“Our personal convenience (for example, meeting in an air-conditioned building rather than outside in the heat) is never a legitimate reason for disobeying the government.”

Our brothers and sisters in the south and southwest might remind us that, especially for people above age 60, the presence of air conditioning is not always just a “convenience”, but can rather be a matter of life and death. For that matter, when the mercury goes about 90F in Europe, there are a LOT of heat related deaths because most people live in masonry buildings that can get very hot in the sun, and there’s not much A/C to mitigate this.

I agree with the basic premiss; that we ought to obey government when we’re not being commanded to sin. It’s just that the range of considerations that churches ought to heed—and I would argue that exposing senior citizens to heatstroke is indeed sin—is bigger than we might have thought. For those of us in the north, well, there’s another opposite weather phenomenon involved, too, coming soon.

Maybe your family does not need a house. Sleep in a tent, bathe in a river, endure all the elements. Let’s take away all buildings from all businesses as well. Schools don’t need buildings either. Learn in nature’s environment.

Should we obey our church elders in everything they command us to do? Or do we recognize that even God-given authority comes with limitations?
Similarly, are their any limitations to govt authority, or do they have the right to rule every part of our lives where the Bible has not issued a specific command (the article describes their authority as being limited only by God’s law [reject good/approve evil]; that strikes me as a dodge)? Because this is how I see many Christians arguing lately. I really don’t think you want to go there. For one, modern technology involves a reach into our personal lives that was impossible in the ancient world.
More to the point, however, the work of the American church right now should be to come to an understanding of what precisely the nature of govt authority as given by God is, and where it ends. This is actually a separate matter, incidentally, from a call to submit, though people keep conflating them; but it still needs to be worked out. For my part, I happen to believe the govt has a right to require vaccinations and face masks for public safety. I don’t believe they have the authority to demand lockdowns and ban worship services. The most they can do is issue suggestions.
And can we stop trotting Nero out as an extreme example? He was a wicked man, but Roman law was remarkably just and good for its time.It is the basis for much of our law today, after all. It also allowed people a high degree of self-rule, typically. Otherwise, the empire could never have maintained control over their provinces. Most people had next to nothing to do with Nero, and little practical interaction with the Roman empire, beyond paying taxes, which I think we would all agree is within the bounds of a government.

Blindly obeying Nero would have compelled the church to abandon the faith and start worshipping Nero and the Greco-Roman pantheon, no? So even with Nero, there was a limit to what the church would do.

did MacArthur say he was resisting the illegal restrictions of the CA governor because he wanted to preach in air conditioning? He is doing it because the 1st Amendment is very specific about religious practice and freedom of exercise of religion.Second, the government’s restrictions are being inconsistently applied.

[Mark_Smith]

did MacArthur say he was resisting the illegal restrictions of the CA governor because he wanted to preach in air conditioning? He is doing it because the 1st Amendment is very specific about religious practice and freedom of exercise of religion.Second, the government’s restrictions are being inconsistently applied.

I think the a/c thing comes from the response of some at GCC when people suggest they just meet outdoors as other churches in SoCal have done. They point to the thermometer and say it’s too hot outside. Guess that was just too bad for everyone before the invention of a/c.

Our old church building has no AC in the auditorium, It was 92 in the auditorium after a service a few weeks ago. We open the windows and turn on fans. :)

Buildings were designed to shed heat a lot better—to draw a picture, the windows on most office buildings today don’t open at all, and many of the bigger ones don’t even have a heating system—it’s all cooling. You can see it with how windows are done today—most homes do not have the double hung windows that used to allow buildings to shed heat readily, but rather ones that just open on one side. Try getting a fan in one of them, and you’ll see how we’re relying on the HVAC systems today.