The NXR Podcast - QUESTIONS - How Should Christians Vote？

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00:00:21.240 Oh, Sir Ian, he's back. All right, I remember you.

00:00:24.420 Should Christians vote on laws based on God's law? Yes. Next question.

00:00:27.980 are there limitations on using Americans' system to enforce God's law? 0.62

00:00:37.240 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:00:38.280 Okay, I'll give you my thoughts.

00:00:39.480 So you got two questions.

00:00:40.940 Put it back up for a second.

00:00:41.900 Let's leave it up for a second,

00:00:42.940 because I need to be able to go back and forth and reference.

00:00:44.840 The first question, should Christians vote on laws based on God's law?

00:00:49.340 That's a clear yes. 1.00

00:00:51.840 Yeah, Christians with, so that gets into those lesser identities, right? 1.00

00:00:56.260 primary identity, spiritual, eternal identity, you're either in Adam or in Christ. You're either 0.99

00:01:00.720 spiritually dead or spiritually alive. You have Adam as your federal head, your representative

00:01:04.960 as your father, or you have Christ as your father, right? And it's like, well, Christ is the son. We

00:01:09.480 have God, the father. Well, the Bible actually says of Christ, one of his names is eternal father.

00:01:14.940 So yes, he is our older brother and he is the son of God, the father, the first member of the

00:01:18.800 Trinity, Christ being the second. And I don't mean by that a hierarchy, but just the second person

00:01:24.240 of the Trinity, of equal divinity and equal worth and all those things. But Christ is referred to

00:01:30.140 in Isaiah as eternal father, wonderful counselor. And so with that, you're either going to have

00:01:36.680 Christ as your spiritual head, federal representative, father, or Adam. That's our

00:01:42.260 primary identity, right? But we have these lesser identities of the Bible to speak to. And so one

00:01:49.520 of them would be, are you a man? And if so, are you a husband? Are you a father? Are you a son?

00:01:54.160 Are you a brother? And the Bible has something to say about that, right? So Ephesians five and six

00:01:59.080 are really helpful with this. So because Ephesians five and six, it starts off at the end of chapter

00:02:05.200 five. The apostle Paul starts off by basically saying that we should be mutually submitted to

00:02:10.420 one another under Christ, in love for Christ, in unity with Christ. So there's this mutual

00:02:16.100 submission to one another. But then Paul begins to specify. He begins to get specific. And he

00:02:22.140 says, and this is what that mutual submission looks like for a husband and a wife. But he

00:02:27.540 doesn't just deal with that. Those are those secondary identities. So primary identity,

00:02:31.060 Christian or not, in Adam or in Christ. But secondary identities being, are you a husband

00:02:37.260 or are you a wife? And Paul says, what it looks like to obey Christ differs based off of whether

00:02:44.660 or not you're a husband or whether you're a wife. There's one set of commands to husbands,

00:02:49.400 one set of commands to wives. And then Paul just takes that same principle and just goes to other

00:02:54.000 human relationships dealing with secondary identities, right? So husbands and wives,

00:02:59.320 Ephesians 5. But then Ephesians 6, he talks about employers and employees, masters-slave

00:03:05.640 relationship. There's one thing that masters need to do in obedience and one thing that slaves need

00:03:10.620 to do in obedience. And both are obedience to Christ, but they're both different based off of

00:03:15.180 your station, your secondary identity. He also talks about children and parents, right? So the

00:03:19.840 dynamic with husbands and wives, employers, employees, children, and parents, and it doesn't

00:03:24.480 look the same, right? And the egalitarian is going to come in here and take Ephesians 5 and say,

00:03:28.680 well, but the headline of the story is mutually submit to one another. And that's why the husband's

00:03:33.320 not really the head of the home. Paul doesn't really mean that. He means something else. Let's

00:03:37.040 defying head? Does that really mean leader? Does that really mean, you know, is that really

00:03:41.280 authoritative? You know, the headline of the story is mutual submission to Christ. Okay,

00:03:45.400 apply that, right? That egalitarian argument that you're taking with husbands and wives,

00:03:50.440 if you're going to be consistent in your hermeneutics, then go ahead and apply that

00:03:54.380 in Ephesians 6 with children and parents. You don't do that. You're a hypocrite.

00:04:01.260 You're a liar, egalitarian Christian. You are. You're a liar. You know that, right? You're not 1.00

00:04:06.660 going to, you don't do that. If you claim to be a Christian, but you're egalitarian in your views

00:04:12.980 between husbands and wives, and that husbands aren't the head of the home, and God gives to

00:04:17.080 you children, you don't apply that same hermeneutic in your parenting. You don't say, okay, but, and

00:04:21.500 when it comes to our children, we're going to do the same thing we do with husbands and wives.

00:04:25.000 You know, I'm not really, I don't really have authority over my children. It's a mutual

00:04:28.220 submission between me and my two-year-old toddler. They give their point of view. I give my point of

00:04:33.840 you. Whenever me and my two-year-old have a disagreement, you know, we take it to the elders

00:04:38.080 of the church to provide counsel and we kind of decide together and we often compromise. That's

00:04:43.160 dumb. Don't be an egalitarian. That's so dumb. All right. So apart from being dumb, the point is 1.00

00:04:48.460 there are secondary identities. Well, another one, husbands, wives, all this kind of stuff, 0.99

00:04:51.840 children, parents, employers, employees, also citizen. All right. Long thing to get to this

00:04:57.880 point. Citizen, the Bible talks about nations and the Bible affirms the goodness of boundaries.

00:05:07.680 Boundaries, borders are not some mean, white, colonizing, oppressive thing. No, the Bible

00:05:16.380 affirms the goodness of nations, distinct nations, not just this new global order. That's from the

00:05:24.220 pit of hell. So it's not a global order. It's individual sovereign nations that have the right

00:05:30.160 biblically to have borders and police their borders. And there is such a thing as legal

00:05:35.680 immigration and illegal immigration. And it is not only permissible, but good and right 0.98

00:05:40.460 and biblically affirmed for a nation to properly and justly exercise its civil authority to expel 1.00

00:05:48.600 illegal immigrants. So there is such a thing as nations, and therefore there is such a thing 0.99

00:05:54.680 as national citizenship. So I wouldn't put that on par with husband, wife, child, parent,

00:06:00.760 but that is an identity. Primary identity in Adam or Christ, right? But then there's male and female

00:06:07.480 and husband or wife, father, mother, parent or children, employer or employee. And there are

00:06:16.420 distinctions of obedience. What does it look like to faithfully and practically obey Christ

00:06:22.240 based off of your, these secondary and tertiary identities? Am I a husband or am I a wife? Am I

00:06:28.340 a citizen of America or am I, that's biblical. And so should Christians vote on laws based on

00:06:35.200 God's law? Yes. Every nation should obey Christ. And that means legislating God's law. All 0.75

00:06:41.060 legislation, all laws are legislated and all legislation is moral. Every law is moral. It's

00:06:46.960 not whether but which. It's going to be a moral law and it's either going to be God's morality

00:06:52.020 or man's morality. So nations have to legislate. They have to have laws. By default, every nation

00:06:57.000 has laws. Even a lawless nation has, it's not that they have no law. A lawless nation is simply a

00:07:03.220 nation that has bad laws, immoral laws. And what makes a law right or wrong, bad or good, does it

00:07:10.060 align with God's law. So nations must legislate laws. Legislation is moral neutrality. Moral

00:07:16.960 neutrality is a myth. Neutrality does not exist. You're either in allegiance to Christ or you are

00:07:22.660 against him. You're either for me or against me. Jesus says that pertains to individuals. It also

00:07:27.400 pertains in the civil realm to nations corporately. So they should be in line with Christ in submission

00:07:32.880 to his law. Therefore, they are legislating morality, which is what laws are, that align

00:07:39.140 with God's law and our duty with our secondary identity, not primary, but one of our secondary

00:07:45.220 identities as citizens, national citizens, is to hold our civil leaders accountable. Yes, let's

00:07:51.520 pray for them. And yes, in biblical cases, let's submit to them. And I don't have time to talk

00:07:56.600 about that, what constitutes biblical submission and when should we resist. But I do hold to the

00:08:01.840 Scottish reform tradition of Protestant resistance theory. John Knox, it said, resistance to tyranny

00:08:07.400 is obedience to God. I would be in that line. So I'm not of the Todd Friel persuasion that,

00:08:13.240 well, if the government says, put pinwheels on the side of your head, then go ahead and put

00:08:17.180 pinwheels on the side of your head, as long as they're not telling you to do something that

00:08:21.320 explicitly rebels against God's law. No, no. Governments, their authority is, and the

00:08:29.400 jurisdictions, the boundaries of their authority is set by God. For instance, here's something

00:08:34.860 is always taken out of context. People say, well, even Jesus said, render to Caesar what is Caesar's

00:08:40.500 and give to God what is God's. Okay, well, here's the question you should ask, Christian, 0.89

00:08:45.560 when somebody says that. You're being too political or you're not being submissive. You're

00:08:49.820 not being humble. You're being rebellious towards a civil magistrate. Even Jesus said, render to

00:08:55.160 Caesar what is Caesar's. Here's the question. And who gets to decide what is Caesar's? Because what

00:09:01.260 Christians are assuming these squishy, winsome Christians that want to winsomely walk off to 0.99

00:09:06.660 the gulags and damn our children to concentration camps. These Christians, you know who I'm talking 1.00

00:09:13.800 about, Tim Keller, David French, these kind of whatever. What they're doing is they're actually 1.00

00:09:19.360 eisegeting into the text. It's not biblical exegesis. What they're doing is they're saying

00:09:23.300 this. They're saying, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and they are then inserting,

00:09:28.200 an eisegeting, an extra statement that Jesus never said. This is what they're assuming. They're

00:09:33.700 saying, Jesus said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. And Jesus also said, Caesar gets to

00:09:38.960 decide what belongs to Caesar. Jesus does say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. But the

00:09:46.100 implication is that there is something that belongs to Caesar, and there are other things

00:09:51.180 that don't belong to Caesar.

00:09:53.300 And then the final question is, and who decides?

00:09:58.520 Jesus, the implication of Jesus' statement,

00:10:00.800 render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar

00:10:02.280 and render unto God what belongs to God.

00:10:04.100 Jesus is saying there's a bifurcation.

00:10:05.800 There are things that belong to Caesar

00:10:06.860 and there are things that don't.

00:10:08.960 So Jesus, even in that statement,

00:10:10.680 is implicitly saying not everything is Caesar's.

00:10:13.740 Caesar does not get to require whatever he wants.

00:10:16.720 Not everything belongs to Caesar. 1.00

00:10:18.360 But then the squishy gospel coalition folk 0.78

00:10:20.560 are going to come out and they're going to implicitly eisegete in the reading of that text

00:10:24.300 that, okay, well, maybe not everything belongs to Caesar, but Caesar gets to decide what belongs

00:10:29.340 to Caesar. No, no, no human being. I don't care if you're the Pope. I don't care if you're

00:10:33.940 the emperor. It doesn't matter who you are. Nowhere in scripture does it say that there is

00:10:38.680 any office, any human office, any, any man who gets to decide, gets to outline and define his

00:10:46.580 role, his jurisdiction, and what belongs to him. No, God decides that for everyone, for the peasant 0.96

00:10:51.520 all the way up to the prince. God determines what rightfully belongs to them and what doesn't.

00:10:57.900 Okay? So all that being said, should Christians vote on laws based on God's law? Yes. Christians 0.87

00:11:03.800 should hold, we have a civil duty within our secondary identity as citizens to hold civil

00:11:10.040 authorities accountable. And one of the ways that we do that in our constitutional republic,

00:11:15.780 we're not a true democracy. Democrats always, oh, democracy, oh, January 6th, an assault on

00:11:21.760 our sacred democracy. No, we're not a democracy. No, we are not a true democracy because a true

00:11:28.340 democracy isn't biblical. And our founders knew that. A true democracy is mob rule, right? A

00:11:34.960 complete democracy would be mob rule. It means that the 50% plus one can completely abuse and

00:11:42.440 press, the 50% minus one, right? The 50% plus one determine, well, they, you know, they have a lot 0.82

00:11:52.400 of stuff and we want their stuff. And so we're going to legislate laws and vote for politicians

00:11:55.880 that'll give us their stuff. No, we are a representative government. And that kind of

00:12:00.920 gets to the second part of your question. Are there limitations on using American system?

00:12:04.580 Yeah, there are. But America, I do think has one of the best systems. And I do believe that this

00:12:09.180 comes from the scripture. Number one, checks and balances of three branches of government

00:12:13.360 and term limits, right? For governors and for presidents and all these, all that speaks to

00:12:20.920 an affirmation of the doctrine of total depravity, right? That we recognize that people aren't

00:12:27.740 perfect and that people with power certainly aren't perfect, right? And so there are checks

00:12:33.880 and balances. We are a representative government. We are a covenantal. We have a covenantal polity

00:12:40.800 here in America because it was founded by the covenanters. Makes sense, right? People want to 0.88

00:12:46.960 say, well, they were all deists. They weren't Christians. Well, some of them were deists.

00:12:50.900 You got guys like John Adams, who seems to be a deist, but then you got guys like George Washington 0.64

00:12:57.040 that people want to make a deist, but I think he was probably a Christian. It seems from the 0.93

00:13:02.340 original sources that he was a Christian. And then you got Jefferson, who is a Unitarian.

00:13:07.100 But the point is America was forged in a Christian ethos, a Christian worldview. That doesn't mean

00:13:12.040 every single one of the founders was a regenerate Christian themselves, but the American origin

00:13:18.260 story, it is a Christian story. And I would argue when people, so are you saying we're a Christian

00:13:22.920 nation? No, but I think we were. I would say, I would agree with guys like Doug Wilson that I

00:13:28.280 think we are currently a Christian nation in a state of apostasy that needs to be called to 0.92

00:13:34.680 repentance and is incurring God's judgment because of our walking away, our rebellion and our 0.84

00:13:39.680 apostasy. So are there limitations on using America's system? I don't think it's a perfect

00:13:43.860 system, but I think it's one of the best. And I think that it does in many ways, largely align

00:13:48.480 with the scripture, even our case law system that we inherited from King Alfred, right?

00:13:54.280 That comes from the Old Testament and civil law and civil code and case law.

00:13:59.000 And then with that, the fact that we have to have witnesses, right?

00:14:02.580 There have to be eyewitnesses, two or three witnesses, and it can't just be hearsay, you

00:14:06.780 know, or that's going to be cast out as non-evidence.

00:14:10.840 Our court system, our justice system, these kinds of things, they model the scripture.

00:14:16.180 So I think America's system, it needs to be reformed.

00:14:18.840 There are things that are not in line with scripture, but there are plenty of things

00:14:21.900 that are.

00:14:22.940 And so I think there are limitations in the sense that America's system, polity, system

00:14:28.580 of policy, polity, governance is not perfect.

00:14:31.920 But because I think it's one of the better systems, one of the closer to being biblical

00:14:36.460 systems in comparison with other nations in the world, I think there are therefore less

00:14:41.460 limitations because America's government, its polity is closer to being biblical.

00:14:48.640 Therefore, it has less limitations.

00:14:51.420 And so the rights and privileges that we have as citizens in this country, if you're an

00:14:57.020 American, those should be used.

00:15:00.420 It's not just a right, but with that right, the other side of the coin is, on one side

00:15:04.320 of the coin, it's a right, a privilege.

00:15:06.000 On the other side of the coin, it's a duty, an obligation, a responsibility.

00:15:09.580 Because I have that right, I have an obligation within this secondary identity.

00:15:13.980 My first identity is I'm in Christ.

00:15:16.200 And then I have lesser identity.

00:15:17.300 But from these identities come rights and privileges, but also duties and responsibilities.

00:15:22.580 It is a privilege to be a husband and to be married to my wife, Megan.

00:15:26.300 But I also have responsibilities because of that office.

00:15:29.180 It's a privilege to be a pastor, but it's also an obligation.

00:15:32.780 And I have responsibilities and duties.

00:15:35.380 And likewise, it's a privilege to be an American, even with our country currently in a state

00:15:40.320 of apostasy.

00:15:41.140 It's less of a privilege than it was back in the day, but it's still a privilege to

00:15:45.220 be an American.

00:15:46.280 I am proud to be an American, but it's not just a privilege.

00:15:50.600 It's also a responsibility and a duty.

00:15:53.360 And yes, we should hold leaders.

00:15:55.900 We should do it respectfully.

00:15:56.900 We should pray for them.

00:15:57.680 All those things that the Bible says, but we don't just, when Caesar says jump, we don't

00:16:02.400 just say how high.

00:16:04.260 Todd Freel and his doctrine on this matter, that's how people wind up in the gulags.

00:16:08.720 And no, I don't think that's biblical.

00:16:10.480 Thanks so much for listening.

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The NXR Podcast - August 18, 2022

QUESTIONS - How Should Christians Vote？

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