Jesus and your Taxes, God and Government
Announcements
Call To Worship
Say: Let us now begin to worship the Father the Son, the Holy Spirit, Our Call to worship Comes to us from
Reading
Introduction
Text
Observations/Background
Application note:
Point 1 - Sphere Sovereignty
Application:
Point 2 - Legitimate authority of the state
This brief statement drips with irony. Here is man’s great tower, reaching skyward to declare his usurpation of heaven. Yet when the Lord appears to consider man’s great achievement, he must stoop from his great height in order to see the puny monument. We get a sense of the text when we fly in airplanes above our cities. However grand are the buildings from man’s perspective on the ground, from high in the air they appear as small and insignificant.
To say that God “came down” or “stooped” is what theologians refer to as an anthropomorphism. While God is not physically located anywhere in creation, an anthropomorphism speaks of God as if he were a physical being. Here, God’s coming down expresses his infinite superiority to mankind. God’s supremacy remains true of the greatest human projects today, such as the NASA space program or the human genome project. The greatest of all that man can ever achieve is as nothing before the works of God, who created the immensity of the universe and formed our very being with his hands. In God’s eyes, nothing we can do will ever impress his sublime genius and infinite power. James Boice comments, “The only truly significant accomplishments are God’s (sometimes in and through us), for only these partake of the nature of God and endure forever, as God does.”1
Application:
When it comes to wicked government
But this doctrine extends still farther, that every man, according to his calling, ought to perform the duty which he owes to men; that children ought willingly to submit to their parents, and servants to their masters; that they ought to be courteous and obliging towards each other, according to the law of charity, provided that God always retain the highest authority, to which every thing that can be due to men is, as we say, subordinate.1 The amount of it therefore is, that those who destroy political order are rebellious against God, and therefore, that obedience to princes and magistrates is always joined to the worship and fear of God; but that, on the other hand, if princes claim any part of the authority of God, we ought not to obey them any farther than can be done without offending God.