Obey God or the Government?

If God is the ultimate authority for the Christian, what do we do when the authority of the government tells us to do what God prevents? For a Christian who is called to obey the authorities God has put us under, we are faced with a conflicting set of obligations. Obeying God will mean coming under the authority of laws justly created by the ruling government, except where obeying the government would mean directly disobeying God. This was what Peter and John declared in saying we must obey God rather than men (Acts 4:20; 5:29). This was also what the Hebrew midwives did when Pharaoh had commanded Hebrew baby boys be put to death (Exodus 1:17-21). Even the wise men who came looking for Jesus, when instructed by Herod to come back and tell him where the baby was, disobeyed and went home a different way (Matthew 2). In their disobedience to the civil government, they were also then subject to the civil punishment. A Christian should always be ready to obey God with wisdom and accept the human consequences whatever they may be.

* Over the next weeks I will be sharing excerpts from a “Gospel & Culture: Politics” paper I wrote to help us better understand how to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17).