Who Shall Judge?

Five centuries of earthly judges, and the one the second psalm names

When a ruler goes wrong, who shall judge him? John Locke put the question in 1689 and answered that the people shall be judge, and since the Reformation others have named the lesser magistrate, the pope, the states, the Supreme Court and now the county sheriff. Most of these answers began from a true duty, that a man must refuse a command to sin, and went on to claim what Scripture keeps for Christ, the verdict on the ruler’s office. This paper traces them from Luther to the present and lands where the second psalm does.

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The question

The question is older than Locke, but he gave it the form it has kept. A ruler who commands what God forbids, or takes what is not his, has to be told so, and someone has to decide what follows. Locke asked who that is, “Who shall be judge, whether the prince or legislative act contrary to their trust?” and answered in the next sentence, “The people shall be judge” (Second Treatise §240), which is the answer the American order still runs on.

Locke’s was not the first answer and it has not been the last, and sections 02 through 05 follow the others from the pastors of Magdeburg in 1550 to the county sheriffs of our day. Even the answer that sounds most like ours, that God judges the ruler, was given on every side of the quarrel. Locke said a people with no judge on earth has no remedy “but to appeal to heaven” (§168), the Declaration of Independence appealed “to the Supreme Judge of the world,” and James VI held that “God is doubtless the only Judge” of the king. Since all three said it, saying it settles nothing, and what separates the answers is what each one permits a man on earth to do in the meantime.

Two things go by the name of judging a ruler, and the whole history turns on keeping them apart. The first is knowing what God’s law requires and saying so. Every man has to judge his own act this way, deciding whether he may do what he has been told, and the church has to declare God’s law about the ruler’s acts, as Nathan did when he told David, “Thou art the man that has done this” (2 Kingdoms 12:7). We call this the judgment of the act. The second is a verdict with jurisdiction over the ruler himself, that he has lost his office, or must be removed, punished or met with force, which other men then carry out. We call this the verdict on the office. Scripture gives the first to every man, and the apostles used it before the council that ordered their silence, “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye” (Acts 4:19). It gives the second to Christ, to whom the Father “hath committed all judgment” (John 5:22).

The history that follows is mostly the story of men who began with the first judgment and claimed the second, and of the American answers after 1789, which turned the question into a search for the last word on what a written constitution allows. Our papers From Disobedience to Deposition and Maxwell Answers Rutherford follow the resistance writers from Calvin to Locke as a question of resistance, and this paper asks who holds the verdict. We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Here the first and the third are one story, because every new judge was proposed to repair what the last one had done, so sections 02 through 05 tell that story in order and section 06 names the truths that were twisted. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

The Reformers, 1523–1579

The first Protestant answer gave the verdict to God and the judgment of the act to the subject, and it kept the two apart. Luther wrote in 1523 that a man whose prince commanded him to believe as the pope did, or to give up his books, should answer, “Dear Lord, I owe you obedience with life and goods,” and then, “if you command me to believe, and to put away books, I will not obey” (Secular Authority, 257). He would not let the refusal become a war. Even a prince, he wrote, “should not wage war against his overlord,” because “one must not resist the government with force, but only with knowledge of the truth” (269). William Tyndale put it more starkly in 1528, that God “hath made the king in every realm judge over all, and over him is there no judge,” so that the king “shall give accounts but to God only” (The Obedience of a Christian Man, 177–178). Tyndale also called the king “in this world, without law,” which goes beyond anything Scripture says and which James VI would later build a theory on.

Within a generation the Lutherans of Magdeburg had moved. In 1550, with their city refusing the emperor’s settlement of religion, the pastors argued that when the higher magistrate persecutes true religion by force, the lower magistrate is bound to resist him “ex mandato Dei,” by the command of God (Confessio, title-page verso). They could cite Luther himself, who in a later disputation had compared such a tyrant to a bear-wolf (sig. G1r), so even among its authors the first answer had not held. The pastors graded the wrongs a ruler might do. Against notorious injuries to life and property a lower magistrate was permitted to defend his people but not commanded to, and only when the ruler forced him into sin, or made war on God and on right itself, did resistance become a duty (sigs. F4r–G1r). They began where Luther had, with the duty to refuse, and ended with the lower magistrate’s sword turned against the higher.

Calvin, writing in the same decade, held the line for private men and opened a door for officers. Of God’s vengeance on tyrants he wrote, “let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer,” and then, “I speak only of private men.” Where popular magistrates had been appointed to curb kings, like the ephors of Sparta and the tribunes of Rome, and “perhaps” the estates of his own day, he would not forbid them “officially to check the undue license of kings” (Institutes IV.xx.31). Calvin cited no Scripture for that sentence, and the writers who came after him built on it.

The English exiles under Mary did not wait for officers. John Ponet wrote in 1556 that “kings, princes and governors have their authority of the people,” and that an evil governor may be deposed. Two years later Christopher Goodman argued that rulers who become blasphemers and murderers of their subjects should be counted private men and punished by God’s law (How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed, 139), and he gave the reason revolutionaries have given ever since. Paul’s “powers that be” are only lawful powers, Goodman said, so tyrants “are not God’s ordinance,” and “in disobeying and resisting such, we do not resist God’s ordinance, but Satan” (109–110).

Writers in France and Scotland answered the question again in 1579. The Huguenot Vindiciae contra tyrannos, written in the years after the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, gave the verdict to the officers of the kingdom, holding that a king who breaks his covenant “is questionless a tyrant by practice” and that “the officers of state may judge him according to the laws” (150). George Buchanan gave it to the people of Scotland, who may “call the king to answer in judgment” (De Jure Regni apud Scotos, 114).

Rome had its own answer, and an older one. The Dictatus Papae of 1075 claimed for the pope the right “to depose emperors,” and in 1570 Pius V declared Elizabeth a heretic, “deprived of her pretended title to the kingdom,” and released her subjects from their oaths (Regnans in Excelsis). Robert Bellarmine stated the principle in one sentence, “Pontificis est judicare, Regem esse deponendum, vel non deponendum,” it belongs to the pope to judge whether a king is to be deposed (De Romano Pontifice V.7). Bellarmine’s principle is the step Magdeburg and Buchanan took, from the church’s word against a ruler’s sin to a sentence on his crown. William Barclay saw the kinship in 1600, when he wrote a single book against Buchanan, against the author of the Vindiciae, and against the Catholic League preacher Jean Boucher, and called them all king-fighters.

The king and the people, 1598–1651

James VI of Scotland answered all of them in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), and on the verdict he answered as David had. Subjects owe the king obedience in everything “except directly against God,” and from his unlawful commands they may flee, “without resistance, but by sobs and tears to God,” because “The wickedness therefore of the King can never make them that are ordained to be judged by him, to become his Judges” (61, 66). God alone judges the king, James wrote, “both because to him only the king must make count of his administration” and because God hears the coronation oath (68).

James’s error lay in the ground he gave that answer. He made the king “above the law, as both the author and giver of strength thereto,” and bound to keep it only “of his good will” (63), which is Tyndale’s king “in this world, without law” worked out as a theory. A king who answers to God for a law he made himself answers to no law at all, and the resistance writers were right to deny that any king stands above the law, because Scripture puts the king under a law he did not write. The king of Israel was to copy it out “by the hands of the priests the Levites” and “read in it all the days of his life” (Deut. 17:18–19).

Samuel Rutherford wrote Lex, Rex in 1644 as a full answer to the royalists, and he faced the question head on: “who (saith the royalists) shall be judge betwixt the king and the people, when the people allege that the king is a tyrant.” His answer was a second court. “There is a court of necessity no less than a court of justice,” he wrote, and in it the people “materially sentence against the king as a tyrant, and so by nature are to defend themselves” (Q. XXIV). Rutherford chose his word with care. Materially means in fact rather than in form, and by it he withheld the formal sentence from the people, but a verdict in fact that men then act on by force is still a verdict on the office, and the people still give it.

In England a few years later the people’s verdict needed someone to speak it, and it spoke through an army. On 6 December 1648 soldiers kept members of the Commons from the House, and an officer told the Serjeant he “could not suffer them to come, till he had received his orders” (Commons Journal). A month later the members who remained resolved “that the people are, under God, the original of all just power,” and set up a court to try the king. Charles asked “by what lawful authority I am seated here,” and the Lord President told him the court required his answer “in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king.” The king replied that England “was never an elective kingdom” (A Perfect Narrative, 5–6), and the court sent him to the block.

Thomas Hobbes watched the war and drew the opposite conclusion. If every subject may judge his ruler there is no commonwealth, so Hobbes gave the sovereign the right “to be judge, or constitute all judges of opinions and doctrines” (Leviathan, ch. 18) and counted it a disease of the commonwealth to hold “that every private man is judge of good and evil actions,” because “the law is the public conscience” (ch. 29). He held that a subject compelled to profess with his tongue what he did not believe, as Naaman was, had done no wrong, since “that action is not his, but his sovereign’s” (ch. 42), and he kept a refusal only where obedience meant damnation, for “then it were madness to obey it” (ch. 43). Hobbes ended the quarrel by taking the first judgment almost entirely from the subject, where the apostles kept that judgment whole and gave up everything else.

The people shall be judge, 1689–1860

The English settled the next quarrel by resolution. In January 1689 the Commons declared that James II, “by breaking the original contract between king and people” and by leaving the kingdom, “has abdicated the government,” “and that the throne is thereby vacant” (Commons Journal, 28 January 1689). Locke’s Second Treatise, published the same year, gave the reasoning.

Locke knew he could not hand the people a court. “Though the people cannot be judge,” he wrote, “so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case,” they have reserved to themselves “that ultimate determination” of whether to “appeal to heaven” (§168). He granted that God alone “is judge of the right,” and went on, “But every man is judge for himself,” whether another has put himself into a state of war with him, “and whether he should appeal to the Supreme Judge” (§241). Where the law is silent or doubtful, he named the body of the people “the proper umpire” (§242). An appeal to heaven that a man makes for himself and carries out with arms is a verdict on the office by another name, and Locke’s disclaimer did not change what his doctrine allowed.

The appeal came from Jephthah, who told the king of Ammon, “may the Lord the Judge judge this day between the children of Israel and the children of Ammon” (Judg. 11:27), and then, as Locke himself notes, “he leads out his army to battle” (§21). Jephthah was Israel’s judge answering a foreign king, with no court on earth over the two nations, and Locke gave his appeal to subjects against their own ruler. Section 08 sets beside him the one subject in Scripture who appealed to the Lord against his own king.

The Americans acted on the appeal. The Declaration of Independence judged that a prince “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” and closed by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” In April 1776 Massachusetts sent its armed vessels to sea under a white flag with a green pine tree and the inscription “appeal to Heaven.” The verdict on the king’s office was given by men he governed and carried out by war, and Jefferson later named Locke among the writers whose sentiments the Declaration expressed (to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825).

The new republic soon carried the question inside its own constitution. In 1798 Kentucky resolved that the federal government “was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself,” and that “as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.” Virginia added that the states “are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” Kentucky stopped short of acting on its claim, asking Congress to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts and the other states to join its protest, and the quarrel of 1798 ended without force. But parties with no common judge settle by force what persuasion cannot, and Locke had said why: “want of a common judge with authority, puts all men in a state of nature” (§19). In December 1860 South Carolina declared the Union dissolved to protect slavery, and it borrowed the words of 1776 to do it, “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” The war decided what the states could not.

The last word, 1803 to the present

The answer that settled the American order was the Court’s. Marbury v. Madison held in 1803 that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” and in 1958 Cooper v. Aaron read Marbury as declaring “that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution,” binding on the officers of every state. The Court rules on acts rather than offices, but its reading stands until it reverses itself or the Constitution is amended, which is as near to a final earthly judge as the American order comes, and it is the claim the papal register had put more bluntly in 1075, “That he himself may be judged by no one.” Jefferson saw the danger in 1819, when he called the Constitution on that view “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” Lincoln warned in 1861 that if policy were “irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” the people would “have ceased to be their own rulers.” Both men objected from inside the premise that the people judge, and Lincoln said so in the same address, granting the people a “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” their government.

The newest answer goes back to Magdeburg. Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, was one of the two sheriffs whose suit produced Printz v. United States (1997), which held that the federal government may not “command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.” A sheriff who refuses to do a thing with his own office is judging his own act, and the Court protected him. In 2011 Mack founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches that the sheriff’s powers “supersede those of any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county.” Against that claim, the Constitution makes federal law made under it “the supreme Law of the Land” and binds the officers of every state by oath to support it (Art. VI).

Leaders of the sheriffs’ movement have handed Matthew Trewhella’s The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates (2013) to those attending their conferences (Wisconsin Watch, 10 July 2024), and the book states the doctrine in two steps. The lower authority “has both the right and duty to refuse obedience to that superior authority,” and “If necessary, the lower authority may even actively resist the superior authority.” The first step is the judgment of the act, and the second is the verdict on the office, the step the Magdeburg pastors took in 1550. In 2021 the mayor of Maury County, Tennessee, issued a state of emergency, which his local paper called symbolic, and announced that he had “invoked the authority of the lesser magistrate” (Columbia Daily Herald).

Stephen Wolfe has given the doctrine its fullest defense in our day. His Case for Christian Nationalism (2022) gives a chapter to “The Right to Revolution,” and its argument is Goodman’s. “In resisting a tyrant,” Wolfe writes, “a people are not resisting the powers ordained of God, for a power of tyranny is not ordained of God” (350, as quoted by James Clark). He allows that a Christian people, even as a minority, “can revolt against a tyranny directed at them” (345), and he asks state governors to “resist and nullify unjust and tyrannical laws imposed on the people by the federal government” (473, as quoted by Mark David Hall), which is Kentucky’s claim placed in a governor’s hands. Reformed Christian Politics (2026), which Wolfe wrote with Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan, teaches that the prince receives his powers to govern from the people, who set the limits of what he may do (199). That is Locke’s premise, which our paper None Gives What He Has Not answers, and though Wolfe writes as a Reformed man, his revolution stands with Ponet, Buchanan and Locke, and we stand against him.

The answers traced here are related in two ways. Where one descends from another, the heir names the parent. Locke rests his appeal on Jephthah, Jefferson names Locke, South Carolina copies the Declaration, Cooper cites Marbury, and the sheriffs hand out Trewhella. Where answers only take the same step, as Wolfe takes Goodman’s, the claim is about what each says rather than about who read whom, and Rome’s version of the step shows that it was never a Reformed inheritance. Persecution explains when men reached for the verdict, Mary Tudor’s for the English exiles and St. Bartholomew’s Day for the Huguenots, but it does not explain how they could reach for it and still cite Scripture. Of the five tests our paper Out of the Root, the Fruit sets for every genealogy, the one that decides this one asks whether the earlier principle licenses the later conclusion, here whether the judgment of the act licenses the verdict on the office. The rest of this paper answers that it does not.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and every earthly judge of the ruler is built from one of three.

Rulers are under law. The king of Israel was to copy out the law and “read in it all the days of his life” (Deut. 17:19), and the second psalm tells the judges of the earth to be instructed (Ps. 2:10). The resistance writers held this truth against James VI, who set the king above the law of his realm, and then they took a law over the ruler to mean a court over the ruler, most plainly in Rutherford’s court of necessity. The law over the king has a Judge, and Scripture names him. He sends his servants to read the law to the king’s face, and he does not seat the people to pass the sentence.

We ought to obey God rather than men. Peter said it to the highest court of his nation (Acts 5:29), and Calvin closed the Institutes with it (IV.xx.32). A command against God binds no one, and the ruler who gives it has overreached his office in that act, as Luther said when he called the prince who commands belief a tyrant who commands “where you have neither right nor power.” The twist turns the act into the office, reasoning that because this command is void, this ruler is void. The Magdeburg pastors took that step when they called the persecuting superior an ordinance of the devil, “ordinationem diaboli” (sig. F3v), and Goodman took it in calling tyrants no ordinance of God. Calvin came to the edge and stopped. Darius, he wrote, “by raising his horn against God, had virtually abrogated his own power” (IV.xx.32), but Calvin drew from it only that Daniel did no wrong in refusing the decree, and Daniel went on serving the king, for “Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius” (Dan. 6:29).

God raises up deliverers. “The children of Israel cried to the Lord; and he raised up to them a saviour, Aod” (Judg. 3:15), and Elisha’s messenger anointed Jehu with a commission to destroy the house of Ahab (4 Kingdoms 9:6–7). Calvin divided such cases into two classes. Some came “by the lawful call of God,” and “armed from heaven, they, by a greater power, curbed a less,” while others, the Medes and Persians among them, did God’s work though they “had nought but evil in their thoughts” (IV.xx.30). Ehud and Jehu belong to the first class because Scripture names them, and the twist turns their named call into a standing office. No lesser magistrate since the apostles has had a prophet’s oil on his head or a verse with his name in it, and Locke’s people claim their commission by nature.

A judge for the judge

Every earthly verdict on a ruler needs a judge of the judge, and none of these answers can supply one. If the lesser magistrate may judge the king, the king may judge the lesser magistrate in return, and each will claim to be God’s minister under Romans 13. If the people judge, someone has to say what the people decided, and in 1648 it was said by soldiers at the door of the Commons. If each state judges for itself, the states will judge differently, and in 1861 the difference was settled by war. If the Court has the last word, the last word belongs to one branch of the government whose powers are in dispute. Each answer makes a party to the quarrel its judge, which is the charge Robert Filmer brought against the resistance writers, repeating James VI’s argument nearly word for word, that otherwise “every man may be both party and judge in his own case, which is absurd once to be thought” (Patriarcha, 72–73).

Our answer leaves the ruler’s sentence on the subject standing on earth, and Scripture accepts that. The council beat the apostles and Pilate sentenced Christ, and on earth the ruler judges his own quarrel with the subject, as Filmer said he must. What differs is the judge above the ruler. The king of Scripture stands under a law he did not write, his subjects keep their own judgment of what he commands, and he answers to Christ, who judges both parties because the ruler holds his office from him and the subject owes him obedience. Scripture gives that answer in two parts, the judgment it leaves to the subject, which David shows, and the Judge it sets over both, whom the second psalm names.

What David would not do

David is Scripture’s answer to every lesser magistrate who has claimed the verdict, because no man in Scripture had a stronger claim to it. Samuel had anointed him (1 Kingdoms 16:13), Saul had made him “a captain of a thousand” (1 Kingdoms 18:13), and God had already given the verdict on Saul’s office through Samuel. Saul hunted David anyway and ordered the priests of the Lord killed for helping him. His own guards refused that order and left him on his throne, for “the servants of the king would not lift their hands to fall upon the priests of the Lord,” and it was Doeg the Syrian who slew “three hundred and five men, all wearing an ephod” (1 Kingdoms 22:17–18).

When Saul walked into the cave where David hid, David’s men told him the day had come. He answered, “The Lord forbid it me, that I should do this thing to my lord the anointed of the Lord, to lift my hand against him” (1 Kingdoms 24:7), and in the same speech he named the Judge: “The Lord be judge and umpire between me and thee, the Lord look upon and judge my cause, and rescue me out of thy hand” (1 Kingdoms 24:16). Saul gave his own verdict on David’s conduct, “Thou art more righteous than I” (1 Kingdoms 24:18). At their second meeting David listed the ways the Judge might act, “if the Lord smite him not, or his day come and he die, or he go down to battle and be added to his fathers” (1 Kingdoms 26:10), and Saul died in battle (1 Kingdoms 31:4–6). David refused to hand himself over, fled, hid and kept his men with him, and he never turned them against Saul or Saul’s men.

Goodman saw that David’s case stood against him and answered that it was “David’s own private cause,” since Saul was no idolater forcing his people to worship strange gods (139). The cause was not private. By the time of the cave Saul had already had the priests of the Lord put to death, which is the very case Goodman built his argument for, and David still would not lift his hand.

Paul and Peter give the rule David kept, and they give it in terms that reach the lesser magistrate. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,” Paul wrote, and “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (Rom. 13:1–2), and every soul includes the soul that holds a lower office. Peter names that office and says where its sword comes from, telling us to submit “to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers” (1 Pet. 2:13–14). The governor punishes evildoers as one sent, and Christ stated the rule of every sending: “neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him” (John 13:16). To give the verdict on the king’s office, the governor would have to be greater than the one who sent him, and a sword held by commission cannot be turned back on the one who gave it.

Paul met a ruler acting against the law and showed what the judgment of the act looks like at its sharpest. When the high priest ordered him struck, Paul answered, “God shall smite thee, thou whited wall: for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law?” (Acts 23:3). He named the act unlawful and left the smiting to God, and when he learned whom he had addressed he withdrew even the insult, “for it is written, Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people” (Acts 23:5). Christ told his disciples to flee when rulers turned on them, “when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another” (Matt. 10:23), and when Peter drew a sword against the high priest’s servant, he told him, “Put up again thy sword into his place” (Matt. 26:52). The judgment of the act includes refusing, fleeing, speaking and suffering, and it does not include the verdict on the ruler.

The King on Sion

The second psalm opens with rulers in revolt: “The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers gathered themselves together, against the Lord, and against his Christ; saying, Let us break through their bonds, and cast away their yoke from us” (Ps. 2:2–3). The Lord answers from heaven, first with laughter and anger, then with a King, “But I have been made king by him on Sion his holy mountain” (Ps. 2:6), who receives the nations for his inheritance and rules them “with a rod of iron” (Ps. 2:9). Then the psalm turns to the rulers themselves: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth” (Ps. 2:10). The psalm speaks to rulers as judges under a Judge already set in his place, and it tells them to “Accept correction, lest at any time the Lord be angry” (Ps. 2:12). It gives the verdict on the judges of the earth to the King on Sion and gives no one else a part in it.

The apostles prayed this psalm on the day the council first threatened them, and they read it of their own rulers: “For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together” (Acts 4:27). The verse sets rulers and people side by side among those gathered against Christ and gives the verdict to neither, which is what the psalm does. Then the apostles made their request: “And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word” (Acts 4:29). They asked God to see and asked for boldness to speak, and they neither asked him to remove the council nor took its removal on themselves.

The New Testament names the King. “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son,” and has given him authority to execute it “because he is the Son of man” (John 5:22, 27). God will judge the world at the last “by that man whom he hath ordained” (Acts 17:31), and he judges rulers now. When a later Herod killed James and jailed Peter, the church prayed, and when he took a god’s praise, “the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory.” The next verse gives the church’s part of the story: “But the word of God grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:23–24).

Daniel blessed the God who “appoints kings, and removes them” (Dan. 2:21), and Nebuchadnezzar learned it in his own body when a voice from heaven told him, “The kingdom has departed from thee,” and he was driven from men until he knew “that the Most High is Lord of the kingdom of men” (Dan. 4:31–32). No prince deposed him, and his kingdom was kept for him until his reason returned and his nobles sought him out again (Dan. 4:26, 36). Years later Daniel read Belshazzar the writing on the wall, “God has measured thy kingdom, and finished it” (Dan. 5:26), and that night the king was slain, but not by Daniel.

The prophets declared God’s verdicts on kings when God gave them one, and they carried out none of them. Samuel told Saul, “The Lord has rent thy kingdom from Israel out of thy hand this day” (1 Kingdoms 15:28), and the man he later anointed in Saul’s place would not lift his hand against him. Samuel’s verdict and Daniel’s each came by an inspired word that named its end. The church since the apostles has the law and no new word naming any ruler’s end, so it does with the law what Nathan did when he told David, “Thou art the man,” and what John did when he told Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18). Christ sent his servants before rulers for that work, “for a testimony against them” (Matt. 10:18), and Paul reasoned with Felix “of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come” until the governor trembled (Acts 24:25).

When King Uzziah went into the temple to burn incense, the priests told him, “It is not for thee, Ozias, to burn incense to the Lord” (2 Chron. 26:18). They declared God’s law about the king’s act, and the Lord gave the verdict, striking him with leprosy while the censer was in his hand. Uzziah was cut off from the house of the Lord, but the throne stayed in his house, and “Joathan his son was set over his kingdom, judging the people of the land” (2 Chron. 26:21).

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers, and this argument gives him one thing to do in each.

He judges his own acts and leaves the ruler his office. When a ruler commands him to sin, he refuses, says why, and takes the penalty without lifting his hand, as the apostles did (Acts 5:29, 41), and he may flee as Christ allowed. He does not say of a man God has set over him that he is no ruler, and he does not join men who say it.

He teaches his sons the cave. He teaches them the difference between “I will not” and “he is not,” reads them David’s words to the king who was hunting him, and teaches them the second psalm, so that they know who sits on Sion before anyone offers them another judge.

He asks his church to pray the second psalm. The church prays for rulers by name, “For kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2), and it prays the psalm as the apostles did, asking God to see the threatenings and to give his servants boldness to speak. He asks his elders what they teach about Romans 13 and the lesser magistrate, and whether the pulpit will tell rulers what God requires of them.

He asks lesser magistrates to judge their own acts. A sheriff, a county commissioner or a judge may refuse to do evil with his own hands, say so in public, and resign rather than sin, and he can be asked to do exactly that. The verdict on his superior’s office is not his to give, by arms or by vote. When a Christian speaks to any ruler, he tells the ruler who will judge him: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth” (Ps. 2:10). Our paper None Gives What He Has Not explains why we do this by speaking to rulers rather than by electing them.

Ten objections

“Then a tyrant may do as he pleases, and Christians must sit still under Nero.” Paul wrote “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers” while Nero reigned (Rom. 13:1). The objection assumes that a ruler goes unjudged unless men judge him, and Scripture records the judgments, Saul fallen in battle, Nebuchadnezzar eating grass and Herod eaten of worms. Nor does the Christian sit still. He refuses sin, speaks God’s law to the ruler’s face, prays the second psalm and flees when he must. The objection asks who will act, and Scripture answers the prior question of who has been given the verdict.

“The lesser magistrate is God’s minister too, and may punish evil even in a superior.” The Magdeburg pastors argued exactly this, that Paul speaks without limit, “neminem excipiens,” excepting no one (sig. F3v). Paul gives the magistrate his sword against evil among those in his charge (Rom. 13:4), and Peter says where the lower sword comes from, from the one who sent it (1 Pet. 2:14), so the lower sword cannot reach back to the higher without making the one sent greater than his sender (John 13:16). The lesser magistrate may refuse to do evil with his own office and resign rather than sin.

“A governor is sovereign in his own sphere.” The American system divides powers between the states and the nation, and within the powers it gives the nation the Constitution binds every state officer by oath (Art. VI). A governor may refuse to do evil with his own office, and Printz protects him when he does. To “resist and nullify” federal law, as Wolfe asks, is Kentucky’s claim to judge for itself “as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress,” and section 07 shows where a party judging its own quarrel ends.

“God’s deliverers resisted kings: Ehud, Jehu, Jehoiada.” As section 06 showed, Ehud and Jehu belong to the class Calvin described as brought forward “by the lawful call of God” (IV.xx.30), and Scripture names both, Ehud as the saviour the Lord raised up (Judg. 3:15) and Jehu by a prophet’s word, “I have anointed thee to be king over the people of the Lord” (4 Kingdoms 9:6). No deliverer after the canon can show such a call. Jehoiada crowned the king and put Athaliah to death, but Athaliah had “destroyed all the seed royal” to take a throne that was not hers while the lawful heir was alive (4 Kingdoms 11:1–3, 12). Jehoiada restored the office to its heir against a usurper and judged no lawful king.

“The saints are given the sword and the fetters.” The psalm gives the saints “two-edged swords in their hands; to execute vengeance on the nations” and “to bind their kings with fetters” (Ps. 149:6–8), and Christ promises the overcomer “power over the nations” and the rod of iron (Rev. 2:26–27). The psalm’s kings are the kings of the nations, Israel’s enemies in war, which is Jephthah’s case and not a subject’s, and it binds them by “the judgment written” (Ps. 149:9). In Revelation the overcomer rules “even as I received of my Father,” so the rod is the Son’s, shared with those who keep his works “unto the end.” Paul’s verb is future too, “the saints shall judge the world” (1 Cor. 6:2), and in the next verses he limits the church’s present judgment to “things that pertain to this life” between brethren (1 Cor. 6:3–5).

“Scripture records revolts with approval.” Chronicles says Libnah revolted from Jehoram “because he forsook the Lord God of his fathers” (2 Chron. 21:10), in the verse that records Edom’s revolt as well. It gives God’s reason for the loss and commissions no rebel. When Saul swore that Jonathan must die, the people refused to let the sentence fall, and Brenton’s text says how: “the people prayed for Jonathan in that day, and he died not” (1 Kingdoms 14:45). They refused the act and pleaded, and Saul kept his throne.

“The Constitution itself provides for removal.” It does, by impeachment, election and amendment, and our answer does not change when a constitution writes the verdict down. The Senate has “the sole Power to try all Impeachments” (Art. I, sec. 3), and on our premise a Christian senator may not vote to convict, because that vote is a verdict on the office that the Constitution gives and Scripture does not. Whoever holds the office when the process is done, the Christian obeys him, because “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1).

“This is the divine right of kings.” On the verdict James VI answered as we do, but he rested his answer on the king himself, “above the law, as both the author and giver of strength thereto.” We rest it on Christ. The king does not stand above judgment. He stands under the Judge on Sion that section 09 describes. Hobbes is the other case, since he took from the subject nearly all his judgment of his own act, and we keep that judgment whole with the apostles.

“Then the American Revolution was a sin, and so was 1688.” On our premise both were the acts of men who gave themselves the verdict on their ruler’s office, and we do not exempt them because we live under their results. A sinful origin does not void a present power where no lawful claimant stands against it, and the crown gave up its claim to the colonies in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The American government is the power that is, and the Christian owes it obedience, taxes and honor (None Gives What He Has Not, section 11).

“Calvin, Beza and Rutherford taught resistance, and they were faithful men.” They were, and we answer their argument, not their faith. Calvin’s rule for the private man is ours word for word, “no command has been given but to obey and suffer” (IV.xx.31). We part with him in the next sentence, where he gives popular magistrates a check on kings that Scripture does not give them, and our paper From Disobedience to Deposition traces what Beza and the Vindiciae built on it.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not forbid refusing, fleeing, speaking or suffering. Section 08 requires all four of the man commanded to sin.

It does not forbid a lesser magistrate to refuse evil. He may refuse to do wrong with his own office, say so, and resign. It denies him the verdict on his superior’s office.

It does not forbid lawful petition or the ordinary work of courts. It denies that any office on earth, however the law arranges it, holds a verdict on another office that Scripture gives only to Christ.

It does not treat misrule as forfeiture. A ruler does not lose his office by misusing it. A title defective from the start, held against a living lawful heir as Athaliah held hers, is a different case, and most disputed successions are harder than hers. Where no lawful claimant stands against a power, the power that is binds.

It does not settle defense against an agent acting outside any lawful command. It forbids force against the ruler and his officers in their office, and David is its pattern. He hid, fled and kept his men, and he never turned them on Saul or Saul’s men.

It does not concern war between nations. Jephthah’s case was a magistrate defending his people against a foreign king.

It does not judge the faith of the men it answers. Calvin, Beza, Rutherford and the men who teach the lesser magistrate now confess Christ. The dispute is over what he has given men to judge.

It stands or falls on one premise. If Scripture gives some man on earth the verdict on the office of the ruler set over him, the conclusion fails. Sections 08 and 09 answer that premise with David’s two refusals, Romans 13, 1 Peter 2, the second psalm and Acts 4. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

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Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844), with its numbering.

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

Gregory VII, Dictatus Papae (1075), trans. Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (London, 1910), 366–367.

Martin Luther, Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), trans. J. J. Schindel, in Works of Martin Luther, vol. 3 (Philadelphia, 1930), 257, 269.

William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), in Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848), 177–178.

Confessio et Apologia Pastorum et reliquorum ministrorum Ecclesiae Magdeburgensis (Magdeburg: Michael Lotter, 1550), title-page verso and sigs. F3v–G1r.

John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power ([Strasbourg], 1556), EEBO-TCP A09916.

Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd (Geneva, 1558), 109–110, 139.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), IV.xx.30–32.

Pius V, Regnans in Excelsis (1570), English text in Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (London, 1655), Book IX, 94.

Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), English trans. A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants (London, 1689), 150.

George Buchanan, De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579), trans. Philalethes (1680), 114.

Robert Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice V.7, in Opera omnia, vol. 2 (Paris: Vivès, 1870), 158.

William Barclay, De Regno et Regali Potestate adversus Buchananum, Brutum, Boucherium et reliquos Monarchomachos (Paris, 1600), title page.

James VI, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in C. H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), 61, 63, 66, 68.

Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (London, 1644; Edinburgh, 1843), Q. XXIV, 117.

Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 6 December 1648 and 4 January 1649, and vol. 10, 28 January 1689 (London, 1802), British History Online.

A Perfect Narrative of the Whole Proceedings of the High Court of Justice in the Tryal of the King (London, 1649), 5–6.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), chs. 18, 29, 42, 43.

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (London, 1680), 72–73.

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), §§19, 21, 168, 240–242, from Two Treatises of Government (London: A. Millar and others, 1764).

Declaration of Independence (1776), National Archives transcription. Massachusetts General Court, resolve of 29 April 1776, in Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 4 (Washington, 1969), 1303.

Definitive Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and the United States (Paris, 1783), Art. 1. Constitution of the United States (1787), Art. I, sec. 3, and Art. VI, National Archives transcription.

Kentucky Resolutions (10 November 1798), in Jonathan Elliot, ed., Debates, vol. 4, 540–545, as printed in The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 5. Virginia Resolutions (21 December 1798), Avalon Project.

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 177 (1803). Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1, 18 (1958). Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997).

Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819, in Writings, ed. H. A. Washington, vol. 7 (1861), 135. Jefferson to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825, Founders Online, National Archives.

South Carolina, Declaration of the Immediate Causes (24 December 1860). Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (4 March 1861). Both from the Avalon Project.

Matthew J. Trewhella, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government (CreateSpace, 2013), back cover.

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, “About,” cspoa.org, accessed 23 October 2026.

Phoebe Petrovic, “The Gospel of Matthew Trewhella,” Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica, 10 July 2024.

Mike Christen, report on the Maury County state of emergency, Columbia Daily Herald, 23 November 2021.

Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), ch. 8, 345, 350, as quoted by James Clark, North American Anglican, 30 November 2022, and 473, as quoted by Mark David Hall, Providence, 29 November 2022.

Stephen Wolfe, Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan, Reformed Christian Politics (2026), 199.

None Gives What He Has Not. From Disobedience to Deposition. Maxwell Answers Rutherford. Out of the Root, the Fruit.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering (1 and 2 Kingdoms are 1 and 2 Samuel, 4 Kingdoms is 2 Kings, and Daniel follows the Greek). New Testament from the King James Version. Calvin is quoted from Beveridge’s translation of 1845 and Locke from the edition of 1764 with its section numbers. Spelling and capitalization in quotations from early printed books, including James VI, Hobbes, Ponet, Goodman and Filmer, are modernized, and no word is changed. The Magdeburg Confession and Bellarmine are quoted in short Latin phrases with our own rendering. Modern authors are quoted briefly and paraphrased otherwise. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com