All right. The next question is dealing with the non-enforcement of church standards and also government laws passed by Caesar. This is what the person writes. They say, if a rule isn't being enforced, then it's not an actual rule and you don't have to follow it. And they mentioned that in the context of speed limits, for example, the COVID masking, church standards, etc. Now, I don't again, I don't think the person is saying that was their view, but that they've heard people say this.
Now, here, it's a good example of how to analyze this using critical thinking. Here, it's not the conclusion that is fallacious. It's the premise. In other words, you can have a very logical argument and the conclusion fits the premise. But if your premise is false, then the whole thing is false. And the premise here, we're going to first talk about the laws of the government. The premise that is fallacious or that is an error is saying that if a law isn't being enforced, then it's not an actual law.
Well, and again, here I'm talking about Caesar's laws. And as an attorney, I mean, I can just flatly say that that's a false premise. It's not true. I mean, for example, for several years, you may drive over the speed limit in a certain stretch of road and no one has ever stopped you or pulled you over and given you a ticket. And so you may say, well, that law doesn't apply. But no, it doesn't mean that that speed limit is no longer the law because tomorrow there might be a police officer there.
Maybe somebody who's new. Maybe the ones in the past let people speed in that area and didn't do anything about it. But you have a new law enforcement officer and he or she pulls you over and gives you a ticket. And when you go before the judge, it's not going to work to say, well, hey, I was speeding there for years and I never got a ticket for it. And so I shouldn't get a ticket now. I mean, the judge is probably going to throw the book at you for admitting that you've been speeding all of those years.
So just because a law isn't enforced, that doesn't nullify the law. The law is still there. There might be some strange exceptions of laws written you know back in the 1800s that for some reason weren't taken off the books, and they're so obsolete, no one even pays attention to them now. But that's kind of a special category. Now, I will give this qualification. This is my opinion. Someone may have a different one, and you know I'm satisfied with that.
I personally don't think that as Christians, we have to be more scrupulous than Caesar is about Caesar's own laws. And I'll give you an example. When I was newly married, I was throwing a paper route. I would get up at three o'clock in the morning. We lived in a small town of 9,000 people. It was in a rural area. And at 3:00 in the morning, I mean, there was just nobody out driving in town except mainly those of us throwing newspapers or police cars.
Now, there was long before I was throwing newspapers, there was an unwritten understanding that had come up between the police and the newspaper carriers that you don't have to stop at the red lights during the middle of the night. They didn't have the money to equip the lights that they would shut off at a certain time and just go to blinking lights or something like that. They didn't have the funds for that.
So the police officer said, yeah, just, you know, be careful, but yeah, we're not going to give you a ticket for going through a red light at three o'clock in the morning. And in fact, this one light that I would go through all the time because it was in the center of town. And so I crossed it back and forth several times. There was often a police officer sitting there and there was no issue. Now, there, I would say that was fine because Caesar did not care. It was not dangerous.
There were no cars out at that hour. And so Caesar specifically did not enforce that law for a valid reason because it wasn't necessary. And I would feel that as a Christian, I don't have to be more scrupulous than Caesar. It's Caesar's law. But now someone else might take a different position. Now, the person brought up the COVID rules. Now, here in Pennsylvania, the government back in 2020 banned all gatherings of over 10 people. This lasted for about a month.
And the law specifically included religious gatherings. Now, some Mennonite churches ignored the law, and they just met anyway and ignored it entirely. And the law also said you were supposed to mask when you were in public. A lot of Mennonites I say Mennonites. I think there were other people. But as far as the churches, the only ones I saw meeting were Mennonite churches. Yeah, they just decided we're going to ignore that law.
Now, because it was a touchy issue, the government had decided, look, we're not going to arrest people going to church. We're not going to go inside churches and look and see if people are wearing masks. The police officer might have stopped you on the road walking to church if you weren't wearing a mask. But once you went inside the building and the door was shut, the police didn't go in the churches to see whether or not you were obeying the law. And so a lot of men and I said, well, they're not enforcing it.
So that means we don't have to obey it. But does it really mean that? See, this wasn't like the situation of the red light at three o'clock in the morning. Caesar didn't enforce that for a good reason. And the reason was it served no purpose. There were no cars there. There was no necessity for it. And it just lacked the funds to be able to change the lights to become blinking lights at that hour in the morning. But this was very different. This was a matter of a pandemic that nobody knew where it would lead to.
The hospitals were overcrowded. A lot of elderly people were dying from COVID. And the government, right or wrong, of our state, was trying to protect the spread of it. And that was the reason for the law. They didn't go inside of churches because they realized that could create a lot of bad publicity. And it would look really bad. You know A bunch of men and women, you know 100 of them being carted off in police vans from a church.
And you can picture you know the news wagons being there with their cameras and all of that. And they realized just let it go. 90% of the churches obeyed the law. And like I said, it only lasted for about a month. And you could meet in small groups of less than 10 or 10 or less, I should say. And so most churches obeyed it. But yeah, I would personally say that that was very wrong to just disobey Caesar because we didn't like it. Particularly, someone could argue, well, it says we should meet together as a church.
And certainly, if we had been banned for a long time, I would have been inclined to say, well, yeah, we need to have clandestine meetings, but they can be small. We don't have to meet in large groups. And even then, the law did allow small gatherings of 10. So at least a couple families were still able to get together. But wearing a mask, how does that violate any law of God? It's inconvenient. I don't like wearing them myself, but it certainly doesn't violate one of God's laws.
But you know people saw that, oh, they're not going to come in our church and do anything about it. So we're free to just disobey the law. Well, that's not true. It's still Caesar's law, and Romans 13 hasn't been overruled that you obey what Caesar says unless Caesar is giving you a commandment that directly contradicts the commandment of Jesus Christ that causes you to disobey Christ.
And there are other secular examples where there have been periods where the police did not enforce the law, but not because they didn't want to. It's because of the political or social consequences at the time. One example that for many of you, this was before your time, you wouldn't remember it. I would still remember the event. I wasn't there though. And this was Woodstock. It was a big outdoor concert. And people had put up a lot of money. They rented the property and there were fences and gates.
You know, you had to pay to get in. It was a several day long concert. And after a while, what people started doing was just crashing the gates, going in without paying, climbing over the fence. So many people were doing it that they gave up trying to enforce it. They appealed to the government. It was like, wow, we would have to bring in the army almost to to enforce this. Then there were a lot of young people there openly smoking marijuana or taking drugs. There was public nudity.
There was just a lot of laws that were violated. And the government, I think, wisely decided, look, this is going to create such a huge negative reaction to come in there with soldiers or the National Guard and arrest hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of young people. There's going to be rioting. There's going to be all this negative publicity. Since it'll just be three or four days, or maybe it was a week, however long it was, we're just going to let them get by with breaking the law this one time.
But that didn't change the fact. They were still breaking the law. It was wrong. It was just the political considerations made it hard to enforce it. It's the same with riots that often happen today. Today, most riots have a racial principle element behind them. And so often the police are told by their authorities higher than them to just stand down. If someone busts a window and goes in and starts stealing things, don't shoot them. It's going to cause just even more backlash, more rioting, more bad publicity.
So they just let them get away with it. And that's a enforcement principle, but it's still stealing. It doesn't change that. It's not because the police feel like, hey, that's okay. That store owner doesn't care if his merchandise is stolen. It's just that we don't want to throw gasoline on a fire that's already existing. So no, just because a law isn't enforced doesn't mean it's no longer a law. It's still there. Okay. What about church standards? Well, here the situation is a little different.
Many churches don't bother to keep their standards up to date. They have rules on their books that nobody in the church follows any longer. And the church authorities have no intention to enforce it. They just haven't taken the time to officially veto that standard, whatever it was. It made sense maybe in the year 1910. It doesn't make any sense now, but they've never taken the trouble to scratch it off the books.
So in a situation like that, no, I don't think it's wrong to violate the church standard because for all intents and purposes, the standard has already been revoked. It just hasn't been officially, but unofficially it has even by the authorities in the church. It just hasn't been removed from the books. And there I would fault the church for not keeping their standards up to date, deleting rules that the church feels are no longer applicable and that they don't intend to enforce.
However, that's very different than someone just pushing the boundaries to see how far they can violate the letter or spirit of a church standard without getting into trouble. Because if you've made a covenant with a church to live by certain brotherhood rules, then you should honor your covenant. Now, many Christians today, many kingdom Christians, would feel like they don't want to be part of a church with a lot of brotherhood rules. And I think that's they're right.
I don't think there's any obligation that a Christian has to belong to a church that decides we're going to spell out you know what modesty means or what this means. As I said, every church in some degree spells out modesty. But on other issues, some churches would not have any standard whatsoever. And I think that's fine. If you choose to go to a church like that, I feel like that's a voluntary thing.
And I personally am not critical of somebody who would rather go to church that didn't have written standards or unwritten ones. But on the other hand, many Christians find standards helpful. They like the fact that, hey, we're all doing the same thing. This helps me to resist temptation to, say, go to movies. If our church has a written standard, you know we don't go to movies. And so we're all doing it together. I will say this. It's voluntary whether you join a church like that or not.
But if you're going to join a church with written standards and you make a brotherhood covenant that you're going to follow those, then you should keep your covenant. That's part of Jesus ' commandment of let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.
No materials available for this lesson.