Category: Apologetics

The Belgic Confession of Faith, Article XXXVI

The Magistracy (Civil Government)

We believe that our gracious God, because of the depravity of mankind, has appointed kings, princes, and magistrates; willing that the world should be governed by certain laws and policies; to the end that the dissoluteness of men might be restrained, and all things carried on among them with good order and decency. For this purpose He has invested the magistracy with the sword for the punishment of evil-doers and for the protection of them that do well.Their office is not only to have regard unto and watch for the welfare of the civil state, but also to protect the sacred ministry, that the kingdom of Christ may thus be promoted. They must therefore countenance the preaching of the Word of the gospel everywhere, that God may be honored and worshiped by every one, as He commands in His Word.

The Scots Confession ““ John Knox

Chapter 24 – The Civil Magistrate

We confess and acknowledge that empires, kingdoms, dominions, and cities are appointed and ordained by God; the powers and authorities in them, emperors in empires, kings in their realms, dukes and princes in their dominions, and magistrates in cities, are ordained by God’s holy ordinance for the manifestation of his own glory and for the good and well being of all men. We hold that any men who conspire to rebel or to overturn the civil powers, as duly established, are not merely enemies to humanity but rebels against God’s will. Further, we confess and acknowledge that such persons as are set in authority are to be loved, honored, feared, and held in the highest respect, because they are the lieutenants of God, and in their councils God himself doth sit and judge. They are the judges and princes to whom God has given the sword for the praise and defense of good men and the punishment of all open evil doers. Moreover, we state the preservation and purification of religion is particularly the duty of kings, princes, rulers, and magistrates. They are not only appointed for civil government but also to maintain true religion and to suppress all idolatry and superstition. This may be seen in David, Jehosaphat, Hezekiah, Josiah, and others highly commended for their zeal in that cause.

A very brief word. This idea of the magistrate maintaining true religion happens today in These United States with the Government school systems. Through, and in, the government school system our Magistrates are maintaining this culture’s true religion and suppressing what it considers idolatry and superstition.

[Second Helvetic Confession on magistrates]

” In like manner, let him (Magistrate) govern the people, committed to him of God, with good laws, made according to the word of God in his hands, and look that nothing be taught contrary thereto. … Therefore let him draw forth this sword of God against all malefactors, seditious persons, thieves, murderers, oppressors, blasphemers, perjured persons, and all those whom God has commanded him to punish or even to execute. Let him suppress stubborn heretics (who are heretics indeed), who cease not to blaspheme the majesty of God, and to trouble the Church, yea, and finally to destroy it.”

“And agreeably to this supposition, we find that Paul argues the usefulness of the civil government in general, its agreeableness to the will and purpose of God, who is over all, and so deduces from hence the obligation of submission to it. But it will not follow that because civil government is, in general, a good institution, necessary to the peace and happiness of human society, therefore there are no supposable cases in which resistance to it can be innocent. So the duty of unlimited obedience, whether active or passive, can be argued neither from the manner of expression here (I Peter 2:13, Romans 13:1-7) nor from the general scope or design of the passage.

And if we attend to the nature of the argument with which the apostles enforces the duty of submission to the higher powers, we shall find it to be such a one as concludes not in favor of submission to all who bear the title of rulers in common, but only those who actually preform the duty of rulers by exercising a reasonable and just authority for the good of human society. This is a point which it will be proper to enlarge upon, because the question before us turns very much upon the truth or falsehood of this position. It is obvious, then, in general that the civil rulers whom the apostle here speaks of, and the obedience to whom he presses upon Christians as a duty, are good rulers, such as are, in the exercise of their office and power, benefactors to society. Such they are described throughout this passage. Thus it is said that they are not a ‘terror to good works, but to the evil;’ that ‘they are God’s ministers for good, revengers to execute wrath upon him that does evil;’ and that ‘they attend continually upon this very thing.’ St. Peter give the same account of rulers: They are ‘for a praise to them that do well, and the punishment of evildoers’ (I Peter 2:14). It is manifest that this character and description of rulers agrees only to such as are rulers in fact as well as in name: to such as govern well and act agreeably to their office. And the Apostle’s argument for submission to rulers is wholly built and grounded upon a presumption that they do in fact answer this character, and is of no force at all upon supposition of the contrary. If ‘rulers are a terror to good works, and not to evil’; if they are not ‘ministers for good to society,’ but for evil and distress, by violence and oppression; if they execute wrath upon sober, peaceable persons who do their duty as members of society, and suffer rich and honorable knaves to escape with impunity; if, instead of attending continually upon the good work of advancing the public welfare, they attend only upon the gratification of their own lust and pride and ambition, to the destruction of the public welfare — if this is the case, it is plain that the apostle’s argument for submission does not reach them; they are not the same, but different persons from those whom he characterizes and must be obeyed according to his reasoning….

If those who bear the title of civil rulers do no preform the duty of civil rulers, but act directly counter to the sole end and design of their office, if they injure and oppress their subjects instead of defending their rights and doing them good, they have not the least pretense to be honored, obeyed and rewarded, according to the apostle’s argument. For his reasoning, in order to show the duty of subjection to the higher powers, is, as was before observed, built wholly upon the supposition that they do in fact perform the duty of rulers….

Rulers have no authority from God to do mischief. They are not God’s ordinance or God’s minsters in any other sense than as it is by his permission and providence that they are exalted to bear rule, and as magistracy duly exercised and authority rightly applied in the enacting and executing good laws. Laws tempered and accommodated to the common welfare of the subjects must be supposed to be agreeable to the will of the beneficent author and supreme Lord of the universe, whose ‘Kingdom rules over all’ (Ps. 103:19) and whose ‘tender mercies are all over His works’ (Ps. 145:9). It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors God’s ministers. They are more properly called ‘the messengers of Satan to buffet us’ (II Cor. 12:7). No rulers are properly God’s ministers but such as are ‘just, ruling in the fear of God’ (II Sam. 23:3).When once magistrates act contrary to their office and the end of their institution, when they rob and ruin in the public instead of being guardians of its peace and welfare, they immediately cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God and no more deserve that glorious character than common pirates and highwaymen. So that whenever that argument for submission fails, which is grounded upon the usefulness of magistracy to civil society (as it always does when magistrates do hurt to society instead of good), the other argument, which is taken from their being the ordinance of God, must necessarily fail also, no person or civil character being God’s minister, in the sense of the apostle, any further than he performs God’s will by exercising a just and reasonable authority and ruling for the good of the subject.”

Jonathan Mayhew — Reformed Minister
Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers

William Symington was a Scottish Covenanter pastor. In 1838 he finished his manuscript that later became published as ‘Messiah The Prince.’ There are very few books that labor so diligently to show from scripture that Jesus Christ is the risen Mediatorial King, not only of the Church, but also of the Nations in their various civil-social expressions. Dr. Symington’s work leads one to see that it is not only the Church that must bear allegiance to the risen Priest-King Jesus, but also the Counting Houses, Law courts, Economic arrangements, and every other institutional structure of any given people.

“Bodies-politic or corporations are to be regarded as large moral subjects. To suppose that men, as individuals, are under the moral government of the Almighty, and bound to regulate their conduct by His law, but that, as societies, they are exempted from all such control, is to maintain what involves the most absurd and pernicious consequences.”

Pastor’s Symington’s work flies in the face of much of contemporary Calvinism that has emasculated the Church’s Biblical Message of salvation by restricting the Church’s proclamation of a salvation to a personal area of one’s heart or perhaps limiting salvation to concerns of Church and maybe family. Such castrated Calvinism misses that the blessings of salvation are to come not only to individuals but also to the cultures that numerous individually saved people build when living together in community. Symington’s leaves one with the clear understanding that should the Lordship of Christ in non-Church cultural realms be vacated for some kind of attempt to work with the epistemologically self conscious unbeliever, in a putatively non-religious realm, where Lordship is only expressed through a Natural law will result in the exercise of Lordship by some other competing deity. Man, both individually and corporately considered, is a being animated by his conceptions of who he takes to be his Lord and if Jesus Christ, as revealed in Scripture, be not Lord in every area of Man’s cultural endeavors, some other false lord will be Lord in every area of cultural endeavor.

Part of the problem with some contemporary expressions of Calvinism in this area might be the insistence that those realities, which are spiritual, can’t be corporeal. For example, often we hear that the Kingdom of Christ is a spiritual kingdom. I do not disagree. What I do disagree with though is that spiritual Kingdoms don’t end up being clothed with corporeal instantiations. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that all earthly kingdoms are corporeal instantiations of some spiritual Kingdom behind them which is the greater reality of which the incarnated Kingdom is but a distant echo.

Another thing that we get from some contemporary Calvinists is the quote of Christ telling Pilate that ‘His Kingdom is not of this World,’ as if that is to end all conversation on the Lordship of Christ over all cultural endeavors. What is forgotten is the way that John often uses the word ‘World.’ John often uses the word ‘World’ with a sinister significance to communicate a disordered reality in grip of the Devil set in opposition to God. If that is the way that the word ‘world’ is being used in John 17:36 then we can understand why Jesus would say that His Kingdom ‘was not of this world.’ The Kingdom of Jesus will topple the Kingdoms of this disordered world changing them to be the Kingdoms of His ordered world, but it won’t be done by the disordered methodology of this World and so Jesus can say, “My Kingdom is not of this World.” Hopefully, we can see that such a statement doesn’t mean that Christ’s Kingdom has no effect in this world or that Christ’s Kingdom can’t overcome the world.