“For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you want to be unafraid of the one in authority? Do what is good, and you will have its approval. For it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, because it does not carry the sword for no reason. For it is God’s servant, an avenger that brings wrath on the one who does wrong.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is the government for? That’s a much bigger question than we are going to try to answer today, but in thinking about our role with respect to the government as followers of Jesus, it is an important question to answer. While Paul doesn’t give us anything like a thorough answer to the question here, he does give us some insight on one of its primary duties. Let’s talk about what he has to say.

Paul starts here by noting that “rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” There are obviously exceptions to this in the case of governments that have gone awry. When a tyrant is more concerned with holding onto power than taking care of his people, he tends to be a terror merely to conduct he doesn’t like or which he perceives as threatening his power in some way rather than bad conduct generally.

But even in systems like that or those that are equivalently broken in other ways, there are some basic functions that any government has to fulfill or else its people will eventually rise up, overthrow it, and put in place a new system of their choosing. They may choose poorly, yes, and the French Revolution is a great example of that, but it will at least be new.

In Paul’s case, the ruler to whom he was most directly referring would have been Nero Caesar. Nero wasn’t exactly known as a friend of Christians…or good, rational conduct. But the Roman Empire itself—the other, more general, ruler in his view, functioned pretty efficiently. The Pax Romana lasted for a very long time (not to mention that it played a key role in the initial advancement of the Gospel throughout the known world) for a reason. As long as you basically kept the laws, you were going to be mostly left alone.

There’s a reason then that Paul so frequently called believers to live quiet lives so that they would be left alone. They were to pray for those in power. They were to submit to the laws of the land (and again, yes, there were exceptions to that, but we’ve already dealt with that, so we don’t need to go back over it again), and to the governing authorities over them more generally.

“Do you want to be unafraid of the one in authority? Do what is good, and you will have its approval.” When Paul was writing about the kind of behavior that should be the result of the Spirit’s presence in the life of a follower of Jesus, he said that all those kinds of behaviors (i.e., the fruit of the Spirit) are not against the law. “Against such things there is no law.” It will never be illegal to be kind or joyful or patient or self-controlled. Doing good will always be okay. Loving your neighbor will never be prosecuted. If we stick to the path of Christ, our lives even in the context of a regime that is hostile to Christianity will go more smoothly.

The next thing Paul says brings us directly face-to-face with one of the scripturally-sanctioned roles of government. “For it is God’s servant for your good.” Government itself is not a bad thing. It is a gift of God’s wisdom and grace. We have always formed governments of some sort, but this is because we are created in the image of a God who is organized and structure. There are several references in the Scriptures to a kind of divine administration with God seated at the top of a heavenly counsel. Our governments are all a reflection of His government. We often don’t get that reflection very close to right, but our drive to create governments is hardwired into us because we are made in His image.

And the reason we create governments is because we can’t meet all our needs on our own. We can’t achieve all the things that are good for us in terms of allowing for a good quality of life (however that happens to be defined in a given era) by ourselves. We need to work together. But we won’t work together efficiently enough to do much good unless there is leadership helping to keep things on track. Well, once you have one person of a small group of people exercising legitimate leadership over a larger group of people, you have a government. Government exists to help provide for the basic needs of the people who are living under it.

It also exists, though, to ensure that bad actors are restrained. Because of the brokenness of sin in us, we don’t tend to do what is right on our own. We need accountability to stay on the right track. Another basic, biblically-sanctioned role of government is to help provide that accountability. This is where Paul goes next. “But if you do wrong, be afraid, because it does not carry the sword for no reason.”

Governments exist to prevent bad behavior before it happens by the passing of laws that helpfully define what counts as bad behavior in a given society and what doesn’t. They also exist to punish bad behavior once it has happened. The reason this is important is that if everyone is allowed to seek vengeance for wrongs done against them on their own, a society will quickly devolve into chaos. A well-ordered society is one in which the people understand that they don’t have to do that (and indeed shouldn’t do it) because the just government under whose authority they live will handle it. This is why a good police force is so important for any well-functioning society.

Now, we could have a whole discussion about what this crime and punishment looks like, including the justification many see here for the morality of the death penalty for some of the most severe crimes, but i don’t want to get into all of that. I don’t think that was the primary thing Paul had in view here anyway. I don’t necessarily believe he excluded that particular application of state power in his thinking, but he was thinking more generally than merely that to the legitimate authority God has given governments to punish crimes in a given context.

In this, government is God’s servant. It exists to extend His goodness to us in helping to meet our needs. But it also exists to extend His justice to us, holding us accountable for doing right, and punishing us when we don’t. “For it is God’s servant, an avenger that brings wreath on the one who does wrong.”

Government often goes bad, and there are plenty of examples of this being the case. But government itself is not bad. It is a gift of God to make our lives better in a world that is broken by sin. When we get it right, everybody does better. Because of this, it is worth our time to endeavor to get it right. Knowing what government is supposed to be helps. So, let’s pay careful attention to passages like this one. There are many more implications and applications of what Paul says here, but this is a start to get us going. Let’s do it.