How can you tell if your obedience to the government is really a cloak for disobedience to God? Our discussion centers around Pierre Viret's analysis of the questions we ought to ask and the conclusions we ought to consider. Our discussion focuses on Chapter 8 of "When to Disobey."

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And so Jason Dome, we have Brian Borgman with us. Outstanding. There's a lot of thought provoking content in this chapter.

I'm looking forward to talking about it. Yeah, no kidding. I listened to Brian early on when the lockdown started. Very, very helpful sermons. I highly recommend them.

Brian, thank you so much for joining us from Minden, Nevada. That's my pleasure. Amen. So Brian is a pastor, local church there, church very much like ours in terms of doctrinal persuasion, but we're really delighted that you could join us. We know you've had a lot of practical experience with some of the things that we're going to discuss today.

And so we're discussing Pierre Virey's book that we've entitled, When to Disobey. It's really a collection of his articles that he wrote to deal with particular situations that he was engaged in. So we have a book, and we have a study guide. Go ahead and get the book and the study guide. Today we're going to discuss chapter 8, which has a great title, When Obedience to the State is a Cloak for Biblical Compromise.

What a great title. I think when things began to break out, we were always wondering, is this compromise, is this thinking true to Scripture? Am I being pushed around by other interests other than God's? So it's a very important chapter, I think, considering the past year where there were demands for church closures. I mean, it was demanded of us that there are no meetings of more than 10.

By the way, news just breaking, the Canadian law of churches meeting with no more than 10 is broken hard out on a former Baptist church in Ontario. They've charged them $40 million, the church, and some of their members have been personally fined and they just took away their building. And their pastor wrote this fantastic letter just saying, well, you know, we met most of our, you know, experience as a church without a building, and we only were in our own building for 11 months. So they can have the building, but there's no way they can shut down our church. It was just an incredibly inspiring letter.

But what Verre is doing here in this chapter, he's addressing motives. People say you're not supposed to motive judge. Verre is motive judging in this part of the deal. And he identifies the excuses. He calls them evasions.

And he goes further, and he tells why he thinks they're compromising. And then he kind of shifts the discussion a little bit and he talks about why it is that men associate with wicked men in their administrations. He gives the reasons why they do that. But he goes right to the juggler vein at the very end. He says, you know, if you're obeying a civil order that's against the order of God, you're just obeying the devil.

So he's pretty uncompromising. So, okay, I'm just going to throw it open. Let's just talk about this. So, brothers, let's dial in on some of the things you think are really important here. Well, I mean, I just would like to say first thanks for getting this in print because you hear Verre's name thrown about here or there if you study church history, especially Reformation.

But to actually read what he wrote has been really a blessing to me. And then his style, the conversation between Timothy and Daniel is very, very gripping to me. But you get to this chapter and you almost feel like maybe he had prophetic insight into 2020 and 2021 because I really felt like a number of the things that he put his finger on really are things that need to be said today because I have felt for, well, about like 14 months now that a lot of pastors are hiding behind Romans 13 and not doing the service that they are called to do. And of course, this digital age makes it far easier to put up that bigger cloak. Yeah, cloak's an interesting word.

Really early in the chapter, he wonders out loud if these people who he suspects are pretending that they're acting on principle in deferring to the government when really the government is opposing God. He wonders out loud how many of them are actually tax cheats when they can do it in secret and get away with it. And he says, a lot of this is just rebellion against God under the banner of acting on principle and deferring to the government. And I mean, I remember feeling that pressure, you know, because I'm just my own personal situation. And I think a lot of pastors were like this.

Romans 13 had never been tested, Not really tested. And so, you know, I was hearing, you know, a lot of my brethren saying, you know, we just have to obey the government. And you're kind of hearing that in an unqualified way. But when you go back and actually dig into Romans 13, it's very, very clear. We're not talking about unqualified obedience at all.

But a lot of men, they continue to hide under the unqualified obedience principle that many of us, at least I did, hey, Christians have an obedient spirit. They want to obey. They want to honor the government, and they want to obey as far as they possibly can. Most Christians are like this. There are rebels who want to rebel against everything.

But I think that there were a lot of pastors that didn't make the transition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that struck me is, you know, you could look at the title of the book, When to Disobey, and just sort of cherry pick certain things that Verre says, and then come to the conclusion that he was one of these, maybe these wild-eyed rebels.

But in the previous chapter where he's dealing with churches in France that were expelled from their buildings, He actually told them, you know, you comply with that order, that our obedience in this will be a good testimony in essence. But when you get to this next chapter and he says something that I have highlighted in arrows, he says, this is page 102, and the paragraph where Daniel starts to speak, and I'll just start at the top because it's a little humorous, you rightly call such people idolaters for since they look upon their rulers as their law in matters of religion and matters of conscience, without inquiring any further into the will of God, they make them their gods and their idols and do them a great wrong. So it's like, hey, Romans 13, that's what it says. That's what we got to do. End of story without any further inquiry.

And then he says, for no ruler or any creature, whatever, no matter how great an excellence he might possess, not even the angels themselves has the authority to issue laws concerning religion and the service and the worship of God. This pertains only to God himself, to whom this worship and honor belong. And that resonates with me because one of the things that struck me from the very beginning was, We are looking to the governor, we're petitioning the governor, we're asking the governor. I was asked no less than three times to sign a petition to the governor to allow more capacity in our church buildings. I refused every time.

The reason was simple, is that the minute that I petition the governor, I am acknowledging an authority that he really does not have. I'm asking the governor for petitioning him to worship God. And so it just seems to me that you read the Scriptures, you don't need the permission of the beast to worship the lamb. That's just obvious to me. And so when I read this, I'm like, amen.

Brian, I'm glad you directed us to that page. Immediately, just in that section, he quotes Galatians 1-8, and I wanted to read Galatians 1-8, because I think it's a really interesting point that he makes there. So here's what Paul writes in Galatians 1-8, but even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. Just think about that for a minute. He's inviting himself to be accursed if he, the Apostle Paul, should preach another gospel other than the true gospel, and so he's even submitting himself.

The point is, God is ultimate, and anything that contradicts God invalidates itself in that, including the apostle Paul. You know, I thought it was very interesting. He dials in on two excuses, two really specific excuses, And the first is, hey, we need to obey the laws of the land. That's this unqualified Romans 13 deal. But then there's a second thing that he identifies as one of the excuses.

And the excuse is this, our pastors told us to. Our consciences are bound by what our pastors told us to. We're just doing what our pastors told us. You know, I mean, it just, my mind just jets to Nazi Germany. That's what they were doing in Nazi Germany to justify what was happening.

We're just doing what we're told, and somehow that absolves us. But I think these two excuses are the ones that he seems to be most concerned about. Yeah. On page 105, he's making a case that the subject of the kingdom isn't bound to obey the king when the king requires him to do something that is against the law of God or forbids him from doing something that is required by the law of God, and he says this, it's easy to see that his subjects, this king who's requiring things that are unlawful, that his subjects wouldn't be any more bound to accommodate him in this way than the devil himself, who is a much greater ruler than all tyrants and all those who demand such honors. And then a couple of sentences later, he punctuates it by saying, they can even say it in these words, we ought to obey God rather than the devil.

So, rather than saying, rather than man, we ought to obey God rather than the devil. For whoever obeys men against the commandment of God obeys the devil by whom these men are possessed." There you have it. Right. Okay, so you had millions and millions of people in churches, and they complied with all this. They sat on the live stream for months, for a year, and they disobeyed God by doing such a thing.

Now, you know, they could say, well, where else could we go? And frankly, there weren't that many places to go. I was talking to a guy in Washington last week, a guy who's in our church network, he says he was the only church open in Linwood, Washington for the entire year. It's bizarre. So What would you say?

I'm throwing this at you here. You know, I mean, we, you know, our conviction was it's disobedience to sit and stay at home and not come and worship with the people of God. You know, the people of God assemble. That's what we do. And, but people were content to do that.

I had a pretty condemning spirit about it, you know, guys who are content to do that, but they were just listening to their pastors. One part of me thinks, well, you know, we're all sheep and we, you know, we will be led by our pastors. Viray points out this error of making your pastor, your conscience. So What are your thoughts, brothers, about this? Yeah.

Well, I will say that on the one hand, I want to be charitable and I want to be kind to men who are in, let's say, a much more challenging or difficult situation than we are here. We have a very good county sheriff who has refused to enforce, so the lesser magistrate, in a sense, was interposing for us. We're sort of out in the country. There are more cows around us than people. And so, you know, so I want to be sensitive to brothers who were in, let's say, more challenging locations.

But I also have received multiple texts, emails, messages from people in different locations and even our neighbors to the north, who people just crying out just saying, what should we do? Our pastors are refusing to let us gather, and in some cases even refusing to let us gather if we're even going to begin to kind of push on the capacity implemented by the government. And in those situations, brothers, I really feel like there was a sense where the shepherds have abandoned the sheep. Now they would turn around and they would say, but we're providing Zoom meetings and we're providing different digital live stream or whatever, but the people of God were designed to gather together in person. You don't have an ecclesia unless you have people assembling and people are just starving to death.

They're withering on the vine. To be sure, there are plenty of people who have taken their leadership's word for it and just been content with pajama church, and yet there are many who are just withering and dying because they are longing to assemble with Christ's people, and their leadership is following the government, and they're destroying them spiritually. Brian, I think you've hit right on the hinge point of the argument. Is online gathering gathering in the sense that it's called for in the New Testament? And I guess they're arguing, yes, it is, and we're arguing, no, it isn't.

The dynamics are so radically different that it just doesn't meet that threshold. Yeah, the only thing you can really do online that's consistent with local church life is hear the sound of a voice. That's it. And there are lots of other things that we do. So, you know, but you had this contentment among millions to stay home.

And I don't know what percentage of these people will come back. But Brian, hey, in our area here in North Carolina, it was illegal to meet for a little while. Then the governor, there was a lawsuit against the governor. He lost. So we've been free to meet this whole time, but still almost all the churches remain closed, even though it was illegal to meet because the governor had a restraining order put on him.

And that was what was bizarre to me. So the people, I mean, the people continued to listen to their pastors and they stayed on the livestream. Should they have done that, they were really caught in a box canyon in a lot of ways. Yeah. And sheep can get caught in a Box Canyon, right?

So if I could redirect for a minute, I think on page 106 he makes a really interesting point. By invoking Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, and Cyrus, these pagan kings who actually make favorable judgments towards the people of God, and he actually says they'll rise up in judgment against so-called Christian kings who are actually legislating and requiring things of the Lord's people that they really can't in good conscience obey. Yeah. And I mean, and he really, he pins us to the wall, and he says The reason is they don't want God's rule over them. They don't want God's authority.

They wanted, they were willing to accept a different authority than God. It's a really interesting point, the thought that unbelieving rulers might actually do the right thing in cases where professing Christian rulers do the wrong thing. And Christians have to react not based on the profession of their rulers, but on what they're actually legislating. So he has some pretty harsh words, you know, to say about those who set aside the commandments of God for the sake of a law or the counsel of their pastors. And he brings it right back down to serving the devil.

He is so withering about it. At the end of the chapter he quotes Philippians 2.21. I thought it probably got to the heart of the matter. For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's. And I think that's probably the heart of, you know, the point of the spear that he's dealing with here.

So let's just talk about some applications, any thoughts that you have about, you know, Veres' counsel for us, you know, even going forward. Yeah, one thing that really struck me is right after that paragraph where he quotes Philippians 2.21, he, and I just, I highlighted it, circled it, indeed, it often happens that there are good ministers who faithfully fulfill their duty in this regard. But those who are joined in the same ministry with them, who ought to assist them and ought to bear the same yoke with them, are those who often place greater impediments in their way than any others. And it just sort of, just, you know, reinforced this idea that, you know, we would believe in a plurality of elders and the idea of having your eldership in sync with each other on these things. Right.

And, and I know brothers that are in very difficult situations, because they have a conviction that we need to be obeying God and assembling, and then they'll have other elders who really are just an impediment for them to be able to move forward. And one of the things that I think is just a wonderful reminder to us is that as under-shepherds we need to be seeking the mind of Christ and we need to have a sense of unity and common purpose. And one of the things that has seemed to me to be so deficient is, when it comes right down to it, so much of this is just about our ecclesiology and what we believe about the church. And I think COVID has ended up exposing an incredibly anemic ecclesiology. And so for those pastors that have the conviction that the church must be the church, and then they are co-laboring with those that are saying, no, we need to follow the government.

It just manifests the issue of the importance of the unity of an eldership in leading the people of God. Amen. Amen. Any parting shots, Jason? There were a couple of points right at the end of the chapter that I thought were worthy of comment.

The first was, Verre talks about counselors who take advantage of what he calls ignorant and negligent rulers. So, counselors know that the ruler doesn't know what he ought to know or just that he's lazy, and so they exploit him to get what they want. And then he says sometimes it goes the other way. The ruler actually leverages, he picks bad counselors for their bad counsel because that's what he wants to do, and so he actually takes advantage of his counselors. So I thought it was an interesting point.

And then finally, he talks about, and this one's smarted a little bit, ministers who only want reformations that suit them. So they want to reform so far until it encroaches upon their own weaknesses, and then they don't want the Reformation to go any further. I think any pastor who says he's never felt that pressure is probably not being honest with himself. Yeah, amen. Yeah, and I think that pastors felt that pressure from many of their people who didn't want the Reformation to go any farther either.

And many of them just capitulated around here, for sure. One church I heard of, they established their COVID response procedures by, not by elders, elders didn't do it, they gathered a collection of people from the congregation and they decided. So What could go wrong? Well, they didn't meet for a year, so other than that, it was not that big of a deal. Well, anyway, brothers, Viray is withering in his analysis and his condemnation, and he really boils it down to, are you going to obey God or the devil?

Maybe this is why he was such a popular preacher in the Reformation. He just got right down to it, really plain language, short sentences, even people like us could understand. All righty, well thank you, thank you Jason, and thank you Brian so much for entering in this discussion. And hey, this is a great moment for the Church of Jesus Christ. I know more pastors who are more bold than ever right now, because they've had to think through things that they never had to before.

And I mean, I think the pressures will probably increase, but we've got an army of pastors in this country right now that are stronger than they've ever been. So I praise the Lord for that. Okay. So thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope to see you again next time.

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