Our country’s founders tried to make sure there would be no martyrdoms here. So far, so good.
But the state is viscious.
Once upon a time Rome demanded that the whole world worship her emperor as a god. This was very inclusive. In fact, if you weren’t included, they would kill you.
North Korea, Iran, China–lethal persecution occurs today, and the blood of martyrs cries to God.
Be assured He hears (Revelation 6: 9-11).
Granted, insane wicked tyrants can do immeasurable damage. How many innocent people, in the 20th century alone, were murdered by their own governments?
But they can’t do everything they think they can.
Although God works within man’s free will, we can still see that no evil empire has ever risen up that was not brought down, sooner or later. To those who insist that God is just a bystander, I can only answer: if He was, we humans would be long extinct.
Nero is gone, but Christ’s Church lives.
Nero… who murdered Christians
There are always Christians who insist Romans 13:1 means that whoever happens to be in power at the moment, even if it’s a bloodthirsty monster who murdered his way to the top, has to be honored and obeyed–because God put him there.
But Romans 13 goes on to describe what it is that God “ordains” the civil power to do. So when that power rewards evildoers and makes itself a terror to the innocent–sound familiar? or don’t you live in a Democrat city?–and actively makes war on God’s word and on God’s people… it’s a righteous thing to oppose that power. As the various Judges did, and David, and Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
Ah! But Jesus didn’t rebel against the power, did He?
No, because He came here as a sacrifice. But when He comes again, watch out.
We do want to be careful about concluding that God in any way endorses the actions of tyrants–Ahab and Jezebel, Athaliah, Nero, Stalin, Hitler, Mao: one could use up a whole day just listing the blood-soaked tyrants of this fallen world–but we don’t dare say that anything happens outside the sphere of His sovereignty.
Remember: God gives us free will. It wouldn’t be free, if we couldn’t abuse it. Sometimes it’s necessary for God to intervene. If He didn’t, we’d wipe ourselves out.
Along with the power of the civil magistrate, the government, come various responsibilities. We are to honor and support any government that fulfills those responsibilities, even if it’s staffed by pagans. The trouble starts when the rulers ignore their responsibilities.
But to insist that God “ordains” every monster who rises to power by climbing over the corpses of his victims–well, that’s simply blaming God.
We can’t see everything that He sees, we can’t know but the most inconsequential sliver of what He knows–and there is a time to trust and obey.
And a time to cast out wicked rulers.
We watched this on Amazon Prime yesterday, where you can rent it: Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018). It’s not for the faint-hearted.
Beautifully filmed and acted, this tells the story of Paul’s life, in flashbacks, against the grim background of Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome. James Faulker, who played Herod Agrippa in I, Claudius, plays Paul–in a Roman prison, awaiting execution. Jim Caviezel is Luke, writing the Book of Acts under Paul’s guidance. Joanne Whalley and John Lynch are Priscilla and Aquila, trying to hold together the city’s Christian community.
There are in the world today places where Christians are brutally persecuted, as they were in Nero’s Rome. And yet those are the places where faith in Christ is growing.
I’m not going to write a long review here, Paul is well worth seeing for yourselves. I just want to note that, as someone who has lived his whole life in a place where, by the providence of God, neither war nor civil strife has touched for centuries, such scenes are strange and terrifying to me. I have never seen anyone beaten on the streets, publicly hanged, herded off to a gulag. I know these things have happened many times in history. I know they happen now.
But on an emotional level, I don’t want to believe that persecution, of the kind that Paul and Luke knew, can be a fact of life. I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want the world to be like that, even though I know it is. God help us peace-loving American Christians, if we ever have to confront anything worse than snarky comments and hate-contorted faces.
For thy sake, Lord, we are slaughtered like sheep…
And yet by you we are more than conquerors.
That’s what Paul said (Romans 8:36-37).
And he taught himself, and us, that only love, filled by God’s grace and the love of Jesus Christ, can survive a fallen world.
Before you can have emperor-worship, you have to have an emperor. Having none, the Roman Republic never had a cult. This had to wait until the Romans had successfully destroyed their republic.
As the master of so many different nations, with so many different gods, the Roman emperor needed more than just the brute force of the Roman army–so often resorted to–to keep them all in line. So what the Romans did was to evolve an imperial cult; and everybody, regardless of their own national religion, had to swear oaths in the emperor’s name and perform sacrifices to him.
This was really inclusive. For a time, Jews got a pass: they prayed to their God for the emperor. Everybody else had to pray to the emperor. For anyone to do otherwise would have been divisive. The Romans were big on inclusiveness, and anyone who tried to be divisive would be killed.
Christians refused to sacrifice to the emperor. Once Nero figured out that the Christians weren’t just an eccentric Jewish sect, he initiated persecutions. The Christians’ failure to sacrifice to him was divisive. Even exclusionary. So he killed as many as he could. Other emperors followed in his footsteps.
Notice Nero’s image on the coin. In Republican times, no living person could have his picture on a coin. That was reserved for gods. So the parade of Roman coins with emperors’ portraits on them tells us where they were coming from.
In the long run, Jesus Christ, who had no army, prevailed against the Roman Empire, which did. He conquered it.
Let them who have ears, hear. Let them who have eyes, see.
Sometimes you, my readers, put things so eloquently that I find it best just to step aside and let you speak.
Some of you–I daresay just about all of us, from time to time–look at world events today and fear the future. I can’t imagine what it would be like, not to. The servants of Satan are running wild. Who can stop them, short of Christ’s return? We cannot help thinking the Last Days are just around the corner, if they haven’t started already, and that there’s going to be an awful lot of collateral damage–to say the least.
Isaiah, speaking for the Lord, wrote, “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?” (Isaiah 2:22)
He might have been thinking of Nero, Emperor of Rome, who persecuted Christians viciously, put on airs like no Roman before him had ever dared to do, and wound up miserably put to death by his own subjects. Here we have him as played by Peter Ustinov in Quo Vadis (1951)–coward, bully, and self-proclaimed poet whose lines don’t even scan and are peppered with the wrong words. Let this Nero stand for all the persons whom we’re afraid of today: he is a more than adequate representative.
Yes, he did a lot of damage. He killed a lot of people. As our friend Watchman pointed out the other day, God works within the confines of free will. And I believe that God intervenes in history. If He didn’t, we would have no history.
But in the long run, Nero was an idiot, Nero was a fool, he had nowhere near the power and might he thought he had, it proved a fairly simple matter for a small number of people to murder him–and he’s gone, but Jesus Christ still reigns.
And shall reign forever, and ever–King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and a priest after the order of Melchizedek.
http://wwwg.uni-klu.ac.at/archeo/chrono/nero.jpg
The petulant gentleman in the picture above is the Roman Emperor Nero, a homicidal maniac and sadist who enjoyed absolute power until some dissidents got together and assassinated him. Nero was on the throne when St. Paul wrote these famous words in his epistle to the Romans:
“[T]he powers that be are ordained of God.” (Romans 13:1)
There are now, have always been, and probably always will be Christians who take that line to mean that whatever fool or criminal happens to be in power at the moment, he is entitled to respect and obedience because God Himself has put him in the catbird seat.
But is that really what “ordained” means?
Let’s go to Strong’s Concordance, an authoritative source. In the original Greek, the word translated as “ordained” is tasso, meaning “to arrange in an orderly manner, i.e. assign or dispose (to a certain position or lot)–addict, appoint, determine, ordain, set.”
There are a dozen different Greek words in the New Testament that have been translated into English as “ordain.” Most of these Greek words have to do with putting something into a particular place.
Tasso, the word Paul uses in Romans 13:1, does not mean to authorize, to endorse, or to deputize. Later in the chapter, we see that God assigns to the civil government–to the state, if you like–the responsibility to uphold the law and to protect peaceable, law-abiding citizens, and the power (and duty) to restrain evil and to punish evildoers.
In the world Paul lived in, the Roman authorities were perfectly capable of carrying out those functions, and usually did. Hence they were entitled to have their positions respected and their lawful orders obeyed, and so Paul advised Christians to do.
But suppose the powers that be break the law instead of upholding it, and plunder and terrorize peaceable, law-abiding folk while favoring and even rewarding evildoers? What if the ultimate power in the state belongs to a bloodthirsty lunatic like Nero?
The rest of the Bible, both Testaments, certainly does not teach us that God is with every power that succeeds in setting up shop in a fallen world: only that God is the sovereign ruler of heaven and earth, and nothing happens without Him.
To say that illegal and tyrannical rulers are ordained by God, in the sense of being authorized by God, is as foolish as blaming the sovereign Lord for one’s own sins. Dude, God ordained me to steal hubcaps!
As Nero and so many others like him found out the hard way, God can get rid of a despotic monster whenever He pleases. He blessed the Maccabees when they rose up in rebellion against the blaspheming tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes. I believe He blessed the 13 American colonies when they rose up against King George III.
Not to write a book here, but how do we know which “powers that be” that God has blessed, and which ones He has allowed to exist, but not blessed?
The Bible has the answer, in the words of Jesus Christ Himself: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)
If it were not so, every successful assassin and usurper could claim a God-given legitimacy.
