“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” (Romans 13:1-2)
Sin is a rejection of God’s authority. This said, it’s safe to say that mankind has an authority problem. We abuse the authority we have and ignore the moral laws He’s written on our hearts and declared in Scripture. And then we wonder why there’s so much strife. This strife and its attending trauma would all dissipate if we submitted to His authority structures. Indeed, the Lord has provided three “super authorities” to govern the world until His return and these are the church, family and state. Understood properly, these are marvelous and divine structures that provide for a truly peaceful, free and Christ-exalting society. The question is whether we dare accept them.
The problem arises when we insist on going our own way and end up perverting these authority structures. We should be sure that we can’t escape them for this is God’s world, His creation and He has set them over us. What we do, unfortunately, in our cosmic rebellion against the great King, is try and throw off God’s rule and establish our own. This is basically what socialism/marxism is – it’s man’s sinful attempt to usurp God’s authority by turning the state into both the family and church. To do that, the state must destroy both of those competing authorities.
Abraham Kuyper said that there’s not a single aspect of reality that Jesus Christ doesn’t look at and say, “Mine!” That’s the point here. God establishes his bona fides over all authorities. In saying that there are no authorities except from God, the Bible puts forth the dominant principle through which men and women may live in peace with one another. Far from being restrictive, God’s law frees us from conflict and violence. It’s our insistence upon literally being laws unto ourselves that causes all strife, conflict, violence and war. The acceptance that all authority comes from God, therefore, has with it – as obedience to God always does – a great blessing. That blessing is political, social and personal order. God’s love is made manifest at the cross of Jesus Christ. We see there, quite amazingly, both love and law on full and glorious display. God never separates His love from His law because He’s indivisible and His mind is inscrutable to us (Romans 11:33). We’re going to struggle with this issue – of love and law – because of our limits and, yes, even because of our sin. But, please remember that God’s law is never played over against His love nor vice versa.
This principle is a spectacular departure from the spirit of this or any age.
By asserting His authority over the state, God separates earthly powers, so to speak. To a man, it’s quite common, even amongst Christians today, to think that the separation of church and state is a secular concept used to protect nonbelievers from the abuse and tyranny of the church. That’s as bald a lie as is told in America right now. It was God who told us to separate the two as no man ever had power that he desired to share with those who couldn’t earn it from him by force.
The idea that one can’t bring Christian principles into politics is based on this lie and no Christian can/should give it credence. To do so is to say that there are some ethical principles operating outside of God that He must acknowledge and submit to. That’s a horrific strike against and diminishment of the sovereignty and omniscience of the Lord. If there’s a force of any sort acting upon Him to which He must adjust, adapt or submit to, then He’s not really and truly God. Therefore, to read this verse in any way other than to say that all authorities derive their true mandate from, and function truly only within His moral law, is to reject the God of the Scripture. Worse, it’s to create an idol because something must invariably be of ultimate authority. Upon this subject right here we have a dismal window into how the modern Christian mind has jettisoned God’s sovereignty and given it over to the state.
To be clear: no entity on earth, no government or organization, no authority whatsoever, has an arbitrary moral mandate nor can any authority claim to be a moral free-agent. To say that there are no authorities except from God is to say that every single authority that exists, from a father to a teacher, to a business owner, to a president, have both the nature and limits of that authority fixed and defined by God. If an authority or power exists independent of God’s order then that power is, logically and inevitably, god.
In man’s wild insistence to be free of God’s moral law he becomes a political animal. He seeks to devise strategies where God’s clear moral order is in the dock and he is the judge. This is the foundation of the idolatrous state, which pretends to be neutral and insists that it acts upon principles of morality and justice that it can’t account for outside of vague pronouncements of “the will of the people” or some such thing.
It’s this issue that’s the root of America’s political turmoil. In rejecting God’s moral law, elections aren’t about the derivative actions proceeding from first principles but the definitions of these first principles themselves. Each election becomes a struggle of morally anarchic people, who resist God’s non-contradictory decrees of right and wrong, to establish into law their personal and latest definition of morality. It’s like this that anarchy (self-law) must lead to tyranny. And this is why the most libertine citizen votes for ever greater government control – he’s actually struggling to redefine God’s moral order as his own and to scale those walls, to assault that great fortress, to cast off the restraints, and build a new Babel.
So, to be subject to the governing authorities means, in this context, to be subject to God’s moral order in every sphere of life. If every single authority on earth exercised their limited and God-defined “rule” in the name of God and for His glory, how blissful we would all be. Instead, we live under a tyranny of sin.
What does this tyranny look like?
Families are shattered by sexual sin, emotional and physical abuse and neglect. Students are herded into an educational complex that instructs them in the way of humanism and moral anarchy. They’re taught that they’re free to do whatever they want sexually and, in fact, anti-biblical sexuality is to be cherished and celebrated. This, of course, destroys the biblical family and all its attendant benefits. Children grow up in broken homes where there’s little guidance and no provision for their economic future. Consequently, to secure their future, they must turn to the state for the things that should be provided by the family (1 Timothy 5:8). The depleted family, the eviscerated family, pulverized by secular sexual mores, turns their children over to the state and these spiritually orphaned children grow to rely on the government for all things.
Millions of American students have their college education paid for by taking government loans. And since it’s the government that pays them, these colleges are really employed by the state, not the student or the family. Do you puzzle as to why college campuses produce so much socialism? It’s because the high-priests of the state, the professors, work diligently to churn out ever more statists.
After graduation these students hit the “working world” where they never seem to notice all of the legal restraints on every side. They tell themselves that they’re free because they’ve thrown off adherence to God’s biblical order and yet there are lawyers under every American rock. The tax code is so convoluted and mammoth that the world’s greatest minds devote their whole careers to simply comprehending it. Consent agreements, waivers, HOA’s, regulations everywhere, workplace rules, speech codes…in “throwing” off God’s ten commandments, men and women everywhere instead carry an almost limitless load. This is what Jesus meant when He said that His burden was light and His yoke was easy. As created beings, we will serve an authority. That’s not in question no matter how well we lie to ourselves. The question is whether we will serve the true and living God or some idol like the modern state.
You see, it’s the principle of self-law that infects us. If we think we can determine right and wrong on our own powers of deduction, without reference to the Word of the Lord, we will invariably develop more and more law. Atheism creates greater and greater volumes of restraint on behavior through law because it tries to deal with sin not through God’s grace, through the cross, but through human effort. In just this one way we’ve mentioned, which is the obliteration of the biblical family as the central human institution, the self-rule principle casts us on a calamitous course. More and more lawyers and laws and regulators are needed as mankind grows ever more wicked. Using politics to fix mankind’s sin problem instead of submitting to God’s law and His gracious authority structures (of church to preach and teach the Word, the family to love and raise children, and the state to punish interpersonal evil, that is to say crime) is like turning on a fan in order to fight a tornado, to blow it away. We can never have peace unless we submit to God’s law and His wonderful authority structures.
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