A Blessing Among Our Neighbors

Our women’s Bible study group is about to dive into Daniel.  Daniel is in the service of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian emperor whose armies invaded Judah and conquered and demolished Jerusalem, including the Temple.  Years later, in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar has a curious dream, and Daniel is the only one who can interpret it.  Before he gives the interpretation, Daniel says: “My lord, if only the dream applied to your enemies and its meaning to your adversaries!” (Dan 4:19).  I don’t think Daniel is just complying with court etiquette, here.  To my ears, it sounds as if Daniel has real concern for the man responsible for the destruction of Daniel’s homeland and people.  Strange, even shocking.  How to explain it?

Through this large section of Romans, Paul maps out what a blessed life of blessing looks like for the Christian, in how we live with one another and as part of the society around us—broken, corrupt and debauched, but maybe not beyond redemption, maybe not entirely deaf to Christ’s call.  It’s bad, but with God it will become better.  “The authorities that exist have been established by God” (13:1), the apostle tells us.  Well, God help us!  “[W]hoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves” (13:2).  Well, isn’t that convenient for those who happen to be in authority?

Even if Paul’s words were not uppermost in their minds, those writing the Declaration of Independence still felt it necessary to address that underlying belief: to rebel is to invite the judgment of God.  In response, the rationale Jefferson and his collaborators arrived at was something like, but if the God-instituted authority is not fulfilling its God-appointed purpose, if it is, in point of fact, doing the opposite of its God-appointed purpose, then there are rational, just (even holy!) grounds for replacing that wicked authority with an authority better in line with God’s purpose for human society and for humanity.  Rebels rebelling against rebels rebelling.

Why is there society?  Do we need society?  Could we have a society without authority?  In a fallen, broken, twisted world, some authorities will be better than others, yet the basic laws seem to apply everywhere—murder forbidden, theft punishable, adultery discouraged, truthfulness expected, showing one another a minimum of respect.  I know of no nation where the law is murder one another, steal as much as you can as often as you can from whomever you can.  I know of no country where the law requires adultery, where infidelity is held up as exemplary morality.  Government is a rough and ready way God uses for “keeping sin in check even in unbelievers.”[1]

No earthly power is permanent.  San Marino, a microstate about four hours north of Rome, has had its constitution since 1600.  Japan has had an emperor for some 2,600 years.  How Japan is governed now is nothing like it was 2,600 years ago.  Much as it saddens me to think of it, if humanity is around long enough, the day will also come when there will no longer be a United States as we know and think of it.  Paul is telling us whatever power happens to be in power, wherever, is not in power contrary to God’s purposes.  How some authorities could be in power in line with God’s purposes is way over my head!  And yet I trust, indeed I must trust (this is called faith) that God is at work everywhere, including those places where those in authority are less than good and definitely no supporters of Christianity.

Christianity isn’t the driving ethic everywhere in the world, not even where it is the predominant religion.  God knows there’s a lot of less than good out there, in power: it doesn’t matter what color tie or pant suit the political big shots happen to wear for the cameras.  Those in authority are no better than us; they are no worse.  John McCain lamented how Washington changed people—including him, I’m supposing.  Power corrupts, we’re told.  Scripture tells us we’re already corrupted long before opportunities for power come along.  The journalist and science fiction writer Frank Herbert, possibly reflecting on how the stage was set for World War Two, contended that pathological types tended to seek power, and tended to obtain it.  I think he might have been on to something—no matter the party commanding your devotion.  Some want to change the world and seem to know exactly how it ought to look, if the rest of us would just wake up and march in line with their orders.  I’d be content just to prevent this world from getting any worse.

God is over all—whatever is happening, God is allowing to happen.  I don’t think that can be argued.  God is also intervening, though not always in ways that are immediately obvious.  God allows many things to happen, bad and good, as we can testify.  That does not mean God is fine with the bad or blesses it.  The argument that, because bad things happen, God can’t exist is not very compelling.  Sin happens; it’s no anomaly!  God isn’t fine with sin or its happening; He is doing something about it.  That’s what Scripture is telling us, cover to cover.  God loves justice and charity: we know that if we know the Bible.  He permits injustice and abuse.  Why is there injustice?  Why abuse?  Well, just to scratch the surface, because we are all broken and God chooses not to remove from us our ability to choose, badly broken though it be.  God chooses to allow us to retain freedom, banged up and bent as it is.  In our deformed freedom, though, we do hurt one another, and worse.  If only we wouldn’t!  Is there no way?  God is not looking for mindless automatons.  He is looking for love.  The really great stories tell pretty much the same story: love overcoming unimaginable, agonizing obstacles.  One of the other great stories: reforming the deformed.  It’s kind of the same story.

Anarchy tries, in its saner moments, to present itself as some deeply principled, philosophical movement for individual freedom and personal liberty.  It ends up expressing itself in violence and destruction, which only points out once more the urgent necessity in human society for there to be laws to restrain destructive behaviors, and an organized way of enforcing the laws and rendering justice—government, in other words.  There are bad governments out there to be sure, and many places in the world I would not care to live.  North Korea comes to mind.  There are also places where, seemingly, there is no government worth mentioning: Somalia, for example.  I’d rather not have to build a life for myself there, either.  I suppose we all have the strong suspicion that power too often favors those willing to pay it off, and able to.  Businesspeople travel to some parts of the world with payoff cash for buying favors.  They must if they want to do business there.  Our founders aimed to design a government that could work in full, candid awareness of human proclivity to corruption, bribery, favoritism, and abuse of power.  I fear we’ve forgotten that part.  But we’re still convinced, for good reasons, that it’s all just cronyism: for getting anything, getting anything done, what you know is not nearly so valuable as who you know, or who you bribe.  Bribery isn’t always strictly a matter of cold, hard cash.

At first glance, Paul seems to be telling us to obey whatever government, without question or objection, because every government has been sanctioned—maybe even blessed—by God.  I’m not sure that’s exactly what Paul is saying, but we might be excused if that’s the sense we get from his words.  Long before, through Jeremiah, God told the exiles in Babylon: “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer 29:7).  Some of the exiles wrote back to Jerusalem demanding that the people there silence Jeremiah, like permanently.  I want, here, to point to how Paul concludes this brief passage: “Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor” (13:7).  Here is what I take to be the key idea.  Not long before, Paul had urged the faithful not to owe anyone, except the ongoing debt of love: to be there for one another, have concern for one another.  The debt of love cannot be repaid, only acknowledged; it is mutual—in human society, we all owe one another to varying degrees; everyone owes God.  Live in mindfulness of your indebtedness to others.

Now, put a price tag on that.  We pay taxes.  We may not like it.  We may be convinced, with the full-on Libertarians, that all taxation is theft.  We make our voices heard—the county actually solicits our protests.  There are those in authority to whom we may speak, speak out, speak up.  They must listen to us, even if they do not agree.  What do we get, in return for the taxes we pay, the taxes extracted out of us?  Not much?  Where does the money go?  That’s a great question, an important question; I mean, in 2024, the federal government spent $6.9 trillion—try to wrap your head around that—$4.9 trillion of which was funded by revenue[2]—which also ought to make us think.  Fifty-eight percent of that $6.9 trillion went to fund healthcare programs, social security, and defense, in that order.  We already know healthcare is costly!  As for the remaining $2.3 trillion of federal spending, the largest share goes to debt service.  Sounds about right.

Closer to home, besides roads and bridges, the county provides public safety and courts, a jail, child protective services, a library system, the fairgrounds, parks, emergency management, and healthcare for the indigent.  We pay for our elected government to provide these services.  We have a reasonable expectation that these services will be of high quality.  You can usually tell when you drive across the county line.

Do we need government in order to have a prosperous life?  Ask that another way: can we prosper without any government.  Anarchists scream YES.  I’m not so sure.  I mean, I’d like to say yes, but my gut tells me no.  Shared values and a common history and language don’t seem to be enough.  Even the one hundred settlers aboard the Mayflower found it wise to come to express agreement about how they would be governed.  Paul prefers law and order to lawlessness and chaos.  This does not mean he loved the Roman Empire or the emperor.  To his way of thinking, it was better than the alternatives: barbarian hordes of one tribe or another that would raid, pillage, rape, burn, and kill, taking what they wanted as they wanted.  And who would stop them?  There were elements within Judaism that, from time to time, would fire up the nation to rebel against Rome; each time, Rome decimated them and made a ruin of the country.  In 70 AD, they thought they had finished the job when they left what was left of Jerusalem a smoldering pile of rubble.  They’d be back about sixty years later.

If the government provides something of value, then don’t fail to be grateful for what is provided.  Paul does not encourage a rebellious attitude.  Nowhere in Scripture is rebellion approved.  In the ancient world, as today, rebellion brings collapse; Daniel also understood; Jeremiah’s words remind us.  I don’t know whether the current government in Syria, such as it is, is better than Assad or not, but I do know that over half a million people, at least thirty thousand of them children, were killed in the process of transitioning from one government to the other, that over half of the country’s population was displaced—homes, schools, and jobs abandoned—in fear and haste.  Those are years of learning, producing, harvesting, healing, and family celebrations that can never be regained.  Syria before the conflict had poverty, but not the sort we might associate with rock bottom third world countries—the rebellion, the liberation—whatever—changed that, for the worse.

All this is not to say that Assad should still be in power.  Paul understood, as we understand, that high-falutin’ rhetoric about rebellion may sound awesome and sell fast in some quarters, but the actual cost as you wander about the ruins and rubble, the stench of the corpses drifting with the smoke on the breeze, will make even the strongest retch.  Some governments should be changed, certainly.  Is there no peaceful way to make that happen?

Too often, it seems, not.  People who enjoy the benefits of power tend to be reluctant to release and return that power.  And to whom would it be released?  The people?  Another dictator who well understands the fine points of brutality?  An outraged, lawless mob?  A foreign-backed lackey?

So, those are big, difficult questions we won’t be solving today.  I’m not sure that Paul is teaching us to obey the government, whatever government, without question.  I do believe that Paul is suggesting the primary concern of a disciple is not whatever government but one’s own discipleship under whatever conditions in a fallen, broken world.  To be in the world but not of the world still requires a proper sense of citizenship, along with the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship.  Paul would definitely have learned this, both from the Old Testament and his own experience as a Roman citizen who was also a Jew who became Christian.

We assume, maybe in part because we are Christian, raised as Christians in a part of the world with a rather long history of Christianity, that human beings in society naturally owe one another a baseline of respect and politeness.  Go to some parts of India, for example, or Sri Lanka, Nepal, Japan, or South Korea, and you may just find that way of thinking is not shared.  One key argument of the abolitionists was that slaves were also human beings, our fellow human beings, though there were those on the other side of the issue who maintained that Africans—especially those held as slaves—were and must be in fact less than human, or at least less than the white race, which in their minds sort of came to the same thing.  It turns out it’s not so difficult to dehumanize people who have something you want and can take.  It’s not so difficult, after all, to treat others badly when they are an obstacle between you and what you want, as we see all around us, still.  But, human nature, you know . . . what’s that?

Paul is urging us, no matter what sort of government we live under, no matter what sort of society, not to treat other people like tools.  Honor and respect others—high and low, imperfect though they be, ignorant though they be, broken as they are, just like us.  Human society, and the governments under which people live, will always be a rough jumble of cooperation and compulsion.  Some entity must make, interpret, and enforce laws.  Laws exist to prohibit harmful behaviors.  Most laws, directly or by logical inference, are saying Don’t.  The law does not reward someone for telling the truth; the law punishes lying.  If there’s a need to make a law requiring people to be honest, that society is in deep trouble.

The authorities are rarely a problem for those who do not oppose them; some, like Antifa and sovereign citizens (citizens of what?) seem to live to be a problem; the idea of being a problem sort of excites and unites them.  They’re not sure what they’re for, but they sure know who they’re against!  Paul is urging us not to live to be a problem but to live as a disciple, calling others to salvation.  Paul is calling us to be active participants in the society of the Body of Christ, wherein we are changed, by grace through the Holy Spirit, after the likeness of Christ.  We’re not here to emulate—let alone idolize—Che Guevara; we’re here to exhibit Christ.

What we owe to others is entirely controlled, governed I might say, by knowing what we owe God: our highest and best.  Owing God, we love one another, including our neighbors as ourselves, and we seek to be a blessing to our neighbors, neighbors we have from God.

[1] John Owen.  Mortification of Sin. 1656.  Aaron M. Renn, adapter.  New York: TradLife P., 2013, 79.

[2] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go