass a legislation in Victoria that is so draconian, so extreme.

16:45

It's very much like the C6 bill in Canada, but it goes even farther to even say that if a child can prove harm upon themselves, a child who first say says they're same sex attracted or a young girl who says she's a boy, and if they can prove that the parents communicated the child that the parents were praying for the child and this caused harm, it'll now be against the law in Australia.

17:21

To pray for your child. Pray for your child. To pray for your child. Now, you look at Romans 13 for rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.

17:32

Is it good behavior or evil behavior to pray for your children? It's good. That's good behavior. Yeah. So if the state is punishing good behavior, this isn't the

17:41

Paul's talking about. This isn't the state that that is a state that needs to be called to repentance and the judgment of God upon it proclaimed very clearly.

17:53

And it becomes the duty of any Christian. It's the duty of any Christian parent to pray for your children.

17:58

If the state says, don't pray for your children, open the windows and pray loudly for your children like Daniel, like Daniel did.

18:06

Exactly. No question about it. What do you do? No, this is how Paul lived.

18:12

This is how Peter lived. I point out that in Acts chapter 12, when, when the, when the angel delivered

18:19

Peter from prison, supernaturally, Peter didn't take it off the road.

18:26

And then he's about to leave. Peter doesn't go to the angel. Oh, wait a minute. I'm sorry.

18:32

He did Romans 13. Yeah. Yeah. I believe in Romans 13. I need to go back now. No, that hadn't been written yet.

18:38

That's why he, well, there you go. Once it was,

18:43

Peter felt really badly about that. And he really felt badly about the fact that his guards were killed, were executed because he, of course, by the end of the chapter, who else was killed?

18:56

Herod himself. Yeah. God struck him dead. A secular leader. Oh, but he was religious.

19:03

Yeah. Tell him, tell him that. Anyway, the point is the apostles did not, the apostles understood sphere sovereignty.

19:11

No, the apostles did not call for an armed rebellion to take out

19:17

Caesar. There is no question about that either, but they also did not subject the church to Caesar's ultimate authority.

19:27

They met in secret. We know that for the, by, by the time of Tacitus, the beginning of the second century.

19:33

So barely after the apostolic period, John could have still been alive.

19:39

Um, but probably had died just before that Tacitus tells us that the

19:45

Christians are meeting out in the, in the open. Uh, they're meeting in secret.

19:51

They're, they're meeting before dawn in certain places, but they're still meeting even though Rome said no.

19:58

And so the, the first generations did not understand Romans 13 to be an unqualified blanket, uh, assertion that whatever the government says, that's what you have to do.

20:09

So most people will say is, well, right. Okay. If the government says, don't pray for your children, you're still to pray for your children.

20:16

Yeah. Okay. That's obvious. Right. The government says you're to kill your wife. You're not supposed to kill your wife.

20:21

You don't do that. That's obvious, but this other stuff isn't obvious. And so where we're going today.

20:28

And I think, I think where a lot of the conversation is today is that there are a lot of Christians who just simply cannot believe that there is a rapidly moving, well -organized global movement toward a secular totalitarianism that has the culture of death as its central religious sacrament.

20:53

They just can't believe it. And people my age, I get it. The world didn't change this fast when

20:58

I was young. Um, so it does really feel like the earth is moving under our feet, but there are just a lot of Christians that just cannot possibly believe that the equality act will do to Christian institutions,

21:15

Christian schools, Christian churches, the things that it's going to do to those things, to those institutions as the

21:21

Australians are doing it. Canadians are doing it. The Germans have been doing it for a while. Uh, Belgium, the

21:29

Netherlands, um, the Scandinavian countries, it's, it's global.

21:34

It's, it's literally all over the place. Not so much in Africa, but they'll want to get there eventually.

21:43

Um, there are some problems in Zambia, God bless Zambia. But anyways, uh, they just want to, they don't want to believe it.

21:50

And so they, they're just like, well, look, we just need to sort of get along for now and hope for the next election, you know, this, this type of thing.

22:02

Um, and, and the reality is in the process, we are taking one step, then another step, then another step, then another step, uh, toward our own subservience.

22:12

And we likewise have come to that conclusion, not based on going, okay,

22:19

Romans 13 says something about masks. It doesn't, but we as an eldership, for example, have looked at the data.

22:28

We've actually read papers. I have been cursed with the fact that I was department fellow anatomy and physiology at Grand Canyon university.

22:36

I finished all my coursework for bachelor of science degree, finished my senior boards. Um, I was pre -med.

22:43

Um, I unfortunately know a fair amount about biology and hence virology and things like that.

22:51

And I can read scientific papers and I know, I know, you know, this, this, this line, but it's becoming one of my favorite lines.

23:01

Rod Dreyer has repeated it for us. So we all know it, but Solzhenitsyn right before he was kicked out of the

23:09

Soviet union, um, wrote to the Soviet people and said, do not live by lies because that's what communism is.

23:18

It's constantly living by lies. You are, you are forced to repeat things that you know, are not true.

23:24

Isn't it wonderful comrade that our, our production is up 5 % this year.

23:29

You know, it's not up 5%. It's down in the hole and you know it, but you're told you have to say these things you're living by laws.

23:38

And are you familiar with the Dalrymple quote that, um, that, uh, uh,

23:46

Doug Wilson, uh, quoted it recently in, uh, one of his, uh, things it,

23:54

I, if you don't mind, I, I have it here. Oh, go for it. Yeah. I was going to look it up, but sure. Oh, this is, this is one of the most important things that I have grasped recently.

24:06

And this was just so insightful. Let me, let me, let me read it for you here. This is from Theodore Dalrymple, August 31st, 2005 in a front page magazine article.

24:17

Here's what he said. Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small.

24:24

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince nor to inform, but to humiliate.

24:40

And therefore the less it corresponded to reality, the better. When people are forced to remain silent, when they're, they're being told the most obvious lies or even worse, when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity to ascent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil.

25:07

And in some small way to become evil oneself, one standing to resist anything is thus eroded and even destroyed a society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

25:22

I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

25:29

Wow. Now I don't know about you, but I'm seeing people all the time right now.

25:36

Uh, there's this one guy on Twitter and he keeps documenting the hypocrisy of people on the left.

25:44

They say one thing, they do something else. And they're just wide open about it.

25:49

And he just keeps going. I can't believe they're doing this. And once I read that, I'm like,

25:55

I can't believe they're doing this and they're doing it purposefully and you're just sitting there pointing at them doing it isn't going to accomplish anything because that's what they want.

26:06

They are humiliating you in your face. We are going to say one thing and do something else.

26:14

We're going to apply completely different standards here. That is the intention. I think you had mentioned this today,

26:22

Gina Carano, who was the star of the Mandalorian is canceled. But meanwhile, Pedro Pascal, who said basically posted something similar comparing the

26:32

United States and Nazi Germany still has his job. There was never a controversy when he did it because he was doing it during the

26:39

Trump era comparing Nazism to Trump. We also have Nick Cannon who said basically, you know about that one with Nick Cannon.

26:46

Oh, I do. I read that quote on the dividing line recently. But there's another singer named

26:54

Morgan Wallen, a country singer who I guess was - Yeah. And so you see these two side by side.

26:59

What Nick Cannon did was premeditated and he wanted people to know what he said. He never apologized.

27:05

He's got his job. He still believes it. You know he still believes it. And Morgan Wallen is profusely apologetic.

27:11

Someone just caught him when he was drunk saying something and he's losing everything. The hypocrisy is amazing.

27:18

I've wondered sometimes when are people going to wake up and see this? Because Morgan Wallen's record sales are going up.

27:26

I think a lot of the common people do see this, but the elites are out of touch, including many pastors, unfortunately, who want to seem to be in that world of elitism.

27:36

I'm not sure why they want that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the point is we came to the conclusion as an eldership that if people wanted to wear masks, they could.

27:48

We were not going to force anybody to do so. And we weren't going to be doing it ourselves. And we weren't going to be doing social distancing.

27:57

And we were going to meet and we were going to proclaim the word of God. And for about,

28:03

I don't know, two and a half months, we didn't do this one thing at the end of the service where if you want to come forward in singing the last song, you can you can do so.

28:13

We stopped doing that for a couple of months. We've gone back to doing it. It's one of the most special parts of the of the whole service, in my opinion.

28:20

It's wonderful. But the point is we we looked at these things and we decided we're not going to live by lies.

28:30

We recognize that there is a basically if it's being censored, that probably means there's something to it.

28:41

OK. And so when you dig deep enough, we're like,

28:46

OK, there is there is a clear effort to control the narrative and to put out just one perspective here.

28:53

And we're going to dig deeper and we're going to act on that. And that's that's what we have done when it comes to the issue of vaccines.

29:02

I don't know if you are aware of the surgeon, young surgeon who passed away a few days ago.

29:12

Oh, I heard. I'm sorry. I heard about it. Yeah, right. I started morning and I again,

29:21

I'm not a medical doctor, but I know something about biology, especially. In fact, the funny thing is my senior year in college when

29:30

I was studying Greek and Greek syntax and all the rest of that stuff,

29:36

I was also raising thirty five thousand Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies to study their genetics at the exact same time.

29:45

So I was double major pumping them with radiation, I'm assuming. And what happens to them?

29:51

No. OK. It was their eye color thing, which is really cool. And I can still smell the stuff we call fly now.

29:57

Anyways, the point is I'm. These vaccines are untested.

30:05

On humans, we are that they didn't do animal testing, the warp speed stuff. Yeah, it's a we are the test.

30:12

We are the we are the test group. And yes, I asked a question because it popped in my mind about two weeks ago.

30:19

And I know somebody that I can ask. I said, hey, what are the Chinese doing for vaccines?

30:27

Have you thought of that? Yeah, that's a good question. I know. I don't know the answer to it.

30:32

I didn't think they did much. What are they doing? They developed an old style vaccine using the old technology.

30:38

They're not doing anything with MRNA or DNA. Interesting. We are. Catch that.

30:45

Yeah. China has a old style vaccination for coronavirus.

30:51

Why don't we? Why don't we? My greatest fear is

30:57

A .D .E., which is antibody dependent enhancement. In all the times they've tried to use this technology before in this area, when they got to animal studies, this is why those studies stop because the animals died.

31:14

Why? Because you can produce antibodies, but that's not a full immune response.

31:20

What A .D .E. does is it tells your body, I already have those antibodies, but you don't have the other elements of the system.

31:29

And so when you get hit by the real virus out in the wild, your body says, we're already ready for that.

31:34

Doesn't respond. The virus takes you over and kills you quick. That's exactly what happened to this doctor.

31:41

That's scary. And in Israel, they've had so far 41 deaths from COVID of people who were fully vaccinated.

31:50

Yeah. That's fishy. That's very fishy. Okay. Now this, I hope I'm sitting here, hoping and praying that there's another answer to this and that this is not because how many millions of doses have already been given?

32:06

Yeah. That this is not what the result is going to be, but there have been numerous medical doctors, numerous, numerous, numerous, numerous have said, this is not how you do this.

32:19

You don't do it. And so I'm very concerned. I'm not going to be traveling anytime in the future because we both know, and I called this in April of last year, in April of last year,

32:34

I said, I predict that you will not be able to travel internationally without a health vaccine passport.

32:43

Very, very, and that's what's starting. Yeah. It's already starting. I want to reinforce this.

32:50

Yeah. I agree with what you're saying. I think, I mean, we're scared now. Everyone's sufficiently afraid.

32:56

I think probably who's listening to this of the vaccine. I think the hurdles

33:02

I was hoping maybe you could address that some people have, because they've been trained this way from their traditions is number one, you kind of touched on this, but because this relates back to Romans 13, the government can't force you to do anything that would limit the preaching of the gospel, but that's it.

33:19

So it's kind of like this narrow view that like, well, you know, you can still preach the gospel and have a vaccination or shut down your church, or I don't know, wear a mask, whatever.

33:30

The other thing is this idea that, well, because it was Nero who was in charge when

33:35

Paul wrote Romans 13, it doesn't really count. It's really just about Christians submitting and you can't find in this anything that would allow a

33:45

Christian to oppose the government if the government's committing evil, because clearly Nero committed evil. What do you say to those objections?

33:52

Because those are the two most common ones I hear. Well, a couple of things. First of all, as has been pointed out,

33:58

Nero did not start off as Nero, the way he went. And Romans probably was written toward the peaceful part of Nero's reign.

34:09

And I believe, and this gets us into eschatology and I've had some shifts in my thinking lately on that particular subject, but I believe that Nero is the one identified very clearly in the book of Revelation.

34:24

I do believe in the early date for Revelation. And so don't tell me if that's the case, don't tell me that scripture is nice about Nero.

34:31

He's the beast. So if that's the case, then scripture very plainly identifies the source of his behavior, which was,

34:43

I can't even start to describe the things that Nero eventually did. But there was a difference between the individual emperor and the empire itself.

34:56

There was actually going to come a fairly stable period of time after Nero into the second century where you actually have some decent emperors that don't go crazy and do wild and crazy stuff like that, but they still persecuted the church.

35:12

And they persecuted the church because the church demanded to say that Jesus is

35:19

Lord rather than Caesar is Lord. So the church that stood up for its sphere sovereignty was the church that was being persecuted even by the good

35:29

Roman emperors. And so when I'm not sure what the objection about Nero would be other than people,

35:37

I have heard people say, Hey, Romans 13 says be in subjection even to someone as evil as Nero.

35:44

As if Paul is actually saying you get to let Nero define what's good and evil.

35:50

They never deal. I don't hear them dealing with what it says. Rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil.

36:00

Nero defined evil behavior, but he didn't decree that everybody else had to do the stuff he was doing.

36:08

So you have to go to where did the church and Nero collide? And it wasn't so much at that time that you have the collision as afterwards when the

36:19

Romans start figuring out these Christians are not Jews. Because at first they're just like, Oh, you guys are arguing because you're using the same scriptures.

36:26

I don't want to hear this. Go argue about your theology someplace else. Eventually, the

36:32

Roman system came to understand, okay, Christians are not Jews. There's a distinction here and we need to deal with the

36:39

Christians differently than we do with the Jews. And so that's when the issue of ultimate fealty or the willingness to say

36:49

Caesar, Kaiser Kourios becomes the issue because the Christian has said

36:55

Jesus Kourios. Now here's a question for everybody in the audience. Why can't an early

37:01

Christian, and I'm writing a book on this subject right now, so why can't, why didn't the early

37:07

Christians believe they could say Kaiser Kourios? Because if you believe, for example, radical two kingdom theology,

37:15

Kourios is over there. And in fact, there were many

37:22

Kourioi lords in political power that you could acknowledge as being lords.

37:31

So there must've been something about Jesus Kourios that was in direct conflict with Kaiser Kourios.

37:39

They didn't have this, Jesus is Lord is just in my heart.

37:46

The Romans recognized and the Christians recognized that Jesus was

37:52

King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And that therefore even Caesar was subject to the risen

38:00

Christ. That was the problem. That was the issue. And we've lived in a nation where that was understood at first, got forgotten, got buried.

38:13

We figured people still understood it. And now Caesar's back. And he says,

38:19

I'm Lord and you need to admit it. Well, that's significant what you said though, because that would mean that it wasn't for preaching the gospel.

38:26

They were ultimately persecuted, but for making a claim to challenge the ultimate authority of the regime.

38:34

Or that the gospel includes that. Right. Sure. Yeah. I don't know if you have one around, but I haven't seen the four spiritual laws for a long time, but I don't think that part was in it.

38:49

No, I don't have one of those in this house, actually. I listened to the dividing line much too early to get wrapped up in that stuff.

38:59

I think that answers the question pretty brilliantly. It really does seem to come back to just some basic presuppositions that you already have before approaching a text like Romans 13.

39:10

It's not really the text itself. That's the issue. It's what you're bringing to it. I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea.

39:18

I'm not saying that there are simple answers. To every question here. Christians struggled under the

39:26

Soviet system. We can look back to that and learn from things, but no one's faced what we're facing now in the history of the church.

39:37

Even under Rome, you didn't have the technology, obviously, and Rome was still a theistic system of some type.

39:46

We are facing full on secular, atheistic, culture of death, technocracy.

39:55

You've got people who are rebelling against God in every aspect of human life who can then follow everybody with drones and with satellites.

40:08

That's not something we've faced before. The church in Russia could hide in the woods and sing quietly.

40:15

We don't have that option. There are no woods that can hide you from satellites. I guess you could find a mine shaft someplace, and that would be a bet that I can think of.

40:27

I'm not saying that there are going to be easy answers. Especially this genetic stuff that's going on and genetic manipulation and the tech along those lines.

40:39

Oh my goodness. I'll just tell you what my hope is. A society built upon secularism will collapse upon itself because that's not

40:52

God's world. We're all made in the image of God, and even if you manage to lie and deceive and brainwash every single human being, we're still made in the image of God, and we're going to know that there's something not right.

41:07

The system eventually is going to crumble. It could last for a while, but eventually it's going to crumble.

41:14

My hope is that, let's say we're going into an extremely dark period globally.

41:21

I pray that's not the case, but it seems to be as far as I can tell. Let's say we go into an extremely dark period globally.

41:30

My hope is that the collapse of this great enemy of Christ, because that's what secularism is.

41:38

Secularism is a full -on rebellion against the claims of Christ.

41:45

Christ is the source of life. Secularism is the culture of death.

41:50

They are absolute opposites. When secularism destroys itself, and in the process may destroy not just millions or hundreds of millions, but billions of people in the process, will that be the trigger that causes people to say never again, never again secularism, never again the denial that we are made in the image of God, never again the chaos that comes from Darwin's world.

42:26

Could that be it? I hope and pray it is. But for me, my big question now, and for a young man like yourself, this is something

42:35

I wish someone had forced me to think about long before now. Doug Wilson said in a movie called

42:47

On Earth As It Is In Heaven, and I had started thinking about this,

42:53

I don't know, a few years ago, and it really crystallized only a few weeks before I heard this, and then

42:59

I heard him saying the exact same thing I've been thinking along. He says, most evangelical Christians never think about their great -grandchildren.

43:08

They never think about what world they're going to live in, or how we must be living our lives to invest in communicating the faith to them.

43:21

And it's true. And if you have certain eschatological beliefs, you don't think you're going to have great -grandchildren anyway.

43:29

Certainly don't think that doing anything now is going to affect them.

43:35

You're not called to that kind of thing. You don't polish brass on a sinking ship, right? Well, I was raised in a pre -millennial home.

43:44

I'll be honest, though, I think it was Gary DeMar who said this years ago, that a lot of these issues are more ethical than even eschatological.

43:53

And I'm not diminishing what you're saying about eschatology, but right is right. And whether Christ comes back tomorrow or in a thousand years or a million years from now,

44:04

I'm responsible. Proverbs wants me to try to give an inheritance to my children's children.

44:12

That's what it teaches. And my family was always very well aware of where we came from, who we are, and the legacy that we're going to leave to our kids.

44:22

So I guess I was raised in a traditional kind of way. I can't understand people who don't live that way because I wasn't part of that.

44:30

We like going to national parks and battlefields and these kinds of things, but I don't know.

44:37

If you have a connection backwards, you're going to realize you want to have a connection forward.

44:43

Right. Yeah, I think that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Right. And so many people today do not have the connection backwards.

44:50

And so they have no thought whatsoever going forward. But for me, my question is, if it does get as dark as it could, how do you communicate the faith through that darkness?

45:06

That's the challenge that I'm certainly spending a lot of time thinking about. I'm thinking the same things.

45:13

What do you say about Alaska? Is Alaska... My wife and I keep kicking things around. We're like, is Alaska the place?

45:19

Very cold. Very, very cold. South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma. Yeah, we're all thinking the same things and now thinking about them very seriously.

45:28

Yes. Because I would like to hope that there would be bastions of liberty and freedom that would stand tall.

45:37

But I don't know. I don't know. I also read certain dystopian novels and go, man,

45:44

I could see how this would happen. I can see the elements of it right now.

45:50

There is one from 1975 called This Perfect Day. I don't know if you've read it. I haven't read that one yet.

45:56

No. You may not want to. It's too close. Of all of them. I mean, 84, obviously,

46:02

Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, blah, blah, blah, blah. But This Perfect Day just keeps haunting me.

46:13

And it's from the mid 1970s. I would highly recommend it.

46:19

It's on Audible. Grab it. You'll either thank me or curse me, depending on how you're feeling at the end.

46:26

Well, I was watching a Francis Schaeffer video. I think it was the last episode in How Shall We Then Live from 1977. Oh, yeah. And it sounds like he's talking about 2021.

46:33

It's amazing. He talks about technocracy. So well, I know you got to go. You got a lot of things to do.

46:39

I appreciate you giving us some of your time here to talk about Romans 13 and some of the concerns I'm tracking with you.

46:45

And I hope this helps some of everyone in the audience, because I know we're all struggling through some of the same questions and having the same challenges thrust in our direction.

46:54

But if you want to find out more about Dr. White or get any of his books, you can go to AOMN .org. Anywhere else you want me to send people?

47:02

No, I mean, obviously, Apology of Studios is where a lot of my preaching is now.

47:08

So Apology of Church, we're doing the pro -life movement and things like that. So Apology of Studios, AOMN .org,

47:14

that'll pretty much cover it. Get them all you can, because I don't know how long we're going to be available in standard social media format in the future.

47:25

Believe me, we know that. We've made our preparations. But I think that's going to be the case for a lot of folks.

47:31

I encourage everybody, if they find the dividing line to be encouraging, better download it and archive it and put it in a safe place, because eventually, inevitably, it all goes bye bye.

47:44

Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll put those links in the info section if people want to go check that out. Or you can follow

47:49

Dr. White on Twitter, since he's still on Twitter. I don't know why you're still on Twitter. Well, I am.

47:55

I'm also on Gab. I'm on Gab. I like Gab.

48:02

I'm on MeWe. And I'm very excited that the president of Gab is a new

48:10

Christian being discipled by folks associated with Christ Church in Moscow. Oh, is that?

48:16

Okay, I didn't know that. I was suspecting something there, but now you've confirmed it to me. Yeah. Andrew Torba, I think is his name.

48:23

Andrew Torba. He was just on CrossPolitik yesterday. That'll drop this week.

48:29

So there's the connection there. And that's exciting to me. Obviously, you're probably aware of the fact that Doug and I do a series together called the

48:39

Sweater Vest Dialogue. Yes, I've seen some of those. And we will eventually be debating each other again.

48:47

We've debated each other a lot.

48:52

And I've seen some of those wonderful examples of where you can disagree in the bond of unity when you've got a solid foundation.

49:01

And I hope that our disagreements have been helpful to people as well as our agreements.

49:07

And in fact, I think they go together. I'm on Gab. I haven't been kicked off Twitter yet.

49:13

I'm going to make him kick me off. I'm trying to, and it's not working all of a sudden. I don't know why.

49:19

Give it time. Trust me. Okay. All right. I just figure be salt and light as long as you can.

49:27

And I'm still getting good material for the dividing line and stuff via that means.

49:32

So I don't see any reason to run off. Or as James Lindsay just said, throw sand in their gears,

49:38

I think is how he phrased that. He's right. He's right. Well, I appreciate it. There is a guy that if the world wasn't going insane,

49:46

I would be pursuing for a debate. Jeff and I versus he and the guy on atheism.

49:53

Yeah. He's a better Christian theist than some Christians out there with how he thinks through some of these things. Well, he's a really, really sharp guy and he's listening to us.

50:02

And he can't help but have been impacted by the fact that it's Christians who are defending his right to speak and yet challenging him from a

50:12

Christian worldview perspective. I think that I would love to see that happen someday. But right now, to be honest with you,

50:19

I'm not sure right now is the best time, but maybe sometime in the future, but got a lot of respect for him, but he is an atheist and I've had dinner with him and we've had very interesting conversations.

50:32

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming on to explain this stuff. And like I said, people can go to the links if they want to check out more.