Did God Close the Churches During the Pandemic Because He Was Sick of Their Worship?

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All right, Tim, so the question for today's episode is, did God close the churches during the pandemic because He was sick of their worship?

01:35

Yeah, this is one of those interpretations of the pandemic that I really didn't hear very many people at all say during the time.

01:43

So, you know, when we're in the midst of it, I don't know that I could think of hardly anyone who came up with this as an interpretation of God's providence at that point.

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But then it's something I asked, you know, a few people about, a few bigger name people about what they thought about it, and it's one of those things that seemed obvious to me at the time that if God was going to sovereignly close the doors of His churches, you know, something that He has commanded us to do, so He's commanded us to go and to worship, and He's going to close it down.

02:15

One of the interpretations that we should at the very least consider is the fact that maybe He was doing that because He was sick of our worship, right?

02:24

What do you mean? Well, I mean, maybe it had something to do with, you know, the state of the church's toleration of sin or practices that we're employing and everything else.

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And so as you read through Isaiah in particular, Isaiah 1 .11 says this,

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What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord? I have had enough burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well -fed beasts.

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I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required this trampling of my courts?

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Bring no more vain offerings. Incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath, the calling of convocations,

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I cannot endure iniquity in the solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts, my soul hates.

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They become a burden to me, and I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you.

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Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourself, make yourself clean.

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Remove the evil from your deeds from before my eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good. Seek justice, correct oppression.

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Bring justice to the followless. Plead the widow's cause. So, you know, thinking about a passage like that, that is a passage where those things that he's saying that his soul is weary of are things that he called the

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Israelites to do, essentially. And he's saying, you know, I'll have no more of these things. You know,

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I'm sick of these things. He's essentially saying, I'm sick of your worship, and I won't have any more of it.

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And, you know, it's one of those things that as you think about a passage like that, you think about what happened during the pandemic, we just kind of close the doors, right?

04:05

Yeah, willingly. Willingly, yeah, and it seems like something that should have caused us to think, is this

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God basically saying, I'm sick of it, I'll have no more of it. So, I'm done with it.

04:17

Yeah, yeah, it is. I think it is particularly striking, especially when you think about the fact that it was basically,

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I mean, totally motivated by, you know, fear, right?

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And it kind of reminds you of all these times that, especially in the Old Testament where God, you know, he instills fear into entire nations.

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I mean, like when the Israelites are leaving Egypt, right? He says that he's going to instill fear in all of the nations that the

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Israelites have to pass by so that they'll be protected and they won't be attacked. And then he does, he does that.

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And so it's obviously not outside of, you know, the scope of his sovereignty to be able to instill entire,

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I mean, entire nations with fear. And so we can, you know, build up all of the technology that we want.

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We can build up all of the weapons of mass destruction we want. But then at the end of the day, it is pretty humbling to think that the

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American Church shut its doors down, you know, for all of our advances, we shut our doors down for, you know, a virus, right?

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It wasn't even what we thought it was, right? Right. Yeah. And he was totally in control of all of that.

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And so I think there is something pretty humbling in all that to say like, hey, look, you can say that we've, you know, we've advanced a lot farther than where we were at back when, you know,

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Moses was walking around, but God's still instilling fear in people as judgment, right?

05:58

Yeah. So I think that's one of those things where as you, you look at a passage like that, I think and just seeing the worldwide response and just thinking about how weak the church is in so many ways and how worldly the church is, you know, across the board.

06:14

And yeah, I know, I know we, we talked about, I don't mean to hijack you, but I know we talked about this before, but it's worth saying again, you know, how many times when, when, when you ask people 15 years ago, hey, when, you know, where's the line where you say, once people go here, you know, against the church, that's when we, you know, when the government does this, like that's when we need to stop listening to them.

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And everyone's response was always, well, when they tell it, you know, when they interfere with our ability to share the gospel, right.

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When they interfere with our ability to worship freely, right. And then the minute that that happens, everyone caves, right.

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Or, or most everyone caves. Yeah. I mean, there's still churches to this day that still haven't opened yet.

07:07

Really? Yeah. I mean, there's still, I mean, there's many churches in different parts of the country in particular that still haven't opened yet.

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And, you know, so, I mean, I think the most obvious cases like that, then it's obvious. I mean, you can look at that and you say, well,

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God was done with that place. Right. So in the most obvious place that was God saying,

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I, I'll have no more of that. I mean, and there's, you know, depending on where you're at in the country, there's, you know, it seems like there's churches that are more, you know, cultural institutions at this point, they've lost the

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Bible. They've lost any kind of convictions a long time ago, any kind of fidelity that scripture has been gone.

07:46

And it seems like as you, you know, map out the different responses to the pandemic along those lines, it seems like the churches that are the most liberal, the churches that are most compromised, those are the ones that close longest.

07:58

Right. Yeah. And so they're the, I mean, They were the ones with the congregations that were the most willing to stay away.

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Right. Right. Right. And so, I mean, but then it didn't dawn on anyone that, that could have possibly been a, you know, a sovereign interpretation of what's going on.

08:13

Right. Yeah. But I mean, but obviously like the ones that close the longest, you could say that,

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I mean, they, without any self -awareness at all, you look at that and you say, well, you know, maybe

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God was really sick of those. Right. I mean, maybe it was a slap on the wrist to someone who closed for a few weeks or a month or whatever, you know, something like that to say, you know, you need to wake up.

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But then, you know, you, you, so, I mean, I don't, I don't think what you want to do is look at it and say, basically, if any church closes door down for, you know, you know, even a short period of time that that was just God basically writing apostate on that church or something like that.

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But there's, but there's clearly, I mean, churches that still haven't, you know, open to this day and, you know, it may be that they have revealed, revealed their state pretty, pretty clearly.

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And, you know, I think it should be a rebuke to all of us. And I think it should be something that, that we should look at and we should, we should say, man, like, you know, we're, we're people who, who supposedly, right.

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Are willing to take up our cross and follow Jesus, right. To deny ourself, take up our cross and follow

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Jesus. And, you know, maybe we're all like Peter, right? Yeah.

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Maybe, maybe we should remind people that the cross is a executioner's tool. Right. Right.

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Right. Right. I think we all proved ourself to be a lot more like the disciples on the night before the betrayal than what we realized.

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Right. Yeah. To where though all betray you yet, yet not I Lord. Right. And then the slightest, you know, stirrings of danger, we all willingly abandon.

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I mean, the most fundamental thing we're called to, you know, the most fundamental thing that you're called to as a

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Christian is just if, if you want to, you know, make it the most basic thing you can possibly imagine, imagine is just go to church, you know, worship the

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Lord on the Lord's day. Right. It's like a bare minimum kind of thing. And so I think, you know, more people need to look back at this time.

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And I think from the perspective of history, whoever writes the, the story of it that should factor in to what we're talking about.

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I think it's pretty telling. You know, I talked to a lot of people who were more on the, on the liberal side of things when it, when it came to this.

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And I think the overwhelming sort of response that I got and, and, you know, keep in mind, this is just like my single perspective, but I do think that there's something to this, you know, talking, talking to people that were more on the left, that were more progressive.

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I mean, they were happy to not be at church on Sunday. They were glad to, you know, like,

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Hey, I'm doing my part and, you know, I'm loving my neighbor and blah, blah, blah, whatever else. And, and my response to it all was just more like, man,

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I wish I could meet with my brothers and sisters, you know, and like, like spend time with them.

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Like I normally would throughout the week and, and whatnot. And, and, and so I think that is pretty telling just from like a, well, what, what is the priority here to begin with, if, if you're so willing to leave it, you know, without any sort of pushback whatsoever.

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And then even as you're leaving it, there's not really any sort of like, man, I really missed that. You know, it's just like, well,

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Oh, well, I think there's probably like a, you know, like, Oh, finally a good excuse.

11:41

Right. Well, I think there's a lot of nominal Christians essentially who that they, all they were looking for, they're barely holding on anyways and they're looking for some kind of moral justification to, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who are more conservative that are the same way, you know, like more conservative, like politically, but then in terms of spiritually, they're really not, they're really not spiritual.

12:03

Right. Well, I think that's, that's not surprising at the nominal Christian level, but then I think the same dynamic you're talking about is essentially this dynamic that many of the big mega churches essentially had to, to where, you know, if they could, if they could in a guilt free way, take a break from the weekly circus and the light show and the, you know, the

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Holy spirit fog machine and all that. And they still get all their money coming in through tithes. Right. But they don't actually have to, you know, have the big production and all that.

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They don't have to actually deal with people and they don't actually have to gather together. I think there's a lot, a lot of them that revealed that like maybe they, they weren't as, you know, they didn't love it as much as they were pretending like they did.

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Right. They were looking for the first opportunity they could to with all the moral high ground, they can muster to go ahead and, you know, stop doing this.

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Yeah. Stop the charade. Right. Stop putting on the show. Yeah. And kind of calling back to our, our episode on, you know, natural disasters, for example, one of the, one of the things we came away with on that episode is to say, you know,

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God can have multiple different purposes for plenty of different people who are affected by the same event.

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Right. And, right. And so, you know, look, look for me, looking back on all this stuff, it, it, it does seem like, well,

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Hey, there's, there probably are multiple different reasons that, you know, God had for 2020.

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Right. And, and I'm sure for a lot of churches, the, it was a judgment just,

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I mean, salt, like solely on there, or at least in part because of like their worship.

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Right. And, and then I can also see how for a lot of others who are probably, you know, faithful when it comes to the worship side of things.

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It's like a trial that I think maybe a lot of people failed or, or didn't pass as much as they would have liked.

14:13

Right. Because, because we've just, we've lived in a country that for so long thankfully has, has not really persecuted us the way that Christians in the past, especially in the early church were persecuted.

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And so we, we've just kind of when you, I think when you don't, when you don't have that person, that threat of persecution, you just, you don't, it gets you used to thinking a certain kind of way that maybe isn't always helpful.

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And so when the persecution finally comes, you find yourself sort of ill prepared for the moment and you've, and you find your congregations ill prepared for the moment, because we just haven't had to think about those things.

14:59

And so long in terms of actually applying them in our lives. Now, should we be thinking about those things even when, you know, we're not facing persecution?

15:10

I think 2020 tells us like, yeah, we should be, we should be preparing that way.

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Even when we're not facing immediate persecution. And so I guess for me, looking back at it is, is probably those two things and probably even more that we haven't mentioned right.

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That as reasons for why God allowed churches to be shut down the way they were.

15:37

Sure. And I mean, I think when you look at just the broader mega church in a big church, nominal

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Christian kind of culture in general, and a lot of these churches were never really about the worship of God.

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Anyways, it was all just about, you know, pleasing the people, giving the people what they want.

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It was all just a man centered production. I mean, you got, you got guys like Andy Stanley, essentially, you know, arguing every week that the first and greatest command is essentially the second greatest command.

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And so, so I think, I think looking at just the state of affairs and the, you know, the nature of most of these churches, it does seem like they've, you know, stopped worshiping

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God a long time ago and kept on going through the motions. And I think, you know, something like this was certainly a revelation to that effect.

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And it's definitely, you know, a warning to the, to the faithful churches out there to say, Hey, you know,

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God, God can, you know do the kind of things that the Bible says he can do.

16:36

Right. I mean, no one would have thought that it would be possible for God to just, you know, shut it all, shut off his worship like that, you know, even up to a year.

16:43

Yeah. I mean, no one would have thought that that would be likely or reasonable. Even a month before. Well, in doing it.

16:49

Yeah. I mean, doing it like not even with like nuclear Holocaust or something like that. Right. I mean, you can imagine it in that kind of way, but then he could just like, so destabilize a people without a single bullet being fired or bomb being dropped.

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He can just shut it off, you know? And he did. And that should terrify us.

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Yeah, absolutely. This has been another episode of Bible bashed. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion.

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