Category: Sermons

As we come to the Matthew text we need to begin by clarifying who Jesus is dealing with when He says,

“”Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy” (v. 43).”

44 But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may prove yourselves to be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors, do they not do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Even the Gentiles, do they not do the same? 48 Therefore you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The question needs be asked here is where has Jesus’ audience heard what is recorded as having been said? Where would they have heard that they were to love their neighbor but hate their enemy?

Is that somewhere in the Old Testament? Does the Law and the Prophets teach that principle?

You can scour the OT and you will not find any command to hate thy enemy. Jesus here, when He says, “You have heard it said,” is not quoting from the Law & the Prophets. He is quoting from the talmud like expostulations that were being said by the teachers of the law that Jesus was dealing with during his incarnation.

And that such was the attitude of Jews during that time is seen readily from chaps like the historian Tacitus who could write of the Jews during this time frame;

“They readily show compassion to their own countrymen, but they bear to all others the hatred of an enemy”

St. Paul describes these same Jews being those who “contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak unto the Gentiles that they might be saved” (1 Thess. 2:15, 16).

Such was he disposition of the Jew. They loved their own which would not be a problem except that they insisted that to love their own they must also hate the Goyim.

A. W. Pink says on this score;

“The Jews have ever been a people marked by strong passions—loving their friends fervently and hating their enemies intensely; and from the Pharisees’ corrupting of the law of God so as to make it square with the prejudices of their disciples, the most evil consequences followed.”

This Jewish mindset wherein all those outside the Jewish circle are hated is what Jesus is speaking against here.

The Pentateuch will be searched in vain for any precept which required the Hebrews to entertain any malignity against their foes: thou shalt “hate thine enemy” was a rabbinical invention pure and simple.

Instead the Old Covenant taught;

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18)

So, the principle here is to determine ahead of time that cunning and wickedness against those outside your clan, people or tribe is perfectly acceptable is contrary to Jesus own words.

Now here the alert person will raise a point of objection and we may say rightly so. The alert person will point to texts like

“Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee? I hate them with a perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies” (Ps. 139:21, 22).

2 Chronicles 19:2
Jehu son of Hanani the seer went out to confront him and said to King Jehoshaphat, “Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the LORD? Because of this, the wrath of the LORD is upon you.

Psalm 26:5
I hate the mob of evildoers, and refuse to sit with the wicked.

Psalm 31:6
I hate those who cling to worthless idols, but in the LORD I trust.

Psalm 119:158
I look on the faithless with loathing because they do not keep Your word.

Psalm 139:22
I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them as my enemies.

Proverbs 29:27
An unjust man is detestable to the righteous, and one whose way is upright is detestable to the wicked.

And pointing to these texts they will ask how can we at one and the same time love our enemies and hate the wicked.

The answer that resonates from Church history and frankly though not completely satisfying still is the best answer going is that the loving our enemies and hating the wicked must be understood as not being in the same manner or the same sense.

We must make distinctions here between private personal enemies and public enemies of God and His Kingdom.

A private personal enemy may well still be a Christian. They have done you a severe wrong. They have maligned your name or cheated you personally in some manner. Here we are to be like our Father in Heaven who sends His rain on the just and unjust. We must not take vengeance into our own hands. We must live with the promise that God will repay. We’ve all had people like this in our lives at one time or another. You can hardly be in a Church very long and be injured by these people. They are broken people who are babes in sanctification. They spew a cutting word or by some misunderstanding of the meaning of Scripture they are driven to denounce you.

Very well then … we must entrust the matter to our heavenly Father. We must not repay evil for evil. We surely can defend ourselves but the Scripture teaches here that we should return good for evil thus pouring burning coals on their head – thus communicating the idea of bringing burning shame and remorse upon those whose hostility is repaid with kindness. We bring them a meal when they are ill. We visit them in the hospital.

We see Jesus Himself living out this truth in His life.

We read in the Mt. 8 right after finishing the Sermon on the Mt. of the account where Jesus heals the Centurion’s slave. How much more of an enemy can one find than a Gentile Centurion who is part of the hated occupying force of the Nation?

So, in a living illustration of what Jesus himself has called for, Jesus goes to heal the Centurion’s slave. We see the same when Jesus heals the child of the Canaanite woman. These were non-Jews and yet Jesus shows the love to them that He is requiring of those who would be His disciples.

Very well that is how we deal with our personal enemies. But how are we to deal with God’s enemies?

How are we to deal with those who are open and inveterate in their revolt against God, those who are a menace to His cause and His people? The answer from the texts above is we righteously hate them, their cause and their sin. We pray imprecatory prayers that God would arise and cast them off. We plan to put snares before their feet. We do all that we can do to crush the public enemies of God. As the Holy Spirit says in Romans, “We hate that which is evil and we cling to that which is good.” (Romans 12:9)

Now having said this we realize that it is not always easy to distinguish between a personal enemy and a public enemy of God. Sometimes those two can easily and so often do overlap. As such there is a need for discernment here and this is one place where prayer has to come in.

“O Father, you know I am a wicked man and desire nothing more than to call every slight against me a matter of someone being your public enemy. Help me to distinguish properly Father between your public enemies and my personal enemies. Help me to be generous with people and try and think the best of them. Help me also though not to allow my cowardice of public confrontation not make me stand up and denounce the wicked who are your public enemies. Grant me wisdom in these matters please.”

I hope I have cleared that up as much as possible.

We obviously have to try and make these kinds of distinctions between personal enemies and God’s public enemies. To just say that we must love everyone unconditionally is to turn Christianity into a suicide pact. Are we to love unconditionally the men and women of the New World Order who would sink the globe into the social order of Hell? Are we to love unconditionally the unrepentant pedophile and rapist? Are we to love unconditionally the minister sending people to hell by preaching Cultural Marxism from the pulpit thus representing Christianity to be something that it is not? Surely, to ask the questions is to answer the question. The Christian life does not require one to be a pacifist in order to serve in the Kingdom of God.

“Unconditional love is a more revolutionary concept than any other doctrine of revolution. Unconditional love means the end of discrimination between good and evil, right and wrong, better and worse, friend and enemy, and all things else. Whenever anyone asks you to love unconditionally, they are asking you to surrender unconditionally to the enemy.”~~RJR

So the Scripture does not teach unconditional love is the sense we lose the ability to hate they who are evil.

Now we need to continue to consider this requirement of our Lord Christ to love our enemy – our personal enemy. We must ask what to love our enemy concretely means.

And here we run into how the word “love” has been redefined thus leading us astray in these matters. As all of you know love has become a word that really means nothing precisely because it means everything. Our English word love has come to mean something that is entirely emotional. We measure the definition of love as only against our un-sanctified emotions.

However, that is the not the Biblical use of the word “love.” In the Scripture love is not emotive before it is juridical. That is to say that love is defined as dealing with one’s neighbor justly according to God’s standard. If you love someone you treat them lawfully according to God’s law.

So, to love our enemy means to keep the law in relationship to them. Thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, bear false witness, steal, or covet or defraud your enemy. You will treat him as you would be yourself treated. You do not reason that since one is my enemy I no longer have to deal justly according to God’s law with them.

We must understand that love is defined as the fulfillment of God’s law towards one another. So, the command to love our enemies is the command to treat them consistent with God’s law. One doesn’t even have to have warm emotive fuzzies while doing so.

Secondly on the meaning of loving our enemy and so treating them consistent with God’s law, this means that there will be times when we are loving our enemy and our enemy is going to be screaming at us that we are not being very loving.

For example, when a minister preaches God’s law and by doing so exposes the wickedness of the wicked the wicked are typically going to screaming “you’re not being very loving.” Every time we lift us God’s standard for right and wrong someone is going to hurl at us the charge that we are not being loving to our enemy and to God’s enemies.

But as you know, speaking in such a way is the very essence of loving our enemy and showing God’s love to our enemy. It is not love to not warn someone standing on a railroad track that a train is bearing down on them and that they need to get their blankety blank tush off the tracks. Similarly it is not love to not warn the wicked that God is a just God who will by no means clear the wicked for their wickedness… to not warn them that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God…. to not warn them that God hates workers of iniquity. To not warn the wicked – family members, friends, and acquaintances – to not warn them and so speak frankly is not love but the very essence of hate and so we are compelled to speak in a way that the wicked will insist is not being loving.

Yet in speaking this way we are of all people loving our enemies.

All this came to the fore some years ago when a Pastor wrote me about the very matter we are examining this morning. Allow me to share that letter with you;

Dear Pastor,

Sodomites, then, are your enemy, and the enemy of your family, no? In such a situation, what does Christ command? “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” He presses his case even further: “…love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.” Then he points out that such behavior will bring us great reward from the “…Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

I don’t see much wiggle room there, or any exegetical tricks that allows for Orwellian twists of phrase like, “…my hating is an expression of my love for the Lord.”

I would be willing to wager that, if you pray with just a bit of persistence and ask God to grant you the ability to love sodomites, that he will grant you that ability, because he is a God of mercy who keeps his promises, and surely if he has commanded you to love your enemies, he will grant you the ability to do that. Not that it won’t be difficult: with God all things may be possible, but that doesn’t mean they are easy. No, usually the process is so difficult that it feels like your heart will break and you will likely just die before it’s over.

Best Regards,

Brad

Bret responds,

Dear Brad,

Your problem is that you are defining love differently than how God and I define love. We define love as acting towards others consistent with what God’s law teaches. God’s law teaches that sodomy requires the death penalty. You are defining love consistent with some kind of sentimental warm fuzzy. We are in different worlds and will not agree. You don’t think I’m being loving. I think my disposition towards the Christ hating sodomite to be the marrow of love. I also think your love is really hatred. I think it is hatred because you are not considering your hatred towards all those children who will be entrapped into the same lifestyle because sodomy was not criminalized. Your “love” for the sodomite, is hatred for the judicially innocent.

Of course you have completely ignored the command of Scripture to “hate that which is evil and to cling to that which is good.”

You also have to deal with the Psalmist who said…”21 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?

22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.”

Now keep in mind that if this is a Messianic Psalm then this is Christ saying this.

You accuse me of exegetical tricks and Orwellian twists. Allow me to return service and accuse you of reading the Scripture through your postmodern emotions.

Throughout the Scripture we find love being expressed by hatred. we see it in Jesus attacking His enemies. You remember those times … “White washed sepulchers full of dead men’s bones,” and “You are of your Father the devil,” and “brood of vipers.” Are you really going to tell me that Jesus was not being loving here?

And what of St. Paul who told his enemies to go castrate themselves?

Yours is an effeminate Christianity. I want nothing to do with it.

I would be willing to wager that, if you pray to the God who is and not the god of your imagination and ask the God who is to open your eyes and give you wisdom and the ability to have a love that hates that which is opposed to your love, the God of the Bible who is angular and will never be made smooth, will grant you the ability to understand how a biblical hate serves biblical love.

Praying that the Spirit of Christ will grant you repentance Brad.

Respectfully yours,

Pastor Bret

And so we agree with RJR on this matter when he wrote,

Unconditional love is contrary to the Bible. The charge of the young prophet Jehu, the son of Hanani, to King Jehoshaphat was blunt: “Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord” (II Chronicles 19:2). The commandment is “Ye that love the Lord, hate evil” (Psalm 97:10), and the prophet Amos repeated it: “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate” (Amos 5:15)….

The enemy of God’s justice and God’s law, of fundamental law and order, must not be loved. To love them is to condone their evil. The accusation of the psalmist is to the point: “18 When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst with him, And hast been partaker with adulterers” (Psalm 50:18). What we condone morally, we also approve of or delight in. Those who preach unconditional love are simply trying to disarm godly people in order that that evil may triumph.

RJR

ROOTS — pg. 626

So what succinct principles can we take from this survey of loving our enemies?

1. We are to love *our* enemies, not God’s enemies. To love God’s enemies is to seek the destruction of Christianity. We certainly may and must hate God’s enemies with a holy hatred. A man *cannot* love good if he does not hate evil.

2.) Love is not unconditional in the sense that one is required to open themselves to harm in the name of Love.

(Not even God’s love is unconditional. Remember, Jesus Christ met the conditions of God’s Holiness in order that we might have peace with God.)

3.) Love for Christians in their relation to others is defined as operating in terms of God’s law towards others — neighbors or enemies.

4.) Loving one’s people (neighbor) does not require hating those who are not one’s people or neighbor. This was the Jews mistake as Jesus handles the problem in the Sermon on the Mount.

An implication of #1 above when we think about hating God’s enemies we have to be done with the “Hate the sin love the sinner” mentality. While it might work as an abstraction in can never work in the concrete because one cannot artificially divorce actor and action. God does not throw sins into Hell, He throws sinners into Hell. There is no murder without a murderer or theft without a thief. Nowhere does the Bible teach “hate the sin, not the sinner” because, indeed, such is impossible. This is just a liberal bromide that’s been used, quite effectively, to undermine Christianity.

“Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, Who write misfortune (violence), Which they have prescribed. To rob the needy of justice, And to take what is right from the poor of My people, That widows may be their prey, And that they may rob the fatherless.” 3. And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your glory?

Isaiah 10:1-3

Here in Isaiah, the Prophet picks up a sub-theme he had begun in chapter 1.

Hear the word of the Lord,
    you rulers of Sodom;
listen to the instruction of our God,
    you people of Gomorrah!

Your rulers are rebels,
    partners with thieves;
they all love bribes
    and chase after gifts.
They do not defend the cause of the fatherless;
    the widow’s case does not come before them.

Isaiah 1:10, 23

Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter….

23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
but deny justice to the innocent.

Isaiah’s complaint here is about the ruling class in Judah – likely what we call legislators – were continually writing laws that today we would describe as anarcho-tyranny. That is laws were being passed that were manifestly unjust towards the needy, poor and have nots and so tyrannical while at the same time the lawless were exempt from law and so were allowed to be anarchistic. They were in short perpetrating the most egregious wrong under legal forms. It is the perversion from the seat of judgment that is being rebuked by the Prophet.

It is the same old story where God is cast out of consideration among the high born and among the political sock puppets of the high born. They who rise to these positions of political power and influence eventually think themselves as exempted from the ordinary lot of the little people even eventually concluding that they are not answerable to any God.
However, Isaiah tells them in vs. 3 that they will be the first to be visited with God’s judgment. Where will they turn in their day of Desolation? What good will all their power be in that day of visitation?

Isaiah brings back the reality of the God who remembers all before the potentates and sovereigns of Judah. He reminds them there is a God who sits in heaven and sees and who will mete out the whirlwind of divine justice in repayment for that wind of graft and injustice the Kings, Princes, and Leaders did sow.

In this warning Isaiah reminds his listeners and us today that there are many things which God appears to pass by in this life but which in point of fact is merely being set aside till that final day of visitation. How many have been the godly righteous through the centuries who counted on this reality. How many Christians suffered under the rule of a Nero or a Bishop Laud, or a Catherine Medici or Julian the Apostate or a King Charles I counting on the reality that God would not forget to bring a day of visitation upon wicked tyrants who would not repent.

Calvin offers here,

Accordingly, visitation must here be understood to mean the judgment by which God, in opposition to the waywardness and insolence of the ungodly, will bring them back like deserters. But if the judgments of God be so dreadful in this life, how dreadful will he be when he shall come at last to judge the world! All the instances of punishment that now produce fear or terror, are nothing more than preparations for that final vengeance with which he will thunder against the reprobate, and many things which he appears to pass by, he purposely reserves and delays till that last day. And if the ungodly are not able to bear these chastisements, how much less will they be capable of enduring his glorious and inconceivable majesty, when he shall ascend that awful tribunal, before which the angels themselves tremble! (Calvin)

So what this passage is dealing with is the reality of Tyranny and tyrants … of usurpation and Usurpers. The Prophet makes the case that God will by no means acquit the tyrant. God will have His way with the wicked who have oppressed His people and who have overthrown His law in favor of a completely subjective law that serves their own purposes and feathers their own nests. By this passage we can authoritatively say that “God Hates Tyrants,” and promises that there will be a payday some day unless they repent now.

And so today as we take up this matter we want to hold out again to the tyrants who might stumble across this message that will receive them as His own if they will but repent and trust Jesus Christ. If they will but end with their Tyranny and usurpation against God and His just law they can be assured that they will be received but should they spurn this offer from the Sovereign of the universe then they this warning will for eternity ringing in their ears.

Webster 1828 Dictionary defines TYR’ANNY as

1. Arbitrary or despotic exercise of power; the exercise of power over subjects and others with a rigor not authorized by law or justice, or not requisite for the purposes of government. Hence tyranny is often synonymous with cruelty and oppression.
We learn from this just what we read in the passage from Isaiah. Here as in Isaiah the point is that authority and power are be exercised in a illegitimate fashion inasmuch as they are exercised as inconsistent with God’s law revelation.

This is possibility of tyranny is a reality whether or not one holds that God’s law is revealed via natural law or whether one holds that God’s law is to be considered as being revealed via Holy Writ. In both of these positions there is the conviction that Tyranny and tyrants are possible and as such the governing rule of such men has no legal or moral legitimacy. There is nothing in their rule that compels or requires obedience.

Of course tyranny and the tyrant remains a problem for modern man. Indeed, we live right now under circumstances not completely different from Israel experience during Isaiah’s time. Americans likewise have those in leadership who decree unrighteous decrees and who write misfortune. The West is covered with tyrants and here in this country we have been living under tyranny of one degree or another for 150 years with each passing year finding the tyranny ever increasing in degree and substance.

There was a time when the Reformed Church above all other churches would lift its voice regarding tyrants, tyranny and Usurpers and Usurpation. There was a time when ministers would mount their pulpit and cause the walls to shake with their voices raised to heaven decrying tyranny. Such days have long since passed as the church as been declawed, defanged and tamed. Today we are told from seemingly every quarter that we must not raise our voices against tyrants and tyranny. We must “keep in our lane” we are told, completely ignoring the driving habits of our Fathers who joined with Isaiah and said things like we hear from the Divine Samuel Rutherford in his Lex Rex;

“Tyranny being a work of Satan, is not from God, because sin, either habitual or actual, is not from God: the power that is, must be from God; the magistrate, as magistrate, is good in nature of office, and the intrinsic end of his office, (Romans 13:4) for he is the minister of God for thy good; and, therefore, a power ethical, politic, or moral, to oppress, is not from God, and is not a power, but a licentious deviation of a power; and is no more from God…”

Calvinist Francis Hotman who posed this rhetorical question,

“If a state was once free, but later was conquered by a tyrant, was it not lawful to overthrow the tyrant and revert to that ancient Independence?”

“The nature of wicked princes is much like to warthogs, which if they be suffered to have their snouts in the ground, and be not forthwith expelled, will suddenly have their snouts in all the body; So they if they be obeyed in any evil thing be it ever so little will be obeyed in all at length.”

John Ponet

Magisterial Reformer

”When therefore the supreme ruler has become a tyrant, he must be deemed by his own perjury (as against the covenant document with the people) to have freed people from their oath, and not to the contrary, when the people assert their rights against him.”

Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos

(Thought to have been written by a one of two men … both of whom were Calvinists)

“As often as the Magistrate commands anything that is repugnant EITHER to the worship which we owe unto God OR to the love which we owe unto our neighbor, we cannot yield thereunto with a safe conscience. For as often as the commandment of God and men are directly opposed one against another, this rule is to be perpetually observed; that it is better to obey GOD than men.”

Theodore Beza

Calvin’s Successor in Geneva

“Resistance to tyrannical governors was, according to (Calvinist Pierre) Viret, a legitimate act of self defense. He even endorsed the use of disinformation if the tyrant were persecuting as analogous to resisting a band of robbers. If the political leader acted like a criminal, Viret thought he should be treated like a one, and the citizens were justified in resisting him.”

The Political Ideas of Pierre Viret

Robert Dean Linder — p. 131

The Calvinist Peter Martyr stipulated that others in the public weal, who were in ‘place and dignity lower than princes’ and yet in positions of responsibility to ‘elect the superiors,’ have power by existing laws to govern the commonwealth. If, therefore, a prince does not preform his covenant as promised, ‘it is lawful to constrain and bring him into order and by force compel him to fulfill the conditions and covenant which he had promised, and that by war when it cannot be otherwise done.’

And who does Martyr include in his list of “others in the public weal’ who had a responsibility to keep an eye on wandering Magistrates?

Why Peter Martyr includes “Ministers of the Churches,” as those who had a responsibility to keep an eye on wandering Magistrates.

“Loyal shoulders should sustain the power of the ruler so long as it is exercised in subjection to God and follows His ordinances; but if it resists and opposes the divine commandments, and wishes to make me share in its war against God, then with unrestrained voice, I answer back that God must be preferred before any man on earth.”

-John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 1159

“The Lord does not give Kings the right to use their power to subject the people to tyranny. Indeed when Liberty to resist tyranny seems to be taken away by princes who have taken over, one can justly ask this question; since kings and princes are bound by covenant to the people, to administer law in truest equality, sincerity and integrity; if they break faith and usurp tyrannical power by which they allow themselves everything they want: is it not possible for the people to consider together taking measures in order to remedy the evil?”

John Calvin

Sermon I Samuel Chapter 8

“…when constitutional limited government is abandoned, tyranny is a result. And citizens have a right to resist tyranny.”

– Robert Godfrey

(2010 Ligonier Regional Conference)

“When Tyranny is abroad, submission is a crime.”

Rev. Andrew Elliot

Election Sermon, 1765

Coming in the context of the English “Stamp Act”

Today that kind of preaching is largely considered “out of place.”

And my friends … my family in Christ, Tyranny is abroad and I for one will not submit. For almost 50 years we have put up with the work of the Tyrants who have tortured and killed the judicially innocent while inhabiting their sanctuaries of life. It has seemingly ended but our tyrant in chief of this country stands before God man and laments that it is a dark day in our history that this small portion of tyranny has come to an end.

But for every one portion of tyranny that seemingly passes us by our Luciferian tyrants prepare for us another crown of illegitimate and immoral law to press down upon our brows by passing legislation that overturns our political covenant as a people.

In the typical fashion of the Usurper and Tyrant our rulers pass an omnibus like legislation this week attacking our political covenant that was arrived upon in the darkness of hidden counsels and presented and passed without the opportunity to even fully read and dissect the legislation that has no passed the US Senate. No amendments were allowed to be offered to this legislation which had more the character of a drive by shooting in Chicago then well thought out and crafted legislation And all of it is fouled with the smell of control that the tyrant so much loves and which the Christ lover hates.

Tyranny now covers what has been called our charter of negative privileges. That document growing out of English common law that was itself so influenced by Biblical law. That document that was committed to explaining what the Federal Government could NOT do to the people in their states organized. That document that is commonly called our Bill of rights but perhaps should be more properly called the “Bill of Prohibitions.”

What happened this week is just the kind of thing that Isaiah was seeing in his time. Legislators who decree unrighteous decrees, and those who write misfortune (violence), Which they have prescribed. To rob the needy of justice.

With the tyrants work this week the Federal Government has broadened its ability to infringe the God ordained assignment to keep and bear arms. With the tyrants work this week all that is left of the Due Process guaranteed in the 5^th amendment is the Cheshire’s cat’s smile. With the tyrants work this week the Federal Government has weakened your 6^th amendment right to face your accuser. Let’s not even talk about the 9^th and 10^th amendments.

With the voice of Patrick Henry from long ago; I ask friends, what means this legislative action, if its purpose be not to force us into submission?

All of this, if allowed to stand, is the State once again seeking to arise to the position of the most high with the goal of being God walking on the earth. It is the state’s play for divinity … for the right to control the way only God does control. It is this aspect of all of this tyranny that should give the Biblical Christian unrest and cause Him to call out to the God of War. It is this that should energize the clergy across the land to lift their voice to decry wickedness and tyranny in high places. Why should the clergy of all people sit by and remain silent in the face of the State’s attempt to be a god that ranks itself before the only one God? God people can never acquiesce to being controlled by and so serving a God besides the God of the Bible.

Our voices remain mute and our actions are not concentrated because we have lived under long term incremental tyranny and we have adjusted ourselves to the increments of tyranny so that one no longer even notices the next ratcheting up of the tyranny. This gun bill that is being shoved down our throats is just the next instantiation in a long line of tyranny but very few people are screaming ruddy murder. We have become inured to the reality that the FEDS are usurpers and now we just roll with whatever the most recent punch is that they deliver in our direction.

This is so because we have become a Christless people. Having abandoned our great King we no longer have a King to whom we owe a allegiance which would provide us with the solid grand upon which to stand in order to defy Tyrants and Usurpers. We have become so malleable and weak that we even gladly surrender our own seed to the maw of the God-State that we are currently living under.

I am so weary of this Christ-less tyranny. So weary of having to adjust in order to find a way to accommodate it. So weary of having to bow my knee to jackanapes, mountebanks, and blaggards when it should be the tyrants who are the ones bowing their knees to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

From Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to FDR and nearly every President since then the tyranny has continued to inflate so that the intolerance of it all screams to the heavens.

And the Church? The Church is like C. S. Lewis’ Lady of the green kirtle who casts spells in order to put people to sleep when they begin to become aroused about the nature of their peril in living under her tyranny. The visible Church is largely useless in this hour having herself decided to now be a servant of the Tyrant that at least a few of us so despise.

If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which our Christian Fathers and we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must prepare to fight! I repeat it, sir, we must prepare to fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!

Patrick Henry