Three Purposes For Government

The following is an excerpt from “How The Nations Rage” by Jonathan Leeman.

Three Purposes Of Government 

Purpose 1: To Render Judgment for the Sake of Justice

The first and most immediate purpose of government is to render judgment for the sake of justice.

The reckoning here requires parity: life for life. It’s not   .“life for stealing a horse” or “life because you hold different religious views.” It’s life for life. A principle of mathematical equivalency and fairness is built into God’s authorization in Genesis 9:5–6. The implication is that lesser crimes should also be punished with matching penalties. Whatever the severity of the circumstances at play, at the end of the day it’s about justice, and God requires it. It’s this divine “requirement” to shed blood for blood that provides the government’s authority with teeth. It can require you to pay your taxes or drive the speed limit or keep your employer from cheating you. It possesses the threat of force, and that threat is a morally legitimate one, says God. It gives a government the right to defend its citizens from foreign invaders, and it gives them the right to imprison people for life when they take life from others. 

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The life-for-life principle is perhaps most obviously illustrated in discussions about capital punishment. Now, we can argue about whether life imprisonment or capital punishment is a more just and better way of establishing a “reckoning,” but here’s a point we must not miss. The punishment given for a crime—whatever form it might take—is not merely about retribution or paying someone back. It’s not just about deterring future crimes or rehabilitating the offender. Rather, punishment, most fundamentally, is about affirming the life and worth and value of the victim.

Look again at the last phrase of verse 6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (emphasis added). Taking the life of the killer demonstrates that the life of the person who has been killed really is worth that much. It’s that valuable. After all, it was a life in God’s own image.

Suppose I lose your diamond ring and say, “Goodness, I’m so sorry. Here’s a stick of gum.” My guess is that you would not feel justly compensated. You would feel justly compensated if I gave you something of equal value to the ring. Justice must acknowledge the value of your ring: it was valuable and precious and beautiful! 

the victim.

Ironically, the refusal to even consider the possibility of capital punishment, typically argued as a way of affirming a murderer’s life, undermines the value of the victim’s life. It says, “Sure, your murder was bad, but it can be weighed out against a few years in prison.” The mathematical equivalency of blood for blood affirms the value of the shed blood. It yields a reckoning. It doesn’t undo the crime, but it acknowledges fully for a watching universe the gravity of what’s been done. It offers justice. And justice, the rest of the Bible teaches, is a beautiful thing. It protects the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the hurting.

Are there limits to a government’s authority when it comes to rendering judgment? And what if the government uses force excessively and unjustly? Just ask the families of victims of police brutality how they feel about governmental force.

Yet here’s another beautiful element of the call in Genesis 9:6 for mathematical equivalency: it creates a governing mechanism that is self-correcting. The verse creates a boomerang effect against any excessive force, no matter the source. If a dirty sheriff shoots a man for a minor altercation in the town saloon, the verse boomerangs back against him, even if he is the dusty cowboy town’s lawman.

No person and no governing authority stands above Genesis 9:6. The dirty town sheriff, the power-hungry king, the genocidal dictator, nor the racist police officer should be permitted to use force unjustly. Rather, we should work to correct the injustice, even if perpetrated by the one in authority. God “requires” it, says verse 5.

In short, God grants authority to human beings to form governments for the sake of establishing a preliminary, this-world justice.

  1 Kings 3:28: And all Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.

 Proverbs 20:8: A king who sits on the throne of judgement winnows all evil with his eyes. 

Romans 13:3–4: For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.

  Governments should protect their citizens from threats from the outside and the inside. They should punish the Cains when they kill the Abels, or do what they can to protect the Abels in the first place. They should uphold the value of every single human life, young and old, aging and unborn, rich and poor, minority and majority.

Consider the Child Protective Services government agency. Insofar as CPS seeks to shelter children from violent and abusive parents, it is acting as God’s servant and fulfilling its Genesis 9:5–6 mandate. Christians should praise God that we live in a country where the government takes an interest in protecting children from abusive parents. And therefore we should be vocal and known for supporting CPS. CPS workers should find that Christians are the most cooperative. Church pastors, likewise, should not treat reports of abuse against the children of members as an internal church affair, but recognize that abuse belongs to the state’s jurisdiction and report those cases.

Purpose 2: To Build Platforms Of Peace, Order, And Flourishing

Governments don’t possess the authority to render judgment and establish justice for their own sake. The goal is to build a platform of peace, order, and even flourishing on which humans can live their lives.

Let’s get into the textual weeds for a second. Think of the context of Genesis 9:5–6. God had punished the world through the flood and just brought Noah and his family off the ark in chapters 6 through 8 of Genesis. Verses 1 and 7 of chapter 9, then, like two pieces of bread on a sandwich, repeat the charge given to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply,” God said at the beginning and end of the paragraph.

Then notice how the meat of verses 5 and 6 fits inside the two pieces of bread given in verses 1 and 7. The authority that God gave to shed blood for blood (vv. 5–6) facilitates the larger enterprise of filling the earth and ruling over it (vv. 1 and 7). Governments establish peace, order, and some measure of flourishing so that people can fulfill God’s greater dominion mandate.

Purpose one leads to and allows for purpose two. Justice leads to and allows for order and flourishing. So says Proverbs: “By justice a king builds up the land” (29:4; also, 16:12, 15). And we see commendable examples of governing authorities doing this in the Old Testament:

  • Joseph as prime minister of Egypt helped the nation prepare for famine. 

  • Israel’s law included provisions in its agricultural policy that cared for the poor.

  • King Solomon pursued an astute export and import strategy that made Israel prosperous.

These leaders were concerned with more than punishing crimes and administering justice; they were looking to establish a foundation of provision from which the people could pursue God’s greater calling. Sometimes people describe government as a necessary evil. But that’s not right. Even in a perfect and unfallen world, someone has to decide whether cars are going to drive on the right or left side of the road. Order must be established for people to flourish.

A contemporary illustration of how governments bring peace and flourishing can be found in the work of the US Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA establishes regulations on everything from the installation of rivets on the body of the aircraft to the pilot’s command of weather theory.

Is this governmental intrusion? Is this going beyond God’s Genesis 9 authorization? You might try doing an Internet search on commercial airline crashes due to pilot error or technical malfunction over the past three decades. You will find dozens of major crashes from airlines of smaller, poorer nations. But you will only find one, maybe two, among US airlines in that time. In other words, the regulations of the FAA arguably save thousands of lives each year. And this is tied to the government’s mandate to do justice. Apart from such regulations, it’s likely that greedy interests would, from time to time, compromise various safety standards for the sake of financial gain.

In other words, governments exist to build a platform on which human beings can pursue God’s dominion mandate. It’s a platform of peace, order, and prosperity, albeit one that should always be tied to the more foundational call to produce justice.

Does this mean governments possess a responsibility to fund health care, education, programs like Social Security, or welfare programs for the poor? Two mornings ago I was walking from a breakfast diner to my church building. At East Capitol and 3rd Street, three blocks from the US Capitol building, I walked past a group of fifty or so marchers with picket signs. They were chanting, “Health care is a right. Health care is a right.” Not a very creative chant, but welcome to an ordinary day in Washington, DC.

I’m not going to make a case for or against an entitlement like health care. But if you want to make sure that your position is biblically legitimate, this is how you need to do it: try to make an argument from Genesis 9:5–6 and related texts that God authorizes government to provide health care or education for its people on the grounds of justice, as well as peace, order, and flourishing.

For instance, my more progressively minded Christian readers might argue that universal health care affirms the humanity of the economic underclass, making premature death or crime less likely. They might argue that certain systemic injustices have produced generationally entrenched ethnic and class disparities, and that these injustices and disparities require a reckoning.

Meanwhile, my more conservative Christian readers might point to the notion of private property implicit in the dominion mandate and the command not to steal. Then they might argue that once a taxation rate reaches a certain point, it risks becoming state-sponsored stealing, not to mention the injustices undermining the biblical principle of a laborer being worth his wages and various emphases on personal responsibility.

Here is a good conversation. Let’s have it! My point is, both perspectives should work to make their arguments through the grid of Genesis 9:1–7 and other biblical passages that elucidate its meaning. Either argue that suchand-such entitlement goes beyond God’s authorization or is unjust, or argue that such-and-such entitlement falls within the authority given in Genesis 9 and fulfills the requirements of justice. (And when I say “argue,” I don’t mean in the public square to non-Christians. I mean in the in-house attempt to arrive at your own position, or to persuade other believers.)

It’s right here in this argument between the conservative and liberal instincts regarding such-and-such entitlement that we are thrown back to the discussion of wisdom in chapter 4. Remember how the people marveled at the wisdom God gave Solomon to do justice (1 Kings 3:28)? We need wisdom to determine whether justice requires entitlement x. It’s possible that, in some circumstances, justice would require an entitlement, while in other circumstances, it wouldn’t. Wisdom might say, “Look at these statistics” or “Consider these trend lines and outcomes.” An argument for justice from wisdom can make use of all sorts of “common grace” material.

Criteria like peace, order, and especially flourishing are somewhat subjective. How much order? How much flourishing? And how do we balance the principles of justice highlighted by the conservative versus the principles highlighted by the progressive? Answering such questions requires wisdom. There’s seldom a black-and-white answer that applies across every situation.

For what it’s worth, if you find yourself applying a formulaic, black-and-white answer to any and every situation, as in “public education is always unjust and wrong,” you might be more driven by ideology (which turns wisdom into absolutes) than you realize. Call this a pastoral hunch. Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged demonstrated how ideological libertarianism can reach absurd conclusions when executed in absolutes; Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in China during the 1950s and ’60s demonstrated the same thing for communism. We must avoid formulaic absolutes when it comes to matters of wisdom.

So, what belongs in a government’s jurisdiction and what doesn’t? What’s legitimately public and what isn’t? My concern isn’t to tell you precisely which areas of life fall into which bucket. It’s to help you know how to have the conversation and think through different topics for yourself. You need wisdom for the purpose of justice, and justice must yield peace, order, and the opportunity to flourish.

Here is one more illustration. My wife and I recently updated our kitchen. It was a pretty major job. Walls were torn down, an external door was removed, and a window was enlarged. The refrigerator and oven were moved, as were the water, electrical, and gas lines accompanying them. Our contractor asked us if we wanted to secure the necessary county permits for the job. Our county, like most, requires homeowners to take out permits for these kinds of jobs, which brings several county inspectors into your house both before and after the work. They make sure the work is done according to county code. 

“What does it cost to get the permits,” we asked our contractor.

“Just guessing, but probably around a thousand dollars,” he replied.

“What?!”

My contractor went on and encouraged me not to get the permits. Yes, he is a principled man, but he made an argument against permits based on my property rights as a homeowner. He had done work on too many houses where inspectors came and required literally tens of thousands of dollars of unnecessary work.

I was honestly perplexed. Did the government have the right to require me to fork over almost a thousand dollars for updating my home?

I e-mailed a LISTSERV I belonged to made up of theologians and ethicists. What did they think?

One ethicist replied with the single phrase, “My precious brother, Romans 13:1–7.”

Okay, that was slightly condescending. A friend on the list then texted me separately saying, “Ha ha, you just got Romans 13’d!” Yes, I did.

But I wanted to know, does the government have a legitimate biblical right to charge me this money? I discovered that many people, even Christian friends, simply don’t take out permits. After all, the county never knows and nothing happens. I admit that this was a tempting route for me.

Still another brother sent this e-mail: “The purpose of building permits is to provide for the safety of the residents of the county. I could point to horror stories of people doing shoddy work on their houses and creating great danger to the residents of the house and neighbors. 

Permits offer a check and balance against subpar work from a contractor.”

Now that made sense. I thought of the news reports I had heard of breaking-down apartment buildings or housing conditions in poorer neighborhoods where someone had cut corners to save a buck. Now people were injured or a bunch of children were sick due to something like lead exposure.

Building codes and construction permits, one could argue, find their basis in Genesis 9:5–6. Blood for blood, it says. Lives are precious, and governments must protect them. Therefore, my county government wants to make sure people don’t take advantage and endanger one another, especially the poor. So, with a little reluctance in my heart, but thanking God for a government that seeks to protect its citizens, I paid for the permits.

Purpose 3: To Set The Stage For Redemption

Finally, we come to the ultimate purpose for government. A good government sets the stage for God’s plan of redemption. It clears a way for the people of God to do their work of calling the nations to God.

Here we discover the relationship between God’s common-grace gifts and requirements and his special-grace purposes. The special-grace work of the church depends on common-grace gifts and realities. People must learn to read before they can read the Bible. People must eat healthy food and breathe nontoxic air so that they can live, know God, and worship him. Children benefit by having loving parents so that they can better apprehend the love of God the Father. Do you see? God means for the stuff of ordinary, everyday life to serve the purposes of salvation and eternity.

So it is with government. God authorized human beings to form governments in Genesis 9. He then called Abraham in Genesis 12, inaugurating the Bible’s great storyline of redemption. And Genesis 9 comes before Genesis 12 for a reason. The first builds a platform and sets the stage; the second begins God’s saving work.

The work of government is a prerequisite to redemption.

The New Testament says the same thing. Luke observed:

  And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. (Acts 17:26–27)

  God has determined the allotted periods and boundaries of nations, and when those nations will rise and fall. Why? That there might be a platform for sustaining human life that people might seek him.

Why should Christians care about good government? 

Immediately, for the sake of justice. Ultimately, so that there’s a platform for salvation. Listen to Paul’s request for prayer:

  First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Tim. 2:1–4)

  Notice the connection between the king, a peaceful life, and salvation. Paul said to pray for good governments, which provide for peaceful and quiet lives, which allows people to share the gospel and build churches. Christians should care about and pray for good government because they want people to be saved.

The governments of the Islamic State and Tamerlane, from a human standpoint, really did hinder the proclamation of the gospel and the work of salvation. The same is true in today’s Muslim nations. It’s becoming true in the so-called secular nations of Europe, where some in government want to classify belief in God as a mental illness, or criminalize proselytizing Muslims, or ban homeschooling because it allows for indoctrinating one’s children with Christianity. And it’s true in America wherever the government opposes religious freedom and the principles of Scripture.

Friend, pray and work for good government. Salvation, in one sense, depends on it.

The following is an excerpt from “How The Nations Rage” by Jonathan Leeman.