Of Cabbages, Kings, and Nations
1 Peter 2:13–17
Opening Prayer
“Father, we’re so grateful we can come before Your throne of grace this
evening and that we can recognize that we have access to You every day—every
minute of every day—because of the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
Father, as we focus our attention, our time, now in studying Your Word
and trying to understand the implications and application of Your Word for our
lives and in terms of our own submission to government and governing
authorities, we pray that You would guide and direct our thinking. Help us
clearly think through how to apply these things, especially because, as the
text emphasizes, this is a critical part of our testimony—not only before
others, but also before the angels. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
I’ve titled this lesson, “Of Cabbages, Kings, and Nations.” I hope we
get to the “Nations” part, but we have a little bit to cover at the beginning.
Once again, before we get there, I want to review quickly to summarize these
principles, because this is so critical for understanding a lot of political
questions that especially have been raised over the last seven or eight years.
I’ve heard these questions raised here or there much of my life, but
especially the last seven or eight years as we have seen a number of court
decisions that have reversed the historic and traditional understanding of the
Constitution and some divine institutions—specifically, marriage and
family—that have been very much a part of American history and American culture
and how it has been understood.
This is a small glimmer of hope. I read an article this last week that
was quoting, I believe, Senator Ted Cruz, that the Obama administration has had
the least amount of success in the courtroom of any of the previous
administrations. It might be 36 or 34 percent, but was right around 35 percent
success in the courts.
Whereas in previous administrations under George W. Bush, Bill Clinton
and George Herbert Walker Bush the success rate in court for those
administrations was somewhere between 65 and 70 percent. So that ought to give
you just a small glimmer of hope that the legal system still works to some
degree, and that is important.
What we saw last time in this passage is that the believer has a
responsibility to, “Submit yourselves to
every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or
to governors.”
What we noted here is that this is submission for every ordinance. That,
as we pointed out, doesn’t mean every
ordinance without exception because there are exceptions that we have gone
over again and again in the Scripture. These are very important because they
set paradigms that we can use for looking at different situations. We will get
into that as we look at a few things today.
We’re to submit. This is the same word, HUPOTASSO
that is used in terms of wives submitting to their husbands, children
submitting to their parents, slaves submitting to their masters. It ties all of
these things together that we’re going to be studying through the next couple
of chapters in 1 Peter. It is a flipside of what Paul talks about in Romans 13.
Remember, even though there is debate over the exact dates, Paul and
Peter are both writing under Nero’s reign. Nero is clearly a tyrant. Nero is,
especially in the latter years, very anti-Christian. This guy is not a good
guy. There’s no sense of the word “righteousness” that anyone could apply to
Nero.
Yet, they are writing very strong statements that we are to be “subject.” It’s the same word used in
Romans 13:1 that’s used in 1 Peter 2:13. “Therefore
submit yourselves to every ordinance of man.” It’s the same word. And here
it’s to governing authorities.
Three times you have this word. The third time it’s in italics, and
actually it’s a pronoun there that God says “these” and then it doesn’t have a
word there; but it means these authorities that have just been there. “For there is no authority except from God.” This is either according to His active
will or His passive will. Even evil rulers were raised up by God for a purpose.
That’s important to remember. They are governing authorities. That
adjective is a participle, HUPERECHO, meaning a “higher” or “superior” authority.
So believers are to submit to every “ordinance.” It’s talking about laws
that aren’t handed down by God, but they are the creations, as it were, of
governing authorities.
The word that is used in the parallel in Romans 13:2 is a word that
specifically means a decree or an ordinance. I think that’s a fair representation.
We are to submit to the king, or to governors. This is a word that could
apply to procurators or proconsuls. It’s not that technical of a term. These
are the ones who are extensions of the governing power. We understood that.
It is talking about not only the office
but also the officeholder. The reason
I’m going back to that and that’s important is because there are many times in
life when we respect the office and we may not respect—or like—the person who holds the office.
We may disagree with the person. You may be in a marriage where the
husband is not a believer where the husband may be abusive to a certain degree.
I think that there is a point where a husband can become criminally abusive, a
wife can become criminally abusive, and that changes the whole issue. There are
exceptions; we will talk about these when we get into that particular situation
and scenario.
We respect the office and we are to submit to the officeholder. That’s important. As I pointed out
last time, in the early stages of the Reformation in the 1550s, before the
Reformation church even came to a full understanding of premillennialism or a
realization of God’s restoration of the Jews to the land [this is roughly the
same time as the Roman Catholic Council of Trent when the big battle is over
justification by faith still—not more developed understanding of doctrines]
there were two books written.
I mentioned them last time. They emphasized two extremes. And they are
extremes. I pointed out that neither one of them represents accurately what the
Bible says. One extreme was the divine right of kings that was being emphasized
at that particular time, and it was the idea that Christians are required to
submit blindly to every law and policy of the government. That allows for no
exception; it is just this blind submission.
The other extreme is that God is for government but He’s not for
anarchy. In this view, you can kick out—you can arrest and try and behead a
king, like Charles I—without violating the commands of Romans 13 or 1 Peter 2
because you are not for anarchy, you are still for government.
You have used the excuse of tyranny; and we might even say that,
“tyranny is in the eye of the beholder.” You have used the excuse of tyranny in
order to justify that action. But this is faulty exegesis and faulty theology.
The Bible recognizes that there are exceptions—that no human authority
is a 100 percent authority in the place of God. It is not only the office, but the person in the office that is established by God.
David Barton recognized this in the paper that talks about this issue, The American Revolution: Was it an Act of
Biblical Rebellion? And he points out:
“Therefore, a crucial determination in the colonists’ biblical exegesis
was whether opposition to authority was simply to resist the general
institution of government … or whether it was instead to resist tyrannical
leaders.”
In other words, it is shows this distinction between the office and the
officeholder. All of their rationales assumed that it was okay—as long as they
weren’t opting for anarchy—to throw the person out if you thought he was a
tyrant.
Also, he pointed out that they used examples for rebellion as people
like Gideon, Ehud, Jephthah, Samson, and Deborah. However, they weren’t
throwing off leaders; they were throwing off conquerors. They were not throwing
off Jewish authorities.
We went to this last time and I got three questions. I forgot that when
we do this, we have to give a microphone to people. We did not have a
microphone. I couldn’t really hear all the questions very clearly, and so I was
kind of guessing at the answers because after you ask somebody to repeat the
question three times it gets a little bit frustrating. So, I thought I would go
back over these a little bit in order to understand this.
First question. This is actually about the third question into it, but I
will take it first because I’m going to put these in a logical order. That was
a question related to the framers of the Declaration of Independence. They
don’t mention rebellion. Well, the reason they don’t mention rebellion, as I
pointed out in the answer, is because if you’re not against government per se, then you’re not really a rebel.
That was their thinking. So they would never think about it quite that way.
The question was, “What about their arguments against the infringements
of legal rights as citizens?”
From the Declaration of Independence: I’m going to read the introduction
in a little bit. They start off:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same Object evinces a design to reduce them [that is, the subjects] under
absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
Government.”
Scripture doesn’t support that at all. When you look at Nero, Caligula,
Claudius—remember Claudius kicked all the Jews out of Rome—none of these guys
were really good guys. They were autocrats; all power was vested in them to the
point that they viewed themselves as a god.
So at the time all of this is going on, Peter and Paul are saying,
“Submit to these leaders”—not because they’re righteous, not because they are
obeying Scripture, not because they can be conformed to righteousness, but
because their position is a position of authority that God has established.
God also raised up people like Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus and Sennacherib
and others who were not righteous, godly leaders. What they were buying into
here was the natural law view influenced by some of the writings of Locke and
some others.
They don’t have a natural right to throw off a government they perceive
to be a tyrant. When you compare George III and what he was doing to what
Caligula and Nero and Claudius were doing, he’s not a tyrant; he’s really a
good guy—comparatively speaking. We have to look at this scale. That’s why I
say, “Tyranny is in the eye of the beholder.” Paul never looks at the Roman
emperors that he’s under as tyrants, and they were much, much worse than George
III was ever thought to be.
The Declaration goes on to say,
“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of
repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Absolute tyranny is the same thing that you had with the Caesars of
Rome. Okay? So this isn’t fitting the pattern that we’ve seen in Scripture
where you have a governing king telling the subjects that they are required to
do something that the Word of God says they can’t do or that they are
prohibited from doing something that the Word of God says they are to do.
So you can go through this. There are 27 of these, and most of these are
related in some sense to a background related to law. According to Edmund
Burke, what had happened in the previous hundred years was a lot of these
duties and taxes had been voted into law, but they had not been enforced. It
wasn’t until George III came into power—and because he opposed the Whig
party—that he began to enforce these fully, and that irritated everybody. Up to
that point they were law, but they weren’t being enforced. Now he was enforcing
them, though, so they were law.
I’ve highlighted the ones in blue that fit a biblical pattern. The
others are all related to the interpretation of the King George III’s use of
power.
“Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
That may or may not be good. But I can envision a scenario that has
happened in history where troops were quartered somewhere, and the believers
look at that as a missionary opportunity and an opportunity to glorify God. It
may be a violation of private property; it may be a violation of good sense;
but they turn it to good. The government meant it for evil, but God meant it
for good.
So this one is kind of one way or the other, but it seems like it’s
developed more in the next point.
The government protected those who were quartered, “By a mock Trial,
from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of
these States.”
Now that’s clearly a violation, because you’ve got murder and the issue
of self-defense. Self-defense is a biblical principle that is laid down
throughout this. Then you have a number of different points here related to
various legal issues, none of which involve the government telling Christians
they have to do what God said not to do or that they are told not to do
something God said to do.
Now you get down to these five that I’ve highlighted.
“He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection
and waging War against us.”
What had happened was they had 11 or 12 years of negotiating, taking
advantage of every legal option they could, with the British government as I
pointed out last time. Finally, the British government quit talking to them and
then sent in troops and quartered them; so it is a hostile action on the part
of the British government.
This comes under the rubric of self-defense. The colonists had rights
and that’s what all of these relate to. They don’t relate to the government of
Britain telling them to do something God said that they shouldn’t do or telling
them not to do something that God said to do. It’s a matter of self-defense.
They are being basically attacked by the mother country.
“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.” They have a legitimate cause of
self-defense.
He brought in, “foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death,
desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head
of a civilized nation.”
“He’s constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to
bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends
and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.”
“He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to
bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose
known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and
conditions.”
The point is that, of the 27, there are six that fit a biblical
justification for a hostile response to Great Britain because they are being
attacked. So that gives legitimacy to what they were doing.
As I pointed out last time, it’s a year plus. It’s from April 1775 when
you have the battles of Concord and Lexington to July 4 before they come to a
decision to declare their independence. They were still working to work things
out. And that’s an important thing to ponder, because I’ve heard so many people
question, “When do we have a right as a state to secede?” or “If you continue
to see the federal government overturn and ignore the things that are sent from
the states, when do they have a right, if ever, to sever their relations with
the federal government?”
The point is that it doesn’t fit either the pattern of the War for
Independence or the biblical pattern. If the federal government suddenly
decided to send troops in and do things on that pattern, then, if the principal
of self-defense were applied, the state would have the right to do that. But
that’s not what’s going on here.
Now we go to question number two.
This is a long question and I’m going to read it because this was well
articulated. John asked this question last week and he says, “My question is,
basically, how we are to interpret Romans 13:1–17?”
My original question, “Were our founders justified in defiance of
British tyranny?” Defiance started before 1775. That’s why I said “defiance”
really was not a good word last time, because it implies certain things. It was
whether they were submitting or not.
He said, “The second part of my question is whether there’s a biblical
support for the constitutional principles set forth in the Declaration of
Independence regarding the right of the people to alter, abolish, or dissolve
the political bonds between the two parties when there has been an infringement
of the unalienable God-given rights of one party by the other.”
That does not fit a biblical pattern. That was happening in the Roman
Empire; that was happening with Caligula and Claudius and Nero. They were
infringing what we would say were inalienable rights; so that doesn’t fit the
biblical pattern.
He goes on to say, “I take that to include infringement of states’
rights by the federal government as the author of the Declaration and later of
the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Thomas Jefferson, was an imminent
proponent of restraining federal power by the use of state power, certainly. He
taught that based on the authority granted to the states by the Tenth
Amendment.”
Let me put the Tenth Amendment on the screen. “The powers not delegated
to the United States by the Constitution …” In other words, the powers that are
not delegated—specifically spelled out—by the Constitution, saying these are
the powers that go to the federal government.
“Nor prohibited by it to the States.” [That is, it doesn’t also say that
the states can’t do it.]
“Are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
That’s very important. The federal government only has the powers from
the Constitution that are specifically delegated to the federal government.
Everything else goes to the state. That’s how the founders establish this.
Let me go back to what John was saying. Talking about Jefferson, “He
taught that, based on authority granted to the states by the Tenth Amendment,
state authority outranks the powers [I think outranks is too strong a word] granted to the federal branches of
government and everything except the few enumerated powers listed in Article 1,
Section 8. He taught that states have the constitutional right to restrain,
correct, reprove, and rebuke violations of the Constitution. Certainly,
Jefferson thought it so important that he made it a national issue, etc.”
The question is whether this is a violation of the biblical command to
be subject to governing authorities. “Our founders made the U.S. Constitution
the rule of law and the federal government the servant of the states, not the
ruler. Therefore, are citizens of each state fulfilling the biblical mandate to
submit to governing authorities when they obey their local and state laws and
ignore federal violations of the U.S. Constitution?
You indicated that so far the states have not availed themselves of
their Tenth Amendment powers to defend the citizens. Does that mean that
citizens of the various states must obey federal laws until the state
legislatures do their job and block federal intrusions in violation of the
Constitution?”
I had to use one of my help lines and call in a little assistance from a
legal expert. Bob Guerra is a lawyer and chairman of the board for Dean Bible
Ministries. He’s also a firm believer in the Tenth Amendment and in
constitutional rights. But we have to understand what’s happened in federal
law. First of all, he agrees that if there’s a conflict between state law and
federal law, it should be fought and resolved in the courts. That’s the place
of battle. It has to be fought and resolved in the courts.
He gives one example for that, and that was a case in South Texas, where
Judge Andrew Hanen, a U.S. District Court judge in Brownsville, made a ruling
that successfully thwarted Obama’s policy of giving complete amnesty to all
aliens. That’s important. They are still judges who are functioning correctly
and blocking things that are unconstitutional.
He makes a second point. He said, “It is clear to me that the Founding
Fathers intended the Tenth Amendment to serve as a check and balance to the
federal government and that any powers not expressly granted to the federal
government were reserved to the states.” Then he gives a couple of really good
examples.
He says, “What do you do, then, when one state recognizes same-sex
marriage and another does not? The U.S. Constitution requires each state to
give full faith and credit to the laws of another state. What do you do when
the transportation laws of one state require an 18-wheeler to have a width of a
certain amount and another state has a different measurement? Because of the
uniformity in interstate commerce, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that
federal motor vehicle laws trump state law.”
“In fact,” he says, “I think the Founding Fathers intended for the
states to be sovereign and independent. However [this is a key statement],
after generations of case law precedents from the U.S. Supreme Court, it has
been decided that the federal government is superior over the states except in
very rare cases.” Now we may disagree with all those interpretations, but
that’s the law of the land, whether we like it or not.
We can go back and argue Marbury
v. Madison and all of these
historical cases, but the reality is, with 175 years of case law, that’s been
settled. A lot of states’ rights were settled on the bloody fields of Antietam
and Gettysburg and Pittsburg Landing and Chattanooga and Chickamauga and many
other battles. That’s all in the past. We’re not living in 1800; we’re living
in 2016 with a whole body of law that doesn’t recognize original intent, except
in very rare instances, sad to say.
I want to summarize this a little bit differently for time sake. So
we’re looking at federal law versus state law. You say, “Well, there’s a
conflict. I like the state law better, so I’m going to obey that and I’m not
going obey the federal law.” Bob made the comment that he doesn’t know of
anything where that exists. He doesn’t really envision that right now.
I raised the issue and said, “What happens if we get a president that by
executive action enforces certain gun-control laws?” Well, then it’s the right
of the Attorney General of the State of Texas to challenge that in court. It is
a court decision and it has to be taken through the courts until you get final
resolution.” I’ll deal with, “If it goes the wrong way, what do you do then?”
That’s what has happened through 150 years; case law has virtually
nullified the Tenth Amendment. There are still a few people who want to fight
it—not that they shouldn’t—but it is not a winning battle. They should fight it
is much as they can, though.
If you’re going to disobey the federal law, you have to be willing to
pay the price. They were willing. They said, “We’re not going to bow down to
the idol. If you’re going to kill us, fine. God may rescue us; He may not, but
we’re going to do the right thing.” Okay? You are willing to take the
consequences. That’s applying the principle of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.
That’s what the colonial governors were doing. They were going to the
court. They were negotiating with the king. They were doing everything they
possibly could. They were not resorting to some sort of radical action right
off the bat.
Use every legal means necessary, but once the system becomes perverted
by the law… See, that’s what is happening—the Supreme Court is changing the
meaning of the law.
That’s where we are today.
Go back to the pattern that Jeremiah talks about. I referred to several
passages last week. They come to Jeremiah and say, “What does God tell us to
do? Nebuchadnezzar is coming, and what does God say to do?” Jeremiah said, “God
says to just surrender. If you want to have peace and you want to have long
life and you want to be blessed by God, surrender and give up. Don’t fight it.”
They were nationalists and patriots and they said, “We’re not going to do
that.”
So they disobey God. They were slaughtered, their families were
slaughtered, and their kids were hauled off into conquest because they
disobeyed God. Sometimes God is saying, “You violated My principles; you’re
going down in judgment.” If you fight it, you are on the wrong side of
history—you are on the wrong side of the plan of God—and the Israelites
certainly were.
So then what you do? We have an example. This was Mark’s question.
Question 3: When are believers biblically allowed to resist government
in a situation where a leader gains that position through illegal means,
changes laws once in power in order to become a dictator or grossly abuses
power?
Well, let’s take the example, because the second part of his question
had to do with Hitler and World War II. Hitler came to power through legal
means. He manipulated the law. He manipulated the law, but it was all legal. He
went through loopholes—all of that—but he got into power. Once he had total
power, he had total power.
Now you’ve got a problem. Are you going to obey him or not? You’ve got
several options. Option number one is leaving the country—which a lot of people
did. They saw it coming and they got out. They took that option. Some people
didn’t have the right foresight. Some people didn’t have the money.
You’ve heard me talk about my first grade Sunday School teacher Ursula
Kemp, whose family got out. She was a teenager at the time, and they got out
just about five or six months before World War II broke out. They were from Breslau,
which was in far eastern Germany, and they got out. They had about five dollars
in their pockets in the whole family, and they barely got out. They got to
Shanghai where they sat out the war and avoided being in the heart of the
Holocaust. So they left.
Another option is to openly rebel and be quashed or killed. But the scenario
that Mark set up in that question is when it gets to that point; the government
has overwhelming power.
Let me tell you something. I am a firm advocate of Second Amendment. The
reason that we have the Second Amendment is so we can protect ourselves against
government troops. I know a lot of you; you have firearms and you can protect
yourselves.
But when some SWAT team that has fully automatic weapons busts in your front door and by
the time they come through your front door and get to your master
bedroom—because they’ve already been able to use infrared technology to
determine exactly where the warm bodies are in your house—you’ve had three
seconds to respond. You’re barely awake, and you think you’re going to grab
your Glock or your AR or your shotgun? You’re going to be dead instantly. The federal
government and police departments—law enforcement—have all kinds of weapons you
are not allowed to have legally.
We hear this talk, “I can defend myself.” No you can’t! What would
happen if we get to that point? I hate to say this—it’s going to burst a lot of
bubbles. What’s going happen if we get to that point is a lot of people who
talk a big talk right now are going to be taken down one person at a time.
There’s not going to be a place where everybody is going to make it to some
last stand. They are going to be hit in the middle of the night—first one
person, then another—and those families are going to be made examples of.
This is the kind of thing that happened in Hitler’s Germany. The next
thing you are going to decide is, “Maybe I just don’t want to take a stand
because I want to live.” I think that’s what a lot of people are going to do.
So you can openly rebel and you’ll be quashed or killed or sent to concentration
camp.
Like many in Germany and Poland did:
secretly obey God; they protected the Jews even at the risk of their own
life. They protected others that were enemies of the state. This is the midwife
option, Exodus 1. Pharaoh said, “I want you to kill all the male babies that
are born.” They said, “Well, we never got there in time. They were born and we
just missed it. We never had an opportunity to kill any of those boys.” So they
are protecting; it’s the midwife option.
Then, if you are pressed on that, then you can take the Rahab option and
lie about it because you are protecting life. That’s another option.
There were many righteous among the Gentiles. Those were Gentiles who
protected the Jews: _hid them on their property, hid them in their houses
during World War II to protect them from the Nazis. There were many that were
found out that were betrayed and they paid the consequences.
The Jews that they were hiding were taken to a concentration camp, and
they were sent to a concentration camp. There were many righteous among the
Gentiles that went up in smoke in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
So your options are to live your life secretly. If you are protecting
life—which is an extension of the self-defense principle—then you’re willing to
take the loss of life, take the punishment that comes, just like Azariah,
Mishael, Hananiah, and Daniel did.
The other question is, “Were the German military officers like
Stauffenberg correct in their plan to attempt to assassinate Hitler during
World War II?” I think so because of the extension of self-defense. By taking
out Hitler, I think that it is arguable that that would’ve ended the Holocaust.
The Nazi government would not have survived without him; he was the glue that
held it together. And I think that’s an extension of protecting the lives of
the innocent.
This is what we see in Scripture. I want you to turn to Acts 4. Let’s
review what happens with Peter and John. This is so, so important. They are
brought before the unrighteous, hostile, arrogant Sanhedrin because of the
miracles they performed—specifically, the healing of the lame man in the
temple.
They have been very successful in preaching the gospel. Many people have
been converted to trusting in Jesus as the Messiah and believing in the
resurrection of the dead. In fact, 5,000 men, not counting all of their
families, were saved.
So they come to the Sanhedrin and they have this interchange. Peter
gives them a mini-sermon starting in verse 8. He emphasizes in verse 12, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there
is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
The Sanhedrin recognizes their boldness and perceives, in verse 13, that
they were uneducated and untrained men. And they marveled. They realize that
they had been with Jesus. They have to put together a plan. They have a little
conference and conspiracy deciding what they’re going to do with Peter and
John. In verse 18, “So they called them
and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus.”
They are prohibiting them from doing something that Jesus has
specifically told them to do. That, again, fits the pattern that we established
in all the examples we see in Scripture.
In Acts 4:19 we see Peter and John’s response. “But Peter and John answered and said to them, ‘Whether
it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge.
For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.’ ” “We have to do what God has told us
to do.”
So what happens? Well, they don’t like it. The people are too much on
the side of Peter and John, so they don’t do anything to them at that point.
They reprimand them and they threaten them. Acts 4:21, “So when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding no
way of punishing them, because of the people, since they all glorified God for
what had been done.”
Then we get into Acts 5 and we skip down to verse 17. We read, “Then the high priest rose up, and all those
who were with him (which is the sect of the Sadducees), and they were filled
with indignation.” Why? Because
Peter and John are out there continuing to preach the gospel. They are doing
what God says to do.
So they laid hands on them. That’s not the ordination type of laying on
of hands—they arrested them.
“And laid their hands on the
apostles and put them in the common prison.”
“But at night an angel of
the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out, and said [so this is a divine mandate],
‘Go, stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this life.’ ”
Command reinforced: Go give them the gospel.
Then we continue to read through the story. They are arrested, they’re
tried; all these things go on. We get to verses 27–29.
“And when they had brought
them, they set them before the council. And the high priest asked them, saying,
‘Did we not strictly command you not to teach in this name? And look, you have
filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this Man’s blood on us!’ ” [verse 29, which you
should have underlined] “But Peter and
the other apostles answered and said: ‘We ought to obey God rather than men.’ ” This is a direct violation of God’s
command. That’s what the Sanhedrin was doing.
Now they’re trying to decide what they’re going to do. Gamaliel comes in
and gives them some wise advice and says, “You guys need to recognize if this
is from God, you can’t stop it. If it’s not from God, it’s not going to have
any impact; so keep away from these men, in verse 38, and leave them alone.”
If you follow their main flow of action in verse 33, “When they heard this, they were furious and
plotted to kill them [Peter and John and the apostles].” Then you get down to verse 40 after Gamaliel gave them that
advice. “And they agreed with him, and
when they had called for the apostles and beaten them.” If you’re going to
do what God wants you to do, you have to be willing to suffer the consequences.
That may be financial; that may be legal; it may be criminal.
After they were beaten, “They
commanded that they should not speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.”
So what did they do? They went to the temple and started speaking in the name
of Jesus. Acts 5:42, “And daily in the
temple, and in every house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as
the Christ.” See, that’s the
pattern.
What did Paul say? Paul said, “For
I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him
crucified.” What will happen if
this government continues to turn against Christianity? We will become a
minority—those who are Bible believers—and it will be a difficult, difficult
time.
Yet, we have to keep the focus on what the priority is: We are to be
witnesses for the gospel. We are not to be warriors for the Constitution. Now
that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but that’s not what the priority is
for us as a believer.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight it, but it’s not the priority.
They’re not competing priorities. But the priority is the gospel. The priority
is not the Constitution—that’s number two. The Word of God is number one. We
have to keep that as the focus.
What are you going to do if they come for your guns? Are you going to
put up a fight? This is a tough question. I don’t know the answer—what I’ll do
personally. I know what I would like to do, but is that my sin nature? Are you
going to put up your fight and that’s it—end of the game?
Or are you going to give them up so that you can continue to be a
witness for the Lord Jesus Christ and give people the gospel? Those are what
the issues may come down to. It’s not easy, it’s not something we want, but we
have to stick with what the Word of God says. The Word of God doesn’t authorize
rebellion other than in specific situations.
Now what I want to talk about as we continue this talk is obedience to
authority. We have to go back to something that is really being lost and
assaulted today, and that’s the understanding of the divine institutions. These
five divine institutions are clearly set forth in Scripture. This is a summary
of what the Scripture teaches of what God has established for the social,
political success of the human race—to preserve and to protect and provide
order for the human race.
There is an authority in that divine institution; that is, we are all
accountable to God for our decisions and for our actions.
God first created the man. Second, He created the woman to be his
assistant, to be his helper. The authority in the team is the husband.
Family was envisioned from the beginning. They were to go forth and
multiply and fill the earth. That’s the foundation. It’s before the Fall. It’s
envisioned; they did not have children until after the Fall. But the family
authority is the parents. They are the ones who are in charge, not the
children.
I don’t have time to read this article, but it is an article about a new
book that has come out called Political
Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order: Chronicling the Rise of the
Pristine Self and it is a book review. This is a great article dealing with
the new term. I love it. The new term for the up-and-coming generation is the
“Snowflakes.” They live in their own little bubble and they think everything
has to be perfect and everything’s going to be pristine and they’re never going
to be hurt or harmed; nobody’s ever going to disagree with them.
It’s because they’ve got a couple of helicopter parents who spoil them
rotten, protect them from seeing the evil in the world and understanding the
evil the world and teaching them about why there is evil in the world and that
people are going to disagree with them. People are going to be mad at them.
People are going to say horrible things about them.
They are so protected that they go off to school and they have to have
some safe space. When they go to someplace like the University of Chicago,
which says, “You’re at university and there’s not going to be a safe space
because we discuss all kinds of ideas here,” they get threatened. And they want
to revolt against it.
So we’ve reared a whole generation. You can read a lot of articles on
Snowflakes in England and here; they’re pampered; they’re pansies. If World War
III breaks out, we’re going to lose because this generation doesn’t have what
it takes to swat a fly because of the parental failure!
It is primarily judicial in its basis. Authority is determined by the
form of government. There are many different kinds of government. In fact, the
perfect government that is going to come is going to be a monarchy because the
Person Who is on the throne is a perfect Person. You will never have perfect
government unless you have perfect governors and until we have someone Who is without
sin in the place of the government, government will always succumb to
corruption and evil.
The establishment of nations and the authority there is God, Acts 17.
The first three are pre-Fall and they’re designed to promote
productivity and advance civilization. The second two came after the Fall, and
they’re designed to restrain evil. Part of the purpose of human government is
to restrain evil through the judiciary. This is established.
Some people have merged these. I find it a huge hermeneutical problem to
say that there’s one divine institution and your support for it is two events
that are 200 to 300 years apart. They cannot be the same institution.
You have human government established in the Noahic Covenant in Genesis
9:5–6. “Surely for your lifeblood I will
demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from
the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life
of man.” There is an
accountability of government to God, and that government is to execute justice,
especially in the most serious offense, which is murder. From that you
extrapolate all the other judicial functions.
“Whoever sheds man’s blood,
by man his blood shall be shed.” There have to be various qualifications there to make sure you’re
shedding the blood of the right criminal. The reason is not preventative,
although that may be a secondary consequence.
“For in the image of God He
made man.” It
is an act of blasphemy to kill, or eradicate, an image of God. So that’s the
reason for capital punishment.
After Noah you have his sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—and they had
children and grandchildren, great-great grandchildren. Two or three hundred
years go by, and instead of scattering to fill the earth, you have especially
Hamites, under Nimrod, gathering together and establishing their own
civilization and their own city in Babel.
We read in Genesis 11:1, “Now the
whole earth had one language and one speech.” This is internationalism. The Tower of Babel is one of the
original examples of the UN. I have an example of the wonders of one of our UN
organizations that happened today, in case you missed it. UNESCO.
UNESCO voted today a resolution that there is no historical connection
between the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and Judaism. Who knew? But the UN has
spoken, right? In 2011 UNESCO recognized a Palestinian state, and that is one reason the US withdrew
giving any money to UNESCO. We don’t give any more money to UNESCO. But they made that
decision.
This is what happens when you have internationalism—people unite against
God. That is what the UN is. It has Bible verses etched into the outside of the UN
building in New York that are Messianic verses—that we will beat our swords
into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and man will make war no more.
That is a description from Isaiah 2 that is related to the Kingdom of the
Messiah, not the kingdom of the UN.
The UN claims to be a modern messiah that will bring in world peace, and all
they’re doing is exacerbating the problem. But this goes back to the Tower of
Babel. They were really against God and establishing these towers as a way of
opposing God—building them to Heaven. The result was, “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the
earth, and they ceased building the city.”
How did He scatter them? Verse nine. “Therefore
its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all
the earth.” See, once God changed
the language and said, “Okay. These five people are going to speak Yiddish or
Hebrew. And these five people are going to speak Hindi. And these five people
are going to speak Russian. These five people are going to speak English.” Then
they had to split and go somewhere else where their small group could all
understand each other and they wouldn’t get in a fight with anybody else. So
that establishes nations.
Somebody once asked me, with a real smart-aleck tone, “How can you have
a government without a nation?” Well, you have patriarchal governments in
families and clans and tribes—read a little history.
This is the establishment of nations, and it’s reaffirmed in Acts 17:26.
“And He has made from one blood every
nation [ETHNOS] of men to dwell on all the face
of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of
their dwellings.”
Another thing that has come out recently in the WikiLeaks of the last
couple of days, is that in a speech to bankers in Brazil, Hillary Clinton,
who’s running for president, says that we need to have open borders and open
trade. No borders. The reality is, if you don’t have borders it destroys the
nation. Borders are essential to the security of a nation. Unless you have
secure borders, you can’t secure the nation; without borders there is no nation.
God has established the boundaries of their dwelling—this is a divine
thing. So when you want open borders, you’re following in the footsteps of
Nimrod and the Tower of Babel and you are asserting yourself against God.
God recognized the existence of borders and that some people have a
right to a certain place and some people don’t. For example, in laws like
Deuteronomy 14:21, the Israelites were told, “You shall not eat anything that dies of itself; you may give it to the
alien who is within your gates.”
That is somebody who’s a foreigner but living in Israel.
“You may give it to the
alien who is within your gates, that he may eat it, or you may sell it to a
foreigner.”
That’s somebody who lives outside of Israel—sell it to the Moabites or the Ammonites;
they can eat it but you can’t. “For you
are a holy people to the Lord your God.”
Deuteronomy 23:20, “To a foreigner
you may charge interest, but to your brother [that’s another Israelite] you shall not charge interest, that the Lord
your God may bless you.” So the
Lord clearly recognizes the legitimacy of different peoples and different
nation states and different borders.
This is crucial, and this is coming up more and more in what we’re
seeing in the current presidential debate. It’s part of the whole refugee
crisis that is going on in Europe. If you follow what’s going on in Europe, you
see where we’re headed in this country if we follow these policies. These are
the policies that the leftists want to impose on America. It is complete open borders,
which is just self-destruction; and that’s where were headed.
We just see all of the divine institutions under assault. We’ve
abdicated personal responsibility because we’re not responsible for anything.
It’s always somebody else’s fault, or we’re just the way we are because we’re
programmed by our DNA; and there’s no such thing as God, no such thing as a soul. Everybody
just does what is automatically programmed into their make up.
Then we have the breakdown of marriage because we recognize that marriage
is for people of the same sex. Before long—there are already cases in the
courts—we’re going to have polygamy recognized, and bestiality, and all kinds
of other horrible things are coming. It’s a complete breakdown of marriage.
When that happens, you already have a breakdown in the family. When the family
breaks down, the nation goes. We are already seeing that with open borders. So
it’s not a pretty picture.
But guess what? God is still in control. That’s right. When Jeremiah
looked at the destruction of Jerusalem, he said, “This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope.” When we as believers are focused on
what the plan is, and what God is doing, it doesn’t matter what’s going on.
I know so many of us get discouraged. You get up in the morning, you
watch the news, and you get discouraged hearing about what’s going on. Forget
about it! Get up in the morning and read your Bible! Get to know your Bible;
get to know the God of the Bible. Really get the Bible into your soul because
there may come a time in our lifetime—we never thought it would happen—when the
Bible may become illegal in the United States. You never know.
It’s going to be hard to find a Bible in Germany in another 20 years,
because it’s going to become an Islamic state. It is just horrible what’s
happening in Germany and the loss of religion. This is what happened. Germany
became a secular state; it really started before World War II. It started,
probably, in the early teens and World War I exacerbated it. World War II made
it worse. It’s become one of the worst places in the world for open
pornography. I mean, it is just like the fertility cult everywhere.
I remember 15 years ago going through Kazakhstan and George Meisinger
was flying through Frankfurt had to spend the night there. He got to his hotel
room, turned on the TV, and it was nothing but rank. You didn’t have
pornography channels that were pay-per-view; it was just everything; all
through the network was just rank pornography. They have rotted from the inside
out, and that’s exactly where we’re headed. We’re about 20 or 30 years behind
them, but we’re fast catching up.
The only hope for us personally is to be absolutely in love with the
Lord Jesus Christ and with the Word of God because that’s the only source of
stability and happiness and joy that we may have in this life. That can never
be replaced, and that is not to be looked down upon or belittled by anyone
because that’s the joy that we take with us into all eternity.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study and to be reminded of
what Your Word says. We look at the world system and it’s just horrible. But we
know that You are in control. This is Your permissive will, and You are
bringing things to a head.
We believe that perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next year, the return of our
Lord is soon; and we look forward to that. As He delays and we see things go
from bad to worse, we pray that we might keep our focus and attention upon You
and have Your joy in our lives, so that we may be a real witness, a source of
stability and hope to those around us as we communicate the gospel, both
through our lives and through our lips. We pray that we might focus upon You,
and that we may constantly look to the Lord Jesus Christ Who suffered for us
under an unjust government and unjust laws; He was punished unjustly and died
for our sins that we might have eternal life. We pray this in Christ’s name.
Amen.”