God alone has original sovereignty. All other sovereignty is delegated sovereignty by God to his representatives in one of the various jurisdictional spheres He has ordained. In such a way God remains the absolute sovereign over each of the jurisdictional spheres with His delegated representatives answerable to Him if they abandon God’s legislative Word for those jurisdictions.

R2K denies this premise by insisting that God has abandoned his original sovereignty choosing to delegate that sovereignty to the realm of Natural law. As such R2K denies that God’s Word has legislative authority for any realm save the church realm. What this move does is to guarantee that the different jurisdictional realms will be sideways with the Church as a jurisdictional realm as there are two different sovereignties established — (1) God’s sovereignty over the Church and (2) Natural law as interpreted by the autonomous and fallen man as sovereign in all other jurisdictional realms. As autonomous and fallen man begins and ends with himself as his authority, the “theology” of R2K guarantees either conflict between the Church and the other jurisdictional realms or (more likely given R2K’s passivism) the church becomes the tail on the social order dog as Christians are explicitly taught from R2K pulpits that there is no “thus saith the Lord” for other jurisdictional realms. Christianity thus becomes privatized and the social order becomes the incarnation of other theologies that are not so shy to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.

However, this problem is not present in a muscular and Biblical Christianity as all jurisdictional realms find their unity and so a harmony of interest in God’s sovereignty and legislative Word. Each of the representative heads of the various jurisdictional realms is uniquely responsible for their own assigned realm but each finds harmony with one another in the fact that each is bowing to God’s sovereignty via His legislative and authoritative Word.

So, we see, that it is only by maintaining God’s unique, original, and exhaustive sovereignty over all of reality wherein social-orders can maintain a lack of conflict among the various jurisdictions. If, on the other hand, Christians, for whatever reason (R2K, Pietism, etc.) surrender the public realm and its jurisdictions to other competing sovereignties the long-term result will be a conflict of interests. Something the West is now discovering too late.

In Biblical Christianity, God’s original and absolute authority mediated by the Lord Christ is the sovereignty that yields harmony to the many jurisdictional realms. Each realm is distinct in its responsibilities and yet all united by oaths of fealty to the Triune God.

This unity is augmented by the recognition that each of the distinct jurisdictional realms is informed by a shared totalistic theology. Theology — and the Biblical world and life view it creates — in submission to the God of the Bible is the subterranean aquifer out of which bubble forth the various springs which we label the various jurisdictional realms and social-order institutional structures and procedures. In this understanding Law, Education, Arts, Law, Family, Church, Politics, International relations, etc., are merely theology by other means. There is unity between these not only because of God’s original and absolute sovereignty but also because man, in submission to God’s legislative Word, owns a shared theology that manifests itself in a myriad of ways like light through a prism produces various colors — all authored by the original light.

It will never do, contra the Amsterdam philosophy, to suggest that these various jurisdictional realms and social order institutional structures and procedures each have their own locus of original and legislative authority.  Cutting off each of the jurisdictional realms from the common aquifer that is a shared theology as “the Queen of all the sciences,” is sure to render a kind of polytheistic hodgepodge as each jurisdictional realm and social order structure and procedure seeks its own independence at the expense of all the others. That independence could never be arrived at apart from some other God and some other theology/philosophy informing these putative independent jurisdictions.

We see again that the only way to keep Education at peace with family, family at peace with Law, Law at peace with Education, Courts at peace with the Church, the Church at peace with the Arts, Politics at peace with family, etc., is for each and all to come in glad submission to God’s original and absolute sovereignty while at the same time each taking up theology as the Queen of the Sciences as applied to their particular fields and callings.

This morning I opened up my e-mail and found that I had received correspondence from one of the remnant in Virginia.

Then I paused again to realize how blessed by God I am to know the people that I know.

These remnant types who write me are the cream of the country. It is unfortunate that they are scattered so thinly across the nation. But they are out there and I hear from them regularly and I am the one who is blessed by that. I don’t think that I could have kept whatever little sanity that I have left if it were not for the 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal who resolve to stay in touch with me.

I hear from them in text, e-mail, pm, proton-mail, telephone, skype and just about any other way one can imagine. The thing we have in common is a longing for the glory of God to be seen and a return to the halcyon days when the insanity could be navigated. We also have in common the realization that that is not going to happen in our lifetimes and so our job is now to play the watchmen on the wall who shouts out the warning — a warning that is neither wanted nor can be heard.

There they are all across the country. Sunday it was texting with one of the several who lives in Georgia.  Today it was an e-mail from a Saint in Virginia. Once a month it is a phone call from England. Then there are the lads in Idaho. Their numbers might be able to support a small church. Tennessee checks in with a dear couple who introduced me to a radio format — now the radio format guys are part of this not large enough remnant. There are the Saints here in this congregation. They deserve a higher place in heaven just for putting up with me through the years. No better group of people could a minister hope for. There are other Saints spread across the WOKE state of Michigan. One of them is closer than a brother. Texas is another spot where several of the warrior-priests live and it is conversational heaven to engage with them. Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky — the remnant is out there, it is just that we are spread too thin like too little butter over too much bread. They will never know what a blessing to me they have been. I weep for them because there are not enough of us.

You see, ideally, these are the people who would be your neighbor across the street or in the house next to you. The fellowship could be more immediate and the mutual support more tactile.

Whether it is the Saints in Canada or S. Africa or in America one thing is constant and that is the desire for a decent church to attend. Let me remind you again … these are the cream of Christianity. These are the remnant and yet it is this very group that laments to me that “there isn’t a decent church around me to attend.” The reason for this is that they expect the church to be the church, but what they find instead is WOKE, or R2K, or FV, or Dispensationalism, or who knows what other flavor of cultural captivity. So, they reach out to me — a minister they know who himself can’t find a denominational home for the same reason they can’t find a congregational home.

So we provide mutual encouragement to one another. We remind each other of the necessity to be optimistic — we serve the King and so can not be otherwise. We remind each other that all of what we are living through is to the ultimate end of the build-up of the present kingdom. We swap gun stories. We correlate the activity of the enemy. We talk about our families and how our extended families who do have a church to attend find us bizarre. All the kind of stuff you’d discuss with other like-minded friends in your church … if you had a church.

They are the smartest/wisest people I know. It is because I talk to them I have so little interest in talking to others. When you are in the habit of driving around a top-of-the-line Mercedes getting behind the wheel of a VW is hardly exciting. These people are epistemologically self-conscious and know what they believe and why they believe it. They don’t send their children to government schools and they don’t think the solution to our problems is by voting harder.

It is not as if any of them are made of better dirt. It’s just that they have a different worldview than the average church-going normie American bear.

One more thing — they read. Dr. Martin 45 years ago told us that “leaders are readers.” I thought it a trite thing to say then but now I know how accurate he was. All of these folks read the kind of material that seldom gets read any longer. They listen to lectures. They are seeking to think Christianly in every area of life.  And the result is that these people are the very essence of leadership. One doesn’t become a leader by listening to John Maxwell’s courses or by attending the very latest seminar on leadership. One becomes a leader by putting the meat in the seat in order to read till you bleed. These people have done that.

I wish I could know each of them and all of them better. I wish we could routinely break bread together around each other’s tables. I wish we could have our children marry one another and become grandparents together. I wish we could all worship together. I wish we formed our own community.

But until then we serve the great King’s purposes by being salt and light scattered hither and yon.

I hope they all know how much they have blessed me over the years and how much I love them. I could only wish they could be part of this fabulous flock in Charlotte, Michigan.

In the small city, I live in there is a “church.” (I use that word as a courtesy. The confession I subscribe to doesn’t allow me to really believe it is a church.) It is one of the oldest churches in the city and was built right across the street from the courthouse. It is one of those large buildings, breathtaking in scope, with high ceilings, and a sanctuary that once actually needed the seating for which it was designed. I’ve often wanted to preach there just for the opportunity for the building itself to hear, one more time, the soothing and startling tones of the Christian faith once delivered to the saints coming from the pulpit. I imagine it has been decades since this facility has heard those truths. It may be the case that the building would fall down from the stress of hearing those truths again shaking the rafters.

Anyway … in the front of this full-on WOKE church stands some regal maple trees and around one of these maple trees, someone in authority in the Church has decided to send yet another message of what a “safe” church they are by wrapping a rainbow flag around the girth of the tree. As such, every day countless numbers of cars drive by this church and witness this tip of the hat to political correctness foisted upon us by the church in question.

Of course, the flag on the tree serves as a sign to communicate any number of things. Some of what it is signaling is more obvious (we embrace as a lifestyle in this “house of God” what God consumed with fire in Genesis 19) and some of what the flag is signaling is less obvious. It is to the less obvious that we turn for a moment.

The flag is a sign sending this message about the “church” and everyone attending the church; “I, the Congregational Church, live here and I know what I must do if I am to fit into the zeitgeist. This flag bespeaks that I am behaving in the manner expected of me. You, citizens of the community, because of this flag sign know I can be depended upon to ape the culture and that in this regard I am above reproach. I am an obedient member of our current death cult in the West and therefore beyond being indicted.”

This message radiating by the flag sign is directed to the community, and at the same time, it is a shield protecting the church and those who attend from any accusation that it or they may be counter-cultural in any fashion. The flag sign is a virtue signal and screams conformity. The flag sign is also communicating to the church itself that it has bowed the knee to the idols of the day. It gives the church identity, dignity, and, morality even if each of those is twisted beyond recognition. It is the identity of the perverted, the dignity of the treasonous, and the morality of Mephistopheles. Even the ground under the building quakes at being responsible for being sat upon by such a monstrosity. Ultimately the flag is a display of loyalty to the zeitgeist. For those with eyes to see it is, in reality, the white flag of surrender.

If the zeitgeist suddenly lurched towards accepting pedophilia (a possibility not beyond the realm of probability) the church would soon likely put out a flag that would communicate that children are merely young adults capable of making their own decisions about intimacy and so likeminded people are “safe” in that “church.” Imagine any polymorphous perversity you can imagine and a flag would sure to be soon wrapped around that poor maple tree that stands in front of their building.

And, oh the irony in choosing a rainbow flag. That very symbol that was given by God by which God set as a sign that God would never again destroy the earth by water. Clearly, those who embrace such symbols forget that God has more means than just water by which he can visit judgment.

Every day I drive by it I see it leering at me as if it were possessed by some kind of Goblin or Wormwoodian demon. It cackles at me that soon every church and every government building and every business building will one day have flags emblazoned somewhere on their property signaling that conformity has now consumed all. In my mind’s eye, I see men wearing rainbow flag pins on the collars of their suit much as they wear the American flag pins now. I begin to think it will rise to flood level and wash over everything and then I remember…