Lux Lucet

Civil Disobedience in the Bible

It may come as a surprise to some Christians just how many examples of civil disobedience there are in the Scriptures.  Some examples are:

• The refusal of the Hebrew midwives to obey Pharaoh’s command to kill all the male children (Exodus 1:17)
• The Israelites’ refusal to allow Saul to execute Jonathan (1 Sam. 14:45)
• Saul’s servants refusing to execute the priests of the Lord (1 Sam. 22:17)
• Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’s refusal to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image (Dan. 3:18)
• Daniel’s refusal to obey Darius’ edict not to pray to any god other than the Lord for thirty days (Dan. 6:10)
• The apostles’ rejection of the Sanhedrin’s order not to preach in the name of Jesus (Acts 5:29)

That the king’s commands are not absolute is one of the clear takeaways from these passages. When a tyrant speaks, it is not for the Christian to ask, “how high?”  Rather, it to our duty as believers to compare the commands of al civil magistrates with the commands of the Lord.  If they run counter to one another, it is our duty to resist.    

Civil Disobedience and Covid-19

“Canadian pastor arrested for violating COVID-19 worship restrictions to be released from jail,” ran the headline in the Christian Post.  The Christian pastor in question is James Coates, who famously ran afoul of Alberta’s Public Health Act limiting church gatherings to 15% capacity. 

In April 2021, it was reported that police had erected a fence around the church to keep people out. 

In response to this, the church has gone underground, meeting in an undisclosed location. Commenting on this situation, Ken Ham wrote, “Canada now has a underground church.  Let that sink in for a moment – Canada, the ‘true North strong and free’ – has forced a church to go underground.” 

Here in America, there have numerous runs ins between law enforcement and churches that refused to abide by Covid regulations.  The most prominent of these has been Grace Community Church’s resistance to the lockdown regulations in California that have significantly restricted the ability of churches to meet on the Lord’s Day. 

As of this writing in May 2021, the lockdown measures in much of the United States are being eased or removed altogether.  While this is good news, it does not take away from the fact that these lockdowns never should have been instituted in the first place.  Evidence for the usefulness of lockdowns, masks, social distancing requirements, and other such measure designed to limit the spread of Covid are both unprecedented and of dubious effectiveness.  When you consider the serious damage to both our liberties and our economy resulting from lockdowns – not to mention the active suppression of effective therapeutics such as Ivermectin; the deplatforming of critics, even highly credentialed critics, of lockdowns, masks and vaccines by major social media networks if they contradict the WHO on Covid; the move to ignore or explain away the unusually large numbers of deaths associated with the Covid vaccines; not  to mention the odious and terrifying specter of vaccine passports and forced vaccinations – it is hard to see the governmental overreaction to Covid as  anything other than a conspiracy to undermine the political and economic liberty of ordinary people with the aim of ushering in a top down, technocratic and tyrannical world government.  Indeed, Pope Francis has openly called for a “new world order” in response to the pandemic.

The Pope is not alone in attacking economic and political liberty.  French President Emmanuel Macron declared Covid has shown that capitalism – the economic system of the Bible – “can no longer work.”  That really depends on your definition of “work.”  As a system to foster prosperity and liberty, it by all means still works and Covid has done nothing to disprove this.  In America, it is the freest states that have been most effective in limiting the spread of Covid, while the most authoritarian states have struggled with it the most.  Macron’s remarks were made at the virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January of this year.  As one of the leading globalist organizations, the WEF has a very different definition of “works” than most of the rest of us.  For them, what works is anything that promotes centralization of power, the destruction of individual liberty and the imposition of world government.

In light of these attacks on national sovereignty, limited government, capitalism, individual liberty and religious liberty, freedoms that were born out of the 16^th century Protestant Reformation and rightfully considered by Westerners as their patrimony, it is imperative for Christians to stand up, speak out, and, if needed, refuse to comply with governmental overreach done in the name of fighting the so-called Covid pandemic. 

Is resistance to tyranny obedience to God?

Clearly, the answer is yes.

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