Christian Civics: Government and Submission
God commands His people to submit to the governing authorities because He has ordained government with the responsibility to forcefully put down evildoers.
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.
Romans 13:1-4
God tells me that I am to submit to governing authorities and why I am to submit to them. Taking both pieces together with their full force, the refusal of certain Godly men to submit to the authorities governing them becomes a little less confusing. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol and are rewarded by God with safekeeping in the furnace their king sentences them to, God is blessing their disobeying of a sinful use of authority. When God blesses the Hebrew midwives (by giving them families of their own) for deceiving Pharaoh and disobeying his command to slaughter the Hebrew baby boys, He is smiling on their refusal to submit to a sinful exercise of authority. Nebuchadnezzar does not have a right to command idolatry, and Pharaoh does not have a right to command murder. Nebuchadnezzar does have a right to put down thieves and murderers and rapists, and Pharaoh does have a right to punish true wrongdoers. The fact of God’s ordaining human government and His purpose in ordaining human government are essential to a Christian understanding of civics.
Much of what many of us in 2023 America expect or want the government to do is not what God has ordained government to do. While governments can help to provide food in dire circumstances or be involved in education, government was not ordained by God to regularly feed us and teach us math. The fact that it does feed many of us and does teach most of our children (among other voids it has filled) is a problem. Government is doing things God did not authorize it to do.
I’m not a knowledgeable enough student of history to fully explain how that happened in the United States, and though I have hunches, it’s not the point of this piece. Since I am trying to describe and exhort people to a Christian understanding of civics, my concern here is what to do now in the landscape of improper government exercise where we stand. The government should not be where most children look to for food and teaching and medicine. The government should be putting down evildoers. And in its proper application of that function, we should be submitting to it. How can we live in light of the reality that government is doing things it shouldn’t be doing, is abdicating where it should be acting, and that we are called to submit to the governing authorities while understanding there are times where we must disobey them?
The first step is to fill the void government has tried to fill wherever I am able. My wife and children should look to me, as the head of my wife and the father of our family, for food and the other necessities of life. Our children should be taught under the authority of their mother and father, who may or may not use other agents as the case seems to them to warrant (tutors, Christian teachers, etc.). Where I am able in my extended family to help someone not need the government to feed or house or teach them, I should step in and provide. And where I am able in my church to do the same, I should as well. God has given each of us a measure of influence and a calling in life, and that calling can be discerned from the commands and patterns of His Word. I know what a husband and father and son and brother and church member is to be because God has told me in the Bible, and the more I obey Him in the calling He has given me, the less the legislators and agencies of my state capital or the federal government will have to fill a vacuum in the lives of those around me.
Next, we should live as obedient citizens of the government He has ordained over us while calling it to exercise its governing authority as God commands. When government sanctions murder, as it does in allowing and tacitly commending the act of abortion, we refuse to lend our support and actively work against it (as those Hebrew midwives did). But when government puts down evildoers or justly collects taxes, we obey, knowing its sword is a gift from God to a sinful world. In our nation, where the governed, alongside the constitution, are the highest authorities, we vote and write our congressmen and senators and governors knowing that we are ourselves a part of the governing authority. When I am pulled over by a police officer for expired tags on my car, I pull to the side of the road and obey his authority as a representative of the government who is tasked with punishing wrongdoing. As a member of the governing authority of our democratic republic, I can then go home and write and vote in such a way as to make expired tags no longer an offense allowing an officer to pull someone over. My expired tags were not an express evil, and I am a part of the governing body of the United States of America since its government has taken the form of a democratic republic. I obey God first, the civil authority after Him, and I work to call the government (in our case a democratic republic that includes her citizens) to a just use of its authority.
If we want to best prepare ourselves to submit to government in the way God would have us, we should know what government is and what God has ordained it for. The prepared, obedient, faithful Christian is indeed the best citizen, because He is in conversation with the King, and knows the goodness of the sword He has placed in the hands of princes.