I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who describes himself as a “Christian anarchist.” He said, “I just don’t think humans were meant to have authority. Only God can have authority.” I must admit that I have some sympathy with that view. You don’t have to look far to find abuses of authority. But I don’t think it’s true that humans weren’t meant to have authority.
When God created humans, he instructed them to take charge of the earth, to work and to protect it (see Genesis 1 and 2, esp. vv. 1.26, 1.28, and 2.15). God established kings to have authority in Israel, including a perpetual dynasty for David (see 2 Samuel 7). Paul tells us that earthly authorities are God’s servants, bearing the sword (= the power of punishment) against wrongdoers. (see Romans 13.1-7).* God wants his creation to be orderly, and he intends for humans to bring order on his behalf. It’s just that sometimes that goes wrong.
Human beings, after all, are notoriously prone to rebellion against God. When earthly authorities do that, it often means that they abuse their (God-given) power in the service of their own ends. When they do this, they use something that God intended to be good (the power to bring about order) and twist it to make it bad. How can we know when this is happening?
Psalm 58, which is an indictment of wickedness in general, gives us a clue. The Psalm begins with an accusation of wrongdoing by earthly powers:
58.1 Do you really speak righteously, you mighty ones?
Do you judge people fairly?
2 No, you practice injustice in your hearts;
with your hands you weigh out violence in the land. (Ps 58.1-2, CSB)
Here we find an analysis of the abuse of power by “mighty ones.”
The first verse asks a pair of (rhetorical) questions of earthly authorities. First, verse 1a asks whether their speech is righteous or not. Do they speak up when they see injustice? Or do they hold their tongues? Do they speak wisdom and truth? Or foolishness and lies? Speech is powerful, especially when done by the powerful.
Second, verse 1b asks whether earthly authorities are making fair judgments. The Psalms, Proverbs, and Latter Prophets are filled with denunciations of rulers who pervert justice. Whether they are making wicked judgments or ruling in favor of their cronies or simply tilting the scales of justice for their own ends, perverting justice is something that God hates. Earthly rulers are supposed to bring justice, not subvert it.
After the questions of verse 1, verse 2 gives the response. Earthly authorities very often fail to speak righteously. Instead, verse 2b says, they harbor injustice within their hearts. Jesus says that it is “out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks” (see Luke 6.45). So, the one with a heart of injustice is hardly likely to speak righteously—and again, the speech of the powerful has powerful consequences.
Verse 2b answers the question of whether earthly authorities are judging fairly. No, the Psalmist says, they are using their position of power to mete out violence in the land. Instead of using the sword to keep evildoers in line (as in Romans 13.4), they use it to fill the land with violence. And since violence is the ultimate (earthly) power, it is all too tempting to use it to get one’s own way.
In response to this, we could simply conclude, like my friend did, that humans shouldn’t have any authority at all. But that’s part of why God created humans in the first place. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, when it comes to human authorities, 1) Are they exercising their authority in ways that bring God’s good order into the world? and 2) Is their use of power consistent with what we know of God’s righteousness? Unless we make God the point of reference for what constitutes good use of earthly authority, we will simply make ourselves the standard. And as the history of the human race demonstrates, doing so has consistently disastrous results.
This is all the more important in our highly partisan times. We Christians owe ultimate allegiance to just one authority: the king Jesus. But our partisan teams encourage us to give our loyalty to Team Red or Team Blue, instead. This often leads us to adopt worldly standards for the use of human authority, rather than godly ones. When that happens, the abuse of power is inevitable.
In my next post, I’ll look at some ways that we can respond to abusive authority without being apathetic or rebellious.
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* This obviously doesn’t mean obeying governing authorities when they command us to disobey God. If our obedience to earthly authority is part of our obedience to God, then any command by earthly authorities to disobey God is a call for us to turn our back on obedience to God, which we must not do, since our ultimate obedience is to him.
