My Line in the Sand

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GUEST POST – Scott Kennedy

I am not an emotional person. In the last 20 years of life, I believe I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have wept. Not that I think this is a virtue, it just seems part of my temperament. But twice in the last week, I have been so upset – distraught even – that I have wept.

Vaccine mandates. Our government went back on its word and has issued a vaccine mandate for all teachers. This is my line in the sand. But drawing this line is crushing me for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I have worked as a teacher for a decade in a full-time capacity and many more years than that in part-time roles. I am totally invested in the school that I work for and have given my time, my energy and even my money to help that school thrive and flourish. While I am not perhaps the most inspiring, interesting or creative teacher, I love my students, and I think they know I am committed to them and desirous of their success. My ex-students keep in touch. This is the area of life that God has gifted me in. I can teach. I can’t build. I’m not physically strong. I’m not able to do techy things. I’m pretty ordinary really. But teaching I can do. And the government with one edict from their Lectern of Lies has taken my livelihood away from me.

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To Obey or Not Obey?

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The chickens are coming home to roost. The church has experienced weeks of ‘online church’, we face (pun intended) the possibility of forced masking in worship as well as vaccine passports for worship services. Look at the Bill of Rights. Our liberties have been stripped from us. Our right to refuse medical treatment is under threat, our right to freedom of thought, conscience, privacy and religion is imperiled. Our right to peaceful assembly is gone. As are the rights to freedom of association, movement and freedom from discrimination.

The time for decisions is here. The trouble is, our collective Christian minds are creaky and stiff from disuse. Our body, feminine, soft and nurturing in form, but lacking the complementary male strength and roughness of virtues such as courage due to a matriarchal dominance of the church (often in spite of male leaders), is frozen in a semi-recumbent position. What will we do? Well, the women of both sexes will bleat on their social media platforms about doing the right thing and rail at any Christians who awaken enough from slumber to question whether we are in fact in the beginnings of a living totalitarian nightmare. “Obey the Government! Romans 13!” exclaim these newly minted experts in theology who, with their theological position, could no doubt justify yellow stars with the word Jude written in fancy lettering vaccine passports.

Since our minds are seized shut from lack of use and no call of action will get us to actually do anything, we’ll resort to one of our favourite feel-good pastimes. We’ll sing. But we’ll avoid the old hymns of the faith. It’s a bit hard to sing “Stand up for Jesus” when that might require backbone. We’ll no doubt sing lustily some inane and trite modern evangelopop. How about “Who the Son sets free, Oh, is free indeed”? But we’ll do it from our living rooms wearing a mask hoping the State will set us free once the population has been compliant enough and buckled under the State’s loving#kindness.

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The Resistance – Repentance – Part 1B

Continued from yesterday…

Acknowledge Corporate Sin

In our churches, we need leaders who will help us see the big corporate sins of our age. We’ve often softened our congregations up on the easy topics that leave us feeling justified. It’s easy to rail against greed – especially when we think it is something that only rich people have. And rich people are people who earn at least $25,000 more than me. It’s easy to turn our applications into calls for more people to give up time in their ‘secular’ callings to spend more time helping out in the church institution. These soft and convenient applications have become staple.

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The Resistance – Repentance Part 1A

In a recent short article, we suggested that in New Zealand, and probably much of the Western world, find ourselves on the ‘edge’ of something. And when I say “something”, I do not mean pink cupcakes with chocolate sprinkles. More the kind of something that Gandalf refers to when sitting with Pippin on the walls of Minas Tirith and says, “It’s the deep breath before the plunge.” The war is about to heat up. It’s been slowly simmering, but the rate of temperature increase is starting to look exponential, and war looks imminent. Let’s hope for better things, but prepare for this eventuality.

What ought we to do in these times? As I continued to consider the ten suggestions for the Christian Resistance which I proposed previously, I realized that many ideas intertwined and overlapped. As you will see, there will be some repetition in our series “The Resistance”, but that is good, because repetition brings ideas to the forefront of our minds, and there are some things that we Christians have allowed to drift to the back of our minds that ought to be front and centre.

So today and tomorrow we look at the first ‘ought’  for the Christian Resistance. We must acknowledge our individual and corporate sin as the reason we find ourselves in this current situation and repent by making changes where Christ in his Word calls for change.

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COVID Stats in Australia

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Hey Look At That

The Spectator Australia has a great piece detailing the COVID stats there. I recommend you read it.

A couple of stats to whet your appetite.

  • As at 7 September 2021 the CFR for Covid in Australians aged under 50 is <0.034% (16 out of 47,897). This can also be expressed as approximately 4 out of every 12,000 cases.
  • The average life expectancy in Australia is 82.8. As at October 2020 the average age of death from Covid in Australia was approximately 85 and the median age at death approximately 86.
  • Out of 894 cases of people aged over 90 who have tested positive to Covid, 557 have survived (as at 7 September 2021). This means that even those aged over 90 have a statistical chance of over 60% of overcoming Covid.

Read the whole article. It is a fascinating read, and there is only commentary at the end. Most of the piece is just plain statistics.

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Disaster and the Lord (Part 3)

Today we conclude our short series on disaster and the Lord. In part 1, we looked at the general principle of blessing following obedience and curses following disobedience which is seen throughout redemptive history. Yesterday, in part 2, we saw that it does seem to be a pattern in scripture that national disaster tends to follow disobedience, but on a personal level, suffering is not always the result of personal sin, since sin has social effects. Reading these posts is a helpful setup for this one.

And Finally…COVID-19

The last two posts have provided a short theological backdrop and setup which allows us to finally deal with COVID-19. One way of thinking about the pandemic would be to consider what the God of the Bible might be telling us. What we have suffered over the last year and a half is not random. It is all part of His plan. I claim no supernatural inspiration. But I do read the Scriptures, and the Scriptures teach that disaster is often used against nations because of their sin and idolatry. Furthermore, let us acknowledge, that God has every reason to punish the Western world for their covenant-breaking and idolatry. We, who once placed God at the very centre of our social lives have for decades been steadily changing our values and allegiance. God says “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and we have allowed no-fault divorce and have refused to sanction those who break the sacred covenant of marriage. God says “Thou shalt not kill” and our hands are red with the blood of tens of thousands of unborn children. God says, “Thou shalt not steal”, and with envious hearts, we attempt to legitimise and call ‘good’ the theft of our neighbour’s goods through the redistributive state. God says, “Thou shalt not covet”, and we have made an art of it, envying successful groups and demonising them in the name of social justice.

Yet these are only sides accompanying our main. They are simply indicators of our great sin. God says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” and we have bowed down to many other idols. One of our national idols is the idol of state. Do you doubt me? Whose name has been hallowed such that criticism is almost sacrilegious in this crisis? Whose will is done on this patch of earth as God’s will is in heaven? Who do we look to to give us this day our daily bread when we lose our jobs? Who do we expect to deliver us from this evil? Who have we given radical power and dominion to with nary a second thought? Who do we expect to care for us in our old age if we don’t have enough money to cover things? Whose benefits are we expected not to forget if not the state who heals all our diseases, who redeems our life from the pit and crowns us with loving#bekindness and compassion and who satisfies us with good things? Who do we look to when things go wrong? Who do we expect to train our children? Who do we look to provide answers to every crisis from poverty, to housing to health and education?

Can we doubt at the very least the possibility that COVID-19 is a divine curse on our rejection of God and the breaking of the covenant of creation with him and turning to the state as our redeemer? And if it is, who could deny that it is richly deserved? God has often highlighted the impotence of idols in redemptive history. The very thing that people trust is shown to be empty, worthless and vain. Who could say that Western governments have managed this pandemic well? Have any of them come out of this looking like an omnipotent deity, or just petty tyrant clowns clutching at straws? It’s clearly beyond them. They are shown to be impotent by a microscopic virus. He that dwelleth in heaven is surely laughing!

At this point, there are two options. A nation and its leaders can take note of God’s hand of judgment and turn to Him in repentance. That would be wise. Wise, but uncommon. Idolatry tends to lead to blindness and folly. Rather than turn and be saved, people blindly think that what they need is more of their idol, not less. Frequently in redemptive history, people needed to suffer under the heavy hand of their idols for a long time before they turned in repentance to God.

In New Zealand, and in much of the Western world, there are not too many encouraging signs at this point. Instead of looking at our idol of state and seeing its impotence to save, we have doubled down like rebellious fools. Our idol promises that with ever more power and excessive regulation they will save us, but instead they enslave us. Unlike the God who creates from nothing, they cannot manufacture wealth and are plundering our children and grandchildren in their fruitless attempts at deity. In all this, the reality is that we are just increasing the wrath stored up against us and prolonging the pain that we as a people will suffer.

The call to all who have eyes to see is to repent. Let us repent of our idolatry of state. It cannot save, and is being shown for impotent idol it is. Repentance ought to start with the household of God, which has not been completely innocent in this idolatry. We have unfortunately been complicit. We have wanted our children educated at someone else’s expense. We’ve enjoyed not needing to use our tithes to help the poor among us since we’ve outsourced that. We’ve failed to speak and apply God’s Word to the politics of envy-driven redistributive government. We’ve not held the marriage bed to be honourable and suffered immorality to be named among us. We must repent and commit to living out God’s laws in our lives and calling our brothers and sisters to do the same. Then we must commit to the Great Commission, calling our fellow citizens to turn from their evil ways, embrace the king and his laws and live.

Why Modern Christians Separate Faith and Politics

In every culture, law is religious in origin and so it must be recognized that in any social order the source of law is the god of that society and that to which the people have bound themselves. To change the law order is then an implicit or explicit change in religion – revealing a change of gods (allegiance) in that political realm. This further implies that no absolute disestablishment of religion is actually possible in any society. A culture can certainly disestablish one faith or church, but it merely replaces that faith with another one, be it Islamic, Buddhist or any other humanistic faith. This is clearly what has taken place in the modern West. We have traded the God of the Bible for the god of the state (man enlarged), where the ‘will of the people,’ personified by an elite bureaucracy, now redefines law in the name of the people, the new god. This has been in no small part due to a faulty theology amongst Christians and the consequent abdication of responsibility by the church in the socio-political sphere. Due to the philosophical dualism that has so greatly influenced the church (discussed in chapter two), modern Christians have tended to separate God’s law and covenant from real history and implicitly assumed that the state is not actually accountable to God’s standards.

Joseph Boot in The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society

Incompetence and Waste

Those who are regular readers will know that we at The Sojournal are opponents of statism. We believe the state has a legitimate role. It is indeed a minister of God, but it has rebelled against God’s role for it and has arrogated more and more power. We have theological reasons for opposing much of its spending and regarding it as theft. However, we understand that not all Christians are yet theologically convinced of our position. After all, most of us have grown up in an environment of statism. It is only natural for us to assume it is normal and right. It’s an unquestioned assumption in our lives. It’s hard to see our cultural blind spots.

However, let me appeal to the pragmatists among you. State control of things outside what we at The Sojournal consider to be their God-given realm tends to be inept and incompetent. You know this. Accountability matters. And when you can’t take your business elsewhere, there is no accountability, and therefore there is always wastage. Today let’s consider the much-vaunted Ka Ora, Ka Ako Healthy School Lunches Programme.

On the Ministry of Education website, we are informed that school lunches will be provided at a maximum per child, per day cost of $5 per Year 1-8 student and $7 for high school students. Now any parent with a few kids living on a budget knows that you can feed your children a healthy lunch for under $5 easy. But even this amount seems mild compared to the actual cost to the taxpayer.

A screen capture from the MOE website on 28 August 2021. Highlighting is mine.

According to the Treasury budget at a glance document for 2021, we are allocating $527,000,000 toward the school lunches programme. According to the document which is dated 20 May 2021, there are currently 144,000 students receiving these ‘free’ lunches. Now let’s do a little basic arithmetic. $527 million, divided by 144,000 students should give us the amount it costs to feed one child lunches per year. Then let’s divide that number by the number of school days in a year (190 in 2021). This gives us a figure of $19.26 per child. Now let’s be generous and assume that there is going to be an increase in the number of children being fed. Let’s #be kind and assume that they managed to get this up to 200,000 students. That would reduce the cost to $13.87 per child.

What does it actually cost to feed a child? I feed my children 2-4 slices of bread for lunch, with their favourite spread and provide them with a piece of fruit as well. Sometimes they’ll get a homemade biscuit. How much does that cost? Around $1. I am almost 14 times more efficient than the government at feeding my children. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I am a grumpy old scrooge-like curmudgeon who is half-starving my children, and I ought to spend double what I do on their lunches. That still makes what the government offers nearly 7 times less efficient than me. Furthermore, because I know what my children like, they will actually eat the lunches I provide while “thousands of taxpayer-funded school lunches are being left uneaten by students each week.” Imagine for a moment the good that all this wasted money, confiscated from citizens through taxes, could be used for if its owners were able to choose how to spend it themselves.

Having thus appealed to the pragmatists, I urge you to consider why this is so. Why is it that the government seems to be so incompetent at as simple a task as providing a child with lunch? Why are its attempts at providing welfare, housing and education so bungling? Is it possible that God has so ordered the world that blessing tends to follow cutting along the grain, and cursing and difficulty follow cutting against it. God has ordained the world with different spheres of authority that are charged with different roles. It is not the role of the government to provide food for children. It is the role of parents. God has ordained that the family is to provide food for itself. The father is the God-ordained protector and provider of the family. He is to provide for his children (Genesis 2:15, 3:19). When the family is functioning as it should, it is going to be far better placed to provide food for children.

Should We Seek a Secular Public Sphere?

What most modern Western people (including many Christians) are asking for in the name of ‘freedom’ is in fact a new slavery, when they attempt to secularize the public sphere and pursue freedom without the Lordship of Christ. To object to this by saying that non-believers are not accountable to God’s covenant law (moral law) is finally to say that we have no basis for presenting the gospel to the unbeliever – since Scripture defines sin as lawlessness and only lawbreakers need the gospel!

The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society by Joseph Boot)

Disturbing Events in NZ

There have been some disturbing developments in NZ lately, and as Christians we ought to be aware of them and think carefully about their significance. Cam Slate of the BFD has highligrhted them in a post provocatively entitled “It’s Official, New Zealand Is Now a Dictatorship“. He highlights disturbing things that have happened in the last week. I quote:

  1. The entire country was locked down under Level Four rules.
  2. The Government passed regulations to enforce mandatory masking.
  3. The Government passed regulations to require compulsory tracing.
  4. The Government via the Police abrogated Health exemption cards to compulsory masking.
  5. People who were protesting were arrested, charged and placed under house arrest with no access to internet capable devices
  6. The Government sets up and encourages people to use a snitch line to dob in neighbours, friends and family
  7. Media are operating as Government snitches
  8. The Prime Minister and her un-elected Health Czar have suspended parliament unilaterally.

To that, I would add the government’s anti-parent approach as demonstrated in the conversion therapy bill and the Ministry of Health’s advice that children between 12-15 do not need parental consent for the vaccine. Go and read Cam’s whole article on the BFD.

Also check out the press releases from Judith Collins and David Seymour. Suspending Parliament at such a time is unconscionable.