Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
A few days ago, I went in to a Subway sandwich shop to buy a cup of coffee. It did not go well.
“Do you have a mask?” the man behind the counter asked.
“No,” I said.
“Do you want a mask?”, he replied.
“No,” I said.
“You must wear a mask; it is the law in Scotland,” he intoned.
“No, it’s not,” I said, and I left, no longer wanting his coffee.
So what this man believed is that “The Law” could force me to cover my face: he presumably also agrees that this “law” can prevent me from seeing friends and relatives; this “law” can say who can attend a funeral; this “law” can regulate every aspect of our lives and we can only obey. Now, I stand on the law, I love the law, but I do not recognise this strange and unexplainable “law” that would oppress me and which says “You are permitted no free will”, “you must obey”, “you are a slave”.
How, ladies and gentlemen, did this happen? How did the law, which was to protect us from tyranny, become an instrument of tyranny? The answer to that question is what I want to talk to you about today. How did we get in this awful mess?
The original law, God’s law, was thundered from a mountaintop in the wilderness. Its purpose was to call a nation out of slavery — slavery to human masters and slavery to sin. In those days, that nation, called Israel, was governed by the law of God, administered by judges. They had no other form of government. No king, no parliament, no bureaucrats, no police. They needed none. They were governed by the word of God.
But our ancestors were not happy: they looked at other nations, governed by kings and tyrants and said, “We want to be like them. We want a king to judge us.” The Lord said:
They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.
But, nevertheless, the Lord respected their choice. Yet he did warn them what sort of king they would have: one that would take their sons and daughters into his own service. One that would regulate and regiment the people. One that would steal from the people and hand the proceeds to his own servants. One that would take a proportion of everything they earned and hand it to another.
Does any of this sound familiar?
But our ancestors did not listen; they said:
Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.
They rejected rule by God and by God's law, not because this made them free, but because they could not shoulder the responsibility that it places on every man and woman: to made make judgements, decisions and commitments; to stand—alone, if necessary—for the truth and for justice. They rejected God because being ruled by a man, and being told what to do, was easier. They did not want the law of God, a law that they would need to place in their hearts and to defend. Instead, they wanted a ruler to think for them and to fight their battles. Slaves they had been, and slaves they still were in their hearts.
Of course, we no longer have a king, as our ancestors wanted. We have gone a stage further. We have politicians.
Our Queen Elizabeth sits on her ancient throne, but does not reign. She might hear and see the travails of the people, but she does not speak on our behalf. She keeps the throne in being, nothing else. She refuses to fight our battles. She will not lead.
No, we have politicians now. Do you think that is better or worse? A king or queen is born into their position; they might turn out to be capable or incapable, dilettante or accomplished, harsh or gentle, merciful or vindictive. A politician, on the other hand, is selected. Chosen from a vast range of wannabes, based on their abilities. Their ability to lie convincingly and not get caught. Their willingness to steal from the people and to use the proceeds to buy loyalty from those they need. Their ability to prey on people’s fears. Their skills in the manipulation of public opinion. And their ruthlessness with former friends who stand in their way.
To these people, selected from the worst, to be the worst, we have handed over power to rule us. And worse still, we call their pronouncements and statutes “laws”. They are not laws, they are the opposite of laws. They are rules for slaves. The law is for free men and women who want to live free and be free in their hearts.
Let us look, then, at the law, as it was thundered from the mountaintop. For the most part, it states what you cannot do, not what you must do. For example:
Thou shalt not kill.
The Liverpool Care Pathway and related treatments for the elderly in the NHS are killing people, plain and simple. Drugging them, starving them and dehydrating them. It is against the law.
Matt Hancock has announced that (despite Covid travel restrictions) people can still travel abroad for assisted dying. This, too, is against the law.
Another example:
Thou shalt not steal.
There is no exemption stating “except by majority vote”.
The only positive commandment is to:
Honour thy father and thy mother.
Under Covid regulations, we are told we cannot see our father and our mother, or we must stand behind a Plexiglass screen and not hug or touch those who gave us life.
Nearly two thousand years ago, Christ was asked what is the greatest of the commandments. His reply was that:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
He then said:
And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Our politicians say we cannot love God with all of our heart and mind, for that would be offensive to some of our fellows and we will be arrested under hate-crime laws or for breaching the peace. And we cannot love our neighbours, for they may have Covid and are outside our bubble.
Our politicians take everything the law defines as righteous and make it illegal. They take everything the law prohibits and they make it either legal or compulsory. They turn white to black and black to white. How do they do this?
They use fear.
In the King James version of the Bible, there are 170 cases of mankind being instructed to “fear not”. This is not a coincidence. It recognises a plain truth of the human condition. Two failings of the human heart can be exploited to get us to commit evil acts: pride and fear. Our politicians know this well and use both, all the time.
If we remember to be neither filled with pride nor driven by fear, we become free (and we also become a threat to the system).
In the Book of Isaiah, God said:
Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.
And in the 23rd Psalm, the psalmist says to God:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
But our politicians say, “NO! Be afraid. The Lord cannot help you. Only adherence to OUR words and OUR laws can save you from Covid–19. To live, you must comply. To comply, you must fear. And to fear you must be faithless. So abandon God and you shall not surely die,” hisses the politician.
But we have been here before: we have a choice, we can refuse fear. We can choose the real law, the one that is based on the words “Fear not”.
The English scholastic philosopher John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English so that it could be understood by the common man and woman. In the introduction, he said:
This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
This was half a millennium before a blood-soaked American politician stole those words to justify an unnecessary war that had killed three quarters of a million Americans.
Wycliffe saw that when we write the law of God in our hearts, then He governs us. When this happens, then we have no need of earthly rulers, nor their phoney regulations, nor their theft, nor their fear. He also saw that God’s law, as it requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves, prohibits all forms of slavery, including that imposed by a dictatorial state, for the dictator is bound to love the humblest of his people as himself and so cannot impose any tyranny.
He saw that Christianity is in reality incompatible with the state. It is no accident that the state and its wars and oppression has grown as faith has ebbed, for:
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Wycliffe spoke against the authorities of his time; he was a maverick, a dissident. He wrote that:
I believe that in the end the truth will conquer.
Ladies and gentlemen, we should believe this too.
So what, then, is the core of our problem?
We cannot serve two masters. We must address the question “Who rules?”. Or rather, who writes the rules. Who is sovereign? Parliament has claimed sovereignty. Our Queen is called Sovereign. The People (en masse) claim sovereignty. And the individual man or woman can claim to be sovereign. All of these claims have some merit, but all lead to the place we stand today, as slaves under tyrannical rule.
We have free will: we can choose, we do not need to consent. We can turn to our Lord and say He is sovereign, we can choose His law, a law of love and a law of freedom. Freedom from sin and freedom from the oppression it generates. In doing so, we choose faith, hope and love. We reject fear and pride.
We find solid ground on which to stand as we reject the Covid scam, the global warming scam and every other state-funded boondoggle that tells us to be afraid and to yield our God-given liberty to a state that claims it will save us from our fears.
For they will no longer be our fears. We can reject them as easily as we can remove a mask and smile and talk to our neighbour.
And every smile, every caring word, every day spent living without fear is a victory!
