Among those who were happy with last week’s jury verdict acquitting the armed anti-government activists who occupied a federal building in Oregon for weeks last winter was David Whitney, an instructor with Michael Peroutka’s Institute on the Constitution and a close Peroutka ally. Whitney and Peroutka teach that government officials and individual citizens must defy laws that they see as going against the Constitution or the Bible or both, and this is precisely what Whitney said about the Oregon incident in a recent sermon at his church in Maryland.
Whitney said that he recently met with the widow of LaVoy Finicum, a member of the Oregon group who was shot and killed by state police near the occupation site; Whitney was also one of the anti-government speakers who traveled to Oregon during the occupation, which was led by two sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.
In his sermon on Sunday, Whitney declared that the jury members who acquitted the occupiers were fulfilling “their God-ordained duty” to ensure that “justice prevails even in the face of an evil system that seems bent, hell-bent, on destroying our liberties.”
In contrast, he said, the marshals who held the defendants were ignoring their oaths to “Almighty God.”
“If there was a fear of God in their hearts, a fear that they one day will be judged before God’s bar of justice,” he said, “they might act differently, they might not act tyrannically.”
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So the jury did what true citizens, true constitutional jurors are supposed to do as an independent entity, almost you could call it a fourth branch of government, judge the law as well as the facts and judge whether the actions of the government are appropriate, are actually just or unjust, and determine therefore if the person who’s been brought into the dock is to be charged or to be set free. This is what happens when citizens fulfill their God-ordained duty, their God-ordained function, justice prevails even in the face of an evil system that seems bent, hell-bent, on destroying our liberties.
You see, elected and appointed officials, they all take an oath. I daresay all of those marshals swore an oath before Almighty God to uphold the Constitution. And it appears that they don’t have a great deal of regard for their oath at all. Why is that? It’s because there’s no fear of God in their hearts. If there was a fear of God in their hearts, a fear that they one day will be judged before God’s bar of justice, they might act differently, they might not act tyrannically. But because there is no fear of God, this has been lost. And I think that is the problem when we look across the scene in America as a whole, it is the fear of God that is desperately needed to be restored in America today. And that’s what we do when we make true disciples of Jesus Christ.
