God has created human government to be a blessing for his people; and as long as this government is under God, it will be and should be supported. Rather than “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” the scriptural view is that government is “over the people, under God, for his glory, and for the common good” (WCF 23:1).

This is part of a mini-series on foundational building blocks for Bible followers who wish to think about politics in accord with Scripture. As such, this mini-series explores a chapter from the Bible with as much concentrated political core material as any.

It is said that if table conversation is to remain friendly, it should treat both religion and politics with detente. The passage considered in this chapter violates both rules of polite dinner conversation at the same time. In fact, not only does this passage in Romans 13 broach those subjects, but furthermore, it puts them in right order. This is one of the more important chapters in all of Scripture for Christians in all times to understand.

The Bible does not explicitly reveal a divine position on all political ideas, bills, and treaties—although biblical principles underpin or contradict most legislation. All legislative measures should have their presuppositions, prudence, and effect measured by Scripture. As far as explicit counsel from God on some subjects, however, the divine rule has not been revealed for all matters of policy. At times, one has to be satisfied with general principles; all that one might like to know has not been revealed. Since the Bible does not pretend to issue opinions on every political issue, certain proposals must be evaluated with prudence.

Our concern is not with what God has not revealed, but to be faithful to what he has revealed. We should be enormously pleased if Christians merely acted on the amount of revealed information in civic affairs. Several decades ago, Richard J. Neuhaus wrote about an abysmal abdication from the public sector in The Naked Public Square. Perhaps as truthfully as any, he captured our age with that metaphor. His argument was that, whereas once monuments to religious values stood in colonial public squares, now those same secularized public squares have been stripped, leaving monuments naked and devoid of reference to spiritual or eternal values.

Nations have opportunities to reclothe public squares with foundational spiritual values, or else they may trek downward along the path of godlessness, toward further deterioration. Christians need to be armed with the sword of God’s Word in reforming the state, not with worldly weapons (2 Cor. 10:4).

With that in mind, there is no clearer passage to study on God and government than Romans 13. This is the fullest single treatment of that subject in revealed literature. God has not left believers in the dark about matters of state, but has addressed those also in his unerring Word. Along with the previous biblical teaching on government, Romans 13 supports and enhances a coherent view of the state. God has created human government to be a blessing for his people; and as long as this government is under God, it will be and should be supported. Rather than “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” the scriptural view is that government is “over the people, under God, for his glory, and for the common good” (WCF 23:1).

Christians do well to note some of the features of this passage, along with God’s prescriptions for the role of the state. After these matters are understood correctly, then the role of the citizen will be addressed.

Key Assumptions

God has designed government to work, and that necessarily involves authority. Authority is the proper discharge of responsibility by those who are assigned certain tasks. A recent statement of faith surmises: “Human society can be neither well-ordered nor prosperous unless it has some people invested with legitimate authority.”^[1] The opposite of authority is anarchy—the rule of lawlessness. In a state without authority, society becomes chaotic.

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