Greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ! I am Dr. Jason Garwood and I serve as an elder and teaching pastor of Cross & Crown Church here in Warrenton where we advocate, teach and widely promote all of Christ for all of life. I am a smitten husband to Mary and the father of three remarkable children. And as I’ve said once before this year, it does bear repeating……….I love Fauquier County and I hate tyranny.

There is a principle I learned several years ago, and it’s a principle that I have self-consciously applied to my life and ministry as a pastor, and it’s a principle that may seem obvious to you at first glance, but is something many people struggle to implement consistently in our day.  It is a principle you must grasp and adopt if we’re ever going to advance our ideas. The principle is this: You can’t beat something with nothing. 

As a follower of King Jesus, I have a vested interest in matters of social justice, mercy for the oppressed, and politics; after all, civil leaders are told in Psalm 2 to bow before Jesus, and the Bible tells us to do justice and love mercy (Micah 6:8). I believe the gospel of the Kingdom of God compels me to do what I’m doing today. Instead of giving ourselves over to fear and injustice, we ought to be in hot pursuit of truth and justice. Christ was crucified in public, therefore, we must speak in public (Acts 26:26). In him do we live and move and have our being, the least we can do is obey his call to disciple the nations, teaching them to obey this King (Matthew 28:18-20). This is an opportunity to do just that, so here I am, I can do no other.

The difficulty from where I’m standing however, is that far too many pastors and Christians who name the name of Christ have succumbed to the impotence of pietism, and have thus left matters such as these into the hands of humanists and other misguided, ostensibly well-intentioned, Christians. I do not besmirch my brothers and sisters—far be it. But this Reopen Fauquier County movement is Omaha Beach; we want Berlin. We must keep that objective in mind along the way.

In other words, this is only Phase 1. Phase 2 is Restoring Fauquier County, which I’ll touch on shortly. It’s important to know that the slow boil of tyranny cannot be beaten with nothing. Nor can it be beaten with the same ol’ partisan tricks. We must have an objective, and we must deploy counter-measures. Rally’s are great; rally’s and only rally’s are terrible. It’s also important to know, please understand, that putting gas in the car makes it go. We don’t put gas in the car to keep it immobile. Rallying is only the beginning. We have a lot of work to do. We have places to go and tyrannical regimes to squash.

Now, I certainly do not make light of the fact that many people have died from COVID-19, or, as seems to be the majority of cases, died from conditions exacerbated by the virus. That said, the Bible says to weep with those who weep, so we do weep with those who have suffered tremendous loss. And it’s not just the loss of life from a viral infection; suicide rates have gone through the roof, and the economic devastation we are facing is unprecedented. This has been no small thing. 

As is usually the case, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The fact remains: the BigPharma cabal has a ferocious grip on health and medicine and when this is wedded to the already problematic state and federal government overreach, we learn that this is a match made in hell. The reality that businesses were forced to close, executive orders were issued demanding that people stay a certain distance apart from others, and fiat currency was recently printed into our already inflationary economy, shows us that the symptoms of tyranny remain steadfast and resolute. Anything short of steadfastness and resoluteness from us will be to our own detriment.  

What we are doing today is focusing on one problem in the immediate. The tangled mess of the second amendment attacks just a few short months ago, coupled with threats to remove medical freedom, educational freedom, and now basic constitutional rights given to us by God, are all grave problems piled on top of other grave problems, and now we have a steaming pile of dung to deal with. To switch to a less disgusting metaphor, it is very difficult to unscramble an egg, which means that sometimes you have to start from scratch. Think 1776. Reopening the county is long overdue. But something else that’s even longer overdue is the basic liberty we receive from King Jesus. 

What the founders of this nation knew was that rights come from God, not the State (this in spite of their hypocrisy towards African slaves, by the way). If you think your liberties come from the state, you have just created a rival god, and a rival God we now have. If the state gives, the state can take, and in the end we’re just a bunch of whiners. But we’re not that. We’re principled. We’re confident. And like the founders, we’re relying on the God of the Bible who gives us those inalienable rights.

We are saturated and plagued by many problems: Abortion on demand takes the lives of 4,000 children every single day—no one has shut down the economy for that!; there’s been a rejection of common law and an embracing of administrative law. Warrant-less wiretaps, militarized police state, government theft via currency devaluation and manipulation; civil asset forfeiture; the welfare state, crony capitalism, socialism, bloated/centralized government; government encroachment on the family; exorbitant taxation, degradation of property ownership, imposition of the state with regard to marriage and gender; corrupt courts, lack of jury nullification, overburdened prisons housing non-violent persons which leads to systemic injustice towards minorities and broken families; generational criminality through the unjust drug war, state-run education centers, property tax, death tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, income tax, endless/unjust war, unconstitutional immigration restrictions, complete disregard for second amendment, mandatory vaccinations, circumvention of due process, bribery in the justice system—to name but a few. 

As a nation we have strayed from the Lord Jesus Christ and because of it, God has poured out his Deuteronomy 28 sanctions. As I said in a recent COVID-19 article, tyranny is a fever you simply have to sweat out.  It ain’t pretty. But while sweating it out, we must fight back. Tyrants won’t play by the rules, but we will. We aren’t stupid. Our rights come from God, not the black robes in DC. Our rights transcend any piece of humanist legislation, and this is because God’s law is higher than man’s law. 

Make no mistake: we want businesses in Fauquier County back open, and regardless of what Richmond says, owners should open right back up…today. Why? Because God’s law is higher than man’s law. Because the State has no lawful jurisdiction in these matters. Because man was created to work and build, not just for himself and his family, but for fruitful production and human flourishing. To deprive a man of this most basic and fundamental task—his work—is to strip him of his humanity. 

As evidenced by the list I curated for our website, RestoreFauquierCounty.com, a site you should visit—with more content coming—the slow boil of tyranny has been heating up for several generations now and we’re reaching a tipping point. What will we do? What will you do? You can’t beat something with nothing, which is why the Restore Fauquier County website exists. There is a better path forward, friends. We don’t have to settle for draconian measures during a crisis, and we don’t have to settle for draconian measures once this pandemic is over. We don’t have to settle, period. 

At times like this we need faithful men and women. We laud men like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. “How courageous they were!” we say. Where are those men today? Where are the pastors and civil magistrates standing on principle instead of pragmatism? Who dare to boldly say, “No, tyrant, we will not obey you.” Those are the people we should follow and support, not the partisan hack who wants to procure a vote only to be yet another bought and paid for cog in the statist machine. 

You can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t beat tyranny by stooping to their level. You can’t beat the injustice by perverting justice. We need to realize that what we have right now in Virginia is a theocracy whose god is morally defunct and inept. It is never a question of IF there is a theocracy, but WHICH theocracy will win the day? Which god will serve as the informant on what constitutes freedom and liberty? Will we give the god of the secular state permission to instruct us on what is right and wrong? To legislate draconian measures that chip away at the foundation of our freedom? Or will we declare the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ over the halls of Congress, over the White House, and over the Supreme Court? Newsflash: The Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being.

I said this in my second amendment speech a couple months back, and I’ll say it again: when your only options are tyranny or repentance, you repent. It’s time to turn away from the false god of statism, humble ourselves, and turn back to Christ whose law is just and whose grace is sufficient. Reopen is Phase 1; Restore is Phase 2. You can learn more about these ideas by visiting RestoreFauquierCounty.com. May God help us all.