Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript
## Reformation Covenant Church — Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text today is found in 1 Peter 2:11-17. Please stand for reading of God’s word. 1 Peter 2:11-17:

“Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation. Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of men for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme or to governors as to 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.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the wonderful gift that it is to us in this time of our worship, having restored us to glory and true personhood through the forgiveness of sins applied. Grant us now this next gift of knowledge of the world about us and ourselves by means of your word. Bless us, Lord God, as we look into that word. May your Spirit do his work. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

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“The center cannot hold.” An often-quoted phrase over the last hundred years, originally penned by William Butler Yeats, whose dates were 1865 to 1939. This phrase—”the center cannot hold”—is one certainly which we’ve seen in the last few weeks. The center of our economic system cannot hold.

As a culture moves away from the Lord Jesus Christ, its center can never hold for long. The center of the culture that we live in is being shaken by God.

I want to begin by reading Yeats’s poem from which this comes. The poem is called “The Second Coming.” Those of you that have seen “No Country for Old Men” will see resonances, I think, of this poem by Yeats, maybe one of his most famous poems, frequently put in anthologies. In that movie, we looked at Yeats because the title of the movie, “No Country for Old Men,” is actually a line from another poem of his—I think it’s “Sailing to Byzantium” or something by that similar title.

But “The Second Coming”:

*Turning and turning in the widening gyre,*
*The falcon cannot hear the falconer.*
*Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.*
*Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.*
*The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere*
*The ceremony of innocence is drowned.*
*The best lack all conviction while the worst*
*Are full of passionate intensity.*

*Surely some revelation is at hand.*
*Surely the Second Coming is at hand.*
*The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out*
*When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi*
*Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;*
*A shape with lion body and the head of a man,*
*A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,*
*Is moving its slow thighs while all about it*
*Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.*
*The darkness drops again; but now I know*
*That twenty centuries of stony sleep*
*Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,*
*And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,*
*Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?*

We are in the midst of the beast that opposes the Lord Jesus Christ and his kingdom. Always taking opportunity at the loss of faith of a people that once moves in this way, in terms of slouching toward Bethlehem. The center cannot hold. Increasingly, violence fills our lives. Anarchy begins to happen. Things fall apart. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Can we hear our falconer? Can we as God’s bird hear the voice of the falconer? Our culture has lost it. They cannot hear the voice of the falconer anymore. May the Lord God grant us grace today to hear the falconer as it relates to our civil government—what it should be doing, what it is doing, what the scriptures say about it, and how we are to engage in a victorious battle plan in terms of the conquest of the church of Jesus Christ.

—

Blood does flow. Liz Pironis brought us a prayer request a week or so ago from Orissa, India, where the slaughter of Christians continues. We had the Oregon City Pastors meeting here this last Wednesday, and I knew that Sherwood, the pastor of Victorious Faith down by the McLoughlin House, had been to India and had been in troubled regions. I said, “Orissa, is that the state where you guys go?” “Yeah,” he says. “We originally were going to another place, but we got called to go there.”

They established a Bible college a number of years back that’s graduated 40 graduates from his Bible college. Twenty have been killed, murdered. He has pictures of bodies being tied up together, doused with gasoline, lit on fire. That’s what’s happening in Orissa. Praying for that area.

Hindu extremists are the ones killing the Christians there, engaging in what can only be called ethnic cleansing. Be somewhat careful about your emails about this stuff, by the way. Apparently, he said that the Hindu extremists are good at the web. They cannot put on their web page names or locations of where some of their people are in Orissa because the Hindus find out and then go after them and kill them.

Why are they doing it? Well, as it turned out, my daughter Lana sent me a story from, I think, BBC, and apparently a leading Hindu figure was killed. While a Maoist terror group took responsibility for the killing, they said they did it. For whatever reason, the Hindus have decided to use the Christians as the scapegoat the same way the Roman Empire used Christians as a scapegoat after Nero. At least. And so the Christians are suffering as scapegoats. Even though the Maoists claimed credit, somehow this is all turned against them. And so they’re going to kill all the Christians.

We’ll have our own version, hopefully not so severe, of scapegoating beginning in a month or so. And the Congress promises to hold hearings on who’s responsible for all these problems. As a culture, as the center cannot hold, fallen men turn to scapegoats to blame things on, to cleanse the evil and purge it. There are dangerous times when the center cannot hold and things start to fall apart. And Orissa is an example to us of how scapegoating can occur in a culture.

I’m going to talk today about ballot measures, which seems a little ridiculous in light of some of the things the world is going through. But it really isn’t. Ballot measures are an opportunity to come together to discuss what the word of God says, to hear the voice of the falconer in terms of civil government—and that’s a very important thing to hear today.

Because as I said last week, I think one of the primary problems that’s created the center not holding and breaking down now is the institution of God’s vengeance—the state—being used instead as a supposed institution of benevolence, which is supposed to be the church and family. And when the church and family decides to appropriate to itself the physical sword of execution, bad things happen, as is seen in arrests. And when the state decides to appropriate to itself the means of benevolence—of helping a people—bad things happen. They’re not very good at it, and everything becomes political.

The government schools: if we were in a right-wing period of political history, well, right-wing conservatism would be taught to people that don’t believe it. We happen to be in left-wing ascendancy right now. And so left-wing politics is taught at the public schools. What a state controls becomes a reflection of the political vision of that state. That’s why we don’t like these things. That’s why we don’t like the state taking over benevolence institutions, educational institutions, because what they end up doing is political. It always has political goals, and plus they’re just—it’s the wrong tool for what perhaps is a proper job.

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So we want to evaluate a couple of ballot measures today. We were talking at breakfast Thursday morning. You know, I’m having breakfast Thursday morning now at the Witchah Pub or Grill, whoever wants to show up. And we were talking a little bit more about the ballot measures. We talked about last week one of them. And you know, we were talking about the “lesser of two evils,” right? And so you’re supposed to vote for the—well, in a way, ballot measures are no different than candidates. We’re probably not at a place where any of them are going to be perfect. No candidate’s ever going to be perfect. No ballot measure will likely be all that perfect.

So whenever we evaluate what we’re going to do in this stuff, well, you’re kind of voting for the lesser of two evils, I suppose you could say. I don’t really look at it quite that way, but that’s what’s going on. And you know, if you got the mafia running the street and you got two different groups vying for authority over your street, probably the one that’s going to beat you up less is the one you should assume will govern you, right? And that doesn’t torture your house every day and only does it once a week. Gives you time to rebuild. That’s what I’m going for. Why not? Why would I not? Seems like it’s part of my obligation to protect myself, my family, my property to try to achieve that.

I have no illusions about where we’re at. I know some within our circle of influence say that they’re going to vote now for the Republican candidate because we see repentance coming. What I see is socialism and socialism light. That’s what I see. I don’t see anybody who’s trying to take a correct biblical approach that hears the voice of the falconer as it relates to the role of the civil magistrate.

You know, I’ve come to a great deal of rest having looked at this analogy of the fact that we’re in exile. I rest in that. I rest in no longer expecting things at the civil, governmental, state, and national levels that just aren’t going to be there for a while, folks. They’re just not. That’s not where we’re at anymore. These falcons, for the most part, cannot hear the voice of the falconers.

Now, we’re supposed to be seeking peace in the midst of exile. The picture on the front of the worship service—that exile picture. Again, we’re supposed to seek peace. By knowing what the goal is and then knowing some means to get to that goal, right? So if you have the right goal—people should own and exercise dominion over property—and use the wrong means to get there, you end up with what we’re at now. Or if you have the wrong goal, of course, you’re never going to get there, even if you’re using the right means.

So you got to know the goal. What’s the goal? Today we’re going to talk about two ballot measures, 57 and 61, that both say what the civil government should do in terms of crime—property crimes primarily. Well, we don’t know how to evaluate that if we don’t know what the job of the civil government is, if we don’t know the goal. We don’t know which of those two ballot measures, if either of them, might be a good means toward that goal, right?

So we want to know the goal of what the civil governor is supposed to be and what he’s supposed to do, and then apply what we do.

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Now, on the outline, I say the tongue is mightier than the pen. Well, most of you aren’t going to be writing things, but what you can do—what do we do? How do we apply this stuff we’re learning about?

Well, first: hear the voice of the falconer. Correct your house. Bring it under order. Become responsible. Don’t let the siren call of irresponsibility seduce you. You know, the problem from one perspective with the financial situation is that we’re all kids in the candy store. Nobody’s gardening anymore. We used to have, you know, kind of an adult in the system—the banking system. The guy lending money. They’re no more adult-like than the people trying to get money. Now, so it’s just a bunch of kids all interested in getting as much candy stuffed into themselves as possible.

We are in a revolt against maturity. We’re in times of tremendous immaturity, and that’s going to affect you. That’s the falconer—the wrong falconer song to you. That’s the siren song urging you to be irresponsible.

So the first way we apply this stuff is applying it to ourselves. The second way we apply it is to talk to people about it. What you do and what you say, the relationships God has given you in his providence—that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. Don’t be hoping to do some great dramatic act that will turn things around. That’s the siren song again.

We’ll see today: simple acts of goodness is the battle plan. Being good people in the midst of a culture in which the center won’t hold. That’s it. That’s what accomplishes victory. So that’s what we’re going to do. We want to understand these things, apply them to ourselves, think about how to use our tongues, which are mightier than the pen, typically.

Oh, there’s lots of articles being written about this and that and the other thing. But as you enter into conversation with your friends and relatives, neighbors, that has tremendous power and influence, particularly when those words are backed up by what they see in your life, as we’ll talk about today from 1 Peter.

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So what’s the foundation of the civil ruler? What is the civil government supposed to do?

It was very interesting this last week. Rush Limbaugh talked about—I don’t know what the final version of the bill was, but the first bill that the House turned down of the bailout or the rescue plan. You know, my son told me, Elijah doesn’t like me calling it a bailout plan. He says, “It’s like the Louisiana Purchase.” And I said, “Well, yeah, it sort of is. The federal government’s doing with the resources, enough and patience enough, to over the long term take care of some of these economic problems. I understand that. My problem is I think it’s going to be more like Seward’s Folly than the Louisiana Purchase.”

There was a time in this country’s history when they had a lot of public lands, and the whole job of the Department of Interior was getting them into private people’s ownership. That’s what they did. I’ve got some manual, some report of what the Department of Interior did—I don’t know, 100 years ago or something. I got a book. “Oh, we sold this to this guy, sold this to this guy, sold it.” It goes on for hundreds of pages. They were trying to get rid of the land they owned.

Alaska. They bought Alaska, and between the federal and state government, 97% of that state’s in public governmental ownership, 3% privately owned. So yeah, it’s sort of like the Louisiana Purchase, but my concern is it’s purchased by a group of people that don’t like to yield power—that see every opportunity of an emergency as a way to accumulate more power and wealth to itself. And they have just accumulated a tremendous amount of power.

I’m not saying I’m for or against what that bill was, but I’m just telling you it’s not an abstract consideration.

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So what is the job of the civil ruler? Well, Rush was pointing out that. Let me read you what the bill said—the one the House first passed down.

Purpose clause, quote: “To provide authority to the Treasury Secretary to restore liquidity and stability in the United States financial system and to ensure the economic well-being of Americans.” To ensure the economic well-being of Americans. That’s quite a claim of ability that the government applies to itself—to ensure the public or the financial well-being of my finances. Gosh, guys in Washington, ensure that I have that wonderful [standard of living].

And Rush contrasted it with the Constitution. The preamble to the Constitution that sets up the whole thing says: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution.”

So they say they’re going to promote the general welfare. Whereas the Congress today says we’re going to ensure the financial well-being of Americans. Quite a shift in emphasis.

“Promoting the general welfare.” Many people think that the way to read this—and this was a big argument even among the founders of the Constitution—but what does it mean? That’s the little thing, “promote the general welfare,” that people have pushed every bit of expansive state control into. That’s the only place in the Constitution that they can get a foothold, a wedge, to get in there and start to change the nature of what that federal government was supposed to do.

But some people think—and I think this is probably right—the general welfare is by creating domestic tranquility, by being an executor of justice, and in that way. So I think that’s what they were trying to do.

According to our Constitution, the federal government was to have quite limited powers. It was certainly not to go about trying to ensure that people have financial well-being. They were to ensure the kind of peace in which we can prosper, which is biblical language, right? From our exile text that we’ve been talking about, that’s biblical language. Instead, they think they can do more than that.

So our Constitution provided for quite limited purpose.

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I’ve got a title of an article on your outline, written by Colonel Davy Crockett, of the wild frontier. Davy Crockett was killed at the Alamo. We all know that. Few of us remember that he was actually a member of the House of Representatives. He was a legislator. And some of us old-timers here, you know, John Forester sent me this. Some of us old-timers used to pass this article around back in the day, as they say, back in the ’80s when we got together as a church. And it’s an interesting story.

Davy Crockett is a legislator, and they’re going to try to appropriate money for a widow of a United States Naval officer because she needed some money, and they were going to help her out. And it was going to be a unanimous vote to give her $20,000 or whatever it was. And Davy Crockett got up and said, “Well, I can’t do this.” He said, “We do not have the authority—the constitutional authority—to give this woman any kind of money.” He says, “It’ll be an act of injustice for the balance of the living if we do this thing.”

And he said, “You know, I think highly of this woman. Being a widow, I’ll contribute, you know, toward this fund. If every one of us contributes the same amount, we can come up with the 20,000 bucks ourselves.” And Crockett was not a man of means like some of the others were. They didn’t want to do that. They wanted to use the public means to provide for this benevolent work.

And Crockett told the story of a long time before that when there had been a fire in Georgetown, and the Congress had appropriated money several years before this to pay for those people whose houses burned down in Georgetown. So he voted for it. And then he went back and was, you know, the election year was coming. So he went in the summertime and went visiting people in his district, and he came across a guy—we later find out in the story that his name is Horatio Bunce. Nobody knows who he is really, but he’s a well-respected guy in the place.

And Crockett says, “Well, you know, as you probably know, I’m hoping to get your vote. Because you’re not going to get my vote. He says, “You either don’t understand what the Constitution says, or worse—if you do understand it—you’re turning it on its head.”

And Crockett says, “Well, how did I do that when you voted—to give benevolent money out of the Treasury of the United States?”

And Bunce says, “Well, we had a lot of money.” He says, “Well, that was the first problem. Why would the Treasury have an excess of money? Because you’ve taken too much by taxes.”

And he told Crockett, he looks to the Constitution, “It’s not your job. That money in the federal treasury belongs to the people. They have—they’re the ones whose job it is to dispense it according to the purposes of the United States Constitution. And it’s not to include benevolences or charity. Benevolences and charity are great. I’d give my money—bunch [of it]—to help those people at the fire, to help whatever it is. But not the government.”

And the simple head of the title of the little story by Crockett is “Not Yours to Give.” It’s not the government’s money to give for those purposes. It’s the government money that’s been collected for the particular purposes of the United States Constitution.

And Davy Crockett learned, as the king of the wild frontier, he knew that he had to act in accordance with what the Constitution of the country that he was governing said. And that Constitution didn’t allow for the kind of programs we have.

We got a candidate now, Senator Obama, who wants to take what we’ve done for the public schools and do that with college. College is supposed to become a right under him. All people get to go to college, just like all people get to go to public schools. Health care—everybody gets health care. The United States government thinks it can ensure these things. It cannot.

They can continue to try. But just like what they tried to do in ensuring private homes for low-income people, and then led to greed by everybody, the center won’t hold when we move away from what God says the civil government should be. We’ve moved away constitutionally, and we’ve moved away from the biblical understanding of who the civil governor is supposed to be.

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So let’s look at 1 Peter 2. Now, the two basic texts on the civil governor in the New Testament are this one and Romans 12:17 through 13:5. Let’s take a couple of minutes and look at 1 Peter 2. You know, we’ll look—we’ll get to the definition thing here, but we want to work our way through the text a little bit and draw some implications out in terms of what this text says.

Now, he begins by referring to the people as beloved. And then he titles them sojourners and pilgrims. Now, as exiles, they’re living in exile. In other words, this is written to Gentile converts who are scattered over in various provinces of the Roman Empire. And so he tells them a couple of things here.

One: he tells them, “You’re living in exile. Just like at times in the Old Testament the Jews lived in exile, you’re in exile now.” Okay, so this makes it a very appropriate text for us. What’s the role of civil governor? What do we need to hear about this stuff, living in the sort of exile we do in the context of our particular setting? So it’s very appropriate to us.

This term—these two terms together—imply one, geographic displacement. They’re in a geographic area that’s not their home anymore. And two, they don’t have the privilege of citizenship rights in the context of that empire. So they’re in a diminished spot. They’re not the rulers anymore. They become those that are ruled over by others. They’re living in exile.

But notice before he tells them we’re living in exile, the word he uses is beloved. One of the most important things we need to know in the context of exile—if that’s a proper analogy for where we’re at—is we’re beloved. It’s going to be okay. That’s the first thing he tells them. Beloved—the sovereign God of the whole universe writes to you as his beloved. So there’s a sense of peace. There’s a sense of, you know, I don’t want you to get all worked up, he says, about the fact that you’re exiles. You’re living in exile. You’re beloved, and there’s a sense of security about that.

What he’s going to give them here in these texts is a battle plan. How do you live in exile? How do you live in confrontation with the Roman Empire, or the Roman culture in which you live, in a way that’s going to be victorious? This is about a victorious battle plan. This is about living in exile, seeking the peace, the conversion of those around you, and how you’re going to seek that peace. Okay, so this is very germane to what we’re talking about in this series and to where we’re at as a country.

He starts talking about this societal conflict by explaining this conflict and what we should do in terms of it. Victory is the key to this story, and the broader section makes that clear. So how can we do it? How do we achieve victory? Is he going to tell us through public demonstrations and stuff? No, he won’t say that. It’s interesting what he does tell us here.

How is the conflict won? Well, he begins by saying, “Brothers, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims.” This designation is also found in Psalm 39:12: “Hear my prayer, O Lord. Give ear to my cry. Do not be silent at my tears, for I am a stranger with you, a sojourner as all my fathers.” There’s an eternal sense in which this is true. We’re moving toward you know, Jerusalem or Zion. But this is a specific sense in which they have just geographic displacement and a lack of citizenship.

So he, and one other thing he does here—he draws an analogy between Gentile Christians and their Jewish forebears in the faith, right? He uses the terminology to speak to them that was used in terms of Jews. So there’s throughout Peter’s epistle there’s this identification of the church as the new Israel, which is very important in a broader sense.

So what does he say? He urges us to do what? Abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. There’s the first battlefield on this battle plan. The first battlefield happens in ourselves. It happens with us waging war against ourselves, so to speak, or our fallen Adamic nature.

Another translation of this puts it this way: “Renounce your natural impulses, for they are at war with the soul.” Polycarp said that these impulses were the impulses of the world—comfort above all other things, self-protection, gratification of desires. We’ve got all these sorts of, you know, things that the world—the siren songs of the world—that are the instincts that we’re drawn to. And Peter says, you know, make sure that you don’t give in to these Adamic desires anymore.

So first of all, he says the first battlefield is abstaining from fleshly lusts. Don’t put those goals ahead of who you are as Christians. In other words, it’s not a material-spiritual thing. It’s an identity—and in Adam, what men want in Adam, and who we are now in our souls, our very lives as new Adam, as in Christ. And so he says live like Christians, basically, right?

But to do that, you have to know that you’re going to have warfare going out against you from several fronts. He doesn’t just say renounce your natural impulse, but natural impulses—plural, okay? So we have various temptations coming at us, and we’re to renounce them. We’re to cut them off. We’re to turn away from them when they show themselves up, and we’re to turn to self-consciously following the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, what does it mean? Here’s the second battle. It’s begun by verse 12: “Having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles.” So this warfare within ourselves will be evidenced as we have good conduct perceived by those around us in empire, okay? So those around us, where we’re living in exile, will be able to see our good conduct.

Now he calls them Gentiles. So you had the Jew-Gentile distinction. And now that distinction in the New Testament becomes Christian-non-Christian. So again, he draws identification of the church of Jesus Christ with the Jews of the Old Covenant. And he draws this connection. Then by “Gentiles,” he means non-Christians. So these non-Christians are supposed to see your good works that result from you battling hard—not to give in to natural impulses, but to renounce them and instead obey the Lord Jesus Christ.

So our spiritual life can be seen by deeds. It’s not a private, pietistic, “nobody knows what’s going on in your life” sort of thing. We’re supposed to be able to have our spiritual life discerned by our activity. In other words, another way to say this verse is to make sure your conduct—what can be seen by the Gentiles—is good.

To what end? That when they speak against you as evildoers—not “if” they speak against you as evildoers, but “when” they act as gossips and slanderers against you—that’s the way of fallen man, okay? When they do these things, they may by your good works which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation.

Now, what he’s saying is you’re going to win. The day of God’s visitation is the day of your vindication. But what he’s saying is they’re going to glorify God. Well, the only way to glorify God, the only way to have the sort of peace that we’re to pray for and seek for, is their conversion. So what he’s saying here is that if you engage in the battle plan correctly, you’re going to win the battle. You’re going to win in this battle with Roman culture. But you’re going to do it by renouncing your natural desires—your Adamic desires—having good conduct in their midst, even in the midst of them gossiping and slandering you, or even taking you to court falsely, or even them blaming you for the death of the Hindu leader in Orissa, or even if they decide, as some of them will when the hearings start, that it’s those Christians that have caused this mess in our empire.

Even if that stuff goes on, people are supposed to see our good deeds as a result of our commitment to follow Christ and to turn away from the old man and walk in the context of the new man. And Peter says here that as they see this, they will glorify God in the day of visitation. Not every last one of them, but the point is the empire will be converted. The peace of the city will be accomplished through this particular mechanism.

Twofold battle plan: one, war within yourself; two, war against the culture—the pagan culture—by being involved in good works that they can see and not repaying evil for evil.

Paul says the same thing in his runup in Romans 12 to his description about the civil magistrate: “Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Peter’s saying the same thing here. So you got Peter and Paul, you know, resonating in the same way, and there’s sections leading up to a description of what the civil governor is supposed to look like.

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Now, another thing that Peter is drawing on here is our Savior’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven.”

Now he makes some changes. Instead of “light,” he says “good conduct.” Instead of “before people,” he says “among the Gentiles.” Instead of “father,” he uses the more general term “God.” And he adds this eschatological element to it: “in the day of visitation.”

Now that doesn’t mean way off permanently, way off in the future. He means times of visitation come. And the particular time of visitation that came primarily at the time of Peter’s writing is the coming of AD 70. The time of the vindication of God’s people happens in AD 70 when God crushes the false church in Jerusalem. So he has an eschatological dimension, but he’s basically saying the same thing that our Savior said. And so it shouldn’t surprise us.

The center won’t hold around us, but this center will hold. This center of overcoming evil with good will hold. It will actually convert—it will be the cause whereby God brings to conversion the city in which he’s placed us. He’s placed us here for a reason.

So this is an inspired battle plan, and it involves good works that stem from commitment to Christ and a renouncing of sin. Pretty simple stuff. Stuff we all can do right away. It’s this afternoon, tomorrow, you can do the battle plan that will be effectual by seeking the peace. You’re going to accomplish the peace of the city by doing this simple stuff. That’s what he says. It’s going to happen.

And Jesus told this to his disciples on the Sermon on the Mount in the context of knowing that persecution will come. So persecution doesn’t change it. In fact, this is what preparation for persecution should look like: a renewed commitment to turn away from the old man, the natural responses we have, and to overcome evil with good works that are seen and discerned in the world in which we live.

You know, it’s not about publishing a political platform. It’s not about publishing an economic platform. It is, for the most part, just doing the simple things—just like Jeremiah 29 told us. Go to work, build houses, marry, you know, have your kids marry other good believers, all that sort of stuff. The simple things of life. And you know what? You’re going to change the world in which you live. That’s what he’s saying here, too.

So the only way to really refute gossip, he says, is by right actions. I mean, what are you going to do? Track down every gossip and slander and prove in the court of law they’re wrong? No, you just live your life—good conduct—and that will silence the mouths that speak against you.

And again, the goal is conversion. Remember what Peter told us about the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, and we are to engage in a righteousness that exceeds that of the Pharisees because it’s a righteousness that isn’t just in terms of our own personal well-being. It’s a righteousness that overcomes the unrighteousness of the place we’re in the midst of. We’re to overcome evil by engaging in this sort of righteousness, this sort of proper action.

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So Peter says this, and then he moves into what some people have seen as an introduction to a household code. You know, how in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3, it talks about husbands and wives and children and parents and masters and servants—a household code. And Peter has a little version of that if we wanted to read into it.

You’re familiar with this stuff. He talks about masters and servants. He talks about the government and subjects. And he talks about wives and husbands. But it’s a little different than the other household codes, right? Because there’s not a mutuality that’s stressed. He doesn’t say governors do this and those that are governed do this. He doesn’t say masters do this and slaves do this. He doesn’t say husbands do this and wives do this. He has one little line to the husbands, but almost the whole section in 1 Peter is given to wives.

You ever wonder why that is? Is it because wives need more instruction generally? No. It’s because the context of the world in which he wrote it—converts, right? People were coming to Christ. That’s who these were: Gentile converts. And typically, you know, the wife would follow the religion of the husband in this culture. So you don’t need to say a lot to the husband: “Be a good Christian. Your wife will follow.” But what do you do with a wife who’s in a position of subordination to a Gentile, non-believing husband?

That’s why he goes into detail about that. And he tells the wife the same thing here that he tells us at the beginning—his big message is fleshed out in these relationships. The big message is, you know, if you’re in a position of subordination to the broader culture, do good deeds. It’s that simple. Jeremiah 29 all over again.

Then he tells the wife: do good deeds. You know, this will be the normal way. Not always, in every case, he’ll be successful. But that’ll be the normal way in which Gentile husbands are brought to conversion. He couldn’t tell the Gentile masters or the Gentile governors what to do, but he could tell those who are living in exile what they should do so that the masters and the governors would do what they’re supposed to do as they’re converted to the faith.

So that’s kind of the flow here, and that’s why this is a little different than Ephesians and Colossians.

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And so he goes into this now, next verse, verse 13: “Therefore, submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.”

Now, the word “submit” might be better put as “respect.” It doesn’t mean obey every time. It has an attitude of submission, but it doesn’t mean obey everything they tell you to do, because you were never given that kind of explicit statement in that way. It’s respect, not obedience. And we can see echoes here of 1 Timothy 2.

Remember, we said 1 Timothy 2 is Paul praying like Jeremiah 29. You know, “seek the peace of the city and those where you live. You’ll be seeking their peace, you’ll have peace.” Paul says, “Pray for all men and particularly for the civil governors, right?” Why? So that you’ll have peace. So in other words, pray for their conversion. Work toward that end. Do good deeds.

And Peter’s doing the same thing here. He starts in a general sense: so we’re to submit ourselves to every ordinance of man, to every man. In other words, to all men in their various callings. That’s sort of the implication of what this says. And so he’s telling them here that this is a general sort of calling. Again, he’s repeating what he just said: do good in the midst of, in the context of the seeing of your deeds by the Gentiles.

He also is picking up—maybe related to this—is Titus 3:1: “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men.” All men. So that’s what he begins at here. Respect all these men.

And then he goes on to say, “Whether to the king as supreme or to governors as to those who are sent by him.” Now, so he says by “king” he means Caesar. Whether to Caesar, who’s the head of the Roman Empire, or to the various proconsuls and magistrates that rule in the particular regions in which you live. He’s writing to various regions. They all have guys over them whom Caesar has set to be his voice where they’re at. And that’s what he’s picking up on here—the current governmental structure of the Roman Empire.

So to Caesar or to those that have been sent out by Caesar, right?

And now he gives us in this discussion the job description. Here it is: “For the punishment of evildoers for the praise of those who do good.” There it is. What is the job of even a Gentile governor that he’s normally going to be doing and should do? He is there to suppress evil. He’s there to punish evildoers—not, you know, fix them, not cure them, but to punish them. Now, it’s part of curing them to punish them for what they do wrong, but that’s what he’s supposed to do.

And he’s supposed to praise those who do good. Now, the context of this is, remember, they’re going to be slandering you. They’re going to be saying to Caesar, “Well, look what this guy, these Christians are doing.” And Caesar is supposed to be able to punish the people that are doing evil and to praise you for your good works. You’re supposed to be really good citizens, and he’s supposed to see that. And he’s supposed to know: “I have these slanderers here, but I’m not believing those charges.” He’s supposed to praise those who do good. In other words, to vindicate you when you’re brought into courts of law by members of the empire.

And this vindication of you by him will be in part due to the fact that he knows that you’re a person that’s lived a good life. You’ve done good deeds, and you can bring in all kinds of character witnesses to save whether slanderers aren’t true. So the job description primarily is to punish evildoers. And as he goes about doing that, he will praise people that do good.

So the indication again is that what we do will be successful—not just to convert the city but also generally speaking for our own well-being. The good works will be our defense before the emperor.

So the job description is this: to punish evildoers and also to praise the people that do good.

Paul says the same thing in Romans 13:3: “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.” You will have praise from the same. So he uses the same two ideas as Peter does.

The job description for the civil government—what they’re supposed to be doing, our leaders—is to punish evildoers, vindicating and actually praising people that do good. That doesn’t mean giving them money. That doesn’t mean, you know, trying to establish their authority in the church and the family and all that stuff. It just means praising people that do good civil deeds. The context is false charges. The king should recognize the good deeds that are done by the best citizens that he has—who are the Christians.

So he protects and praises a culture by providing peace and stability for that culture through the application of vengeance. The assumption is that the empire is benevolent to those who do good. You hear what I just said? The assumption of this text—very important, you hear this—is that the empire will be benevolent to those that do good.

Here’s a comment by the Word Bible Commentary commenting on this fact. They say: “They start with the presumption that their responsibilities to God and to the empire must inevitably come into conflict. Ironically, this very presumption is the surest guarantee that this will be the case.” So if you start by saying, “Well, the empire is evil and we’re good and we’re just going to, you know, butt heads with it all the time,” that’s what’s going to happen. But that’s not what Peter says to do. He says, “Assume the emperor who is given by God is a benevolent guy in the hands of God. You’re going to want to convert him, but in the meantime, he will normally do what’s right by punishing evildoers. You got a real bad situation where they don’t punish you. Well, they normally will. And the point is this is the attitude. This is how you live in exile.”

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There is abroad—even within the context of our circles, people that we love and learn from—there is abroad in our circles an idea that empire and civil government generally is always bad, always somehow less than Christian because it uses violence. And as a result, our job is just to rip the empire down. Uh, no. That’s what the Anabaptists taught in the Reformation. The radical Anabaptists. You know, American Baptists—they’re not, you know, Baptist churches in America have the roots not in the Anabaptists but in the Protestant Reformers. The Mennonites, Amish—those people have the roots in the Anabaptists.

The radical Anabaptists said that Christians couldn’t be civil magistrates because why would a Christian want to lop somebody’s head off? It’s wrong in and of itself, they said. And there are people today in the context of our sphere of influence who seem to be picking up on this very line, who quote—who cite people like a guy named Horsley as a good way to read the book of Revelation. When Horsley says, for instance, that we need to get have a new vision of a political Jesus because 9/11 showed us what happens when we, as a nation and empire, hurt other people. That’s what Horsley’s interpretation of 9/11 was: it’s our fault because we’re an empire. We’re the evil empire.

You see, and these are the citations now that some in our circles are pointing us to. Anabaptist, you know, anti-government being the agency of vengeance for God. You know, it’s really a dangerous position.

And Peter’s take is completely 100% opposite of that. Don’t try to tear down the empire. The empire is there for your well-being. They’re there to execute vengeance upon ungodly men. Now, if they do that, they image the Lord Jesus Christ.

You know what does it say in Psalm 2? He’ll rip you to shreds if you’re evil. We want the Lord Jesus Christ to execute his judgment by physically killing people that are unrepentant and won’t repent and who are enemies of his bride. What husband wouldn’t do that out of love for his bride? And what father wouldn’t do it out of love for his son? Those that hate Jesus, attack Jesus.

Those radical Hindus in Orissa should hopefully come to repentance. But if they don’t, they should be executed by the civil government there. And when they do, that’s not somehow a lesser of two evils. That is the proper exercise of what Peter says the civil governor is supposed to do. And Paul says the same thing. He’s a minister of vengeance. Paul says, “Don’t take vengeance yourself.” But God has given us an institution—the civil government—to bring vengeance, the sword of God, down if necessary, to lop people’s heads off.

Now, Jim Jordan is given to overstatement. He’s got apparently a newsletter coming out. He posted a little bit of it on the BH list this last week in response to some of this Anabaptist tendencies we’re now having in the context of our circles. And he’s given to overstatement. By what he says, for instance: “We should have a Christian president. The Christian president should send his guys out to get Bin Laden. And when they get Bin Laden, they should bring him before the Christian president. He should have the news cameras on him, and he should with a smile on his face execute Bin Laden.”

Yeah, he’s given to overstatement. But his point—his point is a good one. If we recoil at that, we recoil from part of what it means to be in union with the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re baptized in his name. We’re Christians. And as we set up civil states as Christians and as we seek the conversion of the civil states around us, we want them to reflect the righteousness and justice and vengeance of God against evil.

A country like ours that has moved almost totally away from the death penalty has moved totally away from the Jesus of the Bible. And there are many church sympathizers who have pushed the government that way.

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So the job description says—and don’t get misunderstood—the civil institution is a good, godly thing. We should want it to stay in place. We shouldn’t want to tear it down. There’s nothing wrong inherently with empire, with civil government. And it is given the task to execute the vengeance of the Lord Jesus Christ against radical, rebellious, contentious, unrepentant sinners who strike out in particularly obnoxious ways against the image of God in men. That’s what they’re supposed to do, is what this says.

And then he goes on—goes back to his basic theme here: “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.”

Nice little chiasm there, by the way. So you honor all people, but you love the brother—brothers and sisters, right? And you reverence God. You worship God. But you give respect to the king. So at the center of it is brothers and God, and they have a heightened sense. We have a heightened sense of covenantal obligation and love to them. But that doesn’t mean we hate the stranger. It means we have respect and reverence—respect, rather—and submission to the authorities that are set up.

And so Peter ends his discourse in that way.

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So this is a battle plan. It tells us how to achieve the conversion of the nations—conversion to the place where God has placed us. It’s real simple. It’s good works. And we’re to war victoriously by engaging in the first battle: renouncing our own fleshly lusts. Engaging in the second battle: doing good in the context of the culture in which we live. And the normal allies in this battle would be God’s ministers of vengeance and vindication, even if they’re not Christian—even if they’re Caesars.

And remember that the will of God in all this is victory. Victory. He’s not saying dog paddle forever. He’s saying start swimming because you’re going to get to the goal here. And the goal—just like it was in Jeremiah—is seeking the peace of the place where I’ve given you, seeking them to come to praise God in the day of visitation.

And you accomplish that. Evangelism is accomplished in part and in a very significant way in doing the simple things of life. Again, just like Jeremiah told us, in a very self-conscious committed way: renouncing our fleshly lusts and turning instead to the way Jesus tells us to act toward others.

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So we won’t turn to Romans 12, but that’s the other passage. Psalm 72, I say as a caveat, just because Psalm 72 gives more description to the importance of the civil magistrate and protecting the rights of the oppressed and poor by executing justice on those who would oppress them. So there’s other things involved in this. The king’s table may be some indication of some special concern at times for people. You know, it’s simplistic to see if we can look at these phrases in Peter and Paul in Romans and in 1 Peter and come up with the total definition of the civil state.

The Scripture is full of definitions of it and nuances to it. But the basic idea is what we’ve seen it laid out here by Peter. And if we turn to Romans 12, the same thing—that it’s a ministry of vengeance. And it’s said in the context again in Paul’s epistle of overcoming evil with good, and the civil magistrate and having a good reputation to the state is part of the way that battle is carried out.

So, you know, that’s the basic job of the civil governor, and that’s what we’re supposed to learn from the scriptures.

I also don’t have time to go to the church fathers. I pointed this out before, but if you go back—I think these are up on our website at PPAC. If you look through the various confessions of faith, you’ll see these two texts—Peter and Romans—being cited. You’ll see that they say over and over again: the job of the civil magistrate is to execute the sword, to punish evildoers and also to protect those that are innocent—the church included—from the charges of those who would gossip and slander against them, just like Peter says it is here.

And additionally, if you go to those confessions, you’ll also see in several of them strong attacks against this Anabaptist notion that Christians shouldn’t engage in civil government and that we should be necessarily cantankerous with the empire.

Now, those are important admonitions to hear from the church fathers, both in terms of their description—just like these texts tell us of what the civil government is supposed to be like—but also of the sins to avoid.

Peter knew there was a sinful tendency to jump into antinomianism and some kind of weird version of spirituality that sees everything out there that isn’t Christian as an enemy to be fought with and be cantankerous over. And he says, “Don’t do that.” You’re going to overcome evil not with evil, but with good.

And it is evil to say that the civil magistrate is inherently a bad institution because it reflects the justice of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is evil—it is, as one of the confessions calls it, hurly-burly—it’s just wrong; it puts the whole world upside down to say that Christians shouldn’t be involved as civil magistrates because somehow the institution itself is evil.

You know, the Anabaptist version of political action has taken a hit in the chest for Jesus because, if he succeeds in political action, he must have been a compromiser, because he thinks that politics and government are inherently evil.

We want to avoid that kind of nonsense.

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Okay. Roman numeral two: Goal. This will go quick. Goals and means. Justice and judges.

What is crime? Sin or sickness? The question answers itself. The Bible says the civil magistrate is to punish evildoers, not to cure those that are ill. That’s left to other institutions. So any criminal justice system that focuses primarily on dealing with sin as a sickness and not as sin, and attempting to say that well, people just need help, they need rehabilitation programs, they need drug treatment programs at the break—it doesn’t work.

No. In the Bible, it’s called evildoing. It’s called sin, not a sickness. Now, we could say there’s a sense of sickness to it, but it is a sin. Crime is a sin.

What is justice? Well, in the Bible, justice isn’t penitentiaries. It’s restitution, all right? You saw that last week. Sevenfold restitution for various crimes. And then the other thing that the word of God brings to bear is capital punishment.

And I’ve got “Restitution versus Penitentiaries and Monastic Cells” because that’s where those things started.

Most of you know this, I think, but our current system of incarceration—penitentiaries and prison cells—comes from a mistaken Arminian view of life held in by the Quakers that everybody has an inner light. And so when they sin, they just need to be put quietly someplace and made to meditate, and they’ll become penitent in this monastic cell. That’s what the modern prison system comes from.

Have you been to a prison? Have you visited inside a long-term correctional facility? There is nothing penitent going on in there. Usually you got guys caged like animals being yelled at foully all night long in many cases. Talk to a few people that have been incarcerated and put in prison, and you’ll find out the horrific, depersonalizing impact of being caged like an animal that way.

Plus, it’s just plain stupid theologically. Not everybody—if you want to talk about an inner light, God says the way to get the inner light out is to beat them. It’s to bring punishments to bear. It’s to make them pay. It’s to restore justice to the one they stole from—in sevenfold restitution—so that they’ll feel pain in what they did. And if they physically hurt other people, it’s to beat them. And if they become incorrigible or kill people, they’re supposed to execute them.

So prisons aren’t good. Building more prisons isn’t a good thing. We believe in restitution.

Every word spoken in the message the angels brought—Hebrews 2:2 says that every transgression and disobedience received a just reward: restitution, corporal punishment, and the death penalty—is a just reward. The New Testament tells us for certain sins the death penalty, the ministry of vengeance, Anabaptist heresies. I already talked about that.

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Three: Safety, peace, and the goal of seeking the peace.

So what is the guy supposed to be doing this for? He’s supposed to be punishing evildoers so that you’ll have peace in your—you know, you’ll have safety to go about doing the good works that God has called you to do. To the extent that the civil magistrate doesn’t provide for safety for its citizens, he has completely failed in what he’s called to do.

What’s a judge? A computer or a man? Exodus 21:22 says, “When you got this problem—two men fight, there’s harm done—the guy has to pay as the judges determine.” That’s what the Bible says. That verse, as the judges determined, some penalties in the Old Testament—murder penalties, for instance—in Exodus 21:12: “He who strikes a man to so that he dies shall surely be put to death.”

And the indication seems to be that much of the Old Testament civil penalties are maximum penalties that a judge has the discretion to apply, except that it says “surely put him to death.” The judge has no discretion in those cases. He’s got to execute him. Got to execute him. So in the Bible, we don’t have a computer. We don’t have a law book where every little offense has the exact penalty laid out. We have men representing the judge in heaven, right, sitting in session. We have men who had discretion to apply a variety, as they determine, of penalties to a particular wrongdoer.

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Real world options: Measures 57 and 61.

Got the voters’ guide downstairs. It’s out here on the heater. You can read about it in here. But the problem is 57 and 61 are measures that are trying to cut back on property crimes and drug crimes. 61 is a citizen initiative, and the legislature, when they saw it coming, quickly put together a referral which is 57. If you like 61, vote no on 57 because if they both pass, 57 is going to be the law. That’s the way the legislature wrote the thing up.

They’re both basically “get tough on property and drug criminals.” That’s what they both are. They’re both involved with, you know, longer prison sentences and mandatory minimums. So we don’t like some of them, right? We don’t like prisons. We don’t like judges being disempowered.

But when a judge won’t put people in prison anymore, the people say enough’s enough. People have to be punished. And if this is the only way you’re going to keep us safe is to lock somebody up, go lock them up.

You know, in the state of Oregon, nobody gets in prison for possession of any drug that I know of. And actually, if you have a bunch of drugs and it looks like you’re probably selling, you’re not hardly ever getting in prison for that either—unless you got a really whole bunch of them and you’re a major distributor. Then you might get some prison time.

So we have a horrible situation where car thieves, people on drugs, meth people who are stealing cars doing all kinds of horrible things, are decreasing public safety. And something’s got to be done.

The goal is to provide you peace. It’s to protect the citizens who are righteous and doing what’s good. So I think it’s worthwhile supporting measure 61 in spite of its deficiencies of only creating more jail systems and taking away the right of judges to determine these sanctions. They meet the broadest goal possible—the bigger goal—lesser of two evils, right?

We either fail it and we have continuing breakdown in the streets, so you can’t go out at night and your car may not be there, or we pass it. And while we do some bad things, we’re still reinforcing prison, and we’re turning to discouraging judges from having discretion. At least we’re keeping our city safe. So I think that’s the right way to go.

57 emphasizes the sickness aspect. It puts a lot more emphasis on drug treatment programs. Now, I’m all for drug treatment programs, but I’m not for drug treatment programs from the guy that’s supposed to hold the sword. Drug treatment programs, I think, should be done by churches, communities, individuals. And maybe it’s our fault that the state’s doing it because we’re not doing it. But either way, I don’t think they should be doing it.

And so 57 has the further downfall that it treats crime not as sin, but as sickness and attempts to do that. And plus, they have some very lenient sentences as well.

So that’s sort of an application—hopefully of what the word of God says the basic job of civil magistrates is to do. The basic principle, the battle plan for how we accomplish the peace of the city where we live, and then try to apply it in some way to the ballot measure before us.

Let’s pray.