Faithful In Little

ARGUMENT · WHAT WE DO

The authority God gave you, and what to do with it

We have argued that a Christian should decline the vote, because it claims an authority God never gave the people. Declining it is the smaller half of obedience. Having refused an authority God did not give you, you owe Him the faithful exercise of the authority He did give: over yourself, over a household, within a church, and toward your rulers and neighbors. This paper expands What Do We Do? into the duties those offices carry, and draws the line between the sword a father may lift against an intruder and the sword that belongs to the magistrate.

Download the paper (PDF)One-page summary (PDF)

01

Refusal is half

In None Gives What He Has Not we argued that a Christian should decline the vote. In With the Windows Open we argued that he may refuse a ruler only where the ruler commands sin. Both papers say what a Christian should not do. Neither says what he should do with the rest of his life, and a man who hears only the first half has been handed an excuse. He can tell himself that since the ballot was never his, nothing is.

That is not obedience. It is abdication, and it is the same error from the other side. The liberal order, by which we mean the conviction that authority comes up from the consent of the people under it, teaches a man to suspect every authority, his own included. The man who refuses the vote and then refuses to govern his house has learned that lesson twice.

Our rule is simple. Having refused an authority God did not give you, faithfully exercise the authorities and responsibilities He did give you. Christ put it as a promise: “Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities” (Luke 19:17). Paul put it as a requirement: “it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:2). The authority a man holds is small, it is real, and he will answer for it.

What Do We Do? named five duties: stop compromising with evil, repent of your own liberalism, confess the sins of our fathers, submit to Christ and His order, and speak prophetically. This paper expands the fourth. Submitting to Christ’s order means taking up the place in it that God assigned, and that place carries authority as well as obedience. We follow the four fields our talk series uses: yourself, your home, your church, and your political life.

THE LINE BETWEEN THEM

02

Where your authority comes from

Scripture places every human authority under one commandment: “Honour thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the good land, which the Lord thy God gives to thee” (Exod. 20:12). The Westminster Larger Catechism reads father and mother to mean every superior “in family, church, or commonwealth” (Q. 124). Authority is paternal in its pattern, and it comes down from God. It does not come up from the consent of the people under it.

That is why a father cannot lay his authority down. His wife and children did not give it to him, and they cannot excuse him from it. The Catechism lists what the office requires, “according to that power they receive from God”: to “love, pray for, and bless their inferiors; to instruct, counsel, and admonish them; … discountenancing, reproving, and chastising such as do ill; protecting, and providing for them all things necessary for soul and body” (Q. 129). It counts neglect of those duties among the sins of superiors, along with “careless exposing, or leaving them to wrong, temptation, and danger,” and “remiss behavior” (Q. 130).

Sir Robert Filmer drew the same list from the other direction. He argued that a king’s duties are a father’s duties enlarged: “as the father over one family, so the king, as father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct, and defend the whole commonwealth.” Whatever a man thinks of kings, the list begins at home. Before a father is a subject, he is the one who feeds, clothes, instructs, and defends a household.

03

Yourself

The first authority God gives a man is over himself. “A man slow to anger is better than a strong man; and he that governs his temper better than he that takes a city” (Prov. 16:32). A man who cannot govern his appetite, his temper, his money, or his time has nothing to bring to a house. This is where What Do We Do? began: repent of your own liberalism, the habit of treating yourself as a sovereign who answers to no one you did not choose.

This field is not only for fathers. Many of the men we speak to are not yet married, and a single man holds a father’s office in prospect. He governs himself, works, honors his own father, and prepares to take a wife. God told the exiles in Babylon to do exactly that under a pagan king: “Build ye houses, and inhabit them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruits thereof; and take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters” (Jer. 36:5–6 [29:5–6]). The captivity was no reason to delay a household. Neither is the present order.

Governing yourself includes knowing what you do not govern. A man cannot control the election, the economy, the courts, or the culture, and much of the fear in Christian politics comes from pretending he can. “As a rush of water, so is the king’s heart in God’s hand: he turns it whithersoever he may desire to point out” (Prov. 21:1). “Take therefore no thought for the morrow” (Matt. 6:34) is not an instruction to stop working. It is permission to stop carrying what was never yours. A man who trusts God with the nation has his hands free for his house.

04

Home

The household is where most of a man’s authority lives, and it carries five duties.

Provide. “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Tim. 5:8). Paul does not call the man who fails to provide lazy. He says he has denied the faith. Provision is the most ordinary form of fatherly rule, and the one most men can begin tomorrow: steady work, honest money, and a house kept in order.

Teach. “And thou shalt teach them to thy children, and thou shalt speak of them sitting in the house, and walking by the way, and lying down, and rising up” (Deut. 6:7). The command assumes the father is the teacher and the house is the school. A father who hands the whole of his children’s instruction to the state, the screen, or even the church has given away an office he was told to hold. He teaches them what righteousness requires, including what it requires of rulers, so that they learn where authority comes from at home before anyone teaches them otherwise.

Discipline. “He that spares the rod hates his son: but he that loves, carefully chastens him” (Prov. 13:24). “For what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?” (Heb. 12:7). Discipline is the part of fatherhood the present order most distrusts, because it is authority exercised without the child’s consent. It is also bounded. “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged” (Col. 3:21), and the Catechism names “correcting them unduly” among the sins of superiors (Q. 130).

Protect. “Remember our great and terrible God, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses” (2 Esdras 14:14 [Neh. 4:14]). Nehemiah said that to men building a wall with their weapons at hand. Protection belongs to the office, and the next section takes up its hardest case.

Establish a household. A house is more than a roof. Joshua spoke for his household as one body: “I and my house will serve the Lord, for he is holy” (Josh. 24:15). Establishing one means marrying, ordering the home around the worship of God, and keeping it in order through the years, knowing that “except the Lord build the house, they that build labour in vain” (Ps. 126:1 [127:1]). A husband’s authority is the authority of a man told to die for his wife: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5:25). A household brought under that order is, as What Do We Do? put it, a political act, not a substitute for one.

05

The sword at the door

The clearest test of a father’s authority is this one. A man breaks into the house at night, and the father stands between him and his wife and children. None Gives What He Has Not argued that the power of the sword belongs to the magistrate and not to the private man, because Paul forbids private vengeance (Rom. 12:19) and gives the sword to the ruler as God’s “revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. 13:4). A reader may fairly ask whether the father has any right to strike.

The law of Moses answers the question exactly. “And if the thief be found in the breach made by himself and be smitten and die, there shall not be blood shed for him. But if the sun be risen upon him, he is guilty, he shall die instead” (Exod. 22:1–2 [22:2–3]). At night, in the breach, the householder who strikes is innocent. In daylight, the same blow makes him guilty of blood. The difference is not in the thief. It is in the act. In the dark, with the intruder in the wall, the father cannot know what the man intends, and he is defending. When the man can be seen, named, and brought to judgment, striking him is no longer defense. It is punishment, and punishment belongs to the magistrate.

The father who stops an intruder at the door is exercising his office. The father who hunts him down the next morning has taken the magistrate’s. David shows the same office in the field: “Thy servant was tending the flock for his father; and when a lion came and a she-bear, and took a sheep out of the flock, then I went forth after him, and smote him, and drew the spoil out of his mouth” (1 Kgdms 17:34–35 [1 Sam. 17:34–35]). He defended what his father had put in his charge.

The same line governs a man’s neighbors. “Deliver them that are led away to death, and redeem them that are appointed to be slain; spare not thy help” (Prov. 24:11). A man who comes on his neighbor under attack does not wait for permission to intervene, and the Samaritan who stopped for the man among thieves is the Lord’s own picture of a neighbor (Luke 10:36–37). The duty is rescue, not retribution.

The father’s sword reaches the intruder. It does not reach the magistrate. Filmer, who made the father’s authority the pattern of the king’s, said in the same passage that “the power of the father over his child gives place and is subordinate to the power of the magistrate.” When the threat to a household comes from the ruler himself, through an unjust law or a sinful command, the father’s course is the one set out in With the Windows Open. He refuses the command, appeals where he lawfully can, and bears the penalty. He does not take up arms against the power that is.

06

Church

A man’s authority in the church is smaller than in his house, and his duties are larger. Most men will never be elders. All of them are members, and the household is where the church’s officers are trained: “if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?” (1 Tim. 3:5).

Cultivate Christian community. “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another” (Heb. 10:25). The liberal order produces isolated households as surely as it produces isolated men, and a family that worships alone, eats alone, and suffers alone has no one to correct it and no one to carry it. Bring your house into a church, keep it there, and open your table to the other households in it.

Support what preserves Christian order. “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10). That means giving to your church first, and then to the institutions that carry the same order into the next generation: Christian schools and home-education cooperatives, care for widows and the fatherless (Jas. 1:27), and the protection of mothers and unborn children within your reach. A man who spends on campaigns what he will not give to his church has shown where he thinks deliverance comes from.

Preach God’s law. The pulpit belongs to the men called to it: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort” (2 Tim. 4:2). The rest of us hold the law in other places. The father teaches it at his table, and every man confesses it among his friends and coworkers, including what it says about rulers, marriage, and the unborn. Members owe their elders the obedience the same order requires: “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls” (Heb. 13:17).

07

Politics

Declining the vote does not remove a Christian from political life. It moves him to the parts of it God actually assigned, and every one of them was open to Daniel in Babylon.

Pray. “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:1–2). First of all. The exiles were told the same thing about the city that held them captive: “seek the peace of the land into which I have carried you captive, and ye shall pray to the Lord for the people: for in its peace ye shall have peace” (Jer. 36:7 [29:7]).

Speak truth to rulers. Nathan told David, “Thou art the man that has done this” (2 Kgdms 12:7 [2 Sam. 12:7]). John told Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18). When rulers command evil, a Christian names it, to their faces where he can and in public where he cannot. Rebuke is not rebellion. It is the service a subject owes a ruler who will answer to God.

Petition. Nehemiah wanted Jerusalem rebuilt, and he asked the king for it: “So I prayed to the God of heaven. And I said to the king, If it seem good to the king, and if thy servant shall have found favour in thy sight …” (2 Esdras 12:4–5 [Neh. 2:4–5]). Prayer came first, then the petition, addressed upward and in the ruler’s own terms. Paul appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11). Letters, public comment, and lawful suits are the modern forms, and none of them requires a ballot.

Persuade. Paul “reasoned with them out of the scriptures” (Acts 17:2), and he wrote, “we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11). Most of the men around you believe authority comes up from the people, and few of them have ever been asked why. Ask them. Explain where authority comes from, patiently and more than once. That is the work this Journal exists to do, and every reader can share it.

Refuse, and suffer. Where a ruler commands sin, the Christian refuses: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). The three Hebrews told the king, “But if not, be it known to thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:18). He refuses openly and bears the cost, as Daniel did when “his windows were opened in his chambers toward Jerusalem, and three times in the day he knelt upon his knees, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he used to do before” (Dan. 6:10). “For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully” (1 Pet. 2:19). Suffering rather than obeying is the last political act left to a faithful man, and no ruler can take it from him.

08

Where the argument stops

The father’s sword is defense, not punishment. Once the threat has passed, the matter belongs to the magistrate. Exodus draws that line at sunrise, and the principle beneath it is the difference between stopping a present harm and answering a past one.

It reaches the intruder, not the ruler. Against the magistrate, a father refuses, appeals, and suffers. Nothing in this paper licenses force against the powers that be.

Authority is not license. A father answers to God for every soul in his charge, and the Catechism names the abuse of his office as plainly as its neglect (Q. 130).

It speaks to men. Our talk series is for men, and this paper follows it. The offices of wives and mothers deserve their own treatment and receive none here.

It promises no result. Faithfulness in a very little is required whether or not the ten cities follow.

09

The lion and the bear

What Do We Do? ended by telling Christians to stand ready to follow the deliverer God raises, and it added that a people fit to receive a deliverer is a people already practiced at obedience, “in households where fathers govern and are honored.” When the deliverer came in Israel, he came from such a house. David learned to defend a nation by defending his father’s sheep, and he told the king so: “Thy servant smote both the lion and the bear” (1 Kgdms 17:36 [1 Sam. 17:36]).

No man reading this will be asked to rule a nation. Every man reading it has been given something to rule: a house, a family, a trade, or at the least himself. That is the authority God gave. Exercise it, and leave the ten cities to Him.

SOURCES

Texts and companions

SCRIPTURE

Old Testament: The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844), with English Bible references in brackets where the numbering differs.

New Testament: The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611).

PRIMARY

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 124, 129, 130.

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (written 1630s–1640s; printed 1680).

COMPANION PAPERS IN THIS JOURNAL

What Do We Do? A Christian’s Political Guide.

None Gives What He Has Not: The Christian Case for Abstaining from the Election of Rulers.

With the Windows Open: What a Christian Could Rightly Refuse in the Covid Years.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament quotations follow Brenton’s Septuagint and New Testament quotations the King James Version. Filmer is quoted from the 1680 edition. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com