I was listening recently to a very wise teacher from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he said, never tell a story about your sermon. Just preach the sermon. And I'm, of course, going to completely ignore that excellent advice and tell you a story about the sermon. Now, just a brief note. I realized as I was putting together the sermon that increasingly I was feeling that I shouldn't simply go right from Luke to the Reformation and the question of the government that the Puritans were advising the Christians to have in the Westminster Confession of Faith. And then the discussion of government and its relations with the church, that a lot of notice should be paid to what has historically taken place in the interactions between government and church. Not always, and in fact mostly bad interactions, incidentally. Usually we have been called upon to suffer. When Jesus said, in this world you will have tribulation, but fear not, I have overcome the world, he was not kidding. in any sense. So he was also telling the truth when he said that we would be dragged before kings and people in authority and courts and that they would think they were doing good when they persecuted. But before we turn our attention to the word of God, let's go to the God who gave us his word and let's ask him to help us to understand. Please join me. Sovereign Lord, we do pray now that you would be the light of our minds, that you would help us to focus and to concentrate on this question. of the government that we should have, or at least desire. Lord, we know that there is a day coming in the future when the government will be perfect, and that's the day when Jesus returns, when the King of Kings reigns over all the universe and is present, and no longer do we walk by faith, but see directly and stand with the multitude of the redeemed, Lord, and stand amongst the spirits of just men made perfect. Oh, what a day that will be. But in the meantime, Lord, we ask that you would help us to do your will here on earth as best as we can and to understand the best way to go about doing that. Help me now, Lord, to open up your word and to exposit and to be humble as I do so. And I pray, Lord, that you would remind me I am but a messenger. I need to decrease. Christ needs to increase. And we pray this in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Acts chapter 5 and verses 27 I remind you, this is the word of the Lord. And when they had brought them, they set them before the council, and the high priest asked them, saying, Did we not strictly command you not to teach in this name? And look, you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine and intend to bring this man's blood on us. Peter and the other apostles answered and said, we ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree. Him God has exalted to his right hand to be prince and savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are his witnesses to these things. And so also is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they were furious and plotted to kill them. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever." Obviously, the context of this is the apostles had been thrown in jail. The Sanhedrin had instructed them in the previous chapter not to preach the gospel any longer, not to fill Jerusalem with this doctrine that men must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to be saved. And the apostles rightly had said, No, we're going to continue to preach the gospel because Jesus had told them to go into all the world, beginning in Jerusalem, to preach the gospel, to make disciples of all the nations. And so they were carrying out the mandate that Jesus gave, not only to them, but to the entire church in every age. Well, to put it mildly, that made the Sanhedrin furious, so furious they wanted to kill them. Had not the people been amazed at the wondrous acts that they had done and the way that they spoke, they certainly would have done so. But in this passage we read, Peter and the other apostles are facing a situation that was not to be uncommon for the history of the church. Throughout the next 300 years, in particular, as they were persecuted, first by the Jews and then by the Romans, either in little pockets and then systematically throughout the empire. In this case, they'd been dragged before the Sanhedrin for continuing to preach the gospel in Jerusalem. They'd gone against the explicit orders that had been given to them. They had defied the civil magistrate. They defied the government and continued to preach the gospel. Now, technically, When they came before the Sanhedrin, they were coming before what was nominally, that's in name, the highest religious and secular authority in Judaism. But before we get into that, we need to admit, no, that's not quite true. They were really a subject people. And so the government was something of a puppet government. The Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem was an aristocratic religious council, 71 members. Theoretically they had the judicial and legislative authority in the Jewish law, but in fact it had been really stripped by the Romans. Now one of the ways you could tell that was the Romans had taken away the power to put people to death directly. Also, the Romans exercised the power to depose or to put in place, to appoint a high priest, and they had all say in any sort of foreign or military matters. So while this was the governing body of the Jews, it was a governing body that governed underneath another governing body that was higher than them. They retained significant authority only in significant religious matters, civil litigation between the Jews, tort law, that kind of thing, and in temple administration. But it was all subject to veto power by the governor, the Roman governor, stationed in Caesarea. And he had a cohort in Jerusalem itself, not a legion, but a large group of soldiers who, for instance, were going to be very important in in saving Paul from being ripped to pieces in the temple later on in the Book of Acts. But in point of fact, the real power at this point lies in the hands of the Romans. Now, the Romans were happy to let the Jews decide minor matters of their own religion within the historical boundaries of what we would today call the State of Israel, Judea, Galilee, and some of the other areas there. But they weren't going to allow their rules to dominate it elsewhere. So, for instance, when in Corinth there's a riot in Acts 18 because of what Paul is preaching, the Jews drag him before the judgment seat of Galileo, or they drag one of the synagogue rulers who had become a Christian before the judgment seat of Galileo. The proconsul there at that time in Achaia, the most important man, says this is a matter of your own religious doctrines. This is not something that the Roman state is concerned with. So far away from Jerusalem, it did not matter to them. And so they did not want to be the people who determined what was blasphemy and what wasn't. There was no Roman law that said if somebody blasphemes a Jewish doctrine or is seen to be a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin in Corinth, they should be put to death. That's why earlier, when you remember the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews, had convicted Jesus of blasphemy, which was a death penalty offense for them, they didn't have the power to put him to death for that. So when they turned him over to the Romans, what they did is they offered up a secular charge against him, not a religious one. So you can see the difference. If you turn to Matthew 26, Remember Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So, Matthew 26. And then looking at verse 62. We read here, and this is during the trial, that awful kangaroo court trial that they had. And the high priest arose and said to him, that is Jesus, do you answer nothing? What is it these men testify against you? But Jesus kept silent. And the high priest answered and said to him, I put you under oath by the living God. Tell us if you are the Christ, the son of God. Jesus said to him, It is as you said. Nevertheless, I say to you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the power and coming on the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest tore his clothes, saying, He has spoken blasphemy. What further need do we have of witnesses? Look, now you have heard his blasphemy. What do you think? They answered and said, He is deserving of death. But that's not what they present to the Romans. When they handed Jesus over to the Romans in Luke 23, one and two, we read, then the whole multitude of them arose and led him to Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, we found this fellow perverting the nation and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar. Now, let me ask you a question. Was that true? Did Jesus forbid to pay tax? No, explicitly he did not. You remember he said, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And he had even held up the coin. Whose image is on this coin? Caesar's. Caesar's coin. Go ahead and give it back to him then. So that was an outright lie, saying that he himself is Christ, a king. So what are they accusing him of in the official indictment? Well, blasphemy is not mentioned at all. It's all purely political, perverting the nation, which is sedition. forbidding payment of taxes to Caesar, and claiming to be Christ a king, the Messiah, that is a rival to Caesar, and thus guilty of rebellion against the Roman state. And here you see, interestingly enough, the conflict between the ancient Jewish model, in which the state had been fundamentally theocratic, and blasphemy was one of the highest crimes, and the Roman model, under which Jewish blasphemy was, they were almost unconcerned about it. The Roman model for the relationship between state and religion can be summed up in one phrase that every Roman would have been familiar with. Religion is part of the state. The state is not subordinate to religion, so the state was in charge of religion. Religion was a department of state. The ultimate head of the official religion was not a priest, believe it or not, but the emperor in his capacity is Pontifex Maximus. Now interestingly enough, the Roman Catholic Church began to fill the power vacuum that was left by the fall of the Roman Empire, many of the titles that the Roman officials had had before were assumed by officials within the Roman Catholic Church. So who is now the Pontifex Maximus, or claims that he is? The Pope, that's right. So the four great priestly colleges in the Roman state where they were composed of senators and high magistrates, priests were elected or co-opted from the senatorial and equestrian orders. And religious office was a political honor. It was something that you didn't have to be particularly pious to get these offices. And the purpose of official religion was civic and political. First off, they wanted to maintain not only the Pax Romana in terms of their troops, but also the Pax Deorum, the peace of the gods, the contractual relationship that the Romans assumed existed between them and their false gods, where they performed the correct rituals, and then the gods would, of course, grant victory and prosperity and stability and so on. And religion was seen by them as a tool of legitimizing the state. legitimizing the social order. It was not about personal salvation. It was not about morality in the Roman state. And then there were all the other religious cults or groups or various different kinds of worship that were authorized by the state or the emperor, and they had to be authorized. If you were going to set up worship, you had to be authorized by the Romans to do it. Otherwise, they would call you an illegal gathering. They would assume that you were gathering for nefarious political reasons. and try to shut you down. Therefore, foreign cults, new religions, were tolerated only if they did not threaten the public order, and only if they didn't refuse what they considered to be the minimal, simple, civic act of reverence towards the emperor, which was you burned the pinch of incense, and what did you say? Caesar is Lord, and who couldn't do that? Christians, because what is the fundamental confession of our faith? Jesus is Lord, of course, so the emperor cult was something that we could not enter into, but it was something that the Romans saw as binding together the empire politically, who offered a sacrifice to the emperor, and it was the ultimate loyalty oath to the Roman state, and therefore there was no, within the Roman state, no independent ecclesiastical authority. There was no separation of church and state with the Romans. There was no way that the priesthood could claim jurisdiction over the emperor. And the Pontifex Maximus, that is the emperor, was the ultimate arbiter of what was religiously permissible. It was all an instrument of politics, political cohesion, political control, and therefore Christianity was seen as offering a challenge to that. because the Christians said that there was something above the state, and there were rules that superseded the rules of the empire and the emperor himself. If the emperor said something that went against what Jesus said, the Christians said, we have to obey Jesus Christ. Now, this is very different from the system that is the Roman system was very different from the system that prevailed in ancient Israel. The Sanhedrin was kind of the last vestige of the old rule of the Jews. In the old system, in the Old Testament, the Deuteronomic system that's set up there, the head of the state was the king. He was the civil and the military ruler. But he was required to obey the Torah, He had to obey the law of God. He was supposed to, for instance, not multiply to himself horses, wives, or gold. And he was supposed to not do things like get chariots and try to build up his own military power. He wasn't even allowed to hold a census to get an idea of how great his military strength was. He could be in serious trouble for doing that. If they tried to blur the lines, if the king attempted to exercise religious duties by, for instance, when Uzziah, King Uzziah entered into the temple and attempted to burn incense, what happened? The Lord struck him with leprosy to show that this is not your job. But let me ask you, did a lot of the kings fail to uphold their calling before God? Yeah, it's easier to think of the kings who did a semi-good job, and even the best of kings. Let's think about it. Who would be the best of the Jewish kings, the one who was the standard for all the others? David, perfect ruler? No. Far from it. Okay. So, then we have the high priest who is the head of the temple and the sacrificial system. He had judicial authority in religious cases, but he did not have civil rules. So, there was a difference between the two different spectrums there. Then we had the prophet. The prophet could come into the presence of the king and rebuke him. You remember how Nathan came before David? And he told him that parable about the man who had taken the beloved sheep of the poor man when he was a rich man with giant flocks. And David had said, such a man should die, you know, exercising the righteous unction of the civil ruler. And of course, Nathan had pointed to him and said, That's you. You're the man in the story. And he had realized that that was the case and so on. And then finally we had one law that came from God that was binding upon everyone. And this law handled all the religious subpart, not just, you know, the big picture things that we find in the moral law, the Ten Commandments, you shall not murder. It got down into the nitty gritty. What does murder consist of? When have you murdered? When have you committed manslaughter? When is it not murder? Can I kill a thief breaking into my house? Well, it depends. Am I allowed to kill a thief breaking into my house during the day under the Torah? No. Am I allowed to kill a thief breaking into my house during the night under the Torah? Yes, you are. So there were, you know, they sought to get into distinctives and the directions that the people should follow. You're supposed to follow everything. Unfortunately, of course, we all know, and if you went through the series in First and Second Kings with me, the implementation was never perfect. The kings, never perfect. The priest, never perfect. And think of it, the priest, even though he offered that one for all, not once for all sacrifice, he offered the yearly sacrifice once a year on Yom Kippur to atone for the sins of the people, did that really atone for their sins? No, and it was something that had to be repeated again and again and again. The author of Hebrews points that out. You didn't have the best of kings, you didn't have the best of priests. Who is the best of the priests, the kings, and the prophets? That's Jesus Christ. So the human system, the theocratic human system here on earth failed, unfortunately. It fell short, and the sacrificial model, even that went away, of course, when the temple was burned. And after the Jewish state ended in 70 AD with the destruction of Jerusalem, There has never been another theocracy on earth, and we will see the perfect theocracy only in the new heavens and the new earth when Jesus rules. That's when that will come in. So what happened? after the Jewish state went away, and then the Roman state, after 300 years, of course, underwent a fundamental change. It was bizarre, wasn't it, that this little band of fishermen and a tax collector and some zealots and so on, what did they manage to do? They managed to preach a gospel that eventually overturned the Roman Empire. and Constantine became a Christian, and the relationship between the Christians and the Roman Empire changed, but also the relationship between church and state changed. Not always for the better, though. There were elements of the Roman system and Christianity that suddenly became combined. So, for instance, for a little while, beginning with Constantine, he essentially functioned as a de facto head of the church, able to call synods, able to, and, you know, for instance, Nicaea. Who called the Council of Nicaea together? Constantine in 325 AD. But gradually, this, what happened was, as the Roman Empire declined and a power vacuum developed, the church began to exercise, particularly officials within the church. You'd seen the change in the church from a system where you had presbyters and deacons, that is elders and deacons, to a system, we would say pastors, elders, and deacons, to a system in which you said, ARP guys are like, eh, I see what you're doing. A system in which you suddenly had bishops and archbishops, and then you had the Bishop of Rome styling himself as what? Pope, the Pontifex Maximus, right? The very center of all Christianity. And eventually you had a Roman Catholic doctrine developed, which was the Two Swords Doctrine. Pope Boniface's bull, Unum Sanctum, which was written in 1302 or promulgated in 1302, declared, furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff, to the Pope. That included the kings. And so the popes were defining themselves as essentially the head, the pyramid, the apex here on earth, the vicar of Christ on earth. I sit in the chair of Peter X cathedra and I make declarations not only religious but temporal. I can raise up kings. and I can bring them down again. This was the two swords theory, and it prevailed throughout the Middle Ages. Now, many kings with great power fought against it and so on, but it was never fully dethroned. Today, this is an idea that the Roman Catholics still have. It's called Catholic integralism. And it states the state, and that is all temporal political society, must be subordinated to the spiritual end of man, which is eternal salvation. Therefore, the state has a duty to recognize the Catholic Church as the true religion, to protect it, and to order public life in conformity with Catholic doctrine whenever possible. And in cases of conflict between temporal good and spiritual good, the spiritual good always has primacy. So the church becomes the final arbiter of what should happen, and it rejects absolutely the strict separation of church and state. It rejects absolutely outright the idea of a neutral secular state. The classic integralist slogan, incidentally, is the state must confess, and this is from Pope Pius XI's 1925 encyclical Quas Primus, the state must confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is king, And that's sometimes shortened to Christ is King. So when, fairly recently, we had this, especially online, you had everybody declaring, and the Roman Catholics were out front, kind of with a smile on their face, saying Christ is King, I knew they meant something different than the average Protestant was confessing there. They're hearkening back to integralism there. They're hearkening back to Pius XI. So when they say Christ is King, There's a lot of baggage that's included in that particular statement. I prefer to say what the apostles declared, what the early church proclaimed, Jesus is Lord over all things. Jesus is Lord is a biblical slogan. I have no heebie-jeebies when somebody says that. Now, one of the things that we need to understand is that two swords model, okay, the idea that ultimately the church was in charge of the spiritual sword, that is the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and the sword that the civil magistrate wields, that they have control ultimately over both of them, that political model began to end with the Reformation. And the critical point was Luther's stand, obviously, at the diet of worms. What happened there? Well, I'm going to bore you with some history. So here we go. If I haven't already bored you with history, let's do it now. In the year 1521, the most powerful ruler in all of Europe, and nobody would have disputed this, was undoubtedly Charles V, the Holy Roman Empire. He ruled over most of Germany. He was also the Archduke of Austria, the King of Spain, Castile and Aragon, and the Lord of the Netherlands, modern-day Holland. Additionally, his conquistadors were all over the New World, South America and Central America, conquering both the Aztec and the Inca empires at that point in time. But in 1521, Charles had a problem. His Roman Catholic advisors came to him and told him that there was this fiendish German monk by the name of... Martin Luther, who was preaching against the indulgences of the Pope, and he was declaring that men could be saved without indulgences, pilgrimages, relics, sacramental efficacy, or any of those things that the Roman Catholic Church declared to be absolutely necessary for salvation. astonishingly, was teaching, as the apostles had, that the key to salvation was faith alone, in Christ alone. He said this was the heart of the gospel. And, of course, the two verses that changed Martin Luther's entire view of life and salvation, that it opened up the gospel, had been the key to him. were Romans 1.16 and 17. And there Paul had written, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, The just shall live by faith. you can be saved by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ right here. And just as Abraham was saved before he was circumcised because he believed the promises of God that from him would come the blessing to the nations, the Messiah Jesus, so too you can be saved wherever you are in a moment by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ before you are even baptized, which the Roman Catholic Church absolutely said was the labor of regeneration. So Charles was frankly more concerned with the various wars he was engaged in. He would have been very happy just to have said, okay, you excommunicate him, and then I'll get the local leader to put him to death, but there was a problem. The local leader was Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, and he was protecting Luther. He was a man who believed that Luther was teaching the truth. He was. So Charles V was obliged to go through the inconvenience of suffering and having Luther come to an imperial diet, the Diet of Worms. That's when all of the electors in the Holy Roman Empire were assembled in one place. All the princes were there, including Luther's protector. The question was, would Luther go? Luther eventually decided to go against the advice of his friends who said, hey, remember what happened to John Huss. The last time this happened at the Council of Constance, the Holy Roman Empire went back on his vow because the Pope had said to him, a power made to a heretic is not binding upon any prince. and they had taken away that safe conduct and thrown him in a dungeon and then eventually put him to death. But what did he do? He appeared as ordered before the Diet of Worms, and as he was presiding, Luther was expecting an opportunity to debate. to deal with the Scriptures, persuade me from the Scriptures that what I'm teaching is wrong. Instead, he was only given two questions. There was a table that was covered with his writings that the new printing press was spreading far and wide throughout Europe and not just Germany now. And he was asked, are these your writings? Luther went over, looked through them, and he said, well, yes. And he said, will you recant them? What would he do? Was he gonna recant them? Was he gonna go against them and say, no, the things that I wrote were wrong? After all, he was standing before the highest civil authority in the land, the magistrate. And he was also standing before the representatives of the church. Church and state combined together, both of them telling him, you must recant. Both were demanding that he stop preaching the gospel message and the consequences for doing, for not doing so, rather, would probably be his execution. Eventually, the safe conduct would be lifted, and he would be open to be put to death. When you were outlaw, incidentally, in the medieval world, that's where the name came from, outside the protection of the law, which meant anyone could kill you, anywhere. You were no longer under the protection of the law. And so he might be declared an outlaw as well as an excommunicant, and that would have been, you know, most people would have considered it to be his death sentence. Now, when the Apostle Peter had been asked to stop preaching in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to stop preaching Jesus in the midst of Jerusalem, what had he said? We ought to obey God rather than man. He answered correctly. Well, Luther didn't back down either. So he said, unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the scriptures, I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. If you remember any phrase from this, It is neither safe nor right to go against conscience, is always true for the Christian. Remember that. May God help me, he said, amen. That's his great here I stand statement. Now, neither should you go against. The Word of God, when you know it's true, no matter what pressure is being applied to you. Normally, and we've discussed this, normally in cases where what the civil magistrate is saying to you is in keeping with the Word of God, don't steal things, should you not steal things? Even when it's easy to steal something? Yes, you should not steal things, right? The magistrate there is enforcing, simply in a particular instance, the law of God. When he says, don't go 65 in a 55 zone, does the word of God have a section on speed limits anywhere? Not really, no. But should we obey the civil magistrate there? Yes, absolutely. When the civil magistrate says, don't have more than one child under any circumstances, and if you get pregnant after the first, you need to have an abortion, should we obey him? No. under no circumstances. When they tell us to go against the gospel, we must not obey it, no matter what the civil magistrate is, no matter who the civil magistrate is. Charles Hodge said something. He said, we ought to obey God rather than men was the principle which the early Christians avowed and on which they acted. They disobeyed the Jewish and heathen authorities whenever they required them to do anything contrary to the will of God. There are cases, therefore, in which disobedience is a duty. How far the rightful authority of rulers extends, the precise point at which the obligation to obedience ceases, must often be a difficult question, and each case must be decided on its merits. The same difficulty exists in fixing the limits of the authority of parents over their children, husbands over their wives, masters over their servants. Remember, this is not something that you simply say, no, I don't, yeah, I don't feel like obeying you. Therefore, I'm going to say that God has not told me to obey you. So that's not the case. Now, We need to see the immense political ramifications of this. Not only the apostle saying we ought to obey God rather than man, but Martin Luther saying no to someone who styled himself the Holy Roman Emperor, saying he is a Christian civil magistrate. Because like the Sanhedrin had become false and was requiring men to stop proclaiming the gospel, that Christian magistrate in that case had to be defied. In the case of Rome, when the state required men to embrace pluralism and emperor worship, they had to be defied. And in the case of Roman Catholicism, when the state, the church, asserted authority over the civil power and it became corrupt, then both church and state, who were inextricably intertwined at this point in time, they had to be resisted. So, as a result, and this was inevitable, you got not only reformation religiously, But in the civil realm, you got civil war. Because in order to exercise your religion, you had to resist at the point of arms. But what would replace then for those who were reformed, those who were in the midst of the Reformation, the first and then the second Reformation, the first Reformation coming in the 1500s and then the second Reformation in the 1600s. What would replace the old Roman Catholic model and what should we, the heirs of the Reformation and the second Reformation adopt? What is the biblical system or the most biblical system? What should our laws be based on? Well, that's a question for the next sermon. because we do not have time to address that today. So we'll talk about the way that thinking on that particular subject developed and how it worked out for Presbyterians in particular. So I would encourage you to be here next week and we'll continue to talk about that. But in the meantime, regardless of what government we live under, we remember that there is one and only one final governor who we live under, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Ultimately, no matter who you work for, Jesus is your boss. No matter which country you live in, Christ is your Lord. And so therefore, be so zealous to obey Him in whatever situation you're in. And the first thing that we need to do in terms of obeying Him is to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to bow the knee for him in salvation. So let's go before him now. God, our Father, we thank you so much that you've given us your word to direct us. But oh, Lord, we have to confess that so often we get it really mixed up, messed up. We ignore it. we break your commandments. And Lord, were it not for the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, your restraining of our evil, your common grace exercised in this world, we know that that's the reason why we haven't, for instance, destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons, because of your grace. We ask now, Lord, that you would help us to listen to you, to obey your commandments, and to desire to obey the apostles' instructions to live peaceably with all men, but to obey God rather than men when they give us instruction that goes against what you say. Help us now, O Lord, as we seek to determine how we should model our own government upon your instructions in the Word, and how it is we should live out our lives in this world. Looking forward to the day when the government will be perfect, when Jesus returns. And it's in His name we pray. Amen.