Attorney General Jeff Sessions set off a firestorm this past week with his misuse of Scripture – overuse actually. As you likely know he quoted Romans 13 as the reason Americans should support our government’s stance in separating illegal immigrant children from their parents at our borders.
While Romans 13 calls for our subjection to the God-ordained governing institutions of the land, it does not invoke a unilateral acceptance of governing authority acting unjustly or against God’s laws.
In an article from The Gospel Coalition, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary provost and professor Bruce Ashford explained that what the Apostle Paul was effectually saying in the text was, “‘…Jesus is the ultimate Ruler of a cosmic kingdom while Caesar is only the temporary ruler of a limited earthly kingdom. But that doesn’t mean you’re above the law. You should be a good citizen and obey the law except, of course, when God’s law conflicts with Caesar’s law.’”
What I want to focus on here is not the immigration issue, but the bending Scripture to mean what we want it to mean. I find it interesting that in this situation we were swift to call out the misuse of Scripture when Scripture gets used out of context all the time and we aren’t bothered. Now granted we are talking about the mistreatment of children. But the discrepancy calls into question how we view and use Scripture.
Our tendency is to ask questions like, “What does this verse mean to you?” When in actuality God’s Word means exactly what He intended it to say, even if we don’t understand it or agree with it. The problem is we tend to view the Bible as an instruction manual, moral story book or place to find inspiring quotes and therefore miss the bigger story of how it all fits together. We flip through it seeking something applicable to what we are going through and ignore what doesn’t fit with our current struggle or ideology. But when we do this we miss seeing how it’s all about the glory of who Jesus is and all that he has done for us. Bottom line, we miss the gospel!
My husband just told me about a man, Daniel Al-Naser, who converted to Christianity from Islam, but upon visiting both evangelical and catholic churches he was surprised by how strikingly similar the messages were to his own former religion. Christianity devoid of Jesus’ worth and work it is just another religion. A sermon without the centrality of the gospel is just good advice. Scripture out of the context of the one story of a rescuing King who came to save his people will be misinterpreted as law or marked as irrelevant or antiquated.
But from Genesis to Revelation, the gospel is preeminent and the lens in which to interpret all of God’s Word. So wherever we are in Scripture, we must look at its context. This means not plucking out a verse or two, but reading passages as a whole, keeping in mind who wrote it, who they are writing to and why. We then must look for the fallen condition focus – the sin of the passage. Or you could say, where things are broken and point to a need for a Savior. And then the Big Truth, which is where Jesus show up in the passage, before finally we can apply it rightly.
The reason I’m so excited about my upcoming Exodus book because this type of study leads us to see Jesus show up in the Old Testament in such unexpected places as the tenth plague, the wilderness, and the tabernacle. But His presence there shouldn’t surprise us when John 1 tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Jesus has been there since the beginning and everything in it is concerning him (Luke 24:27). He is the full and final manifestation and revelation of who God is and all that God wants us to know about himself. The light of the world and giver of all Life is the Word made flesh. When we “get” this His Word comes alive and by his grace will be “a lamp unto (our) feet and light unto (our) paths” (Psalm 119:105).
So back to the immigration problem. We can’t ignore our neighbors, detained at our borders and separated from family, when we read Jesus’s words, “‘Truly, I say to you, as you did to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” But in the same way we must not misapply or dismiss other elements of truth in His Word that we don’t like. The eternal hope of men in this dark and broken world rests in the light and life offered in God’s Word, His Son.
His word, not “Caesar’s law” or our “truth,” is the Truth.
