Quarrelsome people stir up strife because, already knowing everything, they have no need to listen, learn, or ask questions. Hit close to home? Look to Christ. He has the power to change us and has made provision to forgive. By the death of the Prince of Peace we can be at peace with God and at peace with one another.

Quarrels don’t just happen. People make them happen.
Of course, there are honest disagreements and agree-to-disagree propositions, but that’s not what the Bible means by quarreling. Quarrels, at least in Proverbs, are unnecessary arguments, the kind that honorable men stay away from (Prov. 17:14; 20:3). And elders too (1 Tim. 3). These fights aren’t the product of a loving rebuke or a principled conviction. These quarrels arise because people are quarrelsome.
So what does a quarrelsome person look like? What are his (or her) distinguishing marks? Here are twelve possibilities.
You might be a quarrelsome person if…

You defend every conviction with the same degree of intensity. There are no secondary or tertiary issues. Everything is primary. You’ve never met a hill you wouldn’t die on.
You are quick to speak and slow to listen. You rarely ask questions and when you do it is to accuse or to continue prosecuting your case. You are not looking to learn, you are looking to defend, dominate, and destroy.
Your only model for ministry and faithfulness is the showdown with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Or the only Jesus you like is the Jesus who cleared the money changers from the temple. Those are real examples in Scripture. But the Bible is a book, and sarcasm and whips are not the normal method of personal engagement.
You are incapable of seeing nuances, and you do not believe in qualifying statements. Everything in life is black and white without any gray.
You never give the benefit of the doubt. You do not try to read arguments in context. You put the worst possible construct on other’s motives, and when there is a less flattering interpretation you go for that one.

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Christ crucified for sinners is the aid of God to man! There is life in no one else and in no other way than through the blood of Christ. On the cross Christ’s blood was shed to make an atonement, a propitiation, a satisfaction of the wrath of God for sinners. His blood was shed to reconcile God and man so that those in the empire of sin and darkness might have their chains broken, their yokes loosened, their souls freed, and be welcomed into the Kingdom of Light.

For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham
Hebrews 2:16 NKJV
The Need for Aid
What do you think about as the calendar moves closer to December 25th? Do you think of the lights, the manger, the angels, the birth of Christ? Do you think of gifts, wise men, shepherds, and barbaric kings? Do you think of your need for aid and that God gives aid? How often this month does the year 33 A.D. come to mind? Around that year two thieves and a King were nailed to crosses as they were crucified outside of Jerusalem. Why were they there?
2000 years ago the Roman Empire was in the Pax Romana (Roman Peace). There was economic prosperity as far as Roman legions could reach. There was expansion of roads, transportation, and communication. These things came at a high cost.
Caesar Augustus issued a decree that all the world should be taxed (Luke 2:1). If the taxes weren’t bad enough, corrupt tax collectors exacted more from the people (Luke 19:1-10). It was a time when Roman rulers could kill all the children within cities and kingdoms with impunity (Matthew 2:16-18). Violent uprisings took place (Matthew 27:16). Demon possession was rampant (Mark 9:17-29). Leprosy was common (Luke 17:11-19). The visible church was filled with unconverted leaders (John 3:1-21). The world in which those three men were dying on a hill was a world filled with sin, sorrow, sickness, and suffering. It was a world in need of aid.
God Gives Aid
Judea in the time of Christ was not the first time the world was covered in darkness. Since the earliest days of creation when the serpent beguiled Eve and she gave the fruit to Adam, darkness descended on earth. Adam lived for nearly a millennium but he died and his sons died. Beginning with Cain, people regularly shed innocent blood.
God saw the wickedness of man and every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). The Lord set himself to destroy man from off the face of the earth. But God spared Noah and his immediate family members from the destruction. He commanded Noah to make an ark and preach the Word. Noah did as the Lord commanded. While all the world perished including, in all likelihood, Noah’s own father (Genesis 5:31) and certainly his extended family, God spared eight souls alive in the ark. God gives aid.
Many years after Noah, in the capital of Assyria, every intention of the heart was once again only evil continually. 120,000 souls would be destroyed. God sent a reluctant prophet with a simple message – “yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4). The people of Nineveh repented and God forgave them. He spared them from the destruction that was coming. God gives aid.
On that afternoon dark as night, Jerusalem was part of a vast empire greater than any Caesar could imagine. In the global empire of sin and darkness citizens lay chained to the pit of hell, hope is lost, and destruction awaits. All are guilty, none are righteous. Two thieves from the kingdom of darkness were crucified for the crimes they committed. However, few focused on those thieves as they walked by mocking, laughing, and scorning. They were mocking the man in the middle who had this inscription over His head, “The King of the Jews.”
He was hanging there bleeding from wounds in His head, hands, and feet. He did not receive those wounds for anything He had done. The Roman governor, not known for mercy, could not find fault with Him. No two witnesses could corroborate each other’s story. He hung there innocent of any crime or any sin. Passersby failed to grasp what most fail to grasp today – Jesus Christ hung on the cursed tree because God gives aid.
To Whom Does God Give Aid?
The thieves on either side of the King were not quiet in their dying hours. One of the thieves joined with the mob and soldiers, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us.” The other rebuked him telling him that he was on the cross for his crime while the sinless King was on the cross without any crime. Turning to Jesus the thief said, “Lord remember me when You come into Your Kingdom.”
One thief recognized the justice of his terrible plight. He was a guilty sinner receiving his just reward. His only hope was mercy from another – namely the King of the Jews. The other thief was in the same position but couldn’t care less about mercy. To his dying breath he breathed out curses and mockery and died in his sin. To the one who looked to Jesus for help, he was not ashamed. Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
God gave aid to one thief. He did not give aid to both. His aid does not go to the seed of Adam generally but to the seed of Abraham specifically.
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The Frankfurt Declaration ends with an expression of gratitude to those civil authorities who respect these Christian beliefs and the rights and liberties of each individual, and with a call to repentance to those civil authorities who have disregarded these freedoms, lest in the abuse of their God-given authority they become liable to God’s wrath.

In the spring of 2021, pastors from different countries came together to draw up a joint declaration in response to the COVID measures enacted by many governments. The result is the Frankfurt Declaration of Christian and Civil Liberties, which was presented to the public on August 28, 2022, near Frankfurt, Germany. The document was initially signed by fifty pastors and theologians from America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and Africa, including men such as Grace Community Church pastor John MacArthur, African Christian University dean Voddie Baucham, and Apologia Church elder James White. In the meantime, more than 5,000 signatories from all over the world have joined the Frankfurt Declaration.
Even though the concrete reason for drafting the Frankfurt Declaration was the totalitarian response to COVID, it is not primarily about these measures, but about the underlying spiritual reasons that led states to infringe so massively on the guaranteed rights of their citizens. The signatories of the Frankfurt Declaration see this unprecedented disregard for liberty as just one symptom of an emerging totalitarianism of the state over all spheres of society, including the church, that has developed for decades.
The Frankfurt Declaration seeks to address these threats with the timeless truths of God’s Word through affirmations and denials derived from biblical principles.
Article 1: God the Creator as Sovereign Lawgiver and Judge
For centuries, the countries of the Western world have been moving further away from the biblical truth that God created the cosmos and everything in it, including man. Most people’s thinking is now strongly influenced by a radical materialism assuming that all processes and phenomena in the world come from impersonal matter and motion rather than a personal and transcendent Creator.
But if there is no Creator God, then there is no divine lawgiver who has revealed His universal, immutable law to man, and there is no divine judge who at the end of time will judge all men according to this law. And if there is no heavenly lawgiver above the earthly state, then the state is the highest lawgiver, and its laws need not measure up to any higher standard. With no divine judge, human legislators need not consider answering to Him for their actions. The state and those who govern it thus assume for themselves the role of God, freely determining what is good and evil conduct without the bounds of a divine moral standard. The result is devastating: unconverted people, corrupt by nature, turn the commandments of God into their opposite, rebelliously calling good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20).
Examples of this tendency during the COVID crisis abound. For example, the state decreed (even for healthy people) that visiting the elderly, the sick, and the dying was evil, although Christ says that such actions are signs by which one knows who is blessed of the Father and inherits the kingdom, and who is cursed and must depart from Christ into everlasting fire (Matthew 25:31-46). But the phenomenon of the state calling things good that have been considered sin for millennia is one we have been observing for years: the state enables divorce and sexual immorality, promotes homosexuality and transgenderism, and allows the killing of children in the womb.
The state both approves of such evils and demands that its citizens do likewise. Even kindergarteners are indoctrinated accordingly. Anyone who disagrees is considered backward, bigoted, hateful, and a threat to society.
The Frankfurt Declaration affirms that God, as supreme lawgiver and judge, is the ultimate source of ethics, and that He has revealed an unchanging morality which is rooted in His own character and which determines for all people at all times what is good and evil conduct. It therefore denies that the state has the right to define morality and to demand unconditional obedience from its citizens when their beliefs contradicts God’s law, invoking the clausula Petri, that one ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).
Article 2: God as the Source of Truth and the Role of Science
With the turning away from the truth of the Creator God, other truths also increasingly falter. As Christians, we know that God has ordered creation by objective truths, which man can discover through scientific observation. This knowledge made scientific endeavors possible in the first place, since men once recognized that all scientific investigation is an inquiry into the works of God and hence cannot feign neutrality.
When science no longer serves to glorify God, then science itself becomes a god. Many today are convinced that science can provide answers to all questions and instructions for the right action in all situations. This scientism overlooks the fact that empirical inquiry may not only lead to erroneous results due to the lack of data and the human propensity for error, but that it can in no way provide answers to moral questions. Science can only say what is, but not what should be. Virology and epidemiology can say which measures might be promising to contain a virus, but they cannot answer whether a lockdown or other infringements on rights and liberties are ethically justified to achieve that goal.
However, this is exactly what happened during COVID: individual experts were considered to represent “science,” and their predictions and recommendations guided the policies of entire governments. As C.S. Lewis once explained: “Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
Since man has fallen into sin, all his thoughts, deductions and institutions contain degrees of corruption which tend to distort, manipulate, or suppress the truth. In the hands of ideologically driven people, truth becomes subject to change by reinterpretations, while science is quickly perverted into an instrument of indoctrination through fearmongering, propaganda, and the wielding of political power. Dissident voices are ignored, suppressed, or canceled. During COVID, dissenting doctors and scientists, some of whom had been considered luminaries in their field for decades, were silenced, discredited and sometimes dismissed from their jobs. But we see this trend in other areas as well. For example, the state and the “scientific consensus” have been propagating for decades that scientifically untenable theories, such as Darwinism, were settled truth. We are being told science has discovered that it is no longer possible to determine what a man or a woman is.
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