Pastor Joel Webbin and David Reece dissect theonomy, defining natural law not as flawed observation but as innate moral categories implanted by God. They argue Scripture establishes limited civil authority to punish crimes like murder, rejecting modern bureaucratic tyranny that over-regulates details while failing to wage just wars or enforce justice efficiently. The hosts critique bloated federal structures reliant on taxation and debasement, contrasting them with a biblical mandate for citizen soldiery and avenging wrath. Ultimately, they assert that true governance requires special revelation rather than mere reason, setting the stage for a future episode on immigration as trespassing. [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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Setting The Stage00:11:27
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All right, I'm going to be honest with you.
This one, it's going behind the paywall.
It's not something we typically do.
In fact, thus far, every single piece of content that we've produced here at Right Response Ministries has eventually been made available to you for free publicly.
This is an exception, though.
First two episodes will launch publicly, the next seven episodes will exclusively be available for our members at patreon.com.
Forward Slash Right Response Ministries.
Why?
Well, I'll give you the reason, because right now, the vast majority of evangelical Christians are not ready for the conversation that we have in these episodes.
And frankly, you and I both know that many of those individuals are actually bad faith actors who will seek to slice it up, take us out of context, put it out there for the world wide web in order to discredit this ministry and see to it that we're canceled.
And honestly, I'm not willing to let that happen.
What conversation am I even talking about?
I'm talking about a nine part series between myself and Pastor Andrew Isker on Israel the history, the scripture, the whole big shebang.
Check it out at patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
You can get every single episode available now, all of it ad free.
And here's a couple clips just to whet your appetite.
And so our entire moral framework is based around 1930 and 1940.
And every bad thing is Hitler.
Every failure to confront the bad thing is Neville Chamberlain.
And Saddam Hussein, Hitler.
Vladimir Putin, Hitler.
Donald Trump, Hitler.
That's the only moral framework that we have that is operable.
So the moment that a young man crosses the aisle and the don't believe your lying eyes rhetoric doesn't work any longer, and he You know, and he's just noticed too much because it really is that blatantly obvious.
He has nowhere else to go.
And he crosses the aisle.
Well, the moment he crosses the aisle, there's no reasonable, wise, mature leader over there.
You would just have the guys on the TV telling them, this is what the Bible says.
You have to believe this, right?
On the radio, the Christian radio stations, you'd only hear those guys preaching that particular thing.
When that is actually, when you look at all of church history, that's the minority view, the tiny minority view.
The rest.
Of theological history in the church is that, you know, is the kind of stuff that we're saying.
Yeah, this one's a banger.
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Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, I welcome back my friend, Mr. David Reese.
He is the CEO of Armored Republic.
He's the pastor of Puritan Reformed Church in Arizona, outside of Phoenix, I believe, right?
You're in the Phoenix larger area?
Yes, sir.
Absolutely.
All right.
So today we are going to talk.
So, one of the things I love about David is when other Christians are tempted to throw you under the bus for cheap points with suburban moms with perhaps softer sensibilities, David has proven time and time again to be a real friend and he's loyal.
And it's not because we perfectly agree on everything.
We have like 95% agreement.
So, we agree on a lot.
But we disagree.
And a lot of you guys have, you know, you've reached out and emailed or left comments on YouTube and said that you've been particularly blessed by our conversations at the points where we actually disagree and trying to model how within the reformed world we can love our brothers in Christ and yet disagree.
And so, I think the last episode that Mr. Reese and I had together was on Trump.
I'm going to vote for Trump.
He is not.
And we hashed it out and we did so in a way that we hope is honoring to Christ and beneficial for all of you who are still probably.
Trying to make that decision.
What is the Christian position?
What's the righteous thing to do?
And so today we want to talk about.
So both of us are on the theonomic side of the aisle.
I always like to add the qualifier of general equity theonomy because there's some things within the Reconstruction camp that I would disagree with.
But I'm a massive fan of, I love Greg Bonson, but I especially love Rush Dooney.
I think that Rush Dooney, in my assessment, is one of the old school theonomists that didn't carry With it, the theonomy of Rush Duny was not colored by what I would consider to be the post war consensus lens.
So, all that being said, both of us, Mr. Reese and myself, are theonomists, and yet we would have different conceptions and nuances and particulars.
And so, we want to talk about immigration today, and we want to talk about what is the theonomic mitigating mechanism in order to stop unhealthy.
Nation crippling levels of immigration.
But we want to first set the stage, and I'm going to give it to Mr. Reese to help us define terms with the larger conversation before we get into the particulars of immigration, the larger conversation of theonomy, God's law, and natural law, because there is a danger on the natural law side.
Both David and I affirm natural law.
We're both reformed, and we understand that that is absolutely a part of the reformed tradition.
But there is something to be said for if it's only natural law or if natural law supersedes.
Special revelation and God's law, then the word that you often hear thrown around is prudence, prudence, prudence.
But prudence is really, and I think you'll agree with this, Mr. Reese, it can easily become a euphemism for man's reason.
Prudence, aka man's reason.
And if it's just man's reason with no bumpers, no buffers keeping, then man's reason, I'm persuaded, is why we're in the current situation that we are.
Gets us right back to the Enlightenment and all these things that have ruined the West.
And so we want to frame that first.
Natural law, what's a biblical conception of natural law?
How did the Reformers understand it?
How does that work within a theonomic conception?
When does natural law bow the knee to special revelation and these kinds of things?
And then we're going to play it out with a case study and say, okay, so now with this theonomic conception over and against a pure natural law conception, how does this play out with immigration?
And at that point, That's where you'll see David and I agreeing on 95%, disagreeing on 5%.
And the nice thing about both of us is in real time, this is a real conversation.
It's not staged.
In real time, one of us might be persuaded.
And so you might see one of us tipping the hat and actually coming across the aisle and agreeing with the other.
And so, in that sense, it makes for a very interesting conversation.
So, without further ado, welcome to the show.
Give us our terms, line it all out for us.
Mr. Reese, it's good to see you.
Thank you, brother.
Pastor Revan, appreciate you having me on.
You know, the other thing is, by the way, the main reason that I can afford to offend suburban women is because I already have such widespread popularity amongst suburban women.
I mean, I've been myself.
Support of base support, and especially for Armored Republic, those are the principal customers that I have.
Nice.
I assume you're being sarcastic.
Yeah, basically, I'm sure this would be surprising to you, but the purchasers of body armor are like 98% men.
So, you know, and the other 10% are finding it for their husband, principally.
So, anyway.
All right.
So, okay.
So, when we talk about political philosophy, there are Gordon Clark. did a really magnificent job of kind of addressing the different possible ways that somebody can try to claim to know what the government should do.
And when we think about any sort of question like this, the main thing we're dealing with is the question of how do I know what the government should do?
Right?
So the question of how do you know is something that has to be addressed, but we don't have time to go all the way back there.
But he did this fantastic job of kind of listing out the main ways of organizing political theory.
Okay, so the main, the first one is this political idea that you really when you look around and you look at justifications for force, the main thing is to say, okay, what should the government do or what is it that government is authorized to do?
And the answer is they shouldn't do anything and they're not authorized to do anything.
And that philosophy is called anarchy.
And I think that we don't deal seriously enough with the issue of anarchy as Christians a lot of the time because that question, when you look around, you go, okay, God made human beings.
What authorizes human beings to command other human beings to do stuff?
And if you don't have a warrant from God to be able to order people to do stuff, then you're just tyrannizing them.
Right.
And so I think that we all kind of just like blow off anarchism as a problem that's intellectual by kind of being like, well, that's stupid.
It's like, well, I mean, but seriously, why can one guy go and order another guy to do a thing?
Is it just because he has a badge and a gun?
Like, what about the badge is magical?
And I mean, I get why the gun is effective at getting somebody to do something, right?
So that leads us into sort of the next one, which is this idea of, well, there isn't a moral justification for being able to exercise authority.
In fact, the exercise of authority is sort of a misnomer.
It's really just the exercise of power.
And so we could take Mao's justification.
The badge is just a luxury.
The gun is the thing, right?
And so if that's the case, then power comes from the barrel of a gun.
And it's just telling people what to do and having enough force to intimidate them to do it and killing the guys that aren't scared enough.
So those are things that anarchy is stupid ultimately because it's unavoidable that there's going to be people who try to use coercive power.
So there's actually a period in history that was anarchic in the sense of the civil state.
Authority Beyond Power00:15:52
And that was the period from the creation of the world until the Noahic covenant.
So we have like 1,500 years where the civil magistracy did not exist, where God had not authorized somebody to wield the sword for the purpose of vengeance.
There was the right of the use of the sword before then to be able to defend yourself.
And we have an angelic, you know, fire sword carrying guy defending the tree of life and the garden, God's private property, against Adam and Eve potentially trespassing in there.
But that idea of there's this age of anarchy and realpolitik where people were just ordering people around and building empires without any sort of actual authorization from God.
And again, that's the absence.
For 1,500 years, you got the absence of the civil magistrate.
And the presence of Nephilim.
That always helps.
I know that.
You're a Sethite guy, right?
I assume?
Yes, I am.
Yeah.
So I believe the city of God, city of man.
Even within the Sethite conception, though, like if you're a Sethite guy who's, you know, read a decent amount of, you know, James Jordan, like you can still, I mean, Sethite position still allows for dragons.
It still allows for, like, I mean, all kinds of, you know, Lowercase g gods, you know, even like Heiser's conception, which I think, you know, Heiser hated Calvinism.
He gets things wrong, but I think he gets a lot right.
But even within Heiser's conception, divine counsel, these kinds of things are fully on the table.
You don't have to believe in, you know, hybrid, you know, humanoid angels, you know, fallen angels.
And I personally do, but you don't.
And in order to still look at, you know, the antediluvian world and say, wow, crazy time.
I mean, no, absolutely.
I mean, like, absolutely, there are these monster beast things.
And you even have like Job.
Interacting with that, right?
And I think that there's, even after the flood, you've got this world filled with serious beasts that have to be taken care of.
And I think people just underestimate the degree to which the strivings of honorable men to slay these beasts and make space safe.
It's kind of like when we introduce prime predators, top tier predators back into places, it's like we just decursified this place.
Why are you bringing back dragons?
Right.
Right.
Anyway, so, yeah, also, there are real giants.
I mean, like, you know, Goliath was a real giant.
Right.
So, I'm not opposed to any of that.
There's all, I think, there's demonic interaction there.
And, and you, you certainly have councils of angels.
I mean, anybody who's read Milton on, you know, Paradise Lost and Paradise Gained and all that, you've got some interesting stuff about that kind of, that, that council of the, of the gods, you know, the, the angels.
So, anyways, yeah.
Okay.
Anyway, so cool stuff.
So, my point was to say, presence of Nephilim or however, you know, like, Unique evil, unique evil.
Genesis 6 15 or 14.
I think you'll agree with me that yes, it's true when the Calvinist stands in the pulpit and says, every thought and inclination of the heart was only evil continually.
And the Calvinist is going to look at that and say, that's the depiction of all mankind apart from saving grace, which is received by faith in Christ alone.
And I would say yes and amen.
However, I believe that Genesis 6 15 or 14 is also uniquely a depiction of that time.
It's true inwardly.
Of the people of that time at the level of the heart, and also true inwardly at the level of the heart of people today.
All unbelievers throughout all time periods, that is an accurate description of total depravity, sin at the level of the heart.
But I believe it also served as a unique description of sin at the level of outward behavior.
That during that time, and that brings us back to your point, in part because of the absence of the civil magistrate, that evil of the heart was far more outwardly manifest in the antediluvian world before the Noahic covenant than it is today.
I think that gets us back on track.
Absolutely.
So I think you have this, the preaching of the law was so minimized and the power of God converting was so minimal in terms of what he was doing there that you have the binding power of the law, one of the three uses, right, mirror, chain, and lamp.
The binding power of the law was so minimized that you just had this horrific wickedness.
And there's this dramatic engagement of demonic power that's occurring.
And you have these beasts that are just, the curse is like outrageous on it.
Like you look at like the fossils of beasts that have been captured because of the flood causing quick, you know, covering.
And you go, the teeth on those things are rather large, right?
And you go, I'm not sure that I know of any lizards or dogs or cats that do have teeth that big in our time, right?
So it's all like manifestation of huge levels of curse on the land.
So, okay, so we have anarchy, we have realpolitik, right?
So, this idea that there's no justification for the exercise of power makes it so that you either end up as an anarchist or you become a person who goes, well, there's not a justification for it, but I'm just going to do it.
And so you have this raw exercise of power.
And that's very popular in the Democrat Party, and it's becoming increasingly popular in Republican circles.
It's just like, whatever, let's just do what we want, right?
So, the law of God is very important to restrain evil.
So, we end up with The kind of classical answer that you find that people who call themselves Christians will put forward, and you end up with this natural law view.
And it's classical to us in America because, in particular, we're affected by kind of Lockean thought about how do we try to take Presbyterian principles.
Locke was raised by Scotch Presbyterian parents, and he's like, well, let's take Presbyterian principles and let's try to figure out a way to kind of put them in.
So you have this natural law view of the way government works.
But Locke is not the only person to try to use natural law to justify the civil order.
And so inside of natural law, you have a bunch of different ways of defining that.
And so I think that's one of the things that we should come back to when we're kind of comparing and contrasting theonomy with natural law.
So the natural law philosophy, the most popular version of it is to look around and go like, well, what is nature like?
And then to try to derive principles from observing.
So there's other views, but that's sort of the Thomistic.
Thomas Aquinas view where you're looking around and you're deriving the nature of things by observation and then thinking about it and trying to come up with rules and oughts from what is.
So we can talk more about that later.
But then the other effort is to have a social contract view.
And the social contract view is this effort to say, well, the way that the state gets its power is by agreement, by the forming of a contract.
But that view of social contract contracts aren't binding across generations in the same way that covenants are.
And so social contract sounds sort of persuasive, especially to Americans, because of the fact that we go, okay, well, yeah, there is a consent of the people in relationship to government.
There is an electing of people.
There is an ability to resist higher powers when they do tyrannical things, when they violate the contract.
But here's the deal.
We're not allowed to contract anything and everything to the state.
There are authorized powers given to the state, and it's not just a contract.
That's binding forever.
We go, oh no, we accidentally gave away our choice of who we get to marry to the civil magistrate.
One generation contracted that and we're stuck with that forever.
Oh no.
We go, no, that's not a legitimate function of the state.
And so what we're going to do is retain the dual role of the parents and the children agreeing together about who to marry, as opposed to saying that the civil magistrate is going to get to select your spouse.
So any sort of mistake like that historically doesn't make a contract that you're stuck in that has to go through a revision there.
It's no illegitimate powers are restrained by the law of God.
So covenant versus contract.
A covenant is a voluntary agreement.
A covenant is defined by God.
The state is defined by God.
It's given by God in Genesis 9.
And so Genesis 9 is where it's formed in terms of the Noahic covenant.
And what we find is that we have definitions being laid out of the powers of the state elsewhere in Scripture.
Then there is the divine right view.
The divine right view is, you know, Locke has two treatises on government.
There's the first treatise and there's the second treatise.
And we are all very, the second treatise is the famous one in America because he argues from natural law.
The first treatise is the treatise that everybody forgets about.
And it's kind of like, well, why are we talking about a second treatise?
Was there a first one?
Because second normally means that there was a first.
And nobody ever talks about the first one.
And in the first one, one of the things he deconstructs is this idea that kings have an inheritance from Adam, that they have this inherited monarchy that's an absolute monarchy because the fief symbol of their zone could be traced back or something.
So you might have somebody like Charles II being like, I can trace my lineage back to Adam.
and find how my inheritance would make it so that I have a right to rule England.
Some sort of absurdity like that.
Everybody can trace their lineage back to Adam.
Well, I mean, yeah, of course.
I mean, can't you?
Yeah, everybody.
But the idea that I'm the one who gets to inherit this particular chunk of land would be like a silly manifestation of that.
And so the divine right of kings is sort of like who has the blue blood?
How do you identify the ones that are royal in their veins?
And maybe you have lesser nobility or whatever that manifests that.
So you end up with these things like, well, the way you show yourself to be worthy of having the divine right to rule and your rule is absolute, as though you were dealing with your private property.
That divine right view, you're kind of like looking for signs of that.
And looking for signs of that can be like, well, were you brave enough in battle or whatever else?
And so you end up with these after-the-fact justifications to try to justify an absolute rule.
Would Cromwell kind of be an example of that?
So I don't think Cromwell was.
I think that the monarchy that he resisted was.
I think Cromwell would have made a divine law argument.
I think he actually would go to, he would be an example of the sixth category, which is the one I believe in, basically theonomy, that there's a divine law or a covenant theory for government, and that covenant theory involves just means to form the government, but also what is the government's power.
What are the crimes and the penalties, all that kind of stuff?
The only reason I thought of Cromwell is, I mean, he certainly had the consent of the people, and there was a covenant of sorts that was present there.
I was just thinking, but he was, ironically, like it breaks the divine rule metric in terms of, like, he's not of noble blood, he's not within this lineage.
But you just mentioned what made me think of Cromwell was you mentioned in passing, like somebody who fought really well.
And Cromwell would be like an example of somebody.
It was like that, that would be an example of instead of, you know, monarchy, it was like meritocracy.
It was like one of the first notable times that England was like, okay, just the son of the king and his son and his son and his son, by default being king, hasn't been working out for us, at least recently.
Maybe we should just have it merit, may the best man win.
And this is a virtuous man who's fought well.
And so he kind of ascends.
He was, in some sense, a populist figure.
But then the problem was succession.
That like Cromwell's son did not pan out to be the man that Cromwell was.
No, he did not.
And then they went back to Kings.
So, yeah.
And I think we should absolutely do an episode on Cromwell.
Like, I was just like tracing, I was like going through my head.
I was like, how can I talk about Cromwell?
But I was like, I need like 90 minutes for Cromwell.
Like, let's.
But so, anyways, there's also sorts of awesome to talk about with that and the English Civil War and everything.
So, maybe you'll tolerate me doing that with you sometime.
Sure.
Okay, okay, so that we got through this.
We have anarchy, realpolitik, natural law, social contract, divine right, and we have divine law or covenant view.
So those are sort of the things that we're stuck with there.
So as we think about those, the Bible is plainly not anarchic.
It plainly teaches that there are civil authorities.
We see it in Genesis 9.
We see it all throughout the Torah, the laying out of legitimate authority.
We see the teaching of the legitimate extent of government in lots of places in Scripture, limits on taxation and all that kind of stuff.
We find that in 1 Samuel 8, where it says that 10% is a tyrannically high tax rate.
We go to the classic text in Romans 13, verses 1 through 7, where we find the authority of the state.
And verses 1 through 7 is not like a general command to submit to anybody who has a badge and a gun.
It's a laying out of the job qualifications for you to find who's authorized to rule and who's not, and the extent of their power.
So you find all that.
That anarchy just doesn't line up with Scripture.
Realpolitik, that just whoever happens to have the power is also not what lines up with Scripture because we have tests for tyranny and we have all sorts of examples of resistance against tyranny, the doctrine of the lesser magistrate.
We have this idea of appealing to heaven and calling upon his power, God's power, to save us from tyrants.
And you have this idea that not that might makes right except in the sense that God, who is the ultimate might, does actually determine what's right.
But amongst men and amongst creatures, it is not might that makes right or not might that justifies the exercise of power.
And so we have limits on power and we find all sorts of things in the scripture that show the rebuke of power and prophets often going to rebuke kings, for example.
So it is not the case that simply that authority flows from power.
That is not the scripture doctrine.
With natural law, and again, we'll spend more time on that, social contract, government is not just by the consent of men.
Men are born under governments and they have a duty to submit to legitimate governments whether or not they signed the contract.
And furthermore, You do not have the right to contract away powers that God has not given to the state.
And we find the example of Uriah trying to go in and participate in the sacrifices in the temple and God giving him leprosy in response to that.
It's not just the powers that are taken or the powers that are agreed to representatively or whatever.
It is powers that God defines.
He defines the jurisdictions and the spheres.
And then as far as the divine right goes, we find the idea that people can be removed from office.
God Defined Powers00:03:07
We find the idea that there's legitimate ways to enter office as opposed to usurping.
And it's not just some bloodline.
It's not just an inheritance line there.
You have the example of Saul being elected by the people and then him losing his right to rule because of his actions and then him being removed.
And you have the idea of David.
And even with David, there's a process, even though God chose him, there's a process of Judah electing him.
And then there's a process of the other tribes electing him.
And so there's the process of law.
As well as the fact that there are limits on authority.
So I want to say that there's process of law, there's divine law, there's theonomy, there's covenant institution that is binding across generations that has limits of process for selection of officers and all that kind of stuff.
So that's sort of my effort to give us the limits.
So that's why I think we need to zero in on natural law and we need to zero in on theonomy and contrast those two views to really be able to figure out what is it that the scriptures teach.
Right?
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So then, is there, where would you like me to go?
Would you like me to lay out the different types of law?
Well, maybe starting with just trying to, if maybe the two of us can try to flesh out and define natural law.
And maybe some of the different conceptions, because I don't know about you, but I've found that their natural law is kind of similar to the larger Christian nationalism discussion.
It's like, I'm a Christian nationalist.
What kind?
I'm down.
I like Christian nationalism, but I have a particular type of Christian nationalism that I would adhere to.
And not everybody who wears the moniker necessarily means the same thing.
In terms of natural law, I think that there is a conception of natural law that I think is perfectly biblical, thinking of Romans 1, thinking of Romans 2, especially Romans 2.
So if we could flesh that out starting there, I think that would be helpful.
So if somebody put forward this view of natural law that says natural law is this idea that my conscience, my feelings, what's beautiful, What's pleasant is what's right.
If somebody puts forward that what's natural is what feels good, how would you respond to that if somebody said that's what natural law is?
That's the Disney version of natural law follow your heart.
We would say, well, yeah, those things may come naturally, but the problem is that nature is under a curse.
And so even like I remember people making arguments, liberals, progressive, Christians, Christian in name only, but making arguments 10 years ago, 15 years ago with.
Homosexuality and leading up to Burgerfell in 2015.
And, you know, like, just like we have evangelicals for Harris, you know, there were evangelicals for sodomy, you know, and gay marriage and things like that.
And one of the arguments that they would make was a natural law argument.
Now, I don't think it actually suffices as a genuine natural law argument, but they were arguing, well, we're, you know, we're making, we're reasoning from nature.
And so one of the examples that they would give from nature is they would say, well, we found, you know, certain species, you know, thanks to Alex Jones, you know, and, and, In his observations, the frogs really are turning gay, you know.
And so we found, you know, this species of mudfish or frog or whatever that's, that, that, you know, engages sexually with its, you know, with its partner of the same sex and blah, blah, blah.
And so therefore, you know, sodomy is on the table and people can be gay and they can have the rights of marriage.
And my point is that in their minds, now I don't think they were right, obviously, but in their minds, they would have called that a natural law argument.
And one, I remember all the way back then thinking, You know, one problem with nature.
So we know from Romans 1 that like God reveals himself by what he has made.
So the creation, the cosmos actually does speak of God.
And it doesn't just speak of like Romans 2 in terms of love for neighbor, the obligation, the moral obligation of man as it, you know, horizontally affects his neighbor.
You know, don't steal from your neighbor, don't murder your neighbor.
Certainly the conscience speaks of that.
And that's natural to the Imago Dei.
And even for fallen men, unregenerate men still have a conscience.
And they don't even, it's not just that they haven't lived up to God's standard.
They're without an apology, an excuse, because they can't even meet their own standard.
All men are compromised.
All men have fallen short of the glory of God.
And so that's the horizontal aspect, Romans 2.
But you also have the vertical aspect.
You have, you know, Romans 1 is arguing that natural law, nature, natural revelation, I should say, but I think it, you know, Romans 1 is kind of like natural revelation, Romans 2 is like natural law, but nature itself testifies to the glory of God, his divine power and his eternal power and divine nature, or divine nature and eternal power, one of those.
I can't remember.
But that's all in scripture.
The problem, though, I remember thinking this like eight years ago.
Here's the problem if nature itself is under a curse, And nature, if we decide that nature will be the ultimate standard apart from special revelation or over it and above and against special revelation, uh, well, nature Romans 1 is true, uh, of course, that nature does reveal to us that there's a God in heaven.
And I think you can argue from nature, um, the triune God and not just a deistic, you know, um, deism, but but actual um, Christian God, um, the triune God.
And I think that we actually can see that in nature, however, all that being said, nature also.
Lies.
And what I mean by that is that because nature has fallen and under a curse, if all we do is observe nature, we will come away with some really bad ideas.
Like, there really are certain species that do things that are immoral, right?
Like praying mantis, you know, like after they mate, you know, the female praying mantis, you know, eats the head off of the male praying mantis.
And so if nature is all you have and you look at, you know, praying mantis and all of a sudden you start making an argument like, you know, after.
Uh, after your spouse conceives, then you know the wife can murder her husband, you know, and carry on his line without him.
Like, um, no, that would be a bad argument.
That's that's a bad argument.
So, my point is to say, I think natural law is real, I think it's inevitable and inescapable.
And I am reformed, and it's part of the reformed tradition.
But you got to be real clear about what you mean by natural law.
And when you look at natural revelation, I think it's important to say natural revelation reveals true things about God, but it's not exhaustive truth.
That's why we need special revelation because nature.
I think, and this gets back to Jim Jordan and some of his conceptions, I think nature, there's a sense in which the curse has been pushed back as time goes on.
And so, nature was particularly cursed in the antediluvian world.
However, at the same time, I think you can make an argument in terms of like Psalm 19, the skies pour forth speech.
The stars, so beasts that are particularly malevolent, but the stars, I think that the skies actually, perhaps, I think you could argue, spoke more clearly.
In earlier years than they do now.
And part of that is because in these last days, Hebrews 1, God spoke to us in many, many ways by the prophets, our fathers, the prophets, many times and in many ways, dreams, visions.
And I think you can include in Hebrews 1, 1 through 3, even saying that God spoke with more clarity and maybe even a wider scope of breadth through natural revelation.
But now he's given his final word, who is his son.
And his son has been inscripturated by the apostles and all the prophets who pointed to him and the apostles who pointed to him.
Pointed back to the Bible, the canon.
And this is God's final word, and it's the clearest word.
And I even think there's an argument to be made for the Magi following the star, that it was kind of like the last of the skies.
They still pour forth speech.
Psalm 19 is still true today, but I think it might have been even more acutely true.
And that the stars may have been more active in older times and brighter and clearer as they testify to God.
And then one star in particular, under God's divine providence, As God is about to give his final word in his son, the birth of his son, one star, you know, it's like the last of the skies moving in a very particular divine kind of supernatural way leading up to, and now the stars are more quiet.
The stars used to scream, now they whisper because the sun is now arrived.
The brightest star has come.
You know, like, I don't know.
I feel like that'll preach.
So, anyways, all that being said, the point is natural revelation is true.
It is biblical, but nature, we should remember, is under a curse.
And because nature's under a curse, there are certain things that nature tells us that aren't the overarching truth.
Like, nature tells us that death has the final word, but scripture tells us that death will be swallowed up in life.
And, like, we need scripture.
So, anyways.
I'm like such a wet blanket.
I know you and I are planning to have a conversation in the near future about how do we know stuff.
And so I'm going to put a pin in it.
That's fine.
Talking about some of those things.
Workmanship And Honor00:09:36
But I want to give you a brief reply, which I would say, if I think about natural law, right?
Okay, I think there are four ways that people have tried to give natural law historically.
One is the feeling based one, which you so eloquently called Disney natural law, which I love.
It's exactly right.
It's exactly what it is.
It's like, my perverted affections tell me what is right.
And so, therefore, what is right is whatever I want.
Therefore, I'm God.
That's that first natural law.
And then you actually addressed other versions of it as well.
I think in what you laid out, one of the ones you mentioned is the observation of stuff where you're like, well, the frogs are totally gay.
So the world is gay.
Right.
And so, like, gay frogs, gay world, man.
Like, you got to just deal with it.
Right.
So, I think the idea that you look around at nature and you can find what's right based upon what you can observe in nature, that's sort of the Marquis de Sade version of natural law.
And I think that we try, you can read apologists like Thomas Aquinas or Pele or something like that, where you try to do some arguments from the observation of nature about God and about ethics.
And I think that when you do that and it's based upon what.
what you see, right, you end up with this problem of first you can't derive an ought from an is.
Like you don't see oughts anywhere.
Oughts are not observable.
And so when we're looking around and seeing descriptions of, making descriptions of what we see, we already have to have a definition of good coming in on those observations.
So we're like, we're engaged looking at the world and looking at creatures and saying, well, this is happening and it's good.
So we already have a judgment of good that we're imposing in.
So we smuggle it in, and we don't really get the oughts from our observation.
We're just imposing them.
And I think so when we then talk about observing the world, when I read Romans chapter 1, and I look at verses, I think, 19 and 20 are sort of the key there to the main thing that was being talked about.
Being able to see from the things that are made.
And that language, the text says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.
For since the creation of the world, this is verse 20, Romans 1 20, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.
Even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
So, like, you're paraphrasing from memory, super impressive.
And so the thing there that people read as like we look at creation and understand by looking at creation is being understood by the things that are made.
The being understood by the things that are made is in Greek, it is like being understood by the creature.
And we think of it as like being understood by looking at the stuff that was made.
And I would posit to you that the text there is saying, Being understood by the creature, not by means of looking at stuff, but by man.
And the word that's used there is the same word that's used in Ephesians, where it says that we are his workmanship.
That word, like workmanship, is the same word that's here, that's by the things that are made.
The things that are made is one Greek word, and it's the same one in Ephesians that's workmanship.
So I would put forward that it's being understood by men, not being understood by looking at the universe.
So, real quick, I need you to flesh out that distinction a little bit better.
So, workmanship is a word that describes mankind.
Yes.
But also is being used to describe the cosmos, all created things is his handiwork, his workmanship.
And so, this workmanship, speaking of the cosmos, created things apart from man, man being the pinnacle of the earthly cosmos.
But everything else is also God's workmanship.
And you're saying that there's a distinction between man's observation of God's workmanship.
Leading him into certain conclusions and truth versus what?
Like, what's you're saying it's not that, that it's not just man's mere observation of the created cosmos, but it's because it almost sounds like what you're saying is would almost be kind of like a similar concept to the hermeneutic of Karl Barth.
You know, what he did in his hermeneutic in terms of reading special revelation, the scripture.
That it's not really infallible in and of itself, but it becomes infallible in man's reading of scripture.
You know, like the words on the page itself are actually not God's word.
It becomes God's word when it's being read by a human being created in the image of God, and especially a regenerate human being that has the spirit at work within him.
And so it's like really, it's the words on the page plus the person plus the spirit.
You know, our powers combined, those three things make it the word of God.
And I'm like, no, no thanks.
You know, and it almost sounds like you're saying that, and I'm not even disagreeing with you.
But I just need some more clarity.
It sounds like you're applying a Bardian hermeneutic of special revelation to interpreting natural revelation.
Yeah, so I don't mean that.
I don't mean that natural revelation requires the agreement of the person for it to exist.
So let me round out, and this might help to make it a little bit more clear if I explain.
So the four categories that are natural law there's natural law of feelings, which is bogus, Disney.
There's natural law of observation, which is sort of the Thomist view where you're looking at stuff and drawing out.
And then there's this natural law where you can just kind of reason it out, right?
Like R.C. Sproul's kind of description of rationalism is, you know, you're sitting in a Dutch oven reasoning it out by yourself in the dark, you know?
And so it's not that.
It's not reason alone either.
It's not like, I'm going to posit a definition of man, and if I view man as, you know, like, you know, it's not that.
So what is it, right?
And I'm going to argue natural law is thought content that's planted in man.
So if you think about the heart of man, the heart of man is his mind.
And there are certain content pieces that are unavoidably present at the moment of conception by the very nature of man.
So the image of God, whatever that is, is present in man at conception.
The image of God is reason plus innate concepts.
Innate ideas, innate categories, whatever label you want to use for that.
And I think those categories are defined for us as the attributes of God and also the categories for the moral law.
And so what we do is we end up taking like eternality, which is an attribute of God, and we like apply it to the universe.
And now we have a false God, right?
Or we construct false gods by taking the attributes of God that are unavoidable to thought and we make these false gods.
And then the way we corrupt the moral law.
We'll have like, okay, there's people I'm supposed to honor, fifth commandment, and like you give honor illegitimately, or you give honor without any constraints, or like you worship your ancestors, or you throw off honor and you honor the inappropriate people, or whatever, right?
Same with the sixth commandment.
Oh, I shouldn't kill anybody unless they're Jews or unborn children, right?
Like those are, you see, you end up with like explaining away, you know, categories of the human race as human and trying to say they're not really human, and so therefore I can kill them.
And so we have this sort of like, Or maybe the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie are not people.
And so the idea that you have a right to kill them and take their stuff.
And so these things are corruptions there.
So my point would be you don't have to imagine for a second a mind that is disconnected from sensory experience.
You're paralyzed at such a point where there's a breaking of a connection to any of your sense experience.
You're blind, you're deaf, you can't feel stuff, there's no tactile experience, you're not smelling stuff, and you're not tasting things.
That's tragic.
And so, all of that, that person is still inexcusable if they reject God.
And that's because there's a natural law and there's natural revelation.
It's inherent to their nature as a man.
And so, it's not natural in the sense of feeling.
It's not natural in the sense of observing nature.
It's not natural in the sense of like logic alone.
It's natural in the sense that it's a part of the very nature of man.
And so, we unavoidably have categories of thought that we.
That we make moral judgments with, and we accuse or excuse ourselves based upon those judgments.
And those are contradictory.
So we're condemned under even our own judgment.
Man's Moral Categories00:02:45
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No, that's that's good.
That's that I appreciate that.
That's helpful because you're right.
That's a really good point that you bring up.
Like, you know, uh, Helen Keller, like, uh, is she, you know, is she excused?
Like, you know, does Romans 1 not apply to her?
All men are without an excuse unless you can't, you know.
Invisible Ink Of Law00:12:27
You can't hear or see.
You know, like, well, then you actually do have an excuse because you, you know, the sky's poor speech, you know, Psalm 19 or Romans 1, you know, like what God has made his handiwork.
Well, you know, she can't see it.
She can't hear it.
And so she doesn't need Jesus to get to heaven.
She's actually, you know, she's excused.
You know, I, and of course we would say no.
So that is helpful to say that, It's not just God's handiwork and seeing these things that renders man without an apologia, but that it's something that God, it's not just what God has made outside of man that he can observe, but it's also God's making of man himself, something that's inside of man and the way that God constructed him that makes him morally culpable.
And that right there, if you think about experience, Experience as a whole is interpreted.
You don't learn from experience.
You interpret experience.
And your interpretations of experience are based upon your worldview.
And so when I look at the stars, I can say that's cosmic dust caused by chaos.
Or I can say those are lights in heaven created by God.
And when I think about Psalm 19, it talks about the heavens declaring the glory of God.
And there's no place where their speech is not heard.
It's not that the stars are literally pouring out propositional thought content.
The issue is if there's nobody to look at the stars, are they speaking to them?
It's the observer that the stars remind them of the stuff that's written on their heart.
So you look at the stars, and the stars have been frequent objects of worship, so is the sun.
But their changeableness, the fact that they are changeable means they're not eternal.
Right, yeah, they're not immutable.
And so that eternality is necessary to divinity.
And without eternality, they're not divine.
So as you look at them and recognize the changeableness of them, that thinking about the changeableness of them is what reminds you that they're not God.
And so there's the unchangeable one who is God.
And so I think the stuff written on your heart.
Your mind is the stuff that as you observe it, that's the speech.
And so it's where there's speech, in other words, where there's rational minds, is where that's observed.
And so that idea so natural law, it's not the reformed or biblical view of natural law is not feeling, it's not observation through sense experience, it's not sitting in a Dutch oven and reasoning with nothing else, it's not rationalism.
It's the innate categories.
And so there are two main things we have to deal with with this idea of natural law.
It's the inexcusability of man for rejecting God, which is, again, you've got these categories.
You've got attributes of God.
He's infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.
And his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
A shorter catechism question for what is God?
That definition, I think that does a great job of cataloging the attributes of divinity that distinguish God from creatures.
And so what you have is the infinitude of God.
God is infinite, other things are not.
God is eternal, other things are not.
God is unchangeable, other things are not.
So the creator-creature distinction there is carefully guarded.
Creatures are finite, temporal, and changeable.
And so the finitude of things and the temporality being inside of time and the changeableness, which is what time is, time is change, right?
So if you're changeable, you're in time.
And so that whole idea that those attributes of divinity are.
are things that are written in our heart and we are interpreting things through this lens of what's changeable, what's not, what's temporal, what's eternal, what's infinite, what's finite.
Those are categories that are unavoidable.
And so as a result, we make idols conceptually and we have these false gods and these false gods are incoherent messes.
They're self-contradictory messes.
In their nature, because we've made up this incoherent definition of a false God.
And so only the biblical God has a coherent definition that is not contradictory.
And then when we go to moral choice, we have the objective spoken word of God from the oracles of God.
And that law condemns people who are in the church.
They hear that and they go, okay, I'm without excuse from this written law.
But also, the law in the heart, those moral categories, make it so that our own choices, we accuse or excuse ourselves.
And so one day I go, you know, it's bad to judge people.
And then I all of a sudden realize I've just judged people by judging their judging.
And so you go, I have an incoherent ethical system and I have just done the thing I am condemning, right?
So you realize your own internal self-contradiction and realize that by your own standard, you're condemned.
So that's how I understand the inexcusability to work, both in terms of our conceptual idolatry and in terms of ethical judgments and the use of the law to judge us.
And the two keys to being held responsible are there has to be a judge to judge us, and there has to be a law by which we're judged.
And our false view of the judge is bogus, and it's obvious that we are lying to ourselves and our own standards we break.
And then God's the actual judge, and his standard is the actual standard, and we're guilty under those as well.
And so, woe is me.
I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips.
It should be the only appropriate response from anybody.
Right.
Now, that's all really good.
The only thing that I would say in response is at this point, I think I'm.
Because I'm with you, because I've all, you know, as I've taught Romans 1 on multiple occasions, I've always, you know, tried to emphasize that Romans 1 doesn't merely say, and this goes to your point,
because I think you're exactly right Romans 1 doesn't merely communicate that the attributes of God, his existence, his holiness, his divine nature, his deity, Godhead, and also his power, his eternal power, omnipotence, and Infinitude and eternality, and all these things.
Romans 1 doesn't merely say that the created cosmos, God's handiwork outside of man himself, by means of everything else that God has made, that God's creation testifies and speaks, communicates these truths the truth of God's existence and the truth of many, not all in an exhaustive sense, but many of his attributes.
Romans 1 doesn't merely say that, that creation testifies or speaks about God.
But Romans 1 goes further and says that these things have been clearly perceived.
So it's not just creation has sent a message, that God has sent a message through creation.
It's also man has to be included in this equation because it's also God has made creation in such a way that creation is speaking about God, about its maker.
Also, God has made man in such a way.
That man is receiving the message.
So it's not just that the message goes out from creation, but the message is received by the pinnacle of earthly creation, God's image bearing creatures, man.
And that's precisely why man is, at the end of the day, without an excuse, that is morally culpable, because it's not just that God was faithful.
And this, I mean, you could argue that this would be enough, but God and his generosity and his kindness and his mercy and everything about him, he goes much further.
God is not merely faithful.
To make sure that his creation sends the message, but he's also been faithful to make sure that mankind receives the message.
It's been clearly perceived, not just clearly communicated by creation, but clearly perceived is the word that Romans 1, if I'm remembering correctly, uses.
So not just message has been sent out, but message received.
And because, so the culpability of man, I think, is twofold.
It's not just that man is morally responsible because the message is there written in the sky.
And in the trees and the forest and rivers and everywhere he looks and everything he hears, it's not just the message is there, but also God has constructed not just the creation to speak the message, but man in such a way that the message is within him.
The message is not just outside of him to be observed, but inside of him in such a way that it is perceived.
And so I guess I don't know how to think about it because you've raised some good points.
As of now, I think I would want to say that both are true.
Instead of just that, I want to say that no, there really is an observational factor of like creation outside of man really is speaking something true about God that can be observed.
And also, there really is something in man in that image.
You know, the image of God has been tarnished, but a vestige still remains.
And in the remaining image of God that all people have, there's something in man.
That testifies to the reality of God, the truth of God, the glory of God, holiness of God, and the law of God and man's moral obligation to submit to that law, that it's both outside of man and inside of man.
I guess is where currently I think that's where I would hang my coat.
Is that different than what you're saying?
Am I saying the same thing?
Because it sounds like you're really going to give the full emphasis or at least the lion's share to what is in man, the Imago Dei, whereas I'm kind of.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm splitting it like a 50 50.
Sure.
I think so.
What I would want to say is, you know, Augustine uses this analogy that natural theology or natural law is sort of like invisible ink written on a page.
And experience is like the heat of a flame that causes the invisible ink to become visible.
And so it's like the other thing.
So this idea that you have.
You have these categories, you have these attributes that are in the mind that are unavoidable to human thought.
And you're structuring them.
And you start to, as you engage with experience, you're starting to think about things.
You go, well, is this like this?
And how is that?
And is man this?
And so you start to posit stuff about the things you're experiencing.
It's sort of the process.
And so the experience is a kind of opportunity.
To think and to analyze and to start imposing the thought categories on.
The other thing that Augustine talks about is his book called De Magistra, or Of the Teacher.
And it's this fantastic little, it's almost like a platonic dialogue.
It's like 30 pages.
And it's a little conversation between Augustine and his son who tragically died.
But the dialogue is about does any man really teach any other man?
Language And Symbols00:02:00
And he uses this discussion of language.
And how language is signs and we you can't really understand symbols or signs without without already knowing the language, right?
You, if I, if i'm talking to you in Russian, you wouldn't understand it unless you happen to know Russian.
Do you know Russian?
No okay, right.
So if I spoke to you in Russian, then the the result would be that you'd be like, I don't know what you're saying right, but if you know Russian, then you can.
So, as I talk to you in English, i'm using words that are symbols for thoughts and you interpret those symbols and you understand what those symbols mean, and so if you know the language, Then you can interpret what's being said.
If you don't know the language, then the signs are just meaningless gobbledygook.
That makes sense.
Except I don't even think Russians understand the symbols of Russians because every time I try to read a great novel, and I've done a couple of them, but Doetsky or whatever, I feel like the names of characters, especially in fiction, novels, is like Ivan.
Ivan Isk, Ivan Eski, Ivan, like, and it's like 27 different names that you have to keep in the back of your mind, and 26 of them are just variations of the same name.
You're like, this can't, you can't be serious.
Like, what, like, why, why can't it just be, even, even if it's Russian, why can't we have just very different, distinct names, you know, and, and where they don't all sound the same?
So it's like, is it, is it this character?
And you read like four paragraphs to realize, oh, this is a whole other guy who's talking right now.
So Russians, I feel like they got to do both.
How many names do Russians have?
I mean, there's absolutely, maybe that's the problem.
Maybe there's only like two names, you know, maybe like, like, uh, like, like when you think of, uh, everybody being named Muhammad, it's like, there's got to be another name.
So, the Russians have solved that problem.
They have plenty of names.
They do not run out of names.
Commandments And Sins00:15:29
This is absolutely true.
And so, yeah, the other problem with Dostoevsky novels is like every five minutes, somebody is like passing out or going into hysterical crying fit.
You're like, is this what life is like in Russia?
It's like a Russian anime.
All right, go ahead.
Sorry.
So, that thing right there, this idea that you have to use the symbols, you interpret symbols, you have to know the meaning of the symbols to interpret it rightly.
So, the world.
We only end up interpreting the world rightly with a Christian worldview.
And so we can grab hold of things to point to people to use to argue.
We can go, well, is the sun changing?
Like, okay, so it's not eternal, right?
And then the Egyptians that are worshiping him might go, oh, you're like, wow.
But we're going backward in.
We're going in.
We have the Christian worldview.
It's been given to us.
And as a result, we can go back and we can deconstruct.
And so we can use their experience to engage with them to deconstruct.
And then we can posit a coherent worldview, the Christian worldview, and we can argue for reasons why the denial of it's absurd.
But it is not, our experience of the natural world is not sufficient to get knowledge, to have certainty about things, apart from the revelation of God's spoken word, the propositional revelation that comes to us.
Until we understand and believe what he has said, we don't have knowledge.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
But I think we have to, so getting into epistemology here, but I think there are degrees of knowledge because we have to say that, because I'm with you in terms of eternal knowledge, true, the truest truths, the deep magic, you know, as Aslan would say, that only comes by regeneration.
You have to become a new creature in Christ Jesus and actually have spiritual eyes and spiritual ears in order to discern these things.
But we can't say, on the flip side, we can't say less knowledge or a different kind of knowledge, but we can't say no knowledge.
Because the whole argument of Romans chapter one is that man is condemned on the basis of him having knowledge.
And so that's why he's guilty, because he can't stand before God and claim not to know.
He does know.
And then that's why he has to constantly lie and suppress the truth.
So it's not just he hasn't received the truth.
It's not, number one, that the truth isn't out there, the truth has been clearly displayed.
Also, the truth has been perceived at some level.
The message has been clearly sent out.
The message has been received all at a natural level, natural man, apart from regeneration.
And on that basis, enough that truth that has gone out and that truth that has been the partial truth of natural revelation, apart from special revelation, and the partial perception, reception of that truth by natural man is that partial truth, partial truth reception is enough.
It's sufficient.
For the kind of knowledge, whatever label we want to give it, the kind of knowledge that's sufficient for what?
Sufficient to condemn, sufficient for damnation.
Yeah.
So I just, we can talk about knowledge and the definition of the term and all that kind of stuff in our time when we talk about epistemology.
But I think that I get what you're saying.
I agree with you that there's a sufficient thought process that's occurring that a person's condemned.
And so I think that your inexcusability is based upon your thoughts.
And every man is inexcusable, has had thoughts that make them inexcusable, except for the God-man, Jesus Christ.
And so, yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Cool.
All right, go on.
So when we think about this, we've got this idea of natural law and the moral element of it.
We just spent a bunch of time on the idea of the moral culpability of man based upon natural law.
And if natural law is something that's written on the heart, if it is the stuff that we're inexcusable because of, then what we're going to have is we go, okay, natural law, what does it align with?
And the historic reform view has been that the natural law is the moral law.
So, and that moral law is the Ten Commandments.
And so what you end up with is you basically say, okay, the Ten Commandments are written in the heart, and they're going to be in a corrupted form.
So we have the material out of which the Ten Commandments are made, the categories, the attributes, the definitions that it's made out of, and then we're going to misconstruct.
And so we have these, the human laws that are sort of like House of Mirrors version of the Ten Commandments.
And that's what humans come up with because of the corruption.
Now, that idea that the moral law is what the natural law is.
If you come from the reformed conception of what natural law is, you have to end up saying, if you want to take natural law and apply it to the state, you have to end up saying that the state and its authority and what crimes are versus sins, those things are part of the moral law.
And the distinction of the civil law and the idea that civil authority was given at a particular time, you have to abandon.
So, what you end up doing when you try to say that what the state ought to do is a part of the moral law in terms of the natural law is you have to say that the state is inherent in man.
And so now the state becomes a creation ordinance.
And so that's why you hear all these guys that love to talk about natural law in terms of a Christian state.
They'll go back to the idea of Adam a lot because it's essential to their doctrine that the.
That the state be inherent in man.
So, do you not think, real quick, do you not think that in a prelapsarian world, if there had been no fall, that there would be no state?
There would be no state.
The state is the minister of wrath.
Where there is no sin, there's no need for it.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Okay, that would be another place where we differ.
Even Doug Wilson, who is, for the most part, he's far more Ventilian than he is.
But even Wilson has argued that there would still be a necessity for determining which side of the road we are going to drive on.
Who makes that decision?
Those kinds of regulations.
So there wouldn't be sins to punish with the sword, but that there would still be certain judgments that would need to be rendered for civilization.
And I found that compelling.
That's kind of where I'm at.
But go ahead.
I want to hear you out.
I'm curious.
Sure.
I mean, so we can like it that tells us, like, what gauge of rail should we build railroads with, right?
Or how should plugs work for electrical power?
Like, should we use the European standard or should we use the American standard?
I think that those are entirely easily dealt with in terms of a free exchange through voluntary contracts and how trade works.
And so I think that the pre-fall institutions are the individual and the household.
And so what we find is the church as distinct from the world established in Genesis 3 and the first excommunications in Genesis 4.
And then you have the state being established with this power of the sword for vengeance-taking and just warfare in Genesis 9.
And so if the state exists before Genesis 9, then God was just reaffirming that we have the power of the sword to avenge and institutes capital punishment there.
But it's already actually existed prior to that.
And with Cain, when he put the curse on, don't punish Cain, and if you do punish Cain, you'll get a worse curse.
That was just a special exception as opposed to highlighting the problem of not having the state.
So you end up with a pretty dramatically different framework.
And so when you have natural law and you say the state comes from nature or from man's nature, then you end up saying that what are crimes and what are sins is also a part of the things that can be determined through this sort of understanding of human nature or of the category of natural law, the moral law.
And so if you think about instead, if you say that divine law that's given in terms of special revelation is what establishes the state, and in fact, if the Noahic covenant is an administration of the covenant of grace wherein the state is established, then you have this time of special institutionalization of the state,
and we have an entire dependency on special revelation for what the state ought to do.
Now we do have a sense of justice that's a part of the natural law and so we're going to have responses but humans are going to mess that up so you're going to have our sense of justice is going to be more or less accurate based upon the culture and based upon the presuppositions we're operating on.
But the problem, the reality is we have no idea what the state should do and what things we should coercively use the state to make people do without God's word telling us the limits and features of the state.
I think we have some idea, but I'm 100% with you in terms of all those ideas will be corrupted.
All those ideas will.
I do think that there would be a natural bent because nature is under a curse and man's flesh, you know, the image of God has been tarnished and the sin nature and all these kinds of things that the bent will be towards tyranny or anarchy, no state at all or.
A wicked, overly domineering state.
We need special revelation to clearly define moral law and also to help us discern between sins and crimes.
And that is, like, those categories commonly are, that's one of the big mistakes that I continually run into.
I find that people are like, well, you're saying that there need to be forced conversions.
And I'm saying, no, I'm saying there needs to be forced morality.
Forced morality.
That the state, that's what the state does, is it legislates morality, not conversion.
Only the gospel can change people's heart.
But the law of God, when legislated and enforced by the civil magistrate, absolutely can curb sin at the outward behavioral level.
And that's precisely what the state is meant to do.
It's going to curb outward behaviors of sin, particularly though, when it falls into the category of crimes.
Like nobody in the Christian nationalist or theonomic camps are arguing for the thought police to enforce coveting.
The state cracks down on coveting.
When coveting crosses the line and moves to the expression of theft or murder or bearing false witness or one of the other commandments.
And then I would say the same for the first table of the law.
It's not the first commandment.
It's actually kind of funny.
Have you thought about this, David?
That the 10th, it's like bookends, like the first and the 10th of the 10 commandments.
Because I don't think that the state should crack down on the first either.
The first is a matter of the heart, having other gods before God, idolatry at the level of the heart.
But the first will become.
A crime when it moves from the private realm to the public realm in terms of images, especially public images.
Like you can't build a 90 foot tall, you know, golden statue of Nebuchadnezzar and command veneration.
You know, like that's not just a sin, that's a crime.
And a righteous Christian state would tear down that statue or do what Moses did grind it into dust, put it in the water, and make everybody drink it, you know, something like that.
So, but the first commandment, you could have idols of the heart, as even Christians often do.
But then, when it becomes an image, a public image, where you're in an obligatory fashion, you're even requiring others or even tempting others, drawing others towards idolatry in the public square.
And then, third one, blasphemy, especially when it's very blatant and brash and public, mocking Jesus publicly, like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence did a few years back, where they had to mock Jesus on the cross and nuns that were, you know, Gyrating in front of it, like, yep, straight to jail.
Like, yep, that's a crime.
And then the fourth with blue laws and Sabbath breaking.
And all those things would have to be fleshed out in godly ways.
But my point is, I find it interesting that the 10th commandment, so you have the two tables of law, how it pertains or obligation to God or obligation to neighbor.
The last commandment, the 10th, is a sin, not a crime, but it's a sin that if we don't fight it at the level of the heart by grace, Will then, the 10th commandment then expresses itself in commandments five through nine, which are crimes.
And then on the first table of the law over here, the first commandment, sin of the heart, private, it's not a crime.
But if we don't fight it by grace at the level of the heart, it will express itself outwardly in commandments two, three, and four, which would enter, you know, cross those categorical lines from sin not only being a sin, but now being a sin and a crime.
And I think we, you're not going, I, I'm saying all that.
I find it interesting, but also I'm agreeing with you in the sense that you're not going to derive those conceptions by mere reason.
You're going to have to look at scripture, particularly all the case laws and civil codes that we have given to Israel.
Otherwise, you just look at the Ten Commandments and say, well, I guess the civil magistrate punishes none of it or all of it.
But the only way that you can look at the summary law of moral law in the Decalogue.
And then begin to categorize what belongs to the state and what's punishable by the state and what's not, and what belongs to the church, and these kinds of things is by looking at all.
You can't just look at Exodus 20.
You have to then look at all the case laws and all the civil codes and see what was actually punished.
And then that brings up the next question is, you know, sins versus crimes.
And then if it is a crime, what's the punishment?
Because otherwise, that too falls to the reason of man.
Structure Of The Law00:15:21
And it's just like, well, we think that.
Uh, murder gets a slap on the wrist, you know.
Or we think that if you murder someone, then we murder your whole family, you know.
Like, what how do you know to not go too little, not go too far?
Um, like you need special revelation for those things.
I think what we just communicated about the first and 10th commandments, I think, is really neat.
I had historically kind of thought about blasphemy as fitting under the first commandment, but I think as you've described it, I actually think you're right, it fits under the second commandment in terms of the criminal codes that would fit into.
And so, I actually think that conception that you've got is neat there, and I think it is a neat concept.
Mirroring structure in the law.
So, thank you for pointing that out.
The other thing is, you and I did a show a while back where we talked about the law.
I think it was kind of like a primer on theonomy or something like that.
And we talked about the structure of the law and how you have like the big principal laws, the apodictic law, you know, the two great commandments, the Ten Commandments.
And you got below that, you got case laws, the if then statements, and they fit inside of those.
And then below that, you've got the approved and disapproved examples.
And so, you've kind of got this structure for categorizing and organizing the law.
And so, I think without that structure, without that glorious revelation from God of oughts, we're going to come up with some messed up conceptions of what we ought to do.
And when you get it to the state and you go into the sin-crime distinction and just penalties and where to use coercive power, it becomes a huge tyrannical mess.
And like you mentioned, anarchy or tyranny is the big thing.
I think tyranny is a general tendency.
And one of the big problems with tyranny, when you don't understand the institutions, right?
There's the individual, the household, the church, and the state.
When you blend those institutions, the tendency is for the city of man to have the state be the god and to usurp the church and to usurp the household and to usurp the individual.
And so you've got like the example of like Nimrod, who was a mighty hunter before the Lord.
What was he hunting?
He was hunting men, and he was enslaving them to go build his cities.
And so, and to build, you know, ultimately there's, you know, the Tower of Babel and all that.
So you have this idea of of tyranny and despotism in particular.
Despotism, a despotase in Greek is a manager, right?
And the woman is supposed to be the despotase of the oikos.
She's a manager of the household, it's one of the things that she's called to do.
And this managing of the home is when you're the patriarch or matriarch of a home, all the children and all the servants, you can manage in extraordinary detail.
You have the right to do that, you know, and that's the prerogative and power there.
If the state, if you have a despotism and the despot, thinks of himself like Kim Jong Il or Un or whichever one is running around these days.
And you start to think, I can just make everybody do whatever I want in extraordinary detail.
You've made the whole state into sort of the property, the personal property of that dictator or that despot.
And so he thinks of the state like his house.
And I think that the Word of God gives us the institutions.
And the Word of God tells us the authority and power of the institutions.
And the state is super complex.
And you have to exercise this power where you were exercising dominating power and force on other people to demand obedience with the threat of the sword.
And so that's the most ham handed, big thumbed power of all of the powers that God has given to man.
And so if we don't have the proper limits and we try to go in and go, we're going to manage sin.
And so we're going to be like, you didn't speak with a good enough tone, off with his head.
That obedience was not prompt enough, off with his head.
So, like, You know, this, this, this, like the kind of stuff you'd want to discipline children for, you start using the sword to manage that thing, and you have this like horrific tyranny.
Yes.
Yep.
So, so this, this, this thing.
So, if we say natural world.
Real quick, that's part of the problem that we have right now.
And I know you agree is our entire society, our entire culture is managerial.
So, like what you're, it's such an irony and it's a tragic irony.
But what people see today, what they would call authoritarian, Or tyrannical or domineering categorically is not.
And then what actually is tyrannical and domineering is what we actually have.
So, like, people think, well, if the state said that you can't have calls to prayer, sirens five times a day, calls to Muslim prayer.
That's tyrannical.
That's authoritarian.
That's a breach of the First Amendment.
It's like you always have to tell, like, what's the first word of the First Amendment?
People don't understand, not even close to understanding the First Amendment.
But that's tyrannical.
When it's like, no, telling people to the centimeter what size screw they have to use to construct a porch in their backyard is tyrannical.
That's like, that's.
Actual tyranny that that's the tyranny that we're under is this the fact that nobody, the fact that the government knows exactly how much I owe them in taxes, but somehow I still have to figure it out every year.
And nobody can ever, nobody can ever contest it because it's like 9,000 pages of tax law, you know, that nobody could ever figure out.
And then IRS agents, they're like, you know what, we should spend, you know, $80 million on giving them guns.
And it's like, what?
What in the world?
And, you know, so you got to figure out how much you owe.
And then you go to them and say, okay, I'm going to pay you this much.
And they say, nope, that's wrong.
It's more.
Then why don't you just give me a bill?
You know, and so, anyways, but that's what it is.
And the sad thing is, it's also, I think, in the ecclesiastical realm, it's the same theme.
I don't know what it is and how we got here exactly.
I have ideas, but that seems to be the overarching theme, not just with the state, but all across the board.
It's the managerial class, the managerial culture.
And the church is the same way.
So it's like we'll say the state is tyrannical if they ever thought about saying we're a distinctly Christian nation or adopting the Apostles' Creed as a preamble to the Constitution.
That's tyranny.
But they can have a million different laws and regulations across the board with everything else.
And that's fine.
So they can be managerial.
And then the same thing in the church.
You preach something that's clearly God's word, like women should be beautiful, and beauty for a woman is defined not by perishable beauty outwardly, but the imperishable beauty of the heart, which is defined chiefly by a quiet and gentle spirit.
And that will be viewed as authoritarian, tyrannical.
But on the flip side, being a pastor and having 47 different midweek programs.
You know, on Wednesday nights and Tuesday nights and this and that and the other.
And like, you got to be in a life group.
And if you're not, you know, then you're, you're, you're failing and we're going to give you a guilt trip and blah, blah, blah.
And like, all these different things.
That's, we're like, well, that's fine.
That's just trying to foster community.
And that, like, it's like, well, no, but he actually doesn't have any jurisdiction to do that.
He can, he can ask people to show up on the Lord's day and worship in spirit and in truth with the ordinary means of grace.
He can ask that.
But there's actually, he actually has no authority for Wednesday night.
He could suggest it maybe as a good thing.
But like, but no, there is no mom's prayer meeting that is morally obligatory.
That a pastor, like, just like, you know, so it's, I just find, I don't know, as you were talking, it just got me thinking.
I find that interesting that like right now we're suffering under the tyranny of a thousand little laws that come from a managerial class.
And it's funny that you used the wife in the home.
As an example, because I think there's a connection there too, that the managerial role, and correct me if you disagree with me, but I think it's a uniquely in God's design, it is predominantly, maybe not exclusively, but predominantly a feminine role.
Whereas I feel like the going out and conquering new hills and expansion, and that's a uniquely masculine role.
But then giving to, once the next hill has been conquered, and And once the next town has been built and handing that over to the shield maiden in the home to manage those things as you go back out to fight and to expand, to work and to keep, like Adam is giving this twofold role working and keeping, providing, but also protecting.
So it's like conquering more and then defending that which has been conquered.
It's this fighting and building, fighting and building, sword and trout, like Nehemiah and Ezra.
And that seems uniquely, inherently masculine.
But managing.
Seems inherently feminine.
And right now, you look at the church and it's really feminine.
And you have very managerial church leadership.
And then you look at the state and by golly, wouldn't you know it, it's a gynocracy.
It's very feminine.
We have a woman currently running for president.
And wouldn't you know it, 10,000 little managerial laws, but no actual, you know, but on the world stage, we're a laughing stock.
IQ has gone down for America.
Wealth has gone down for America.
Life expectancy has gone down for America.
On all the metrics, education, we're dumber than ever before.
The only thing that keeps going up for America is imprisonment.
And so it's funny that just this transfer from 10 commandments to 10,000.
I think G.K. Chesterton said that.
Like, you can have 10 commandments.
If you will not, you'll have 10,000.
And it's all the meticulous, incessant managerial, And all of this has also come at the same time, and I don't think it's a coincidence, as our embrace of feminism.
But it's not just the state.
I see it in the church also, is my point.
Right.
I think the idea that men are supposed to take risks and have a little bit more of the pioneer type of work and that women doing some of the, dealing with the administration, the managing of it, the farming, right?
You pioneer the land and you kind of prepare it and you have rough hume, whatever, and there's sort of detail.
I think it's not managing of the detail.
Managing, I don't think by itself is inherently feminine, but I do think women are designed to tend to be focused in, have strong relational things, and have a really like strong focus on that detail there.
And men are designed to generally be more okay with letting more stuff go.
And that makes it so that we can be more effective at interacting with other powers that are outside of our jurisdiction.
I think that's a part of the way the Fifth Commandment is written on our heart.
And so we do want to be good managers of the stuff that's in our jurisdiction.
But I do think that there is a special gifting, generally speaking, to women.
That they are better at managing those details and the maintenance, right?
So, and generally, men are better at getting the new stuff.
And so, I agree with that.
I agree with the general point that you're making there and all that kind of stuff.
And just, I don't want some man to hear what you just said and use that as an excuse to not be a hard worker managing stuff that he's got jurisdiction over.
That's true.
And a lot of guys are apathetic when it comes to organization and absolutely would be tempted to take my argument and say, hey, the reason why my life is falling apart is because I'm just so masculine.
Right.
I'm being a lion.
I'm just sleeping in the day, waiting to fight off another lion if he comes.
So that's all.
That's my only concern about that.
Good point.
Okay.
So when we have this natural law theonomy thing coming on, one of the big critiques of theonomy is you go, well, theonomy doesn't allow the government to do all the stuff I want it to do because there are limits on its power.
And I want the trains to run on time.
So, you know, and, you know, there's other things that I'd like to have fixed.
And so I think that the messianic view of the state, the managerial view of the state, the desire for a strong man to come along and fix our problems, the worship of princes and the putting of trust in them, the state olatry and the fact that we think the state is the solver of all the problems, and our like pretense like, conservatives think that the military is full of hyper competent people.
And liberals think that like the State Department is full of like hyper competent people.
And it's like in reality, they're both just the post office.
Yeah.
You know, and it's like there are some magnificent soldiers and Marines and airmen and sailors.
And those magnificent soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, and I don't know, what do we call Space Force people now?
Space Forcees, spacers, I don't know, Starship commanders.
Okay.
And the Starship guys who work for Elon.
Right.
Right.
So when we think about, when we think about.
All of those, the magnificent ones all hate the bureaucratic managerial nonsense awful that is the system.
Right.
And so, so they, I think, I think of all of the, you know, war fighters that I have talked to that deal with stuff, they hate the system and the bureaucracy and the institution.
And they have some of the people that they worked with that they love because of the fact that they had, you know, virtues and desire to do right things and all that kind of stuff.
Right.
So I think the liberals look at the peacetime bureaucracy as full of intelligent and whatever people, and then conservatives tend to look at the wartime system and view it that way.
And so what we need to realize is that it's all this horrific nightmare, and Elon should fire 95% of the people in every institution that we currently have that's a federal one.
I think he will.
Yeah, I really do.
Government Bloat Issues00:03:05
What?
Say it again?
So no, yeah.
So that's great.
I mean, the government's ridiculous.
The federal government's absurd.
I mean, all levels of government are bloated.
And so we just have an absurd level of government everywhere.
And what we do is we just forcibly extract money through tyrannically high taxation of confiscatory levels.
And then we also cheat everybody out of stuff by debasing the currency constantly.
And we can talk about wanting to lower taxes, but when we spend the money, we're really printing the money.
And so the taxes come from the spending.
The spending.
is the problem.
And so you go, what should the government do?
What is the mission of the civil government?
What has God commanded it to do?
And it's supposed to be an avenger of God.
It is a minister of wrath.
And so its purpose is to punish criminals and its purpose is to wage just wars.
And if we're doing other stuff besides that, then it's not serving its purpose.
And so what we find is that governments don't deal with disputes of law efficiently.
The court system's horrific.
And so it takes forever to deal with disputes about breaking contracts.
And it takes forever to deal with any sort of criminal process.
I mean, it costs like the equivalent of the wages a person, an average American is going to earn in their entire life to deal with prosecuting one criminal.
The inefficiency of our system is absurd.
And so we're terrible at the actual purposes of government.
And in the waging of warfare, as opposed to having a citizenry that is armed with limited government that makes it so that we're not an imperial power, right, as opposed to having a republic of a citizen soldiery, we have this huge standing Or me, and we put it all over the place, and we spend enormous amounts on enormous numbers of things.
And so every element of what the government does in the United States now is bad.
Like there is this horrific managerial bloat, administrative bloat, bureaucratic bloat, regulatory bloat, the bloat of laws, the bloat of rulings, the degree to which it's just this horrific thing.
And the law of God puts restraints on it.
And so, what I want to say is, people don't like it because the government doesn't do all the stuff they want it to do then.
And I want to suggest to anybody who's not satisfied with that, the problem is them and not God's definition of what the government's supposed to do.
Jurisdiction Limits00:02:23
All right.
That's good.
Okay.
Well, I feel like any final thoughts for this episode?
I feel like we're going to probably continue the conversation.
We want to talk about.
I would like to, you know, like I said in the beginning of the episode, I kind of maybe overpromise and going to underdeliver.
And, you know, since we're talking about the state, you know, it's only fitting that I promise something and under deliver.
But maybe we can make this, I'm thinking we can make this, you know, part two, if that's something that you're comfortable with, where we talk about, okay, so now let's take this concept and let's talk about immigration, because that's outside of, you know, punishing enemies, both domestic and foreign, you know, waging just wars and, you know, agents of wrath for those who are criminals.
Like you said, What about immigration?
I say it's outside, but if somebody's coming illegally, then they are a criminal.
And you would argue, right, that it does fall to the state to be a protector of borders?
Yes, absolutely.
That's the extent of the jurisdiction.
And so if somebody crosses the border and they're not authorized to do so, you've got an invasion.
Yep.
Great.
You've got trespassing there.
So now the question is what do you do about that and who's allowed to come across?
The whole legal immigration versus illegal immigration thing.
And, you know, obviously, if you let somebody on your land, they're not trespassing.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, then let's, if you're okay with it, let's go ahead and make that an episode two and talk about how this applies to immigration.
If there's any room for prudence, or if it's simply, no, it's this is what you're allowed.
This is what's clear of how you can mitigate immigration.
And there's no mitigating factors beyond these.
That is a conversation that I think would be really fruitful to have.
And I think that'll play into kind of demonstrating as a case study natural law versus theonomy.
And then in that, maybe we can also have the conversation of how do we know what we know in epistemology.
Great.
So it seems like I filibustered myself into getting another show.
Fruitful Future Conversations00:01:17
Yeah, you did.
But to be fair, not just you, I was over here talking about stars, you know, and the stars speaking more loudly, and then leading up to Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus.
And I worked in the Nephilim.
Somehow, some way, and did that.
And Michael Heiss.
You had dragons in there.
Yeah, we had dragons in there.
So it's, I don't think it's, it would not be fair if I said that it was your fault.
You should just tell people this is a show about dragons.
The title should just be.
There you go.
We talked about dragons.
We'll get, yeah, we can get 50,000 views like that.
Nephilim brings all the boys to the yard.
That's the strategy here.
It's like, you know, you've got giants, maybe just a dash of mermaids, and then boom, Christian nationalism, theonomy, you know, like people like, I actually did have, you know, I've had a few people email us and it's been encouraging.
Theonomic mermaids.
Yeah.
What'd you say?
Theonomic mermaids.
Theonomic mermaids, yeah.
Writing dragons.
There you go.
But I've had, it has been funny.
I've had a number of emails where people have reached out and they said, they've said, I'll be honest, I came for giants and I stayed for the base theology.
So, I mean, it works.
It really does work.
So, all right, we'll land the plane here for today and we will pick it up next time.