In this final chapter of When to Disobey Viret urges Christians to be patient under tyrannical regimes. Viret cites several examples we can look to in Scripture in Jeremiah, Esther, and Mordecai. Viret also uses Jeremiah 29 to demonstrate that Christians ought not to respond to tyranny in sullenness, pride, and rebellion, but rather in productivity and fruit-bearing. When difficult times come, it is the easy thing to sit in a corner and complain, to allow conversations with friends to be dominated by objections and fretfulness, to take up your pen (or phone) and rail against the oppressors. Viret urges all of us to rise up, take dominion, and be a blessing.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And Jason, here we are again. Glad to have you. We're back with Gavin Beers.

Gavin Beers. Yeah, Gavin, thank you again for joining us. It's good to be back. So we're going to discuss chapter 15 of Pierre Viret's When to Disobey. We have podcasts on all these chapters, and you've helped us with many of them.

We really, really appreciate it. This one's chapter 15. It's the last chapter of the book. Yeah. We did it.

We did it, yeah. It's called A Christian's Duty Under Ungodly Rulers. And what Viree does here is he encourages Christians to be patient under the tyrannical environment that they're in. And he gives us two examples. One is Jeremiah's counsel to the captives in Jeremiah 29, and also to Mordecai and Esther.

So we're going to discuss each of those. And he's urging Christians that there's a particular way that they should respond to tyranny. And it's through patience, and it's through taking dominion, and through doing the things that God has commanded and the easiest thing to do when you're in the midst of a tyrannical situation is to spend your time worrying complaining Talking about this problem and that problem ad nauseam, and Jeremiah actually directs them to do something different. I think we would say this was written particularly to the captives in Babylon for 70 years. It would be wrong for us to say this was written to us.

It would be better to say this was written for us. There are principles here. Our situation is not exactly the same, but we're here to say that the principles are very, very important. And so Jeremiah 29 is the example. I'm just going to read verses 5 through 8 just to get the language of Jeremiah's counsel.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and dwell in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit, take wives and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters, that you may be increased there and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it, For in its peace you will have peace For thus says the Lord of hosts the God of Israel Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are in your midst deceive you nor listen to your dreams Which you cause to be dreamed For they prophesy falsely to you in my name. I have not sent them, says the Lord." And of course, the false prophets are saying, this is gonna be really short. You're gonna be able to go back soon. And that wasn't true.

It was going to be a 70-year, three-generation stay. So Scott and Gavin, Verre begins with the Babylonian captivity, which was self-inflicted, meaning it came upon the people because of their rebellion against God, not really because of the tyrants. The tyrants were a secondary cause. Here's what Verre says, but if we desire him to deliver us, so he's talking about the desiring the deliverance of God from tyranny, We must first remove the cause of the indignation he has against us, which is the reason of our captivity. Since our sins are the cause of all our evil, we must not seek a remedy among the creatures." Meaning, you can misdiagnose the problem and say that the problems are the tyrants.

Actually, the tyrants are an instrument in the hands of God to get you to pay attention for the first time in a long time. Yeah, I think the language there is used that God had caused them to go into captivity. So the whole idea that God is in control. It's interesting to draw lessons from it because there are things that are parallel. There are things that are different.

You know, Israel is the common nation. They have their own government structures. They are the Old Testament church. And at this point in their history, they've been lifted out of that and dropped into a pagan society. So in many ways, the church as it exists now within a nation, we can find a lot of parallels there, particularly when our nations become increasingly secular and godless.

But to come to the recognition, first of all, that God is in control. I think we've all talked in those terms over the last year or so. But I wonder in our response, have we in practical ways acknowledged that? You know, we're concerned about the tyranny. We're concerned about the encroachment of the civil magistrate.

But to truly recognize the hand of the Lord would take us, where you just mentioned Jason, an acknowledgement of our sins. And there's a huge challenge from this chapter to acknowledge that. I remember maybe a year or so ago, Scott, we did the thing on the plague in air. And that was the way these men responded. You know, other writings like Hildersham, when you've got the plague hitting England in the 1700s.

And a year further on, we've done a lot more talking about the limits of civil power. I'm not so sure we've done much more repenting. Yeah, his language is really remarkable. We must first remove the cause of the indignation he has against us. And that probably has been the most difficult because we want to blame everybody else.

We want to blame this global agenda. We want to blame our political leaders. We want to blame the people who are driving the medical industrial complex. We want to blame all those people. But looking to ourselves is not where we usually look first.

And that's what Verre is saying. Look at the cause first. So Verre says this on page 172, take up arms. And I saw that and thought, that doesn't sound like Verre. So, but then he continues and says, so then he lists the arms, repentance, faith, fasts, prayers, and supplications.

Those are the arms that Verre says you should take up when you find yourself under the judgment of God. It's really wise counsel. Yeah, that was remarkable. To put that into New Testament terms, where the church is very much in a similar position, you know, under Roman authority, Paul writing to the Corinthians, you know, the weapons of your warfare are not carnal, they're spiritual, but they're mighty through God to the tearing down of strongholds. Amen.

Yeah, do we believe that? Do we believe that the instinct, sad to say, is always the arm of the flesh? You know, if only we can read more articles about what's going on and, you know, like you mentioned, the medical industrial complex. Well, this will help us. Will it really in the end?

Imagine the time spent of all the Christians that we know and those we don't, reading all this stuff, debating online. Imagine if that was invested in repentance and faith toward God and pleading for the Lord to come and revive His cause. Stop, Gavin. I can't take any more conviction enough. Yeah.

And he also, he says, Are we more righteous than Daniel and Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther? Because they repented. And he cites Daniel 9, 3 through 19. I'll just read a very short section. Then I set my face toward the Lord God to make requests by prayer and supplications with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes, and I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession.

And then he declares how wicked they have all been. So he even cites Daniel, who is also in Babylon, But he also gives them tremendous positive direction. Build houses, dwell in the land, plant gardens. He addresses single men and he says, find wives. And then he addresses parents and he says, get husbands for your daughters.

So he's really calling them to really just do the things that God has already commanded them to do and to flourish in the land. You know, people say, glibly, bloom where you're planted. Well, that's exactly what what Jeremiah is doing. He's really calling them to be a blessing by the way that they live and to focus on the things that they can do something about, which is always the tendency, you know, when you're dealing with difficult situations, you pine away about things you can't do anything about. But you do have a family and you do have a little piece of ground.

I believe the captives were located on the river Kebar, or Chebar, however you pronounce it, and they were able to conduct business. Some of them got wealthy, and they were able to live a fairly normal life in Babylon along that river, and they were kind of concentrated together and were able to preserve some semblance of biblical culture while they were there. Yeah, just as you're talking there, Scott, a number of things come to mind. You know, the prayer of Daniel is repentance and resistance. Because here's something for your listeners to think about.

I would make a case that the prayer in chapter nine is very likely the prayer that he was offering to God in relation to when he disobeyed the edict, and he went and opened his windows towards Jerusalem and prayed. So there's resistance there where, okay, you're in Babylon, you're not revolutionaries, but you are believers, therefore you obey God rather than men. So you've got resistance and repentance in that prayer, corporate repentance, but then you've got those other things that you're talking about, the directives to the people in the land, and basically rebuild and reproduce. Marry, take care of your family, preserve your identity as the church. You're in the world, you're not off the world.

Take particular care for marriage and the raising of your children, that you don't become assimilated into that culture. And, you know, if you apply that to our current day and generation, if Christians were to do that, where the culture is crumbling all around them, and if we took seriously the call to, you know, multiply and be diligent in the raising of our children, proportionally within this culture that's committing suicide, the church should grow. Yeah, some just recent numbers have come out about marriage that there's been a tremendous rise in college age women having babies out of wedlock. It's gone from like 4% to 28% in about 20 years, something like that. It's just astounding.

But children are not going to be growing up with fathers. I mean everybody knows it's about a 75% fatherless rate in the black community, you know, and I think that if you take all the different categories together about 50% of the children growing up in America will not grow up with a father. So what's the impact of that? I've been thinking about that today. You know, the people that think that way and live that way are so far afield from us in a lot of ways.

But, you know, the people in our churches, they don't think that way. They're having lots of children. They really are trying to replicate biblical home life. We really have a very unusual culture. You know, you mentioned Daniel in terms of resistance.

You know, he was there, had tremendous authority in the country. At the same time, he was resisting Nebuchadnezzar. He said, I'm not going to eat that food. He determined in his heart he was not going to eat that food. He was going to preserve his religion, whether that was most likely in obedience to the food laws or whether it was just jurisdictional overreach of what he's gonna eat, that can be debated.

But Daniel, while doing all these things that Jeremiah is calling for, he's still resisting in the areas that he must resist. And he's doing it as a young man. He's still doing it as an old man. You know, Darius comes, same King, same crazy ideas, although he was kind of duped into it by his advisors, but Daniel's the same now. I'm still going to resist.

And so he shows a long term, patient resistance, seeking, seeking the Lord. But going back to Jeremiah 29, Scott, in light of what you just said there, is it verse seven, he says, seek the welfare of the city. So they were to seek the city's good by way of their own Godly living prayer and witness. And maybe we as the church need to look at some of the things that you've described as an opportunity. Not that we need to be careful we don't end up going like the liberals, the social agenda, social gospel.

But in this crumbling society, if we are to seek the welfare of the city, what do we do as Christians to reach out and bring the gospel and bring help to multitudes of children who are fatherless and directionless. It's interesting. Verre calls for patience under affliction and patience under tyranny, and he points to the time that was set for the Babylonian captivity before anyone ever went into captivity, the duration of it had already been set. It was 70 years. And so Verre points to that and says, if you find yourself under tyranny and affliction, God knows exactly when to release you from it.

And when you've been sufficiently humbled so that He can bless you again, and when He knows that it will be good for you to release you from the tyranny and affliction, He'll do it. Amen. So let's move on. He also talks about, I guess, let's see, he talks about David. Speaks of Mordecai and Esther.

Mordecai and Esther. And they're actually seeking the Lord when they were under severe, severe tyranny and affliction. They called for a fast and called for the people to pray. He sets them out as an example of patience in the midst of the tyranny. What else can we say about Esther and Mordecai?

It's interesting for historical context because it's after the Emancipation Proclamation. So these are people who have remained and haven't returned. And I've often wondered about that. You know, they had the opportunity to go back and they didn't take it and more persecution is stirred up. You know, was that like the Lord chasing them with with rods?

Whatever it was, I think Both Mordecai and Esther show us similarly to Daniel, and you still do what God says. You know, the famous line in Esther, you don't know if you're come to the kingdom for such a time as this. Well, the motivation there was simply to do your duty in your station, which is another vital principle for the church living in times of secular encroachment and persecution. We may look for miraculous deliverance, but the deliverance actually came from simple decisions of ordinary people, and the Lord used that and blessed that. So do your duty in your station, coupled with Daniel, you know, resist in areas where people want you to disobey God?

He says, Vire says, they did not despair, but appealed to the Lord. I think this is the great danger of the people in our churches, is that they would fall into despair, that they would lose a sense of the hand of God. And, you know, these are situations that were very, very dark, And yet God had a plan. There was patience that was necessary to get through the time. Yeah, the wonder of the account of Mordecai and Esther is, as a reader after the fact, you get to see all the things that were set in motion for their deliverance before they were ever in trouble.

So God had these things in hand and He had their deliverance on its way before there were any decrees for their harm. He wakes up a king in the middle of the night, he can't sleep, and he wanders in and opens up a book. Remarkable. You just, you can't make this stuff up. God takes care of his people.

Yeah, and the Lord's name isn't mentioned in all the narratives. His hand is just moving every piece of the puzzle to exactly the same, exactly the place where it needs to be. Yeah, if there's a book where his name isn't needed, that's the one. Yeah, he's all over it, all over it in silence, behind the scenes. So I think that this whole chapter is an encouragement to rest in the Lord and to say with David, which Vire quotes toward the end, he says, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." And he cites several other people in the Bible that had to wait.

But in waiting, there was so much blessing in the waiting. So here in the last chapter that we have in this, in among these articles, I think, is Veres urging us to be at peace and to rest in the Lord. The captivity might be longer than you think. It might be three generations. In Jeremiah 29, the people who were originally reading the message, the letter, because it was a letter written, they would be dead before three generations passed.

And they would not go back, but they would live a blessed life even so during their time. Okay, Any parting shots here on this chapter? What should we say to folks who are reading this chapter? I think, and I speak to myself, that it's easy to do the surface things and it's easy to talk. It's much harder to do the spiritually heavy lifting work of repentance, self-examination.

These are in some ways intangible things. We don't get news reports on them or headlines or hysteria. And if we're spiritually minded, our ears are open to the Lord, we have to be brought there more. Then with regard to, if we were to go back to Jeremiah chapter 29, beyond that portion that you read, verse 10 and following, he starts to bring in the promises. And one of those in 21st century cultures, I was personalized, I know the thoughts and plans that I have for you.

It's a promise for the security of the church, that the Lord is going to preserve the church and the world. And insofar as that was true of Israel, it's true of us. And it's an antidote to despair. Should we live and die, watching downgrade, watching increased persecution, these promises still hold fast, and the Lord will bring them to pass. Amen.

So, since it's chapter 15, maybe I could zoom out and give a parting shot on the whole book. You have a handful of verses in Romans 13 about the civil government and how Christians should relate, a handful of verses in 1 Peter 2. But there are actually a million different permutations of different circumstances that you might encounter. So while the verses and principles are clear, the application of it actually takes some thought. And I really appreciate how Verre took us to Jesus, to Paul, to Esther and Mordecai, to Daniel, to the Babylonian captivity to help us sort of trace out some of these tentacles and help us have a more full-orbed view about how you actually apply this rightly.

Amen. Okay, so let's do it. Let's build houses, dwell on the land, plant gardens, have a family, have kids, have more kids from one generation to the next, and bring glory to God in the midst of what He's given us. It's that simple. So...

Yeah. Okay. Thank you, brothers, for joining us again in Pierre Verre. And I hope Verre is helpful to those who read it and clarifying, stimulating to think rightly about governmental overreach. So thank you for joining us at Church and Family Life Podcast, and we'll see you next time.

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