"Is the Government God?" Luke 20:20-26 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Well, the buzzword right now in social media and in politics is that of Christian nationalism.

There's headlines in newspapers and uh long thoughtful think pieces written by failed presidential candidates about the dangers of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism uh has become a phrase that few probably even heard of a few years ago and now has taken on a life entirely of its own.

It is probably as well-defined as it is helpful, which is to say, not very well-defined nor very helpful.

To some, the phrase Christian nationalism means anything they don't like from Republicans.

Um for others, Christian national nationalism means anything that Christians want in society.

I was living in California when they passed a constitutional amendment uh banning gay marriage that was struck down by a openly homosexual trial judge at the federal level.

And in invalidating that constitutional amendment, he said that it had to be struck down because Christians were a large voice in advocating for it.

And there was no non-religious sectarian was the word he used, no sectarian reason to justify being opposed to gay marriage except for religious animus, which is therefore unconstitutional.

So he took this concept of Christian nationalism and applied it to Christians that were voting their conscience in society.

So in his mind, Christian nationalism was anytime Christians voted for something that they thought was a biblical mandate, that is Christian nationalism.

I read a book recently on Christian nationalism that was a little bit frustrating for me.

It seemed to define Christian nationalism based upon two events, January 6th and the election of President Trump.

Those two things marked Christian nationalism in our own society, according to this uh this author, in a fairly popular book.

I won't necessarily name it, but if you ask me afterwards, I'll tell you.

Um it was a frustrating book to read because it implied that Christian nationalism had its birth five years ago.

Um, it implied that Christian nationalism was an American uh phenomena uh in relationship to President Trump.

But the truth is Christian nationalism has a long history uh in the Christian church.

And even for those, Baptists generally tend to reject Christian nationalism when it's properly defined.

Even for those who reject it, you recognize that it has existed well before President Trump.

It has existed uh really into the Puritan era, that Christian nationalism was an often an attempt to have government oversight of uh religion, over true religion.

You saw the Puritans as a rejection of that in large part.

You saw the King of England trying to maintain control of the Church of England, even as it broke away from Catholicism.

And you saw the Puritans and the nonconformists who refused to honor the king's tinkering with religion, with who can preach and what they can preach on and when they can preach and so forth.

I mean, that is true, Christian nationalism, right there.

If you're not recognizing the queen is the head of the church or the king is the head of the church, that is, I think, a truer form of Christian nationalism than what you see often on TV today.

So people will ask me, do you reject Christian nationalism?

And my normal go-to response is, what do you mean by that?

You tell me what you mean by that, and I can tell you whether or not I support it or reject it.

And I think often people are unwilling to define it in any way that is helpful or useful.

Um but in reading recently I came across a new phrase I had never discovered uh before, and that was the phrase of the secular epoch.

It was Michael or epoch, secular epoch, or a secular era, and that was Michael Horton that used it in a uh book edited by J.K.

Smith on secularism.

And Michael Horton sounds like a dispensationalist.

Let me read you the sentence, and I think you'll uh agree with me.

He says that God works through his different covenants in different ways, different eras of time or epochs of time, and the age that goes from the ascension to the second coming can rightly be described as the secular epoch and what he, or epoch, the secular epoch.

And what he means by that is that something unique happens between the ascension of Jesus Christ and his second coming, where God is interacting with people in a covenantal framework differently than he was before that.

If you are familiar with dispensationalism, you hear that and you say, that is dispensationalism.

The idea that God works with different people in different eras of human history in different ways for his own purposes.

But what I liked about what Michael Horton said is that something changes with, I would say Pentecost more than the ascension, something changes in the church age where God is no longer working through one national people, but God is working through his church.

Horton calls that secularism, and I hadn't heard it called that before, and I really like it.

It's the contrast with the old covenant, probably before the exile era, 470 BC, in that era in prior, God was working through the nation of Israel.

His covenant promises were given to Israel.

People in a right covenantal relationship with God experienced that covenantal relationship through the nation Israel.

Israel lost the land in uh four centuries before Christ, they were put into exile, even though they returned for uh a couple hundred years before four hundred years before Jesus comes, they didn't return to their king, they didn't return to their sacrificial system really for the most part.

They were lost and, in a sense, distant from God because of that.

When you the New Testament comes, the New Testament does not restore the nation Israel to uh the recipient of God's covenantal promises.

That will happen in the kingdom.

In the millennial kingdom, God will return to working through Israel, but in this gap in between, the church age, we often call it, God is not working through a nation.

God is not working through a nation.

In this church age, God, and this is why Michael Horton calls it a secular era, God is working not through a nation, but there are nation states that govern the earth.

God is working through his church.

I think that's very important to remind ourselves of, because every election it seems that many Americans fall into the trap of covenantalism.

Every election, many Americans start talking like a covenantalist, especially in church.

You will hear people say, and I hear this every four years, you hear people say, if only Americans would humble themselves and bow their knee before the Lord, then the Lord would return and do a mighty work in this in this nation.

That's the language of covenantalism.

That's the language that implies your nation is in a covenant with God.

That's quoting Old Testament passages and it's applying them to the United States as if the United States was in that, was that nation that was in a covenantal relationship with God.

Now, the United States had a founding that displays God's favor on us for sure.

The United States has freedoms enshrined in our Constitution that guard democracy and guard religious freedom and guard a Christian worldview, I think, delivering it unto us.

And yet that is not the same thing as saying we're in a covenantal relationship with God.

Our country does not have a covenantal relationship with God any different than any other country has.

And so this idea that if we do X, God will keep his end of the bargain and do Y, that's covenantal language, and I don't think that it's helpful.

And that probably is closer to Christian nationalism than what you see in the news or in the media.

I think it's worth thinking about this for a second because it is not unique to 2016.

It is not unique to January 6th.

This idea of how the church and state function together, uh, it goes all through church history.

It goes back to Augustine's book, uh, The City of God.

Augustine's book, The City of God, which is, I call it a book, it's you know, 14 or so different books that are built together in a massive volume.

Uh he works through those issues there, and he spends, you know, 10 or 11 of those books uh basically making fun of the Roman Empire, showing how the Roman Empire is uh, you know, a mess of contradictions and idolatry.

And he basically shows that when people in Rome take their gods seriously, they give themselves over to foolishness.

You know, Roman gods kill each other, Roman gods resurrect from the dead.

There's all kinds of craziness with Roman gods.

It doesn't, it's not virtuous to believe in that, Augustine argues.

But then Augustine makes a point that would not be popular today, I think, in the United States.

Augustine shows that when Rome was at its most pagan, it was at its most secure.

And as Christianity entered into the Roman world and grew in the Roman world, Rome teetered and eventually collapsed.

So why is that?

I think we often think that the more religious a country is, the more favor will be upon them by God.

The more Christian a country is, the more favor will be on them by God.

That's certainly not what Augustine argues in the City of God.

In fact, Augustine argues that there's two different kingdoms.

He's kind of the first to elaborate two spheres, he puts forward a two kingdom approach or two spheres of human living, that there's two different kingdoms at play in the earth.

There's the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God.

And Augustine goes further, and I think many of us would even be comfortable going, in saying the two operate more or less independently of each other.

That countries rise and fall based upon not the religiosity of the people in them, but upon nothing other than God's kind disposition.

God is the one who appoints a country's rise, God appoints a country's fall, and Augustine argues that it is not connected to the religiosity of the people that are there.

Again, that's very different than many Americans think.

Most Americans that are Christians that I interact with, especially every four years, feel very strongly that unless Christian ethics win out in the election booth, our country will collapse.

Now, that may or may not be true, but Augustine argues that the two are disconnected from each other.

Countries rise according to the will of God, they fall according to the will of God, the gospel goes forward in the world, disconnected from the health of the nations from which it goes.

Now, all of that is in the background with what you see here in Luke chapter 20.

Luke 20 · chapter mention

In Luke chapter 20, which is of course three centuries before Augustine, you have a similar question raised to Jesus.

Luke 20 · chapter mention

This is the first of the traps that are laid for him.

These traps are laid by people that are hostile to Christ.

And it comes from the result of the parable Jesus just told.

He told a parable that's the ESV calls it in Luke 20, verse 9, the heading above that, the wicked tenants.

Luke 20:9

And you're familiar with this parable.

I've preached on it quite a few times.

And it's the parable of the landowner who leased out his land.

The people who leased it did not pay the rent, basically.

And so the landowner sent servants who were beaten and flogged.

They represent the prophets.

Finally, the landowner sent his son, the son was murdered.

And Jesus says the landowner will come and kill them all now.

And take the vineyard from them and give it to others in keeping with it.

Well, the Pharisees and the scribes, look at verse 19 of Luke 20, they wisely perceived that Jesus told this parable against them.

So they picked up on it.

This is one of the first parables they put the pieces together on them.

Like, wait a minute.

I think we're the bad guys in that story.

Like, yes, you were the bad guys.

And worse than that, the crowd understood that they were the bad guys.

And so the scribes and the chief priests figured out they had to do something to stop Jesus.

So the beginning of verse 19 says they sought to lay hands on him, but they couldn't just arrest him because the crowd would go wild.

The crowd was listening to Jesus.

They didn't necessarily worship him or honor him, but they were enthralled by him.

And so they couldn't do anything to him.

Instead, verse 20, they watched him and sent spies who pretended to be sincere to catch him in something they said.

So this is rank hypocrisy.

These people will come up to Jesus.

The first one we'll see in a minute will flatter Jesus.

But they don't have any nothing they're saying is true.

They are spinning away.

It's a Greek phrase, it can even mean spinning a web.

They're spinning a web to trap Jesus.

They're digging a pit, putting a mat over it, and hoping Jesus falls in it.

And it is a mat that is made with words.

This is a trap about words.

They're going to out try to outsmart Jesus.

They're going to trap him in his words.

And if you're going to go toe-to-toe with Jesus, that's probably the right realm to go in, because Jesus is a speaker.

He has the crowd enthralled, first of all, for the miracles.

But when he enters in Jerusalem now, it's not necessarily the miracles.

The miracle he did was curse the fig tree, which represented Israel, and the figs died.

That was the miracle he's done here.

Mostly what he's doing is teaching.

And so they want to trap him in his words.

You're going to spend all day teaching?

He'll say something improper.

I can't say, I can't teach for 30 minutes without saying things that are wrong, despite my best efforts.

So they're going to trap Jesus in something he says that is wrong.

And that's what they're going for here.

And they'll deliver up him, verse 20 says, up to the authority and the jurisdiction of the governor.

So that's their plan, to trap him in a lie, turn them over to the governor, and let the governor deal with them.

Make this Rome's problem.

Now, religiosity at this time here, the Roman Empire is ruling Israel.

The Roman Empire is ruling Jerusalem.

They have what is basically a governor who is there, Pilate.

He's demoted from a king.

He's less than that, but he has oversight of Jerusalem.

There's a temple there that was built by Herod the Great.

This is the temple the Jews are allowed to have as long as they don't cause a disturbance from Rome.

If the Jews cause a disturbance from Rome, they will lose their temple.

Remember, the Jews wanted a temple, as I mentioned earlier.

They used to be in a covenantal relationship with God that expressed itself through temple worship 470 years ago.

They lost that.

It was taken away from them by God.

They returned to the promised land.

They tried to build the temple again.

That temple was disgraced.

They basically had no covenantal worship expressed in those centuries until Herod the Great gives them their new temple.

He expands their old one and lets them worship in it.

This one hasn't been defiled by worship of the Antichrist like the previous one was.

This one is it's theirs.

The Romans stay out of it, the Jews get to have it.

That's the deal they have, which creates all kinds of questions about the intersection of church and state.

If the Israelite religion is that of the true covenant and the true worship of the true God is seen through their religion, why is the Roman government, which is a pagan Roman government, the mediator of that?

Jews were not happy with Roman rule.

This is why they were trying to rebel.

They weren't happy with Roman taxes that had Caesar's face on it and declared that Caesar Augustus was their God.

They didn't like any of this.

And it is all on display this Passover week in the temple.

Jesus is on the steps of the temple, and it is there that one of these guys who is a spy, who's pretending Luke 20 says, or Luke 20, verse 20 says he's pretending to be sincere.

Luke 20:20

He comes up to Jesus and says, Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly.

Well, so he's lying.

Accidentally he's telling the truth, but he is lying.

He says that Jesus speaks and teaches rightly.

But right before that, they didn't like Jesus, they rejected his teaching, and so they were going to pretend to be sincere.

And tell Jesus, you show no partiality.

This is the opposite of the Pharisees, of course.

The Pharisees show all kinds of partiality.

This guy is trying to win the crowd onto his side here.

The crowd had a hostile relationship with the Pharisees precisely because of their partiality.

He tells Jesus, you truly teach the way of God.

Again, he's he's flattering him.

He doesn't really believe that.

So now he has a question for Jesus.

Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar or not?

That is the question.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

As I mentioned, the Jews hated paying taxes to Caesar because of the coin.

The coin had this printed on it, by the way, I'll put it on your screen.

One side of the coin says Tiberius Caesar, Divi Augusti, Filius Augustus, which means basically Tiberius Caesar, who's the son of the divine Augustus.

He's the son of God, the coin says.

And the other side refers to him as Pontifix Maximus, which means the high priest.

The high priest.

And that is the Roman Catholic Pope's Twitter handle to this very moment.

You gotta love irony.

So the coin declares the Caesar to be the son of God and the high priest.

You can see why Romans hated this, why the Jews hated this.

Now the Jews had their own coins and their own currency they could use in the temple.

They wouldn't let these coins in there, of course.

In the Jewish mind, this was a violation of the first commandment, having another God before Yahweh, the second commandment with images, the third commandment, taking Yahweh's name in vain.

So this coin was blasphemous.

And yet the Romans said, you can have your temple as long as you pay the census tax with this coin.

And so, should they do it?

Even here in Luke's telling of it, the guy uses the word tribute to describe it.

Uh this is lacing the answer here.

It's he doesn't just say is it okay to pay it to Caesar?

Is it okay to uh pay it by giving tribute to Caesar?

They're bowing the knee.

He uses a word that's even more intense than simply paying it.

He's it's more than saying, Is it okay to pay taxes to Caesar?

He's basically asking, is it okay for you to bow your knee through the paying of tax to Caesar?

That's the spin he's putting on paying of tax.

Well, verse 23, Jesus perceived their craftiness.

That's a plural here.

He receives all of their perceives all their craftiness.

They're going to ask him a series of three questions, by the way.

Jesus sees it all coming.

He's reading their thoughts like he reads the mail here.

He perceives their craftiness.

By the way, that word craftiness jogs your memory maybe to 1 Corinthians 3, verse 19, where it says, The wisdom of this world is folly with God, for it is written, He catches the wise in their craftiness.

1 Corinthians 3:19

I love that verse.

The wisdom of this world is folly to God.

These wisest guys, the scribes and the Pharisees, have their like best trap for Jesus, and they God just sees right through it.

It's totally childish to him.

Totally childish.

And he catches the wise in their craftiness.

That might even, when Paul wrote that, he might even have this exchange in mind.

That Jesus sees their craftiness and he is about to catch them in their own trap.

They dug a pit for Jesus, they're gonna fall into it.

He says to them, Show me a denarius.

Whose likeness and inscription does it have?

And they said, Caesar's.

Now there's a lot going on here.

First of all, they're acting holier than thou.

Is it okay to pay tribute to Caesar?

They're trying to get Jesus to say it's not okay so that they can turn him over to Rome for inciting an insurrection.

Or if Jesus says, Oh yeah, no big deal, then they would turn him over to the crowd who would think he's blasphemous.

So that's what they're trying to do here.

But Jesus exposes their hypocrisy with something as simple as asking them for a coin to look at.

So one of them delivers the coin.

So Jesus is not the one here with the coin.

Do you see this hypocrisy?

Jesus is not the one here with the coin.

They have the coin.

They are the hypocrites.

It's theirs.

Well, it's Caesar's face, it's on it.

And Jesus says to them, then render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God that are God's.

In this answer, Jesus is crafting two different spheres of authority.

He answers the question in an incredibly deft way.

He tells them, It is indeed okay for you to pay taxes to Caesar.

God has established governments for the common good.

This goes back to Genesis chapter 8, 9.

Genesis 8 · chapter mention

God has established governments for his purposes.

Governments are funded by taxes.

God justifies paying tax to government.

Governments do not have to be righteous to deserve your tax.

This is Paul's point in Romans 13.

Even unrighteous governments deserve tax.

Christians are not under a moral obligation for how their government spends their tax money.

This is kind of a foundational principle.

Your government spends tax money on all kinds of things you don't agree with.

You still have to pay your tax.

That's a basic American legal principle.

If you know there's if you don't like that the government does experiments on ferrets, and I saw uh a news release from the Oklahoma Center who catalogs all of the wasteful spending of the government last year, and there was millions of dollars spent on these experiments on ferrets and their eyesight.

Um how to make ferrets see better.

And you think that's wasteful.

I don't want ferrets to see better.

I want my ferrets blind.

So I'm not paying my taxes.

Well, no, that goes too far.

That goes too far.

You're not morally responsible for the experiments done on ferrets when the government does it with your tax money.

That's not up to you.

That's not you're not responsible for that.

And of course, ferrets is funnier, but of course.

Our government funds abortion, our government funds all kinds of things that are immoral and unethical, but you are not responsible for that, even when it is, in some sense, your money that does it.

There is a moral detachment that takes place there.

And Jesus is illustrating that with this answer.

The coin belongs to Caesar, give it back to him.

In our country, the currency belongs to the U.S.

government.

You can go ahead and give it back to them when they ask for it.

Now, this is not a statement on the right taxation rate.

You know, at some point taxation probably does become theft, and Jesus isn't entering into, you know, should you have adjustable taxation brackets and should your mortgage payments, you know, count against your adjusted gross income for the purpose of taxation?

That's not what he's talking about here.

He's not saying it what the tax rate should be, but he is underlining that tax given to government is a just thing.

Now, why does the government collect tax?

Well, this comes back to what the government is supposed to be doing with your money.

I'm going to put a little slide on the screen here.

Rather than making eight of them and have them go one at a time, you get the whole thing at once.

The government has four functions it's supposed to do.

The government is supposed to protect worship.

It's the first thing Noah did when he got off the ark, is he sacrificed animals to worship.

He brought extra animals on the ark for the purpose of worship.

When God establishes government off of the ark, that's what changes after the ark, is government.

When God establishes government, he establishes government for the purpose of protecting worship.

This is taught in Genesis 8 and 9.

It is taught in Acts and by Peter when uh and then Paul in Acts 17, where Paul says that in the old times God let nations go their own way, so that in the present time they may feel their way back to him.

Notice what Paul is attesting there, that God designed nations with their governments to have some semblance of religious freedom so that inside of those nations there would be those who look for God.

So government is designed to have some form of religious freedom, to permit religious freedom, to protect the worship of the true God, and to permit freedom for people to find the true God.

That's the point.

This is very different than this idea that government should mandate worship of any kind.

That's of course not what the government can do, nor could the government do that.

The government could not mandate true worship of the true God, even.

That's the story of the Old Testament.

It's not possible to do that.

For there to be true worship of the true God, it has to come from hearts that are persuaded of the truth of the gospel, not from government compulsion.

And that's one of the functions of the government is to allow religious pluralism or religious freedom.

That's one function.

Second function is to protect food.

That was the second thing Noah's supposed to do.

The animals were supposed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

They were given to Noah to eat.

This is different than the original creation mandate back in Genesis 1 and 2.

This new creation mandate, they get to delight in the animals.

And then thirdly, government is supposed to protect family.

Noah and his family were supposed to be fruitful and multiply.

The government is given the sword to protect family, to protect food, to protect worship, and fourthly to protect life.

It's not a capital offense to poach somebody's livestock, even though David leans that way in 2 Samuel with Nathan's parable.

It is a capital offense to take a human being's life, to murder someone.

Whoever sheds man's blood by man's hand shall his blood be shed.

This is the institution of government.

So this is what government does, those four things.

They don't do it for free.

And so you pay taxes to accomplish those four things.

When government goes beyond those four things, government is doing things that God didn't authorize them to do.

And, you know, a lot of that, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, is building an interstate system, one of those four things.

I mean, likely it protects the food source and whatever.

And so things get arbitrary pretty fast, you understand that, but this is what God gave the government to do.

That's what taxes go for.

And so that's why Jesus can say, render unto Caesar what belongs to him.

Because Caesar, in that sense, is working for God.

It is not that Caesar is over the church, it is that God is over Caesar and has told Caesar what to do.

And Caesar gets his money to do it with from paying taxes.

And so Jesus sanctifies us with just one sentence, which is incredible.

The economy of words our Savior has and all the worldview that goes into it.

The Romans and the Jews, neither of which had this worldview.

The Jews didn't see government like that.

The Romans didn't see government like that, but Jesus taught that government is like that.

And now, 2,000 years later, we have that kind of baked into our own worldview about the nature of government.

This is what government's supposed to do, so you pay taxes for it to accomplish that purpose.

In contrast, render to God the things that are his.

Well, if the coin has Caesar's image on it, who in this conversation or what in this conversation is in the image of God?

If the coin has Caesar's image, who is in God's image?

And that answer is the people that are there.

They're in God's image.

They are in the image of God.

And so they belong to God.

If the coin goes to Caesar, the human hearts and the human souls that are there, they go to God.

And this is why Jesus trapped them in their own words.

That was the one thing they were unwilling to do.

Remember, this whole thing started with them seeing the parable of the wicked tenants, and they recognized that they were the bad guys in the story.

What should the bad guys in the story have done?

They should have repented and surrendered, thrown themselves at the feet of God and begged for forgiveness, is what they should have done.

But they don't want to do that.

So though this story comes after that parable.

These people do not want to surrender their lives to God.

They are independent operators from God.

That's the way they view themselves.

And so Jesus rebukes them with their own trap.

If you are in God's image, you belong to Yahweh.

Give your own life to Him.

He is your Lord.

He belongs to you.

That's true of every human being.

You belong to Him.

That's true of every human being.

Every human being is in the image of God.

So you can tell to whom a human being belongs.

If he or she is in God's image, he belongs to the Lord.

And we doubly, as believers, doubly belong to the Lord.

We're in his image, plus he bought us with the death of Christ.

And so our lives belong to him.

Now, with this answer, Jesus is recognizing two different kingdoms, two different spheres, two different cities, if you to use Augustine's language, city of man and city of God.

Two different kingdoms, in a sense, depending on how you look at it.

I have them both on your screen there.

And I put them under the title Lordship of Christ, because I think there are some that say, oh, there's the kingdom of man or the city of man, and that's secular, entirely secular, and then the kingdom of God over here, and that reports to Christ.

But I want you to see that both of these derive their authority from Christ.

The judge in this story is Jesus.

Caesar is not the judge.

I'm sure people have asked Caesar, or people will ask Pilate, or people will ask Herod about the relationship of government and church.

You'll see that in the book of Acts.

But their responses are not what's recorded here.

What's recorded here is Jesus.

It's his response that is important.

He is the judge.

So he is the one who renders what government can do.

He's the one that declares this is the verdict.

Government can do these things.

That comes from him.

He is in charge of government.

Even the secular governments of this world, in the secular era, the secular time period where nations go their own way.

There is not a nation in a covenantal relationship with God.

There are nations going their own way, so that inside of those nations there can be people that seek for the true God and find him.

In that era, governments report to Christ.

The governments do ungodly things, of course.

Those things don't come from the will of Christ.

As I said earlier, anything that's outside of that list of four things government does, they're not doing it by God's command.

They venture out on their own.

Sometimes governments can venture out on their own and do morally neutral things or morally appropriate things, but most of the time when you venture out on your own, you're treading into the world of sin and harm.

So when I say that Christ rules over governments, he does so through giving them their job description, what they're supposed to do.

This is what Paul means in Romans 13, by the way, when he says that you should honor government because their authority comes from God.

He doesn't mean you honor government for all that it does.

He means that the authority, the rightful authority governments have come from what the Bible describes government as being given to do.

And when government goes beyond those four things, maybe you obey because you don't want to go to jail.

Maybe you obey for the sake of your conscience.

But you definitely don't obey because the government was established by God.

When government ventures out from what God has commanded, you can obey it or not.

It's a gray area, it's up to each individual conscience.

But it would go too far to say when government does anything that God hasn't commanded it, it's doing so under the authority of God.

No, the authority of Christ given to government is their job description.

In contrast, though, I did put four things in your screen for you to see what does fall directly to God.

And falls to God is the worship of his people.

The word of God describes how the people of God should worship the true God.

That's given in the Word.

That does not fall to government to regulate.

And I have that first because this is the most common area where government and church have conflicted through church history.

When the government seeks to regulate the worship of the true God.

This is where the Puritans came from and the nonconformists came from, where the government steps in and says, no, only these people can preach.

Or you can only pray for this side of the war, or you can only pray for these soldiers in this regiment, but not those soldiers from that village over there, which was the big issue with the Puritans initially, was praying for the soldiers in the Civil War.

When the government says, you have to be a graduate of one of these two schools to preach.

They're interfering with what God has said.

Or even in the Puritan era, they had restrictions in the Puritan era about how many people could gather for worship.

Do you know that?

Where the king of England, King Charles, said, in this kind of prayer meeting, you can only have five people.

Any more than five people, and you've crossed the line from what's permitted.

And the Puritan said that it doesn't fall to the government to regulate the number of people in congregational worship or in prayer meetings.

It goes too far.

The kings of England tried to declare what songs could be sung, or even if singing was allowed.

They tried to declare what topics could be prayed for, what passages could be preached on what days.

None of that belongs to government.

None of it does.

It all belongs to God.

God alone regulates the worship of his people.

And I have often heard it said that you're supposed to obey government at all times unless the government tells you to sin.

And I tell you that is a woefully inadequate explanation.

Woefully inadequate.

And to go back to the Puritan era again.

In the Puritan era, the government passed a rule that said pastors couldn't preach within five miles of where they lived.

Okay, it's called the Five Mile Act.

Is it a sin to preach more than five miles away from your house?

No.

I'm safe just to be clear, though.

I live less than five miles away.

I'm in the clear.

But it's not that it's sin to preach more than five miles away from your house.

It's just that it's not up to the government to decide where pastors live in relationship to where they're preaching.

That goes too far.

Worship belongs to God, not to government.

In the same way, a church shouldn't say what the tax rate should be, government shouldn't say how many people can be in worship.

Or conscience.

Conscience belongs to God and God's word.

Our consciences are so easily defiled and so easily manipulated by peer pressure, by pressure from society, from entertainment, everything manipulates our conscience.

The one thing that has authority over our conscience, the only thing that can bind a conscience is the word of God, is Christ through his word.

Not even other believers can bind a conscience.

That's a huge sin in the New Testament.

In fact, in Romans 13, that's where Paul goes next.

Remember, if the government goes beyond what it's supposed to do, you can obey or not obey.

That's up to you and your conscience.

In the very next part part of Romans, Paul says, don't you dare bind somebody else's conscience to your decision on that.

Don't you dare.

Each person stands or falls before the Lord on their own.

He will judge his own people.

You don't get to bind other believers' consciences to things that aren't in the word.

Only God can do that.

Your life and conduct in terms of godliness.

This is what Peter says: that his divine word has given you all things pertaining to life and godliness.

All things.

So if it pertains to life and godliness, it doesn't fall under the authority of government.

It falls under the authority of God's Word.

And finally, your conduct.

How you conduct yourself morally, that comes from the Word of God.

It's your final arbiter.

It directs how you live in your life.

You could expand that list.

I'm sure you could add other things to it, but I thought those paired well with the list on the left.

That's what God has given the Bible to do in your life, versus what God has given the government to do in your life.

They are not two overlapping spheres necessarily.

Most of your life is lived in one sphere or another when this is navigated properly.

There are rare occasions where they conflict, and those conflicts require wisdom, but they never require bowing the knee to Caesar or rendering to Caesar that which belongs to God.

That which belongs to God will always belong to God, and God will call both groups into account.

Now, in light of all that, you can look at how this concludes.

Verse 26, they were not able in the presence of the people to catch him in what he said, but marveling at his answer, they became silent.

You're going to see that theme, by the way, with people trying to surprise Jesus with a question.

His answer shuts them down, and they leave silent, exposed, shown to be the frauds that they are.

Jesus did not command them here.

And I think the principle from how this wraps up is that religious liberty is a central element to a Christian worldview.

That in this secular age, God allows nations to go their own way, as Paul says in Acts 17, so that people inside of those nations can look for the Lord themselves.

The only place you'll find the Lord is through his word and the preaching of his word.

The only kind of conversions that are valid are those that are free conversions.

It is Jesus who said, Look, you got a heavy yoke, take it off.

Take on my yoke.

It is easy.

That happens individually at a time.

One heart after one heart comes to faith in Christ.

There can be no compulsion for worship.

There can be no government oversight of worship.

There can be no government mandating of worship in this secular era.

There will be government mandation of worship in the kingdom.

When Jesus is reigning on Jerusalem, he gets to determine the order of the service, okay?

But for now, there's freedom to serve God according to our conscience and according to his written word.

I think that most of what I said tonight is I think widely held throughout church history.

But I do think it I've I I wasn't going to preach this passage tonight, but I wanted to return to it because I do think that the COVID era just produced so much confusion on this issue, so much genuine confusion.

And it was it's hard to navigate because of what I said earlier.

You don't want to bind somebody else's conscience to your understanding of worship.

And so I think that obviously mistakes were made as politicians said, but I think it obviously goes way too far to say the government has the authority to regulate worship or close worship or cancel worship or say how many people can be in worship or where you sit in worship and all of that.

That falls under the authority of Christ, not under the authority of Caesar.

Lord, we're grateful for your word, knowing that you are the King of heaven, you rule over nations, and you rule over hearts.

We surrender our hearts to you.

We're going to render unto you what belongs to you.

We pay our taxes because you've commanded us to, and you use governments, even wicked governments, for your purpose.

But Lord, we don't necessarily care about our taxes tonight.

We care about worshiping you in spirit and in truth.

So, God, we pray.

And as we worship you, we would help us see that our hearts are knit to yours through your Holy Spirit, not through our country or our nation.

Would you pray for the leaders of our country and for our president and Congress, Supreme Court, those that have any kind of authority over us?

We pray for them.

We pray that they would be converted.

We pray that their hearts would be broken because of their own sin.

We pray that they would find a refuge in you and not in their own political authority.

It's so hard for the rich to come to faith, Jesus says, and it's so hard for those in political power to be broken by their sin.

They have so much confidence in themselves.

But Lord, you've commanded us to pray for them, and so we do pray that you would break their hearts and cause them to come to saving faith.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.