No One Is Exempt: Romans 13:1–7 in Context

Part 1: Prolegomena

Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.” — Augustine, City of God IV:4

Whatever else is true of the events since March 2020, we have seen excellent examples of rich and powerful people doing as they please with those who cannot defend themselves. The biggest names in anti-COVID mitigation measures, millionaires all, never missed a day of work or a paycheck, but my barber and my Peruvian cacao farming Christian brother, both of whom have considerably smaller budgets, missed months of both.

The question most Christians ask about the situation is, Does the government have the right to shut down the economy? But to phrase the question that way is to ask if one abstraction has the right to act on another abstraction. This is absurd because abstractions do not act, nor can they be acted upon, nor do they have rights. If “government” is anything tangible, it is people so powerful (and usually rich) that no one can defend himself against them. So, the better way to phrase the question is, Do rich and powerful people have the right to forcibly prevent those who cannot defend themselves from peaceably providing goods and services to their neighbors in voluntary exchange for what they themselves need?

This is a subset of the larger question that is usually phrased, What is the proper function of government? I will argue in this series of posts that that also is an absurd question. Government is an abstraction, so it cannot function. The proper question is, How are rich and powerful people to treat those who cannot defend themselves against them?

On the basis of Romans 13:1–7, the conventional wisdom says that because the “authorities” (exousiai) have been “instituted by God” they are therefore entitled to, among other things, collect taxes because they are “God’s servants devoted to governing.” A man from Mars reading that passage before landing on earth would expect to see nothing but orderly societies run by God’s servants in the political class using tax revenue for the good of their subjects. Would he be surprised at the reality today? Would he have been surprised at what he saw if had landed in the Rome of Paul’s day?

Of course not. But the problem is even worse than that. What if there were a Christian—a devotee of sola Scriptura who truly wanted to serve God—and he were put in charge of a government’s budget: where would he go in Scripture to find guidance for a just tax structure and for where the money should go after it is collected? I was told by one respected Christian leader that taxation can be theft, but is not always, but when asked where Scripture distinguishes the two, he had no answer. Another told me that because Scripture does not address tax rates they are not a moral issue—which I take to mean that tax rates of 5%, 50%, and 95% are equally moral. As anyone familiar with the Laffer curve can attest, those rates would have drastically different effects in the real world, and to say that taxpayers have no moral argument against being taxed into financial ruin seems at best a counterintuitive way to defend the rights of the poor (Jer 5:28). So where does our sola Scriptura Christian magistrate go for wisdom—to John Maynard Keynes?

If a Christian can get no practical guidance in the fundamentals of just governance—taxation being the sine qua non of government—from Scripture, how can we expect God to direct the heathen to govern justly? If they will not believe the law and the prophets and would not believe if someone returned from the dead (Luke 16:31), how will they know what justice is, and how will their hearts receive the wise words that describe it? Will God give them special revelation?

I argue in this series that nobody but nobody has the right to kill innocent people, take their property, defraud them, or defame them (Rom 13:8–10). Winning an election or a war does not entitle a person to do as he pleases with the lives, property, trust, or reputations of those who cannot defend themselves against him. I will be challenging the conventional wisdom on Romans 13:1–7, so I will present in the second installment an interpretation of that passage that keys off of Romans 13:8–10.

The conventional wisdom

The conventional wisdom is that God has instituted the family, the church, and the state. We can see where God institutes the family (Gen 2:24) and the worshiping community (Exod 20–23). I argue that while God gives laws that govern human conduct, he nowhere institutes a state; he nowhere ordains some people to take for any purpose the lives and property of innocent people. He nowhere makes some people exempt from the prohibitions against murder, theft, fraud, or defamation.

Three thousand years ago, the people of God were the freest people the world had ever known or has ever known since. They had been living in a stateless society: “There was no king in Israel” (Jdg 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). They paid no taxes. When they obeyed God, their nation was safe from enemies foreign and domestic: “the land had rest” for forty years twice (Jdg 3:11; 8:28) and eighty years once (Jdg 3:30). But the day came when they forgot God. They turned their backs on the perfect law (Ps 19:7) God had given them, despised the times God had delivered them from their enemies despite their sin (1 Sam 12:8–11), and committed great wickedness by demanding a king (1 Sam 12:17). This sin was so heinous that God said that he would not remove the punishment even if they repented (1 Sam 8:18). No matter—they did not repent.

The mentality that drove that revolt is still with us today and has been since at least the Reformation. Matthew Henry speaks for the majority of Christians when he famously writes, “Better a bad government than none at all,” this following the words, “Never did sovereign prince pervert the ends of government as Nero did, and yet to him Paul appealed, and under him had the protection of the law and the inferior magistrates more than once.”[1] What is this “government”? What can be so wonderful that its absence is more to be feared than even its most maleficent forms?

Luther, Calvin, every major Puritan writer, Kuyper, and every major “Bible-based” writer today echo the sentiment. Reformed Christians, as have their Baptist brethren, have stood shoulder to shoulder with tyrants since the beginning, and as the world suffers through the greatest moral crisis at least since the Third Reich—some would look at the unprecedented global scale and say in all of history—the “Bible-believing” church is at best helpless to fight the moral decline and descent into tyranny and at worst helping it along, with the insouciant majority somewhere in the middle.

In what way does today’s church resemble what Jesus was talking about when he said, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18)? Europe and the United States could have passed for Christendom a century or so ago, but today, the church, if not in retreat, is certainly losing ground, and these societies are better known for sexual immorality, political corruption, warmongering, and now man-made pestilence—much if not all of it made possible by government.

The state

Government (or the state) for the purpose of this essay is defined as those people who are rich and powerful enough to force their will on other people. They can prohibit their neighbors from peaceable activities and force their neighbors to act contrary to their choice and even to their welfare. They can make rules for others that they themselves do not have to obey. They are those to whom the poor and defenseless cannot say no.

Scripture makes it clear that it is God who has ordained these people to be rich and powerful and enabled them to impose their will on those who cannot resist them, but I will argue that he has not thereby allowed them to take the life or property of innocent people, to defraud them, or to defame them. Innocent is, of course, a loaded term in Scripture. Ultimately, no one is innocent in God’s sight. For our purposes here, however, I define innocent as “not guilty of violating the body, property, reputation, or trust of a person similarly not guilty.”

Is this the Scriptural definition of government? “There was no king in Israel” during the period of the judges, so whatever a king is, there was none in Israel then. First Samuel 8 describes government using Samuel’s description of what the Israelites were asking for:

He will conscript your sons and put them in his chariot forces and in his cavalry; they will run in front of his chariot. He will appoint for himself leaders of thousands and leaders of fifties, as well as those who plow his ground, reap his harvest, and make his weapons of war and his chariot equipment. He will take your daughters to be ointment makers, cooks, and bakers. He will take your best fields and vineyards and give them to his own servants. He will demand a tenth of your seed and of the produce of your vineyards and give it to his administrators and his servants. He will take your male and female servants, as well as your best cattle and your donkeys, and assign them for his own use. He will demand a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will be his servants. (1 Sam 8:11–17)

In a word, they were asking to return to Egypt and live under a Pharaoh, someone exempt from the laws that governed the rest of them and against whom they were helpless (cf. Deut 17:16).

Romans 13:1–7 assumes that government is put in place by God, that it brings judgment and retribution, that it serves God, and that it collects taxes. However, note the pronoun “it.” (I follow the NET here.) Many translations quite understandably regard the abstract exousia (“authority”; vv. 1b, 2a, 3b[,c]) as a metonym for the concrete and human exousiai (“people in authority,” v. 1a), archontes (“rulers,” v. 3a), and diakonos (“servant,” v. 4a, [b,] c). Government is thus not fundamentally an “it.” It is a “them.” It is people. While the conventional reading of Romans 13:1–7 considers them a special privileged class, I will argue that that is not the best way to read the passage.

The questions to be addressed here are these: How are Christians to relate to their neighbors? How are defenseless Christians to relate to the rich and powerful? How are rich and powerful Christians to relate to the defenseless? What does any of this have to do with fulfilling the Great Commission?

The gospel defined

This is my understanding of the gospel: God is good. People have rebelled against him and so deserve nothing but his eternal wrath. Jesus died to pay the penalty of that rebellion for those who repent, believe the gospel, and join in calling the world to repent. The church is repentant sinners calling sinners to repent. As sinners repent and believe the gospel, their lives change as individuals, families, and larger social structures, and we should see societies characterized by people of integrity promoting justice, peace, and prosperity. But going back to square one, if people are to believe the church’s call to repentance—that is, to respond to the Great Commission—Christians have to live out their own repentance. If they live out their repentance—if they truly become disciples who make disciples fulfilling the Great Commission—they will build just, peaceful, and prosperous societies. And for that, they will have to know what it is not only to love God above all else with their entire being and walk humbly with him but how to love their neighbors as themselves, to do justice, and to love mercy. The state as Scripture and the conventional wisdom define it is inimical to the entire Christian purpose.

God does indeed want Christians, as part of the Great Commission, to work toward building a just society; in such a society everyone is truly equal before the law—there are no exceptions—and the rights of the poor and insignificant carry the same weight as those of the rich and powerful. Such a society and only such a society is truly just; because it is just it is peaceful; because it is peaceful it is prosperous. Such a society will have no state.

The biblical case for anarchy

The Israelites in Egypt were under the government of a king, but when they came into their promised land, they were not (Jdg 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25): under Othniel, “the land had rest for forty years” (Jdg 3:11); under Ehud and the judges who succeeded him, “the land had rest for eighty years” (Jdg 3:30); under Gideon, “the land had rest for [another] forty years” (Jdg 8:28), a record that was never matched after the establishment of the monarchy. Had they really been better off under government in Egypt than they were without it in the promised land? Were the Christians under the government of Nero better off in earthly terms than the Israelites were with no government in the days of the aforementioned judges? If your answer is no, you should enjoy reading on.

It is easy to see where God ordains the family (Gen 2:24) and where he ordains the church (Matt 16:18; John 20:22; Acts 2:4). But Scripture nowhere bestows on one group of people the right to do as they please with the lives and property of their innocent neighbors, even in the name of the latter’s welfare; that is, God nowhere ordains the state.

The argument that the judges were kings in all but name is an argument from silence. A state begins with taxation, but the Torah—which devotes mind-numbing detail to items that seem to be important (e.g., the tribal offerings, Num 7:12–83), no matter how private (e.g., how men are to clean up after nocturnal emissions, Lev 15:17), and therefore cannot be accused of lacking attention to detail—says not a word about a taxation system, nor does it speak of a standing army, road construction, public schools, or any other supposed benefit we associate with the state. The closest it comes to establishing a state is in Deuteronomy 17:14–20, which is a concession, not a prescription. Israel in the promised land had no king, no state, no government.

So if government, the state, some people entitled to tax and govern—“exercise continuous sovereign authority over,” in Webster’s words—their neighbors, is not God’s design for society, God’s best, what is?

Well, what is the most important thing God wants us to keep in mind? When Jesus was asked that question, he said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments” (Matt 22:37–40). Would God’s best for his people—for all people—not flow from consistent obedience to those two commandments?

What it means to love God

If God’s best for his people does indeed flow from consistent obedience to the commands to love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves, we need to ask what it means to love God, what it means to love our neighbor, and what Jesus meant when he said that loving our neighbor is “like” loving God.

We are to love God first, but the nature of that love is not what comes first to modern minds. We tend to think of love as a feeling that overflows in words, but confessions of love for God are rare even where we would expect to find them, in the Psalms (18:1; 116:1)—as are claims to praise him (71:6,8; 119:164).[2] Instead, the Psalms speak of loving God in terms of obeying his word (Ps 1:2; 119:47, 48, 97, 113, 119, 127, 159, 167). Love seems to hinge on obedience to God’s commands: “If you love me, you will obey my commandments. . . . The person who has my commandments and obeys them is the one who loves me. . . . If anyone loves me, he will obey my word” (John 14:15, 21, 23). This echoes Moses’s words in Deuteronomy: “What does the LORD your God require of you except to revere him, to obey all his commandments, to love him, . . . ? . . . What I am commanding you today is to love the LORD your God, to walk in his ways, and to obey his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances. . . .  I also call on you to love the LORD your God, to obey him and be loyal to him” (10:12; 30:16, 20).

I assume that at some level the man who asked Jesus about the most important commandment (Matt 19:16) knew that to show his love for God he needed to obey the commands; he was asking where to begin, where to concentrate his efforts. Jesus’s answer was, in essence, “You do not begin with the minutiae of the ceremonial laws; you begin with loving your neighbor.” If we take the idea of love as gushy feelings, then we’re still at square one. But, of course, he gave the man, and by extension us, measurable criteria with which to judge our compliance with that command and thus with the first: “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 19:18–19). Paul repeats much of this in Romans 13:8–10: “The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,’ (and if there is any other commandment) are summed up in this, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.”

This is not to equate love with obedience. No one obeys perfectly, and even those who do well can sense that they lack something (Matt 19:16). But love for God and man shows itself in obedience (James 2:17–18), specifically respect for the life, property, trust, and reputation of the neighbor.

What it means to love the neighbor

The commandments against murder, theft, fraud, and slander are not invitations to get as close to those activities as possible without crossing the line as they are commands to stay as far away from those activities as possible.

Thus, the true meaning of “Do not murder” is more like “protect and preserve your neighbor’s life” than “it’s OK to beat him or otherwise afflict him as long as you do not kill him.” The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) and the teaching about judgment day in Matthew 25 make it plain that there is more to loving one’s neighbor than not harming his body: we are to actively promote his health and physical welfare. But that promotion has to be built on the foundation of doing no harm to him or to anyone else.

Similarly, “do not steal” is not a license to damage property or borrow it unbidden as long as we do not maintain possession of it. Rather, we are to actively enable our innocent neighbors to acquire physical resources (Matt 25:35–36) and to protect them from those who would expropriate them (Ps 82:3; Jer 5:28). John the Baptist defined the repentance to which he called people by saying, “The person who has two tunics must share with the person who has none, and the person who has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:11). John the apostle adds, “Whoever has the world’s possessions and sees his fellow Christian in need and shuts off his compassion against him, how can the love of God reside in such a person?” (1 John 3:7). Promoting our neighbor’s material good has to begin with considering everyone’s property sacrosanct; while we may be called to give up our own property for our neighbor’s benefit, we are not to take from one neighbor to benefit another.

The commands against adultery and false witness both have to do with transgressions against truth. Adultery is simply the worst form of fraud. A man who commits adultery has taken a woman’s virginity, which she can only give once, under the condition that she will have exclusive rights to that man; to go against that condition later is fraud. Anytime anyone promises to give something later in return for something now and does not come through, he has committed fraud.

Similarly, bearing false witness in court is the worst form of defamation. Slander is defamation outside of court, and gossip, while it does not deal with untruths, still conveys facts to those who have no business knowing them such that the betrayed person’s reputation suffers unjustly. Bearing false witness in court exposes the victim to fines, imprisonment, and possibly death.

According to Jesus and Paul, then, the most important thing for us to remember as we seek to please God is to protect innocent people, their property, their trust, and their reputations. Christian discipleship requires more than this, but it requires no less: this is where it begins. The second commandment is, in Jesus’s word, “like” the first because we cannot obey the first without obeying the second.

Tetranomy introduced

Here is the primary message of this series: nobody but nobody has the right to kill innocent people, take their property, or defame them. Nobody but nobody can legitimize killing innocent people by using a different term (like “collateral damage”) for it. Nobody but nobody can legitimize taking innocent people’s property by calling it by another name, even “taxation” or “regulation” or “zoning” or “eminent domain.” Nobody but nobody can defraud or defame his neighbor and justify it by calling it a “cost overrun” or “a campaign promise that was impossible to fulfill” or “a noble lie.” Nobody but nobody can defame his neighbor and justify it by calling it “spin.” I call the resulting ethos, based on these four laws, for lack of an extant term, tetranomy.

The world is full of practical problems. My claim here is that those practical problems can be solved without resorting to any of the practices just mentioned. Without such practices, the world would look very different from how it looks today. Eminent domain, for example, makes possible the highway system that arguably enables better movement of goods and services than what would exist without it. However, the system also results in urban sprawl, increased exhaust emissions, and the scattering of families and weakening of family ties; and, of course, those who lose their proper-ty to eminent domain—by definition the powerless—lose what is proper‑ly theirs—to those who are by definition more powerful—and thus suffer injustice. I will argue that correcting this injustice, while it might make the solutions to the practical problems more difficult, would bring about increased peace and increased prosperity in the ways that truly count. It is of no profit for a society to gain material abundance and forfeit its soul (Mark 8:36).

A matter of the heart

I will address the text of Romans 13:1–7 in a later post, but first, let me address what I think is the issue of the heart. I’m assuming that most of the people I talk to are typical: they consider government—some people rightly controlling other people—essential to a just society and the activities Samuel describes in 1 Samuel 8—military conscription, eminent domain, patronage—simply part of the price that needs to be paid. This is life the way God intended, and they are prepared to give thanks for every part of it. Why?

Why do Christians want to consider taxation a sacred part of life? Why do they want the rich and powerful—the “authorities,” the “powers that be”—to have God’s permission to do as they please with the poor and defenseless? I understand that they want the rich and powerful to defend the rights of the poor and defenseless, and this is why they want Christians and Christ-like thinking to permeate the political power structure (the good intentions of Abraham Kuyper come to mind), but is it not the rich and powerful by definition who act against the poor and defenseless? “Are not the rich oppressing you and dragging you into the courts?” (Jas 2:6). How likely are rich and powerful elite non-Christians (or Christians, for that matter) to work against their own interests for the sake of the poor and defenseless? Why do Christians prefer a system that privileges some at the expense of others to one in which all are equal?

Could it be because they think they are good people and they—or those with whom they sympathize—receive positive benefits from the state and believe that any system that benefits good people like them is thus by definition a good system? Many times I have heard something like, “Public schools can be good. I got a good education in the public schools. They have problems, but we should work to fix the problems, not abolish the schools.” Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for the Americans with Disabilities Act, the highways, sports venues, the War on Drugs, the wars on racism, communism, terror, COVID-19, ad infinitum, and other supposed exceptions to tetranomy. Is it not worth at least considering the possibility that good people can benefit from evil systems? Does the benefit that good people derive from a system justify that system?

The issue is not whether schools, provision for the disabled, highways, and sports venues are good things or whether some evils need to be resisted forcibly; it is rather whether God wants Christians to continue to live under the command to hold life and property sacred when they make those provisions and resist those evils or whether the basic commands to love our neighbors by protecting their lives, property, reputations, and trust can be suspended when we decide they need to be.

Does the scriptural view of human nature say that those who have power over others would not use it for their own benefit? That they would never fool themselves into thinking that they are sacrificing alongside those whom they are oppressing when in fact they are doing nothing of the sort? Does “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” (Jer 17:9) not apply to the rich and powerful who win wars and elections?

I assume all Christians really do want the poor and helpless and afflicted to be taken care of and provided for. My argument is that this is more likely to happen under a system in which all people are bound as much as possible by the duty to protect life, property, and truth than they are in a system that allows some people to violate others’ property and lives. “As much as possible” here brooks no legitimate exception: people are sinners, so they will sin, and the system needs to provide for defense against, prosecution of, restitution by, reconciliation with, and, if necessary, execution of malefactors. However, these provisions must be made in a context of respect for innocent life, property, and truth; the system must be voluntary and treat all participants equally.

The first objection the Christian reader is likely to make to my claims thus far is, “Why didn’t God think of that? Romans 13:1–7 assumes that God has ordained some people to govern others.” In my next post, I will show that the conventional wisdom about that passage is simply wrong, but here I explain that conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom on Romans 13:1–7

Let us begin by noting that the conventional wisdom does not take the passage at face value. A face-value reading gives the “governing authorities” (NET, ESV) carte blanche: “The authorities that exist have been instituted by God. So the person who resists such authority resists the ordinance of God” (13:1–2). The ordination of the authority (the person) extends to his decrees: he speaks for God, in loco Dei, and his decrees are thus God’s will. “. . . (for rulers cause no fear for good conduct but for bad.) Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid . . . . For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” There is no room there for a difference between the decree of the authority and the will of God. The text does not say that the ruler should cause no fear for good conduct, that he should approve good behavior, or that he should carry out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer; rather, it says that this is what he does. In matters of governance, then, in a face-value reading of our passage, the governing authority speaks for God and must be obeyed in every detail.

Here the conventional wisdom departs from the face-value interpretation by appealing—and reasonably so—to Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men.” My point is not that this appeal is wrong; it is that by making this appeal, the conventional wisdom departs from the face-value interpretation of our passage and posits that there are times when the governing authority can speak without divine authority.

(It also violates two exegetical principles. By reading the didactic Romans passage in the light of the narrative passage from Acts, it violates the principle that narrative is not normative but didactic passages are. It also reads the later revelation—Romans was written after the events in Acts—in the light of the earlier revelation.)

The logical question, then, is when do governors overstep their authority? The conventional answer is, “When they prohibit us from worship [or from evangelism]” or “When they command us to break God’s law [again usually defined as worship or evangelism].” Do they overstep their bounds if they prohibit peaceable activities, as when the US government made it illegal to own gold? How about if they force people to engage in risky activities, like being injected with experimental substances, or even silly ones, like wearing useless “face coverings” in public? More importantly, how does one determine whether the governor has overstepped his bounds, and what recourse does one have if he does? If we cannot look to Romans 13:1–7, the putative plainest statement of the legitimacy of government, where can we look? If we look at Acts 5:29, we are simply going around the circle again. So how do we get out of the circle?

The stepping-off place is precisely where it is in Romans 13: the “love your neighbor” verses, verses 8–10. This is a restatement of Jesus’s answer to the question about the commandment that is “like” the greatest commandment and from which no one is exempt. Stated positively, it commands us to treat our innocent neighbors, their property, their reputations, and their trust as inviolable. Nobody but nobody has the right to violate these things, nobody but nobody has the right to command that they be violated, and nobody but nobody has the right to obey such commands. Ergo, whenever government commands that innocent people be physically harmed, expropriated, defrauded, or defamed, it is overstepping its bounds. This condemns “collateral damage” and military conscription, taxation and eminent domain, broken campaign promises, and propaganda.

What about Romans 13:6, which assumes that we pay taxes? That verse is a statement of fact, not a command, but the question is legitimate and will be dealt with in the exposition.

An exegetical presupposition

Let me state an important presupposition on which I am basing my exposition: I presume that the highest priority of any state is to stay in power. Scripture attests to this abundantly: The king of Sodom was willing to give up his entire fortune as long as he had people to rule over (Gen 14:21). Even after Egypt had been destroyed (Exod 10:7), the Pharaoh of the exodus was not willing to let go of his power over the Israelites. Saul knew that God was against him (1 Sam 13:14) and that David would someday be king (1 Sam 24:20), yet he never abdicated; instead, he hunted David until his dying day. Herod apparently was so desperate to hold on to his power that he felt he needed to eliminate the threat of a toddler (Matt 2:16).

Would we expect the emperor of Rome to be any different? It would be bad enough for him to have Jews in Rome, those odd people who claim that there is no god but their God. While they had their religion and caused trouble by trying to shake off Roman rule over their homeland, they were in no position to threaten to overthrow the empire by assassinating the Emperor. But an offshoot of that religion that was even more fanatical might be worrisome, saying as it does that the one who would eventually rule the world had been born, had died, and had come back to life; he had gone off to the afterlife but could be expected to come back at any time and set up his rule. (Think of how afraid Herod was that John the Baptist had come back from the dead, Matt 14:2.) Even the Jews did not go that far!

No ruler looks in the mirror and sees an unjust man, and one symptom of the face-saving that characterizes non-Christian religions is that justice is whatever the party that wins armed conflict says it is, a corollary being that the further from godly justice the decrees of ungodly rulers are, the less likely those rulers are to countenance debate or dissent.

We do not know how many Christians were in Rome to read Paul’s epistle. Conceivably dozens or hundreds of Roman Jews could have been converted in Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts 2:10, 41) and returned. If they were able to make disciples themselves in the subsequent twenty-five years or so, there could have been thousands of Christians in Rome when the epistle arrived. This was less than ten years before the great fire in Rome and Nero’s subsequent notorious persecution of the Christian community. I think it reasonable to assume that the Roman Christian community was visible and a matter of some concern to the Roman government.

As surely as water runs downhill, the Roman government would have sent spies into the Christians’ midst to find out what they were planning—or to look for disenchanted former members who would be willing to tell their secrets. How the people of God were to interact with godless rulers was a question that believers had been facing for centuries, and Paul needed to balance the unjust laws all too familiar to his readers with the jeopardy he was putting his readers in by mentioning those laws generally, let alone specific instances. He thus had to lay any question of the emperor’s legitimacy or morality between the lines.

Am I reading too much into the passage? Allow me to call your attention to the book of Esther, which is notable in part because the most important character in it, the God of the Jews, is nowhere mentioned; the reader needs to enter with presuppositions and read between the lines to arrive at the message of the story. Further, note how the book up to 2:18 introduces the situation: the king as a model of hospitality and fun, the party as a rich Presbyterian wedding reception, the queen as an irrational rebel, and the gathering of the virgins as the chance of a lifetime for a girl to become royalty. Is it unreasonable to read the king as a dissipate monster, the event as a tax-funded drunken orgy, the queen as stripped of her dignity, and the gathering of virgins as kidnap and sex slavery? The former reading is that of the conventional wisdom regarding Romans 13:1–7, the latter of tetranomy.

I do not know whether the Christians in Rome had read the book of Acts or heard of Peter and John’s words to the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than man,” such that they could have heard our passage read and automatically responded, as modern Christians do, “That’s all well and good, but we have to obey God rather than man,” let alone that they would have thought to say, “That’s what rulers are supposed to do, but his rule is legitimate even if he doesn’t.”

What I do know is that after Paul lays out his case in verses 1–7, he reminds his readers what they surely knew because Jesus had said the same thing (Matt 7:12; 22:40): “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as measured by respect for life, property, trust, and whatever other commandment there might be—was the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:8–10). This, I submit, is the lens through which we are to read our passage and is the basis of what will follow in subsequent posts.

Part Two is here.

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[1] Matthew Henry, “Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible,” Bible Hub, https://biblehub.com/commentaries/mhcw/romans/13.htm.

[2] Psalms-only singing traditions are highly unlikely to fall into the trap of gushy “Jesus is my boyfriend” love songs and endless repetitions of “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord.”

Thoughts on the Shanghai Lockdown

I brought up the Shanghai lockdown in a meeting of our men’s group the other day, and when I mentioned that there were people there who said they had no food, the response was that there were trucks out delivering food, so—gathering from the tone of voice in which the statement was made—I infer that the ethos in the room was that the lockdown was simply a necessary inconvenience to its citizens: so, jeez, we wouldn’t want it to happen here, but hey, if it does, that’s just God’s appointed authorities doing what’s best for us.

But I have some questions.

When you lock 11 million people in their houses, does it have any effect on the production of food, clothing, or other essentials? If so, who decides whether the reduction in production is a good price to pay for the supposed safety of the lockdowns? On what basis and by what standard do they decide? If not, what do these people do when they are supposedly at work?

Do the people receiving the food have to pay for it? Or is it free? And if the food is free, are the people who grow it, process it, package it, and deliver it paid for their work? If so, where does that money come from if those under house arrest are not producing anything? If not, are those working free to not work? If so, they are truly heroes, but if not, what are they but slaves?

Is it safe to assume that the governing authorities (Rom 13:1–7) determine who receives what food? Does a man who is 5’5” tall get the same amount of food as a man who is 6’6”? Does a pregnant woman get the same amount of food as a woman who is not? Do they make allowances for allergies and gluten intolerance? Do these practical questions even matter, or is good enough for government work good enough?

If there were dissidents among the population, people whose opposition to the government were known—or suspected, as in the case of biblical Christians—would the governing authorities be tempted to treat them differently from their loyal subjects in the distribution of food? Might they yield to that temptation?

If it is reasonable to believe that at the best of times human needs and desires exceed the available supply, and if it is further reasonable to believe that a government’s highest priority is staying in power, what reason would a government have for treating dissidents equally with loyal subjects? Furthermore, what incentive with a government have for not manufacturing crises that would enable them to weed out dissidents?

How are people who are not allowed to leave their homes any different from prisoners? Does the government have the right to imprison people who are strong enough to resist the virus? Do they have the right to imprison people who have already had the virus and are therefore reasonably immune? If masks and vaccines are effective mitigation measures, why are people who would wear masks and have been vaccinated locked in their homes? And if not, why are those things required?

More importantly, does Jesus care about any of this? After all, most of those locked down in Shanghai are headed for a justly deserved Christless eternity. Won’t Christians standing up and saying that this is an injustice and an abomination to God simply drive them further from the gospel and make life more difficult for the Christians in China? Does God care about injustice in the abstract? If not, what is he good for? If so, what does he think, what should his disciples think, and what should his disciples do about it?

That is, when our own government puts teeth into the vaccine mandate and reinstates the mask mandates and lockdowns, what will American evangelicalism do? What are those ordained to teach us telling us to do?

And most importantly, why do we even need to discuss these questions? God told his people 3500 years ago not to kill, defraud, steal, or defame. Period. He gave them a society in which everyone was equal; there was death, but there were no taxes (i.e, no stealing; the tithe is not a tax). Over the next five hundred years, “there was no king in Israel” and “the land had peace” for eighty years once and forty years twice. Israel was the freest people the earth has ever seen, but only when they obeyed God—when they disobeyed, their peace evaporated.

Finally, their apostasy was so bad that they lost sight of the connection between obedience and peace; they believed the lie that, in Matthew Henry’s words, “a bad government is better than no government at all” and decided that what they needed was a king. God warned them that they were asking for trouble—asking to become slaves to the political class “like the other nations”—but they would not listen, and God’s people have been slaves under masters of various degrees of cruelty ever since.

So what do we do now? “Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord” might be a good place to start. Taking the beams out of our own eyes before we comment on the specks in others’ might be another.

But where the church seems weakest is in her understanding that while the gospel is a call for repentance, it is primarily an invitation to a kingdom. That kingdom has certain rules, the most important of which is that no one is exempt from the prohibitions against murder, fraud, theft, and slander. Winning a war or an election gives no one the right to take innocent people’s property, let alone their lives, for any reason, either directly or by fraud or slander. Taxation is theft, and until the church overcomes the Stockholm syndrome that has enthralled her to her captors, she will never be able to proclaim liberty to the captives in any form but “pie in the sky by and by.”

Of course, that pie is not to be disparaged, but is there no connection between the conduct of the king’s children and people’s willingness to believe that the king is good?

The last enemy to be conquered is death, and only God can conquer that. By implication, the political class God has established will be done away with before death is. But God does not call us to overthrow it by violence. “Not by [military] might, nor by [political] power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.” “Our weapons are not carnal ... they are spiritual.” So then how?

Whatever means we use to overthrow the political class will be spiritual and will follow the prohibitions against murder, fraud, theft, and slander. But “without a vision, the people perish,” so we need the vision of a kingdom that comes to earth when God’s people do God’s will on earth as it is done in heaven. We need to be winsome ambassadors of that kingdom. We need to gather a community that lives for solely for Christ and him crucified, risen, and coming again. We can expect such a community to start small but to grow in accordance with its faithfulness (and probably to be painfully pruned by persecution).

The least painful way to begin that process—and as good a test as any of people’s decision to live for Christ alone—is to get the flags of the political class out of our gathering places and homes.

What if Corona Is God’s Judgment on Apostate American Christianity?

Drive by any church with a flagpole, and what flag do you see? Probably Old Glory, right?

If there is a “Christian flag,” where do you see it? Flying alone, or with Old Glory? And if they’re both flying, which flies higher?

American Christians have every reason to be grateful that we live in a political system that has allowed us to worship freely as we do many things more freely than most people in other times and spaces. But that love and gratitude for a system that once allowed us to be free have—yes, I’m painting with a broad brush here—transmogrified into acquiescence to, if not worship of, anything associated with Old Glory.

The Christians of North Korea and North Vietnam suffered and still suffer horribly under Communism. Have American Christians made life easier for them by bombing them?

Collectivism has made life horrible for Cuban and Venezuelan Christians. Have American Christians made life easier for them by cheering for sanctions that further restrict their access to the necessities of daily life?

Life under Islam in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Libya is no picnic for Christians. Has starting wars that have resulted in them being killed and displaced fulfilled the command of him who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers”?

We’re now strangling the economies of Iran and China, where the church is arguably growing faster than anywhere else in the world despite government and local opposition. This is how we fulfill the Great Commission?

Can you blame Putin and the governments of Laos and Myanmar for banning Evangelicalism because they regard it as a tool of American imperialism?

Well, now we have a taste of our own “generosity” brought to us by “the powers that be … ordained of God” and wrapped in Old Glory: shortages of necessities, persecution of the innocent (those in “nonessential” businesses), incessant lying propaganda—and locked church doors, with Christians cowering at home.

Paul wrote Romans 13 to readers many of whom knew the Ten Commandments and knew that the prohibitions against murder, theft, and deceit added objective standards for measuring how well the faithful are to love their neighbors as themselves and do for others what they would have others do for them. He was teaching them how to live under oppressors who routinely violated those prohibitions. He was not making the powerful exempt from the prohibitions. Nor was he telling them they could get around them by using terms like collateral damage, taxation, and spin.

Paul in Romans 1 warns his readers that God will “give them over to” what they truly desire and in Romans 2 tells them God will reward them for their deeds. Well, American Christians have wanted a government that routinely violates the prohibitions of Sinai, have flown its flag higher than the cross, and are now supporting its destruction of the livelihoods of the politically unconnected and the economy as a whole in the name of fighting a virus that is not as deadly as others we have tolerated.

My guess—guess—is that this is just the beginning of hard times. The riots and violent responses and restrictions and food lines and shivering and mass death are still future. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, and the destruction of the United States will make the ears of all who hear of it tingle. Our nation will disappear without a trace when the electricity goes out and all our memories and literature are gone.

But maybe in our great-grandchildren’s day the curse that God put his people under in 1 Samuel 8:18—“You will beg for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you on that day”—will be repealed, and the church will stand for justice, make peace, and see true prosperity.

The War in Cameroon Hits Home

Last night we received news that a good Cameroonian friend, a pillar of the church, a supporter of local music in the church, was hauled out of his church’s Sunday morning service yesterday and shot to death. Chief Esoh Itoh hosted my wife and me in his house both of our first two visits to Cameroon. The first time he called his volunteer choir to sing so we could record them, and the second time he organized a day of performance by all of the performance choirs in his village (half a dozen or so in a village of about 5000 people), again so we could record the music. He was a good friend who served God and his fellow man as best he knew how.

I turned this morning to Psalm 83, my go-to psalm to pray against evildoers, but I realized almost instantly that this psalm did not fit the occasion: his murderers were not persecutors of the church, at least not per se. They were “separatists,” people who want the English-speaking regions of Cameroon to be their own nation, out from under the boot of the French-speaking majority. “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled,” as the saying goes, and from what I can see, this is a war of secession in which there are no good elephants, and Chief Esoh was simply grass that got trampled.

Or was he?

He had been doing his best to not take sides, having stayed in his house for months to show his neutrality. But in a sense he could never truly be neutral. He was a chief, a government official, and as I point out here, chiefs are an integral part of a system that is indiscriminately exploitative at best. In this case, though—at least from what I’ve been told—the French-speaking majority, which lives in a comparatively resource-poor area, depends on revenues from the comparatively resource-rich English-speaking area to pay for their government “services.” For decades the English speakers have been what might be called first-class taxpayers but have received second-class services. After decades of the government turning a deaf ear to their protests, some English speakers organized a peaceful—again, according to my sources—protest in November of 2016, to which the government responded by shooting a couple hundred of them to death.

Since then, the separatists have been entering villages, killing government workers, burning the houses of their families, killing random Francophones they find on buses, and God knows what else. My guess is that if they succeed in forming their own nation, it will be a worse hellhole than it was in October 2016. And, of course, after the separatists leave, the government comes in and burns the houses of anyone they think offered help to the separatists. Thousands of people have fled their homes and are living in the forest.

John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” and despite my disagreements with him in most places, I have a hard time disagreeing with him there. And, of course, violent revolutions always turn out badly, as our own is clear evidence.

Chief Esoh was aware of at least part of the exploitative nature of the system. The last time we were with him, the discussion turned to how difficult it is for private people to make a good living, and he said rather wistfully, “It’s too bad that we can’t give everyone a government job.” Until yesterday I was thinking that it was good manners that kept me from saying, “Everyone in North Korea has a government job. Is that what you want?” Now I think it was cowardice. My words probably would not have changed his mind, but at least I would be at peace knowing I had done what I could to influence his thinking.

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” An integral part of peacemaking is not only pointing out the evils of exploitative systems but providing alternatives. The Cameroon Baptist Convention provides an alternative to the government schools and health care system. (It may be that they take government funding, in which case I’ll leave it to you to prove to me that this makes them more, rather than less, effective at weaning the man on the street from dependence on government largess.) If the churches had also been loudly protesting the exploitation of the Anglophones by the Francophones all along—that is, peacemaking—perhaps the current situation of all-out war would not have happened.

If we accept the idea that those in government are serving God by doing good, we can only conclude that there is abundant evidence that he doesn’t protect his servants very well. We have the book of Habakkuk, which teaches not only that those whom God calls to execute judgment on his behalf are evil but that he will eventually punish them for their evil. But another example that came home to me in my devotional reading the other day I find chillingly relevant to Chief Esoh’s death.

In Acts 12, we see sixteen soldiers who were just doing their jobs. They didn’t set the policy that put Peter in prison; it was only their job to see that it was carried out. Though they did nothing wrong, carrying out their duties as they had been assigned, God worked a miracle and brought Peter out of the prison. God’s miracle ended up costing those sixteen men their lives (Acts 12:19).

The less influence people like King Herod, His Excellency Paul Biya (President of Cameroon), and Donald Trump have on our lives the better. We need to show that relationships based on voluntary service, not political processes, are the foundation of a just, peaceful, and prosperous society. And submission to Jesus, while most importantly the ultimate good in and of itself, is the way to true voluntary service. I am indeed an obnoxious—I’d say son of a bitch, but I don’t want people to think ill of my mother—but this blog is the best I know to do to do just that.

Meantime, we need to be careful whom we work for. Daniel and his three friends worked for an evil government and survived the experience only because God worked miracles on their behalf. Chief Esoh—may he rest in peace—was not so fortunate.

The Delicious Irony of the NFL’s Flag Problem

This is an absolutely delicious irony. Government at state and local levels has spent billions of dollars building football stadiums. The federal government has spent millions of dollars promoting admiration for the military at football games. Government at all levels has spent millions on scholarships for football players who end up going into the NFL, not to mention the millions (billions?) spent on football at the middle school and high school level.

And now what it do they get in return? They get people who refuse to honor the national symbol. And the fallout from that is that people have stopped going to the games. Billions of dollars worth of stadiums now sitting empty during the very events they were built to host. What to do?

If the owners decide to stay the course (i.e., do nothing), they will soon have so few fans that they cannot meet their payrolls, and they will go bankrupt. Then what will the stadiums be used for?

If they do decide to force players to stand before the national anthem, many players will simply stop playing the game. This means that the talent pool will become very thin, and the teams will lose fans. Or perhaps the players will knuckle under. In that case, the backlash will take a form that I cannot predict, I certainly cannot expect a player who gives in to maintain his self-respect or the respect of those who currently support him as he takes the knee.

I have no reason to believe that this will result in a groundswell of sentiment to get government out of the sports biz. The boycott is, after all, loud and clear testimony that Americans love their government no matter what it does.

But it is fun to watch the fat cat football execs and the political class squirm for a while.

Let Earth Receive Her King

When you come to the land the Lord your God is giving you and take it over and live in it and then say, “I will select a king like all the nations surrounding me,” you must select without fail a king whom the Lord your God chooses. From among your fellow citizens you must appoint a king – you may not designate a foreigner who is not one of your fellow Israelites. Moreover, he must not accumulate horses for himself or allow the people to return to Egypt to do so, for the Lord has said you must never again return that way. Furthermore, he must not marry many wives lest his affections turn aside, and he must not accumulate much silver and gold. When he sits on his royal throne he must make a copy of this law on a scroll given to him by the Levitical priests. It must be with him constantly and he must read it as long as he lives, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and observe all the words of this law and these statutes and carry them out. Then he will not exalt himself above his fellow citizens or turn from the commandments to the right or left, and he and his descendants will enjoy many years ruling over his kingdom in Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:14–20)

If you have spent much time in the Bible, you know that from the time God brings the people of Israel out of Egypt in Exodus 20 until he brings them into the promised land in Joshua 3 it seems like he issues command after command after command for forty years. The last half of the book of Exodus and the books of Leviticus and Numbers are hard reading. You’ve got all these meticulous laws about the sacrificial system and how the people were to live their daily lives. There are laws about murder and theft and adultery and perjury and fornication and how to treat the poor. And you have all the bizarre rules about only wearing clothes made from one type of material at a time or never shaving the beard or not eating pork or lobster. And to top it all off is the bit about circumcision. But with all that, it isn’t until years after God tells the people how to deal with these sins and crimes that the idea that Israel should have a king even floated. The passage I just read is part of the speech that Moses delivered to the Israelites just before he died and they entered the promised land. They went forty years after they left Egypt before any mention was made of a king.

Alone among the nations, Israel did not have a king, one person with hangers-on who was expected to tax everyone else as much as he wanted to and do with the proceeds as he pleased. There was no one who could make laws for other people that he did not have to obey. All people were equal under the law of Moses. Yes, there were the tithes to support the priesthood and the gleaning laws to support the poor, but there was no salaried armed force to enforce those laws or any others. Those laws were to be enforced by the men of the community acting as equals, and that was the way God told Moses it was to be.

It is only in the book of Judges that the Bible finally says openly, “There was no king in Israel,” and by then the words are a lament, not a joyful proclamation. The words “In those days Israel had no king. Each man did what he considered to be right” form bookends around the last five chapters of the book of Judges. In these chapters, we hear of a man who steals silver from his own mother and then starts his own idolatrous cult. We hear about some Israelites who kill off a peace-loving people so they can take over their city, and about an innocent woman who is raped to death, and about a civil war that almost totally kills off one of the tribes of Israel.

Now between our passage in Deuteronomy 17 and this sordid mess, the word king is not associated with anything particularly good. Most obviously, the kings of Canaan were not able to save their people from the Israelites. The Israelites had no king, but they defeated many peoples who did have kings. Also, the kings who were there were cruel people. When King Adonai-Bezeq was about to die, he said, “Seventy kings, with thumbs and big toes cut off, used to lick up food scraps under my table. God has repaid me for what I did to them.” Was he especially evil? I don’t think so. My guess he only succeeded in doing what many others died attempting to do.

Then we have the first king in Israel, Gideon’s son Abimelek (Jdg 9:6). The people of Shechem and Beth Millo crowned him king after he had murdered all of Gideon’s other sons but one. And he too was soon murdered.

So by the end of the book of Judges the Israelites were clearly looking for someone to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Their logical choice was a king. This is simple human nature. When times get tough, people want a superman to bail them out of their troubles, and things finally got so bad that the Israelites asked Samuel, the last judge, to give them a king. Whether they were consciously trying to follow the directive that God gave them in our passage in Deuteronomy 17 I don’t know, but let’s review what kind of king God told them to look for and what they ended up with.

The first characteristic was that he was to be the king that God himself chose. If you look in 1 Samuel 9, you’ll see that God worked all sorts of minor miracles to make it clear that Saul was the man he had chosen to be king: Saul went through days of incredible “coincidences” one after another and won a nationwide lottery, to name just two of them.

The Lord’s king was to be an Israelite, and Saul was an Israelite. He was not to accumulate horses or marry many wives. Saul did neither of those things, so he’s four for four so far.

He runs into trouble when we get to verse 18: “He must make a copy of this law on a scroll given to him by the Levitical priests. It must be with him constantly and he must read it as long as he lives, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and observe all the words of this law and these statutes and carry them out. Then he will not exalt himself above his fellow citizens or turn from the commandments to the right or left.”

We have no record that Saul ever did that, and he and God were at loggerheads from almost the beginning of his reign. He disobeyed God at every turn, he amassed an army that he used to kill innocent people, and he eventually died a fool’s death.

Remember, now, this was the king that God had personally chosen for the Israelites. Why would God have given Israel a king like that?

The quick and dirty answer is in 1 Samuel 8, where the people ask Samuel for a king. They say, “Appoint over us a king to lead us, just like all the other nations have.” Well, what kind of kings did the other nations have? They had cruel kings like Adonai-Bezeq. They had kings like those whom David later wrote about in Psalm 2: “The kings of the earth form a united front; the rulers collaborate against the Lord and his anointed king. They say, ‘Let’s tear off the shackles they’ve put on us! Let’s free ourselves from their ropes!’” In fact, it was because they had rebelled against the Lord that the kings of the nation were cruel. As the Lord told Samuel, the Lord was the one the Israelites had rejected as their king (1 Sam 8:5). The Israelites did not want a king like the Lord. They wanted the kind of king they got in Saul and in so many of the kings of Israel and Judah that followed later on.

This month, of course, we celebrate the advent of a king. We celebrate the advent of the king who was king over the Israelites before they asked Samuel for a king. Our king is none other than the Lord, the God of Israel.

The idea of a king and a kingdom is crucial to the New Testament message. The word “gospel” occurs 95 times in the New Testament. The words “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven” occur 99 times. We are celebrating the coming of a king—one who brings good news and is himself the good news, but a king nonetheless.

As the angel said to Mary before Jesus was conceived, “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end” (Luke 1:32–33).

When God told the pagans that something was up in Israel, he didn’t talk in terms of a religious figure. What did he tell them that piqued their interest? “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, in the time of King Herod, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem saying, ‘Where is the one who is born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him’” (Matt 2:1–2).

Here’s where it gets interesting. Worship a king? Who worships a king? Donald Trump is the top dog of the most expensive and powerful government the world has ever seen, but no one would think of worshiping him. Hitler and Stalin and Mao demanded unalloyed loyalty, but they didn’t demand worship. Even Nebuchadnezzar, who commanded people to worship an image that was probably of him, didn’t demand people worship him directly. But here these men came to worship the king of Israel.

He would have to be a pretty special king, wouldn’t he? What was special about him?

You remember I said that Saul went wrong by not keeping God’s law near him and reading it regularly. Well, the king we celebrate this month, Jesus, not only keeps that law near him, he is the embodiment of that law. “In the beginning was the Word,” the Gospel of John tells us, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God. … The Word became flesh and took up residence among us.” (John 1:1, 14). It is because he has kept God’s law—and better than that, that he is that law incarnate—that he is able to be that superman that the Israelites were looking for when they asked for a king.

Because he embodies that law, he does not lord it over his people the way the “kings of the earth” do. Instead, he says, “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28). He serves us day after day by providing us with what we need, and he especially looks like a servant when he answers our prayers. He serves us even though at heart we are rebels against him. But he also understands how deep our rebellion against him is, so he works patiently with us, changing our hearts so we come to love his ways and willingly surrender everything to him. And as we go through the process of learning to love what God loves, he goes on serving us.

There are ways in which he is like an earthly king. Like an earthly king he punishes those who will not allow him to rule over them. Membership in the kingdom is voluntary, and those who do not want to be members he will banish from his presence forever. He will also correct those who want to be part of his kingdom but step out of line, and that is an unpleasant process: “All discipline seems painful at the time, not joyful. But later it produces the fruit of peace and righteousness for those trained by it” (Heb 12:11).

Those words peace and righteousness are very important. Our king disciplines us so that we can have righteousness, so that we can stand before God forgiven and knowing he approves of us, and so that we can have the peace that is more than the absence of conflict; biblical peace is an abundance of everything good that will last forever. When he corrects us, it is always so that he can give us something much better than what we try to get by disobeying him.

It’s also true that like any earthly king Jesus considers himself entitled to take from us everything we hold dear—all our most treasured possessions, our families, our freedom, our health, and even our lives. If you go to icommittopray.com, you can read story after story of Christians who have lost their homes and all their possessions, who have been rejected by their families, who have been put in jail, and who have been beaten and maimed and even killed. And every one of them will say that they have given these things up willingly because King Jesus has asked them to.

When Jesus died, Pilate had the notice of accusation posted on the cross above him: Pilate also had a notice written and fastened to the cross, which read: “Jesus the Nazarene, the king of the Jews.” Thus many of the Jewish residents of Jerusalem read this notice, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the notice was written in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The king of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am king of the Jews.’” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.” (John 19:19–22)

Pilate knew who he was dealing with.

So we have a choice. We can either follow the kings of the earth—who care nothing for us—in their rebellion against God, or we can follow the king of heaven who loved us so much that he willingly died for our sins, to offer us peace and right standing with God. We can’t do both: Jesus said that no man can serve two masters. Jesus invites us to follow him, but the invitation to his kingdom contains some pretty scary words, so those of us who think we want to accept it need to listen carefully and soberly.

“If anyone wants to become my follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it. For what does it benefit a person if he gains the whole world but loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:23–26)

May God have mercy on us and grant us grace to become true subjects of King Jesus.

Bible Verses I Don’t Like

This is the script of a sermon I preached at Meadowood senior center, October 8, 2017.

Are there verses in the Bible that you just don’t like?

One struggle I’ve had almost ever since I became a Christian has been dealing with the Apostle Paul.

Here’s the backstory. In August of 1972 I was on my way my bicycle from southern Oregon to Seattle, returning to college from my summer job. God was already chasing me. Already that summer I had been witnessed to on a Greyhound bus by a little old lady from Orofino, Idaho, and in a park by a barely literate hippie kinda guy from the Gospel Lighthouse in Eureka, California. In Coos Bay I’d gone into a head shop, a place that sold drug paraphernalia, looking for a place to stay and the owner had referred me to a Christian street mission. I’d enjoyed the people there so much I’d stayed there an extra night. The folks there had referred me to the home of a Christian lady in Newport, and she had referred me to her niece and nephew-in-law, who ran a communal crash pad called the Shiloh house in Seaside.

After a couple of days at the Seaside Shiloh house I realized that there was something there that I wanted, and I decided not to return to college. After a few more days of Bible study and singing psalms, I started to understand that my problems were the result of my rebellion against God. I say started to understand because I had no idea how deep my rebellion against him was, and 45 years later I still surprise myself with how quickly I find myself thinking seriously about chucking the whole Christian scene.

As I said, the Shiloh house was a commune and crash pad, one of many in the Pacific Northwest at the time. In those days young people were hitchhiking all over the country, and they needed cheap places to stay overnight. The Shiloh houses would let people stay overnight and feed them for free and tell them the gospel. People who lived there would go out on the street in the evening to pass out tracts and witness to the people they saw, and if they saw a “tripper,” they’d invite them to stay overnight.

So even from day one I was out on the street passing out tracts and accosting people. After Labor Day, Seaside pretty much shuts down, so Shiloh closed that house and moved me to Boise, Idaho, where I stayed until almost Christmas, when I felt it was time to move on. But I have never forgotten the daily regimen of two Bible studies per day, singing songs straight from Scripture, and going out on the streets at night to pass out tracts and try to start conversations.

One place people liked to hang out after dark in Boise was the parking lot of the Boise Cascade Corporation offices. They’d park their cars, sit in them or stand around, talk, smoke, and drink beer. We’d go and chat them up. One evening I was talking to a twenty-something girl who passed herself off to me as an off-duty nurse. I’m not sure how the conversation got there, but she was objecting to what she understood as Christianity’s view that women are inferior to men. So I pulled out my King James Bible—Shiloh people used only the King James Bible—and started reading a passage I’d never read before that I thought would assure her that God loves women as much as he loves men, 1 Timothy 2:8–9: “I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting. In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel [Who could object to that?], with shamefacedness ….” Shamefacedness?

Well, that was the end of that conversation. And, of course, there are other passages that to this day I can’t get my mind around. Like 1 Corinthians 11:14: “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” Um, no, that’s a lesson I haven’t learned. Besides, how long is long? Or 1 Timothy 2:11, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.” Or 1 Corinthians 14:35, “it is a shame for women to speak in the church”: “church” in Paul’s day would have looked more like what we would call a home Bible study, so does that mean women can’t speak in Bible studies? Or 1 Corinthians 11:10, speaking of how women should appear in public worship: “For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.” We take “power” to mean some sort of covering, but it’s a strange use of the term, and how angels fit into the picture I’ve never heard a good explanation. So I’m happy to go to a church where most women don’t wear veils or shawls or bonnets or caps; am I thumbing my nose at the Apostle Paul by so doing? How many of you ladies here would come to these meetings if you had to wear a head covering before you were admitted?

And then there are numerous places where his sentences are grammatically incoherent and he seems to go from one topic to another without any logical connection. He’s not an easy author to read, and I get the feeling that he wasn’t exactly mister warm and fuzzy in person. All in all, he’s a pretty difficult guy to relate to.

Now we Christians tend to look askance at the Muslim doctrine that because Muhammad is God’s prophet, to speak against Muhammad is to speak against God. But am I not doing the same thing by questioning Paul, God’s prophet? To speak against what Paul has written is to speak against the word of God, isn’t it? And God identifies very closely with his word: “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” To speak against what Paul has written is to speak against Jesus. Either that or we have to deny that what Paul has written is the word of God, in which case we have to decide what the word of God is, or even if God has spoken at all, and good luck with that.

So, what evidence do we have that Paul’s words are the words of God?

For me, oddly enough, it comes down to his life, who he was as a person. He doesn’t seem to have been mister warm and fuzzy, but there’s a depth of character there that even I with my blind spots can see.

God called him, as you remember, by striking him blind on the road to Damascus. He then sent a Christian man named Ananias to lay hands on him so his sight would be restored. Interesting, isn’t it, that the name Ananias is the English version of the Hebrew name Ḥanan-Yah, which means the grace of Yahweh, the Lord? What was the primary focus of Paul’s teaching? Grace! The grace of God shown in Jesus. He uses the word 100 times in his letters.

When God told Ananias to go find Paul, Ananias was afraid that Paul would kill him. After all, Paul had come to Damascus to cleanse the place of Christians. But God says something interesting to Ananias: “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). And Paul did suffer. In the Book of Acts, we read of him being thrown out of towns, beaten with rods, and stoned and left for dead. He tells the Corinthians, “Five times I received from the Jews forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with a rod. [Just one of either of those would be enough to get me to stop, but even after seven he kept going.] Once I received a stoning. Three times I suffered shipwreck. [Again, wouldn’t once be enough for most of us?] A night and a day I spent adrift in the open sea. I have been on journeys many times [They didn’t have Holiday Inn or even Motel 6 in those days.], in dangers from rivers [bridges were rare], in dangers from robbers [who would lurk in the bushes waiting for small groups of travelers to come by], in dangers from my own countrymen [who wanted to kill him for blasphemy], in dangers from Gentiles [who hated him for breaking up the unity of their communities that were based on idolatry], in dangers in the city, in dangers in the wilderness, in dangers at sea, in dangers from false brothers, in hard work and toil, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, many times without food, in cold and without enough clothing” (2 Cor 11:24–27). We’re not talking about a one-time deal here; we’re talking about a lifestyle of suffering. Does that sound like someone who sat in a comfortable chair surrounded by ivy-covered walls and sniffed contemptuously at women?

As for the incomprehensible sentences, he didn’t write his epistles with Microsoft Word and distribute them as PDFs. I’m with those who infer from comments he makes here and there that he could not see well enough to write, so he dictated his epistles. He could think faster than he could speak, and he could speak faster than his secretaries could write, and people read at speaking speed—they didn’t speed read silently, as we do today—so editing would have been a difficult chore. I don’t find it unreasonable to cut him some slack on that score.

But let’s get back to the hard passages, the ones I don’t like. As we’ve seen, Paul paid a high price for the privilege of writing every word of those hard passages. Now being willing to suffer for something does not make that something true or morally good. Kamakazes, jihadists who blow themselves up in crowds, and soldiers who fight in imperialist wars are brave. Why do I make an exception for Paul, and say that his life backs up words I have a hard time obeying?

Because he more than anyone else in history speaks of the grace of Jesus, and he follows in a long line of people who had the same message. Moses spoke God’s words of grace—like “It is not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the Lord favored and chose you – for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples. Rather it is because of his love for you and his faithfulness to the promise he solemnly vowed to your ancestors” (Deut 7:7)—and worked miracles, and yet the Israelites didn’t believe him, and he died without setting foot in the promised land. Micaiah spoke God’s words to the kings of Israel and Judah, prophesying doom if they continued on with their evil plans; no one believed him, and the last we hear of him he was headed for prison. Jeremiah wept as he pleaded with his people to repent, but they refused, and he was abducted and taken to Egypt, which is as far as we know where he died. They all spoke hard words in the name of a God who loves his people and is willing to forgive their rebellion if they will only turn to him and repent.

So, however reluctantly, I find myself saying, at least in principle, that Paul’s words are God’s words. And when I have to face my own unwillingness to obey the ones I don’t like, I find myself mentally sitting in the living room of the Shiloh house in Seaside, looking at the ocean, remembering Jesus’ words that those who follow him have to be willing to leave everything behind, and hoping that he would let me keep the stereo set I had just spent $300 on that was now sitting at my father’s house. Well, that stereo was waiting for me after I left Shiloh, but most of my memories of it are associated with things I wish had never happened. We ignore the hard passages in the Bible at our peril.

Let’s close with Paul’s words to his protegé Timothy: “This saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ – and I am the worst of them! But here is why I was treated with mercy: so that in me as the worst, Christ Jesus could demonstrate his utmost patience, as an example for those who are going to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Tim 1:15–16). Some say that Paul’s comments about women show that he is indeed the worst of sinners, and they’re welcome to their opinion.

But Paul’s message was not primarily about keeping women in subjection or reinforcing the male-female binary. Everything he said he said to point to Jesus. “We preach about a crucified Christ, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). (Notice how he was willing to put up with the resentment of Jews and the scorn of Gentiles.) “I decided to be concerned about nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).

It was because Jesus had done so much for Paul that Paul was willing to suffer so much for Jesus. This same Jesus died so that his people could truly live for God, and his life is testimony that no matter how much we suffer, it’s worth it even in this life and will be even more so in the world to come.

“The Spirit and the bride [Jesus’ people] say [to Jesus], ‘Come [and rule over us]!’ And let the one who hears [God’s word] say: ‘Come [Jesus, and rule over me]!’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wants it take the water of life free of charge.” Amen.

Hope for Bill Buckner Moments

This first podcast is of the sermon I preached today at the  Meadowood senior center.

Click here to listen.

The State Through the Bible (or, The Bible on the State)

[[This is the first draft of the introduction to what I hope will become a handbook for Christians who want to see the kingdom of God expand and fill the earth, who believe that Jesus wants us to live lives of loving service to our neighbors as a way of calling them to submit to Jesus, the ultimate servant and the true ruler of the universe, and who are convinced that Christians have made a tragic mistake by thinking of themselves as citizens of two kingdoms and of the “powers that be ... ordained of God” as rightful lords over the lives and property of those powerless to oppose them. Subsequent chapters will appear as I am able to make them coherent; this will have to suffice for now to give my vast readership an idea of where I am trying to take my argument.
  The inspiration for this endeavor was my trip to Vietnam in 2016, documented here. Upon my return, I was invited to report to my church, which had supported me financially. While in Vietnam I read a Vietnamese Christian account of the bombing of Hanoi by the US—which I know included US Evangelicals—and I felt it my Christian duty to muse on at least the possibility that had US Evangelicals had a proper view of the state they would not have supported the war in Vietnam and thus saved Vietnamese Christians years of the misery of war and of the subsequent reprisals, which includes decades of being viewed with suspicion by the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I did so by trying to go from Genesis to Revelation in ten minutes, a journey that ended up taking considerably longer. My importunity (and, I must admit, discourtesy) was gently but firmly rebuked, but I think I am on the right track, and so I will press on.]]

While one can answer the question “What is wrong with the world?” no better than G. K. Chesterton’s “I am,” somewhere high on the list is the tendency of human beings to idolize power. What Augustine called the libido dominandi, the lust for power, pollutes all relationships, from the toddlers and schoolyard bullies who insist on forcing others to do their bidding, to sexual exploitation in dating and marriage, to national and worldwide politics.

While most people condemn the lust for power in most circumstances, they give it a comparative pass when it comes to politics. Christians especially tend to begin their theology of society by quoting Romans 13:1–7:

Obey the government, for God is the one who put it there. All governments have been placed in power by God. So those who refuse to obey the laws of the land are refusing to obey God, and punishment will follow. For the authorities do not frighten people who are doing right, but they frighten those who do wrong. So do what they say, and you will get along well. The authorities are sent by God to help you. But if you are doing something wrong, of course you should be afraid, for you will be punished. The authorities are established by God for that very purpose, to punish those who do wrong. So you must obey the government for two reasons: to keep from being punished and to keep a clear conscience. Pay your taxes, too, for these same reasons. For government workers need to be paid so they can keep on doing the work God intended them to do. Give to everyone what you owe them: Pay your taxes and import duties, and give respect and honor to all to whom it is due.

When reminded that God’s people from the beginning have faced severe persecution at the hands of government—the decapitation of the writer of Romans 13:1–7 being one notable example—and that the famine and other forms of poverty—to say nothing of war—that plague the world today are the product of government policies, the response is something along the lines of “Well, government is imperfect, but it is God who has established it and so we have to submit and trust that God is working his perfect will out through it.”

Worse, they allow Romans 13:1–7 to trump everything else the Bible has to say about how people are to treat their neighbors. They reduce “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) to a prohibition against literally bowing down to an idol (à la Daniel 3) or ceasing to evangelize (Acts 5), meanwhile saying nothing against theft by taxation and murder in imperialist war; perhaps worse, they disdain to bring bring disputes over such matters as sexual abuse by church staff before church courts, preferring instead to take them to secular courts in violation of 1 Corinthians 6.

Perhaps the paramount principle in biblical interpretation is to put the passage under discussion in context. This book is an attempt to put Romans 13:1–7 in its proper context by taking the Bible in chronological order, reading it “along the grain.” That is, I am assuming that the Torah is almost entirely the work of Moses, written during his lifetime, prior to 1400 BCE, and that the events the Old Testament describes happened pretty much as the books describe them. The writings of the early church, specifically the books of the New Testament, seem to know little if anything of modern source criticism. More to the point, my intended audience is people who, as I do, believe that the Bible is God’s holy Word and intended by its ultimate author to be so read.

Under this hermeneutic, Romans 13:1–7 was written a millennium and a half after Moses brought down from Sinai the commandments against murder and theft. For fifteen hundred years, then, the Word of God to his people was unalloyed: love your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18); do not kill, steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness (Exod 20:13–16). The Torah knows of no exception to this rule for a special class of people set apart as the state. While the Lord commands capital punishment in some instances, we shall see that it is to be executed by common people, not a special class of people. Similarly, he commanded the people to pay what amounts to taxes, but these were to support the cult system—the temple and the priesthood—and to help the poor, not to support career politicians and their armed agents. Most importantly for our purposes, how much people gave, how they obeyed the commands, was between them and God; there was no class of people funded by the very taxes they extracted to enforce the tax laws.

It is this kind of society—a society of people voluntarily serving each other—that we are to hold up to a world ravaged by the political class. Whatever form the state takes, it destroys whatever it touches. Monarchs have always tended to exploit their subjects. Republics and democracies arose as a response to the depredations of monarchs, but democracies inevitably degenerate into mob rule as people vote themselves privileges out of their neighbors’ pockets, and republics similarly degenerate as the elected representatives are no less greedy than the people who elect them. And, as the book of Judges documents so clearly, an anarchy will degenerate into the chaos of the state if the people will not put the Lord and his law first in their hearts.

The take-away from this book should be a passionate desire to see the knowledge of the glory of the Lord fill the earth as the waters cover the sea (Hab 2:14). While those who live to see that day will live well, our goal should not be that we, or even they, live well. This passionate desire should instead spring from our love for God, which in turn is the result of his love for us: our gratitude for the grace he shows us in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension and his gift of the Holy Spirit.

The way forward, then, is to eschew the weapons of the world, specifically political power, to “come out from among them and be separate” (2 Cor 6:17), and to build a society that models the nature of our God, the servant king. We will pay taxes and obey just laws meantime, but always with an eye to winning a hearing for the good news of salvation in Christ. Part of that good news is the nature of the kingdom, the promise that the king of that kingdom will make sure that his people are fed and clothed (Matt 6:31–33) and that innocent people will never have to hear a functionary of a self-serving state say, “Do as I say or I’ll kill you.”

We model this kingdom not by attempting to “Christianize” the coercive world system but rather by meeting people’s needs God’s way: through voluntary means. Schools, hospitals, and homes for orphans and the aged, institutions that post-Christian and never-Christian societies now consider indispensable, were begun in earnest by Christians as voluntary operations. As they have been taken over by the taxman, they have indeed become more “effective,” if by such is meant able to “serve” more people and provide more in the way of tangible benefits. But as selfish human nature has taken its toll, many of them have also become primarily places where employees make a living and secondarily channels of common grace.

To the degree that they fulfill the function their builders intended, such institutions proclaim that God is irrelevant. That is, not only does the observer see no reason to glorify God for the benefits he receives from an institution that does not acknowledge God, but those who build the institutions do so in part to show that they have no need of God, that God is somewhere between irrelevant and the subject of an excrable, death-dealing lie.

He who is faithful in little will be given charge over much (e.g., Luke 19:17). The stone “cut out without hands” that destroyed the image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was small, but grew to fill the whole world (Dan 2:15). The kingdom of God—the antitype of which Nebuchadnezzar’s stone is the type—similarly starts small and grows to fill the earth (Matt 13:31–33). We can choose to be part of this growth or not. We can, to borrow C. S. Lewis’ metaphor, make mud pies in the slums of politics, or we can work to have a holiday at the shore of voluntary service. Crowning Romans 13:1–7 king of our social theory inevitably binds us to the slums.

This book is intended to give you the courage to put that unwitting usurper in its place, a place in subjection to Jesus’ plain words: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves” (Luke 22:25–26), and most importantly, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matt 22:37–40, quoting Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18).