Living Under Authority: A Christian Perspective

Beginning with verse 1, I want to start there this evening. Chapter 13, beginning with verse 1. This is February the 2nd, Romans 13, beginning with verse 1. I think all of this rest of the book of Romans is sort of governed by what takes place in chapter 12, the first two verses, where Paul says, Therefore I urge you, because of all the things he said above, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. Then he goes through a long section where he talks about the relationship with other people, how we are to think differently about other people and react differently to other people. And now in chapter 13, he moves beyond that to talk about our relationship, not only with individuals, other individuals, but with the relationship of ourselves to the country in which we live, or the government agencies that we're around. He starts talking about our role here. Now when he talks about relationships with other people, where he says, Love must be sincere, in chapter 12, verse 9, he starts talking about what that is, how relationship, how love in its purity presents itself. He talks about submitting to other people, making sure that you cling to what's good, and you bless people instead of cursing them, you rejoice with them, you mourn with them, you live in harmony with them, that you're not proud or elevated, that you are willing to associate with people who most others wouldn't associate, you don't repay evil for evil, that you are at one with people, that you are united with them, so that there is a bond between you and them. So this idea of connections and submission is a key ingredient in love. You love people because you choose to serve them. Love in the Bible means the self-denying sacrificial service to other people. It is this characteristic that he sees as a primary result of God's control of our lives. Now when he moves to this section where he talks about government, he picks up, I think, on the same kind of idea. Some see this as a really odd way for Paul to move, but I think it's not odd in the sense that it exemplifies relationships not between individuals, but it exemplifies relationships between individuals and the community in which they live. Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities. Just as he talked about above, living in harmony with one another, which meant that you would be willing to give up your side of an issue, that you might be in harmony with another person. So in the larger community structure, he sees this as a way of submitting to the authorities that control the governments in your area. Everyone, not just the Gentiles, but the Jews also. He talked about, in the early parts of the book of Romans, about how Jews and Gentiles both were in need of this redemptive power of God. Now he's speaking in a world that's a lot different than what we're accustomed to. The Jews had their own system of religion. They had their own system of laws. And in some communities where they lived, they would have their own courts. They would have their own rules that they lived by, so that governments would allow them in their city, for example, to have their own court system. So if a Gentile were to be caught in some kind of situation, he'd be tried according to the Gentile rules. If a Jew was caught in a situation where he did something wrong, he'd be tried in the Jewish courts. So they had two separate communities of faiths, spiritual communities and legal communities. Now, Paul has talked about, through the book of Romans, that all this structure of the law has been done away with because of what Christ has done. No longer will the Jews see the Jewish law as a system they will hold on to, but now Christ has superseded that. They are to see that there is no longer the barrier between Jew and Gentile among them, but instead they're all united in one under Christ. So no longer will this system be that they will live in a place and be able to isolate themselves from the culture around them. So that's why he starts off with this idea, every one of you, whether you're Jew or Gentile, and the church at Rome had both Jews and Gentiles in it, all of you, living in this Roman world, have to be prepared for the fact that you can't live in this church community with the Jews saying we're going to live by our own rules and the Gentiles saying we're not. You're now living together under the authority of Christ. So in wherever you live, you don't have an option as to how you'd operate. You must, everyone, submit to the governing authorities wherever you live. Now the word for authority that's used here is a word that would be used also in the Ten Commandments. You're to have no other God before me. I am a position of authority. God ultimately is in the position of authority. What Paul is describing for us is that God's idea about how the world is to be organized is it to be structured with some authority in charge. Immediately, this throws out the idea that you can have a world where everybody just does what they want to do. God's plan is for human beings to be in structure where there is authorities, and authorities are part of God's plan for the world. I think there's a lot of feeling in this country, sort of growing up from maybe the days when it was settled, when Americans, whenever the English people came over here, you know, and we'd move out and settle the West, and people lived in the mountains and no one around them. I remember reading a story where a guy said to another fellow who came and said, I think I'm going to move further West. I saw two people this year. It's just too crowded. There's this feeling in America that we can go somewhere and simply live on our own without facing authority. And it's been difficult for our culture to be settled in that because there's this strong sense of I don't want anybody telling me what to do in America. And this is contrary to scripture. God's intention is that everyone in the world would live under authority. Now, the reason for that is, he takes it up in the next phrase, for there is no authority except that which God has established. Here he makes it clear. Everywhere in the world where there's somebody in charge, God has put that person in charge. He doesn't simply mean governments, the head of governments, but in local communities. God expects us to live in structured community where there is some leadership and some structure. That is his plan. And you can see this very well when you look at the whole world that God has made. There's authority there. God is in control of it. That's what the first commandment's about. God is in control of the world. He made it all. It's under his authority. And we're to submit to that authority, the very first of his commandments. The key ingredient is, you submit to me. Now, here he's telling us that as the authority for this world, he chooses in every culture to put people in authority over that particular culture. And that person, or those persons, or however the government's structured, he chooses to allow us to pick that. Whatever kind of government you want to have, you want to have a king, or you want to have a dictator, you want to have a democratic structure, whatever kind of structure you have, I will make that a representative of what I want in that country. God is not particularly in favor of one kind of government or another, but he is in favor of government. There's a lot of anti-government feeling in this country that is contrary to Christian thinking. Even if it's a bad dictator? Pardon? Even if it's a evil dictator? What do you think, who do you think was the government, governor in charge of the Roman Empire here? He was a mean pagan. And he was writing this to the church in Rome. I know that sounds odd to us, but I'll tell you this fact, more Christians live under evil, wicked governments in the world than live under Christian governments. And where the gospel is thriving most powerfully right now are in places where there are wicked, evil governments. I don't know why it's true, but it was true in the Roman Empire. They thrived as never before in this government ruled by kings, by Caesars, who were wicked, who were maniacal. One of them was even insane. Several of them had boy homosexual people staying with them openly. There was nothing moral about this whole thing. And whenever Jesus was confronted with this, they said, should we pay taxes to support this homosexual loving Caesar that we've got up there? He said, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, his taxes, and to God what belongs to him. Now, Paul is describing for us how it is that we get along in a world in which we live. If we have to have in our culture only people who are in charge of our government, who are sinless Christians, we'll have anarchy. There just aren't any. But what God says is you have one part of this to do. You submit yourself to the authority of the government wherever you live. You're not to see it as an evil thing because I have established it. God has the opportunity, the power, to be able to kill every wicked government leader in the world. He just doesn't choose to do that. He allows these people to be positions of leadership and rule, but they are under his authority. That's what he says. It's like saying this. Okay, you have a wicked emperor. I put him there and I'm going to deal with him. It's none of your business. You do what he tells you, and if I'm ready to kill him, I'll do that because I'm in charge. I'm in charge of everybody in the world. And at one stroke of my pen or one word from me, he's gone. But what you need to look for is how to be able to live in that structure and do the work that I've given you to do as the church. See, God is more interested in the work of his kingdom than in the political processes that we live in. What he wants is for his people to be able to work in that structure. He knows if they go into this church in Rome, if they present themselves as opposed to the government, everything they do will be observed by the government and the government will be after them to destroy them as quickly as they can because they'll see them as subversive. I want you to be, in the Roman Empire, the most obedient people to the ruler of Rome that you can be. So there will be no reason for you to ever have the idea said about you that you're subversive to Rome. I know that's hard for us to see sometimes, but in China, for example, where the communists ruled for so long, many people were challenged to support the guy that smuggled, against the law, Bibles into China. I'm not sure that this allows us to be able to support that because what happened is that Christians were seen as enemies of the communist state. And whenever Christians were willing to cooperate with the government in China and print their own Bibles, then things changed for them. And now, of course, in the end, God's going to win all these battles. I mean, it's just a fact. And in the end, now China is exploding with people who are converting to Christianity, one of the most powerful movements of change in a culture that we've seen in our lifetimes in that country. What God wanted was, I want you to be friends with the government so you submit to them. Now, we know in the Scripture that there is a limit to the submission. And Peter was brought before the courts and they said, we don't want you to preach about Jesus anymore. He said to them, you must tell me whatever you want to tell me, but I have to choose whether to obey you or God. So whenever the church finds itself in a position where its obedience to God is challenged, it has no alternative but to choose to be obedient to God rather than be obedient to something that requires disobedience to God. So there is a boundary that God has for our obedience, but his goal is, like you saw with other people, try to have one mind about this. The government is trying to run this country so it will be successful, whatever government, whatever country you're in. I don't know of any, like there may be countries where the dictator just wants to ravage the country and get all the money he can and move to Switzerland. There are circumstances like that, but they're not necessarily the norm. Most of the countries, people are trying to do the best they can to run the country correctly. So I want you to assume that that's the norm. Give them the benefit of the doubt. That's the way he said we should get along with each other. Give other people the benefit of the doubt. Assume that they want the best in the church. Assume that they're trying to do their best, and you give them obedience as best you can. Will it require loss of some of the things we really want to do? Yeah, sometimes you'll want to build a house, Alan, and they'll have regulations that you won't want to like there. Do you like to live out on a farm? You may not like it, but submit to it. That's what he's saying. We're all going to find ourselves in that. The submission to things like this allow us the freedom to do the work God gives us to do. What if you win this battle, but as the church, we rise up and then present ourselves to the community as an enemy of the community? Then our efforts to be able to reach that community are lost. You see, what God is interested in is carrying the message of Christ around the world. And I think that he wants us to understand that when we are enemies of the government, we're enemies of someone he has put in place. Now, think about that. If God puts our president in place, whoever it's a Democrat or Republican, and God's neither on one of those sides or the other, he expects us to respect that person or our leaders and to give submission to them because he's placed them there. Now, God doesn't say he selects them, but when they're selected, they belong to him. They work for him. Does that make sense? We can select whoever we want, but once they're in that office, they're accountable to God, not us. That's the way God sees it. And he handles that person however they are living and acting, and they're responsible to him. There is no authority except that which is established, what God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God, so that his requirement here is to recognize that submission to the government in which we live is submission to the existing persons he's placed there, and in that way, actually submission to God. Now, whenever he talks about you're to change your mind, and he talks about this in chapter 12, don't be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You see, the normal way we think in this country, I think pretty much it's a widespread reality, at least, is we don't like the government. Whoever's up there, we don't like them because we want to do the things we want to do. We want to live the way we want to live. We want to make choices the way we want to make choices. We want to build things we want to build. We want to do the things we want to do, and we want our own independence. We don't buy any telling us what to do. This was really fundamental in the American Revolution, where we said we don't want to live with England telling us what to do. I'm not sure God would have been in favor of that revolution. It's not consistent with what he says in Rome, in the book of Romans. We want to do what we want to do. Now, if you'll identify that attitude, you'll see that's exactly the fundamental attitude that all sin comes from. I want to do what I want to do. What God sees in this is a person whose life wants to be self-controlled instead of controlled by God. So, he sets a structure in which all of us live inside of a structure, where we're responsible to somebody else for obedience to them. This is his manner by which he wants his world to be ruled. So, remember, whenever you go out, it's talking about the church at Rome, wherever you are, the Roman government, wherever you are, every person that's in position of leadership and authority, that person is responsible to me. I will hold them accountable for the wicked things that they do, and they will pay for what they do. You are supposed to be submissive to the government wherever you find yourself, and under whatever circumstances you do find yourself. Consequently, here's the consequences of what takes place. He who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted. So, whenever we have a rebellion against the government authority around us, we are actually rebelling against what God has set up. See, we think in terms of our own world of politics, of saying, if it gets to a place where you don't like your government, you should be able just to rebel against it and form your own. This is really contrary to the scripture. That is common worldly thinking. That's what he said. Don't any longer conform to the pattern that this world has about how it thinks about politics, because you are not living in that world. When you've entered the kingdom of God, you live a different way. What I want you to do is to see the whole world under my authority, and everywhere you are, to recognize that I've placed in positions of authority what I want. So, the result is, when you rebel against the people who are in authority, you're rebelling against what God himself has set up. He sees this as rebellion against himself. Now, in our political structure, it's very proper, kind. You know, you hear this all the time about how bad the government is, and they're our enemy, and we don't want them taking in our lives, or doing anything. So, that kind of language is very popular. But what Paul is telling us is, it's sinful. It's not just a political choice, it's sinful. It creates a spirit of rebellion in the lives of people. And much of the chaos we have in Washington is a result of this. Everybody's not going to be told what to do. They're not going to cooperate. You can see how it's created such chaos in our country. God sees this as the opposite of what he has for us. Try to go there and figure out how you can get along together. Respect those people in leadership and authority, whichever party it is, and learn to cooperate with one another. This is the way I want you to do it. And if you don't, you are really distressing, disturbing, or tearing apart, or rebelling against what God has instituted. And the next phrase, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. Those are sobering words. It makes us in a position, if we have disrespect for the leadership that God places in our city, or county, or our state, or the nation, it makes us, when we have disrespect and rebellion toward them, it puts us in a position where God has to bring judgment on us. I don't know how he does it, or what he plans to do, but if you believe the scriptures, you believe that's exactly what God will do. Well, the question comes in. What if you have bad rulers? For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. The government is given to us to punish those who do things that are wrong. Now, when you bring up the issue of what if you have a ruler who's wicked, and he doesn't have any sense of doing things that are right, and we have some of those in the world, God does bring justice on those situations. So, but rulers, as a general rule, for rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those that do wrong. As a general rule, all governments want to have rules that do the best for the community and for the nation. That's their general principle, and we are to assume that. Do you want to be free from fear of one in authority? Then do what is right, and he will commend you. What he wants them to do, wherever they go, is to obey the laws, do exactly what the law says, and they will be free to do the work that he sent them there as a community of faith to do. For he is God's servant to do good, but if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath, to bring punishment on wrongdoers. All governments have been given by God the authority to punish those who do things that are wrong. It's a part of their responsibility. Now, he is God's servant. He uses this word here. The word for servant that's used here is the word that's used in the Bible for a deacon. He is the servant of God, like we use the word for a deacon, someone who serves God in the church. God sees all the people in authority and government as accountable to him. This word is also used for someone who would be a waiter in a restaurant. So whenever you go into a restaurant and the waiter comes to wait on you, they have the responsibility of pleasing you. Here's what he says to us. If you have a wicked ruler who steps out of line, they work for me, and I will settle the scores. It requires a great deal of confidence in God to learn to think as he tells us to think. It's true in our relationships because you submit yourself to another person and put them ahead of yourself, and you don't allow yourself to retaliate whenever they do something bad to you. It puts you in a position of the possibility of you being taken advantage of. The same is true in this concept of government that God gives us. We are vulnerable to the authority of wicked people. In the same way that we're vulnerable to the authority of wicked people around us all the time. We see this in Jesus' life. Not only did he submit himself to the authority of the religious leaders in his country, but he also submitted himself to the authority of the Roman government. The charges against him as a spiritual person with the court of the Sanhedrin, all of those religious charges were wrong, and they lied about him. But he never once tried to get out of it. When he was brought before Pilate and now tried in a Roman court, the charges were false. But he did not try to resist or stop. Jesus has shown us how he lives in a world where there are wicked governors and leaders, and it is submission. He asked this for us in our personal relationships, and he asked this for us in our relationships with the governments around us. What he wants for us is to get about the work of the kingdom of God. He doesn't want us to place barriers between ourselves and the people that are around us. And one of the things that's the hardest thing for people to do is to find a welcome whenever they are absolutely dedicated to the destruction of the government in the country where they live. When there are people come here who are agents of Al-Qaeda, and they see our American government as demonic and dedicated to its destruction, how do we think about Islam? We don't want that in our country. When we go to other places and present Christianity as being against the governments of those other countries where they live, we have the same difficulty in our evangelism. What Jesus asked for his followers is everywhere you go, you put first the kingdom of God and what your mission is. However difficult it is, you submit to the earthly authorities that are around you so you will have the freedom to proclaim the gospel wherever you are. For the person in charge there, I have placed them there. I've placed them there to do good things and not bad things, and trust them to do that. You obey the laws that they live by the best you can where they don't ask you to violate the teachings that I give you. You live there in harmony with them and do the work that I've given you to do. I am in charge of the world, and if you will do what I tell you to do, you will be able to succeed in the mission that I've given you wherever you are. That's God's plan. Whenever he wants us to see the world in which we live, not as an enemy to what we're doing, but as incidental to what we're doing, we can submit to the government authorities and regulations that we have here without compromising our faith. We can do that. For we're free to live like we think God wants us to live. We should not create a climate in which we become seen as a culture of people who are antagonistic toward our government. We've seen some of our spiritual leaders who have taken strong positions that make them appear as if they are only in favor of one kind of government. And so it makes it hard whenever somebody else thinking differently gets in positions of leadership. What God is interested in in churches is for us to build a way by which we can live and work together as one. What he's interested here in our government and our country is for us to live together with even pagans in harmony so that we can do the work that God has for us. I will control the world, he says. What I want you to do is to do your job. Bring the message of Jesus Christ to everyone in your country. And do everything that you can not to appear an enemy of your country or the culture in which you live but proclaim the truth of God everywhere. That's God's mission for us. You can't do that and fight what I'm doing. So you do the work I've given you and I will fight the battle with the leaders of the country that you're in. I will take care of that because they work for me. Let's pray. Father, we live in a world that is hostile to you. Hostile because they don't accept what you have to say as the truth. Hostile because their own lives are filled with sin. We have not been sent here to make it more hostile. But instead to be able to present the word of truth to those that rebel against you. Give us compassion for each other. Compassion for our political leaders. Support and encouragement for them. And help us to be about the business you've given us. That we might not cause in our own world for the work of Christ to seem as if it's slanted and an enemy of the country in which we live. In the name of Christ we ask for your wisdom to do this. Amen.