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.”