“Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)
In this amazing passage, God sweeps away with an enormous wave of profound and heavenly wisdom the pathetic sandcastles of human political philosophy.
First, He states clearly that no one owes his life/liberty to anyone else as a matter of first principles. This isn’t a prohibition against taking a loan so long as the loan is for some legitimate business purpose. Rather, it’s a prohibition against the philosophy – taken up by oneself or having it forced upon you – that you aren’t politically free. A man who owes no one anything – except God – is a free man. This simple proclamation obliterates all, repeat all, vile and contemptible notions that one person owes another something just because…for no objective philosophical reason. Put plainly, slavery of any kind, any sort of caste system or social order that renders some rights to one but not another, and any debt driven society is in plain violation of God’s command.
God alone has the authority to define reality and render unto each their obligations. No person, entity, group, organization, government, philosophy, religion or authority on earth has the right to redefine God’s declarative order. When we hear that one has some sort of obligation we must ask from where that obligation commences. All human conflict stems from this simple and obvious point. No one may put an obligation upon anyone else that God didn’t give them. Period. So long as we adhere to this simple truth, peace will reign and there will be no more war, violence, murder, strife, etc. Indeed, lawyers and police officers would be superfluous if not for sin and sin is the usurpation of God’s authority. The rule is: the more lawyers and police officers you see, the more legalism (the creation of arbitrary obligations and commands) abounds.
The sad irony of sin is that the sinner sees the results of rebellion all around him. Alarmed by the burgeoning anarchy and crime, and unable/unwilling to face the true reality of why this is happening, he turns not to the church and repents of his own sin, but he goes to the state for protection. The state, in this case energized by the same principle of autonomy (self-law), then begins to issue ethical edicts from on high. The sinner, alone and outnumbered, can’t force all of society to follow his/her moral orders so they organize with others who share their particular strain of autonomous beliefs. Thusly organized and moved to vote and create political power for themselves, they seek to gain enough leverage to force their neighbors to do what they deem morally proper. It’s this way that sinful man tries to play god from within the modern democracies – he uses the state and reasons that “having a majority” gives him some kind of right to force people to do what they don’t want to do. Ask the politician and/or voter where rights come from and you’re liable to get a funny stare, like a dog watching TV, as if you spoke in some foreign and alien language. Here’s the rule to always remember: sinners never want to discuss where rights come from. Autonomous man is hemophiliac on this point – scratch him and his ethical and epistemological world will bleed to death.
Autonomous man does to political ethics what Tonya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan – they send a leg-breaker. Underneath every argument and debate about public policy is this question: “where do you get the authority to do this…to use force?”
Simply put, sinful man hates this passage of Scripture almost as much as it hates Genesis 1:1 and John 14:6. It hates these because they limit his authority. We repeat: all strife is because sinners claim/seize authority they don’t have. That’s what this passage means as far as daily life and social order are concerned. When someone acts outside of their designated authority, they’re claiming for themselves God-like powers. Once again, the question on everyone’s lips should always be: “by what authority do I say and/or do this?”
When Jesus extolled the virtues of the Centurion’s faith in Matthew 8:5-13, it was because that great man had said to our Lord, “I too am a man under authority…”. Our Lord actually said that He hadn’t seen so great a faith in all the land. Why? Because the professional soldier – a Roman incidentally, not a Jewish theologian oddly enough – spoke to Him about authority and knew that Jesus’ power came from God. In all, no one has Jesus as Savior unless he also has Him as Lord, and no one has Jesus as Lord unless he knows His authority.
God gives no one the authority to place ethical demands on anyone else. As a derivative of this plain and powerful truth, we know that we may not force anyone to trade with us, provide for us, or serve us. Any person or entity that does so is a criminal and this criminal may be resisted by the force of the intended victim or later avenged by the civil magistrate. Every person must be subject to the governing authorities – and the governing authorities have their power only insofar as they exercise it according to God’s word/law.
Easily missed in this passage is that the Lord commands us to love our neighbor and defines that in this case as not doing wrong to them. Modern man, in his sin-driven tyranny, distorts “love your neighbor” as a means of forcing the neighbor to comply with an extra-biblical code, rather than leave him alone. God defines love, not man. God’s love sets men free whereas man’s love imposes burdens and obligations out of thin air. God is speaking about civil affairs in this context – He’s laying down political principles of first order and that order is that love means that your neighbor must be free. The key question to ask about our political idea is, “does this make my neighbor owe me something?” If it does, the idea isn’t Biblical, but sinful. The impulse to control our neighbor is the Pharisee principle in us and we must repent of it. Applying this simple principle to modern life would eradicate ninety-nine percent of all political turmoil.
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