1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this 15th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Romans 13:1-10, it’s entitled “God & Government,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Every so often a Christian gets confused about which kingdom he’s living in. He shows up to a city council meeting expecting to hear the Gospel preached, or he shows up to church expecting the pastor to endorse a candidate from the pulpit, and either way he leaves disappointed. And if he does both, he may have a very confusing Sunday. Or, he may leave the city council meeting wondering why nobody sang a hymn, and leave church wondering why the pastor didn’t tell him how to vote. Martin Luther had a name for this confusion: mixing up God’s right-hand kingdom with His left-hand kingdom. And Saint Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome — under the rule of a government that would soon feed some of them to lions — gives us in Romans 13 one of the clearest teachings in all of Scripture on how these two kingdoms fit together, and why a Christian can honor Caesar without ever bowing to him.
3. Paul opens plainly: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1). Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say “obey the government because the government is good,” or “obey the government because you like its policies.” He says obey the government because God put it there. This is a hard word for us, because we like to imagine that legitimate authority only exists when we approve of the people holding it. In other words, we’re usually very enthusiastic about government authority—provided, of course, that the government is doing exactly what we think it ought to be doing. We tend to believe authority is legitimate when it agrees with us and questionable when it doesn’t. That is not exactly Paul’s standard.”
4. But Paul wrote this under Nero — a man history remembers as a murderer of Christians, who would eventually have Paul himself beheaded. And still Paul says the governing authority is God’s institution. That ought to humble every one of us who has ever grumbled that the government we’re currently subject to doesn’t measure up to the one we’d prefer.
5. This is what Martin Luther called the doctrine of the two kingdoms. In His kingdom of the right hand, Christ rules through Word and Sacrament, through the Gospel of forgiveness, calling sinners to faith and giving them eternal life freely, without any merit or worthiness in us. But God also rules a kingdom of the left hand — the kingdom of swords, laws, courts, and taxes — and He rules it not through the Gospel but through Law and force, restraining evil and preserving order among believer and unbeliever alike. God the Father Himself used the pagan king Cyrus this way, calling him “his anointed” and using him to accomplish the Lord’s purposes for Israel even though Cyrus never knew the true God (Isaiah 45:1, 4). The government does not need to be Christian to be God’s servant. It only needs to punish evil and reward good, and Paul tells us that’s precisely its job: “For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4).
6. That word “sword” is not decoration. The Roman sword took heads. And Paul, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us that when the government wields lethal force against evildoers, it is doing so as God’s own instrument. This is why our Lutheran confession has never been ashamed to say that capital punishment, just war, and the ordinary coercive power of the state are not evils to be apologized for, but gifts of God’s left-hand rule for our good, even when sinful men wield that power imperfectly. We live in a world still groaning under sin (Romans 8:22), and left to itself, without curb or restraint, sin devours. God, in His mercy, gave us government as a dam against the flood — not a perfect dam, manned by perfect engineers, but a dam nonetheless. This is Luther’s first use of the Law: the Law as a curb, holding back chaos so that ordinary people can raise their children, run their businesses, and worship in peace on a Sunday morning without a mob breaking down the doors.
7. And notice: Paul doesn’t stop with grudging obedience. He says we owe more. “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (Romans 13:7). I imagine there are a few of you doing arithmetic on your tax return right now who find that verse harder to sing ‘Amen’ to than most. ‘Taxes to whom taxes are owed’—that's one verse we might prefer to read in a different translation.” But our Lord Himself, when handed a coin bearing Caesar’s image, said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21) — and He said it while living under Roman occupation, having done nothing to deserve it and everything to be exempt from it as God’s own Son. If Christ paid the temple tax so as “not to give offense” (Matthew 17:27), and if He paid Caesar’s tax without complaint, who are we to withhold what belongs to Caesar and call it Christian conviction?
8. Here is where it gets uncomfortable for people who call themselves law-abiding. Ask any of us whether we’re a “good citizen,” and we’ll say yes rather quickly. But how many of us have fudged a number on a tax return, coasted through a stop sign at 2 a.m. because surely no one was watching, or muttered under our breath about the officer who pulled us over as though we hadn’t, in fact, broken the law? Of course, that depends somewhat on whether you ask us before or after we receive the speeding ticket. It is necessary to be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience” (Romans 13:5). Conscience. That’s the real test, isn’t it — not whether you got caught, but whether you’d have confessed it anyway. The First Table and the Fourth Commandment both stand exposed by this text: we have not honored those God has placed over us as we ought, not our government, not our parents, not our pastors, not our employers. And the Law does what the Law always does — it accuses (Romans 3:20).
9. But — and here the sermon must turn, because a sermon on nothing but civic duty is not a Christian sermon at all — Paul does not leave us under the sword. He moves, in the very same breath, from the kingdom of coercion to the kingdom of love: “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law… Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:8, 10). The government can restrain your hand from murder. It cannot make you love your neighbor. Only Christ can do that — not by threatening you with a sword, but by dying on one. The two kingdoms find their deepest meeting point at Calvary, where the left-hand kingdom, in the person of Pontius Pilate and the soldiers under him, executed an innocent man using the very sword God had entrusted to it, and God, in His inscrutable wisdom, turned that gross injustice into the payment for the sins of the whole world. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The same government that had every right to punish wrongdoers put to death the only man who had never once broken the Law of Moses or the laws of Rome — and in that death, your citizenship in the kingdom of God’s right hand was purchased, sealed, and delivered.
10. So which kingdom do you belong to today? Both, in a sense — you live under Caesar’s rule as long as you draw breath, and Scripture calls you to honor it, pay it, and pray for it (1 Timothy 2:1–2). But you belong, first and finally, to a Kingdom that no election can overturn and no army can conquer, ruled entirely by grace, entered entirely by faith, and secured entirely by the blood of Jesus Christ. Luther put it simply in his explanation of the Second Article: that Christ has redeemed you, “not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death,” so that you may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom. Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But you — body, soul, conscience, and eternity — belong to Christ. And that is a debt of love you will spend the rest of your life gladly, and never fully, repaying. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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