A Study in Contrasts

“There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

If the COVID era had a defining passage, surely it was Romans 13. To say that large numbers of Christians employed verses 1-7 to justify passivity under pressure of government mandates and/or fear of negative opinions from our neighbors, families and friends is no exaggeration. While no small number of believers balked at the extended closure of church buildings and seemingly arbitrary health-related rules of conduct enforced on us, others simply submitted to any and all restrictions, no matter how bizarre or ineffective, as “God’s will”.

Romans 13 was their evidence. “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” Of course, they were also letting our rulers define “good” and “bad” for us.

A Struggle

I will readily admit to struggling with the passage, and not only because of the COVID rules, most of which, as it eventually turned out, were not really in the public interest at all. Our readers’ mileage will vary here, depending on where you source your news. Nevertheless, even the most pedestrian, mainstream media outlets are, along with The New York Times, finally conceding that “The COVID Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else”. If you haven’t seen at least one of these big retrospective articles in the last year or two, you have been living under a rock. It is now readily evident that the authorities God himself ordained slipped up on the job in a big, big way, and that people died because of it. Whether this was down to incompetence, malice or some combination of the two is debatable but also immaterial: the effect was the same.

Past the initial period of worldwide unknowing, to call such massive, self-indulgent overreach a well-meaning error is naïve to the point of dullness. I will spot our government the first six months to be charitable. After that, many of the unknowns about COVID became known, and yet the arbitrary rule imposition and ham-fisted crushing of all principled dissent continued, picking up speed with the unnecessary, utterly useless vaccine mandates.

Moving Past COVID

But let’s move past COVID. That’s old news. The crisis drew attention to Romans 13, but staring at the passage and trying to put its teaching into effect in heart and life only raises more questions about practices in which our governments have been engaged all along. Is it “bad conduct” to feel an acute resistance to having one’s tax dollars misused to fund abortions, trans bathrooms, pride parades, unjustifiable wars and half a million other initiatives ranging from of questionable value to downright immoral? If the authority is “God’s servant for your good”, where is the good in his policies? How does obeying him as God’s servant produce the positives of which Paul speaks in Romans? To the objective modern observer, it seems most governments do more evil than good.

Is Paul’s instruction outdated? Does it not apply in democracies? What’s the problem here?

Perhaps my issue is a matter of perspective. Romans 13 never promises the Christian rulers with a godly, biblical view of governance. It never promises us wise rulers, kind rulers, prudent rulers or rulers with foresight. It never promises us rulers who will not abuse powers they are given by God, or who will not cede that authority to faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats whose tender ministrations are even worse than the makers of law. Faced with a menu chock full of Bidens, Trudeaus and Starmers and nothing substantive with which to contrast them, it is exceedingly difficult to explain how our rulers provide any sort of value at all.

A Problem of Biblical Perspective

This is also not a new problem. Governments were immoral, godless, abusive and arbitrary in Paul’s day and in every era since. What real value does government provide, and why does Paul appear to praise secular authority so profusely when it was so frequently misemployed to abuse him, rob him of justice and chase him from town to town?

Well, Paul had something biblical with which to contrast the authority under which he lived, and it was the state of affairs described so vividly for us in the book of Judges, “when there was no king in Israel” and “everyone did what was right in his own eyes”. In Judges, the rulers are frequently foreigners. They don’t just misuse your tax dollars, they afflict and oppress you. They steal your food. They don’t just talk endlessly about rounding up your guns, they take all your swords. Like the legendary men of Sodom, in Judges the “leaders of Gibeah” indulge their appetites in the homosexual rape of strangers and the murder of those under their care.

Now that’s a study in contrasts. If you think Justin Trudeau or Donald Trump are bad news, try gang rape and murder on for size.

Giving Thanks in Thankless Times

But that’s also the biblical antithesis of Romans 13. Some government, no matter how self-serving, wicked and incompetent, is always better than no government at all. That’s Paul’s frame of reference as he writes; not the glory days of Andrew Jackson or Ronald Reagan, but crazed anarchy and culturally-approved depravity on a scale that resulted in the near-elimination of one of Israel’s tribes. Compared to that, the Romans were a walk in the park.

Does that mean Christians reflexively obey every edict made by every authority in every instance? Does it mean we call evil good because those ordained by God have ordained it? Of course not. We have covered that at length here.

What it does mean is that we have much to be thankful for, including what to my mind is an explanation of an otherwise-inexplicable passage of scripture.