A Few Thoughts From Romans 13
I know, I’m a little late to the party. It seems like everybody has been talking about Romans 13.
Actually, I did a little search on Sermon Audio to get an idea how often people were preaching on this passage. Between 2010 and 2015, there were about 238 sermons per year on the site. Between 2016 and 2019, about 337 per year. And 2020-2021 – about 631 per year – almost double! No surprise, right?
Well, the fact is that we’ve been preaching through Romans, and eventually we arrived at – you guessed – Romans 13. We saw it looming on the horizon for a while. And as I was preparing to preach (actually on Romans 13:1-10), I messaged my fellow preachers, and asked if I could take two weeks instead of the originally planned one.
Anyway, I thought I’d write down a few thoughts here. It’s a fascinating passage. And let’s face it, it looks a lot different if you’re reading it from North Korea, or Canada, or Mexico, or England, or the USA. Each country with its own history of how people have interacted with the government.
Actually, as I was preparing, I think I initially read articles or listened to sermons from 6 countries on 3 continents (in two languages) – and yes, some “pre-COVID” and some “post-COVID”. The meaning of the text never changed, but certainly our application and perspective does.
And although there has been a lot of emphasis on how local churches should respond to the government, the first line is actually calling on individuals (although written to Christians, I would say any individual, Christian or not): Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. (Romans 13:1)
It seems simple enough. But Paul fleshes out this idea quite a bit.
There are also solidly parallel passages from both Paul (Titus 3:1-2) and Peter (1 Peter 2:11-17). And the other passages are curiously similar. All right, of course Paul is going to sound like himself. But the fact that Peter uses such similar language is fascinating. “Be subject” – the same word in all three texts. And very much the same specific ideas (as we’ll see).
It seems to me that the apostles had good reason to think about this topic. And maybe even that they discussed it together, and came up with a very clear, concise, consistent teaching. These words were not chosen at random.
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” Although this has application to various authorities, it seems clear from the context that Paul is talking about what we typically call government – various levels of government, as Peter clarifies – “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors…”
Another thing that is interesting about this phrase is that Paul doesn’t use the word “obey” (and he had several good Greek words to choose from if he had wanted them). In fact, the word “obey” doesn’t appear in the entire chapter. He is trying to say something very specific with the words (as we put it in English) “be subject”.
If you’ll put up with me, I’d like to take some time to explore this passage here, along with these other texts, and some of the other related things that the Bible teaches us about government. In a quickly changing world, this passage does indeed have some urgent applications. And even if you’ve heard one of the hundreds of sermons preached on the topic, I have a feeling God’s Word will always have more to teach us.
[to be continued…]