The Romans 13 Template for Biblical Dominion, Ten Reasons Why Romans 13 is Not About Secular Government

If conscience-motivated submission is required to secular government, then it’s also required for all other usurpers who might replace one’s husband, parents, or master.

God-ordained civil authorities stand in the place of God when adjudicating on His behalf:

[King Jehoshaphat] set judges in the land throughout all the fenced cities of Judah, city by city, and said to the judges, Take heed what ye do: for ye judge not for man, but for Yahweh, who is with you in the judgment…. And he charged them, saying, Thus shall ye do in the fear of Yahweh, faithfully, and with a perfect heart. (2 Chronicles 19:5-9)

For the criminally-disposed person, submission to the government depicted by Paul is enforced by judges who execute God’s civil sanctions. For the citizen who lives to do his King’s bidding, submission is engendered by love for His King from a Holy Spirit-quickened conscience.

Nowhere does Paul appeal to the Christian conscience for the sake of anything secular, as alleged by those who maintain Romans 13 is about secular government. Instead, conscience-engendered submission is always directed at God-ordained authorities, whether they be civil leaders, parents, husbands, or spiritual leaders:

Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God.... Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you. (Hebrews 13:7, 17)

Grieving the Holy Spirit

Promoting that which is evil grieves the Spirit:

Quench not the Spirit.... Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
(1 Thessalonians 5:19-21)

Those who have not seared their consciences are equipped by the Holy Spirit to discern good and evil, including biblical authorities and secular powers. To fail to discriminate between these two polar opposite types of civil leadership is tantamount to a Christian endorsement of government corruption:

Therefore the law is slacked, and [righteous] judgment doth never go forth: for the wicked doth compass about [surround, NASB] the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceedeth. (Habakkuk 1:4)

To use Romans 13 to foster secular government is a classic case of Isaiah 5:20, calling evil good and good evil. Rather than pleasing the Holy Spirit by engendering obedience to righteous government, the Holy Spirit is instead certainly grieved when secular government is promoted.

No Vacuums

There are no vacuums when it comes to ethics and law. Consequently, government is never neutral. It either serves God or is opposed to Him. It’s either righteous or unrighteous, as determined by whether its laws are based upon Yahweh’s unchanging morality.¹

Secular governments are not all equally wicked. Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that regardless how good a secular government may otherwise appear, it remains evil, if only because it rejects Yahweh as its sovereign.

Case in point: the 18th-century Constitutional Republic. The United States government today cannot hold a candle to the government first framed in 1787. Someone may, therefore, contend Christians would have done well to submit to the government originally framed by the Constitutional Republic’s founders. However, it was indiscriminate Christian submission to this very government that’s responsible for what America is enduring today, including government-financed in utero infanticide,² government-legalized sodomite “marriages,” government-approved transgender bathrooms, and government-sanctioned polytheism.

There’s hardly an Article or Amendment in the Constitution that’s not antithetical, if not seditious, to Yahweh’s sovereignty and morality.³ These sins of commission aside, every single problem America faces today as a nation can be traced back to the framers’ sins of omission—that is, the failure to expressly establish government on Yahweh’s moral law as its standard for society. For example, Exodus 21:22-25⁴ would have largely eliminated in utero infanticide, Leviticus 20:13⁵ would have prevented today’s homosexual agenda, Deuteronomy 22:5⁶ would have precluded today’s transgender bathrooms, and Exodus 34:13-15⁷ would have averted the Muslim invasion.⁸

America today is reaping the whirlwind resulting from the wind sown by the 18th-century founding fathers:

[B]ecause they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law ... they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.... (Hosea 8:1, 7)

Had the 18th-century Christians rejected the secular Republican form of government created from Enlightenment traditions (no matter how good or innocuous it appeared at the time), we wouldn’t today be reaping their whirlwind in tens of thousands of different ways. This whirlwind will only intensify until we repent of our complicity in our American forbears’ sins against Yahweh.

Reynolds v. the United States

It didn’t take long for this allegedly neutral government to formally become overtly anti-Christian in what is arguably the most consequential case ever adjudicated by the Supreme Court. A mere one hundred years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Reynolds v. the United States (1879) addressed the Mormon Church’s claim that polygamy was a right afforded them under Amendment 1. Because most Americans find polygamy repugnant, the magnitude of Supreme Court Justice Morrison Waite’s decision is lost on them:

Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice?... So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land.⁹

Contrary to Matthew 7:21-27¹⁰ and James 1:22-25,¹¹ the Supreme Court ruled that a man’s actions can be severed and isolated from his faith and thereby judged illegal according to the Constitution and its supplemental edicts. This precedent paved the way for any Christian¹² action based upon a Biblical conviction—such as preaching against sodomy or refusing to bake a wedding cake for homosexual “weddings”—to be arbitrarily outlawed in the same fashion. Had the framers established Yahweh’s unchanging law and its predetermined immutable morality as the supreme law of the land, polygamy and human sacrifice (and all other issues) would have fallen under its jurisdiction and thereby been determined as either lawful or unlawful.

It only took a hundred years for this ostensibly innocuous government to officially strip Christians of their dominion responsibility¹³ and send them cowering to their church buildings, transforming what was Christendom in the 1600s into mere four-walled Christianity today.

Submitting to Evil Does Not Equate With Holy Spirit Conviction

To argue for a secular government in Romans 13 is to argue we are obligated to submit to that which is evil from a Holy Spirit-convicted conscience. It is unconscionable to think Paul would advance such theology.

Paul does appeal to our Christian conscience to submit to government. But the government he depicts is a government under the supervision and direction of God-ordained authorities, who attend continually upon doing good to the righteous and either bringing the unrighteous to judgment or deterring them from their wicked predispositions.

END NOTES

1. A Biblical Constitution: A Scriptural Replacement for Secular Government

See also series of ten online books on each of the Ten Commandments and their respective statutes, and judgments, beginning with Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

2. The battle against this atrocity begins with identifying it correctly. By calling it “abortion,” we’ve acquiesced to the opposition’s terminology. Look up “abortion” and “miscarriage” in any dictionary. A miscarriage is an abortion. What doctors (and parents) do to infants in the womb is murder. Had Roe v. Wade been waged over infanticide rather than abortion, it would have never made it to the court room. In fact, by employing the word “abortion,” Roe v. Wade was won before it ever got to court.

The Greek word brephos employed in the New Testament for infants already born is the same word used for infants in the womb (Luke 2:12 and Luke 1:41), without specifying the precise moment they became a brephos. Therefore, our only option is to accept they became such at conception. Thus, intentionally killing a brephos at any point is “brephocide” or, more properly, infanticide.

3. Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective

4. “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot....” (Exodus 21:22-25)

5. “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:13)

6. “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto Yahweh thy God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

7. “[Y]e shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves. For thou shall worship no other god: for Yahweh, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou … go a whoring after their gods….” (Exodus 34:13-15)

8. I use the Muslims as only an example. The same pertains to any non-Christian religion and its adherents, including Judaism, Hinduism, etc.

9. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879)

10. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.... [D]epart from me ye who do iniquity [lawlessness, NASB]. Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:21-27)

11. “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.... But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.” (James 1:22-25)

12. This is not to say The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka the Mormon Church) is Christian. It is not Christian, but rather a cult masquerading as Christian.

13. “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We aredestroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-6)