PHIL:

Well, John, you have stirred a lot of discussion both online and around a lot of water coolers—discussion and a little bit of debate—with an open letter that you sent to the governor of California, and then you followed that up with a sermon to your flock at Grace Community Church later that same week, and that message is so important that we’re going to preempt our normal Grace to You broadcasts tomorrow and the next day. But I wanted to spend today talking with you about this letter—why you wrote it, and what happened. You made some comments at Grace Church a week before the letter went out that sort of let people know it was coming. We’re going to play those and let our listeners hear that.

All right. So, John, talk about what motivated you to write this letter. I think I could tell from your comments there that it’s, it’s a sense of righteous indignation that someone would billboard a misuse of Scripture, such as the governor of California did.

JOHN:

Well, I think I saw it as an assault on the person of Christ and on the Word of God. And that’s exactly what it was. You don’t, you don’t support that sort of blasphemous, criminal behavior of killing babies in the womb with quotes from Jesus. That is a gross, devilish misuse of Scripture, and it is a blasphemy against the Lord Jesus Himself, who said, “Permit the children to come unto Me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” So, I think felt somewhat like the psalmist who said, “Zeal for your house has eaten me up,” and then Jesus quoted that when He tore into the crime going on in the Temple and said, “You’ve turned my Father’s house, which is to be a house of prayer, into a den of robbers.” And I think that was stepping across a line to me. When you try to get Jesus in support of rampant, massive transgression—you know, it’s a Herod-like thing to want to massacre babies. That’s what Herod did. And he did that hoping to kill the Son of God in the process.

PHIL:

Yeah, same thing with Pharaoh in the Old Testament.

JOHN:

And Pharaoh did the same thing, and Moses was rescued from that. So I saw this as another misrepresentation of Christ and another attack on His, His creation that needed to be addressed. And how do we address it? I mean, we all resent abortion, we hate the idea of it. And I suppose there’s a frustration among all of us because we, we can’t seem to do anything about it. We can’t vote it out. We don’t have enough power—certainly in the state of California we don’t. We can’t stop it, even though the Supreme Court removed the Roe/Wade case, they didn’t eliminate abortion—it’s still up to states to decide what they want to do. We would like to get rid of it—it’s mass murder. We can’t do that. And I thought, the frustration of that leads me to one conclusion, and that is, there is no political solution to this. The only hope for righting this wrong is to go right at the head, right at where it originates, and in this case it originated with the governor of California. And that is the biblical approach.

You know, you go back into the book of Exodus and Moses confronts Pharaoh, and indicts Pharaoh, and says, “Let my people go.” So the prophet of God confronting authority is something you see throughout the Word of God. I made a list of, I don’t know, fifty different occasions where this happens throughout the Old Testament and included those in the message that I preached. And you have the same thing in church history. You have rulers and kings and authorities being confronted by faithful preachers of the gospel, all the way from the church fathers through to the, to the Puritans. And speaking the Word of God to the authorities is part and parcel of the church’s mission in the world. And let me show what I mean by that.

Some people say, don’t we have divided responsibility? Yes, we do. The government has its fear and the church has its fear. And people will remember a couple of years ago when the government tried to tell our church what to do and we said, “You’re out of your zone.” And so we wouldn’t accept what the government said, and we put together a paper that said Christ is the head of the church and not Caesar.

PHIL:

Uh huh.

JOHN:

So we understand the separation of powers. We understand that parents have the authority over their families. We understand that government has authority over society. We understand the church has authority over the kingdom. But that separation has to be understood with one very, very specific distinction: The church, because it contains and holds the Word of God, speaks to all those other categories.

How to fathers and mothers know their responsibility for their children? The Word of God informs them. So we speak to fathers what it is to be a godly father. We speak to mothers on what it is to be a godly mother. We speak to parents on what it is to be godly parents. And just as we speak into the lives of parents, we speak to the government as well. And you see that biblically from Exodus all the way to the end. In fact, Psalm 2 is basically a psalm that looks throughout all of human history and tells every ruler in the planet to bow his knee to the Son of God. That’s how the psalm ends: “Kiss the Son, lest He be angry.”

So while the separation of powers exists, the church speaks to all those powers about the God-ordained responsibility. So that when the government tried to shut our church, we said “No, you can’t do that, because this is what the Word of God says about that.” So we speak to government, we speak to authorities. And what our message is: You must conform to God’s Word. You must bow your knee to the revelation of God, and the God of that revelation.

So how do we do that? Well, it was—it’s just—the pattern is direct. You go to whoever the ruler is and you address that. And it was interesting to me that as it just became a compulsion for me to do this because this was a line that never should have been breached, that I had not noticed anybody doing it. And that’s kind of [what] the feedback has been since we put that letter together for the governor of California. People have been saying, “Why doesn’t somebody else do this? Why has this not been done?”

Why are people in Washington lobbying with politicians to get righteousness into this nation when, in order to even have an audience with them, you’ve got to compromise to start with?

PHIL:

Yeah. I wanted to follow up on that. Because you said earlier, there is no political solution to this. And over the history of your ministry you have stayed mostly out of partisan politics. And what you just said is stressed by Scripture as well. Paul says, righteousness doesn’t come from the law. The law defines what righteousness is, but it doesn’t produce righteousness. Paul says, if righteousness could come by the law, then Christ died in vain. So the gospel is about salvation from sin. It’s not about political strategies and all of that. And you’ve made that clear over the years and have stayed out of the realm of partisan politics. The problem is, partisan politicians in America have not stayed out of the realm of morality, and government policy is becoming more and more a threat to the church. But this is not a political ploy. You’re not lobbying for any kind of political policy here or any of that. The gist of this letter is to call the governor himself to repentance.

JOHN:

Well, that is what struck me. I had had a conversation with him on Larry King some years back, in which he claimed to, to be a Christian and said, “I guess I believe the Bible.” So, you know, I knew him, and that was—that conversation was at the very time he was basically mandating same-sex marriage in the city of San Francisco.

PHIL:

That’s right. He was the mayor of San Francisco.

JOHN:

And that’s what the discussion was about. So I knew he was lost at that point. And then when I see him go from that, years back, to having the brashness and the hubris to promote the slaughter of infants and quote Jesus, the jeopardy that—it struck me—the jeopardy of his eternal soul was just more than I could, than I could handle. And I, I would have under some circumstances just confronted him personally, if there was some personal sin to be deal with and I knew about that and I had that access. But once he decided to make his transgressions public and blanket the nation with his sin, then a fitting response had to blanket the nation with the call to repentance.

But there is nothing political about it. There is no political answer to this. My concern is that this man is going into a horrendous eternity without God forever unless he repents and trusts Christ. And the punishment—the severity of that punishment—is compounded not only because of his own rebellion but because he’s just, he’s just reaching out to garner as many of the rebels as he possibly can to dishonor the name of God and denigrate the person of Jesus Christ. The culpability is massive. And it struck me that it’s his eternal soul that concerns me, um, and all those who follow him. He’s got lots of people around him who are buying into this. I know—I doubt he came up with that verse.

PHIL:

Right. Yeah. And, you know, just from your tone, it’s evident to me that you’re indignation is balanced by a genuine concern for his soul. That also came across in those comments you made to your church a couple of weeks ago. As I listen to that, I found it sobering and, and moving in a way, and convicting, that we need to pray for our leaders—we’re commanded to do that in Scripture. Do you hold out any hope that he might hear that and repent? Is there any precedent for that?

JOHN:

Well, it’s rare, honestly. It’s, it’s very rare when you get to that level of boldness. And the pattern looking back in redemptive history is that if you just take a general category of the prophets who confronted rulers, it didn’t turn out well.

PHIL:

Right. Pharaoh hardened his heart.

JOHN:

Well, yeah, it starts with Pharaoh. But remember what our Lord said to the leaders of Israel. He said, “You killed the prophets. You stoned those who were sent to you.” And Jesus told that amazing parable about the vineyard owner . . .

PHIL:

Right.

JOHN:

. . . who turned the vineyard over to servants to take care of the vineyard. And when it was time for him to check on what they had done, he sent back some of his personal agents—who represent the prophets—to check. And they stoned them and killed them. And then he thought, “Well, I’ll send my son.” And he sent his son. And they killed the son as well. And our Lord was indicting the leaders of Israel, historically, because the pattern had been that every messenger that God sent, they killed—stoned. And He sent His Son, and they killed Him. And think about it: They then proceeded to kill John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament prophets. They then killed Christ. They then started killing the, the apostles, martyring the apostles; and the last of all them exiled, John. And then in the early church, what happens in the early church? Nero launches a persecution and they start killing Christians who are confronting the leaders of Rome as well. And it continues throughout all of church history, and it continues even today.

So generally speaking, people who get to that level of power react with persecution. And we—you have to understand historically that the great persecutor of the people of God has always been government power. Because they’re the only ones who can put you in jail.

PHIL:

Uh huh.

JOHN:

They’re the only ones that can take your life. And that’s generally the reaction.

PHIL:

There are some blessed exceptions.

JOHN:

Well, I was just going to say, the exceptions are rare. The, the king of Nineveh . . .

PHIL:

In Jonah’s time.

JOHN:

. . . in Jonah’s time repented.

PHIL:

That’s an amazing scenario. And Scripture doesn’t give us all the details we’d like to have about it.

JOHN:

And then in Daniel 4, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the world—I mean, in the known world, the Mediterranean; he was the ruler of the world.

PHIL:

And one of the worst bad guys in all the Old Testament—the last guy you’d expect to repent, right?

JOHN:

Yeah, he was as bad as a pagan king could possibly get. And he was so, so severely evil that the Lord literally turned him into an animal wandering out in the wilderness for seven years of his life. But at the end of that, his senses came to him, and he bowed his knee to the true and living God. And I believe he’ll be in heaven. I believe he’s there now.

But even a more dramatic story is the story of Manasseh. Manasseh was the most evil king in the history of the people of Israel. He was wretched. He was as wretched as you could possibly be. And, um, he was confronted and rejected that confrontation. But eventually he was literally hauled off by ropes—hooks were put into his body and he was marched off to Babylon. And that would be about a four-month walk.

PHIL:

Wow.

JOHN:

And this is in humiliation from this wretched sin that he had perpetrated on the nation. And his sin was so bad, it was so bad, that God even said that if Samuel and Moses had interceded for him, God still couldn’t stop the judgment. So he created such evil everywhere that there was no way to stop the captivity, and the Babylonian captivity was the result of it. In fact, the Bible says that Israel—or Judah, the southern kingdom—was taken into captivity because of the sins of Manasseh. The worst.

But the amazing story of Manasseh is, he came to repentance. Second Chronicles 33—this incredible repentance. And the Lord restored him back. So here is this king who is the worst of all kings ever, and the details are almost unspeakable. But he repented, and the Lord showed him mercy. And so much mercy—and this is kind of an interesting footnote to it—that he actually appears in Matthew chapter 1 because he’s in the line of the Messiah. It goes from Hezekiah to Manasseh to Ammon, his wicked son, and then to Josiah, and then proceeds to Christ. So evil Manasseh was in the messianic line. That’s a rare thing.

You do have in the New Testament Sergius Paulus, who was a Roman official who believed the gospel. But very rare. Pilate? No. Herod? No. Agrippa? Almost, but no. But that doesn’t mean you give up. And with that in mind—that you don’t know the purposes of the will of God, and you do know that sinners are responsible for their rejection if they reject—you present the gospel to the sinner boldly and pray for his salvation. That’s what Paul said in 1 Timothy 2: “Pray for kings and those in authority over you.” And—

PHIL:

Yes, talk about that. That’s an interesting verse, given everything you’re saying about the unlikeliness of a ruler—a powerful ruler who is wicked in his heart—would ever respond to a call to repentance. And when Paul wrote 1 Timothy 2, Nero was on the throne, probably the most notorious—notoriously evil—Caesar who ever sat on that throne. And yet Paul says pray for him. He’s saying pray for his salvation, right?

JOHN:

Yes, because the whole passage in 1 Timothy 2 is God our Savior who will have all men to come to believe and Christ is the mediator for all. He’s talking about salvation—pray for the salvation of rulers. Yes, it is amazing to think about pray[ing] for the salvation of Nero, who launched persecution—Nero who was so corrupt in his own life: incest; I mean, he murdered family members; he was the worst of the worst. And so here the people are—these believers are praying for the most wretched figure in their world, and praying for his salvation, and he is coming after them to kill them. And that reminds me of what our Lord said in Matthew when He said, “You are never more like God than when you pray for your enemies.”

So I am sincere in saying I am praying for the salvation of the governor of California, the president of the United States, and every other leader, for the sake of their eternal soul.

Look, I don’t have to pray for Christ to triumph in the end. That’s prewritten. I don’t have to pray for the return of Christ. I can long for that. He will come and establish His kingdom. But I am told to pray for those in authority. And the result of that is that we can live a quiet and peaceable life in—with a measure of godliness. So the only way you can fix the culture is the salvation of the ruler. That’s what that’s saying.

PHIL:

Now, we live in California, so this affects us personally. But the truth is, the problems in California are just a microcosm of political issues that exist across the nation and literally around the world. The world seems to be barreling further and further into darkness as time goes by. As you look at that, are you hopeful or are you discouraged? Do you think it’s possible that there would ever be another reformation or revival—that the Lord would delay His coming—or do you think we’re looking at the last days? And is there any way to know?

JOHN:

Well, yeah. I think we’re looking at the last days, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But I don’t get discouraged because we always triumph in Christ. But my concern is for the salvation of these people and the realization that there are degrees of punishment in hell. And when you trample underfoot the blood of the covenant and count it an unholy thing, as the book of Hebrews says—when you know Christ’s name and you know the gospel, and you use and abuse that name for evil purposes—that is a horrific thing: to face God with that record. Because that’s the severest punishment.

So my concern is not to help Christ win the battle. The calling of the church in the world is to cry out for nonbelievers to repent, starting with the people at the very, very top. And I don’t see the church doing that. I see the church hiring people to go to Washington and lobby with politicians to get what they want, or suing, or compromising. I think people were irritated at me writing that letter because they’ve been trying to convince the leaders of this country that we’re harmless good guys and, you know, we want, we want you to like us so we can keep building our church and keep drawing big crowds, and they don’t want to make the powers angry. They want—

PHIL:

They want to appease them.

JOHN:

They want to appease them, which is a terrible compromise. Because if there is going to be a quiet life, if there is going to be any measure of godliness in a society, it’s going to happen when the people in charge have been converted to Christ. And I—I mean—I pray for that; it can happen. Historically there have been times like that. There have been kings that were genuine believers in Christ and made a difference in their society. But I think we’re closer now than we’ve ever been to the very end of everything—if for no other reason the book of Revelation says that we’re going to have a number on our forehead and a number on our hand, and there’s all kinds of information out there about chips that they want to insert under your skin on your hand. I mean, who would have thought that? And the idea that if you take this—you get a number and you can’t buy or sell unless you have the number—what is that? Well, they could shut us down right now if they just took—everybody knows, everybody in the power structure knows how to shut any human being down. They can shut their bank account down, they can shut their credit cards down—I mean, it’s already possible. So when you think about the world of the antichrist as described in the Scriptures, where he has total control over everyone and either you bow or you’re canceled and shut down, we’re there. Also, in the end time, evil will grow worse and worse, and I don’t know how it gets worse than what it is now, when they’re mutilating children—castrating young boys, butchering young girls—and the government is making laws to protect that, and medical doctors are butchering children. This is paganism. This is as if—this is as if Christ never came. This is like going back to Rome before Christ arrived. So I have to think that the Lord could come at any time. Certainly, prophetically nothing has to happen because the Rapture of the church is imminent and it can happen at any time. And then all hell breaks loose in the times of the Tribulation.

PHIL:

Again, sobering thoughts. And, John, as we wrap up this broadcast, would you lead us in a prayer for kings and all who are in authority so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity?

JOHN:

Lord, we do come to you and ask that you would, by your grace and for your glory, bring salvation to the rulers of this country. We think of the governor of the state of California, Governor Newsom; we think of the president, Joe Biden; we think of Senators, Congressmen, judges, magistrates, governors—whoever they are. People in authority—even people in authority over the military and over the police, and people in authority over education, and people in authority over civil issues, as well as criminality. May there be conversion of these people. May they come to faith in Christ so that we aren’t ruled in such a dominating way by the devil’s henchmen. And we ask this for your glory that your grace could be put on display. It would be such an amazing, amazing, almost breathtaking reality to see well-known leaders—who have shaken their fist in your face and worked against you even in blasphemous ways—to bow the knee as Nebuchadnezzar did, or bow the knee as Manasseh did, and recognize you are the true and living God and you rule in the world, for their own souls’ sake and the souls of those around them. We pray that you would put your salvation on display for your glory. Amen.