SPEAKER_00: Our country, the United States, has had a long history of division about politics.
SPEAKER_00: It has had a rare season of political unity with the election of our first president.
SPEAKER_00: People were on board with him.
SPEAKER_00: Even with his re-election.
SPEAKER_00: And it was there that you could say either the experiment in democracy was perfected or the wheels fell off the cart.
SPEAKER_00: Basically, every presidential election since then has been a fight for our country's future and freedom.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, you can find, if you were to do enough research, people who have declared, beginning with Alexander Hamilton, going all the way through President Trump, that every election in our country's history has been the most important election ever.
SPEAKER_00: And if John Adams loses, then the country is over.
SPEAKER_00: Or if, alternatively, Thomas Jefferson wins, our experiment is done.
SPEAKER_00: Put a fork in it, no more.
SPEAKER_00: Government as we know it, by the people, for the people, ceases to exist.
SPEAKER_00: If Jefferson and his Francophile ways get into the White House.
SPEAKER_00: Well, he did worm his way into the White House.
SPEAKER_00: We have a monument commemorating it.
SPEAKER_00: You've seen it, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the conversation continues 200 plus years later with the same kind of rhetoric that marked Jefferson's electoral victory so long ago.
SPEAKER_00: The reason why every election is the most important election in our country comes down to how people view government.
SPEAKER_00: It comes down to how believers in particular view government, at least I'm talking why Christians are often prone to that kind of language.
SPEAKER_00: How we view the role of government in our life.
SPEAKER_00: And there's no easy, of course, answer for this.
SPEAKER_00: This debate is exasperated in the United States because of the nature of democracy.
SPEAKER_00: The very nature of democracy gives every American a vote and gives every American a voice, it gives every American responsibility for their government.
SPEAKER_00: And it gives every American the, I guess, the obligation or the stewardship to understand all the political issues of the day.
SPEAKER_00: And it's very difficult to understand them all without getting roped into them all.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, how are you supposed to be a good steward of your voice and of your reason without researching the issues, as they say?
SPEAKER_00: And once you research the issues, you become committed at that point.
SPEAKER_00: You're all in.
SPEAKER_00: At the heart of the divide in our country, I think really is a basic division that goes back to debates between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, even a basic division about where our rights come from.
SPEAKER_00: Where our rights come from.
SPEAKER_00: If the role of government is to guard rights entrusted to us by God, or if the role of government is to acquire and procure those rights and then advance them?
SPEAKER_00: I think if you're to boil down the division, the party names have changed since Adams' election, but that nugget of debate is still what is the same.
SPEAKER_00: Do rights that we have come from God, or do rights that we have come through the enactment and the advancement of an agenda from the government?
SPEAKER_00: How you answer that question is going to kind of fundamentally change the way you view a Christian's responsibility to government and a government's responsibility.
SPEAKER_00: What is a good government?
SPEAKER_00: Is a good government that one that advances an agenda for a purpose to achieve a result, or is a good government one that backs off and takes their hands off of the thing, so to speak, and has a more of a minimalistic requirement?
SPEAKER_00: Now you can see pretty easily when you phrase things like that that if you are on the receiving end of injustice in society or you're on the receiving end of a criminal act, you want government to have a very active role in your life, don't you?
SPEAKER_00: If somebody breaks into your car and steals your radio or your purse or whatever, I once had a printer stolen from the backseat of my car.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody broke into my car and stole a printer.
SPEAKER_00: I wanted a full-on government investigation.
SPEAKER_00: I wanted all three branches of government to cooperate.
SPEAKER_00: The LAPD sent the crime lab, their mobile crime lab, came to our apartment complex and dusted for fingerprints.
SPEAKER_00: No leads, though, no leads.
SPEAKER_00: The villain is still at large.
SPEAKER_00: If you're on the receiving end of injustice in society, you of course want a very active role of government.
SPEAKER_00: If you are in a position where you feel like your wealth is acquired and your life is pretty well set, you want more of a hands-off approach to government.
SPEAKER_00: That's the normal way that's not confined in the United States.
SPEAKER_00: You see that form of economics and view of government around the world.
SPEAKER_00: But I do want to talk about how the Bible describes this issue because there is, I think, a biblical perspective on this.
SPEAKER_00: And so I want you to turn to Genesis 9 because we're going to look there.
SPEAKER_00: This is really the birth of government.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason we're going to Genesis 9 to look at this is because there are a lot of wrong views of government out there, which I know saying that is just like saying there's people that are wrong online.
SPEAKER_00: You know, of course, that's true.
SPEAKER_00: Don't lose a lot of sleep over it.
SPEAKER_00: But there are people that have a very corrupted view of the role of government in this world.
SPEAKER_00: There are, and when I say people, I mean even Christians.
SPEAKER_00: There's been a common mantra throughout the years.
SPEAKER_00: The government's role is to legislate morality or to advance this particular moral agenda.
SPEAKER_00: And that's, I think, a deficient view of government, whether or not it's wielded by the left or the right.
SPEAKER_00: And government, and we're going to see as we look at Genesis 9, has a predominantly defensive role, not an offensive role.
SPEAKER_00: To use a football analogy, government's job is to uh protect field position, not to acquire it.
SPEAKER_00: The government's job is to defend people, not to advance or legislate an agenda.
SPEAKER_00: And we're going to see that tonight as we look at Genesis chapter 9.
SPEAKER_00: There is a danger that comes from political involvement with churches.
SPEAKER_00: Once churches, and I want to say this pretty precisely, I have it written down so I say what I follow my words carefully.
SPEAKER_00: I've said this from this pulpit many, many times before.
SPEAKER_00: I want to repeat it though, in light of our most recent election, there is a huge danger when churches view the government as an agent for moral advancement or an agent to advance morality in the world.
SPEAKER_00: The danger comes because churches who do have the obligation to proclaim morality and to proclaim righteousness and sin and confront the sinner with the good news of the gospel, when you view government as an agent of that, it produces a cooperation between the church and government that always leads to compromise.
SPEAKER_00: Always, always leads to compromise from the church.
SPEAKER_00: Political activism in a church leads to corruption in the church.
SPEAKER_00: If political activism was the goal of the church, then we would partner with Mormons and Muslims who often have the same kind of moral agenda we do.
SPEAKER_00: And then the Watching World would consider us just one more political block to be negotiated with.
SPEAKER_00: This is why I cringe when you know I see exit polls that say, you know, some percentage of Christians did X or did Y.
SPEAKER_00: Because there's no way to spin that.
SPEAKER_00: That's not annoying.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, friends don't let friends believe exit polls.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: But secondly, it's not healthy or helpful to view Christianity as one of many blocks, or evangelicals as one of many blocks of Christian voters or any kind of voter.
SPEAKER_00: With the Watching World views the gospel as a group of people that collaborate for a political end, we become just, of course, like the world.
SPEAKER_00: Churches that look to the government to advance the political agenda will inherently become liberal, inherently.
SPEAKER_00: And that is the it's not, I've had people tell me, you know, I wish Emmanuel was more involved in politics because when you look at all those, the all the all the Democrats out there, they have their churches that will proclaim politics from the pulpit.
SPEAKER_00: Why don't we have churches that proclaim our politics from the pulpit?
SPEAKER_00: And when I hear that, I recognize you're confusing cause and effect.
SPEAKER_00: The cause of liberalism is the idea that you can use the church to advance a political agenda.
SPEAKER_00: That's the cause.
SPEAKER_00: Because once you start using the church to advance the political agenda, you by necessity, the nature of politics, have to cooperate with people that are outside of your political profile.
SPEAKER_00: They're outside of your theological profile, certainly.
SPEAKER_00: It's the nature of politics.
SPEAKER_00: You're trying to collaborate and build a large enough block of people that will compromise on one candidate to get him over the finish line.
SPEAKER_00: That's the nature of politics.
SPEAKER_00: That leads to liberalism.
SPEAKER_00: And by liberalism, I mean I'm using that word in the theological sense.
SPEAKER_00: It leads to theological liberalism.
SPEAKER_00: It leads to the downgrade of theology, it leads to the downgrade of the exclusivity of Christ, and leads to openness to the universality of the gospel, views the church's job, or one of the church's functions in that kind of worldview is to manipulate government to get a result.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's not easy to live a godly life in an ungodly society with an ungodly government, but it's also the only option available to us, so we may as well figure out how to do it well.
SPEAKER_00: There's of course different kinds of governments you've seen through church history: a monarchy, God ruling the world through a king, a democracy, God ruling the world through a voice of people.
SPEAKER_00: You've heard the label theocracy use.
SPEAKER_00: It's a common label.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it has ever really existed.
SPEAKER_00: Theocracy in the strict sense means God ruling people directly through direct revelation.
SPEAKER_00: You don't even see that in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: When God was leading Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the twelve children, the twelve which would become the twelve tribes, they didn't have their own nation.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have their own government.
SPEAKER_00: Once they were to the size that they needed their own government, they were ruled by the Egyptians.
SPEAKER_00: Once they had freedom and crossed the Red Sea, they immediately had their law.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't ever do that, which leads to the days of the judges, which were bad days, not good days.
SPEAKER_00: And eventually God gives them a king as a form of punishment and ultimately turns that into a form of blessing, which leads to Jesus Christ, the true King over the world.
SPEAKER_00: Others have called theocracy a kind of system where the Bible is the authority of society.
SPEAKER_00: Again, I don't know if that has ever actually been tried enough to critique it one way or the other.
SPEAKER_00: It seems more of a fiction.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason it hasn't been tried is because Christians are the narrow road in society.
SPEAKER_00: They're the narrow, you know, in a democracy.
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of people sent me a sermon a few weeks ago from another pastor to tell his congregation how to vote.
SPEAKER_00: And it starts, started with the pastor saying, you know, the churches, churches need to wake up or we're gonna lose our country.
SPEAKER_00: You need to wake up, Christians, or we're gonna get outvoted.
SPEAKER_00: And I hear that and I think, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: Christians are going to get outvoted.
SPEAKER_00: We're the narrow road.
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't matter if you're awake or asleep.
SPEAKER_00: You know, if you vote while you're awake or you vote while you're asleep, it's still one vote.
SPEAKER_00: You're going down.
SPEAKER_00: If you have that attitude.
SPEAKER_00: The point, though, is that there's different forms of government that have all been tried.
SPEAKER_00: But I want us to go to Genesis chapter 9 tonight, because Genesis is the book of beginnings, and we're good at studying these for the beginnings.
SPEAKER_00: Everything that is significant in our world, every human institution that is significant has its birth recorded in the book of Genesis, the birth of human life, the animals, nature, the stars, the sun, God's word to people, priests, sacrifice, conscience.
SPEAKER_00: Everything significant about our life is revealed to us, how it came to be in the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings.
SPEAKER_00: Government is no exception.
SPEAKER_00: We see how government came to be, where it came from in Genesis chapter 9.
SPEAKER_00: To set the stage in Genesis chapter 9, the flood is over.
SPEAKER_00: You had a world without government in Genesis 1 through 8.
SPEAKER_00: You had a world where sin reigned in Genesis 3 through 8.
SPEAKER_00: You had a world where people were at enmity with each other in Genesis 4 through 8.
SPEAKER_00: You had a people, a world where people divided based upon those who wanted to serve the Lord and those who didn't in Genesis 5 through 8.
SPEAKER_00: And you have a world where the Savior is promised to come to some group of people, and yet there is such hostility and chaos in the earth that it's not even a functioning society, really.
SPEAKER_00: The evil and debauchery of the human world before the flood, I think, reaches heights that are unparalleled in our minds.
SPEAKER_00: God, of course, said that he wouldn't destroy the earth again.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to give an institution to the earth that will keep the earth from getting as wicked as it was before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: You have to view government in that lens.
SPEAKER_00: So do you understand that before Genesis 6, the wickedness in the earth was extreme?
SPEAKER_00: I think the development on the earth was extreme.
SPEAKER_00: I think the uh the intellectual capacity and the technological advancement on the earth before the flood would surprise us.
SPEAKER_00: I think we often look back at the before the flood age as, you know, one step away from cavemen.
SPEAKER_00: I don't think the Bible presents it that way at all.
SPEAKER_00: I think they were very technologically advanced.
SPEAKER_00: It would not even surprise me if they had discoveries like electricity and all kinds of crazy things.
SPEAKER_00: If they could fly airplanes, it would not surprise me at all before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: Their ability to do things was extreme, their life expectancy was long, and so they had this ability to pass down knowledge throughout society that we don't often understand.
SPEAKER_00: What they were missing, though, is the ability to check evil.
SPEAKER_00: So if they lacked the ability to fly or they lacked the ability to have a power grid, it was only because evil was so widespread in the world that you couldn't collaborate with enough people to get a power grid going.
SPEAKER_00: They were a wicked, wicked bunch, but extremely, of course, intelligent and knowledgeable about the world.
SPEAKER_00: God confronts them with their sin and their wickedness.
SPEAKER_00: They do not repent.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, the reason I think they were so technologically advanced is because what makes the ark so noteworthy is not that Noah built it.
SPEAKER_00: What makes the ark so noteworthy is that people didn't join it, they rejected it.
SPEAKER_00: The world rejected it.
SPEAKER_00: They showed disdain for it because they rejected God.
SPEAKER_00: Because they rejected God.
SPEAKER_00: And so God floods the earth.
SPEAKER_00: He says back in Genesis 6 that he will not strive with mankind forever.
SPEAKER_00: This is uh recorded for you back in Genesis 6.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 3, Yahweh said, My spirit will not uh abide in man forever.
SPEAKER_00: And I think strive with man is a better translation.
SPEAKER_00: It will be 120 years.
SPEAKER_00: That's the amount of time from between God declares this and he destroys the earth through the flood.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 5, Yahweh saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, every intention of his heart, hot the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord was grieved in verse 6 that he had made mankind.
SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, verse 8, Noah found favor in God's sight, and so God destroys the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Noah was a righteous man, verse 9 says, because he walked with Yahweh, and so Noah is spared.
SPEAKER_00: Noah and his family who uh believed the Lord get onto the ark.
SPEAKER_00: Noah goes on to the ark with animals, enough to repopulate the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Of all the clean animals, chapter 7, verse 8 says, uh they went on in pairs, animals that were not clean two by two.
SPEAKER_00: Male and female went on the ark as God had commanded Noah.
SPEAKER_00: The animals, of course, repopulate on the ark.
SPEAKER_00: And so you flip over to chapter 8.
SPEAKER_00: The animals get off of the ark, left, notice they went on the ark two by two.
SPEAKER_00: Look at how they leave chapter 8, verse 19.
SPEAKER_00: Every beast, every creeping thing, every bird, everything that moves on the earth went out by families from the ark.
SPEAKER_00: And so they were repopulating on the ark.
SPEAKER_00: If you've had pet gerbils or bunnies before, you know how that works.
SPEAKER_00: They leave the ark in families.
SPEAKER_00: And now you see what you encounter in chapter 8 and chapter 9 is that the sin did not wash away.
SPEAKER_00: The floods of the water did not wash away the sin of mankind's hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Noah's gonna repopulate the earth just like the animals are repopulating the earth, and they're gonna repopulate in sin.
SPEAKER_00: But we just read in Genesis 6.5, the Lord was not going to repeat what we're gonna call a mistake, because the Lord says he regretted it.
SPEAKER_00: We recognize the Lord didn't really make a mistake, but the Lord's not going to repeat this recipe.
SPEAKER_00: He's not just going to flood the earth and let Noah start over because the same exact thing will happen.
SPEAKER_00: So, what changes?
SPEAKER_00: This is a key question for Genesis 9 and a key question for tonight.
SPEAKER_00: What changes from before the flood and after the flood that keeps the evil on the earth from getting that extreme ever again?
SPEAKER_00: Now, the answer that you see is the rainbow, rainbow does not restrain sin.
SPEAKER_00: Rainbow is the sign of the pledge that God is not going to destroy the earth again.
SPEAKER_00: But it rainbow, you're not about to commit a sin and you see a rainbow and go like, okay, I repent.
SPEAKER_00: The rainbow does not restrain sin.
SPEAKER_00: What restrains sin is the institution we're gonna see today of government.
SPEAKER_00: Of government.
SPEAKER_00: To build up, we're gonna do a little bit of a walk to get to our introduction to government, a little bit of a walk to build up to this, and I think this is very important for understanding this.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you a brief outline of four blessings that God gives man, these are four blessings.
SPEAKER_00: God gives mankind as they come off of the ark.
SPEAKER_00: No one in his family comes off the ark, he blesses them in four ways.
SPEAKER_00: These four ways are critical because these four ways are not uh just coincidentally noted here.
SPEAKER_00: These four ways play into what government is supposed to do.
SPEAKER_00: So the first way you see that God blesses mankind after the flood is he blesses them with freedom.
SPEAKER_00: He blesses them with freedom, which you see expressed here in worship.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 20.
SPEAKER_00: Noah then built an altar to Yahweh and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt alterings on the offer, uh, on the altar.
SPEAKER_00: This was not, as far as I can tell, an offering that was um, this particular offering that's described here, one that was commanded.
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, God had given Noah animals.
SPEAKER_00: He'd given them more of the clean animals for this purpose.
SPEAKER_00: This appears to be a response from Noah to the kindness of the Lord, especially how you see it in verse 21.
SPEAKER_00: When Yahweh smelled the pleasing aroma, Yahweh said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man.
SPEAKER_00: The intention of man's evil heart is evil from his youth.
SPEAKER_00: This is how you know sin did not wash away.
SPEAKER_00: He repeats what was said in Genesis 6.5.
SPEAKER_00: People's hearts are wicked, they are corrupt, they're always evil.
SPEAKER_00: So Noah and his children are still going to be fallen, they're still going to be depraved.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't get better on the ark.
SPEAKER_00: Noah homeschooled his kids, it didn't work.
SPEAKER_00: Their hearts are going to be evil as they come off of the ark.
SPEAKER_00: However, Noah here is able to worship without the world corrupting it, without the world interfering, it, without the world rejecting it, as it happened for the last 120 years and 40 days.
SPEAKER_00: So Noah worships.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord is pleased with his worship and says, Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
SPEAKER_00: While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.
SPEAKER_00: The first blessing God gives mankind is the ability to worship.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that he ties worship here to the seasons, which is very interesting.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to encounter this in the in uh Exodus.
SPEAKER_00: The different feasts Israel will have, the different expressions of worship they will have are connected to the calendar year.
SPEAKER_00: They're connected to the seasons that go by.
SPEAKER_00: You worship God as the seasons progress.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that you find Christmas buried here, but I can have Christmas with a clean conscience.
SPEAKER_00: You worship God as the seasons go by.
SPEAKER_00: The point here that is embedded in this text is there is a freedom that Noah has, and that freedom expresses itself in worship.
SPEAKER_00: The second blessing you see that God gives mankind here is family.
SPEAKER_00: Chapter 9, verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
SPEAKER_00: This is a restatement of the blessing that God had given Adam and Eve.
SPEAKER_00: So this part hasn't changed.
SPEAKER_00: Adam and Eve are going to have a family and they will be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Then God floods the earth and destroys it.
SPEAKER_00: Starts over with Noah and his wife and his children and their wives, and this will happen again.
SPEAKER_00: They are again commanded to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
SPEAKER_00: This is a time of a great mystery.
SPEAKER_00: This has never happened before.
SPEAKER_00: And so it is an interesting question.
SPEAKER_00: Is God going to allow Noah to repopulate the earth?
SPEAKER_00: Like the animals were already doing in the ark?
SPEAKER_00: Is God going to use Noah to fill the earth again?
SPEAKER_00: Or is that what has changed?
SPEAKER_00: Is God going to limit the evil on the earth by limiting the people on the earth?
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is no.
SPEAKER_00: He's not going to limit the people on the earth.
SPEAKER_00: He is going to let them be fruitful and multiply.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, that will be a blessing to them.
SPEAKER_00: Is it certainly a blessing?
SPEAKER_00: Because it is repeated after I looked down at verse 7, and you be fruitful and multiply, and team on the earth and multiply in it.
SPEAKER_00: Genesis 9, verse 7 says it's a repetition of this.
SPEAKER_00: It is certainly a blessing.
SPEAKER_00: You find in this that the highest joy imaginable on earth, of course, comes from your family.
SPEAKER_00: Your closest relationships on earth are in your family.
SPEAKER_00: The person you love the most on earth is your spouse.
SPEAKER_00: Your children bring joy into your life and into your family in an unrivaled way.
SPEAKER_00: Way.
SPEAKER_00: There's just so much joy that comes from having children.
SPEAKER_00: Having children in the home, having children that they're just little factories of joy.
SPEAKER_00: They're factories of sin, also.
SPEAKER_00: There's this heartbreak, of course, that comes from children.
SPEAKER_00: The same way that nobody brings you more joy in your life than your children.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody can can hurt you more than your children when they rebel or if they fail to follow the Lord growing up.
SPEAKER_00: That's true as well.
SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, even in that kind of situation, you would still say your children are a blessing.
SPEAKER_00: You would still say they're a blessing.
SPEAKER_00: And again, this is not a promise that every child will be a blessing to his parents universally in the earth.
SPEAKER_00: There, of course, there are some parents, the book of Proverbs tells you that do become a curse to their family.
SPEAKER_00: This is a general blessing here, a general principle that children will bring joy to the family, joy to life, like arrows in the archer's quiver.
SPEAKER_00: They're your weapons you take on the world with a give you joy.
SPEAKER_00: We sang the song from Psalm 127 earlier, was the song, All Glory Be to Christ, adapted from Psalm 127, which is a song about the blessings of living a life for the Lord through your family.
SPEAKER_00: God gives the family to be a joy.
SPEAKER_00: Children are a joy.
SPEAKER_00: Life is a joy.
SPEAKER_00: Marriage is a joy.
SPEAKER_00: And God reiterates the function of the family to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and become joy-bearing creatures in your home.
SPEAKER_00: Children are bundles of joy, and they're to be delighted and received with open arms.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, the third blessing you see here is man's food.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 2 the fear of you and the dread of you will be upon every beast of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: This is different than the pre-fall, the pre-fall world.
SPEAKER_00: Before the fall, and perhaps even before the flood, the animals didn't fear mankind.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if the fear of uh mankind fell on animals in Genesis 3 or if it waited until Genesis 9.
SPEAKER_00: Regardless, animals now, starting in Genesis 9 after the flood will have a fear of mankind.
SPEAKER_00: Which is you see why that's a blessing?
SPEAKER_00: There are animals in the world that will hurt you.
SPEAKER_00: They will seriously hurt you.
SPEAKER_00: But thankfully, those animals are also afraid of you.
SPEAKER_00: It works out very, very well for all of us.
SPEAKER_00: That deer that is cute in your backyard would box you right in the head.
SPEAKER_00: And uh fortunately, they don't let you get up close enough to box you.
SPEAKER_00: You know, most of them don't.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them get deranged and do it.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that raccoon, fight a raccoon, see what happens.
SPEAKER_00: See what happens.
SPEAKER_00: That thing will bite you and scratch you, and you might ultimately win because you're bigger, but it will not be pretty.
SPEAKER_00: But fortunately, the raccoon will scurry away from you for the most part, unless you feed it your cat food for a series of weeks and tame it.
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
SPEAKER_00: For the most part, the animals that will harm you flee from you.
SPEAKER_00: And the animals that are domesticated don't flee from you unless you're mean to them.
SPEAKER_00: Lesson for our cat owning friends.
SPEAKER_00: This is a blessing God gives you.
SPEAKER_00: The fear of mankind is on the beasts of the field.
SPEAKER_00: And everything that creeps in the ground, all the fish of the sea, they are delivered into our hands.
SPEAKER_00: And they're delivered into your hands for the purpose of food.
SPEAKER_00: This is verse three.
SPEAKER_00: Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.
SPEAKER_00: It's all given to you as food.
SPEAKER_00: This is before the dietary laws.
SPEAKER_00: The Israelites were not allowed to eat shellfish, they weren't allowed to eat bacon, but that's because the dietary laws restricted that.
SPEAKER_00: That's not the way the law, the food laws come to the world.
SPEAKER_00: The food laws come to the world in verse three very clearly.
SPEAKER_00: You can eat anything you want to.
SPEAKER_00: Have a steak.
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy it.
SPEAKER_00: Medium rare, preferably.
SPEAKER_00: Don't overcook that thing.
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
SPEAKER_00: Have shellfish.
SPEAKER_00: Go have some kind of shrimp, seafood bowl, pot kind of creature that's incredible.
SPEAKER_00: Go have one of those things.
SPEAKER_00: It's okay.
SPEAKER_00: It's delightful.
SPEAKER_00: And verse 3 says, get the side salad.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see that?
SPEAKER_00: I give you the green plants.
SPEAKER_00: So get the side salad.
SPEAKER_00: You're commanded to.
SPEAKER_00: Get the side salad right there.
SPEAKER_00: It's given to you also.
SPEAKER_00: Everything is given to you to eat.
SPEAKER_00: So enjoy it and eat it.
SPEAKER_00: Delight in it.
SPEAKER_00: This is how God made it.
SPEAKER_00: This is a way that it was not designed before the flood that way.
SPEAKER_00: People weren't eating animals before the fall, anyway.
SPEAKER_00: They weren't eating animals, but now after the flood, they are eating animals.
SPEAKER_00: They're still eating plants.
SPEAKER_00: Everything is a blessing.
SPEAKER_00: You have to try harder sometimes to figure out how to eat some creatures the right way.
SPEAKER_00: You have to try harder sometimes to figure out how to eat some plants the right way.
SPEAKER_00: Because of the fall, there are some plants that are poison.
SPEAKER_00: Because of the fall, there are some plants that apparently were not designed for human consumption.
SPEAKER_00: I can think of a few vegetables that definitely fit into that category, but people still eat them.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 4, you shall not eat flesh with its life.
SPEAKER_00: That is its blood.
SPEAKER_00: This isn't a prohibition, I don't think, against rare steak.
SPEAKER_00: I think this is basically describing to Noah the way this world is going to work.
SPEAKER_00: You have to kill the animal to eat it.
SPEAKER_00: Don't eat it while it's alive.
SPEAKER_00: This is a statement here that people will be putting to death animals so that they can eat them.
SPEAKER_00: You kill it, and then you eat it.
SPEAKER_00: This is the same thing repeated to Peter in Acts chapter 10.
SPEAKER_00: Kill and eat.
SPEAKER_00: Don't eat without the killing.
SPEAKER_00: Kill first.
SPEAKER_00: And this phrase is used elsewhere in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: It's life is in its blood.
SPEAKER_00: It's going to become, of course, obviously emblematic of Jesus Christ, that his life is in his blood.
SPEAKER_00: His blood is a propitiation for our sin.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing, as I often say at communion, there's nothing magical about the actual blood of Jesus, that he had a different kind of DNA or different kinds of white blood cells that makes his blood powerful to forgive sins.
SPEAKER_00: The blood represents the life.
SPEAKER_00: His life was sinless.
SPEAKER_00: When they killed Christ, they shed his blood.
SPEAKER_00: So we can say that we're saved by faith in his blood, which is another way of saying saved by faith in his life and death and resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: This is all caught up here in verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: You don't eat flesh in its life, that is its blood, because the blood represents the life of it.
SPEAKER_00: You have to kill your food to eat it.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, this is a protection as well from all kinds of foods that can harm you.
SPEAKER_00: Foods that can harm you if there's, you know, disease on them or bacteria on them, they'll harm you.
SPEAKER_00: And so use your head when you eat your food, another way of saying it.
SPEAKER_00: And the fourth blessing you see here, finally, you saw man's freedom, man's joy, man's food, and finally man's image is described here in verse five.
SPEAKER_00: And for your lifeblood or God's image, in verse five, I should say, for your lifeblood I will require reckoning.
SPEAKER_00: From every beast I will require it, and from man.
SPEAKER_00: From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.
SPEAKER_00: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.
SPEAKER_00: In Hebrew, this is very much poetry.
SPEAKER_00: The way it's indented here in the SV makes it look like it is poetry.
SPEAKER_00: In Hebrew, it is poetry.
SPEAKER_00: It does rhyme, there is repetition, it is symmetrical here.
SPEAKER_00: I love the way the SV renders it because it kind of brings it out.
SPEAKER_00: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.
SPEAKER_00: For God made man in his own image.
SPEAKER_00: This is the final blessing here in this little list.
SPEAKER_00: God blesses us with worship, he blesses us with family, he blesses us with nature to eat, and he blesses us with life to be protected.
SPEAKER_00: What happens in verse five and six is what all of this was building to.
SPEAKER_00: And I hope you see this here.
SPEAKER_00: What happens in verses five and six is the change from the pre-flood world.
SPEAKER_00: Everything before this point, you could also argue was true before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: There was sacrifice before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: You can ask Cain and Abel about that.
SPEAKER_00: There was family before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel and Seth and others, and they populated the earth.
SPEAKER_00: There was food before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: There was nature before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: But this becomes the different thing before the flood.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you jog your eyes back to Genesis chapter 5, just by a, I'm sorry, Genesis chapter 4, just by a brief form of contrast.
SPEAKER_00: Cain murders Abel.
SPEAKER_00: In chapter 4, verse 10, the Lord asks, Cain, what have you done?
SPEAKER_00: The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.
SPEAKER_00: You are now cursed from the ground, which is open of his mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand.
SPEAKER_00: When you walk the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength.
SPEAKER_00: You'll be a fugitive and a wanderer on earth.
SPEAKER_00: That is the punishment that Cain gets for murdering Abel.
SPEAKER_00: He becomes a fugitive.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, he can't be a farmer.
SPEAKER_00: That's just what he was doing.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, Cain wanted to farm.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't want to offer an animal sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: He wanted to offer a grain sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: The punishment for murdering his brother now is that he won't be able to grow in grain.
SPEAKER_00: He won't own a plot of land.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't get to have a farm.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't get to grow wheat or grain anymore.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to be a nomad, a fugitive, and a wanderer.
SPEAKER_00: This gets right at the heart of Cain's sin.
SPEAKER_00: Cain laments this.
SPEAKER_00: My punishment is greater than I can bear.
SPEAKER_00: How will people kill him in response?
SPEAKER_00: And so the Lord protects Cain from being killed by giving him a mark.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the mark is, but he gives him some kind of mark.
SPEAKER_00: And then verse 15 says, Not so, if anyone kills Cain, kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold.
SPEAKER_00: And so Cain is protected.
SPEAKER_00: Then you see Lamech.
SPEAKER_00: Look down at Lamech, verse 19.
SPEAKER_00: Lamech took two wives.
SPEAKER_00: Now you see sin entering in the world.
SPEAKER_00: The name of one was Ada, the name of the other Zillah, and then it describes the family that he had.
SPEAKER_00: But Lamech was wicked.
SPEAKER_00: He was a polygamous and he was wicked.
SPEAKER_00: He says in verse 23, Adah and Zillah hear my voice, your wives of you wives of Lemech, listen to what I say.
SPEAKER_00: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see what Lemech is doing?
SPEAKER_00: Lemmech is operating with impunity.
SPEAKER_00: He's murdering whoever he wants to to defend his own pride.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, What are you going to do about it to the world?
SPEAKER_00: Verse 24.
SPEAKER_00: If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lemech's is 77fold.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to flip back to Genesis 9.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see the wickedness on the earth?
SPEAKER_00: Cain was not put to death for killing Abel.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, people were banned from punishing him with death.
SPEAKER_00: He were banned from withholding assistance to him.
SPEAKER_00: He was a fugitive and a nomad, but nobody could act out vengeance on him.
SPEAKER_00: So Lemech takes that as an excuse to act even more wickedly.
SPEAKER_00: And he kills people brutally.
SPEAKER_00: And nobody can do anything about it.
SPEAKER_00: That's Genesis 4.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine what life is like in Genesis 6.
SPEAKER_00: It keeps getting worse.
SPEAKER_00: If the next generation says, hey, I'll be 77 times worse than the guy before me, graph that out exponentially.
SPEAKER_00: There's probably a formula you can use to talk about how wicked the earth is going to be.
SPEAKER_00: What changes after the flood is that God establishes government here in verse 6 to protect mankind from that kind of wickedness?
SPEAKER_00: That's the change.
SPEAKER_00: I know it doesn't use the word government.
SPEAKER_00: What it says here is that whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed.
SPEAKER_00: Who is that man in verse 6 that will be shedding people's blood?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the rest of Genesis bears witness to the fact that that becomes government.
SPEAKER_00: That becomes trials, that becomes law enforcement, that becomes people working in collaboration with each other to avenge evil.
SPEAKER_00: This is what was banned back in Genesis 4, that led to the proliferation of evil on the earth, and now is established in Genesis 9 that you cannot kill somebody, you cannot take somebody's life, you cannot murder without other people coming after you.
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it's not the person who was murdered that's going to avenge himself.
SPEAKER_00: Abel doesn't resurrect to go get Cain.
SPEAKER_00: If somebody murders you, it's not your hand that will shed his blood back.
SPEAKER_00: It's the people who survive that will collaborate together to avenge the death.
SPEAKER_00: This is also a blessing.
SPEAKER_00: Now, these four blessings on the screen are all connected to each other in that they are what is going to make life in the post-flood world functional.
SPEAKER_00: They make life functional.
SPEAKER_00: And they make life functional in collaboration with each other.
SPEAKER_00: And so that's why I want to go to this.
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to take these same four things, which I'm sure you have written down or memorized or treasured in your heart, and I'm just going to change the heading here, to four functions of government.
SPEAKER_00: If you take those same four blessings, this becomes how God establishes government to serve mankind.
SPEAKER_00: He establishes government to protect freedom, to protect family, to protect food, and to protect life.
SPEAKER_00: And I know it's you have to train yourself as an American when you hear protect freedom.
SPEAKER_00: Take down the bald eagle here, and unless he's being sacrificed.
SPEAKER_00: The protect freedom here is the freedom of worship, the freedom to serve God and worship God.
SPEAKER_00: It's the very first, it's not arbitrary, it's the very first thing Noah did getting off of the Ark is respond to his saved life and the new world with worship.
SPEAKER_00: So you protect freedom to worship, you protect family to have children and bring joy into life.
SPEAKER_00: You protect food.
SPEAKER_00: This is a very basic function of government, and it's not controversial.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody likes this one, right?
SPEAKER_00: We like the FDA.
SPEAKER_00: We want health inspectors raiding our favorite restaurant and taking the temperature of the water and making sure the lettuce doesn't have salmonella.
SPEAKER_00: We like that, right?
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: We want government that does those kind of things and ultimately to protect life.
SPEAKER_00: To protect life.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, these are on the screen next to each other.
SPEAKER_00: But I hope by putting them on the screen next to each other that you don't conflate them as all having the same importance.
SPEAKER_00: Because they don't all have the same importance.
SPEAKER_00: They're building up, even if you look at the way the text is formatted in front of you in verses 1 through 9, they're building up to verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 6 is what is called out.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 6 is where the government takes on its existence.
SPEAKER_00: But the others are all wrapped up around it.
SPEAKER_00: And let me explain to you what I mean by this to protect freedom.
SPEAKER_00: As I said, this gets back to the debate that was at the very heart of our country's birth and forming that exists to this very day.
SPEAKER_00: Do rights you have come from government, or do rights you have come from God?
SPEAKER_00: And I think the study of Genesis 9, if you have Genesis 9 in your Bible, you I think you have to answer the question that rights come from God, not from government.
SPEAKER_00: Because these rights that are on the screen existed prior to government.
SPEAKER_00: The only thing new with the addition of government is capital punishment for murder.
SPEAKER_00: The other things existed.
SPEAKER_00: Your ability, your kind of right to life is just such a strange way of saying it.
SPEAKER_00: But the fact that you have life exists independent of government.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you have food exists independent of government.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you have family exists independent of government.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you have the capacity to worship exists at a fundamental level, independent of government.
SPEAKER_00: But God establishes government to cultivate life in the post-flood world with these four specific blessings as the ones attached to it in the birth of government here in Genesis 9.
SPEAKER_00: Let's just look at them very, very briefly.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, briefly.
SPEAKER_00: Government serves the protection of the freedom to worship by allowing and guarding people to have the freedom of conscience to worship God however they see fit.
SPEAKER_00: This is a basic baptistic principle about the world.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Christians believe in the freedom to worship or freedom of religion that transcends what happens on Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_00: It touches every area of life because all of life is lived in worship to God, and it is also a freedom that has to apply to people that don't believe the Bible and don't believe in God and don't believe in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: This is what I mean by it's a baptistic principle.
SPEAKER_00: This is why churches stand in favor of religious freedom, even for mosques and synagogues and Mormons and Catholics.
SPEAKER_00: Every form of religion should have protection from the government for people to worship as they see fit.
SPEAKER_00: Because once government starts preferring one religion over another, the first people to get persecuted are generally speaking Baptists.
SPEAKER_00: So we've learned that lesson.
SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe Jews first and then Baptists second.
SPEAKER_00: We've learned that lesson.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is why a good government protects the right to worship and protects people's freedom to worship.
SPEAKER_00: Because it is the basic response to living in a post-fallen world is the desire to worship.
SPEAKER_00: And we recognize that what's going to happen in Genesis 10 and 11 is God's going to let the nations go their own way.
SPEAKER_00: So God's not unaware of the fact that people are going to go their own way and worship whatever idols or whatever gods they want to.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, Acts chapter 11, or Acts chapter 17, verse 11, I believe, Paul says that God let the nations go their own way for them to search, to them, for them to search for God, which they're unable to find on their own.
SPEAKER_00: That's the point.
SPEAKER_00: But it was God that let the nations scatter.
SPEAKER_00: It was God that put the desire to worship in the heart of mankind and then let the nations scatter apart from the Savior.
SPEAKER_00: We've preached many sermons on that.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you understand why that is.
SPEAKER_00: So the gospel has a narrow road so that Israel is called out from the nations, the Savior could come there, etc.
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of reasons for that.
SPEAKER_00: But the ability to worship, the freedom to worship, transcends all of that.
SPEAKER_00: It gets into the nature of how God made people with a desire to recognize eternity set in our hearts and to honor and worship the God who made us.
SPEAKER_00: And we recognize that most people who worship God don't do so properly.
SPEAKER_00: They don't even worship the right God.
SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, they should have the right and the freedom to do so however they see fit.
SPEAKER_00: This is why our church supported the mosque, getting a zoning waiver.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the mosque needed a zoning waiver to put their runoff water into the creek, you know, through our property.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you know, it's better for us to live in a world where mosques and have their parking lot drained properly into the creek than the churches say, no, we don't want the mosque to have a draining parking lot.
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I hope you understand that.
SPEAKER_00: And it's good for a government to do those kinds of things, to allow churches and mosques and synagogues and whatnot to worship freely.
SPEAKER_00: It's a basic function of government.
SPEAKER_00: To protect family is the second thing on my list here.
SPEAKER_00: To protect family, to pursue an agenda that guards children and that guards the sanctity of marriage is the phrase it's used now.
SPEAKER_00: Again, that's just these kind of phrases just sound so dumb when you say them because it's so axiomatic from scripture.
SPEAKER_00: The phrase the right to life.
SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding me?
SPEAKER_00: You're alive.
SPEAKER_00: You have to reduce it to a right is just so surreal.
SPEAKER_00: Sanctity of marriage is a silly phrase, too, but it is the institute that God designed to bring joy into your life, and it should be free from attack.
SPEAKER_00: It's the basic structure of society.
SPEAKER_00: You see it in the Garden of Eden, you see it again after the flood.
SPEAKER_00: Adam and Eve will leave the garden and have children.
SPEAKER_00: Noah and his wife will leave the Ark and have children.
SPEAKER_00: This becomes the fabric of society.
SPEAKER_00: It's at the most basic level.
SPEAKER_00: God designs society with children in mind.
SPEAKER_00: The joy they bring to the family and the protection they need.
SPEAKER_00: Children will be exploited by the world.
SPEAKER_00: Their family is the first line of defense to that.
SPEAKER_00: Government is the next line of defense.
SPEAKER_00: It cooperates for the protection of the family and of children.
SPEAKER_00: The third thing I have on here is food.
SPEAKER_00: Again, this is not a controversial one, but you see how it gets twisted in our world.
SPEAKER_00: And that God gives us animals to eat, and government should guard the food chain and make sure that you can, you know, if there's a meat processing plant that is spreading salmonella, I hope the government steps in and shuts it down.
SPEAKER_00: And it should.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are going to order a well-done steak.
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe that it's legal, but the government allows it.
SPEAKER_00: But do you see how that quickly gets twisted into protecting nature as an end in and of itself?
SPEAKER_00: To protecting nature as the goal.
SPEAKER_00: To shutting down farms.
SPEAKER_00: Deeja and I are friends with a family in California that has a massive farm.
SPEAKER_00: They sell a lot of the fruit.
SPEAKER_00: We can buy their fruit in Costco right now.
SPEAKER_00: It's lovely, lovely fruit for sale in Costco from our friend's farm.
SPEAKER_00: It's so hard for them right now because they have so many restrictions about what they can water and what they can't water because of an owl.
SPEAKER_00: And the idea behind this is that if they were to flood their fields, which is the most actually environmentally friendly way to water those kind of trees with the least amount of water and the maximum uh result of it, there's concern the owls will drown.
SPEAKER_00: And our friends are like, the owls have wings.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're not going to drown.
SPEAKER_00: They're not going to.
SPEAKER_00: And if the trees get knocked down because of the flood, which has never happened in the 80 years that family has had the farm there, if it did happen, the owls would go rebuild a nest in a different tree.
SPEAKER_00: This is not an exaggerated hyperbolic example to make fun of environmentalism.
SPEAKER_00: This is an example I have friends living through right now.
SPEAKER_00: The owls have wings, but the government views as their job to protect the nests that the owls make wherever the owls want to make their nests, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Even if it affects the food chain, which is a twisting of the purpose of government.
SPEAKER_00: It's not designed to protect the owl's nest.
SPEAKER_00: We should be good stewards of nature.
SPEAKER_00: We should not make the owls go extinct.
SPEAKER_00: They're marvelous to look at.
SPEAKER_00: And if we get to watch owls out our window, all the better.
SPEAKER_00: All the better.
SPEAKER_00: We have an owl for the longest time.
SPEAKER_00: That perched outside our window that eyed our old sickly cat.
SPEAKER_00: The owl wanted to eat our cat through the window.
SPEAKER_00: They had a little relationship, they were looking at each other, and that cat went to Cat Heaven without the aid of the owl, thankfully.
SPEAKER_00: But if you get to look at owls, great.
SPEAKER_00: But the blessing described in Genesis is not exotic animals to be cultivated at all costs.
SPEAKER_00: Although it's a blessing, that's great.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what's described in Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: What's described in Genesis is the ability to have food that is protected.
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, to protect life.
SPEAKER_00: This is obviously the one that's called out.
SPEAKER_00: Now I said I hope you don't see them all on the screen and think they're all equal.
SPEAKER_00: They don't all have equal importance.
SPEAKER_00: Life becomes the predominant one here because it's different.
SPEAKER_00: As God made verse 6, Genesis 9, verse 6, as God made man in his own image.
SPEAKER_00: That's the one that gets that marker.
SPEAKER_00: The animals don't get that marker.
SPEAKER_00: God is not called a family here, even though he's a father and the son.
SPEAKER_00: The family is not in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: The animals aren't in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: Food is not in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: The only thing said to be in the image of God is the life of mankind.
SPEAKER_00: We have the ability to worship God, to magnify God, to capture the attributes of God and express them in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: We can magnify the glory of God by how we live and serve and worship.
SPEAKER_00: Animals cannot do that.
SPEAKER_00: We are supposed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth because we are in the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: Animals are fruitful and multiply because they are put on the earth to serve us.
SPEAKER_00: We are fruitful and multiplying because we magnify the image of God.
SPEAKER_00: And so killing an animal is not as severe of a crime as killing a human.
SPEAKER_00: Killing a human is a more severe crime than it's the worst crime you can do.
SPEAKER_00: It is why government exists.
SPEAKER_00: That's its first function.
SPEAKER_00: I was talking to a pilot and I asked him if he's ever had any kind of crazy emergencies when he was in the cockpit and he told a crazy story about an American Airlines fly who's pilot piloting that got into Derecho and the, you know, they were it was the most excitement he'd ever had.
SPEAKER_00: I think he was first officer in that flight and describing that.
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, did you panic?
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, well, you remember the very first rule of being a pilot.
SPEAKER_00: You remember the very first rule.
SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to fly the plane.
SPEAKER_00: Like, would that happen?
SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh yeah, that would happen.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you're you're trying to chase down a checklist, or you got some buzzers going off, and you're chasing down a checklist and you're focused on dealing with this buzzer or that alarm or communicating with air traffic control, all kinds of distractions.
SPEAKER_00: You would be surprised.
SPEAKER_00: A common mistake pilots make in those kinds of emergencies is that they forget they're flying the plane.
SPEAKER_00: I've never flown a plane, but I believe that that is true.
SPEAKER_00: There's a similar principle with government.
SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to protect life.
SPEAKER_00: It's the basic thing government was put on earth to do.
SPEAKER_00: It's the big change between post-fall and pre-fall.
SPEAKER_00: Post fall, God will let people collaborate together for the purpose of protecting life.
SPEAKER_00: That becomes government's primary function.
SPEAKER_00: When they fail at that, it doesn't matter really how good they are at the other things.
SPEAKER_00: You've heard it often said that Christians are pro-life until somebody is born and they don't care about their life.
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, that is not true.
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, hospitals and orphanages and every element of Christianity testifies to the contrary of that.
SPEAKER_00: It's such a really a dumb accusation, it barely is worth warning a response to, I think.
SPEAKER_00: However, let me do give you this response.
SPEAKER_00: It kind of doesn't matter, just to overstate the case, if you're dead.
SPEAKER_00: This is why it's the basic function of government to protect life.
SPEAKER_00: Everything else becomes secondary, like flying the plane.
SPEAKER_00: Everything else becomes secondary.
SPEAKER_00: The government has to protect life.
SPEAKER_00: This gets you back to where we started tonight.
SPEAKER_00: Is it significant that our rights come from God instead of coming from government?
SPEAKER_00: I've told you this is one of the debates that's at the foundation of our country.
SPEAKER_00: It's reiterated every four years.
SPEAKER_00: If you view your rights as coming from government, you look to government for protection.
SPEAKER_00: You look to government for advancing your rights, you look for government to acquire rights, you look for government for your safety and security.
SPEAKER_00: That comes from government.
SPEAKER_00: Of course it does.
SPEAKER_00: It's government's job in your mind to acquire those things for you.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't think that is the biblical view of government.
SPEAKER_00: But let me do say this very quickly before I close with one more thing.
SPEAKER_00: You do have to appreciate why that gets so ingrained in our society.
SPEAKER_00: Because, especially coming from a history of slavery and a history of racism, if you look at your government as the ones taking away your rights, if you look at the government as the ones keeping you from voting and institutionalizing slavery and keeping African Americans living in different housing districts, if the government is the source of your corruption in the world, if the government is actively harming you and you want them to stop harming you, then you see why you would say that government is the ones that give you rights, because they're the ones that are hurting you.
SPEAKER_00: Are you following me?
SPEAKER_00: The right response to that, though, is not to say that your rights to not be enslaved or not be discriminated against or not be deprived of property and family is not to say the government has to stop doing those things to me, although the government should, because it's an immoral and unjust government, but to recognize that your rights come from God, which supersede government.
SPEAKER_00: Government is hurting you and harming you and is unjust and is immoral, that's true.
SPEAKER_00: And that's wrong for government to do.
SPEAKER_00: It is sinful, and people that do that will be judged by God.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't alter what Genesis 9 reveals, though, which is that government is, ought to be the source of these kinds of protections.
SPEAKER_00: When a government fails to protect rights that God has given, the government becomes immoral and unjust, and the government becomes a fountain of harm.
SPEAKER_00: The government was given to the world to protect, not to harm.
SPEAKER_00: To give a situation where life can prosper, not where life can be neglected.
SPEAKER_00: I read an article recently in Psychology Today called The Danger of Saying Our Rights Come From God by a guy named David Niossi, written just back in October.
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote about this.
SPEAKER_00: He identified the same debate that I was conveying to you tonight.
SPEAKER_00: I like this article because I think it does capture the debate.
SPEAKER_00: He's on the other side of it, of course, psychology today.
SPEAKER_00: He's on the other side of it.
SPEAKER_00: But he did comment how this is a debate this is old over as old as our country, whether or not you see rights coming from God or rights coming from government.
SPEAKER_00: And he makes one very good point in there.
SPEAKER_00: He says, the strongest argument in saying your rights come from government is it doesn't matter if your rights come from God if government keeps you from having them.
SPEAKER_00: You need the actual Continental Congress to go come in and declare your declaration of independence.
SPEAKER_00: You need the actual Constitutional Congress to declare that you have these rights in the law, or it doesn't matter what God says if you have people take that's his main argument.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter what God says if you have people depriving you of those rights.
SPEAKER_00: I get his point.
SPEAKER_00: He also says some outrageous things.
SPEAKER_00: I'll read you a little section here.
SPEAKER_00: He says, it's nice to have a philosophical basis for the view that government can't deny our God-given rights.
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, however, the entire argument falls apart under scrutiny.
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, can be more accurately understood as a disingenuous attempt to promote religion while doing nothing to explain or secure anyone's rights.
SPEAKER_00: Even believers would grant there is no way to prove the existence of God.
SPEAKER_00: And let me just stop there and go, ha ha ha.
SPEAKER_00: Even believers would grant there's no way to prove I can prove the existence of God right now.
SPEAKER_00: He says he exists.
SPEAKER_00: Let's move on.
SPEAKER_00: Calling God a liar or look out.
SPEAKER_00: Our most precious rights are apparently flowing from an entity whose existence can reasonably be doubted.
SPEAKER_00: Even believers acknowledge that faith, as opposed to verifiable evidence, is the basis of their belief.
SPEAKER_00: That's fine for one's personal religious outlook, but why would we feel that cherished human rights and civil rights are more secure if they arise from God when most of us don't even believe that God exists?
SPEAKER_00: And the answer to that, I hope, is obvious to you.
SPEAKER_00: If you think your rights come from government, and it's the government's job to procure and advance those rights, then your rights are as secure as your government is.
SPEAKER_00: Which will lead to an overt affection and connection to government that is not spiritually healthy.
SPEAKER_00: If you view your rights as transcending government, then you would have, I think, a more limited view of government and a view of government that should protect life, protect your family, protect the freedoms that you have, but it is not the source.
SPEAKER_00: When you view government from that lens, government is a necessary function of life in a fallen world.
SPEAKER_00: It is corrupt because corrupt people do it.
SPEAKER_00: It is sinful because sinful people are doing it.
SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, it has a purpose, and that purpose is to protect human life.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that all examples of the death penalty are good and noble.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, our country has made the death penalty practically dysfunctional in every way, shape, and form.
SPEAKER_00: It is in many places entirely unjust how it's practiced right now.
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't change the reality that God designed a government to defend human life by shedding the blood of men that shed blood.
SPEAKER_00: This is something instituted by God for a good and for his glory, because the goal of all of this is our worship of him, not the advancement of government.
SPEAKER_00: I know there's many of you that might perhaps disagree with things that I've said tonight or view my response to government that deprives people of rights as too flippant.
SPEAKER_00: But I think that if you study Genesis 9 and you look at the origin of government, you'll see how God designed it to operate in the world in this limited sense, in this protective sense, to guard the rights that He Himself has given us.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, I'm thankful for your word that goes into your world.
SPEAKER_00: And we're thankful for the book of Genesis in particular tonight.
SPEAKER_00: And it shows us where people come from, animals come from, worship comes from, even government.
SPEAKER_00: We're thankful that you have shown us that life in a fallen world can be difficult, but it can be filled with joy.
SPEAKER_00: And you've given us that joy in our family and our children.
SPEAKER_00: You've given us that joy in the church with each other.
SPEAKER_00: You've even given us that joy in our country.
SPEAKER_00: We recognize that we have, in a sense, in an earthly sense, a citizenship with people that don't share our view of government, and that's okay.
SPEAKER_00: Because we uh we do love our country and we love and pray for those uh who lead it.
SPEAKER_00: But tonight, Lord, we're thankful for the fellowship in the community we have with those who are united around your word, bought by your blood, bound together with your spirit.
SPEAKER_00: You're the one who has given us joy even in this tumultuous world.
SPEAKER_00: And so we pray tonight that you would give us peace in a world that is filled with violence, you would give us peace in a world that is filled with injustice.
SPEAKER_00: You would help our souls rest not in the future of our government, not in the outcome of an election, but you would help our souls rest trusting in you.
SPEAKER_00: We ask this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us today.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, I would love to meet you personally at Emmanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: Our service times and other church information is on our website at ibc.church.
SPEAKER_00: If you want information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to tms.edu.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this resource has been an encouragement to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.
SPEAKER_00: May the Lord bless you.