this time, please open up your Bibles to 1st Peter chapter 2 (that is, 1st Peter chapter
2, if you don't have a Bible, there should be one in the seat in front of you) and follow
along silently as we read.
1st Peter chapter 2, the Bible reads, "Wherefore, laying aside all malice and all guile and
hypocrisies and envies and all evil speakings, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of
the word, that ye may grow thereby; if so be ye have tasted that the LORD is gracious,
to whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed in deed of men, but chosen of God, and precious.
Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, and holy priesthood, to offer
up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.
Therefore also it is contained in the scripture, "Behold, I lay in Sion a chief cornerstone,
elect, precious, and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.
Unto you therefore which believe he is precious, but unto them which be disobedient, the stone
which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, and a stone of
stumbling and a rock of a fence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient,
thereunto also they were appointed. But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood
and holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye should show forth the praises of him who
hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, which in time past were not a people,
but are now the people of God, which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstained from fleshly lusts,
which war against the soul, having your conversation honest among the Gentiles, that whereas they
speak against you as evildoers, they may be your good works, which they shall behold.
Glorify God in the day of visitation.
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 ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish
men, as free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants
of God.
Honor all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.
Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle,
but also to the foward.
For this is thankful worthy, if a man for conscience toward God, endure grief, suffering wrongfully.
For what glory is it, if when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently.
But if when ye do well and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with
God.
For even hereunto were ye called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an
example that ye should follow his steps.
Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.
Who when he was reviled, reviled not again, when he suffered he threatened not, but committed
himself to him that judgeth righteously.
Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins,
should live unto righteousness, by whose stripes ye were healed.
For ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned unto the shepherd and bishop
of your souls.
Brother Jeremy, would you bless the service for us?
Well, thank you, Pastor, for the opportunity to preach.
Of course, we hope everything is going well in Indianapolis.
Trust that it is.
The title of my sermon is "Honor to Whom Honor," and it's taken from Romans 13, actually.
But here in the chapter, it says, "Fear God, honor the King."
I could have alternately titled it "Honor the King," which was a sermon I preached
a couple years ago, and kind of dredged it up.
I thought it was still timely.
It says in Romans 13, "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."
And continuing that thought, Peter says, "Fear God, honor the King."
Now, the fear of God and honoring the King is connected because a king is God's minister
for good, even if the man himself is a sinner.
And so I believe like King James, like Thomas Hobbes, like our pastor here, like King David,
like Moses, and like most civilized people in history prior to the French Revolution
and the divine right of kings.
But I hadn't had time to organize a thorough defense of that.
So the sermon is more of a general overview of some of the things kings do and how that
we ought to obey them, honor them.
And because in modern society we have a chronic problem of not understanding authority, not
wanting to respect authority.
This is an issue that comes up again and again in new IFB preaching in society more generally.
Like ought husbands to be obeyed, ought pastors to have some degree of independence and authority,
ought we obey the government, or is just everything government, illegitimate, or whatever.
Now kings operate as ministers given to us by God just as pastors and parents do within
their respective spheres and we are kings too but some kings have the title as such
but are not supreme but are sometimes lesser kings as Agrippa and Herod.
We're kings subject to the Roman Emperor, the supreme ruler to whom Paul appealed and
Jesus paid tribute as his earthly parents also did.
We have the model in scripture of Paul and grace submitting themselves unto earthly kings
and also the fact that there were lesser kings.
Jesus is the king of kings, we're called kings too.
Every king has a realm and you know when it says the kingdom of God is within you like
that's where God has chosen to put his kingdom in the New Testament.
He says my kingdom is not of this world but he has left us instructions to submit to certain
authority figures and it seems like today like we read verses like in you know 1st Peter
2 that says that rulers are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers.
Like this is their purpose.
They're sent to earth to punish evil and we read in like Romans 13 where like they
bear not the sword in vain.
They're sent by God to execute wrath and then but then people get squeamish when that actually
happens in real life like they see some blue haired homo freak throwing rocks at the cops
and then he gets hit by a rubber bullet and then they get soft on this doctrine.
It's like that's the point of government.
That's what government is supposed to be doing is shooting that guy with a rubber bullet
or worse like or they see like the narco terrorists as the administration is calling them running
you know hundreds of pounds of drugs that could kill like tens of thousands of people
then they get blown up and they get squeamish about it.
It's like that's literally what the Bible says the purpose of government is, is to destroy
those people and to execute wrath upon them.
It's not URI's responsibility, it's why he designated a particular institution, particular
group of people to do it and so anyway that's kind of an aside but it's pretty relevant
actually.
You know the Bible says that the powers that be are ordained of God that is the extant
powers not powers that are merely historical or theoretical so like the king in England
doesn't really have the full sovereignty like he used to right?
You don't like people in England don't actually have to do whatever Charles says right now
basically it's talking about the real political powers that are made manifest by the fact
that they are wielding power and some people just get all twisted into a pretzel trying
to take the edge off of Romans 13 you know we're trying to say that we aren't meant
to have kings or chief executives because once upon a time there were judges in Israel
that basically functioned like kings but I don't know how you get around submit yourselves
to every ordinance of man whether it be to the king as supreme or under governors so
it sounds to me like we as Christians have to obey the government whether it's monarchy
or republic or some theocracy of judges or whatever and Proverbs 22 says the fear of
a king is as the roaring of a lion whoso provoked him to anger sinneth against his
own soul so God is a God of order therefore any legitimate human political system is predicated
on this attribute of God among others so it's an executive authority which is absolute but
not capricious nothing's beyond its reach yet it allows for the individual personalities
have been to be expressed on a degree of free will to be exercised and any other entity
seeking to execute laws is a usurper or a renegade.
The devil has his own kingdom only in the sense that a rebel leader exercises authority
in his camp while the king tarries in the prosecution of a war against him.
Obviously he'll be hanged in the town square, metaphorically speaking, even though he spends
a few years as a renegade in the jungle, seemingly running this parallel society among his followers.
You know, you see like a microcosm of this in Minnesota where the governor was going
to like just try and negate federal law and just like not enforce federal law and try
and kick federal agents out of his state.
And it's like, that's not how it works.
Like you're like, you can't do that.
You know, and he eventually had to back down.
And now they're protesting him for backing down.
So he's getting a taste of his own medicine.
So organization is good.
The decently and in order doctrine is very real and it's important thing.
God's enemies always seem to want to upset natural order and decency in some way.
When God called his creation good and very good, it was not just the celestial and terrestrial
objects themselves, like the material science of it, right?
It's some galactic art exhibit or their attributes in the abstract, but it was the way in which
they were organized and coordinated with each other in functional ways, like the way that
they move around and like it says, "We won't depart from the course, right?
The sun won't cease to set until God comes back."
Right?
These are organized systems and whereas like man's art, we find it more difficult to combine
beauty and function sometimes.
In the case of the tabernacle, it was God that put the wisdom in the hearts of the craftsman
to be able to make that.
When you come home to a disorganized home, it can be stressful or tiring or whatever.
Disorganized workshop is hard to do business or work in.
You can't find the tool or the part you need and clutter gets in the way of the working
surfaces.
Dirt and grease gets in the wrong place and creates more work.
Dehazards arise like the risk of fire slipping.
So you need an organized home, you need an organized country, you need organized religion.
So we believe in organized religion but independent churches.
So we believe in organized countries but independent countries.
We believe in organized homes but independent homes not some communal village.
And so if pure religion is to visit the fatherless and the widow and their affliction, which
is an allegory for visiting the spiritually unadopted, the fatherless and those married
to a dead God that cannot save the widow as opposed to the bride of Christ, then there's
a good reason to organize it like the deacons in the book of Acts were organized by the
apostles for that very kind of ministerial work.
So we believe in, as I said, organized governments but independent countries.
God sets up kings but he also divided the languages, the bounds of men's habitation.
So no, we can't just all get along because thoughts of man's heart are only evil continually.
So you put us all in the same room, it's just going to get worse, right?
God has to continually intervene in human affairs to help us.
And so we believe in all this organization but then we also make allowance for individual
soul liberty in regards to faith, even within the home.
You can't force your family members to believe, you know, no one's born Baptist as if it's
like genetic or something.
But all order emanates from an intelligence or in other words a mind.
In the case of the ordering of the universe, it's the mind of God.
The Word of God created and ordered it and now God is one.
And so in the case of a church, government or home, there must be, the buck has to stop
somewhere.
There must be a single executive that has a final authority or else you run into the
same issue which makes polytheistic creation accounts ridiculous.
That is, one will must ultimately prevail over the others or else it will be constant
disorder since their gods, plural, being imperfect and not omniscient by their own admission
in their myths, unlike the three persons of the Holy Trinity, their wills and minds will
never be perfectly aligned and always will end up at cross purposes so you couldn't have
an ordered, consistently ordered universe with multiple wills directing it.
It is only by subjection to an authority figure that order is established and this is why
God's revealed will is filled with commands about obedience to husbands, pastors, kings,
magistrates, parents, secular, work masters and so forth.
You know, imagine if your lungs obeyed one mind and your heart obeyed another or your
stomach obeyed one mind and your hands and mouth another, there would be like this constant
imbalance.
And so when you see these local and state authorities trying to be at cross purposes
to the national government, you have riot and disorder and imbalance and it doesn't
work well for society.
You know, it's like the foot trying to usurp authority over the mind.
As we sing in the hymn Christian Soldiers, "All one body we, one in hope and doctrine,
one in charity."
So, we are supposed to be united as a body the body has a head, a reason, a will.
And God separated the day and the night.
He made seasons.
He appointed certain days and certain people to do things to organize the family, the courses
of wild animals that migrate, they move in herds and packs, the courses of the planets,
the water cycle, all these things that Job and Solomon and others observe in their writings
about nature.
So nature can be a model for us to look at, "Well, God ordered things this way.
Maybe that's how things ought to work for us as well."
As we've been studying in Exodus, that would have been relevant for us.
We were two years ago when I wrote some of this.
Not as many detailed organizational things that go into the tabernacle.
They're done sort of the same way over and over.
The Bible says that the Levites are "set in their courses," which calls to mind the
similar language we use for planets, doing the same thing year after year.
Novelty and constant progression into new things are not virtues in and of themselves,
but this is the attitude of the modern world and the progressivist position.
The ideas of 10 years ago are always out of style to moderns.
You see on social media, people will post, "Well, this is what Joe Biden said 10 years
ago and then now he says this," or, "Obama said this 10 years ago and now he has the
opposite position," right?
But to someone of a liberal persuasion, that's normal and natural that you would constantly
be, like, shedding the old skin and coming in with the new idea.
Whereas for us, there's one New Testament, one Old Testament, there's no continual updating
process like modern democracies or organizations.
This is not a lack of creativity, but it's a framework within which to be creative.
We sing new songs, but we don't sing ugly songs or songs of questionable doctrine just
for the sake of being new, to appeal to a sense of novelty.
The ancient Greeks, as the Bible says, always wanted to hear some new thing.
However, once they heard the truth though, that desire began to fade into the distance
and Greece became, at least in name, at least in profession, a Christian nation.
We don't know what percentage of people in ancient Greece got saved by Paul and all that,
but Christian evangelical truth has such explanatory power that it appears as the eminently reasonable
position even to the unsaved when compared with paganism or epicureanism or modern secular
binality.
One example of this would be that the percentage of Americans who believe in creation is much
higher than the percentage of people that are actually saved.
The position is reasonable even if you're not saved.
Ditto for questions like abortion and gay marriage and things like this.
There's a way higher percentage of people that would agree with us than are actually
saved because they can still see just with their mind, with their human reason that these
things are wicked or that they don't make sense, etc.
Now having established that order and organization are good, they're attributes of God when
properly done.
We come to the question of what means are used to accomplish this.
This is done in large part by laws.
So where do they come from?
God, as in the case of like Exodus and Deuteronomy and so forth.
The kings of Israel were to write out a copy of the law in the presence of the Levites.
The Bible says, "However, even the Gentiles having not the law have the law written on
their hearts."
And so you see over and over in Scripture, godly men submitting to unsaved rulers because
as in 1 Peter 2 is in Romans 13, even unsaved rulers have the ability to execute wrath against
evil.
They have an innate sense of that as long as they're not just totally reprobate, right?
And so what if the king or the king's ministers fail to respect the law of God?
Well, if we trust God, we trust His power, we don't have to lose too much sleep over
that because God is still all-powerful.
He can still fix that situation any time He wants to, right?
And so when we worry, we're really questioning God's sovereignty.
In Psalms 119, 126 it says, "It is time for thee, Lord, to work, for they have made
void thy law."
So David's invoking God to take action when some members of his society are making void
God's law.
And so when man goes too far off the rails, God steps in.
As with Saul losing the kingdom and his life, where we can look to the destruction perhaps
of the Aztec and Inca kings.
They felt invincible.
They felt like they were gods and then they're wiped out by these tiny bands of foreigners.
And so Christians can have a more peaceful relation to a monarch internally because we
know he doesn't actually have unlimited power, even if he thinks he does, like a delusional
late Roman Emperor.
Just as God destroyed Pharaoh or drove Nebuchadnezzar to madness, we can rely on God to protect us.
We as Americans, I feel like get more nervous about the subject of kings because monarchy
is presented as a negative thing in light of our struggle for independence.
But be that as it may, we should consider that America was actually founded, properly
speaking, by King James with the Virginia Charter of 1606, what authorized the first
settlement at Jamestown in 1608, which was before the Mayflower, by the way.
Just a little note for Virginia supremacy over the Pilgrims.
But I think New England is like the cultural center of early America, kind of like elevated
the Mayflower over the Jamestown colony.
But it's my little chip on the shoulder being from Virginia.
But anyway, many of us have ancestry on this continent predating the revolution and those
colonial charters were all authorized by kings and people weren't freaking out about the
king for like the first 150 years.
But laws provide organization.
But a machine, a flock of geese, a prison yard or a communist bureaucracy can all be
said to be organized somehow, but they're not really the same thing.
And so what characterizes righteous laws?
Of course, this is the concept of justice.
How it should be defined is also explained in the law and the prophets and the gospel,
etc.
And so we kind of have developed this idea in America that democracy is like this magical
talisman.
If we just give it to other countries, they'll be as good as we are.
But I think the truth is when we think about the concept of justice and how it's based
on God's law, the republican system of government or the democratic system of government, constitutional
system of government, however you want to characterize it in America has mostly worked
because we've had the mostly Christian people.
When you just try and take our software and apply it to Catholic, Latin American countries
or Pagan, African countries or Muslim countries in the Middle East, it often doesn't work
as well because we're all sinners but it's a lot harder to go through life as a sinner
when you're not saved and you don't have God's law.
So it's not the software that's magic, it's the thing that God has had mercy on us in
spite of our system because there's been so many Christians here.
That's not to toot our horn or anything but if you just compare how many evangelical Christians
are in Iraq, yeah, democracy is not going to go super great there, it's just a fact.
So justice is characterized by judgment and mercy and it's motivated by love, it's not
a mere mechanical function, it's not just a software system of government that you apply,
right?
It involves a human relationship and these empathetic thought processes, otherwise it
could be done, we could have computers as our judges in the courtroom, right?
We could have AI be like the judge of legal cases.
Bible says the heaven for height, the earth for depth, and the heart of kings is unsearchable.
So the king has more emotional processing power than any computer, right?
Now next we come to the question of if there are laws based on justice, what good are they
to anyone if they only exist in the abstract, in the mind?
So God established these metaphysical principles, but they have no effective or expected means
of implementation by man, right?
If you are on the frontier, right, in early America and the Indian raiding party comes
to your cabin and is like killing everyone and taking your stuff, it doesn't do a lot
of good to be like, "Excuse me, sir, like this is felony larceny, like code 127B."
There's no executive law enforcement taking place there, right?
So this executive function is one of the chief roles of kings and Romans 13 says they bear
not the sword in vain, it's not enough to have laws and principles in the abstract,
right?
These libertarians are like, "Well, the non-aggression principle, well, who's going to enforce that?"
Like, it's absurd, right?
So we know we are commanded to not avenge ourselves, so there necessarily must be some
entity God has tasked with it, he didn't leave us defenseless, you know, in rare instances
God will just directly, supernaturally intervene, like taking Korah's people down alive into
hell, but that's the exception to the rule, right?
The rule is that he's set up earthly government to execute wrath against the evildoer.
Now, the exact means of this administration is largely a matter of discretion and practicality,
and it will differ in details place to place, king to king.
It cannot be dogmatically defined or resisted, like, I mean, if you were to try and come
up with a biblical argument of like, well, should we execute people by stoding or hanging
or firing squad or this, that, you know, it's like it would be difficult to make a dogmatic
position on something like that, right?
It's kind of just falls under we should obey the ordinance of man, unless they're doing
some kind of this bizarre, you know, torture.
I think the drawing and quartering in like medieval England, you're going too far.
And so we don't have a great deal to worry about in that regard if we're doing good and
not evil, because in Proverbs 21 verse 1 it says, "The king's heart is in the hand of
the Lord.
As the rivers of water, he turneth it whithersoever he will."
And Romans 13 says, "Rulers are not a terror to good works."
So seeing that law is based on justice for the purpose of order require administration,
we come to the question of what things administration requires, whereas men and materials beyond
the king only, right?
David was not personally going around, you know, arresting every bandit, right?
So you have the biblical wisdom that money answereth all things.
Romans 13, 7, "Bender therefore to all their dues, tribute to whom tribute is due, custom
to whom custom," another word for that is tariff, "fear to whom fear, honor to whom
honor."
Ultimately, we're only supposed to fear God, but here we're commanded to fear magistrates,
which can only mean they are, as it says, God's ministers, otherwise it would be an
inordinate fear.
We fear them acting in the role on behalf of God, a subordinance of the King who is
ordained by God.
It's not like bootlicking or being weak to just have a general respect for government
officers, because they're not just constantly doing evil.
We're not in the Soviet Union or whatever.
A government cannot function without funding, just as a church or a household cannot function
without an income.
So God makes provisions of these things with taxes, tithes, offerings, or wages for our
labor, alms, and gleaning for the poor, even miracles in rare cases.
The Pentecostal thinks money is going to be a miracle in their mailbox like every week.
That's the exception to the rule.
This is not, again, normal law enforcement is by human means, normal income is by human
means, and the Bible says custom and tribute are valid means for the support of kings.
We don't simply pay to avoid jail but for conscience sake, the Bible says.
Again, if anyone had reason to disobey a king, it was David who Saul had tried to murder.
This is almost like the worst case scenario, like your government is trying to kill you.
I don't think that's happened to any of us in here, hopefully.
You can tell me about your narrow escapes after the service, but he refused to touch
God's anointed and he waited on the Lord to deal with Saul.
Of course, there's a little bit of distinction here because Saul was literally anointed by
God and oil poured on him by a prophet of God and all this, right?
Be that as it may, I haven't seen Joe Biden or Donald Trump throw a spear at anyone in
here.
So it's just not a thing that we deal with.
So people make objections to clear commands in Romans 13 because they say because the
magistrate is supposed to be attending continually on the administration of justice against evil
doers.
If the magistrate does anything besides this, in their personal opinion, setting themselves
up as like the Supreme Court, then they have a license to resist or to disobey or not pay
tax, etc.
So imagine if they applied this to tithing, they wouldn't tithe any imperfect church,
or they wouldn't, you know, earn, given a living expenses to an imperfect family members
and things like this.
We're supposed to pray continually, but no one takes this continuous practice to mean
continuous in the sense of like perpetual motion, right, unless they're like a holier
than the house as they literally pray nonstop.
So if you take the tithing continually on that to literally, you would need the cops
to be like RoboCop, right, be constantly awake, hunting criminals, if we're to be that literal,
right?
And 2nd Samuel 9.13 says, "So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem, for he did eat continually
at the king's table, and was lame on both his feet."
So he ate continually at the king's table, but this was not the never-ending Golden Corral
of Jerusalem, right?
This was something that he just did on an ongoing basis, right?
Again, another role of this executive branch, making war, protecting the people, is a role
of kings.
As a shepherd to the sheep, fighting off lions and bears and all that.
This is a whole sermon of itself, how the Lord is a man of war, and all the wars that
the kings did in the Old Testament and so on.
So temporal kings are authorized to conduct temporal wars.
We're priests and kings, we're authorized to do a spiritual war, there's a division
of power there.
We cannot conduct temporal wars lawfully ourselves.
Kings cannot conduct spiritual wars lawfully themselves, they can't usurp the role of
the pastor and tell us what's heresy and so forth, so there's two realms and they both
exist for a reason and they're separate for a reason.
But they will be united when Christ returns because he's going to be good at both, he's
priest and king.
So basically what I'm saying is we're not called to be anti-war activists that resist
the king, we're commanded, but we are commanded by Christ to do violence to no man.
So there's a needle to thread there.
Wars sometimes are unjust, they're part of the fallen human society, but they're also
can be used as instruments of God to bring down evil kings or evil nations or to chasten
them.
Daniel 2 says he changes the times and seasons, he removeth kings and setteth up kings.
Sometimes kings get kidnapped from their presidential palace in the middle of the night, you know?
I mean, the only people that got hurt were communist Cubans, so, I mean, I don't know.
I didn't lose any sleep over it.
Kings without a willingness to fight are doomed to lose their rights and powers, both by a
loss of respect and by shying away from fights in general, but also by ceding their power
to other men and institutions for nations.
So, like, temporal kings will gradually lose their power and position if they're unwilling
to fight, and spiritually that's pictured in Revelation where if they're not fighting
the spiritual war, they're not doing the first works, the candlestick will be removed.
And war involves killing and other things which would be unlawful for private men to
do, and David was a righteous man but he was not allowed to build the temple by God because
he was bloody.
War is an unsavory business.
However, David was not subject to a world court subpoena when he burned down the towns
of the heathen or put them to the sword.
There's no international war crimes tribunal, there's no Israeli FBI investigation of King
David.
David said, "He teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight."
The Emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem with impunity.
The apostles didn't say, "Well, we changed our mind about honoring the king because
there was some collateral damage when Titus destroyed Jerusalem or whatever."
Atheists will say that God is bad and mean for killing Sodom and Gomorrah or for killing
Pharaoh's army and so forth and so on, but this is a legitimate operation of a king to
destroy evildoers, and when God does it, He's doing it perfectly.
Like Sodom and Gomorrah was just filled 100% with wicked people.
Pharaoh's army, Pharaoh was a reprobate, right, and they were trying to kill God's people.
So these were like 100% just war operations, whereas like when our kings go to war, it's
going to be like, "Okay, hopefully they're mostly doing good," right?
But Proverbs 20, 26, if you have a wise king, Proverbs 20, 26 says, "A wise king scattereth
the wicked and bringeth the wheel over them."
So a wise king is running over wicked people with a war chariot.
Like this is this Bible, so there was a study I saw on the internet where they did one of
these psychological lab tests where they had people playing a game and they were hooked
up to electric shock sensors, like this one is like university things, right?
And then they had people observing them maybe like through a one-way mirror or something
like that and there would be people who were playing the game fairly and they would get
shocked and the male outside observers and the female outside observers would both feel
empathy for the person and feel like something was wrong, right?
Guys playing fairly but he got shocked, what the heck?
Then they would, you'd be observing and this guy would be like cheating and like rigging
the game, right?
And he would get an electric shock and for the female viewers, the same empathy centers
in their brain would light up as for the innocent person, right?
Whereas like for the male observers, their pleasure centers lit up.
They were like, yeah, get them, right?
This is why men are supposed to be judges because like it's just female nature, you
know, it's just like you're for like picking up kids that have skinned their knee or like
maybe they were doing something dumb and they kind of deserved it but you still have to
give them empathy, right?
That's sort of like the female household role, right?
It's like, you know, it doesn't matter what you did.
I'm going to give you the hug, right?
Whereas like this is why the men are the judges because like our empathy centers don't light
up like when we see a criminal getting hit over the head with a nightstick, right?
Whereas like it's just like the initial female reaction is like if the criminal is hurting
someone or if the cop is hurting the criminal they're having the same empathetic reaction
both to the victim of the crime and to the criminal getting punished by the police.
And obviously women that are righteous that read the Bible, their reason can overcome
that for their initial emotional reaction in these sort of like isolated studies.
Anyway, so we have to understand that when the king is punishing evildoers he's doing
the right thing and we have to let the Bible and our reason overcome those sorts of feelings.
And so like drug runners, like foreign gang members that have, you know, killed two people
and they had a final deportation order from a decade ago, when they get arrested we're
not supposed to cry over that.
You know, again, in the same laws don't apply to the king, the executive as they do to us
private persons.
The Romans called it Princip legibus salutis.
The law does not apply to the one who acts as leader.
Jesus healing on the Sabbath, David eating the showbread, David being spared when he
committed murder, Moses ordering the Levites to slay the idolaters in the camp when he
came down from the mountain.
Moses gave the command, but it was under the aegis of who was on the Lord's side.
The chief priests and elders of the people asked Jesus by what authority dost thou these
things and who gave thee this authority?
Of course he had all authority, but nonetheless was gracious in that he gave men space to
repent and acknowledge him, even those who physically helped to kill him like the centurion.
And so how does one become king?
That's a complicated, that's a complicated subject.
Succession of kings is often can be father to son, but there's exceptions to that.
Biblically, it seems that the king picks the son that he wants, regardless of their order
and age.
In the New Testament, it's similar, the succession of pastors from one to another.
It's not by constraint as though they must ordain any particular person or a certain
number of people.
It's by their discretion, you know, just as David picked Solomon from among many sons.
There's never any indication that the congregation selected the priests or that the people or
a committee selected the king.
These concepts would be contrary to the entire conception of the institutions and their divine
not popular authority upon which they rest.
Now, people will get confused between the source of an authority and the minister thereof.
Like, even if the Bible is the highest authority who is the minister, the man who works in
the office of the ministry, they bear not the sword in vain, it doesn't return void.
And so, likewise, even if we have some written document like the Constitution that's an authoritative
government document, the actual minister that we obey and honor is the human being who bears
the sword.
Ultimately, it's God that authorizes the government and not the people, regardless of what Thomas
Jefferson or your eighth grade civics textbook says.
And although it can be sort of a mystery of Providence, how this is functionally accomplished
in a democracy, but we know that that's reality because God tells kings like Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar
that He gave them their power.
Jesus tells Pilate, "You would have no power at all except it was given you from above."
So these figures whom God's men and even God in the flesh in this case are in subjection
to aren't, you know, they aren't exactly George Washington and John Adams, right?
Yet they were respected by godly men even though they weren't these enlightened champions
of liberty or of the Bible or freedom of conscience, right?
Romans 917, "For the Scripture saith unto Pharaoh, 'Even for this same purpose have
I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee.'"
So does God sanction every bad thing that rulers do?
No, but God doesn't sanction everything that you do, you know, O thou stiff-necked libertarian.
Yet if you are saved, you are still acting as a priest and a king in furtherance of some
purpose or some will of God in this world.
And if you cease to do that, he'll take you out of this world, just as though he sets
up kings.
If the king ceases to perform whatever his purpose for them is, he can remove them from
power, you know?
Moses wasn't perfect, but God backed him up multiple times when the people rebelled.
So is God wrong to support an imperfect leader?
Solomon was anointed by God to build the temple, yet in Ecclesiastes we see as these long periods
of making mistakes.
And we also know that the end of his life wasn't excellent either.
King James was a notorious spendthrift and he was given money to his friends and spending
it like water.
And if we can believe all the histories, maybe he was a heavy drinker, but he was ordained
by God to provide the proper protection and encouragement of one more exact translation
of the Holy Scripture as the KHV introduction says, which is a work that is abounded to
more salvations than perhaps any other rendering in any language.
We can't necessarily prove that, but I can't imagine any close second really to the King
James in terms of numbers, given that the ancient world had such a smaller population.
So God doesn't necessarily sanction everything your pastor does, yet God has ordained him
to some purpose. And the fact that he's here is proof of that, right? And there's pastors
that are removed from office when God sees fit, and there's not like some central Baptist
committee removing them, right? It just happens. And so God doesn't sanction everything your
husband does, yet he commands objection in the Lord. Demanding or expecting perfection
from people or institutions who aren't God and can't possibly be perfect is the excuse
for rebellion for those who already didn't want to submit to them in the first place,
okay? That's why the haters of our manner of churches and pastors always come off as
very pedantic and petty rather than that they've been enlightened by some kind of grand sweeping
theological difference, right? If they truly had some massive undergirding theological
difference and that they were honest about it, then they would become Catholic or Presbyterian
or Pentecostal or Lutheran or whatever religion would properly address this great variance
between us and them, but instead they often just sort of hover on the outskirts of the
movement and take pot shots and engage in like independent Baptist friendly fire, right?
So they're just mad that something's not perfect according to them. So we therefore
submit to a king as imperfect, knowing that God is active in the world and will still
accomplish his will through him and will protect us and his people for doing what's right and
good. And whether God steps in explicitly or not, consider our text in verse 18, "Servants
be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also
to the foward. For this is thank worthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief,
suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if when ye be buffeted for your faults ye
shall take it patiently? But if when ye do well and suffer for it ye take it patiently,
this is acceptable with God." And so like when the cops are called soul winning, we
take it patiently. We try and explain the law to them perhaps. A soft answer turneth
away wrath, right? We're not like some libertarian that just flies off the handle and we're organizing
some mass riot because we got kicked out of an apartment complex, right? We're not throwing
bottles at them and putting on our gas masks and blocking the entrance to the police station.
This is what people who despise government is what reprobates do, right? So we submit
to a pastor or a boss or magistrate in the same vein knowing that God would not command
subjection if God had no intention of affording us some degree of protection from unreasonable
and wicked men. God has legions of angels at his disposal. He can kill anyone at any
time. That alone should give us some good confidence in obeying authorities in all things
that are not sinful, right? It's a materialist and a rationalist mindset to constantly be
fearful that authority figures are just going to arbitrarily decide to harm you and that
it would be done without recourse. Or you're a wicked person and you're projecting. You're
like, "Well, if I had authority, I would stick it to all these people." Whatever, right?
Of course, the reprobate weirdo who's spitting in people's food at the fast food restaurant,
if you gave them real power, they'd be doing much worse. Of course, they're going to riot
and rebel and just assume the worst about the government, right? Because they're projecting
that, "Well, I would arbitrarily harm people, so if the police have power, they just must
be going around just killing random people for sport or something." If God were not
real and able to intervene, then that would be a legitimate concern, assuming this world
could even exist absent the Creator. This is why these great watchmaker deists like
Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, the doubting Thomases, were so afraid of centralized power,
whereas the more Christian-inclined founders like Adams, Hamilton, and Washington, they
were federalists. They were not deeply ideologically opposed to kings in the abstract. They were
opposed to a particular king and his functional abdication, in fact, to parliament in matters
pertaining to America. They were, in a lot of ways, rebelling against a democracy in
which they were allowed no vote. You know, parliament was effectively ruling England
as much as George III. And so if you're going to be ruled by a democracy instead of by a
king, well then you ought to have some say in that. So they were more against that than
they were against the idea of kings in the abstract. This is the critical distinction
between the American war for independence and the French Revolution. Our system continues
today. We're coming up on a 250th anniversary, whereas France has had like six or seven governments
since then, and not long after they killed their king, they had to have an even more
powerful central ruler, this emperor Napoleon, to restore order. You know, and instead of
just having a king that spent too much money, they had a king that, you know, sent them
into Russia to all die in the snow. So it's like you go out of the frying pan into the
fire when you rebel against authority. Now, we also note that the secular world fears
authority of husbands and says, you know, what if they're bad, you know, etc. It fears
parental powers vis-a-vis the schools and other social institutions. You know, what
if the parents are evil, right? You know, we need the school to straighten things out.
So but God blesses good people with good kings, and he sends tyrants to vex wicked nations
and cause them to repent. So but without the existence and intervention of God, the exercise
of power by anyone becomes potentially frightening to the unsaved. And so they resort in the
extremes, not all the time, but the extremes to like a leveling communism where everyone's
equally ground down to nothing in an attempt to eradicate envy. And so justice is defined
by the lowest common denominator of the people which you know that never works out very well,
the lumpen proletariat as it were. Or they resort to a libertarianism where no one has
authentic command authority except for those votes cast by money, where justice is defined
by economic profit. Milton Friedman famously saying that the corporation has no moral duty
except to the shareholder. But these projects are vanities and always end with someone taking
charge anyway because that's the natural order. Taking charge as if they were a king, you
know, Lenin, Napoleon, Stalin, whatever. You don't actually get the communism or the libertarianism
that you thought of in the abstract because that's not the natural order of the world.
You have to have executive authority. And so when you try and eschew that authority,
you get authority anyway, but you get bad authority as a punishment or as a curse on
the people, not the blessing of God like a good king is. And so who challenges the authority
of the king? Sometimes it's the sub-rulers or the functionaries in the middle sort of
between the people and the king that you have to worry about. It's like we have these governors
that are refusing to cooperate with the federal government and so forth. The king as supreme
has nothing left to gain and therefore doesn't have more power to gain other than by building
up the general condition of the kingdom and seeking favor with God. Whereas like these
underlings they can always feel like they can increase their power by undermining the
real leader. Judas saying he should give to the poor, trying to undermine the leader by
appealing to the other sub-leaders. Cora saying all the people are holy, trying to rally the
masses against the ruler. No one's illegal. We're all Americans. All the people are holy.
There's no rules. Everyone's equal in the whole world or whatever. Of course these things
have like a kernel of truth in them, right? But the application is illegitimate because
the holiness of the people should compel them to obey the leader, not be used as an excuse
to put themselves above the leader. Darius' advisors appealing to the Persian constitution
against Daniel is another example, right? Trying to tie the king's hands with a man-made
legal tradition that says the laws could never change. And so the king were not sovereign
to make in an old laws by virtue of his office, parallel with how the Jews always attacked
Christ and Paul and said they were trying to subvert or overturn the old laws and they
didn't have the authority to change anything. But as Christ this king was a source and
authority for the law, he had every right to alter it. And you have like all these
like low and mid-level judges trying to say like, "Well, you can't make any executive
decisions. We're just going to strike down everything you're trying to do to enforce
the laws." Appealing to other mid-level leaders, appealing to the masses, appealing
to procedural rules and man-made traditions are the ways that men try to subvert legitimate
leadership in the Bible and in history. In most historical kingdoms there is an affinity
between the king and the common people. But there's often an intense jealousy between
the king and the aristocracy who are always looking for how they can gain more power vis-a-vis
the king. This is why some clever rulers utilize foreigners like Joseph and Daniel as governors
since they have no native following or lands or influence apart from their dependence on
the king. This recurring friction between king and lesser nobles is as paralleled in
the fact that the angels who are the ministerial core of the king underwent their own rebellion
of one third of them which is still ongoing and they now like Korah they're trying to
bring humans along with them and like Judas to bring God's own servants into questioning
God's methods. So leaders are the main characters and this is why it wounds man's pride to
submit to them. This is why Satan didn't want to submit to God because God's the main character.
People remember Stonewall Jackson for good or bad, that's irrelevant. Who they don't
remember is by ancestors in the Stonewall Jackson Brigade. They're like maybe recorded
in a ledger somewhere, right? That's simply the reality of things. However, the narcissist
wants to be the main character and they'll try to gain the spotlight at the expense of
almost anything. Even if the spotlight, as it were, is a police helicopter search spotlight,
they want to be in the spotlight one way or another. This is true in the relation of
God and prideful Satan, as I mentioned. Leviathan, it says, is the father of all the children
of pride. And this plays out all the time in other relations, in miniature. The Bible
says rebellion is "as the sin of witchcraft." And this is interesting because what is witchcraft
but trying to wield those powers which are not ordained of God but are of some other
force or forces. And so there are certain laws of nature which God has ordained. But
the magus or the witch tries to overcome them which is rebellion. And this is mirrored when
anyone tries to find a way to operate outside the biblical authority structure. For instance,
the lone ranger Christian who is too cool to be under any pastor. The feminist who is
too liberated for any man. The sovereign citizen who's too sovereign for any government. So forth
and so on. When men rebel against the king they are doing so that they or someone they support
can wield power instead of the person ordained by God to do so. And so they're in a parallel sin
alongside witchcraft. They're trying to utilize some power other than the natural order of things.
We're not even supposed to think evil towards the king much less curse him with our mouth.
Ecclesiastes 10 20 says curse not the king though not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy
bedchamber for a bird of the air shall carry the voice and that which hath wings shall tell the
matter. So we see the consequences of local politicians rebelling against the federal
government encouraging riots protecting criminals including violent and sexual sexually deviant
people over their own constituents just flatly denying first peter two flatly denying romans 13
and so it's not disconnected that these same people who are in that kind of rebellion today
against federal supremacy they're also in favor of killing babies they're in favor of feminism
they're in favor of doing hard drugs transgenderism sodomy socialism leniency towards crime
surrendering american industry to foreign imports and just you know all things that that violates
civic virtue and natural order okay and there there there was a mindset that's um that's crept
into uh you know some right wing and even some christian circles that you know the government's
all bad our money's bad taxes are bad cops are bad we need to move to a remote place the mill
nowhere and live off a garden and drop out of civic society in contravention of the previous
20 centuries of urban centered christian practice which is where the soul winning is you know you
can't fish without being near the water um so all this survivalist loner stuff is some kind of weird
psyop it's a delusion um first of all the you know the peace and the quiet on a farm only exists
because of the central organization and laws of our society without which you'd stand no more
of a chance than the roman rural estate owners against the barbarian hordes after the collapse
of the central government and its legions or you know more contemporarily the south african bower
of today alone on his farm is only protected in so far as the south african government is remotely
functional and yet many in yet many roman senatorial families continued existing after the
fall of the the western roman empire why or how because they submitted to the new kings and made
themselves useful and more important they showed that they were competent and they could you know
run this estate without undermining the power of the new king and more importantly they shared the
christian faith and so they were seen as respectable people and and you know they didn't try to go all
libertarian mode and refuse to pay taxes to the frankish king and you know try and shoot arrows
at anyone that came near their their libertarian compound or whatever. So I'll skip the part about
fiat currency and all that. So another concern people have is that power will go to the king's
head like you've heard this like power corrupts right but again it's more often the underlings
and other bad actors you have to worry about who are striving for more power right. Consider the
concerns presented to the king by the interlopers in the book of Ezra against the Jews claiming
that the king would be injured injured by a loss of tribute and custom if he allowed the Jews to
rebuild the temple and the city walls but the king replied that he wanted the money and agricultural
goods from the tribute they owed to go to the Jewish elders and Levites to complete the work
so that they could pray for the king and his sons and so part of why kings can make godly or at
least principle-based decisions in such cases is precisely because they have by nature of their
position enough resources at the disposal they don't have to oppress or cheat anyone to have
everything they need right whereas the underling is constantly striving you know how can i get a
little bit more the king already has power he already has a roof over his head and the gold and
the army and all this stuff he doesn't he doesn't unless he's uh uh intrinsically tyrannical and
just set up by god the punisher wicked nation he has uh nothing to gain by uh oppressing people
and losing the love of his subjects which is which one of his main sources of power um and so
like you know david uh was not just feared he was also loved you know david's mighty men don't storm
the city and get water just because it's like the only practical water source and david doesn't pour
it out uh nor does david pour it out despite his thirst in order to gain some physical advantage
like watering a plant these are symbolic actions or gestures done for ideas like honor glory loyalty
love etc they're not from the animal plane from the divine and so god likewise he doesn't set
himself as king over the heavens and the earth so that he can receive meat and drink or a house
this is the conception of the pagan gods is it like well we need to bring them food we need to
give them a house and give them a statue and stuff and so because you had material relations to the
gods material matters come under the king and so in the pagan society religion was just another
function of the state it's just another material process right whereas in you know the christian
conception spiritual and the temple realms are separate the priest is not under the king and
vice versa they're they're they're autonomous fields in a lot of respects and so a god does
not have to justify his ends by some further higher set of ends that are justified by some
still higher like a sort of infinite you know turtles all the way down in hinduism
you know which the atheists and the agnostics want to hold him to pretending like he's answerable
to anything or anyone whereas decisions are subject to some higher level of review derrius
did not have to explain or justify himself to the enemies of the children of israel because they
were not his authority he was theirs and he advised them that he would hang them on their own timbers
should they wish to test this thesis and that's not to say that might makes right but rather that
the existence of power is self-apparent like gravity or inertia and so we as christians we
don't need to trouble ourselves with questions about whether a ruler or government is legitimate
or not because it will rapidly be made apparent one way or another by their effective exercise
of power right? Who's collecting taxes from you? That's who the government is right? One day it's
the king of england the next day it's george washington like that's who the government is
that's who you like it just it's self-apparent by the fact that they have an army that they're
collecting taxes that they're making an enforcing laws right? So again the bible commands us to
obey these magistrates insofar as they're not compelling us to commit sins and if we trust that
God is active in history which he is we can rest assured that he would not long suffer a magistrate
forcing Christians to sin you know? Has anyone ever been ordered by the police? Has anyone here
ever been ordered by the police to commit adultery or you know? Has anyone here ever been ordered by
the police to bow down to an idol right? These are historically rare sorts of things and as with
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego God made a way for them to escape. Even in the case of communist
countries like China there was a chance to escape for people who wanted to. There's an island called
Taiwan where a nationalist who did not want to live under communism fled to and it's still a
source of contention to this day right? And so if you want to read the bible in Taiwan it's
perfectly legal to do so right? In the case of Hong Kong which had Christian freedom under the
British rule there was a set date well known way in advance for decades when it would go from being
British to back under the People's Republic of China and the bible says a prudent man foreseeeth
the evil and hideeth himself but the simple pass on and are punished. And so what's the application
is that we should understand these things for a lot of reasons but one of which being that we are
made kings and priests unto God and so we can't properly appreciate Christ's role as king of kings
or our own role as kings if we only have a sort of superficial like Disney understanding of monarchy
or this modern post-French Revolution understanding of monarchy as something
inherently dangerous and abusive or some kind of dog and pony show in the British tabloids
where the king is politically neutered. And so with that view we cannot properly contextualize
the fact that we serve a very real kingdom and not only that but are said to have the kingdom of God
within us. This is mysterious how a kingdom can be inside us. The more we understand how real
and legitimate kingdoms work in the Bible and in reality and not in these sort of modern warped
ideas of them, it helps better understand our own internal governing and our own transformation
and our own role in the social gospel, helping one another as fellow citizens in the kingdom,
and that a good king considers the poor and a good king does all sorts of... You look at all the
things that a good king does and apply that to how should you behave yourself to people in society.
And so again, we serve the kingdom of God, so our fatherland, our loyalty is not to soil on this
earth. It's certainly not to magic soil in Israel. It travels with us as strangers and pilgrims in
this world, carrying all the rights and duties of a king in our heart, this royal commission to be
ambassadors for Christ. And furthermore, another application that's more in the distance, but one
day we, or more likely our descendants, spiritual, physical, will live under some of the 10 kings in
the end times, even if we're in a democratic society today. And if we're running around agitating for
for libertarian nonsense and being rebels over tax rates and immigration policy or something,
we're going to get smoked for the wrong reasons instead of being like Joseph in Egypt or Daniel
in Babylon or Jesus under Pilate and Herod or Paul in Athens and Rome. And an even more distant
application is that we will be allowed to a greater or lesser extent the honor of ruling and
reigning with Christ for a thousand years. And while we'll be incapable of sin and we'll have
the mind of Christ to do the correct things and stuff, I can't help but to think though,
and I think that this is doctrinally correct, that this life is still preparatory in some way
and so there must be some benefit to reading and studying these things about kings now
or else scripture would not so repeatedly emphasize them. So some people though,
they try to contextualize everything in the Bible like kings or the agricultural references or the
gender roles and the capital crimes and stuff as that's just how it was back then. Rather
than that God being infinite and eternal wrote a book that believe it or not was applicable
and up to date for all times. And so it's not our job to set up a king nor is it our job to
tear them down. It's God's job. However, this is not to be confused for Anabaptist quietism
or a helpless fatalism because we are still called to action and initiative. Paul appealed
to Caesar. He put his word in. He put his two cents in, right? And we're called even to great
exploits, God willing, in many areas of life, both as kings and priests of the kingdom of God
and in our secular occupations. So we're not resigned to sort of a fatalistic acceptance
of everything that happens. We can take actions and initiatives, so to speak, but at the end of the
day, God is the one that sets up and removes the kings. We're not called regicide like Cromwell
or whatever, even though he's like this like cool puritan or something. You're not supposed to take
code that far into your own hands, right? So in this vein, Christians or at least ought to be
the ideal citizens, even though the world often doesn't understand this or understand why we
believe the things we do, but our works ought to show that we have a king and even that we
likewise conduct ourselves in a kingly fashion as our text says, "Submit yourselves to every ordinance
of man for the Lord's sake, whether it be to the king and 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 you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish
men." And so like the foolish men will be like, "Well, hey, you know, you Christians, you just,
you know, you don't care about injustice because you're not out rioting and like attacking federal
agents and stuff." And it's like we need to put that ignorance to silence by like doing good,
by, you know, not just believing the right things, but like doing good things, being charitable,
all that sort of good stuff, loving your neighbor, you know, the sort of the social gospel aspect in
addition to the doctrinal correctness of the gospel, right? And so if we can learn to suffer
ourselves to be in subjection to the rulers and masters of this world with all their imperfections
and injustices, how much more should we with joy submit ourselves under the care and mercy
of the Lord Jesus Christ who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth, who when he was
reviled, reviled not again, when he suffered he threatened not, but committed himself to him that
judgeth righteously to his own self bear our sins in his own body on the tree that we being dead
the sins should live under righteousness by whose stripes he were healed for ye were a sheep going
astray but are now returned under the shepherd and bishop of your souls so Christ sort of model of
submitting to authority and then and he is our correct authority we return to our shepherd to
our bishop our king etc so Jesus came as a humble servant and a friend such that we could
embrace him and know him but he will return as a triumphant king to rule with a rod of iron and
I didn't really get to cite it too much but I've read DiRegno by Thomas Aquinas and one of the
things he says is that you know friendship is about the best thing in the world and so like a
good king is not going to just want to be a tyrant and have everyone hate him because when
you have everything right what's what's really the best thing is though to have friends okay
and and so god has all power all glory all majesty all authority right but he still
wants friends he still wants communion he wants people to interact with him in a loving way
so he came as a friend but he's also coming as a king to rule with a rod of iron these things are
not contradictory or exclusive okay and just as john the baptist was forerunner for that first
coming we are appointed to prepare the way for the second coming by inviting men to fear god and
honor the king while this offer of mercy is still extended right there's like a there's like a grace
period right you know like the irs will be like okay if you just admit you didn't pay your taxes
in the next six months like we will have reduced penalties or whatever right and something like
that like a like a tax holiday it's like we're in like a sin holiday right now we're like people
still have god is long suffering not willing that any should perish but you know he wants to all men
that they would repent so we still got this offer extended but you know that's coming to a conclusion
and so we have to preach the love of god but also the the fact that god's a king that he has laws
that he will execute wrath upon evildoers after a certain point and so we we also part of that is
we need to set an example of obeying earthly kings lest we be found hypocrites who are not
preparing the way of the lord we have to be teaching men to honor the king is an imperfect
picture of honoring the king of kings because the powers be ordained of god and you know again
we can include peter says honor all men love the brotherhood fear god honor the king so special
mention to honoring the king there but it extends through a lot of areas of authority in life hope
that was useful to you there's a lot of confusion in society today on these matters we ought to be
as christians the voice of reason because we have a book that was written by god and we should be
able to just lay our head on that part that says honor the king and be like okay like it's going
to be okay because if it gets too hairy god will intervene as long as we aren't just some completely
wicked wicked group of people that are just god sending an evil ruler to vex us in which case
that should call us to repentance more so than it should call us to to get rowdy against civil
authorities all right we'll close with a word of prayer heavenly father thank you for your word
thank you that you send magistrates to protect us from evil doers we pray that they would
execute justice and be do that as well as possible we know that they're going to do it imperfectly
that they're not all saved and we just pray that we would be long suffering with that process
and not get swept up into disorder that sort of rebellion and we just again we thank you for your
word and how it teaches us to act and we pray we just patiently await your return when we'll
actually have a truly good government and Jesus name we pray amen.