In the 2nd of 1 Peter, the Spirit
says, Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man
for the Lord's sake, whether it be to
the king as supreme, or unto governors, as
unto them that are sent by him for
the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise
of them that do well.
For so is the will of God that,
with well-doing, he may put to silence
the ignorance of foolish men, as free, but
as the servants of God.
That's 1 Peter 2, 13 to 16, inclusive.
Last week we considered the Christian's relation to
society, conceived simply as his relation to the
Gentiles, the unconverted, roundabouted.
Today, we consider the Christian's relation to government.
And again, only broad principles are laid down.
The application of those principles will be left
to the prayerful, spiritual, watchful Christian.
Now, human government is of divine order.
This is far something otherwise than the old
doctrine of the divine right of kings, which
placed kings over their people, as a very
God, and gave them full authority of life
and death, and they could be as arbitrary,
as contrary, as cruel, and as oppressive as
they chose, and they justified it on the
grounds that no one had a right to
complain against the anointment of the Lord.
That is one thing, but that is not
what the Bible teaches.
The Bible, however, does teach human government.
Beginning with the book of Genesis or earlier,
you will find human government.
In Genesis 9, it is clearly laid down.
And the government, the idea of human government
laid down by the Lord, has developed from
the family idea.
The father, as the paternal source of the
family, and thus as head of the family,
and naturally as protector, defender, and breadwinner of
the family, was the first ruler.
And then this idea of someone who has
a right to do it, who earns that
right by protecting, defending, and winning living for
the family, then is spread to the tribe,
as you will find developed in the books
of the Old Testament, and then to the
village, and then to the largest city.
And in some instances in old times, a
city was a government in itself, as Athens
and Sparta, for instance.
And then to the nation, and then finally
to empires.
Now, in the Bible, the king ideal is
very prominent.
In fact, it's only fair to say that
there isn't any other kind of government recognized
in the Bible, except the government overhead, usually
called a king, over an obedient and happy
people.
The word king, curiously enough, comes from the
word kin, K-I-N.
Now, up around this part of the country,
you rarely hear the word kinfolk used, or
kin, my relations or my relatives, we say.
But if you go south, you will find
it very common to say his kinfolk.
None of my kin are living, or none
of my kin was present.
You will hear that often, because it is
the old word for someone of very close
relation to you, usually a blood relative.
And so we add a G on it,
and we have king, curiously I say.
Kin, that is a relative, one of our
own people.
And then the word king carries not only
the idea of kinship, but it also means
a noble one, meaning that a king in
the Old Testament ideal was a close relative
who was very noble, and who was promoted
to rulership because of his nobility and his
blood relation.
Like a father as protector and head of
the family, motivated by love for his family,
so the king, under the Old Testament concept,
was one who was motivated by love and
who was related to the people, not the
usurper from the outside, but one who was
of blood relation and was very noble of
character.
Now, some people object very strenuously to the
king-god concept of the Bible, where we
see him sitting on a throne high and
lifted up, and that God is a great
king over all the earth, where Christ is
called King of Kings as well as Lord
of Lords.
That runs like a silver or golden thread
through the entire Bible on through to the
end.
And some people object very strenuously to that.
They say that the old idea of the
divine right of kings dominates scriptures, and for
that reason the whole phraseology should be changed
and the present concept of God as a
king is based upon a primitive and false
idea of human government.
But, my friends, it accords entirely with the
true concept of kingliness.
A king is a noble head of his
people, deriving his glory not from the servile
obedience of his people, but from the happiness
and prosperity of his people.
You read the 72nd Psalm, where the king
comes from heaven to rule over the whole
earth.
Read the 11th chapter of Isaiah, where the
Lord anoints Jesus as king over the earth.
You will find there that the glory of
the king as king derives from the prosperity
and freedom and happiness of his people.
And that is the Old Testament concept of
the king.
And the whole Bible is shot through with
this.
And this ideal, however, in human practice is
not perfect, because rulers are men and men
are fallen.
There isn't anything perfect.
You read the newspapers, all of these bleeding
hearts that answer the questions my husband has
runned away, what shall I do?
And they are always talking about a perfect
marriage.
You can't have a perfect marriage because the
two that make up the marriage are fallen
beings.
They want a perfect politician.
You'll never have a perfect politician because every
politician, even if he rises to the stature
of statesman, he is still a fallen man.
You'll never have a perfect teacher nor a
perfect child.
You'll never have a perfect human because humans
are people and people have fallen.
So the concept of rulership, while it is
divine and while government is divine, you'll never
find any form of government that is not
imperfect somewhere, because those who rule, whether they
be in a democracy or a monarchy, are
human and humans are fallen and fallen men
are selfish and selfish men are bad.
But of course not all bad, so that
there have been noble men.
There have been kings of England that shone
as bright stars and queens, and England looks
back with nostalgic yearning to those great golden
years when noble and righteous kings ruled.
The same, I suppose, is true in all
countries.
I remember what the famous sonorous old Dr.
Samuel Johnson once said.
They were discussing politics and the right form
of government, and he clearly wrote and began
with that famous, Sir, it is.
He said, Sir, I perceive that it matters
little what form of government prevails in a
country.
The people will be happy if only the
rulers be righteous men.
That's worthy to be written down on the
halls of Congress and everywhere throughout the world.
The people will be happy if our leaders
are righteous men.
But they are not all righteous men because
they are humans and they are subject to
temptation the same as everybody else.
Now, Peter herein joins us.
Peaceful obedience to government.
This is to be understood, these words of
Peter, by other scriptures.
Always remember that the truth is never to
be discovered by saying it is written.
Truth is to be discovered by saying it
is written, and again it is written.
Truth is never found in one verse.
Truth is found in one verse, plus another
verse, plus another verse, plus another verse, until
the whole truth of God lies before you.
If you take one verse and make that
to be supreme and crowd out everything else,
unless you can teach any kind of crazy
doctrine in the world, there is no God,
said a verse in the Bible.
And people will actually, mind you, even in
this day in which we live, in offices
and places where people work, they'll attack a
young Christian who doesn't know much yet about
the Bible and say, Well, the Bible says
there is no God.
But the truth is not to be found
in one verse, there is no God.
The truth is to be found in that
verse, plus all other verses.
And if you will read the rest of
that verse, you will find it says, The
fool has said in his heart there is
no God.
Somebody said, God's created.
I know that because God had a source.
God came from somewhere.
And you smile and say, What kind of
theology is that?
Well, it says the Bible says God came
from demons.
So God was a demonite.
Again, we have foolishness because they take one
verse and do not add anything to it.
I remember one little lady who was a
Christian.
She was a maid in a home, and
she saw a nice piece of jewelry that
she liked, and she just latched on to
it.
They discovered the theft and faced her with
it.
She smiled and said, Well, I'm a Christian,
and I took it because it's mine.
And they said, How do you get that
way now?
How do you reason that way?
Well, she said, Doesn't Paul say, All things
are yours?
So she figured if all things were hers,
she might as well take what belonged to
her.
Now, that's a misuse of scripture.
So when we read, Submit yourselves unto every
ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether
it be unto the king or unto the
governors or unto the rulers.
Submit yourself for the Lord's sake.
We're not to take that as being all
the sides there are.
We're to take that as being one side
of a great truth, necessary and right and
proper to be obeyed, but to be understood
along with other truth.
Now, for instance, Peter himself, the very man
who wrote these words for our text, one
time was in a jam with the authorities.
He had preached and prayed and had gotten
in trouble, and when the authorities took him
aside and said, We enjoin you, never preach
again in the name of Jesus.
Peter put his chin out and said, I
leave it to your judgment whether it is
better to obey God than man.
And then he promptly went out and began
to preach.
The very Peter who said, Submit yourself to
every ordinance of God, refused to obey an
ordinance, or every ordinance of man, refused to
obey an ordinance of man when it conflicted
with the word of God.
So you see, there you have it, my
brethren.
It is perfectly right that I should park
my nonexistent car in the right place, keep
traffic laws, pay income tax, and keep the
laws of the country.
But if the laws of the country ever
told me I couldn't pay, then, as Shakespeare
said of another, it is better observed in
the breach than in the observance.
And by breaking a law that tells me
I can't be good, I am a better
Christian than if I kept it.
But how many laws are there in our
country?
How many laws were there in the days
of Paul, for that matter, that told people
they couldn't be good?
For the most part, even in the worst
of countries, laws are made to keep people
straight and in line and righteous, and right
as good as human fallen men can be.
And therefore there is rarely a conflict between
human ordinances and the laws of God.
But wherever that conflict occurs, then there must
be disobedience.
And there comes a time when the only
good people may be in jail.
You know, as I've said, jails were made
by good people to put bad people in.
Because the bad people were in the minority,
and by putting them in jail you took
them out of circulation.
And the good people reluctantly made jails to
put bad people in.
But it's conceivable that a nation can degenerate
morally and politically to a point where the
majority are bad.
And in that case, only the good people
are in jail.
They just take away the jails from the
good people and put the good people in
them.
That happened in Russia, that happened in Germany,
and I think that's happening in China now.
Now, this rule that we read this morning
is twofold.
Laws governing social relations and civil regulations are
to be obeyed without question.
Christians are never to be lawbreakers.
They are to lead good, peaceable, and peaceful,
law-abiding lives.
And in doing that they will silence their
detractors.
But the other side of that is that
laws interfering with our duties to God are
to be held non-obligatory by all Christians.
Daniel was in Babylon, and he was given
a high position there as a good, honest,
law-abiding, decent man.
And he served his God without breaking the
laws of God, and he kept the laws
of Babylon.
And then one day a bad law was
passed, a law that told him he couldn't
pray.
And he broke that law without ever even
asking whether he should.
He just broke it right in the middle,
threw one piece here and the other piece
there, and kept right on praying toward Jerusalem.
Of course, they put him in a den
of lions.
It didn't do him any harm.
He came out all right.
God Almighty, the King of all the kings,
overruled the embarrassed king and saved Daniel.
He didn't always do it so.
There have been martyrs by the tens of
thousands who have had to give their lives
to obey the laws of God in a
society that said the laws of God were
bad and forbade them to obey them.
So now I think we have it here.
It's so simple that a wayfaring man need
not err therein.
Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for
the Lord's sake, whether it be to the
king as supreme or unto governors as them
that are sent by him.
So is the will of God that withwildering
he put to silence the ignorance of foolish
men.
And insofar as the laws of man do
not conflict with the laws of God, a
Christian's duty is to be law-abiding.
But as soon as they conflict with the
laws of God, the Christian's duty is to
be a lawbreaker instantly.
The moment they tell me from Washington that
I can't preach the gospel, it'll be my
sacred duty to preach the gospel and go
to jail.
But I'm glad for our country, and I'm
glad we don't have that problem.
I'm glad nobody's waiting downstairs to arrest me
when I go down there.
I hope.
At least I'm not expecting them there.
And I'm glad that there's nobody that tells
me I can't.
But if that day should ever come, or
if I were thrust into a nation where
it should be so, then it would be
my duty to disobey the laws.
Now, the reason for this, of course, is
that God is above all, and Christ transcends
all nations and all laws and all countries.
I might add here, though it is a
repetition of a paragraph in yesterday's broadcast, let
us beware trying to nationalize Christianity.
There's grave danger that we do this, that
we fuse Christianity with politics and use the
gospel of Christ as a tool for political
ends.
Remember it never dare be so.
Truth is master itself, and is never to
be used as a tool to an end
that lies outside of truth.
We have some noble politicians in our day.
I heard of one of them.
I read it in a little script in
Time magazine.
I don't take that magazine, but somebody told
me there was something in it about Billy
Graham, so I bought it and read it,
and I got this.
In one little script there, it said that
a certain politician was running for governor.
No, for the Senate.
And he came out ferociously on the platform
that read like this, If it's right, I'm
for it.
Courage there, brother, I'm telling you, courage there.
That makes George Wood and look to his
niche in our hearts.
If it's right, I'm for it.
There are still those who use right as
a means to political ends.
And there are still those who so fuse
and confuse Christianity with some form of government
that one is made to stand for the
other.
It's always bad, brethren.
Hitler tried to use Christianity as a tool
of the state, and he went down.
Stalin also tried it, and he went down.
Murchison, that's the way you pronounce that poor
fellow's name, is trying it, and he'll go
down, and it'll always be true that God
Almighty, the Sovereign King, will not permit little
men to make truth a tool towards selfish
ends.
So let's never equate Christianity with any politicalism,
Americanism, democracy, freedom, or any otherism.
To do so is to misunderstand Christ completely
and go astray in interpretation of the whole
will of God in redemption.
There was democracy before Christ was born in
Bethlehem or died on the cross.
And there has been flourishing Christianity in lands
where there was no democracy.
So Christianity and democracy are not the same,
though certainly the kindly ameliorating influences of the
Christian gospel have softened men and raised the
sense of appreciation for the individual and given
us the freedom we do have yet left
in the world.
And so far as Christianity has allowed to
soften and touch the hearts of man, we
still have what we call the free world.
But the two are not the same.
Now, the Church rises above all governments.
Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against
kingdom, said Jesus in that last day.
And the psalm says, Crowns and thrones may
wither, kingdoms rise and wane, but the Church
of Jesus constant will remain.
And in 25 Matthew it says, When the
Son of Man shall come in his glory,
and all his angels with him, then shall
he sit upon the throne of his glory,
and before him shall be gathered all nations,
and he shall separate them.
The sheep were separated from the goats, and
he put the goats on his left hand,
the sheep on his right.
And he'll issue the words of doom and
blessing.
He rises above all the nations, stands aloof
from it all and above it all.
So we are pilgrims in a nation.
We happen to be pilgrims in a nation
which I without, I trust without any undue
patriotic emotion, believe to be the greatest nation
and the best still nation in the world.
And we're grateful for that.
But Christianity has flourished in the courts of
Caesar.
Christianity has flourished under the flashing sword of
the headman.
Christianity is still flourishing in China.
Don't let them tell you it isn't.
It's underground, certainly.
It's gone underground.
And there are still in Russia stolid old
boot-wearing Musics who believe in God the
Father Almighty and Jesus Christ his only Son,
our Lord.
If you think that the Russian Orthodox Church
never produced any saints, come up to my
library and look over some of my books.
I can give you teaching that is as
good as anything Dr. Simpson ever uttered.
Coming from the steppes and plains and bogs
of old Russia.
They only think they've killed Christianity, brethren.
They've stopped our forward progress.
They've driven out our missionaries.
They've subverted some of our leaders.
They've killed some of our leaders and closed
church doors.
But they haven't killed the Holy Ghost.
And they haven't trampled out the seed of
the gospel anywhere over there.
I got a letter the other day from
Barthel.
Maybe it appeared in the Weekly.
I don't know whether it's out yet or
not, that particular issue.
But he said to me, I read your
editorial in which you said, don't let's give
up China.
And he said, I've been thinking the same
thing now for a long time and I'm
daily waiting for that political turn that will
loose China and give the gospel a chance
again to rush in and take over.
And I believe that time will come.
Unless we're so near the end that our
Lord shall come first.
But one or two things will come.
Either Christ will come in the glory or
free China will yet have the gospel.
Too many of those old, yellow, slant-eyed
saints have watered China with their purple tears
to give up 400 million, is it, Chinese
to the devil.
So the gospel of Christ rises above all
isms and political views and parties and all
the rest.
While we're here in the middle of these
swirling waters, we do the best we can
to support the best party we know and
live in obedience and be good and law
-abiding, always knowing we're here only for a
little while.
Always knowing that this goodness we see about
us in a political way isn't Christianity.
It's only something that God in his sovereign
providence has brought to pass for the last
days.
All this financial prosperity God has given in
order there might be money to evangelize in
the last days.
All this political freedom God has given in
order that we might send missionaries in the
last days.
But Americanism isn't Christianity.
The kingdom of God has no nationality.
The kingdom of God has only the human
race within its broad framework, and the Son
of Man as its head and king.
Now we are gathered, and will gather, and
do now gather unto the new creation.
Could I read it again?
I quote it so often, maybe you get
tired of hearing it.
Ye are come unto Mount Zion, unto the
city of the living God, to heavenly Jerusalem,
and to an innumerable company of angels, to
the general assembly and church of the firstborn,
which are written in heaven, and to God
the judge of all, and to the spirits
of just men made perfect, and to Jesus,
the mediator of the new covenant, and to
the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things
than that of Abel.
So this is the new creation that transcends
national lines, linguistic lines, racial lines, rises above
it all, unto Mount Zion, the city of
the living God.
As we go on now into the communion
service, we celebrate the coming unto this holy
Zion, and the blood of Jesus that speaks
better things than that of Abel, and the
blood of the everlasting covenant which seals our
peace with God.
Brethren, I hope that we're properly appreciative of
all this.
I hope that we're not guilty of ingratitude
or even carelessness in thinking about all this.
Thankful to God for political freedom that enables
us to operate without a threat of jail
or death, but more thankful to God for
that national line transcending, racial race transcending gospel
that brings us into the kingdom of the
new creation and makes us sons and daughters
of God.
This we celebrate in the communion.