07-24-11 This is Christian?!

We come today to the study of the 3^rd of 6 church principles given to us by Paul

in the final 5 chapters of his letter to the Christians at Rome.

It is a principle unlike any of the others contained in Scripture.

It is principle that will surprise some of you,

a principle that, I think, will make some of you angry,

a principle that will cause some of you to take what I will say in the next few minutes and reject it utterly,

saying to yourself, “Well, that’s just Larry’s opinion,

and even though I like a lot of what he says,

he’s just flat wrong on this one.”

I just want you to know

that I understand that type of response perfectly.

And, in my own defense,

I just want you to know

that I am very open to listening to any and all alternative “interpretations”

that anyone may have to offer.

In fact, I have even looked for them myself.

I, too, have looked for some way around the principle we will see today.

But the great problem with the seven verses we will study in a few minutes

is that they are so clear and understandable in what they say.

Not only are they not obscure,

or confusing,

or filled with complicated or intricate Bible truth,

but they are, in fact, exactly the opposite.

I could simply read these verses for us,

with no interpretation or expansion at all,

and every one of us would understand what they are saying.

But the real thing we wrestle with

when we come to this principle

is not WHAT God says,

but rather WHY He says it.

So, let me go ahead and read the passage,

and then I want to talk a little bit

about the WHY.

I mentioned a few minutes ago

that this principle is unique from all the others in a number of ways.

And at the top of that list of unique characteristics

is the fact that this is the only principle

that talks with us

not about our relationship to God

or to one another within the Church,

but rather it talks to us

about our relationship with the non-Christian world in which we live,

and specifically it talks with us

about the Christian’s relationship to the human governmental structures

within that world system.

OK, let me read the passage for us,

and then we’ll see if we can make some sense out of it.

This is Romans 13:1-7

ROM 13:1 Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.

ROM 13:2 Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.

ROM 13:3 For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same;

ROM 13:4 for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath upon the one who practices evil.

ROM 13:5 Wherefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience' sake.

ROM 13:6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.

ROM 13:7 Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.

Now, do you see what I mean?

The real problem with these 7 verses

is not that they are obscure

or difficult to understand,

the problem with them is that they are exactly the opposite.

But before we spend a few minutes

looking a little more closely at what Paul says,

I want to back way up

and see if I can help us place this principle into it’s proper setting.

And that setting begins

with the first words our God ever spoke to us...

Gen. 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...

Before there was anything else,

before there was an earth,

or a solar system,

or a sun or moon or stars,

before there was an angel,

or a demon,

or a human being

there was God.

And He created all that is.

And, as we go through Scripture,

He tells us why He created.

He tells us that He created this world for us,

and He created us for Himself.

But right here is where our misguided human thinking starts to get in the way.

There is a misguided notion floating around the human race

that God created man with the hope

and the reasonable expectation

that man would simply trust God and obey Him and live happily ever after.

But tragically, an enemy slipped into this perfect world

when God was looking the other direction,

and tempted Adam and Eve into sin.

And ever since then

God has been frantically trying to patch up this disaster

by finding some way of coaxing the human race

back into obedience and submission to Him.

From this perspective

Christ’s death was God’s “Plan B”,

a plan in which He accepts the miserable failure of His original design

and comes up with an alternative

in which He doesn’t have to write off the whole creative effort as a total waste.

Folks, there has never been a “Plan B” for God.

There has never been a time

when His back was turned

and Satan slipped one over on Him.

We are told in Ephesians 1:4 and in I Peter 1:20

that God’s redemptive plan for us,

and Christ’s coming to this earth

and all that He accomplished through that

was already predetermined by God

before one star

or one speck of dust ever existed.

You see,

from the very beginning

it never was about God creating us

with the hope that we would never sin.

It was about something else altogether.

It was about His designing a creation

in which two things could happen.

First, He could create people who have real, true free will,

which is the only basis upon which a true love relationship between us and Him could exist.

And second, He wanted a creation in which

we would be able to discover

the true nature of His love for us.

And the only way that could happen

was for us to see His response to us

in the face of our wilful rebellion against Him

and our rejection of him as our God.

You see,

if the human race had not rebelled,

we would always have assumed

that God’s love for us

and His care of us

was in some way tied to the fact that we were good boys and girls.

It’s just like with those two brothers

in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

You all know the story.

One son stayed home,

worked hard,

did his duty,

and said, “Look! For so many years I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours”.

And the second son

rebelled against the Father,

squandered his inheritance,

shamed the family name,

and said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'

And at the end of the story

both sons wore glorious robes,

both had rings on their fingers

and a place of absolute security in their Father’s house.

But only one knew the love of the Father.

The story of creation

is the story of God designing a world

in which we could discover the true heart of our Creator

by having the freedom to use our free will to rebel and sin against Him

and then discover what He is really like

by watching Him die in our place

for our sins.

And that right there is the story of the human race.

But there was a problem with this plan

that God needed to deal with,

and it has to do with the self-destructive nature of sin.

You see, everything that God has ever told us,

every commandment He’s ever given us,

ever instruction about life He has ever communicated to us

has been absolute truth.

By that I mean that it is absolutely consistent

with the way He designed us.

He was never ever even remotely trying to cheat us,

or rob us,

or deprive us of any good thing.

He was simply telling us the way things are.

When the guy who wrote the car manual tells us

that we must put antifreeze in the radiator,

and oil in the engine,

and transmission fluid in the transmission,

and gas in the gas tank,

he was not trying to cheat us,

or deprive us of some hidden driving thrill.

He was telling us the way the thing was designed to operate.

But what that means

is that the only way in which

we human beings could ever rebel against God

is for us to do so by choosing to enter into behaviors

that are, by their very nature, self-destructive.

All sin is, by its very nature,

self-destructive behavior.

Which brings us to the problem God faced,

and the solution He provided for it.

Because sin is so self-destructive,

unless God put some protective tools in place within human society,

the human race would have utterly destroyed itself

long before God could bring about His redemptive plan of salvation through Christ.

And so,

in order to restrict the destructive power of sin in the world,

He put in place three major protective measures within human society.

First, on a personal, individual level,

He provides each of us with a moral conscience

that slows our self-destructive tendencies by providing us

with a built-in inner resistance against sin.

It doesn’t stop us, of course,

but it slows us down considerably.

Then, on the broader scale,

in society as a whole,

there are two additional protective measures

used by God to preserve the human race while He continues to work out His redemptive plan through Christ.

One of them is His isolation of the human race into hundreds of separate people groups

through His establishment of hundreds of different languages.

Sin really is so highly contagious.

And through His establishment of language barriers between people groups

He quarantines sin into little pockets.

And even when one particular group

becomes immersed in some type of immoral conduct,

it doesn’t spread quickly or easily

to those groups around it.

And the second cultural preservation tool,

and the one that brings us at last

back to Paul’s comments in Romans 13

is God’s establishment and use of human governmental structures.

And here is the truly remarkable thing -

all human governments are corrupt

because all human governments are filled with people who are themselves corrupt,

and immoral,

and prone to use their positions of power for their own gain.

In other words, the presence of obvious corruption within all governmental structures

is a “given” of Paul’s comments here in Romans.

The very governmental structure

under which Paul himself was living

at the time he wrote these words,

the Roman government,

was, at times, openly hostile to Christianity,

and would become the tool

used by God to bring about Paul’s own death.

And yet it is within the context

of this assumed corruption

that Paul says,

Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities.

But why would God say this to us as Christians?

Here we are, with our spirits already living in submission to God Himself,

with our spirits indwelt by the Spirit of God Himself

who is in the process of living His life out through us on a daily basis.

So why in the world

do we need human governments to keep us where we need to be?

Because, even though our spirits are now holy and pure,

our flesh is still corrupt to the core,

having been trained under the leadership of an inner spirit

that placed itself at the center of the world,

and resisted submission to any one or anything at all costs.

And because our flesh continues to be

so hostile to the life of Christ within us,

it continues to need the custodial supervision of human government.

And even now, as Christians,

human governmental structures

serve God’s purposes in our lives.

Let me just give it to us in a single statement

so we understand what’s going on.

Human governmental structures

are used by God to preserve the human race

until His offer of salvation through Christ has been completely fulfilled.

Human governments will never change the world.

They will never alter one tiny piece of moral corruption within one person in the world.

There never has

and never will be any law

that can ever be enacted

that will have the ability to change the human heart.

Human government cannot at any level ever bring salvation to the world.

What it can do

is to preserve the world long enough

so that we can find true salvation and transformation through Jesus Christ.

When we look at human governments

what we see is all that’s wrong with them,

all the corruption,

and the waste,

and the stupidity,

and the abuse of power.

But when God talks to us about our relationship to human governments

He does not talk to us about what’s wrong with them,

but rather He talks to us

about the good

that even the most corrupt Government is able to accomplish in us.

He talks to us about the real measure of moral stability

he is able to bring into our world

through that corrupt government.

Did you notice that question Paul asks in verse 13:3,

that question that forces us to take our eyes off of what’s wrong with human governments

long enough to be able to see

what God is able to accomplish through them?

He says, For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same...

Who is it in society who fears the government?

Is it the guy who poaches the moose

or the guy who doesn’t?

Is it the guy who goes 60 in the 25 zone,

or the guy who goes 25?

Is it the guy who’s spreading the child porn over the internet,

or the guy who isn’t?

We can only begin to understand

God’s purpose for the governments He establishes

when we look not at the corruption in the government,

but at the ability of that government

to maintain some measure of moral stability within that society.

That doesn’t mean we should not take every opportunity we have

to minimize the corruption

in the governments that affect our lives.

But in the end, as Christians,

we do not submit to the government

because it meets our morality standard,

we submit to it because it is God’s tool in our lives.

And there is something else

that God is able to accomplish in our lives through human governments as well.

Human governments

provide us with excellent training in developing life attitudes of submissive obedience.

Whenever we get into battles with our governments,

nearly always the issue that drives us forward

is the desire to prove that WE are right

and the government is wrong.

But I will share something with you now

that may help you better appreciate

God’s perspective on most of those battles.

You see, in God’s design for the Christian,

developing a heart of submissive trust

is of more value to His work in us

than proving that we are right.

That’s why God makes the remarkable promise to us

that we find in this passage.

Speaking to the Christian,

He promises that human government ...is a minister of God to you for good.

If I were to rephrase that I would say

that God promises that He will reveal and accomplish His will in our lives

through the human authorities He has placed us under

as we submit ourselves to them.

Paul then concludes this passage

with a rather painful life-oriented illustration.

ROM 13:6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.

ROM 13:7 Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.

OK, now let me conclude this with just a few more statements to keep it in perspective.

First, this is not the only passage

or the only principle in Scripture.

As such, it must be understood

within the context of other principles as well.

There are times when some Christians

will have to disobey human authorities

in order to remain faithful to God.

But such times are always exceptions.

Our general stance as Christians

in any human society

should be one of submission,

and obedience,

and cooperation.

At those times when we choose to defy the authority over us,

we must do so with the conviction

that it would be impossible for us to live in moral obedience to God

and still submit to the authority.

In other words,

if there is any way for us to remain faithful to God

and stay in submission to the authority

we have no grounds for disobedience.

And then, finally,

I just want to reemphasize that submission is not a passive term.

By that I mean that Christians

have always served a crucial role

as a sort of moral conscience for society.

Our lives and our actions

should actively seek to uphold God’s moral standard for the world,

and part of that process

is our doing all that we can

within the government structures He has placed us under

to hold our rulers accountable

to God’s morality.