Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. (Romans 13:1-7)1
Reason #8
The Apostle Paul Charges Christians to Submit to the Government He Depicts From a Holy Spirit-Convicted Conscience
Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. (Romans 13:5)
What makes a government secular is its rejection of Yahweh2 as its sovereign and thus His law as supreme. This is the government some people declare Christians are to submit to from a Holy Spirit-convicted conscience.
[G]rieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4:30)
Is the Holy Spirit grieved when Christians fail to submit to government established upon rejection of Christ as King? That’s what we are compelled to believe if Romans 13 is about secular government.
The Reason
The reason the Apostle Paul appeals to Christians’ conscience is because submitting to God-ordained authorities—committed servants of God who implement and enforce His laws—is submitting to God Himself. Conscience-motivated submission is the principal catalyst for all subordinates and their God-ordained authority: wives to their husbands, children to their parents, servants to their masters, and kingdom citizens to their civil magistrates.
If conscience-motivated submission is required to secular government, then it’s also required for all other usurpers who might replace one’s husband, parents, or master.
God-ordained civil authorities stand in the place of God when adjudicating on His behalf:
[King Jehoshaphat] set judges in the land throughout all the fenced cities of Judah, city by city, and said to the judges, Take heed what ye do: for ye judge not for man, but for Yahweh, who is with you in the judgment…. And he charged them, saying, Thus shall ye do in the fear of Yahweh, faithfully, and with a perfect heart. (2 Chronicles 19:5-9)
For the criminally-disposed person, submission to the government depicted by Paul is enforced by judges who execute God’s civil sanctions. For the citizen who lives to do his King’s bidding, submission is engendered by love for His King from a Holy Spirit-quickened conscience.
Nowhere does Paul appeal to the Christian conscience for the sake of anything secular, as alleged by those who maintain Romans 13 is about secular government. Instead, conscience-engendered submission is always directed at God-ordained authorities, whether they be civil leaders, parents, husbands, or spiritual leaders:
Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God…. Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you. (Hebrews 13:7, 17)
Grieving the Holy Spirit
Promoting that which is evil grieves the Spirit:
Quench not the Spirit…. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21)
Those who have not seared their consciences are equipped by the Holy Spirit to discern good and evil, including biblical authorities and secular powers. To fail to discriminate between these two polar opposite types of civil leadership is tantamount to a Christian endorsement of government corruption:
Therefore the law is slacked, and [righteous] judgment doth never go forth: for the wicked doth compass about [surround, NASB] the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceedeth. (Habakkuk 1:4)
To use Romans 13 to foster secular government is a classic case of Isaiah 5:20, calling evil good and good evil. Rather than pleasing the Holy Spirit by engendering obedience to righteous government, the Holy Spirit is instead certainly grieved when secular government is promoted.
No vacuums
There are no vacuums when it comes to ethics and law. Consequently, government is never neutral. It either serves God or is opposed to Him. It’s either righteous or unrighteous, as determined by whether its laws are based upon Yahweh’s unchanging morality.3
Secular governments are not all equally wicked. Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that regardless how good a secular government may otherwise appear, it remains evil, if only because it rejects Yahweh as its sovereign.
Case in point: the 18th-century Constitutional Republic. The United States government today cannot hold a candle to the government first framed in 1787. Someone may, therefore, contend Christians would have done well to submit to the government originally framed by the Constitutional Republic’s founders. However, it was indiscriminate Christian submission to this very government that’s responsible for what America is enduring today, including government-financed in utero infanticide,4 government-legalized sodomite “marriages,” government-approved transgender bathrooms, and government-sanctioned polytheism.
There’s hardly an Article or Amendment in the Constitution that’s not antithetical, if not seditious, to Yahweh’s sovereignty and morality.5 These sins of commission aside, every single problem America faces as a nation today can be traced back to the framers’ sins of omission—that is, the failure to expressly establish government on Yahweh’s moral law as its standard for society. For example, Exodus 21:22-256 would have largely eliminated in utero infanticide, Leviticus 20:137 would have prevented today’s homosexual agenda, Deuteronomy 22:58 would have precluded today’s transgender bathrooms, and Exodus 34:13-159 would have averted the Muslim invasion.10
America today is reaping the whirlwind resulting from the wind sown by the 18th-century founding fathers:
[B]ecause they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law … they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind…. (Hosea 8:1, 7)
Had the 18th-century Christians rejected the secular Republican form of government created from Enlightenment traditions (no matter how good or innocuous it appeared at the time), we wouldn’t today be reaping their whirlwind in tens of thousands of different ways. This whirlwind will only intensify until we repent of our complicity in our American forbears’ sins against Yahweh.
Reynolds v. the United States
It didn’t take long for this allegedly neutral government to formally become overtly anti-Christian in what is arguably the most consequential case ever adjudicated by the Supreme Court. A mere one hundred years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Reynolds v. the United States (1879) addressed the Mormon Church’s claim that polygamy was a right afforded them under Amendment 1. Because most Americans find polygamy repugnant, the magnitude of Supreme Court Justice Morrison Waite’s decision is lost on them:
Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice?… So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land.11
Contrary to Matthew 7:21-2712 and James 1:22-25,13 the Supreme Court ruled that a man’s actions can be severed and isolated from his faith and thereby judged illegal according to the Constitution and its supplemental edicts. This precedent paved the way for any Christian14 action based upon a Biblical conviction—such as preaching against sodomy or refusing to bake a wedding cake for homosexual “weddings”—to be arbitrarily outlawed in the same fashion. Had the framers established Yahweh’s unchanging law and its predetermined immutable morality as the supreme law of the land, polygamy and human sacrifice (and all other issues) would have fallen under its jurisdiction and thereby been determined as either lawful or unlawful.
It only took a hundred years for this ostensibly innocuous government to officially strip Christians of their dominion responsibility15 and send them cowering to their church buildings, transforming what was Christendom in the 1600s into mere four-walled Christianity today.
Submitting to evil does not equate with Holy Spirit conviction
To argue for a secular government in Romans 13 is to argue we are obligated to submit to that which is evil from a Holy Spirit-convicted conscience. It is unconscionable to think Paul would advance such theology.
Paul does appeal to our Christian conscience to submit to government. But the government he depicts is a government under the supervision and direction of God-ordained authorities, who attend continually upon doing good to the righteous and either bringing the unrighteous to judgment or deterring them from their wicked predispositions.
Stay tuned for Part 10.
Related posts:
Christian Duty Under Corrupt Government: A Revolutionary Commentary on Roams 13:1-7
Law and Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant
A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government
1. Christian Duty Under Corrupt Government: A Revolutionary Commentary on Roams 13:1-7
2.YHWH, the English transliteration of the Tetragrammaton, is most often pronounced Yahweh. It is the principal Hebrew name of the God of the Bible and was inspired to appear nearly 7,000 times in the Old Testament. It was unlawfully deleted by the English translators. In obedience to the Third Commandment and the many Scriptures that charge us to proclaim, swear by, praise, extol, call upon, bless, glorify, and hold fast to His name, we have chosen to memorialize His name here in this document and in our lives. For a more thorough explanation concerning important reasons for using the sacred name of God, see “The Third Commandment.”
3. A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government
See also series of ten online books on each of the Ten Commandments and their respective statutes, and judgments, beginning with Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4. The battle against this atrocity begins with identifying it correctly. By calling it “abortion,” we’ve acquiesced to the opposition’s terminology. Look up “abortion” and “miscarriage” in any dictionary. A miscarriage is an abortion. What doctors (and parents) do to infants in the womb is murder. Had Roe v. Wade been waged over infanticide rather than abortion, it would have never made it to the court room. In fact, by employing the word “abortion,” Roe v. Wade was won before it ever got to court.
The Greek word brephos employed in the New Testament for infants already born is the same word used for infants in the womb (Luke 2:12 and Luke 1:41), without specifying the precise moment they became a brephos. Therefore, our only option is to accept they became such at conception. Thus, intentionally killing a brephos at any point is “brephocide” or, more properly, infanticide.
5. Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective
6. “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot….” (Exodus 21:22-25)
7. “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:13)
8. “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto Yahweh thy God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)
9. “[Y]e shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves. For thou shall worship no other god: for Yahweh, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou … go a whoring after their gods….” (Exodus 34:13-15)
10. I use the Muslims as only an example. The same pertains to any non-Christian religion and its adherents, including Judaism, Hinduism, etc.
11. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879)
12. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven…. [D]epart from me ye who do iniquity [lawlessness, NASB]. Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:21-27)
13. “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves…. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.” (James 1:22-25)
14. This is not to say The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka the Mormon church) is Christian. It is not Christian, but rather a cult masquerading as Christian.
15. “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-6)
How can we change from what has been done and start operating the system of Our Father with His precepts, statutes, and ordinances? In Revelations 11:15 “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.” Jesus even states “And I appoint unto you a Kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me” Luke 22:29. How can we do and fund the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ on Earth during our time? It cannot happen without action. Like-minded people are present but where are the doers, and exactly what are they doing and how can we unite across the nation. I am also under the interpretation that Romans 13 is pertaining to the believers and doers of Christ’s Government. I am looking for ideas and tasks that can be implemented now.
Johnny, thanks for joining the discussion.
It’s needs to be done on the local level. If you have like-minded Kingdom believers in your area, you’re one up on a lot of people. Somehow you’ll need to start meeting together and get them motivated toward that end.
When ready, I wrote “A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government” with such ecclesias in mind. In case you haven’t yet seen it, it can be found at http://www.bibleversusconstitution.org/biblicalConstitution.html.
Thank you, I will get on to reading it soon. I am striving to understand what exactly took place in Acts (Acts 2:42-47). Are we suppose to bring our finances together in one accord? The entities of the world have banks, quick loans, retirement plans, insurances, employment entities, schools, and hospitals. Where is the church’s plan to train each man to fulfill our Father’s expectation for a good man to leave an inheritance for his children’s children (Proverbs 13:22). I would like to be a part of creating grocery stores that are organic, pasture raised and sustainable harvested-Our first order was to have dominion over the animals and the land (Genesis 1:26-28). We need banks-we are called to be lenders not borrowers (Deuteronomy 28:12-13). I believe the tithes belong to the people that each one is to do with their tithe as they please (Deuteronomy 14:26). The tithes belong in each man’s storehouse and out of the storehouse they give a tenth to the Levite and out of that tenth the Levite gives a tenth to the priest (Numbers 18:26). It is through funding and being good stewards of our finances that the church will be able to create entities and business to be a light unto the world. Without uniting together with our money the church continues to be a slave to the world. Working for the world 40+ hours a week, sending their children to the world’s schools, and receiving medical care that is not of the herbs (of which God said herbs are for our healing Revelation 22:2; Psalms 104:14-15). What are your thoughts on people bringing their money together and investing? What have you created with others to do the Kingdom? Do you get an account together, set aside a %, or how once you have the people?
Good question. Hadn’t thought about it previously. Certainly something to consider.