Sunday, April 25, 2021 PM

Bibles, and we're going to eventually be in Matthew chapter 10. Prior to that, we'll take a whirlwind tour through parts of Genesis, Exodus, and Matthew. So we'll get there eventually. But we are starting a new series.

The Biblical Basis for Christian Resistance to the State

Last week was the first opportunity we had to study this topic. It's called A Doctrine of Christian Resistance to the State, and we were reflecting upon the fact that, I know it's a surprise, but sometimes the civil government doesn't agree with the Word of God, and they advocate for things and order things and structure things and do things that are not in agreement with the Word of God.

And so when it comes down to it, there will be some times when the state will say one thing, and then the people of God are going to resist, dissent, decide otherwise. And the reasons why we do, and the way that we do, and then what we do afterward, matter.

They matter to Christ. They matter to the Lord. After all, the whole quandary set before us is the state is not submitting to the Lord in this particular way, and then they're telling us to do things that are not in agreement with God's Word.

Then our response to that had better be in submission to God's Word and the way that He wants us to live. It can't just be anything we want. And so we've got to give some thought to that. This last year has certainly thrown our need for studying this into sharp relief, and so we're going to study it.

Last time, we tried to lay out some basic thoughts, some basic introductory thoughts about authority, about God's authority and His sovereignty over all other authorities. Authority is not bad. God created the world in such a way that there were various authorities.

Authorities are good and to be structured under His Word, under His law, under His truth. And we considered the different spheres of authority, that of personal responsibility, that of self-government, the image of God.

We are made in God's image and we are subject to God. We are responsible for the things that we think and say and feel and do. We've been made in the image of God to manifest His glory as we mediate His goodness.

We have a uniform we wear day in and day out. And whether or not we live up to the code of that uniform, that's determined by God Himself as He has given us His Word and expressed His character in His law.

But we are, each one of us, we are not to be autonomous, autonomous, self-law. We're not a law to ourselves. We are not autonomous. We are under the law of God. Each one of us is personally responsible to Him.

We talked about that last week, but the family, family has a structure and an order. There are roles within the family. There is a government to the family. Wives are to submit to husbands and husbands are to love their wives and lead them as Christ loved and led, leads the church.

Children are to submit to their parents and honor their parents and parents are to raise their children and direct their children to fear the Lord. So, family has a government, but a family is not a law unto itself to do whatever a family thinks is best.

A family is not a mafia. The family is submitted to Christ and He is the ruler of the family. And then, of course, we have the church. A church has a government, a polity, a way things are structured and organized, elders and deacons and a congregation, and a certain way that we're supposed to do things, a way that we're structured.

All of that is determined by the Lord. He's the head of the church. So a church is not an authority unto itself. It's not a cult or any kind of pagan religion. We are submitted to Christ. So also, the civil government, the state, has been instituted by God and it is not autonomous either.

It does not rule for its own sake. It is to be submitted to the Lord according to His will and His plans and His purposes. So all these things we saw from Genesis, the image of God and the family and the church and the state, we can all see that in Genesis where it originates and all submitted to the Lord and plenty, plenty of passages we could look at if we were just considering government and authority in general.

We could spend a lot of time looking at each one of those aspects and seeing the various passages of Scripture that support it. Particularly, we are going to be focusing on what do we do as individuals, families and a church when the state contradicts the Word of God and orders things and instructs us to do the same.

What then? What is a doctrine of Christian resistance to the state, a biblical approach? Now, we talked about last week that we have seen, we have examples in the Scriptures where that occurs. And I was asking you for some examples and Daniel was first on the list as far as individuals who resisted the state when the state said to do things that were against the Word of God.

We talked about the family, not as clear, but then we thought about Gideon and his family, how they resisted the state and the civil government, the way things were being run in terms of Baal and the family stood together against Baal.

We remember the family of Jacob standing against the evil, immoral state and Shechem. We also have resistance to the state in the form of the church, but we have Nathan as a prophet, Elijah as a prophet, someone called to preach the Word of God to the people and saying, hey, everybody, we need to adhere to the Word of the Lord.

And Nathan and Elijah had to resist the state. In the case of Nathan, he resisted David's evil and David repented. In the case of Elijah, he resisted the evil of Jezebel and Ahab and not so much. They both died bloody deaths in rebellion to God.

And then we also, as a category, we're going to eventually get to in terms of what happens when one civil government resists another civil government. We have plenty of examples of that in the scriptures as well, everything from Joshua leading the people of Israel through the land of Canaan to what happened in the days of the judges when they had to resist the tyranny that came in among them to Nehemiah leading the people in resistance to Nehemiah as one local magistrate under the authority of the emperor of Persia, resisting other magistrates who were trying to force their will upon them and how there was resistance between the magistrates within the Persian empire.

Did you know that the Bible is sufficient? We have all sorts of examples and instructions to tell us what to do in all of these various complex situations. We're given a robust, sufficient word. We don't have to stumble about in the dark and saying, well, wisdom is somewhere out there in the middle ground.

Wisdom is in the fear of the Lord and the fear of the Lord is...we have the fear of the Lord when we listen to what he has to say and submit ourselves to his word. How important is resistance to the state, to the godless state, to the pagan state, to the pagan persecuting state?

How important should we think of this doctrine? How important is this doctrine to us as believers, followers of Christ, so on? I mean, check this in your own heart. I mean, here we are having...this is our new Sunday night Bible study.

Is this really important? Is this kind of trivia? Like, well, this is of some interest. Is it theoretical? Yeah, if we ever get around to having that situation, be glad to know how to approach it. Is it debatable?

Interesting topic. Love to see both sides of it, see how it shapes up. Or is it somehow vital at some level? This topic shows up a lot in the Bible, and so we have a lot that we can learn from it. And I think it shows up a lot because it's important and it is vital that we understand the spheres of authority, the spheres of government, and what to do when they clash rather than cohere under the authority of Christ.

And in fact, biblical resistance is a big part of the story of Christ and the story of the church in the Scriptures. Let's think about how resistance to the state is a part of the story of Christ, the person and the work of Jesus Christ.

Christ’s Resistance to the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and Violent Arrest

Where do we find, in the story of Jesus, any kind of resistance to the state? Any ideas? Yes, he did not submit to the demands of the Sanhedrin or the Jewish leaders to cease and desist or change his message because his message was not helpful, right?

And in fact, he said things that depicted the Sanhedrin and the ruling class in Second Temple Judaism, he depicted them as less than attractive. They didn't feature as the good guys in his stories that he told.

And he knew that they didn't like it. People told him he didn't like his disciples. Did you know that you upset them when you said this? And he just continued on, not because he was mean-spirited, but because it was essential and necessary.

Any other resistance going on? Yes. Yes, so he educated Pilate about who he was as a magistrate. Pilate didn't know that, but he needed to know that. And again, people get the ideas like, well, Jesus, when it was time for him to be arrested, you know, he didn't resist and he told Peter not to resist and so on.

Well, Jesus, clearly, many, many incidents before the Garden of Gethsemane, people wanted to kill him, and it did not happen. And he resisted in a variety of ways, sometimes simply passing through their midst to the crowd who wanted to, you know, the city elders who decided he was unjust and time to throw him over a cliff in Nazareth, or simply hiding out and not being around the people who wanted to kill him.

And then when Peter drew his sword, cut off the ear of the servant, Jesus told Peter to put his sword in his sheath. He didn't tell him, melt it down and get rid of it. He said, put it back in its sheath, because he had also educated his disciples earlier that, you know, they needed a couple of swords for their journey because, I mean, hey, there's going to be bandits along the way.

So people get the idea of Christ being a total pacifist, but he wasn't. And in fact, later on when he destroyed Jerusalem in 1870, you can see that Christ is no pacifist. Judgment had to be rendered. Think about his parents.

Mary and Joseph Fleeing Herod’s Tyranny

How did his parents resist the state? Yeah, they fled to Egypt. His parents got wind of the fact that Herod, who was, you know, he was the civil government, he was the head of the civil government. He was a minister of God, right?

And he declared that all male children under a certain age should be slaughtered in Bethlehem. And Mary and Joseph defied the civil government. They didn't say, well, God put the government in charge, so we're going to stay here and we have to offer up our child because we have to obey the government.

They ran. That's an act of resistance. They ran. They fled down to Egypt. And then later on, after Herod had died, they were going to return and they heard that Herod Antipas was ruling in Judea, so they went back to Galilee, and so they were hiding out some more.

And Nazareth is a backwater... Nazareth was a one-well town, by the way. That's what it was called. It was a one-well town. It was so small and off the beaten path. It was not a place a lot of people went.

So Jesus grew up in hiding, out in the boonies where nobody would be looking for him. So that's an act of resistance as well. Yeah, so when we go back a little bit, it's interesting to see that resistance to the state is...resistance to a godless, perverse, persecuting state is biblical in that we see it in the very life of Christ.

Abraham’s Break with Ur, Egypt, and Chedorlaomer

But let's go back all the way. Let's go back to Abraham. Abraham, when he was called out of Ur, we're told in Joshua that he was a pagan worshiper, he was an idolater. He left Ur. In fact, God told him to leave his family and to go to the land that God would show him.

So he broke with his culture, he broke with his family, he left all of that behind, and he became a worshiper of the one true God and him only, and then moved to Canaan where he proceeded to litter the whole pagan land that he had yet to possess with altars to the one true God.

So Abraham is not exactly going with the flow. And then we see that there is a famine, chapter 12, in Genesis. There's a famine and there's no food. So, well, hey, everyone's going to go find food somewhere.

So he goes down to Egypt. When he is there, he engages in resistance. How does he engage in resistance? What does he tell his wife? Yeah, we are in a place, we're in a part of the city, we're in a neighborhood where they see you, they're going to kill me and take you if they think that you're married to me.

That's the way that this neighborhood rolls. This is the way that Egypt goes. So he said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to resist the local tyranny. And we are going to say, this is our story.

We're brother and sister. And he's like, well, Abraham was not much of a man of faith, was he? He didn't trust the Lord. So, hang on a second. Are you saying that lying is always wrong? Thou shalt not bear false witness against who?

Your neighbor, your neighbor, your neighbor. When you're at war with someone, it will be most unrighteous of you to tell them where you're hiding the Jews, Corrie ten Boom. Most unrighteous of you to tell Pharaoh where to go kill those little Hebrew babies.

Most unrighteous of Rahab to out the spies. So, in this case, Abraham says, we're resisting. The result of him resisting and protecting his family from the local tyranny is that, by the grace of God, they end up leaving Egypt well-endowed, plundering Egypt on their way out.

We also find Abraham resisting the state. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abba and Zebulun and Zoar, five kings, rebelled against their overlord. Those five magistrates rose up against another magistrate named Chedorlaomer, who had an alliance in the north, and it kept those five cities paying tribute to him.

This is in Genesis 14. They all decide, we're done paying him tribute. We're going to rebel. We're not going to pay him any more money, protection money. We're done with him. And so, he comes sweeping down with his armies and beats them, destroys their army, and takes all the survivors captive and all the spoils from those five cities.

And he takes them all, and he's going to take them back north, and they're going to be slaves forever. And among them was Lot, the nephew of Abraham. And Abraham says, not so fast. And he grabs a couple of allies, and they go chase down Chedorlaomer, 318 men.

With 318 men, they chased down Chedorlaomer, and at the night, they split their forces into three groups, and they arrayed them at night and sent them running. They attacked, they resisted the state, and God gave him the victory.

So, he delivers his fellow, Lot, right? He delivers his fellow from the state, from being enslaved to this tyrant, Chedorlaomer. And then he goes where? He goes to a priest. He goes to a priest, Melchizedek, priest of God Most High, king of the city of Salem, Ereshalom, Jerusalem.

And so, he delivers his fellow from the state, and then he goes to a priest. Interesting thing happens right after that. Chapter 15 of Genesis, Abraham encounters the holy God and receives promises about his people.

So, we see Abraham acting as a king when he gathered his forces and went and opposed Chedorlaomer. We see him acting as a priest when he encounters the holy God, setting up the sacrifices and encountering him in Genesis 15, and then receives promises from the Lord as a prophet.

Very interesting pattern because it happens again in Exodus. In Exodus 1, we have, as we do with Abraham, in Exodus 1, we have resistance to the state on an individual level and a family level. On an individual level, we have the midwives resisting Pharaoh's command to drown the male babies of the Jews in the Nile River.

He wanted to kill infants. Now, on his head, he wore a circlet with a serpent on his head, and serpents always want to kill infants. Pharaoh was no different. He was trying to murder these men, these infant male children because he knew that if he could slaughter them, then he could conquer and totally assimilate all of the Jews into Egyptian culture, and he would win the day.

He was trying to destroy Israel. By extension, therefore, the serpent was trying to destroy the seed of the woman who was to come. The serpent was after the seed of the woman by killing all the male children of Israel.

The midwives resist. He told the midwives, when you get there and it's a male child, you take that child and you throw it in the Nile River. And they didn't say, well, God ordained the state, so we have to just do whatever the state says.

They weren't statists. They lied to Pharaoh and said, oh, they, you know, these Hebrew women, that boy, they give birth before we can ever get to them. And God blessed them. And God blessed them because they resisted the tyranny of the state.

So individual resistance and family resistance. Jochebed, Moses' mother, says, I'm not giving up my baby. I'm going to hide him and nurture him and love him. And then he got too loud. Apparently, Moses is kind of a loud kid.

Sometimes we have loud children. We do. So he's like, I got to hide. She's like, hide this one. So she hides him in a basket made out of bulrushes with pitch all around it. It's a little floating cradle.

And Miriam's hiding out, trying to keep a watch over him, right? That's the family resisting the state. We're all in this together. The state says we have to kill one of our own. No, we're not going to.

We're going to protect ourselves against tyranny. Well, we have the resistance on a family level, don't we? Just like with Abraham resisting on a family level protecting his wife. And then what does Moses do in Exodus 2?

He delivers a fellow from the state. Abraham delivered a fellow from the state. So does Moses. Here is a fellow Israelite who's about to get beaten to death by an Egyptian slave driver. And he kills the slave driver, protects his fellow man, and well, soon after it's known.

And then where does Moses go? To a priest, Jethro, priest of Midian. Isn't it interesting what happened with Abraham is happening again with Moses? He goes to a priest in Midian, that's Exodus 2. Chapter 3, guess what happens?

Moses has an encounter with a holy God, burning bush, and then receives promises about God's people. Interesting pattern that we're reading here. And in this way, Moses, trained up in Pharaoh's household, takes the law into his own hand as a king.

And we have him encountering the holy God as a priest, and then he is called as a prophet to tell the truth, the promises of God's people, and to confront Pharaoh. So it's very interesting. We have the story centered around Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews, all these essential promises to Israel, first given to Abraham.

What a critical moment in the story. Second most critical moment in the story is Moses, right? Moses and the survival of the people of Israel while they're in bondage in Egypt. And then what happens next?

We have the story of Christ. We have the resistance of the wise men who refused to report back in to Herod to let him know where he can go kill the Christ child. The individual resistance of the wise men.

We have the resistance of a family, Joseph and Mary, taking their child Jesus and fleeing to Egypt. And then we have Christ acting in his kingly, priestly, and prophetic work, delivering his brethren into right relationship with God to bring to pass all his promises concerning his people.

So I'd say that biblical resistance is at a very central part of the whole story. All right? We're talking about Abraham, Moses, and then, of course, Christ. Resistance to the state is interwoven with all of those stories.

So we can't possibly then just say, well, it's the state. They've got more guns than we do. They've got more money than we do. They have more lawyers than we do. So whatever they say, it's the will of God.

Just do it. All right? That isn't even the easy way out. You follow that down to the path. Now, we have this, the story of Christ really is also the story of his people. And coming up next time, and in preparation, I would encourage you to read through Matthew chapter 10.

Matthew 10 and the Church’s Response to Persecution

Matthew 10, Jesus is sending out his disciples to do the work of preaching the kingdom of God, good news to folks, and he wants them to be like him. You know, he tells them at one point, you know, no student is above his teacher.

You know, this is what I'm doing, I want you to do as well. And he equips them and empowers them and instructs them to do as he has been doing, going through the cities and the villages of Israel. Here's the good news of the kingdom, the gospel of the kingdom.

And as you go, he gives some specific instructions about what happens when things don't go well. When things don't go well, what do you do? Well, he gives them instructions in that, and you can read it for yourself in Matthew 10, and we'll look at that together because Jesus will give a wide variety of ways to resist the tyranny of a pagan or unjust state.

He gives a variety of ways. And it's not always a one-size-fits-all solution, but we want to hear how Jesus instructs his disciples in that regard first because that was discipleship 101. It was like, hey, here's the basics of Christianity.

And woven in there was a whole lot of instructions about what to do when you get arrested. Or when they try to kill you, here's what you do. And that was basic discipleship. Then following up past that, what I want us to do is just take a few glances at stories in the book of Acts to see how Jesus' instructions back in Matthew 10 are fleshed out in the life of the church when they first got started and got going past Pentecost.

What did that look like? And I think that that will give us a healthy biblical perspective to begin thinking then about some of the more particular things that were instructed in, you know, say, Romans 13 and passages in Peter and so on.

These are very helpful instructions, but we want to read them in light of the rest of Scripture and not as if it was all there. And so that will, I think, help us to have a better approach. That's what I want to do as far as our developing a biblical doctrine of Christian resistance to the state.

And any feedback, questions, observations from the elders tonight. And then if the Lord leads past that, as we try to make application of these biblical principles, it would be helpful to see not only how things have worked out in church history or how things are working out for our brothers and sisters in Christ in other places in the world, but then also to try to make some application to our particular context here in what is most obviously on the horizon.

And that way, I hope we will have a very practical way forward. All right. Well, let's close by singing the doxology together.