ERLC Is Right About John MacArthur

I can't believe I have to do this, but I have to agree with the ERLC. John MacArthur is wrong about religious liberty.

Alright, alright. Now before you get too upset, the ERLC is wrong about religious liberty as well, which

I find so crazy because the ERLC exists to be right about religious liberty.

It's the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and they are just out to lunch on this topic.

I mean, people from the ERLC have been notoriously seen promoting the building of mosques and things of that nature.

It's just absolutely upside down and crazy for a Christian organization. But they're not wrong about MacArthur, although they kind of are because they're right for the wrong reasons.

Yeah, that's how it is. So this article is talking about the viral video that went out about John MacArthur, and that viral video essentially misrepresented

John MacArthur because it made John MacArthur seem as if he were a theonomist or he was against the ability to practice other religions besides Christianity and all of that, and that's not what

John MacArthur believes. And the reality is, I know this is not what John MacArthur believes because I don't follow him around.

I don't follow his teachings very carefully, but as a person who believes that we should have a

Christian government, this is me, I believe we should have a Christian government implementing Christian laws.

I know that John MacArthur doesn't believe that, and so I knew they were misrepresenting him. But this article, forget all that.

Who cares if we're misrepresenting him? We're going to go after him because, you know, one thing that this actually does prove,

I think that's good, is that John MacArthur is not in the guild. He is not a part of the Big Eva guild because they attacked him directly and they had no problem lying about him.

So that's a good thing. But this whole thing about religious liberty, it's just very, very crazy.

The article tries to give three reasons why religious liberty is a good thing, and they define religious liberty as essentially a secular government, a government that allows for, you know, any kind of religious leader to rise up and implement whatever kind of law they want, so long as I'm sure they have something about human flourishing or something like that.

And it kind of allows for a pluralistic secular government, and I think that that's illegitimate for a

Christian. I think we ought to have a Christian government implementing Christian laws. And the article makes three cases as to why that is not the case.

What I just said, they don't believe that. They don't believe we should have a Christian government implementing Christian laws. And to be honest, these three reasons are actually very popular.

And chances are, there are some people in this audience that would agree with a good part of this article. Maybe they don't agree with them attacking

John MacArthur in this way, but the arguments, they would agree with. And so I want to go through them, and I want to talk about why

I don't think you're really thinking through these arguments against a Christian government implementing

Christian laws. I think that's a very obvious conclusion for a Christian to reach. We ought to have a

Christian government implementing Christian laws. So here's the first case that they try to make against it.

So they say religious liberty is supported by human nature. And the idea is that people won't be coerced into a religion, right?

And so if you try to implement a Christian government implementing Christian law, then what you're doing is you're trying to coerce people into being

Christian. So you're saying, look, at the point of a gun, we're going to coerce you into being a

Christian, believing. And the article says people don't work that way. People don't work that way.

So if you tried to do that, people would rebel or they'd fake it, but they're actually not going to end up in heaven and all of that, so that would be really wrong.

That's the argument. In fact, even John MacArthur's group, Grace to You, they also said, look, if you implemented

God's law, that would be what you're trying to do. This is Megan Bashan's article that was defending

MacArthur. It quotes Phil Johnson, who I like, but Phil has this wrong. He says this. Listen to this.

He says, MacArthur is certainly not advocating the theonomic notion that Christians today should commandeer governments in order to force

Christianity on the world. That's how Phil Johnson, I should say, characterizes the theonomic notions.

That's not correct. That's not correct. But think about this for a second, though, okay? So let's just put aside the fact that that's not what theonomy teaches, right?

Or God's law, rather. Think about if it was true, right? The kind of government you implement is essentially coercing someone to behave according to a certain religion or another.

If that was true, then what kind of religion are we coercing people to obey now?

So we have a secular government. We have a pluralistic government that, you know, you can be any religion, and you can have any law that you want, and you can implement it.

So long as you can get enough people to support it, you can implement it. So in Canada, they've got, you know, if you say that someone's a man when they want to be a woman, then you can go to jail for that, right?

Or in the United States, if you want to murder a child that's in the womb, that's okay.

They allow for that. And so as long as you get enough support behind the law, that's how our system works.

You can implement it. So if it's true that the government is coercing people to behave according to a certain belief, then what is our system doing?

Our secular system, our pluralistic system is coercing people into behaving like pluralists, like secularists, like pagans.

We have a pagan system of government. And so if it were true that the system of government is religion externalized into the civil realm, then

I guess we're all pagans now. So I really don't think you're thinking this through, right? So should we be behaving in the civil realm according to the pagans or according to God's law,

God's precepts? You see, I think it's a very clear choice for a Christian. If we're in government and we're a

Christian in government, we ought to be behaving like a Christian ought to behave. And God has a word on how to do that.

So that's the first one. It's a very common objection, but I just don't think you're thinking it through because I certainly believe that if the government is religion externalized, then we ought to be doing that in a

Christian way. Now, the second argument here is that he makes the case that religious liberty is supported by the doctrine of original sin.

The basic premise here is that, you know, we're not infallible, right? The civil governing authority is not infallible.

And therefore, we can't even try to implement God's holy and perfect law because we'll be doing that fallibly.

We'll be failing. We'll be making mistakes. And then, you know, we'll be dragging Christ's name through the mud because we make these mistakes.

Nobody is qualified to implement an infallible law because everyone is fallible.

This is also very common. I hear this a lot in my comments where it's like, it'll be a horror show,

A .D. That's what people say. If people were trying to implement God's law, it'd be a horror show because people are fallible.

They're sinful. They've got a sin nature and that would be horrible. Now, again, this is a common belief, but let's think it through.

And I think if you take it out of the civil realm for a minute and think about other governments, you'll see instantly the problem, right?

Because government, the word, used to mean a lot of things. Right now, we only use it to talk about civil government like the federal government, the state government, things like that.

But in the old days, government meant, you know, self -government. There's a family government. There's a church government.

And it meant all these different things, right? And so we recognize, even though we don't use the word the same way these days, we recognize that there is sort of a family government.

There's a church government. There's an authority figure in the home and in the church and they have to abide by certain laws.

Now, let's think about this for a second. Let's think this through. Let's say you're an elder of a church, right? And, you know, you have a couple other elders in this church and you're all kind of ruling this church.

And, you know, the Bible says that those who rule well are worthy of double honor and all of that. We get it.

There's a church government, right? Let's say one of your co -elders said to you, you were trying to adjudicate a situation, let's say between a father and a husband and a wife, and you're trying to, you know, implement

God's morality in this situation. And let's say your co -elder came up to you and said, what do you think, you're God?

A .D., you're not infallible. How can you be applying God's law in the church?

It's a perfect law. You're not qualified. You're fallible. That wouldn't make any sense, right?

Or let's say, let's break it down even more relatable, right? You're a father. And actually, some fathers do say this.

They say, I can't adjudicate my son. I can't discipline my sons infallibly the way the

Bible says I ought to. Therefore, I'm not going to do it the way the Bible says. I'm going to do it the way I think it should be done in a pragmatic way.

The way, you know, I read a study about peaceful parenting, and I'm going to do it this way because the study, the psychologist said, and imagine if somebody said that, right?

Like, I'm not infallible. Therefore, I can't try to implement God's infallible law.

That wouldn't make any sense, right? You have to rule your church and your home according to God's law, even though going in, you know, it's not going to be done infallibly.

I think God blesses this, by the way. I've been reading the book of Kings, and I don't know if some of you guys are reading the book of Kings now because we're kind of, some of us are doing the same reading challenge.

And I find it amazing how regularly good kings have these tremendous colossal flaws.

Like even a good king, they still left the high places where people could go and worship whatever God they wanted.

And God says, that was terrible that you did that. I'm still going to bless you though for these reasons.

Like God wasn't looking for perfection in order to bless a king's kingdom, right? I mean, yes, you need to be perfect in order to be saved.

And therefore, you know, that's why the sacrifice of Jesus Christ gets credited to us. Christ's perfection becomes our perfection, which means that we can be saved.

We can live with him forever. We get that. So to be saved, you got to be perfect. So we need Christ's perfection.

But the reality is that to bless his children, he doesn't require perfection.

Listen to this. Like think about it. I'm not, I'll speak for myself here. I'm not perfect, right?

I am very acutely aware, let's say, acutely aware of my own imperfections, my own sins, my besetting sins, the sins that I sometimes return to, even knowing better, the sins that I return to,

I'm keenly aware of those. And yet God blesses me. He's blessed me beyond measure.

And the thing is God's law accounts for the fallibility of humans. I mean, I, you know, you look at God's civil law.

There's ways, there's fail safes, there's checks and balances and things like that. Even with my own family, right?

Like I've sinned against my own son before, a six -year -old, right?

And I've apologized to him and I've asked for forgiveness and I've said, hey, you know, son, I shouldn't have said this.

I shouldn't have done that, whatever it was. And, you know, it's a failure of mine and I repent and I've asked for forgiveness.

You don't think that has an impact on your son? Look, I'm fallible, but your son needs to see that you're fallible and how you react to the failures and things like that.

You don't think that has an impact on your son? Just because I can't execute discipline perfectly is no excuse to not try.

It's no excuse to not have a standard, a way to sort of guide, you know, how you should be behaving.

Like it wouldn't make sense in the home to say I'm fallible, so therefore I can't follow God. It wouldn't make sense in the church to say

I'm fallible, therefore I can't follow God. And likewise, it doesn't make any sense to say we're fallible, therefore our civil government cannot follow or attempt to construct laws that we derive from God's law.

Those are the guideposts, right? We need to hitch to that. That's the standard, that's the guidelines, the guardrails, whatever you want to call them.

We need to pull the general equity out of those when we're creating our own law system. And so our fallibility is no excuse to be unhitched from the civil law of God.

The last argument, I think, is the worst one of all. This one's also popular. Every time I talk about this,

I see people in the comments and they say, A .D., don't you know that every time theonomy has been tried, it's been a disaster?

Don't you know that ever since we've had secular governments, the gospel has spread? And that's the argument here.

It's saying that every time the government gets involved in trying to apply God's law, that the gospel is snuffed out, and every time it's just a free -for -all, the gospel flourishes.

So the way they make this case is so dishonest, in my opinion. The K .C.

McCall here, he points out, he cherry -picks a few examples of states and things like that and the results, and he thinks that it makes the case that secular governments are good for the gospel, right?

But the problem is that he's cherry -picking, right? Because the results that we have right now are also part of this secular experiment, right?

So you can't just stop in 1850 and say, See? The gospel spreads when you're secular.

No, no, you got to go all the way through. We're currently experiencing the fruit of a secular government. And guess what's happening?

People are becoming secular at a colossal pace. We've got the rise of the nuns, the atheists, no religion.

We've got the fake spirituality religions where, you know, you trip on mushrooms and you're a witch and things like that.

Like we've got, like right now, we're reaping the fruit of a secular government, and it's not going very well.

But yet people are holding on to this idea that the best we can do as Christians is a secular government.

That's not the best we can do, guys. That's not the best we can do. And the reality is,

I think we'd all see, look, just because there's been failures in the past does not mean we can unhitch from the

Scripture. Again, take it to the church example. Yes, many church governments abuse their power.

Pastors have abused their power in the past. Priests have abused their power in the past. Fathers have abused their power in the past.

Would you take it as an excuse to not follow God? Look, look at all these people that were Christians that abused their power as a father.

See, that's why I know that doesn't work. It doesn't work to follow an organized church government according to God's law, because look at Driscoll.

He abused his power. And they say, so I'm not going to even go with that. I'm going to make my own thing up.

It sounds silly, right, guys? It sounds silly to do it in your own family. It sounds silly to do in the church. But for some reason, we're fooled into thinking that that's a good argument for not doing it in the civil realm.

Guys, there's so much better out there. God's law is way better than man's law in every facet.

And there's so many examples of this, and I'd love to take you through some of them, but that's not what this video is about.

The reality is that these arguments from the ERLC here, there's a good chance that a lot of you read this article and agreed with it.

Maybe except for the part attacking John MacArthur, but agreed with the criticisms of theonomy and God's law and all of that.

They're terrible arguments. And I think you'll see how terrible each one of these arguments are if you just scale it back a little bit to something more relatable.

Would the argument work for a father? Would the argument work for your pastor? If the answer is no, then it doesn't work for the state either.

Look, we ought to have a government that honors Christ as Lord in the way it's structured and in the laws that they implement.

We have to have a—we should have a constitution that acknowledges Christ as Lord. Because we have—look, we're Christians, right?

So if we're in a situation where we have authority— I mean, look, if I was made president, it would last about five seconds and I'd be impeached.

But the reality is—the truth is, when the gospel goes out and it spreads, we've got to aim for a

Christian government. Because you can't have a document— like, the Constitution's a document that kind of divvies up authorities.

Who has this authority? Who has that authority? The people have this authority, all that. And it's like, how can you have a document divvying up authorities that doesn't recognize the very source of all authority?

What does Christ say? All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me.

There is no authority except from God, and we have a document that divvies up authorities that does not honor

Christ directly, specifically, by name. That is a recipe for failure every single time.

And until we correct that in our hearts and then on paper, this society is doomed.

The country is doomed. The nation is over until we address that. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful.