Government and the Bible: Trust God with the government
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There's a new girl in my youth group. The other day at church, she told me she had "the Force." Being the Star Wars nerd that I am, I understood this to mean she was claiming to be able to move things without touching them and do mind tricks.
And she was right.
She proceeded to lick her palm and tried to touch my face with the same hand. Sure enough, my head moved the way she wanted it to without touching it. She knew exactly how to control the circumstances around me to convince me to do what she wanted.
If an 11-year-old girl can do this to an adult with more education than sense, then it would stand to reason that the all-powerful, most-wise God can direct the affairs of paltry humans and their faulty governments. But though it follows logically, it does not seem many Christians actually believe it.
The Bible is clear and concise about the role of government. Romans 13:4 says the government is "God's minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil." 1 Peter 2:14 affirms that the government is "for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good."
The Bible is equally clear, but much less concise, about the role of the believers who find themselves subject to a government. Repeatedly, Scripture admonishes believers to submit to and obey the government. Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17 and Hebrews 13:17 all admonish believers to submit to and obey governments that actively and physically persecuted them with imprisonment, beatings and execution. In 1 Timothy 2:2, Paul encouraged Timothy to pray for the same king that would later execute Paul.
Something makes me think that Paul's advice would have remained the same even if Nero — the emperor of Rome at the time — had a weak foreign policy or signed an unconstitutional executive order. Whatever the average Christian has to complain about, it pales in comparison to the political situation of first-century Rome.
I'm not saying we have no place in the culture wars. I'm saying our place has to begin with obedience and submission to the government, and we're really bad at that.
Americans, and Texans especially, seem to have rebellion built into our DNA.
The 13 colonies rebelled from England because they didn't like paying taxes without having a say in how much those taxes were. Remember than until then, there was almost no precedent for this expectation in all of human history. Texas rebelled against Mexico because the Americans who had moved to Texas no longer wanted to follow the rules they had agreed to follow when they moved to Texas in the first place. The South attempted to secede because the mean old Yankees were trying to take away states' right to legitimize the practice of owning other humans.
None of the rebellions in our history has been biblically warranted.
Rebellion of any kind is actually expressly forbidden for believers. Obedience is expressly commanded. And we can submit even when we disagree with our government because we trust God.
If that seems radical, it isn't because it's not biblical. It seems radical because we don't have many good examples of it in our own history. Good thing we have the Bible to confront such misguided cultural ideals.
Instead of viewing history from the perspective of our high school history class, Acts 17:26 gives an interesting glimpse of history from God's perspective, "From one man (God) made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands." It isn't just the officials in authority over a government which God controls. The land each government commands, the time in which they do it, and the people which inhabit them are all under God's sovereign control. We as Christians either believe this or we don't. We betray whether we actually believe this or not by the way we talk about our government and the measure of respect we show our elected officials in private conversation.
Perhaps we don't actually believe God is in control because we misunderstand the purpose God is trying to accomplish with his sovereign control. I'm so glad the very next verse in Acts 17 makes that clear, "God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17:27). God uses history and governments to draw people to himself. His goal is not to make Christians comfortable in public bathrooms or to protect them from baking cakes for gay weddings. His desire is for unbelievers to be won to himself "when they see the purity and reverence of your lives" (1 Peter 3:2).
Christians can remain respectful, submissive and obedient to the government because we do not depend on the government to protect or provide for us. We don't need to fight for our own rights because our "rights" don't come from the government. We can trust God to be in control of history. The question is not whether you trust the government. It is whether you trust God enough to submit to the government like he commands you to.
There is a time and place to stand up, but we will never arrive at that place until we have really trusted God with the mess our country is in and rely on him to use it to draw people to himself. I fear that on the whole, the American church hasn't done this yet. It's about time we started.