Scripture declares that civil rulers are to be “God’s ministers . . . for good” (Rom. 13:4). But what does this mean, in practice? Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss the answer with pastor James Baird. In his new book, King of Kings, Baird explains that every ruler—in every nation throughout history—is required to “be wise . . . [and] serve the Lord with fear” (Ps. 2:10-11). And this doesn’t mean advancing some vague notion of “good,” but what God decrees as “good” in His righteous laws, as summarized in the Ten Commandments. To put the matter simply—all civil governments must promote Christianity as the only true religion.  

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk about the doctrine of the civil government and we have with us James Beard who just wrote this book, King of Kings. It's a fantastic book and I hope you can join us at our national conference next year, May 7 through 9, on manhood and womanhood, the glory of God in the creation order. We also have a pastor's conference, a pre-conference, and also a singles conference. Come on, be with us.

It's a great time. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Hope you enjoy the podcast. So Jason, just this week we had a bunch of disappointments in our local elections. Our people worked really hard in our church to try to get a couple of conservative Christians elected to our Wake Forest Commissioners.

And we worked really hard. We probably had 12 men. I was one of them who stood before the Wake Forest commissioners over the last two years. And our kids were campaigning like crazy. And we lost the whole thing.

We really wanted to have candidates in office that would overturn the town policy that would allow a pride festival right here, 300 feet from us, okay? And we lost. But we do believe that the civil magistrate should facilitate Christianity and suppress evil. That's what we believe. That's a pretty hot, hotly contested topic.

Yeah, which actually brings us to the moment. We have, We have James Beard with us. Hey James, how you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, James is the pastor of Christian education at Covenant Church in Naples, Florida. And he just wrote a book. This thing is like right off the press, isn't it? It should still be warm if you feel like that. Yeah, King of Kings.

It's a fast read, it's a great read, it's easy to read, it nails the stuff. You know, I was also thinking about this book we published because it sort of gives the counterpoint of when to disobey the civil magistrate. We published this book during COVID, when to disobey case studies and tyranny, insurrection and obedience to God. We did a takeoff on Pierre Verre Because Verre had really wonderful counsel for those who would actually need to disobey the civil government. But your book, really, King of Kings, really focuses on the authority of Jesus Christ in the civil realm.

We believe that Jesus Christ does have authority in the civil realm, and we, as His servants, ought to implement it as best we can. So, anyway, it's great to have you on. I hope everybody can can get this book. James, you said that you wrote this book to your past self that cracked me up. That was so, I thought Here's an honest man.

Writing letters to 2022 James. And trust me, if I had met him, I wouldn't want to talk to him. Yeah. So your view changed. Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, you know, in 2022, I had kind of absorbed this conviction that there's a strict separation between how the government ought to operate and how the church ought to operate. And of course, everyone should believe that that's an important distinction between the two. But for me at the time, what it meant was that if you're serving in government, you shouldn't use the Bible to try and make a case for a certain law to be passed, that you should try and accommodate as many different people and religions as you could, and even ethical viewpoints. And I think after 2020, I'd already started to see how things had been going and question the trajectory that we were on.

But especially in 2022, as I was looking to become a pastor, I said, I need to have a strong grasp of what is my political theology. So I went back and started reading all those old theologians that I love, and I found a political theology that they had worked out very carefully that many people didn't know. I mean, they wrote hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pages on this topic. And I just dipped my toe in and I said, not only does this make sense, it seems very relevant to us today. And so I changed my mind just by reading from church history, reading the Bible in a new way.

And then I wanted to share it with as many other Christians and especially pastors as I could. That's great. You know, just hearing you talk, somebody should write a biblical theology on politics. A book. Awesome.

From Genesis to Revelation. Will you do that a little bit in your book? Yeah. And we'll talk, I want to talk about that later. You say that government must, M-U-S-T, promote true religion.

So, explain. Yep, that's right. And that's the core idea for the whole book. That's one reason why I could keep it short is I focus on one main idea. The government must promote true religion.

The government must promote Christianity because Christianity is the only true religion. And what I mean by that, by the word promote, is that the government should protect the church. The government should encourage people to go to church. The government should be using Christian principles as the basis for how it formulates its laws. There's lots of ways that you could imagine the government promoting it and depending on the circumstance, some may work well, others may be inappropriate, but with wisdom and love, the government one way or another needs to help the people be godly and make it hard for them to be sinful.

That's kind of the essence of what I mean. James, I think people will be as shocked as I was in this section where You quote from the original state constitutions and how they carved out not just Christianity but Protestant Christianity and said they would promote it in the state constitutions and in many cases said that they would financially provide for it so that there were teachers in communities promoting Protestant Christianity. So could you just develop that a little bit? Oh, I'd be happy to. So the founders, when they built our form of government, they knew something we've forgotten.

And it's that you can't have a free republic if you have vicious citizens. If you want a free republic, you need virtuous citizens. And they also understood that you can't have virtue without religion in the same way that if you don't plant anything in your backyard, you're not going to get any fruit trees. Virtue is the outgrowth of religion. So they saw it for that reason as a critical component of the job of the government to help encourage and promote and cultivate Protestant Christianity, Protestant morality amongst the people.

And you see this especially with the states, Massachusetts, you have, I can't remember if it's North or South Carolina, they just say this is a Protestant state. Both. But Yeah, both of them. At different times. Yeah.

But even at the time of the founding. And then you have Georgia says to be a representative here, you have to be Protestant. You can find it over and over and over again. A couple of exceptions, but even the exceptions prove the rule. In New York, you still have laws against blasphemy because respect for the Christian religion is so important.

So it's a cornerstone of how the founders thought about the American Republic, that they should encourage this amongst the people. You pointed out that our knee-jerk swimming in the waters that we're swimming in, having imbibed what we've imbibed is to say, that's un-American. Your point is, it's not modern American. If you actually go back to our founders, it's as American as it gets. Yep, that's right.

You can look at the Continental Congress before they even declare independence. What do they do? They declare a national day for fasting and thanksgiving, not to some general deity, but to the Trinity. They say God must help us and give us wisdom, forgive us of our sins and bless us if we're going to figure out what to do at this treacherous moment. They tell all the people of the colonies to do this.

So if they heard someone come along and say, hey, you can't pray or read a Bible in school, that would make no sense to them whatsoever. They would think that is the opposite of what they thought should happen. Yeah, you make a big point about that. The Supreme Court in 1947 changed their tune. Talk about that.

That's right. So, 1947, you start to see this opinion develop on the Supreme Court that the government is not capable of determining which religion is true. That eventually turns into various decisions that happened here in the 60s where now you start seeing Bibles aren't allowed, Bible studies, things like this aren't allowed in public schools, A prayer isn't allowed in public school. And what they start saying is, the First Amendment means anyone that is in any way connected with the government cannot take a position on religion in their official capacity. That's not the point of the First Amendment at all.

And we have now been taught to read this mid to late 20th century interpretation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights back into history when it's just not there. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, it was the boomers that did this. Thanks, boomers. Yeah, thanks, boomers.

Well, which I am chief, right? In this room, anyway. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the greatest generation kicked the ball. It started rolling, and then it started rolling with a vengeance and it rolled over the entire culture.

Yep, it did. It's true. So Let me read the opening words of chapter two. I thought this was very thought provoking to me. Government is not like baseball.

Baseball is a mere human invention. We made it up. If we want to change the rules, we can change the rules. If nobody likes the sport anymore, we can stop playing. This is a helpful track to go down because when you're talking about what we're at liberty to do and what we're constrained from doing, You have to go back to the origins of it and see who owns it.

Baseball, feel free to change the rules. Feel free to ignore until the end of time if you don't like it anymore. But government's not like that. God is the origin of government. So changing the rules is off limits, at least for Christians.

We need to be going about it in the way that he prescribes in scripture. That's right. This is just the heart of everything that we work for, and that is that Scripture is sufficient. It's sufficient for government, for your family, for your church, for your work. It's sufficient for everything.

It gives you what you need. That's right. Praise God for that. Amen. He's given us so much freedom in how we arrange a government, but there are some fundamental things that he says, go here and no further.

One of them is government exists for God's glory. It doesn't exist for its own glorification, for the glorification of- And let's just say that's prescriptive. That's prescriptive. That's right. That's right.

That's a great point because a lot of people will interpret that to mean, well, God will find some way to make this glorified, which he will. Okay. God will use your sin eventually, one way or another, to glorify him. But that does not, that's not an excuse to sin further, you know? Should sin continue that grace may abound?

By no means. Yeah. Right? This is Paul 101. Hey, I love the propositions that Christianity by virtue of it is a creation of God and it is a public good.

So You work over Romans 13, 4, for he is God's minister for your good. That's also prescriptive. He's got to do what's good. But you created this great syllogism. Tell us about your syllogism.

Yeah. So the core of my argument is very simple. It has three steps. The first one is government must promote the public good. Public good means it's not just good for the government, it's not just good for a few people, it's good for the whole community.

That's what we see in Romans 13 for that government is God's servant or God's minister for your good. It's biblical right there. It's in our confessions as Christians. Right. It is in our confessions of what is good And what both of our confessions, I'm a Baptist, you're a Presbyterian, what both of our confessions say is that, I'll summarize it, what is good is what God says is good.

It's not what you think is good. That's right. It's what God thinks is good. God gets to define right and wrong. Yeah.

But to say, I mean, you take that to say that a government must pursue and promote true religion, i.e. Christianity. That's right. So the first premise is the government must promote the public good. That's what God designed it to do.

The second premise is Christianity, as the only true religion, is part of the public good. Now, Christians may wonder about that, but let's think about it for a second. Think about who is Christianity not good for? Right. Doesn't God call all men to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?

And doesn't the moral teachings of Christianity, aren't they instructing you to live the way God designed you to live, so that you'll flourish if you follow His commands and you'll languish and struggle if you don't. That's Christianity 101, right? That Christian morality is built into the way God designed people. So how can you deny that Christianity isn't a public good, that it's not good for everyone. We see this in Romans 13, excuse me, Romans 1, when we suppress the truth about God and unrighteousness, what happens?

The wheels fall off the bus. Read the rest of Romans 1. It's the perfect description of everything opposed to the public good. That's the opposite result if you don't promote Christianity. So if the government must promote the public good and Christianity is an essential part of the public good, the conclusion naturally follows.

Government must promote Christianity. Yeah. So you prove that by both the Old and the New Testaments. Well, walk us through your arguments and the connections. Yeah.

Happy to do that. So if you read the Old Testament, one thing has to be absolutely clear, and it's that God wants kings to promote true religion. That is the measuring stick that God uses when he goes through all the kings of Israel. If a king followed in the way of David, that means that he was promoting God's truth, God's morality to the people. And if he was not following in the way of David, if he turned aside, it's because he was either lazy and didn't promote it or he actually welcomed in false religions.

But of course, people at that point might say, isn't Israel different? Isn't it a special nation? It is. It's very different, but not on this point, because we see in Psalm 2 that the Lord calls the Gentile kings to serve the Lord with fear. And when we see the Gentile kings like the King of Nineveh or Nebuchadnezzar or Darius or Cyrus the Great, when do we see them in fleeting ways and imperfect ways, follow Psalm 2.

They do it when they issue official decrees that are declaring the truth about Yahweh to their people. So this is a duty that binds the kings of Israel, the Gentile kings, it binds all kings in the Old Testament. Yeah, it's so funny. I was reading in Jeremiah 38, 39, and 40 this morning when I got up in the morning, and here it is, God is holding the nation states, Egypt, Philistia, the Moabites. I mean, you see the same thing in Deuteronomy.

You see the same thing in Isaiah. Isaiah works through a bunch of nations. Jeremiah works through a lot of pagan nations, and what does he judge them on? Their adherence or rebellion against the law of God and particularly, and particularly their worship. God actually destroys pagan nations for their worship, And he's done it over and over again.

And I'm confident he's going to keep doing it. But yeah, even the people say, well, yeah, that was Israel. No, God holds every nation ever to his law. He does. James, what did you mean by a cage stage Calvinist?

How does it relate to what you're writing about? I speak from personal experience. Asking for a friend. Didn't you come out of the SBC or something? I specifically remember being defrocked of my position as a Bible study leader at our local SBC college I went to for a little bit because I might've gotten too excited.

It's the idea that someone learns the doctrines of grace and that's all they can talk about and they don't know how to present it with grace and they think that it's the most important thing for everyone to learn about right now. And they want to walk everyone they meet through Romans 9. And I think a similar thing can happen with this. Once you realize that the Bible teaches that the government has a positive duty to help all the citizens worship God the right way according to the Lord Jesus, you can get a little over excited. Yeah.

We've all done it. We've all done it. We've all done it. And you miss that one of the key, key principles anytime that you're talking about politics, or especially doing politics, is prudence. It means being wise and careful and finding just the right way to help people become godly.

And that means shepherding them along. Yeah. Hey, I want to, there are two more things I want to talk about before we land the plane. First of all is the law of God and civil government. You know, I've preached and written about this.

I preached to Deuteronomy one time for three years. And oh, how I love thy law. Every law of God is a law of love. But anyway, so as you talk about that in the book, tell us what you say. Yeah.

So the Ten Commandments, classically, this is the Protestant position. They summarize God's moral law, the natural law, the laws of human nature. And if the government is supposed to help people flourish, which it is, it's what it means to seek the public good, help the people to flourish. Well, then the government needs to understand the laws of human nature. Just like a cow farmer needs to know how cows work to take care of the cows.

And if he treats the cows like beavers, you're gonna get a bunch of dead cows. Well, the government needs to realize how humans work. And to do that rightly, he needs to know the laws of their nature that God put into them, the Ten Commandments. What that would mean is that all Ten Commandments should be the basis of and informative of civil law. The purpose of civil law should be to guide the people, make it easy for the people to follow all 10 commandments, first table and second table.

Okay. How does the government prosecute on the second table? Great question. So there's some obvious, we can look at American history of how we've done this in the past, because one point I'm trying to make is this is not un-American. So in the past we had blasphemy laws.

You know, if you stubbed your toe in the middle of the night and said Jiminy Cricket, you wouldn't get in trouble. But if you openly blasphemed Jesus, let's say in a restaurant or in the public square, you know, you could get definitely fined for that. And that was to make sure that the public was required to show respect for Jesus and not break that first, one of those commandments. You have blue laws, many blue laws, all around the country, even today, to help us honor the Sabbath. Now, does that mean that anyone who, let's say, decides to do some gardening on Sunday or something like this gets cast into jail.

No, you find prudent ways to do it. Maybe it's just businesses are supposed to be shut down. In some towns, you can't serve alcohol on Sundays. So you find just the right way to prudently and wisely make a law, it doesn't necessarily mean everyone who does anything wrong in the first table gets the worst possible sentence. Yeah, the government could get a lot of money by punishing blasphemy laws from some of our great appreciated social media stars.

That's very true. It'd be a great revenue force. They could afford it though. It's no big deal. So, okay, I want to talk about one more thing here.

Sure. The Establishment Clause. We touched on it earlier. I want to read it and then I want to sort of end. And I'm going to ask you, was this a mistake?

Was there agreement or not agreement? Because you address this in your book. The establishment clause goes like this, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That's right. I do not think that the First Amendment was a mistake.

I think it was a very good idea. Once you know what it means. So the first point to make is that establishing a religion had a technical meaning. It meant that Congress could not decide a national church for all the states. So it couldn't say the official church of the United States for all the states is Presbyterianism or Congregationalism or Episcopalianism.

They didn't have that power. So it has a very technical meaning. It did not mean that they couldn't encourage people to go to church. They had national days of fasting and thanksgiving encouraging people to go to church from George Washington. You even had it from James Madison.

They could do everything that they thought necessary to, without coercing you, encouraging you to go to church. Didn't mean that, it just meant Congress couldn't pick a national church. That's the first thing. The second thing to know is, what's that? Could you read me the first word, the Establishment Clause one more time?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. So it's Congress. It is specifically about Congress, what Congress can do. In other words, Congress could not establish a religion. The states could.

And they did. And they did. That's right. And that's the very clear teaching of the First Amendment and the Tenth Amendment, which says any power not granted to the federal government is given to the states. So you have Virginia, you have Massachusetts, they have state churches.

You have one of those Carolinas, I can't remember which one at the time. Both. Both? They say we're Protestant. This is a Protestant state.

And you have religious tests for office. Some states you just have to be a Christian, but many other states you have to be Protestant to serve in office. This is all considered perfectly fine. Now we know later on in the 19th century, many decades later, the states decide not to have state churches, and there are good reasons for that. But the point being is that it was perfectly legal for them to keep them.

It certainly didn't prohibit, for example, the president declaring a national day for fasting and Thanksgiving. I think it was wise to limit the big government and push that power down to the states where the state rulers had a better idea of the nature of the people and their customs and expectations and what will be best. Generally, what is it? You want the guy pushing the mop to pick the handle? It's always a good idea to allow those decisions to be made by the people closer to the ground.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, I think we just need to keep praying for holy, godly, righteous, law-keeping, mock-picker, mock-panel pickers. There you go.

James, what a delight. It's been great to talk to you. Hey, I hope everybody goes out and gets this great book. It's just a very clean, quick read. Everybody should read it.

And you've got some great one-liners in there. I agree with everything in it. Thanks for writing it. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. And I hope you can be with us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com