John critiques the "squishy gospel coalition," arguing Christians must vote based on God's law as secondary citizens. Citing Ephesians 5 and 6, he asserts nations have a duty to legislate moral law rather than remain neutral, rejecting Tim Keller and David French for eisegesis into Romans 13:7. While acknowledging the US is a representative government in apostasy, he praises its Christian covenantal origins and checks and balances. Ultimately, citizenship demands holding leaders accountable respectfully while resisting unjust commands, urging listeners to review the episode. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Mutual Submission in Marriage00:04:45
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Thanks.
Oh, Sir Ian, he's back.
All right, I remember you.
Should Christians vote on laws based on God's law?
Yes, next question.
Are there limitations on using Americans' System to enforce God's law?
Hmm.
Yeah, that's a good question.
Okay, I'll give you my thoughts.
So you got two questions.
Put it back up for a second.
Let's leave it up for a second because I need to be able to go back and forth and reference.
The first question should Christians vote on laws based on God's law?
That's a clear yes.
Yeah, Christians with.
So that gets into those lesser identities, right?
Primary identity, spiritual, eternal identity.
You're either in Adam or in Christ.
You're either spiritually dead or spiritually alive.
You have Adam.
As your federal head, your representative, as your father, or you have Christ as your father, right?
And it's like, well, Christ is the son, we have God the father.
Well, the Bible actually says of Christ, one of his names is eternal father.
So, yes, he is our older brother and he is the son of God the father, the first member of the Trinity, Christ being the second.
And I don't mean by that a hierarchy, but just the second person of the Trinity of equal divinity and equal worth and all those things.
But Christ is referred to in Isaiah as eternal father, wonderful counselor.
And so, With that, you're either going to have Christ as your spiritual head, federal representative, father, or Adam.
That's our primary identity, right?
But we have these lesser identities that the Bible to speak to.
And so one of them would be are you a man?
And if so, are you a husband?
Are you a father?
Are you a son?
Are you a brother?
And the Bible has something to say about that, right?
So Ephesians 5 and 6 are really helpful with this.
Because Ephesians 5 and 6, it starts off at the end of chapter 5.
The Apostle Paul starts off by basically saying that we should be mutually submitted to one another under Christ, in love for Christ, in unity with Christ.
So there's this mutual submission to one another.
But then Paul begins to specify.
He begins to get specific.
And he says, and this is what that mutual submission looks like for a husband and a wife.
But he doesn't just deal with that, those are those secondary identities.
So, primary identity, Christian or not, in Adam or in Christ.
But secondary identities being, are you a husband or are you a wife?
And Paul says, What it looks like to obey Christ differs based off of whether or not you're a husband or whether you're a wife.
There's one set of commands to husbands, one set of commands to wives.
And then Paul just takes that same principle and just goes to other human relationships dealing with secondary identities, right?
So husbands and wives, Ephesians 5.
But then Ephesians 6, he talks about employers and employees, master slave relationship.
There's one thing that masters need to do in obedience, and one thing that slaves need to do in obedience.
And both are obedience to Christ, but they're both different based off of your station, your secondary identity.
He also talks about children and parents, right?
So the dynamic with husbands and wives, employers, employees, children, and parents, and it doesn't look the same, right?
And the egalitarian is going to come in here and take Ephesians 5 and say, well, but the headline of the story is mutually submit to one another.
And that's why the husband's not really the head of the home.
Paul doesn't really mean that.
He means something else.
Let's define head.
Does that really mean leader?
Does that really mean, you know, is that really authoritative?
You know, the headline of the story is mutual submission to Christ.
Okay, apply that, right?
That egalitarian argument that you're taking with husbands and wives, if you're going to be consistent in your hermeneutics, then go ahead and apply that in Ephesians 6 with children and parents.
You don't do that.
You're a hypocrite.
You're a liar, egalitarian Christian.
You are.
You're a liar.
You know that.
You don't do that.
If you claim to be a Christian, but you're egalitarian in your views between husbands and wives, and that husbands aren't the head of the home, and God gives to you children, you don't apply that same hermeneutic in your parenting.
You don't say, okay, and when it comes to our children, we're going to do the same thing we do with husbands and wives.
I don't really have authority over my children.
It's a mutual submission between me and my two year old toddler.
They give their point of view.
I give my point of view.
Whenever me and my two year old have a disagreement, you know, we take it to the elders of the church to provide counsel and we kind of decide together and we often compromise.
That's dumb.
Don't be an egalitarian.
That's so dumb.
Rendering to Caesar and God00:06:27
All right.
So, apart from being dumb, the point is there are secondary identities.
Well, another one husbands, wives, all this kind of stuff, children, parents, employers, employees, also citizen.
All right.
Long thing to get to this point.
Citizen.
The Bible talks about nations and the Bible affirms.
The goodness of boundaries.
Boundaries, borders are not some mean white colonizing oppressive thing.
No, the Bible affirms the goodness of nations, distinct nations, not just this new global order.
That's from the pit of hell.
So it's not a global order.
It's individual sovereign nations that have the right, biblically, to have borders and police their borders.
And there is such a thing as legal immigration and Illegal immigration, and it is not only permissible but good and right and biblically affirmed for a nation to properly and justly exercise its civil authority to expel illegal immigrants.
So, there is such a thing as nations, and therefore, there is such a thing as national citizenship.
So, I want to put that on par with husband, wife, child, parent, but that is an identity.
Primary identity in Adam or Christ, right?
But then there's male and female.
And husband or wife, father or mother, parent or children, employer or employee.
And there are distinctions of obedience.
What does it look like to faithfully and practically obey Christ based off of your secondary and tertiary identities?
Am I a husband or am I a wife?
Am I a citizen of America or am I a citizen?
That's biblical.
And so, should Christians vote on laws based on God's law?
Yes, every nation should obey Christ.
And that means legislating God's law.
All legislation, all laws are legislated, and all legislation is moral.
Every law is moral.
It's not whether but which.
It's going to be a moral law, and it's either going to be God's morality or man's morality.
So, nations have to legislate.
They have to have laws.
By default, every nation has laws.
Even a lawless nation has, it's not that they have no law.
A lawless nation is simply a nation that has bad laws, immoral laws.
And what makes a law right or wrong, bad or good, does it align with God's law?
So, nations must legislate.
Laws.
Legislation is moral.
Neutrality, moral neutrality is a myth.
Neutrality does not exist.
You're either in allegiance to Christ or you are against Him.
You're either for me or against me.
Jesus says that pertains to individuals.
It also pertains in the civil realm to nations corporately.
So they should be in line with Christ in submission to His law.
Therefore, they are legislating morality, which is what laws are that align with God's law and our duty with our secondary identity, not primary, but one of our secondary identities as.
Citizens, national citizens, is to hold our civil leaders accountable.
Yes, let's pray for them.
And yes, in biblical cases, let's submit to them.
And I don't have time to talk about that, what constitutes biblical submission and when should we resist.
But I do hold to the Scottish Reformed tradition of Protestant resistance theory.
John Knox, that said resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
I would be in that line.
So I'm not of the Todd Friel persuasion that, well, if the government says put pinwheels on the side of your head, then go ahead and put pinwheels on the side of your head as long as they're not telling you to do something that explicitly rebels against God's law.
Nope, nope.
Governments, their authority is.
And the jurisdictions, the boundaries of their authority is set by God.
For instance, here's something that's always taken out of context.
People say, well, even Jesus said, render to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's.
Okay, well, here's the question you should ask, Christian, when somebody says that you're being too political or you're not being submissive, you're not being humble, you're being rebellious towards a civil magistrate.
Even Jesus said, render to Caesar what is Caesar's.
Here's the question and who gets to decide what is Caesar's?
Because what Christians are assuming, these squishy, winsome Christians that want to winsomely walk off to the gulags and damn our children to concentration camps, these Christians, you know who I'm talking about Tim Keller, David French, these kind of, whatever.
What they're doing is they're actually eisegeting into the text.
It's not biblical exegesis.
What they're doing is they're saying this they're saying, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and they are then inserting, eisegeting, an extra statement that Jesus never said.
This is what they're assuming.
They're saying, Jesus said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and Jesus also said, Caesar gets to decide what belongs to Caesar.
Jesus does say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
But the implication is that there is something that belongs to Caesar, and there are other things that don't belong to Caesar.
And then the final question is, and who decides?
Jesus, the implication of Jesus' statement, render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and render unto God what belongs to God.
Jesus is saying there's a bifurcation.
There are things that belong to Caesar and there are things that don't.
So Jesus, even in that statement, is implicitly saying not everything is Caesar's.
Caesar does not get to require whatever he wants.
Not everything belongs to Caesar.
But then the squishy gospel coalition folk are going to come out and they're going to implicitly exegete in their reading of that text that, okay, well, maybe not everything belongs to Caesar, but Caesar gets to decide what belongs to Caesar.
No human being, I don't care if you're the pope, I don't care if you're the emperor, it doesn't matter who you are.
Nowhere in scripture does it say that there is Any office, any human office, any man who gets to decide, gets to outline and define his role, his jurisdiction, and what belongs to him.
No, God decides that for everyone, for the peasant all the way up to the prince.
God determines what rightfully belongs to them and what doesn't.
Okay, so all that being said, should Christians vote on laws based on God's law?
Yes.
Christians should hold, we have a civil duty within our secondary identity as citizens to hold civil authorities accountable.
And one of the ways that we do that.
True Democracy and Accountability00:03:52
In our constitutional republic, we're not a true democracy.
Democrats always, oh, democracy, oh, January 6th, you know, an assault on our sacred democracy.
No, we're not a democracy.
No, we are not a true democracy because a true democracy isn't biblical, and our founders knew that.
A true democracy is mob rule, right?
A complete democracy would be mob rule.
It means that the 50% plus one can completely abuse and oppress.
The 50% minus one, right?
The 50% plus one determined well, they have a lot of stuff and we want their stuff.
And so we're going to legislate laws and vote for politicians that'll give us their stuff.
No, we are a representative government.
And that kind of gets to the second part of your question Are there limitations on using the American system?
Yeah, there are, but America, I do think, has one of the best systems.
And I do believe that this comes from the scripture.
Number one, checks and balances of three branches of government and term limits, right, for governors and for presidents and all these, all that speaks to an affirmation of the doctrine of total depravity.
That we recognize that people aren't perfect and that people with power certainly aren't perfect.
And so there are checks and balances.
We are a representative government.
We are a covenantal.
We have a covenantal polity here in America because it was founded by the covenanters.
Makes sense.
People want to say, well, they were all deists.
They weren't Christians.
Well, some of them were deists.
You got guys like John Adams, who seems to be a deist.
But then you got guys like George Washington that people want to make a deist.
But I think he was probably a Christian.
It seems from the original sources that he was a Christian.
And then you got Jefferson, you know, who was a Unitarian.
But the point is, America was forged in a Christian ethos, a Christian worldview.
That doesn't mean every single one of the founders was a regenerate Christian themselves.
But the American origin story is a Christian story.
And I would argue when people, so are you saying we're a Christian nation?
No.
But I think we were.
I would say, I would agree with guys like Doug Wilson that I think we are currently a Christian nation in a state of apostasy.
That needs to be called to repentance and is incurring God's judgment because of our walking away, our rebellion, and our apostasy.
So, are there limitations on using America's system?
I don't think it's a perfect system, but I think it's one of the best.
And I think that it does, in many ways, largely align with the scripture, even our case law system that we inherited from King Alfred, right?
That comes from the Old Testament and civil law and civil code and case law.
And then, with that, the fact that we have to have witnesses, right?
There have to be eyewitnesses, two or three witnesses.
Witnesses, and it can't just be hearsay, you know, or that's going to be cast out as non evidence.
We, our court system, our justice system, these kinds of things, they model the scripture.
So I think America's system needs to be reformed.
There are things that are not in line with scripture, but there are plenty of things that are.
And so I think there are limitations in the sense that America's system, polity, system of policy, polity, governance is not perfect.
But because I think it's one of the better systems, one of the closer to being biblical systems in In comparison with other nations in the world, I think there are therefore less limitations because America's government, its polity, is closer to being biblical.
Therefore, it has less limitations.
And so, the rights and privileges that we have as citizens in this country, if you're an American, those should be used.
It's not just a right, but with that right, the other side of the coin is on one side of the coin, it's a right, a privilege.
American Privilege and Duty00:01:20
On the other side of the coin, it's a duty.
An obligation, a responsibility.
Because I have that right, I have an obligation within this secondary identity.
My first identity is I'm in Christ.
And then I have lesser identity.
But from these identities come rights and privileges, but also duties and responsibilities.
It is a privilege to be a husband and to be married to my wife, Megan.
But I also have responsibilities because of that office.
It's a privilege to be a pastor, but it's also an obligation.
And I have responsibilities and duties.
And likewise, it's a privilege to be an American, even.
Even with our country currently in a state of apostasy, it's less of a privilege than it was back in the day, but it's still a privilege to be an American.
I am proud to be an American, but it's not just a privilege, it's also a responsibility and a duty.
And yes, we should hold leaders, we should do it respectfully, we should pray for them, all those things that the Bible says.
But we don't just, when Caesar says jump, we don't just say how high.
Todd Freeland, his doctrine on this matter, that's how people wind up in the gulags.
And no, I don't think that's biblical.
Thanks so much for listening.
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