00:09:28.140I think one of the reasons it needs to be stated is because we have so many, as I think I mentioned last time, Gashmew saith it.0.98
00:09:34.460We have so many people within the quote-unquote Christian camp, the David Frenches of the world, who are trying to discourage Christians and Christian rebuilding of Christendom, civil government, etc.
00:09:44.500So you have people like David French saying that LGBT story time at the library is a gift of freedom.
00:10:16.180I can think of a number of places, Dan, in Proverbs where that would be true, but why do you think it's true that Christians make better rulers than wicked men?
00:10:24.240Well, it kind of goes back to Thesis 3 that said, godly city fathers are to rule with respect to God's objective standards, not man's subjective inclinations.0.72
00:10:35.220And if you have pagans ruling over people, then what standard do they have by which to rule?
00:10:44.040Well, it's going to be something other than God's objective standard, according to his law.
00:10:49.360Which gets back to the first portion of our thesis here, because we love our neighbors.
00:10:55.500And the love of neighbor being one of the pillars of the law.
00:10:59.360Yeah, the way of summing up the whole law.
00:11:00.580Yeah, the way of summing up the whole law is outlined throughout the revealed character of God through his law, throughout the scriptures. And so just rule by Christians, according to the objective standard of God, should cause human flourishing. It should cause joy, like we had said in the last episode, like a freshly mown field that had just rained or whatever the beautiful that I'm butchering.0.93
00:11:29.820Oh, you're right. It's like the dew that comes down and cools the grass.
00:11:35.200Proverbs 29.2, Dan says, when the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.0.94
00:11:41.180Yeah, and if you've been paying attention at all to our cold opens, you would have a good picture of what these absolutely pagan nations will do to their people, especially in regards to love of neighbor.0.95
00:11:54.300The Aztecs, Mao's China, places like that. We could find example after example after example of pagan nations and how how they break the law of loving neighbor as themselves.0.95
00:12:07.920Yeah, essentially to the point of massacring their own people in order to attain their means or even in our current situation, dare I say, with everybody's budgets getting quite a bit tighter because of inflation, which is theft due to radical spending and overreach from the government not loving their neighbor because people are hurting.0.97
00:12:29.160There was just a study that came out that revealed that people have less money in their bank account now than they did last year.
00:12:55.640And so you're starting to see, and this is 2022, year of our Lord, how the effects of pagan leaders, pagan rulers who do not love their neighbor, who do not have an objective standard, by doing something simple, and quite honestly, it seems innocent in a way because we've become used to inflationary spending of 2% or 3% a year, to now people can't buy food.
00:13:23.760And you're going to see issues with housing and with continuing with energy costs.
00:13:29.340All of that, all that rambling rant to say that pagans, when they rule, do not cause a love of neighbor.
00:13:39.720For the project of this season to be successful, the project of seeing a new Christendom built,
00:13:44.900there will need to be thousands and thousands of Christian men and women who are equipped to stand for the truth of scripture
00:13:50.320against the errors of both the liberal church and the pagan culture.
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00:17:28.440I mean, just look at, you know, say Muslim today.
00:17:30.460Yeah. Would I want to be ruled by a quote unquote wise Muslim? Well, does that mean we're living in Sharia law? Is that really wisdom? Yeah. My answer would be no. Right. And there's a few there's a there's a kind of it's such a it's such a short sentence, but it's so loaded. What is wisdom? It sounds like something David French would say, actually. I think Denny Burke claimed it was one of his favorite Luther quotes.1.00
00:26:26.380I think it was Robert Frost who said, you know, fences make good neighbors.
00:26:30.460You know, the point is, Dan, like if we live next to each other, a fence helps us establish clearly what is Dan's responsibility and what is mine.
00:26:38.040And so that helps us live at peace in the polis.
00:26:41.420Again, if you're going to be a well-ordered society, you've got to have clear distinctions about who's responsible for what.
00:26:46.740And I would include in this discussion, one of the things wise city fathers have to know is, you know, where does the church begin and where do I end?
00:26:55.580A lot of men today, especially in the Protestant tradition, we're sort of like, you know, no one will tell me, sola scriptura, I'm my own pope.
00:27:05.560No one ever throughout history or now can tell me what I need to confess.0.97
00:27:27.500Yeah, what has happened to carry your fence metaphor a little bit further is that some of these spheres have essentially taken down the fence and abandoned portions of their property.0.93
00:27:38.560And the land-hungry neighbor has decided to upkeep that portion of their property.
00:27:52.420And they're going to do a really bad job.
00:27:54.700Yeah, and that's what we tend to see. I think one of the things that fathers have to do here on this is you could grow discouraged, or the one really opportunity we have with the federal government being so overgrown and so big and trying to interfere in everything is, as Dan said, they suck at it.0.91
00:28:12.700And so because they're terrible at it, we know that wherever we see authority being abdicated and somebody doing a really poor job, if we just start taking responsibility, the authority will flow to us.
00:28:25.060So if you see your neighborhood run down, well, start taking responsibility for your neighborhood.
00:28:30.120If you see that the families in your church are not practicing family worship, well, talk to the elders, talk to the pastor.
00:28:37.220If you're one of those men, do something about it.
00:28:39.840start ordering the chaos and a funny thing happens the authority starts flowing to you
00:28:45.420yes and as you do that then you know you're starting businesses you're being a leader in
00:28:49.580your church the people of your community will look to you yes as the one with authority to speak
00:28:55.480it's so true because and the opposite happens is that when authorities abdicated
00:28:59.600when responsibilities abdicated job of the state will come in and say oh no one's doing this i
00:29:06.100guess i'm in charge of it i voted and i'm in charge of it that's how you get this endless
00:29:10.380bureaucratic swell yeah where uh we we say we're a government of elected officials we're not
00:29:15.940we're a government of a few elected officials in a vast unelected bureaucratic state that is has
00:29:21.480essentially swollen to to take every area of responsibility but this is the key thing
00:29:26.140every area of responsibility that was ceded to them by the people which are the kuiper quote
00:29:32.380at the beginning of last episode where we talked about the one who's been lulled to sleep. He's
00:29:38.020been lulled to sleep and allowed for his responsibilities to be overtaken. He's complicit
00:29:43.880in the governmental swell. And so, yeah, I think absolutely the first thing we have to establish
00:29:50.720here is that the authority of the government is not unlimited. And yet the only way to stop it
00:29:57.080from becoming unlimited, since it's such a slippery idol, is for individuals from the
00:30:02.700ground up to take responsibility for what is in their realm.
00:30:38.580So when we talk about the limits of civil authority, and I would commend you a book like, this is an old book from the 1800s, James M. Wilson wrote an exposition of Romans 13, 1 through 7 called The Establishment and Limits of Civil Government, which is just a great primer.
00:30:54.380It gets you out of our current moment and current politics.
00:30:57.080and gives you a very biblically grounded look at like the edges here. Because it's clear, again,
00:31:03.800we don't want to make the error of anarchists. It would say, well, civil government's completely
00:31:08.680bad. It has no authority over me. I can do whatever I want. Get out of here, government.
00:31:13.260It's actually not true. God has given the government, civil magistrates,
00:31:18.500legitimate authorities in certain areas where you are to, quote, you know, believe what Paul says,
00:31:25.020therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will
00:31:30.220incur judgment. However, and this is the crux, when you understand Paul and Paul's understanding
00:31:39.420of sin and righteousness, and then you try to say that he is in verse 2 in Romans 13 telling us
00:31:45.320that whatever the government tells us to do, if we resist it, we'll incur judgment.
00:31:49.080No, that statement right there automatically limits Paul's statement to saying,
00:31:55.440when you resist the authority, doing what God said it is allowed to do.
00:33:37.220And it's like you realize the government going beyond their authority.
00:33:41.180You start to realize that the additional principle you need is not just when they're commanding you to sin, do you resist, but you have legitimate grounds to resist the arbitrary exercise of authority.
00:33:53.120And the thing is, like you said at the beginning, Eric, nobody will disagree with this when it comes to any other sphere.
00:34:00.080If a father started issuing arbitrary abusive commands to his children and saying, children, you're not allowed to do this.
00:34:07.720You have to jump up on, you know, started issuing those kinds of commands.
00:34:32.760Romans 13 is also clear that paying taxes, verse 6, because of this, you also pay taxes for the authorities or ministers of God attending to this very thing.
00:34:42.760Pay to all what is owed to them taxes to whom taxes are owed.
00:34:58.800But you get a lot of the libertarian camp that it's like, well, the government can't ever tell me what to do ever, anytime, about anything.
00:35:08.540The problem is it's like, look, if you were telling a woman who had been radically abused by her husband, Ephesians 5 says to submit to your husband, you're not telling her anything untrue.
00:35:22.300But she has been set up by the sin of the authority to hear that as a curse.
00:35:28.320And that's what's happened in America today.
00:35:29.900That's what happens in statist governments.
00:35:32.060If you went to communist China when people are eating the clay to try and survive, like in the cold open from part one of this episode or this topic, and said, Romans 13, they would be probably pretty prone to despise your instruction.
00:35:48.860So what a lot of pastors today have made the error in, in the last couple years particularly, is in telling the battered wife to just submit to her ungodly husband in his battering, instead of saying, it's totally true, submission to the authorities is absolutely biblical, and we've got this every man a pope problem, we've got this libertarianism problem, but we need to recognize that one of the places that comes from is from the abusive husband of the state.
00:36:16.120Well, can you imagine, for example, like if a husband was like forcing his wife to put a foreign substance through needle into her body and she was saying no?
00:36:25.440What would the same Christian leaders say?
00:37:02.720But for some reason, Christians are helpless against it.0.94
00:37:07.660Well, guilty people who have ceded their responsibility out of laziness, out of sin, out of sloth, are easy to manipulate through guilt.0.71
00:38:28.200By the way, Christianity went from, I think it was under 10% for sure, and it might have been, I think it might have been under 2% on the chart in front of me, from the beginning of the 4th century, to something like 40 to 60% of the Roman Empire claiming Christ by 350.
00:38:45.500Do you know what happened between that time?
00:40:15.340And we could give, obviously, any of these – the reason we're going so long on these episodes is because we could give a dissertation on any of these topics, I think, because they're all so foundational.
00:40:24.220Brian could give a dissertation on any topic.
00:42:03.280if you're to be a good mayor or a good governor of a polis,
00:42:06.440So you're going to be a good emperor, a good king.
00:42:08.380It's like, how are you going to love your neighbor if you don't love the place where your neighbor is established and planted and is growing?
00:42:15.740And if you don't love your people, if you don't say, if, you know, if I am appointed mayor of Ogden for a day and I go, you know what?
00:42:24.280I'm pretty indifferent to these people.
00:43:05.080It is true. Dan is in charge of that. So give him a tip.
00:43:08.120So a couple of places where I really discovered Love of Place.
00:43:13.780Again, it's one of those areas where you get out of our insane moment and you start looking at what has human history been like throughout the ages.
00:43:22.480I was reading Wendell Berry. Then I started reading Chris Wiley, which is like a gateway drug into the Aeneid and Homer.
00:43:31.400And then you find through Western culture and then even extending into Christendom, there really is a deep love for place and for belonging and for the land.
00:43:42.620And when you look at even the promised land and what God has shown his people through the revelation of scripture, he promised them a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of their fathers that would be an inheritance for generations.
00:43:54.640The biggest curse was belonging to no land.
00:44:34.980Godly city fathers have to love their place and their people,
00:44:38.560and this is one of those sins that the scriptures talk about certain sins0.98
00:44:43.400that make you worse than an unbeliever,
00:44:46.200which is interesting because the scriptures are not particularly kind to unbelievers.
00:44:52.580I mean, Paul says that they are, you know, walkers in darkness, passing their days in malice and envy, hating one another and being hated.0.93
00:45:03.000And then he goes on to say, oh, and by the way, if you don't provide for your own members of your own household, you've denied the faith and you are worse than an unbeliever.0.55
00:45:59.120Which is a concept the Christians filled out even more deeply, but they began with a Roman concept, and they filled it up to its flowering.0.75
00:46:06.740Well, and here's the problem is we say, oh, well, that's Rome.0.88
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00:49:50.860And so, for example, the continent of India.
00:52:15.400He wants to use them and slaughter them and have them serve him.0.58
00:52:18.440Yeah, and I would even say, you know, we have, I'm sure, listeners who are not fully bought in on the post mill, and we've said in the past, yeah, fine, great, join us in the work.0.55
00:52:28.200One of the things I think to those brothers and sisters I would say is you have to still obey, you know, the general command from Jeremiah.
00:52:37.240That wherever God sends you, even if you're in exile, even if you believe that this is fundamentally exile, you are to seek the welfare of the place where you live.
00:52:44.780You plant gardens, meaning you plant your roots.
00:56:43.960or whatever that they had owned this farm and you got to think like they're they're able to go up to
00:56:48.880certain groves of trees and say like great great grandfather pat pat planning that and and this
00:56:54.400grandfather you know put in this fence line and this one put in this barn you know so why why you
00:57:00.300have people like that that to me seems like absolutely glorious and then the vogue thing to
00:57:05.580do which is to actually despise your place so i think it's it's connected to this when we talk
00:57:11.380about patriot a patriot patria father is the root word a patriot is one who loves the fatherland
00:57:17.540so our disdain for our fathers specifically the fathers who built america our violation of the
00:57:24.800fifth commandment is the reason why if we hate our fathers we're going to hate the father's land
00:57:29.660we're going to hate what they built so i think it's so much deeper than just like hating illinois
00:57:35.140or hating, you know, Wisconsin or hating your small town. It's actually hating your father
00:57:41.400and what his world made. Now, the problem today is there are some things that we should repent of
00:57:46.540and disdain. We should disdain the boomer world. That would be a good example. But I think there's1.00
00:57:51.880also a fundamental reality. Wendell Berry has an essay on the Iliad and the Odyssey.
00:57:56.980And he says the Iliad and the Odyssey is the fundamental struggle of every man in all history.
00:58:02.400The Iliad is every young man's journey to go out, to win war, to fight and to, you know, have these feats of battle.
00:58:11.300And then the Odyssey is the second part of a man's life, which is coming home to reclaim his homeland, to find his place and his people, to reclaim really, as Odysseus must do, his household.
00:58:22.640I think the problem, though, and Wendell Berry points this out, the problem today is because we've had this hatred of the fatherland, we just stopped coming home.
00:58:31.560Like, so in the old days, this was, you know, 1950s even, this was very common.
00:58:35.420Like, the son would go to the big city, and a lot of movies and novels had this story arc.
00:58:41.040They would go to the big city, and they'd be like, wow, this isn't all it's cracked up to be.