What does it mean that Christians are the best citizens? Our discussion centers around Pierre Viret's explanation of why Christians are and must be the best subjects under civil governments.

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Our desire is to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, particularly for church and family life. And of course, as you know, I have my partner in crime, Jason Dome here in Wake Forest with me. Hey Jason. Hi Scott, no crimes committed here.

No crimes committed here. Well, we also have a very dear brother with us and his name is Phil Kaiser. Hello, Phil. Good to be with you. So, Pastor Dominic Covenant Church in Omaha, Nebraska, and holder of a great website called Biblical Blueprints.

Lots of great articles and things like that. Phil has written and preached on this matter of the civil government, continues to do it, you know, in the days that are upon us now. We're here to discuss chapter 2 of Pierre Verre's writings that we've collected in this book called When to Disobey, Case Studies and Tyranny, Insurrection and obedience to God. And we're just working through the chapters. We want them to be instructive.

We're doing this for people who might be reading the book just to get some free flow conversational thoughts about the particular chapter. And we're here to discuss chapter two. I love the title. The title is Christians, the Best of Subjects, and he talks about this critical feature of Christians living in civil environments to be the very best servants of the king according to the Word of God. And that's really where the problem exists.

I'm just gonna start by quoting the first paragraph. There is no doubt that rulers are beyond all compare, much better served by believers who know the gospel than by any other men. They have no servants who are less likely to betray them as these, for believers would much prefer to die rather than to have even thought of such a cowardly act as to betray their rulers because they fear God. The problem really comes is that while believers are the very best subjects when they obey the Lord, they're not regarded that way. I mean just to the north of us, You know, we've had two churches shut down, one church charged forty million dollars.

The government just took the church away from this Reformed Baptist Church, another church, you know, the other side of Canada. They shut down that church, built two fences around, and put their pastor in prison. Unfortunately, this is not how you shut down the church. You cannot shut down the church. That's the funny part of the whole story, is that men think they can shut the church down, and that won't happen.

So, oh well. So, okay, let's talk about this. How does Verre describe this? How are Christians the very best subjects? You know, this is such a condensed chapter.

I mean, he expands on each of these points later on, but there's about six or seven ways that he, in very brief summary, I mean, you just read that one there, they know the gospel. And one of the things that you see when you study the French Huguenots was that they were so secure in their salvation that they didn't spend all day long like a lot of the Roman Catholics did trying to earn their salvation and that freed them up as Max Weber pointed out to take dominion. Their security enabled them to not be fearful of their future destiny. So that was what produced Protestant work ethic. And as a result of that work ethic, these people ended up being some of the cream of the crop in France when they were persecuted and scattered everywhere, France was devastated economically, and they even admitted it.

And so Christianity, true Christianity, this reformed Christianity that these Huguenots held to was phenomenal. So I would say the gospel, and then a second point that he brings up. I just want to stop you just for a second because just yesterday in church, somebody said to me about the gospel and about the whole matter of the sovereignty of God. We don't worry about the future. We're not spending our time worried about the future of the stock market, or the future of this, or the future of that.

We know God's in control of it. So we're out there doing stuff. We're not pining away. We're not spending our energy being terrified by everything. We're doing the stuff that God called us to do.

And so, we're happy, we're productive, and we're fearless, and we're free to go and do the things that are good. So anyway, it just struck me yesterday, somebody said that to me. Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people don't realize the extent to which the gospel impacts all of life. And you couple that together with a God-centeredness, which is what the Reformers really were trying to have the Lordship of Christ over all of life.

And they, he points out both on the bottom of page 29, and then on the beginning of page 30, that everything they did, they did not do for selfish motives. They did it for the Lord. And since the Lord wants us to serve our community and to serve one another, that enabled them to be totally different than the courtesans that they mentioned, who are always serving themselves, accumulating fortune and possessions. When your passion is to serve the Lord, it's going to make you a steward. And you're going to be so good at what you do.

You're going to be like a Daniel, even if people hate them, they can't get rid of them. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Nehemiah. And that's really what happened. I mean, the King of France, as much as he hated the reformed people, he found himself having to hire some of them for the things that they were because they were so good. They were the best, best in architecture, best in science.

He hired Huguenot botanists, you know, to run his massive gardens, his herb gardens. And so those two points, their security in the gospel and their God-centeredness, freed them up to take the dominion mandate much more seriously than just about anybody else did. You know, Stalin discovered this the way I understand it. He, you know, imprisoned Christians. He had him working in his factories, and he kept hearing reports about how there were these people that were so productive, they were all Christians.

So he loosened his restrictions upon the Christians so that they could have a little bit more freedom to do what they do best, be productive. But he discovered that they were the best factory workers in his prison system. Yeah, I think in terms of flagship passages in the New Testament, you have Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, if you'd sit down an average world leader with those two texts, and they've just spent the time digesting it and understanding it, and you told them, you do have citizens who this is their marching orders in their holy book and what their God tells them to, how their God tells them to relate to you, they would want more. They should want more. It's obvious when you look at those two texts how good that type of citizen should be to any leader, any leader, anywhere.

You know, and the Christian is called to glorify God, not to exalt himself. You know, humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, and He will exalt you in the proper time. And He says in contrast, non-Christians don't have that in the way that they think. They want to be somebody, they want to be somebody big, they want to be somebody fast, and so they're more likely to betray. He uses this great language.

He says, they're more likely to sell their rulers to the highest bidder. Right, right. So he's really exposing the power of the gospel to transform your life and make you actually a servant of God and not yourself and not your passions, not your desire for honor and riches. And Veré quotes Colossians 3 where Paul teaches that submission to authority is really submission to God. So, human authorities get the benefit of that.

Christians have this mindset that they can obey God by being submissive to human authority. Yeah. Yeah, when you're striving to please the Lord, you're also going to go above what other people's expectations. We found this even in our homeschooling. You know, you'll have a bright student who can sail through things really quickly, And if you just let them coast, they're going to end up being lazy.

But if you try to get them to be as good as they can within the giftings God has given to them, they're going to strive a lot, a lot harder. And he points out here, a lot of these people in government, it says they love their peace and their possessions and their fortunes more than they love the king. And so they were really people in some ways, they were psychopaths, you know, who would try to butter up whatever it would take for themselves to advance. But he found that the Christians, the reformed Christians, really, they did it for the Lord, and they would do it whether the king was looking or not. They were stewards.

It was a stewardship issue. And it's really, go ahead. One other thing that he mentions that makes them really good citizens is mentioned on page 29. And that is they're not cowards. This made them far better soldiers.

And we have testimonies from that period, especially, you know, when the Huguenot armies were fighting against the French, the courage that these people had as they sang the battle psalms, you know, from the Salter, Going into battle, it just astonished people, the kind of courage and boldness that they had before the Lord, because they did not fear death. Made them far better soldiers. Amen. You know, he mentions lots of examples in the Bible of this. He connects it to particular personalities that God has put before us.

And he meant he mentions them and maybe we could just make some comments. I'll, I'll name them. He mentions Joseph. He mentions Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Mordecai, and Moses. Specific examples of how godly men served, you know, their kings.

You know, he could have mentioned Isaiah and others who served kings. So let's talk about some of those men and some of the qualities that they displayed. It was a really interesting quote at the top of page 31. It says, rulers ought to meditate well upon what the Scripture says, that, quote, the Lord bless the Egyptians' house for Joseph's sake, Genesis 39.5. So there's this one dynamic that Christians are commanded to be good citizens, and that God teaches us to be good citizens.

But there is this other dynamic, which is very interesting and wonderful, that God is real, God is in heaven, God looks after His people, and as his people are under these authorities, God blesses these authorities and these nations for the sake of his people. Yeah. Well, three times he mentions the conscience of the believers being held captive to God's word. It's one of the things that actually makes them being persecuted as well, because if you have an insecure leader, he's not going to want somebody that is steadfast to a different principle than himself. But you take a Daniel, Yes, his conscience being captive to the word of God did get him into trouble, but it made him reliable, trustworthy, where the King knew if he said something, he would always stand for it.

And so it's a double-edged sword. It's something that makes Christians invaluable because they are dependable, but it also makes people who are insecure rulers not really comfortable around that because it cuts their own conscience that they don't have the same standard that the Christians do. You know, in many industries here in the States, some of the top businessmen have said that they surround themselves with men who are better than themselves in various areas of life. Insecure leaders never do that, and that tends to be the insecure leaders in history that have persecuted the Christians and not valued what they had. Yeah, that's a very interesting point because you have men who serve their own desires.

And in a later chapter, Verre makes it very clear that often rulers, they want wicked people in their cabinets in order to flatter them to get their way. But you also find this other principle where, you know, there's just many times in history where godly men are elevated by wicked kings, and all of these men that were mentioned in his list were like that. So, he speaks about the conscience quite a bit. I thought that was very interesting. So, let's talk about the conscience.

God has given Christians a conscience. And why? What does it do? What's the impact of a conscience? Wow, the conscience, if it's not instructed by the Word of God, it's going to be either held by legalism or it's going to run rampant.

He talks about these two areas that people tend to go into, especially in later chapters. But if your conscience has been instructed by Scripture, you're going to know exactly when to submit and exactly when to resist, which is really still a form of submission. It's in the chain of command. You're submitting to God's authority when they're commanding you to do something contrary. But a person who's not really studied the Scriptures and does not have a conscience that's educated by the Scriptures, he's always going to be vulnerable and not know which way to go, always anxious, and he's going to tend to submit the tyranny much more readily.

Right. And then, of course, you have the other side where your conscience leads to your being tyrannized. And just last week I believe there was a legislator in Finland who released three tweets. This woman was in government since the 90s, and she quoted the Bible on matters of sexuality in three tweets, and the government put her in prison for six years. Two years for each tweet.

But her conscious was captive by the word of God, but those around her were condemned by her conscience. So that's the big problem. The Christian conscience will condemn the conscience of the unbeliever. Yes, yes. In fact, a lot of persecution is directly a result of people's own conscience as being pierced by the steadfastness of the Christian.

Right. Christians make other people feel guilty. Right. They might clean up their language for a little bit, but they might throw you in prison as a result. So this chapter is about Christians making the best citizens, but in other places in the book, Verre says that Christians shouldn't expect to be appreciated as such.

From the earliest days, the charges against Christians are they're anti-government, they're against government, they're preaching that we should behave ourselves in ways that are not compliant with the government. So it is true that we're the best citizens, but you can't expect to be viewed that way. Right, yeah. And that's because what Christians must do is speak to the civil magistrate when the civil magistrate has violated the law of God. So how do you be a good citizen?

It isn't just being a productive nice guy. A good citizen must traffic in the will of God. So let's talk about that a little bit because I think that's the problem. Being a good citizen means you become a bad citizen in the eyes of the government. And I think that Christians want to be the very best citizens.

They want to be the most obedient people in the realm. But the problem happens when your conscience is captive to the word of God. So let's, let's talk about that. When you understand that the, all the jurisdictions that he mentioned in the first chapter, When you understand that when the civil government oversteps a church jurisdiction, that must be resisted. Or when it oversteps a family jurisdiction, it must be resisted.

There's going to be conflict, but a lot of Christians, in fact, he implies that as much, he says much better served, but he's not implying that every Christian is in that category. In fact, later on, he castigates Christians who really are not living by the Word of God, they're just being rollover in their submission. It's not true submission in the Word or submission in the Lord. But that whole issue of Christians who are the best citizens, they know what true civics is, They know what God has called them to do, and they do it with strength, but for some, those who are insecure leaders, that's going to inevitably lead to persecution. And we see that even in modern history.

Saddam Hussein did persecute Christians. He put them on the front lines of the battlefield because he knew he could trust them to do what they were supposed to do. But interestingly, he also hired them as his own bodyguards. He could not trust his fellow Muslims, but he could trust the Christians. And so, you know, they do tend to rise up the Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego's.

And side by side, you're going to get the persecution, but you're also going to get these opportunities because once you have preached the gospel, as it were, and applied it to life, and people know you have the answers, when push comes to shove, you're going to be the first one they're going to go to to find those answers. Right. And I believe this is the time now more than ever in our lifetimes, where good citizens must uphold the jurisdictions of the church and the family. And they must speak, and they must live according to those jurisdictional requirements. And these are the most dangerous places to become a bad citizen in the eyes of the government.

But I just want to maybe to talk about in the remaining moments that we have about how critical it is that we understand what it means to be a good citizen in the sense that we uphold the Word of God in the lines of jurisdiction of church and family. This is so critical. The great attacks are on the church and the family today, and the church must resist as good citizens in those areas. What are the areas that you think that we ought to be paying attention to right now? In the church or in the family?

There is overreach in both of those areas. Any time that the government tries to regulate what goes on within the church, I think it must be resisted, just like the priest stoutly resisted King Isaiah when he came in and He wanted to burn incense. Or in the book of Revelation, you know, it mentions the church going underground and the government absolutely forbade their meeting when they say, we must obey God rather than man. So I would say even in the area of masking, that's up to the church leaders what kind of discretion is going to go on within those walls. And you give in on one and then the government wonders why you're not giving in on the second and third and fourth step.

And we're seeing this up in Canada, but we're seeing it in California and other states as well. And so there's many different ways in which we can resist. We can resist using the government against the government. We can resist in some countries, they have to resist by hiding citizens. We're involved in trying to rescue some people from martyrdom in another country.

This kind of stuff happens. So there's many types of resistance. There's many situations in which we need to resist, and the Bible, I think, describes all of those quite clearly. So I think this is the time for us to be the very best citizens, and that means that we obey the laws as well as we can, that we exert a biblically informed conscience in all of our work and all of our experiences with the civil government, and it means that we have an obligation as good citizens to speak to the civil magistrate when he steps out of line. And I think this has been one of the things that we really need to learn how to do a way better job on, at least I feel like we do here.

We did do quite a bit of that when things broke out here with our own governor informing him that he was really violating a couple of laws. One was God's law and the other was the state constitution of North Carolina on religious liberty, but we wanted to inform him, not ask permission, but to inform him what he was doing. I think we need to, the church needs to just continue to do that better and better and more vocally as good citizens. Right. You know, one of the areas of resistance that many churches fail to engage in is praying the imprecatory Psalms, especially against the worst of the tyrants and against the demons that are behind them because ultimately our wrestling, he doesn't mention it in this chapter but Vare does mention that later in the book, we're dealing with demonic forces that are behind these rulers and so praying the imprecatory Psalms against them I think is one of the nuclear weapons that God has authorized.

And the Huguenots were big on that. In fact, they were the first ones to develop the metrical psalter. Yeah. Quite a few that were involved in that. Amen.

Okay, well, what a great chapter, a short one, but very helpful and to help us to understand what it means to be a good citizen, and it means to do the very best according to the Word of God, but it may turn you into a bad citizen in the light of the civil government as you follow the Lord. And it's just so important that we're fearless to be good citizens the way that God has defined them. So, brothers, thank you so much. I pray that God just makes us better and better citizens in the places that we live. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

Thank you, Jason, and thank you, Phil. Really appreciate the comments. You're welcome. Great to be together. Great to be together.

And I pray that God would sink these things into our souls and into our churches and into our families. God bless you. Okay. We'll see you again next time on the Church and Family Life Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life Podcast.

We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to ChurchandFamilyLife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.