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   David J Starcher on May 26, 2020 at 3:55 pm

   I can’t agree with Dick Guido on much of what he said. if we must obey God rather then man is a command to be obeyed on a spectrum rather then an absolute then what must we conclude other then that God has not clearly spoken or that obedience to God is less then an absolute requirement? I personally find no contradiction or tension between the command to obey the authorities in Rom 12 and the concept of obeying God rather then men. It seems to me that Paul actually address the matter of when obedience and disobedience is necessary in Romans 12 when he prescribes the function of the civil authorities in verses 3-5 as being to punish evil doers and praise or encourage those who do good. All we have to do is recognize that Good and Evil are defined by God and found in his word and are not simply the artificial constructs of a civil authority that arise out of their position. In other words it doesn’t become good or evil because a governing authority said so. If a governing authority says to do something which God has defined as evil then we must obey God rather then men. If a governing authority says don’t do something which God has defined as good the again we must obey God rather then men. Obedience to the civil magistrate is determined by the proper use of their God given function. God has clearly spoken about the necessity of the public gathering of the church for worship including the administration of the sacraments thus we can’t accept the view that they are a nonessential function. If such a command of God to assemble is going to be neglected for a time there must be a serious reason for doing so that can be made independent of the civil magistrate said so; the reasons he says so must be examined and then accepted or rejected on their merits at the discretion of the church elders. While public health is a legitimate public concern it doesn’t follow that everything which the civil magistrate declares to be a public health concern necessarily is one or that he is then free to impose whatever restrictions and to whatever degree he chooses. God actually has spoken in regards to public health and the quarantining of the sick; not the quarantining of the healthy. 100,000 is a lot of deaths until you compare it to the CDC statistics on yearly deaths for all causes or to the flu pandemic of 1918 which killed 500,000+ people in the USA at a time when the population was only a third of it’s current size. Adjusted for the increase in population for Covid-19 to be comparable would need to result in 1.5 Million deaths from it today. I am also familiar with the restrictions which were imposed in 1918 and they were nowhere close to as draconian as those that state government’s have been employing. They were local usually by city mayors in response to actual deaths not projected deaths and not in places where the flu had not yet reached, businesses were not usually shut down though a curfew was imposed on their hours and the occupancy was reduced, and the longest time period that I am aware of where such restrictions were imposed was for about 6 weeks at which time everything went back to normal. We are in some places now about to enter our third month with promises to drag it on as long as possible with churches being one of the last allowed to open; there are even talks of a new normal.

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