In my opinion the masks are not the issue even though they seem to be the issue. The issue is that the civil government has been taken over by people hostile to the nation and to the Christian faith. As someone mentioned above, its main focus has been security and safety of those with power. It has rammed through abortion, sodomy, opposition to freedom of association, mass illegal immigration, and the list goes on. It has acted untrustworthy time and time again, willing to use crisis to push through restrictions on the liberties that previous American’s fought for. Whether it was an abuse of 911 or climate change, the government has held to let no crisis go to waste. Yesterday evening, I sat through a local council meeting in which pro-aborts used Covid as an excuse to try to ram through a bill that would have made a portion of public property in front of an abortion mill off limits to prolife people. It was brazen how much these people were playing up Covid and lying through their teeth. They tried to act as if they were concerned for the safety of people not only at the clinic but at other medical facilities that this would have supposedly applied to. They made the case that this was the only compassionate decision to be made because of Covid. Praise God there were a few council members who spoke to the hospitals and found out that no place but the abortion mill had asked for the bill. Something even more shocking was that it was revealed that the local CDC had endorsed this bill. A bill that the proaborts had been pushing for years was being endorsed by various groups that are supposed to be for public safety.
I bring this up because most conservative Christians are tired of it. We are tired of the rolling over and playing dead every time this happens. You might say well why haven’t they done anything before now. I don’t know. I do know that men like Matt Trewhella have been fighting tyranny and abortion for years. They have the scars and the arrest records to prove it. I also know that a mask really isnt that big of a deal and yet it is. For many it is a brazen and literally in your face reminder of a civil government gone amok.
Some have used the analogy of a wife submitting to her husband or a father to a child to describe our submission to the civil magistrates. For example, the father believes that a tornado is coming and so he takes the whole family into a basement. Even though he was wrong, he had the right to do it. Well, the situation is more like an abusive and unfaithful dad who should have been divorced and jailed a long time ago, not only demands the wife and child to go into the basement, he also makes them make all the sacrifices for this supposed tornado. And he not only does it one or two nights, but he does it for 6 months. Finally, he says they have to wear a rain jacket every day while he flaunts the rule himself. The mother says “no we aren’t going to wear a rain jacket.” It was one of the first times she ever stood up to the abusive husband. It definitely seems like a silly place to stand up. Why there and not when he was abusing her while cheating on her?
In my opinion, for Doug and Toby and all their followers the issue isn’t per say the mask. Its all the thing it entails. To them and to many Christians, it seems just like one more issue that the church rolls over and plays dead on. Its the refusal by most of the church in America to preach to the civil magistrates.
I do think that the article above is correct on some of the details but that seems to be besides the point. Even more so is LittleJohn’s article and the 9marks article against John MacArthur. Those comes across like David going out to fight Goliath and his brothers upset that he isn’t wearing Saul’s armor probably.
The Philistines are camped about us and I want Saul to win.
All of that said, I agree that its stupid to make blanket statements about masks being idolatry. But I also think Doug made the appropriate concessions finally in that article. If the real issue is his padeocommunion, well we have known that for years. He’s wrong and dead wrong on it. But that hasn’t kept us from being cobeligerents and friends before now, and I don’t know why we think we need to divide over it now.
