Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast.

This audio is brought to you by Cannon Press. Yes, God, God, God, God, I never speak. Welcome to the

the Plodcast episode 162. Thanks for joining me. Good to have you here. I hope

you're having a good commute or whatever it is you do when you're listening to these things.

So I want to begin with episode 162 with something, just some of my reflections on a series

of episodes that we're in the middle of here in Moscow and that you may have

gathered something about it from news or from Facebook or from Twitter or from something.

We've had a masking order for a while here in Moscow.

When the COVID panic first swept the country,

Idaho went into an emergency mode and then the mayor put us

in an emergency lockdown order and since I believe you know in Leviticus 13 other places I believe that the civil magistrate does have a legitimate authority when it comes to quarantining and fighting off infectious diseases or protecting the public life and limb of the general public.

And so when the tornado warning sounds, tornado siren sounds, I don't think the elders have to meet and determine independently

whether there really is a tornado before they cancel the church service and

send everybody down to the basement. So I believe that when it comes to infectious diseases,

deadly infectious diseases, I believe the civil government does have genuine

authority. And I think that there's no problem with defaulting to their judgment on such things, which we did.

So at Christchurch, we went to online services, which we did for three weeks. It became apparent pretty early on that there was

something fishy. And so we started to push back pretty early on and we then conducted three drive-in services just outside the city limits and we bought an

FM radio transmitter and all the cars came and parked and we broadcast the service to the cars and we did that for three weeks and

then we went back to in-person worship and when we went back to in-person worship we did not require masks.

I'm giving you a short history here. Then early in the summer we had decided on

other grounds completely independent of all of this that we wanted to have at least

...