By Scott Lively
Government attempts to regulate church attendance and worship practices violate not only the law of our land, the U.S. Constitution, they violate the law above the law, and because of that every Christian pastor should individually be in open defiance of restrictive "mandates" and collectively in active civil rebellion against the state and local governments issuing them. The daily news should be dominated not by violent BLM/Antifa rioting over phony "systemic racism" narratives, but by images of bold but non-violent men of God standing resolutely against tyranny – speaking forth the truth of the Gospel even if hauled off to jail – while their congregations gather in mass protests outside the city halls and state houses singing the great old hymns about the "Mighty Fortress of our God" and "Christian Soldiers Marching As to War." No secular power could withstand Christendom united in this way!
But instead of Lions of Faith, we see Cowering Sheep "having a form of Godliness [by their words] but [by their actions] denying its power." That's from 2 Timothy 3, which describes the "perilous times" of the last days, when the society is overrun with the wicked. The wicked run wild because the righteous are ashamed to assert their authority as agents of the Lord of Hosts.
Why would any observer of today's church believe its God has any power to protect and keep His followers even through the valley of the shadow of death when its leaders show by example that He's not even worth the risk of incurring the disfavor of petty government bureaucrats? Jeremiah rebuked the wimps of his day by asking, "If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, How will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?" The same principle is stated in the Gospel of Luke: "He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much."
No, an order to obey man instead of God on "social distancing" is not the Mark of the Beast. But it's a rehearsal for it. It is conditioning the sheep to follow a false shepherd into a cattle chute.
My First Century Bible Church is small and widely dispersed. The COVID-19 plandemic hit just as I was ready to launch a local congregation-building campaign here on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, on the border of Mississippi, so growth has been difficult. My prior congregation was an inner-city mission church in Springfield, Massachusetts, also small. So my right to speak on these matters is not by virtue of leading a mega-church, but only the right common to all men of the clergy to assert God's truth as I understand it, in submission to the unction of the Holy Spirit and in conformity to His Word.