Sermon January 21, 2007 Romans 13:1-7 (Part 1 of 3)

This is not a small, relatively unimportant section of Scripture. It is incredibly important for us today: so important, in fact, that I think we should devote at least a couple Sundays to looking deeper into what Paul is suggesting here. So today, I’d like to try to lay the groundwork both historically and Biblically to put this section of Scripture into context. Because one of the biggest things that you and I can remind ourselves as we read the Bible is one word: context. (Context context context)

When we talk about the relationship of a follower of Jesus to the state, we are talking about one of the great themes—the great issues of the world—that should lift us out of a message that you and I face more and more each day that our lives don’t matter in the great scheme of things. We’re told if we don’t own this, aren’t in power of that, aren’t climbing this social ladder, aren’t making this or that decision where multiple lives hang in the balance, aren’t a Senator or a CEO or a President, that our life and our perspectives are meaningless. If you don’t believe that, stop for a second and look at how our society devalues the role of a mother that decides to stay home to nurture her kids and create a home environment where Christ is exalted. I’m not opposed at all to women or men to provide for their families; I’m just asking you to consider what our society would think of such a woman. (How do they think?) That is a lie. Repeat that with me. That is a lie.

And the reason I mention this is because Romans 13:1-7 is only a part (an important part), but only a part of the larger context in this letter here from Romans 12 through Romans 13, and both BEFORE and AFTER this section, we are reminded of the foundational expectation God carries for us as his people that has something to say about the Scripture today, because, remember, this letter was NOT written to individuals, but to a CHURCH. Paul has something to say about how the church will act FIRST BEFORE and AFTER this passage: “Bless those who persecute you. Bless and DO NOT curse. DO NOT repay anyone evil for evil. DO NOT take revenge, but leave for God’s wrath.” And why do we leave for God’s wrath? Remember us talking about this a couple weeks ago? (We leave room for God’s wrath because God is righteous and just and makes perfect decisions; and we recognize that we are often terribly biased and flawed. God brought us into this world, and God is meant to decide when and where we leave this world. In the meantime, we love sacrificially). Love must be sincere.

After this passage, we are reminded forcefully again in verses 9 and 10, “whatever other commandment there may be, they are summed up in this one rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And what follows that? (Love does no harm to its neighbor) So that’s the first thing for us to remember in interpreting this Scripture: chapters 12 and 13 in their entirety form one literary unit. So, 13:1-7 cannot be understood alone, even though it is so often ripped out of its context and twisted into something very different than Paul intended it. Remember, context context context.

Historically speaking, in this section of Scripture is the theme of God's establishment of and authority over every government in the world that has ever existed. And, if we recognize God’s freedom in establishing every government in the world, we also recognize God's sovereign disestablishment of every government in the world that has ever existed. If there’s one thing we can count on, we can count on the reality that worldly governments rise and fall. There will always be a top dog in the world, and in due time, that top dog will lose their status, and another will rise in its place. There has NEVER been a vacuum of power in the world. Someone has ALWAYS been the most powerful. Jesus stated quite clearly that “There will be wars and rumors of wars until the coming of the Son of Man.” And there were wars and rumors of wars before he came in the fullness of time. This is the nature of fallen, broken humanity. But Jesus didn’t just leave it at that. If he had, maybe his disciples could’ve been duped into thinking their role was just to knuckle under to whatever the empire asked of them. But he didn’t.

Because one day, when James and John’s mom knelt before him and asked for her sons to sit at Jesus’ right and left in the coming of the kingdom, revealing James and John’s desire for power and importance and prestige, making the rest of the disciples very angry, Jesus ripped the rug out from underneath all of them, saying, “In the world the recognized rulers lord it over their subjects and their great men make them feel the weight of authority. That is not the way with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant…For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to surrender his life as a ransom for many.” So before we even dip our toe in the water to look at Romans 13 today, it is important for us to be reminded of our foundation. We must recognize the intense temptations of hatred, money, power, and influence; and how, if we allow them to take control of our lives, can twist our lives and our priorities and our actions. Historical context. Context context context.

Next, the royal context, the authority context. The issue for Christians is supremely: Jesus Christ. When he rose from the dead he said in Matthew 28:18, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” That includes being over and above every government in the world. The confession “Jesus is Lord!” was a political statement. His lordship is over Caesar's lordship. This is why Jesus was killed. (In our context, his lordship is over President Bush’s lordship, or over Congress’ lordship) The crowds intimidated Pilate with the words, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). “These followers of Jesus, they have another king! They are subversive, treasonous, they’re dangerous to your empire.” And when Jesus was raised he became known as “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Revelation 19:16; 17:14) that is, King over all earthly kings. So when Paul says, “There is no authority except from God,” he means to speak of the secondary authority of human rulers to the greater authority of Jesus. That’s the authority context. Context context context.

So the reality that God is at work in this broken world and our humble confession that Jesus is our King raise a central question for us as followers of Jesus as we look at this passage: What is my relationship to the government as a Christian, whether I’m American or British or Afghani or Chinese or whatever? Another question we might ask is this: Why does Paul deal with the governing authorities here of all places?

In Romans 12:2 Paul had said, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world.” This simple statement was consistent with the life of Jesus to put the church on a direct collision course with the society they lived in. Elsewhere in his letters he talks about “the present evil age,” (Galatians 1:4), assumes that “the external form of this age is passing into nothing, (1 Corinthians 7:31) and states that “the rulers of this age, who are being destroyed,” did not understand God’s wisdom “for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:6-8), and the last Scripture quotation here is a clear reference to the Roman Empire that Paul lived under. We know that we are here in this world and must adapt in some measure to the culture where we live. But we are citizens of heaven first and must make the counter-cultural life of Christ known in this world.

Another reason the question of the Christian relationship to the governing authorities needs to be answered is because we read in Romans 8:35-38 that the faithful subjects of King Jesus can expect to be faced with trouble, hardship, persecution, nakedness, danger, and the “sword”—he is speaking of the sword of Romans 13:4, the sword of the state. And when we read this, we wonder, How do we relate to rulers who slaughter Christians? When Paul says again in verse 1 that “there is no authority except from God,” does it include evil rulers? When it says in verse 1 that we should submit to civil authority, does it mean no matter what? When it says in verse 3 that the civil authorities are “not a terror to good conduct, but to bad,” is that always true, or do some governments terrorize good conduct? These are some questions we’ll seek to answer next Sunday, but besides Paul’s other statements about governing authority in Romans 13, there are two specific situations he probably means to address. The first is seen in verses 6 and 7. Everything is general until you get here: submit, don't resist, do what is good, avoid what is bad. That is what we have until we get to verse 6. Then Paul gets specific:

6This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

So, out of all the specific behaviors Paul might have used to illustrate submission, he uses paying taxes. Why in the world does he talk about that? I asked that same question myself over and over here, until I found a little chunk of info in looking into the matter that cleared up the muddy waters a bit here (so to speak): Historical context again. (Context context context)

You see, the Romans had gained a reputation of aggressively taxing their subjects: it costs a lot of cash money to run an empire, you know? But the Jews had a special, negotiated arrangement when they paid a temple tax in Jerusalem, and this arrangement came across to many Gentiles to be a form of tax evasion, and this perception resulted in terrible distrust of the Jews. Now you think of how the IRS would treat YOU if they deeply suspected you were evading taxes, eh?

So, in this context, Paul’s reminder to be subject to the authorities, above reproach in the matter of paying taxes and revenues, made sense for both the way the Jewish Christians were viewed as far as their integrity in the community as well as their general safety in Rome. The weaker, more poverty-stricken members of the community were particularly vulnerable to the hostility of the surrounding Gentiles.

We get more clues into Paul’s reason for mentioning taxes if we’re paying REAL CLOSE attention to the transition from verse 7 to verse 8, we find verse 7 says, “Give everyone what you owe him,” right? “If you owe taxes, pay taxes, if revenue, then revenue,” and the very first phrase of verse 8 is what? (Let no debt remain outstanding, EXCEPT the continuing debt to love one another.” So in 13:8, Paul relates “not owing any debts” (paying taxes and revenue as necessary) to “owing the debt of love” to the neighbor and in doing this, fulfilling the law. He lists four commandments from the Old Testament, no adultery, no killing, no stealing, and no coveting- that are CRITICAL for life in community to be stable. And it is striking that in the context of Leviticus 19, from which Paul draws the command to love your neighbor, the first half of the verse immediately before it speaks of avoiding something. (Have someone read with NKJV)

“You shall not take vengeance…but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I AM the LORD.”

Take a wild guess where we’ve heard the word vengeance here recently (Romans 12:19)

This is a CLEAR reminder to us that the way of the followers of Jesus, who are specifically and directly told NOT to take vengeance- is being contrasted with the way of empires and states which do execute vengeance..

Another situation for us to be aware of today was the extremely dangerous situation that Jewish communities faced at this point in the Roman Empire. In Acts 18:2, we read “And [Paul] found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.” That expulsion of Jews would have included Jewish Christians. And it may be that the expulsion was owing to agitating in revolution or raising a ruckus in the city. Romans was written about A. D. 55 and this expulsion had happened about five years earlier. So Paul, in conversation with Priscilla and Aquila would be very sensitive to the issue of church-state relations.

With all of these questions, there is one conclusion we CAN come to in looking at the context of this Scripture, one interpretation that we can REJECT, and that is this: That, using Romans 13:1-7, Christians should give a blank check to the states they are citizens of in decisions made and what they ask of them. This interpretation should be absolutely insane to consider on our parts for several reasons.

First, Paul himself was a prisoner when he finally arrived in Rome, the city where he eventually was tried and executed by the Emperor Nero specifically because he would not shut up about Jesus, and this Christian movement by this time had gained significant momentum and was the gaining the hearts of the people, so Nero started killing them off right and left in his jealousy.

Second, if the earlier parts of the letter to Romans say ANYTHING to us, the gospel is REVOLUTIONARY in its very character. It takes the way humans handle relationships, the way in which you and I live our lives, the way that we look at others, care about others, and look out for others. So revolutionary, in fact, that a few years after this letter, Christians were considered so odd, so dangerous in their commitments that they were arrested and tossed into arenas to be torn limb from limb by lions and tigers. The message of the gospel is meant to be so powerful that it either drives others to love us and want what he have or hate us and want us dead for the ridiculous commitment to love we carry. Paul wasn’t saying here that the gospel isn’t revolutionary, he was saying that Christians shouldn’t get killed for the wrong reasons. Pay your taxes, pay your revenue! Let everyone around you know that you live with integrity. But as a part of that, let everyone know that Jesus is Lord, and if George Bush or Bill Clinton, or from 2008 on, if John McCain or Sam Brownback or Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama asks of us something that our commitment to Jesus forbids, we politely tell them that we will not be participating in what they’re asking of us. Some people may call us unpatriotic for this action, but our living into the reality that Jesus is Lord calls us to bear that cost.

With everything we’ve talked about today, it should be terribly ironic to us that we even CONSIDER the possibility that this Scripture passage is telling us that we should obey the state no matter what: because Jesus didn’t. Paul didn’t. Peter didn’t. The early church didn’t. And millions of Christians throughout the years leading up to now, including Jim Elliot, Michael Sattler, Alexander Mack, Christopher Sauer, and others haven’t. And they’ve been willing to pay the price for that, whether the price was being ridiculed or hated by coworkers or fellow citizens or, ultimately, death. This is part of the cost of discipleship.

Sing "Humble Thyself in the Sight of the Lord"