Romans 13:6

GOD’S CIVIC MINISTERS

‘For they are God’s ministers.’

Romans 13:6

St. Paul gives the Roman Christians the very highest, the most overwhelming views of their spiritual position, the greatness of their present inward elevation, and of their glory to come—such a glory, he says, that the whole created universe sighs and struggles in the expectation of its bliss.

I. Then he comes to common life.—And what has he to say? All he does is to lay it upon them to be loyal to every relative duty; to be cordially amenable to order; to pay their every debt; to meet half-way the demands of the State for tax and toll; and to do all this—not in the spirit of the fanatic, who flings his money, so to speak, to the agent of a God-forsaken world of wickedness, but in the spirit of the dutiful child of God, who sees in civil order God’s will, in civil authority God’s stern but sacred instrument of right, in the civil magistrate the minister of the heavenly Father.

II. It was the precise contrary to the parody of Christianity which a frightened and dissolute paganism had created for itself. But it was precisely Christianity, in its pure essence. For it is of the essence of Christianity, the Christianity of the apostles and of their Lord, that it blesses both worlds; that it has a promise for both lives, the present and the future; that it lifts, with its right hand, the curtain of eternity, and lets in all the powers of the coming world upon the awakened and believing soul, at the foot of the cross of Christ, and by His empty grave; and meanwhile, with its left hand, smoothes the human path, and adjusts human relations, and points out perpetually to man how the eternal hope before him, the eternal life within him, is meant to influence, and to assure, his whole being’s attention to the common duties of the hour.

III. Christians may fail thus to put in contact eternity and time. But Christianity does not do so.—It hath a promise for the life that now is, as well as for that which is to come.

IV. So, in the very name of its mysteries of salvation and of glory, the Faith of Christ cries to its followers to be good citizens, in whatever place or state they find themselves, leading or led, governing or governed, or, as so often, both together. It lays it upon the private citizen to take the gravest account not only of his rights, which are important, but of his responsibilities, his duties, which for him are immeasurably more so. Not in the name only of propriety and bien-être, but in the name of Christ and of eternity, it calls on him to pay his debts, to pay his dues, to regard himself as a responsible member of the body civic, of the body politic. It calls him to live, not in the spiritual order only, but in the national, and in the urban, ‘ not unto himself’; to seek the good of his neighbour; if need be, to sacrifice for it.

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.