Well, if you'll take your copy of the scriptures, and as you're able, stand with me as we turn in the Old Testament to the book of Daniel. Our reading this evening will be from Daniel chapter 3, verses 13 to 18. No doubt a familiar text, but one that will introduce the theme of our study tonight, Daniel chapter 3. Before we read those verses, let's bow and ask God's blessing. Gracious God, as we have sung a psalm and prayer of justice and of judgment, we thank you, O God, that you have sent forth your Spirit, that we who were wicked and foolish, who would not seek you or any good at all, have been drawn powerfully to you, our hearts changed by that effectual call and enabled to know and love and serve you, And so we pray that the same Spirit that has done this work of grace in our hearts, that He would continue to work upon us by means of Your Word tonight, to enlighten our minds, to strengthen our understanding, to stretch our faith and increase it, O God, and increase our joy and courage in Christ, even to which we are called. For it's in Jesus' name that we ask it. Amen. Daniel 3, beginning at verse 13. Then Nebuchadnezzar, in rage and fury, gave the command to bring Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. So they brought these men before the king. Nebuchadnezzar spoke, saying to them, Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the gold image which I have set up? Now, if you are ready, at the time you hear the sound of the horn, flute, harp, lyre, and psaltery in symphony with all kinds of music, and you fall down and worship the image which I have made, good. But if you do not worship, you shall be cast immediately into the midst of a burning, fiery furnace, and who is the God who will deliver you from My hands? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If that is the case, our God, whom we serve, is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up. Congregation, this is the word of the Lord. Amen. You may be seated. So we've been talking on Sunday evenings this month about the concept of spiritual warfare, focusing particularly on the idea of liturgical warfare, the fact that the church's corporate worship on the Lord's Day is the first and primary means by which she makes war against the hosts of wickedness in heavenly places and pushes back against the darkness in this present world. We've talked about the battle hymns that the church sings, and each Sunday evening this month, prior to the lesson, we've sung one of those battle hymns. Psalms of imprecation, Psalms of justice, Psalms of the kingship of Christ, and the ultimate judgment of God over all of his foes. Tonight, we want to kind of cap off some of these reflections by thinking about rowdy righteousness. rowdy but not rebellious righteousness, the kind of troublemaking that faithful people like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego do in the name of their God in a world that is hostile to the faith. Tonight I want to challenge a notion that I think is broadly accepted by many Christians and even as an unexamined axiom of the Christian faith. The assumption in question is that Christians should be sweet, placid, cooperative, and submissive in their attitude toward the world and its civil authorities insofar as they stand opposed to God's truth. I don't believe the Bible teaches that, and I want to show you why tonight. Now there is a danger in critiquing this idea, and it's a danger that I'm going to speak forcefully, too, at the end of the study. But first, I have to convince you that this idea that many Christians have taken for granted as the teaching of Scripture is, in fact, not biblical. I want to argue that the notion of Christian submission to wickedness is entirely without biblical foundation, and that while we are to be submissive to God-ordained authority, it is in relation to a larger and more foundational commitment to God's justice. So tonight I want to begin by just giving you a brief survey of God's uncooperative children throughout redemptive history. And most of these passages I'm not going to read. I've given you references on the study guide so you can go home and clutch your pearls as you think with dismay about how unsubmissive some of these leaders of the faith were. Moses, we'll start with, was a fugitive from Egypt for about 40 years. who only returns to the jurisdiction where he is wanted on a murder charge because God sends him there in order to defy Pharaoh and his authority and to order Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go and worship him in the wilderness. Of course, if Moses had been a real man of God, we know that he would have turned himself in to Pharaoh for execution and trusted that God would have raised up some other leader to lead the people out of the land of Egypt. After all, the Bible says that slaves are to obey their masters. And we should, in fact, obey our masters, except in those cases when we shouldn't. Another troublemaker might be Rahab and the spies of Jericho who are actively engaged in espionage and evasion from the civil authorities in preparation for an invasion of the land. Of course, if those spies had really trusted God, they would have been upfront about what they were doing. They would have told everyone there that they were doing reconnaissance prior to a military incursion. And they would have trusted that God would have protected them in that. Jericho's king orders the arrest of the spies and so Rahab, as a citizen of the land of Canaan and the city of Jericho, should have given up her guests when the king's men came to inquire at her house about them. We have a long period in Israel's history, you know, the period we call the Judges, where largely all of the heroes are in fact troublemakers for governing and occupying authorities. If the Judges had really been spiritual, they would have accepted God's discipline when He raises up raiding bands and foreign powers to come and oppress the people of Israel. They would not have resisted that. They would have simply accepted that God was disciplining the people and that He would relent whenever He chose But of course, fortunately, all of these examples so far are in the Old Testament, and so we've been assured by our theological betters that we don't have to take their ethics as seriously as if they were in the New Testament. David was a fugitive from King Saul, and he acted as a saboteur behind Philistine lines. For a period of time, he is living in a Philistine city, and he is taking his men out and raiding Philistine villages, and coming back and claiming that he had actually been raiding Israelite cities. If David were really a man after God's own heart, he would have surrendered himself to the court of King Saul, or at least not tried to deceive a Philistine king. King Saul, after all, was the ordained king by God, and so David was obligated to obey him, which he did most of the time, except, of course, when he didn't. And then we have the Old Testament prophets. Many of them were fugitives who defied and evaded government authorities. In fact, there was one man who himself was not a prophet, Obadiah, but was a servant in the administration of King Ahab who was secretly hiding a hundred different prophets in two different caves during the time that Jezebel's executioners were spilling the blood of God's prophets. Many of the prophets, in fact, hid or fled from the kings before later being arrested, imprisoned, and killed. They also showed a shocking lack of respect for the dignity of the murderers and adulterers who were in power at that time. They went so far as to denounce the kings and the nobles, which obviously was a violation of the spirituality of the church. And then two of my favorites from that same period, Jehoiada and Jehoshabah. Jehoiada being the high priest at the time, Jehoshabah being a descendant of the king and Jehoiada's wife. They defied Queen Athaliah. They hid one of the princes who had been appointed for execution. And then later, when he was several years old, decided to lead a military coup. And a priest should have known better. than to do things like that. If the civil leader wants to murder a child, then it's the priest's job to get out of the way. We've been assured by our ecclesiastical bettors that the Old Testament theocracy was a disaster, and so obviously we can see that that was the case from this survey. Now, in the New Testament, we'd like to think that people have more sense, but of course, the best of men are only men at best, and so we still see this same troubling trend. John the Baptist, for example, provokes Herod Antipas by confronting him and criticizing him, both about matters personal and public. Clearly, it was a lack of strategic wisdom and a shocking lack of winsomeness in his ministry, and who can really blame Herod for being angry about it? The fact is that, as Jesus said, we build monuments to the prophets, but we would be embarrassed and critical if anyone acted like a prophet today. And if they try, we are quick to tell them to stop it. Jesus also, unfortunately, fell into some of these same kinds of behavior. He insulted dignitaries and religious leaders using sarcasm and mockery. Recently we were assured that Jesus would never have called Herod a fox, except of course the passage that the person in the interview was thinking about was in fact a quote from Jesus. Jesus is the one who called Herod Antipas a fox. And our Lord used the language of pious mockery that He had learned in the Old Testament from the prophets there. But of course we would say Jesus is God and so it's okay if He does that. Surely He cannot be an authoritative example for us since His divinity makes Him unique. Never mind the fact that the New Testament repeatedly urges us to imitate Jesus. And then, of course, Jesus' apostles. They disobeyed civil authorities. They evaded arrest. They fled from prison. Peter, in fact, was broken out of jail by an angel. And rather than submitting himself once again for incarceration, he fled the jurisdiction and remained a fugitive for a number of years. Paul escaped from Damascus while the authorities were searching for him with the assistance of the brethren in the city. And that was not the last time that they did something like that. In fact, all of the apostles at one time or another were arrested, punished, and most of them, perhaps with the exception of John, were executed eventually by civil authorities. And yet one highly esteemed elder in the church and historian has publicly stated, quote, Nero did not violate God's law if he executed Christians who obeyed God rather than man. If Paul continued to preach after the emperor said he may not, then Nero was doing what God ordained government to do. Christians don't get a pass from civil law just because they follow a higher law." Now I haven't given you the source of that quote because I don't think it would be appropriate to put people to shame for stupid things that they say. Now, that is a brief sense of the way in which scripture shows us the rowdiness of God's faithful saints. None of those examples are the kinds of examples that we could also cite, for example, of Abraham being fearful and lying. Or David being full of lust and committing adultery. Or Peter being overcome and intimidated at the trial of Jesus and denying that he even knows the Lord. No, this is considered righteous behavior in Scripture. This is the kind of behavior that Scripture regularly praises these men for. and highlights as worthy of our imitation. In fact, it's this kind of behavior that the Hebrews writer in Hebrews chapter 11 uses and then says, these are men of whom the world was not worthy. The scriptures are replete with examples of godly men and women acting righteously in defying civil authorities insofar as those authorities defy the will of God and act contrary to righteousness. These examples do not allow us to ignore or disobey Scripture's clear commands to submission. The Bible has those commands. They do, however, require us to beware of a facile interpretation of those commands. And I think that, quite honestly, that's how many of us have approached those kinds of texts in the past. We have read the exhortations of Scripture to obey the governing authorities, and we have thought that is the case, no matter what the authorities may say or do. In fact, for many decades, it's been easy for American Christians to treat these kind of questions simplistically, but at least in the last five to ten years, that is no longer the case. Now tonight what I want to do is I want to walk you through some of the principles that are involved in this theme, and in order to do that, let's turn over in the New Testament to Romans chapter 13, which of course is a key text in this conversation. Romans chapter 13, and see the obligation to honor and submit to civil magistrates. Start with me in verse 1 of Romans 13. Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authority, resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God's minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God's ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due, taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. We read this morning from 1 Peter 2 in our lectionary reading. Let me take you to that text again and remind you of verses 13-17. 1 Peter 2, verse 13 says, Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors as those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. As free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God. Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the King. We are to honor and obey those whom God has appointed as ministers of justice. That's what those two passages say, and there are other passages that speak essentially to the same effect. They are God's deacons, is the same word in the New Testament in Greek. They are deacons of wrath, deacons of justice. And why are these magistrates appointed and empowered by God? For the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of those who do good. Now this is amply demonstrated in Scripture. We see the apostles being arrested and brought before the Jewish council and acknowledging the very real authority of those magistrates. We see, when Peter was arrested after the execution of James, that the church does not lead a military coup. They don't take pitchforks in clubs and go and try and break him out of prison. They acknowledge that this is a legal act however unjust by the governing authorities and they offer continual prayer to God on his behalf. We see Paul submitting himself to the Roman authorities even when he is being unjustly treated, even when his court case is not being adjudicated righteously. He avails himself of the legal rights that he has and yet he continues to show submission and respect for those men who are in those positions of power. The early Christians did not deny the reality of the magistrate's authority. They did not pretend like legal proceedings that are unjust are somehow make-believe. Now, at the same time, they were willing to participate in those proceedings in a way that was in the interest of justice. For example, Paul, when he is unjustly beaten without a trial in the city of Philippi, he and Silas, when the magistrates the next morning say, you can go, let them out, go on your way, Paul says, no, we are uncondemned Romans, you have beaten us contrary to the law, we are not going to go quietly off, you can come and let us out yourself. And that's exactly what the magistrates did. Later, when Paul's case gets bogged down in the city of Caesarea, he appeals to Caesar, which he had a right to do as a Roman citizen, and eventually is transferred to Nero's court. And yet, during all of that time, these Christians are not looking to politics, they're not looking to legal structures as if that is going to be their salvation. As Jesus says in the court of Pilate in John chapter 19, you would have no power over me at all unless it had been given to you from above. And so Jesus recognizes, even as Paul, even as Peter, and the rest of the apostles, that there is a power higher than the king before whom he may stand, or the governor in that case. We are not permitted to ignore just any law that we might disagree with. At the same time, the magistrate's power is not absolute. Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 clearly indicate that there is a particular jurisdiction and a particular responsibility that God has given to civil magistrates. Look again at verses 3 and 4 of Romans 13. Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God's minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is God's minister and avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil." But what if he doesn't? What if he doesn't execute wrath on him who practices evil? What if he does, in fact, execute judgment on the one who practices good? Well, that is not what Paul is speaking about here. He is talking to us about the normative responsibility, the normative behavior of the civil magistrate. And that explains why the saints sometimes in Scripture disregarded and evaded those magistrates when they were righteously warranted. Now many people will say that we can only disobey God, or excuse me, we can only disobey the government if they command us to disobey God. They'll say that's the kind of narrow boundaries in which righteous disobedience to civil authority is in order. If the magistrate orders you to disobey God, to do something that God forbids, or to not do something that God commands, then you can disobey them. But that doesn't explain all of the examples that we briefly cited at the beginning of our study. Peter and Paul would not have been disobeying God by turning themselves in when an arrest warrant was issued. I mean, we see multiple Christian martyrs in church history handing themselves over to the civil authorities in order to die for Christ. We also see a lot of those martyrs fleeing first and being hidden by the saints for as long as they possibly can. When the authorities finally catch up with them, the Christians don't fight, they don't shed blood, they don't act violently in order to protect the saints, but they will flee, they will evade, they will hide for as long as possible. Why? Handing yourself over to be executed is not disobeying God in any way. And yet it is clearly a defiance of the civil magistrate. On what basis could they do that? They could do that because the civil magistrate doesn't have the right to put someone to death for preaching about Christ. It's not an appropriate use of their authority. And so when Scripture is saying, obey the civil magistrates, it is not saying, obey the civil magistrates no matter what they tell you to do. That if they command you to do some presumably lawful but outrageous thing, well, you have to obey, because the Bible says obey the civil magistrates. I mean, if the civil magistrate wants to kill you, I mean, you know, God will allow you to be killed. No, the saints flee in that case. They get out of town. Jurisdiction matters. The magistrate cannot righteously exceed his divine mandate. And in every one of those cases, when you look back through redemptive history, what do you see in common? In every one of those cases, the magistrate is doing wrong. He's exceeding his jurisdiction. He is acting in an unjust way. And what do the saints do? They ignore him. They circumvent him. If I receive a tax bill from the state of New Mexico, I'm going to do what every good Christian should do. And that is ignore it. I didn't leave anything in New Mexico. I don't own property there. I don't own a business there. That government has no right to tax me. When you say, but you're a Christian, you're supposed to obey the civil magistrate. Not when he's sending me a bill that I don't owe. And it's the same thing in principle. Believers, when they go down this road of defying the civil magistrates, need to be careful that they do so in a righteous way. That they exercise piety and prudence in this resistance. If you're still in Romans 13, turn back a page or so to Romans chapter 12, and notice what Paul says in verse 9. Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another, not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer, distributing to the needs of the saints, giving to hospitality. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion." Now, what kind of person is being described there? Is it a person who is angry? Who is resentful? Who is concerned about his rights? Who is defiant of authority because he's acting autonomously? No. This is a person who is humble, who is reverent, who is cheerful, who has a cheerful indifference to the injustice that's coming against him because he knows that his trust and his confidence is in the Lord. Believers should have a godly and not a worldly spirit whenever they defy civil authorities in this way. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are a perfect example of this. They don't pop off at Nebuchadnezzar, they just say, oh king, well I mean, if that's the case, we don't even have to answer you in this, I mean like you're asking, who can deliver you from my hand? Well actually, his name is Yahweh. We serve him. He definitely is going to save us from you, but even if he doesn't save us from the furnace, that's okay, because we've already decided that we won't bow down to your idol. So we could just wrap this up here. We're not worried about being thrown into the fire, because our commitment is to our God. The saints in Scripture consistently display a cheerful militancy. They have a joyful faith in the face of danger. They are not anxious. They are not troubled. They are not downcast. They are singing on their way. And this is true, by the way, of martyrs through Christian history. It was the songs, it was the Psalms of the persecuted that sometimes drove their persecutors crazy. These saints were careful to be respectful even when the authorities themselves were contemptible. Let me give you an example of this in Acts chapter 23 that seems to be a counterexample but actually makes our point. Acts chapter 23, look with me at the first five verses. Paul is before the Sanhedrin at this point. And it says, Then Paul, looking earnestly at the council, said, Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day. And the high priest, Ananias, commanded those who stood by him to strike him on the mouth. Then Paul said to him, God will strike you, you whitewashed wall, for you sit to judge me according to the law, and do you command me to be struck contrary to the law? And those who stood by said, Do you revile God's high priest? Then Paul said, I did not know, brethren, that he was the high priest. For it is written, you shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people. Oh, Paul sinfully lost his temper there. No, he didn't. No, he didn't. He just did a little piece of prophetic trash talking. You can find that kind of language all over the Bible. It's perfectly appropriate, perfectly acceptable, except Paul is not supposed to address the high priest that way. Because his office is to be respected even when the office holder is worthy of nothing but our contempt and scorn. Now you say, how in the world did Paul not know that was the high priest? Think about it. Paul was a rising star in Judaism before his conversion to faith in Christ. Paul knows all of the up-and-coming Jewish leadership. Paul knows Ananias personally. But you know what Paul can't do at this point in the book of Acts? He can't recognize faces across the room. Paul is functionally blind at this point in the story. This is one of several evidences of it in the New Testament. And he hears a voice from the other side of the wall. There is a council of men sitting there. Strike that man on the face. He says, God's going to strike you, you whitewashed wall. By the way, he learned that particular phrase from Jesus. That's how Jesus referred to them. He says, you're sitting here ostensibly to judge me in the name of the law, and then you're commanding me to be struck contrary to the law. You hypocrite. You're a whitewashed tomb. And they say, that was the high priest. And Paul says, well, you're not supposed to talk that way about the high priest. I retract the statement. If it was one of the other clowns on that side of the room, I'll let it stand. But the high priest, I'll retract the statement. He doesn't recognize who had spoken and what is Paul doing. He's being careful to acknowledge the dignity of that office. Even though Ananias is not personally worthy of that level of respect. Christian resistance is rooted in the confidence that God is our hope and not politics. You do not trust in the king. You do not trust in the army. You do not trust in horses. You do not trust in strategies. They do not trust in their evasion. They trust in the Lord. They avail themselves of every opportunity, whether it is the legal rights of Roman citizenship, or a basket being lowered down over the city of the wall in the dead of night. They avail themselves of whatever opportunities they have, but their confidence is in the Lord. And that is the basis, the foundation of Christian resistance. Is to say, I don't have to fear the authorities, I am going to respect the office, I am going to respect the divine appointment that lies behind it, but I'm not going to fear the man, and I'm not going to fear anything that he can do, because God is my defender. This is what the Psalms teach us. To sing and to pray. We do not fear the opposition of enemies because we do fear the Lord. And to fear the Lord means we don't have to fear anyone or anything else. Psalm 27 says it well, Yahweh is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? Not the government. Not the president. Not the governor. Not law enforcement. Not the executioner. Yahweh is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked came against me to eat up my flesh, my enemies and foes, they stumbled and fell. Though an army may encamp against me, my heart shall not fear. Though war may rise against me, in this I will be confident." What is Psalm 46 talking about? If you sing and pray Psalm 46 regularly, as many of us do, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, though its waters roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with its swelling. There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High. God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved. God shall help her just at the break of dawn. The nations raged. The kingdoms were moved. He uttered His voice. The earth melted. Yahweh of Hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of Yahweh, who has made desolations in the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two. He burns the chariot in the fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. Yahweh of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. If you fear God, you do not fear anyone or anything else. You might feel fear, but you repudiate that fear. And you trust the Lord. You cannot fear God and man. And yet what we see in many sectors of the church today is the fear of man. We see the fear of man. And the fear of losing our reputation, the fear of being slandered online, the fear of what other unbelievers might say about us. We are unworthy of our heritage when it is that way. In Hebrews chapter 2, the Hebrews writer points out that Jesus has delivered us by his death and resurrection from slavery to the fear of death. You are not enslaved by the fear of death anymore because you know that you are bulletproof until the hour that Jesus has appointed for your death. And at that point, you can't dodge the bullet. You are immortal until the Master calls you home. So you live with reverent abandon. You do not fear what men may do. And that not only gives you courage, it allows you to have wisdom in choosing when and where to fight. This is a larger theme in the Gospels that we're not going to develop tonight. I've given you just a few cross-references so that you can begin to follow this thread on your own, but Jesus in the four Gospels chose the battleground for every conflict and every confrontation He had with the religious leaders. He chose when to have those conflicts and when not to. He deliberately avoids them on multiple occasions, and He walks right into the middle of them on others. For example, in Mark chapter 3, He is in the synagogue on the Sabbath, there is a man there with a withered hand, and it says He knows the religious leaders are watching Jesus to see what He will do. He's being set up. That's why the man with the withered hand is there. They made sure he was there that day in order to try to set Jesus up. What does Jesus do? He reads the room, he recognizes the trap, and he springs it. He calls the man with the withered hand forward. He says, step forward right in the middle here. Now, to all the rest of you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill? You know, he could have healed that man on Monday. He could have healed that man on Thursday. He doesn't have to heal him on the Sabbath. And he knows that if he heals him on the Sabbath, he's just creating trouble. Like, what exactly does John the Baptist expect to happen when he confronts Herod Antipas? I mean, you talk about the most foolhardy thing, right? Can you imagine the blog articles that would be written about John if he did that today? Can you imagine what they would say on Twitter? Jesus intentionally creates or evades conflict in the Gospels. He knows when to push and when to wait. Foolishness is not the behavior of faith. Faith acts wisely. Faith acts intentionally. Faith does not react to anything. It only acts. But faith is never cowardly. Wisdom knows the difference. Wisdom knows when to poke the bear and when to let him sleep. If you choose to defy every unlawful ordinance of man, you are wasting your opportunity and influence. You have to pick your battles. And that involves knowing why you fight, wherever you do fight, and what it is you hope to accomplish. And if you walk back through that initial survey of troublemakers in scripture, I think that you will see that every one of those was a purposeful engagement. It was not the silly, petty kind of point scoring that some Christians want to do, just to prove that they can. There's no bravado there. It's almost like a form of reverse virtue signaling, right? I'm going to virtue signal that I don't care about your virtue categories. But that's not what goes on in Scripture. There's an intentional way in which they defy the powers of evil in their day. There is a danger here that I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson that we need to get very, very clear in our minds before we leave this theme. Two dangers, in fact, that I want to particularly focus upon, and both related to the justification of pride, anger, and a rebellious spirit, none of which are appropriate for a believer. The first is the danger of being a cage-stage culture warrior. It is easy for political and cultural priorities to hijack faith and then to be used to justify it in the name of religious piety. That has been the error of many religious sects going back actually to prior to the first century. This becomes the error of the Pharisees, by the way, who begin ostensibly with a noble desire of restoring the authority of the law and calling the Jewish people to holiness and become the stereotypical Pharisees. the legalists of their day, straining at gnats and swallowing camels. It's the error of the zealots, who were largely political revolutionaries and violent extremists, all in the name of Israelite piety. It was the error of the Anabaptists in the time of the Reformation, and it's too easily the error of some today. We may inadvertently confuse cultural transformation with spiritual salvation. As if the cultural battle is the primary battle, when it's not. Jesus says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth, go therefore and make disciples of the nations. That's the goal. It's not to make the nations moral, it's to make them followers of Jesus. How do we do that? By baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that Jesus has commanded. They will become moral as they are taught to obey Christ. But we need to keep our priorities clear. Many people have woken up since COVID and the BLM riots and the unmasking of evangelical compromise in our nation in the last several years. But that anger and agitation needs to be formed, corrected, and directed by biblical convictions. And sometimes what we see are people who are very stirred up and very angry, and they may be professing Christians, but their theology is being drugged behind them. It's not theologically driven commitments, it's rather cultural commitments that have theology tucked in the back pocket. We should not allow that to be the case. We go back to Scripture. We recover a biblical worldview. We learn how Scripture would have us think about those issues, and then we pursue public witness and public transformation in gospel-centered ways. We don't simply react in anger and slap the name of Jesus on it. Secondly, there's a danger of taking our cues from the wicked. It is easy for people who feel misused and attacked to eventually assume the identity that their slanderer has put upon them. The person who is unfairly accused of abuse and finally snaps and becomes a violent abuser. so that now the slanderer can say, see, I told you all along. The desire to be the opposite of the wicked may lead to falling into a ditch on the other side of the road. You have to remember that there are always ditches on both sides of the road. And you don't want to become the kind of extremist who reacts against extremists. We may also fall prey to the temptation to fight fire with fire in an ungodly way, as if the misbehavior and misconduct of totalitarians allows us then to become totalitarians in behalf of a righteous cause. But you remember that Romans chapter 13 is preceded by a paragraph at the end of Romans chapter 12 which says that vengeance belongs to God. Now one of the ways that God takes vengeance is through the civil magistrate when he acts righteously. But even when the civil magistrate doesn't act righteously, God still is the one who executes judgment on the ungodly. We might imagine that the hostility and opposition of ungodly authorities frees us to act in whatever way we want. Because they abuse their power, therefore I am under law to no man. But of course that's not the case. The saints were willing to acknowledge the authority of the magistrates even while they defied the same magistrates in the narrow questions of abuse of power. This is not the way, brothers. We answer to a higher calling, and we answer as those who are ready, willing, and able to suffer for doing what is right. Peter speaks to this point in 1 Peter 4, beginning at verse 12. He writes to persecuted Christians and he says, Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you. But rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ's sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. On their part He is blasphemed. but on your part he is glorified. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as a busybody in other people's matters. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter. For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God, and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God? Now if the righteous one is scarcely saved, where will the ungodly and the sinner appear? Therefore, let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good as to a faithful Creator." This relates to what we said this morning about the behavior of love in 1 Corinthians 13 and Calvin's comments on that point. When he says, it is not that love is naive or foolish, it's that the person who is acting in love is more willing to suffer wrong from someone else than to do wrong. And that should be the spirit here. I would rather suffer wrong, I would rather suffer injustice, I would rather be persecuted than to do anything that is an offense against my God. That's the calling that we are to live up to, aspire to live up to by the help of God's Spirit. The saints will be maligned by the world as rebels and troublemakers. And if they are not, it is right to question whether the saints are actually living holy lives. After all, it is Jesus who said, woe to you when all men speak well of you. If you are not being opposed, then there is a good reason to question, am I actually shining as a light in a dark place? But when they slander you as evildoers, be sure that it is slander. Be sure that it is not true. Be sure that you are still faithfully serving the Lord. When Elijah the prophet finally appears before Ahab at the end of a three and a half year drought, throughout which Elijah has had an arrest warrant out in his name and Ahab has searched high and low everywhere to try and find this troublesome prophet, Ahab greets Elijah by saying, is that you, you troubler of Israel? And Elijah says, I'm not the one who troubled Israel. That would be you. That's an example of the kind of rowdy, but not rebellious righteousness that we're talking about. The world will slander you, but let it be slander. And be sure that you are walking by faith, humbly, in submission to God's authority, even when that submission sometimes requires defiance to other lesser magistrates. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.