Government PART 3 - Government and Freedom

Open your Bibles, please if you open Romans chapter 6 and verse 15.

Romans 6 · chapter mention

I'll read Romans 6, 15 to 19, and then I will pray for us.

Let's listen to God's word.

What then?

Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?

By no means.

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness.

But thanks be to God that you, who were once slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

I'm speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations, for just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.

So let me pray.

Father in heaven, we do want to offer up ourselves to you as obedient slaves, as ones whose hearts have been captured by the gospel and in whose service we know there is perfect freedom.

We pray for the world around us, family, friends, neighbours, town, nation, which does not know the joy of serving Christ, and we pray that many would increasingly know the freedom of becoming his slaves and servants.

As we think this morning about your plan, your desire for civil government, blessings, dangers, the pattern of your word, we ask that you be our teacher.

And we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

We're thinking about politics, government, and nation.

How does God think it should work?

How does the Lord think Christians should participate in the life and government of our nation?

So far, the last few weeks, we have seen where government comes from, all government is instituted by God.

And therefore, all governors, all human rulers owe allegiance to the one true God.

And we are to submit to the authorities who are over us, because they exist because of the Lord, except when our higher obedience to our higher authority, the Lord Himself, means we must disobey those human beings who are over us.

We've seen that the key duty of the state, of all governments everywhere, is to promote the public good.

And that is unavoidably religious.

That is, there is no neutrality, all people everywhere worship something, every state, every system of government has its deity.

And the great duty of all governments in Christ's world, where Christ is king of kings, is to promote Christianity as the true religion.

And they do so by protecting the church and by governing in accord with God's law.

That's what we thought about last time.

We saw how false religion destroys societies.

We saw that all that is good is based on Christian foundations, and that specifically kings are commanded to promote righteousness and the fear of the Lord.

Now, question: What about religious liberty?

Following on directly from what we thought about last time, do we believe in freedom of religion?

And you can see why we might ask that.

Does the obligation of the state to promote the Christian faith mean we end up with a thought police coercing people to believe certain things and not believe other things?

Or come at this from another angle, and this might feel more topical.

How do we feel about the niqab?

How do we feel about Muslim public prayer and call to worship in Trafalgar Square?

Now, lots of what I'm teaching in this series is drawn from two sources, from David Thomas down the road at Christchurch Romford, and from an excellent little book by James Baird called King of Kings, which I would highly recommend.

So our topic this morning is government and freedom.

Now, our first heading, consider for a moment the Christian view of freedom.

Now here's a question.

Have you ever thought about what life in heaven will be like?

It will be perfect and we will be perfect.

And maybe the greatest gift of heaven to us, we will never sin again.

We will lose our ability to disobey God.

We will see Jesus and we will be like Jesus.

1 John 3, verse 2.

1 John 3:2

There will be no sin and no sinners.

Revelation 21, 8.

Now, question does that eradicate our freedom?

And the answer, of course, is it depends how you define freedom.

The Bible does not define freedom as the liberty to do what you want.

In fact, really, that is the essence of sin.

I remember the pagan rulers in Psalm 2, they want to throw off God's chains.

They imagine that he shackles them.

Freedom in the Bible means the liberty to choose the good.

Now that's why we read from Romans chapter 6, verses 15 to 19.

Romans 6:15–19

Christians are freed from slavery to sin in order to be slaves of Christ.

We are slaves.

And that is a wonderful thing.

Christian people, we know the freedom of being servants of the living God.

The world around us, and for quite a while, has defined freedom as a lack of limits.

It says everything removed or hindrances removed.

Biblically, that is not true freedom.

And nor have Christians down the centuries ever thought that was the case.

Now apply this to the national life.

The more piety, the more true religion, that is, the more Christianity there is, the more true freedom there will be, the more true liberty there will be, there will be more public good, there will be more serving of the needs of the whole community.

The state must, and that's it's a moral obligation, must promote Christianity because Christianity is truth, and its advancement will bring this true liberty.

It will not hinder it.

Think about where a fish is most free.

Think about the fish that thinks to itself, I want my freedom, and so it leaps out of the fish tank and it lies flip-flopping around on the carpet until it finally expires.

Well, where is the fish free?

On the carpet as it dies or within the confines of the tank for which it was designed.

So if a civil authority is promoting a religion, and it will be, and if that religion is not the true religion, and it might be a formal established religion, or it might just be secularism, well, Christian people, we do not want them to promote it, not only because it is untrue, but also because it is a slavery.

It is a harmful slavery, even if it claims to be freedom.

We do want to stop people harming themselves, and that is actually an act of love.

So the simple point here: no true religion, no true liberty.

And it's important to have that in mind as we come to this topic of religious freedom or personal freedom.

How do we think about this though?

The freedom of religion.

Second heading.

I'll explain what this means.

God rules over the inner man and the outer man in different ways.

Just think about how God has made you.

You and I, we each are an embodied soul.

We have bodies and souls joined together.

There is an outward aspect to us, the bodily.

And there is an inward, the realm of the heart.

Think about that inward for a moment.

The heart, our affections, the mind, our thinking, our will, our deciding faculty.

This is the realm of the conscience.

Then the internal reveals itself outwardly in things we say with our lips and do with our hands.

Now the Lord has made us to be governed by three different human authorities: the family, the church, and the state.

Each has got distinct authority from God over a specific sphere.

Each has a distinct calling and emphasis and tools.

So for example, the state has a sword.

Church and family bear no such tool.

Each authority is meant to work together for the glory of God in their government of human beings.

So here we are, body and soul, outer and inner, and we're living in this world with these God-appointed human governors.

And here is a really key point, and this is our point here for us.

Only God Himself is able directly to govern the heart.

God alone is Lord of the Conscience.

There's no need for human authorities to try and coerce the conscience.

In fact, it is impossible for any of these different human authorities, be it a father or an elder or a magistrate, to compel heart belief.

So take the church for a minute.

As a gospel minister, I am to call and command the church to follow Christ, to obey all of his commands, but I cannot make you.

And I can encourage you toward good things that are not God's commands, but that sort of sit alongside them.

For example, why don't you come to the church lunch?

There isn't one, by the way, but hypothetically, not today.

There will be one in a few weeks.

Why don't you come to the church lunch?

I'm not trying to bind your conscience.

And if you don't come to the church lunch, you haven't sinned.

But in neither of those things can I make your heart line up with my wishes, and nor should I try.

Now, in the ministry of the church, we try to preach the word in such a way that we hope and we pray that souls and hearts will be touched and persuaded.

Because it's from the heart that all else follows, but we cannot force that response.

So the conscience, the inner man, is God's domain.

So no earthly authority, no king, government, minister or elders, mums or dads can bind someone else's conscience, or rather cannot make someone believe.

But we can and we are to use the authority God has given within those institutions to compel and restrict behaviour where it is necessary.

So here is the outer man, still governed by God.

God governs everything, but he governs them indirectly through these three human authorities: families with fathers, church with elders, and the state with its magistrates.

And God has given to them authority to compel and to restrict outward behaviour.

So a father has authority to spank his child or put him on the naughty step.

Church elders have the authority to exclude someone from the Lord's table or even to excommunicate from the church.

Who is in the visible church of Christ, who is not.

It's the church's job.

And the state can restrict behaviour.

Deciding that certain public acts are harmful to the common good.

So just think about the job of the state for a moment, called by God to maintain peace and justice and piety, to ensure the freedoms of the church, ensuring an environment where the church can flourish, and that might mean suppressing certain things.

Maybe it's heresy or false worship.

Maybe it's introducing Sabbath tracing laws or restricting blasphemy because they judge that such public acts are harmful to the common good.

Now that is why, as Protestants, we can champion both freedom of conscience, that is, you can believe what we like and we cannot force you otherwise.

No one can compel belief, and at the same time, still say there is a place for compulsion in external things, even religious practice by the state.

And the reason why, well, that's our third heading, some religious practices are not for the common good.

So, should people be free to practice whatever religion they want within society?

We we might instinctively say yes to that.

We should have had a poll when we came in.

Some people, I think, would probably instinctively say yes, perhaps because we want to be free to believe and practice the Christian faith.

So why shouldn't others?

Now it's not hard to show why that argument is false.

Some examples.

Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot.

It was Roman Catholic religious conviction that led Guy Fawkes into terrorism when he tried to blow up parliament in 1605 together with his friends.

Religious conviction continues to drive acts of mass murder around the world.

Or just think about attitudes towards women and non-believers in certain religions, especially in Islam.

It shows us, doesn't it, that there is no religious right to harm others.

Some religious practices, very plainly, are not for the common good and they ought to be outlawed by any government.

Because living in a society of people entails constraint on at least some people practicing their religious convictions.

Now just to repeat, we're making a distinction between religious belief and practicing those beliefs.

If you worship the goddess Ishtar of Babylon, and you think she should be honoured with temple child prostitution, well that's utterly evil, but at the level of belief and heart, there is a freedom to think that.

But it does not mean that you should be free to practice it.

Who though gets to decide what and where these lines are to be drawn?

Now the basis for that decision ought to be the word of God plus scriptural prudence, biblical wisdom.

Now, as the years roll on, just think about our place and time, as the years roll on, we rarely see such decision making.

Because our government reflects our society.

It operates out of our nation's own religious framework, the religious system that we collectively have in our heads, which worships self and the God of personal autonomy, which rejects the God of the Bible, which regards every non-Christian creed in religion as being equal to or even superior to Christianity, and therefore will often promote the wrong and penalize the right.

So we find ourselves in a mess, don't we?

Some questions just to think about, to illustrate this.

Is spanking a child to disciple them, because I think that's what the Bible calls me to do as a parent, is that harm?

Is conversion therapy harm?

Is telling someone that they are a sinner who needs to repent and turn to Christ and die to themselves, is that harm?

What about ramming a car into a synagogue on Yom Kippur?

And the million-dollar question, of course, is who decides and on what basis?

But you see the principle?

It is necessary for the state to restrict religious practice for the common good.

Now, as we think about how this might be put into practice, there are three possible responses.

Promote.

We absolutely should pray for and do all we can to encourage those in authority to promote biblical Christianity.

Seems very far off from our experience, but that is God's desire, and that should absolutely be our prayer and our subject of our encouragement.

Why should we do that?

Because the Christian faith is true and it is good for all.

Also, if we do not proclaim the triune God of the Bible, Father, Son, and Spirit, in our laws and in our institutions, we must expect those who believe otherwise to proclaim their gods.

There will be no neutrality.

There is an impossibility of neutrality in government, law, and institution.

There will always be worship of some god.

But what about when we come up against something that is wrong or wicked, something which causes harm?

Well, we must either resist it or tolerate it.

We can never affirm it or promote it.

But there is an important difference between promoting something and tolerating it.

Think about toleration for a minute.

The word tolerate is not a very popular one.

I tolerate you, or I tolerate that thing or that idea.

It means that you disapprove of something, but for various reasons, you let it go ahead anyway.

And it's an important word for us in this context.

So we may want to tolerate a false religion, that is, people holding false beliefs and certain outward practices, even though they are false and therefore they are not to the common good.

And we might want our civil government to tolerate those things as well, because it's not their job or ours to coerce people's hearts and their heart beliefs.

And it might not be wise, that's another really important word here.

It might not be wise, it might not be prudent to restrict all outward expressions of a false religion.

So I guess you're trying to convey this sense that we don't think this is best, in fact, we think it's wrong, but we will tolerate it.

Let's just apply that for us as Christian people.

Just think about our own attitude to the world in which we live.

Religious freedom for non-believers is never something we should approve of, but that which we tolerate.

As Christians, we think our Mormon or Hindu neighbours are not merely dishonouring God, Romans 1, but that also they are harming themselves, they're harming their families, they're harming their wider communities.

And so we are grieved for them, we are sad for them, we try to share the gospel with them, seeking for the Lord through his appointed means to change their hearts.

So this is religious freedom not as a positive good, but as a concession, as a permission.

Apply this principle to civil government for a moment.

There can never ever ever be a moral right to do that which is wrong.

But a government might legitimately make that thing legal.

So a thing that's morally wrong.

It still might be legal.

They might tolerate it either because they're not competent to restrain it, or because they judge that restraining it might cause more harm than good.

Seems to me that this is where many folk go wrong in current online debates.

There I say, especially young, supposedly Christian men, who want to say we're Christian, we want to affirm Christianity is true and all other religions are false and evil and harmful, and we will not affirm what's morally wrong, and so far so true.

But then they wrongly say we must resist and use coercion to get rid of certainly the practice and maybe even the belief of other religions.

You see, there is no category of tolerance.

The key question as we reflect on this idea of tolerance, I think is this will enforcing the restraint of such religious behaviour do more harm than good?

Here's a very straightforward example.

Making child sacrifice illegal is clearly for the common good, and it will avoid gross harm being done.

Here is a tricky example.

What about restraining blasphemy?

Most Western countries had Christian blasphemy laws until quite recently.

Would reinstating those laws here and now be something we should demand as Christians?

And the answer is, hmm, it depends.

Clearly the state has the authority for such laws, the Ten Commandments, the moral law, gives them that authority.

But would it help things here and now?

Could we remove this great harm from society simply by making laws against it?

Would it help at all?

Now that's actually quite tricky.

It might be unhelpful.

Suppose that society so reacted against it that there was a rebellion.

It might be counterproductive.

And yet, laws that don't completely work still can help a bit.

For example, having some kind of abortion law does restrain some abortions, and that's a good thing.

Laws can have a restraining function, they can lead to less sin.

So do you see what we're trying to say here?

Only God can make people Christians.

The fool will say in his heart, there is no God.

Who's going to stop him?

No human authority, no human power.

But as soon as the fool starts running around in the streets declaring there is no God, that is then an external matter.

He's engaging in the sphere in which civil authorities have been delegated or have got delegated authority from God to act.

But just because they can act doesn't always mean that they should.

It becomes a matter of prudence.

So think about the negative, responding to evil, including evil religious practice, it should require some coercion, some tolerance, and bags of wisdom.

What a business it is to govern in this world.

But also remember the positive injunction on civil government.

The civil magistrate must promote the public good, which means the Christian faith.

Now, I am going to pause there, and I would love you perhaps to chat to a neighbour for three or four minutes.

Share some things that perhaps are new or encouraging or things you've got questions about, and then we'll pause and take some of those questions.

Talk to a neighbour just for a moment.

How is that not persecution, sort of illegitimate in that uh respect?

I suppose it could be persecution if something was done unwisely or unkindly, so you shouldn't automatically assume that it couldn't be.

It could be.

Someone might, um, for well-meaning reasons or malign reasons treat non-believers in an ungodly way and unnecessary restrictions.

That's probably the one thing to acknowledge.

I guess positively it's the it's the claims of God's word and God's truth that authorise this.

We all accept that certain things are harmful and ought to be restricted.

We all believe that.

Everyone everywhere believes that certain things should not be permitted in society.

Then the question obviously then follows: how do you decide that?

Then you I guess you have to sit down and have a conversation about truth claims and where do truth claims come from.

And as Christian people, we know and believe that truth comes to us from the true and living God, and it's given us in his word.

And then you're getting into a conversation actually about the truthfulness of the Christian faith and what the Lord Jesus means when he says that he is the way, the truth, the life, and no one comes to the Father except by me.

And maybe one of the things that we as Christian people are learning is that the implications of that verse are not just private or personal, but they're actually universal.

So Jesus is all truth, and he's got authority over all things and all people.

There's no neutrality.

Unbelief lies are not okay wherever they are found.

And so there is no ultimate goodness to be found anywhere apart from in uh the claims of Christ and in the scripture as it works out uh in the common life.

So I think that's probably the kind of conversation I'd be wanting to have with a person.

It very much depends on the kind of person and the kind of context how that conversation I think would go.

Anyone's like to come back on that or or take us in a different sort of direction?

Reflection rather than question.

Um just uh thinking that we're in this kind of conversation, we're very quick arguing to go to other religious quote unquote.

And but actually, I love the hard that we've been in our society of how we're gonna talk about there is no problem.

And actually, the vast majority of those ground is our things, and that's promoting and all that.

So I just just to sort of get our mindset off if not just not really.

That's super helpful because every because every person is religious, including Richard Dawkins.

Um we are all worshippers, we we cannot not be.

So something like um same-sex marriage or the ideology and the practices that flow out of um transgenderism.

Do we get our views only from the scriptures?

Yes.

Um and therefore might that lead a person legitimately to say of the Christian, well, actually, you're just you're just bigoted.

Um just a couple of brief thoughts on that.

Obviously, all truth comes from God, all truth is from the scriptures ultimately, but some things are also very obvious by God's common grace.

And lots of the harmful lies that surround those things are actually quite evident.

You don't have to be a Bible-believing Christian.

Indeed, plenty of people who are not Bible-believing Christians think that those things are actually full of harmful lies.

And I guess one of the things, one of the things that we can do as Christian people is point out some of the obvious harms.

So if you, I don't know, go to somewhere like the Christian Institute website, one of the things they really excellently do is not only show from Scripture why certain ideas and uh practices and laws are sinful from scripture, but you can actually evidence from public health or sociology or bluntly common sense in certain respects why certain things are harmful.

So I I think that I think that should encourage us.

Um we obviously our ultimate authority is the Bible, but the Bible always is reflected then in the world and in truth, and we can we can we can point to evidence in the world that kind of in a secondary sort of way backs up the truthfulness of the Bible.

So I think that's a quite helpful thing for us to be able to do.

So, how do you hold together our desire and prayer to be able to lead a peaceful and quiet life, 1 Timothy 2, but also being a public Christian and living and speaking openly and publicly, which may take us into territory which is not peaceful.

I guess there is a there's a wrong kind of peace, and there's a wrong kind of conflict, isn't there?

There's a wrong kind of peace, which is you know the peace of just total silence, sit in a dark cupboard, say nothing, do nothing.

That's not biblical peace, that's probably negligence or cowardice.

Wrong kind of conflict would be um being belligerent in the wrong way or over the wrong issues.

Um remember how Peter, when he's talking about persecution in One Peter, uh he says, Don't let the state persecute you legitimately.

You know, don't be a thief or a murderer.

Then you really will be in a row with a with the state, and legitimately, because the state is God's agent of judgment over you.

But very often you will find yourself butting heads in the different places in life where we are with those who have authority over us.

Distinguishing those things is is helpful.

What is the right kind of peacefulness and what is the right kind of conflict to which we are called?

Yeah, there are a couple of there are a couple of other questions.

We'll pick them up in we're gonna do a question time in a few weeks.

I will pick them up then.

Let me pray.

Father, we pray for ourselves, for our thinking, our living, our speaking, that we would honour Christ, grow in our understanding of his word, live with increasing faithfulness and clarity, and also speak up for the Lord Jesus and His goodness and truthfulness and power in the different places in life where you've put us.

We pray for the right kind of courage, pray for the right kind of graciousness.

We want to obey you and pray for those you've put over us.

We're mindful of the things that we can be grateful for.

We pray too for your mercy upon them and therefore upon us as well and our nation.

We ask that the kinds of things of which we have been speaking, namely the public claims of Christ, that they would be increasingly known and understood and loved, firstly by your church, up and down the land, and then that others through us would see his goodness.

Be our helper in all of these things, we pray.

We feel uh weak and small and unable.

We thank you that the church is the bride of Christ, that she is the great thing that you are doing in this world of yours, and that you have graciously made us a part of her.

And we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.