The Creator the Supreme Governor
By Calvin P. Bollman
The Proper Sphere of the Civil Ruler—Where He May and Where He May Not Operate With those who believe in an intelligent, personal Creator no argument is needed to establish the thesis that He is the supreme Governor. This is true of every sphere, spiritual, physical, mental, and moral. “There is no power but of God.” Rom. 13:1. This is equally true, also, of political power. “The powers that be are ordained of God.” The Power for Getting Wealth
A measure of His power the Creator gives to His creatures to be used to His glory. The abuse or misuse of this power constitutes sin. In the wilderness, Moses gave this caution to the people he was leading: “Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God;” and “say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God: for it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth.” Deut. 8:11, 17, 18. Man is prone not only to forget the source of his power, but actually to misuse his God-given powers. Hence the charge brought by the Lord against His people in Isa. 43:24, “Thou hast made Me to serve with thy sins.” The power of the arm given of God, in order that man might protect himself against wild beasts, and wrest from the soil, the forest, or the mine a livelihood, may be, and often is, used to destroy his fellow man. In like manner, power given by God to rulers for the purpose of preserving civil order, to the end that men “may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:2), is often used in robbery and oppression. It is the power, and not the use made of the power, that is ordained of God. He is not the author of sin. The fact, which all must admit, that the misuse of any of the powers possessed by man is sin, brings us face to face with another fact; namely, that inasmuch as the Creator is supreme Governor, all human authority is merely delegated power. The legitimate domain of human government is therefore limited. All authority not clearly given to men by Him who is the source of all power, is necessarily retained by the Creator. The Creator has delegated to man civil authority, and civil authority only; or in other words, the conservation of his own rights. In the domain of morals—that is, of duty toward God—not only is the Creator the supreme Ruler, but He is the sole Ruler, and His word is the supreme arbiter. Outside the domain of physics, there are but two spheres of government; namely, the moral and the civil. Moral government enforces moral obligation, and civil government enforces civil obligation. Moral obligation is that which is imposed by the Creator Himself. It may be inherent in the very nature of things, as, for instance, the commandments, “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal”; or, like the Sabbath commandment, the obligation may rest wholly upon the revealed will of the Creator. On the other hand, civil obligation is based not upon the revealed will of the Creator, not primarily upon any law that He has promulgated , as He did the Ten Commandments, but upon the nature or rights of man as a social being, and the necessities and custom of civil society. From time immemorial, peoples without the aid of divine revelation have recognized and more or less adequately protected the right to life and property. The founders of our government set forth as a self-evident truth the proposition “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They further declared “that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.” Dividing Line Between Civil and Moral
And just here we discover the real dividing line between moral and civil government. Civil government should deal with self-evident things, not with matters of divine revelation. The framers of the Declaration of Independence did not enumerate as self-evident any purely spiritual truth, such as the eternity of God, the plan of salvation, the work of the Holy Spirit, or the necessity of conversion; neither did they include among the legitimate objects of civil government the enforcing of religious duties, such as faith, attendance upon or support of public worship, Sabbath observance, baptism, Bible study, or indeed any duty which men owe to their Creator, and which they may render or not render to Him without injuring in a material way their fellow men. In including only civil duties within the sphere of the legitimate objects of human government, and in excluding from that sphere religious things, our forefathers either wittingly or unwittingly drew the line between things civil and things spiritual just where the Saviour had drawn it eighteen hundred years before in His words to the Herodians: “Render therefore unto Cesar the things which are Cesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” The Scriptures tell us there is one thing even the Lord cannot do; “He cannot deny166Himself.” 2 Tim. 2:13. Therefore the Creator has never given any created being any authority whatever over his fellow creature in the domain of moral obligation. Even children are required to obey their parents only “in the Lord.” Eph. 6:1. Were the Creator to delegate the administration of His law to any man or set of men, that law would at once cease to be perfect and unchangeable. As an academic proposition, “the intent of the lawmaker is the law”; but practically the interpretation put upon the law by its administrators is the law. Everybody knows that even the law of God is variously construed by different churches, and even by different individuals in the same church. But in the case of the divine law, “the intent of the Lawmaker is the law” both as an academic proposition and in very fact, for the Lawgiver is also the sole Administrator of His own law. The Lord is the supreme moral Governor, because He is the sole moral Governor. He by His Spirit is the sole authoritative Interpreter of His own law. He alone has the right to command men under penalty of sin. The violation of the law of God is sin, and this without any reference to what the civil law may say upon the subject. No human law can by any possibility make moral wrong right. Neither can the civil law make morally wrong that which the divine law has made morally right. It did not become morally wrong for Daniel to pray three times a day when the king’s decree made it a crime—a civil wrong—under the laws of the empire. It was not morally wrong for the disciples to preach Christ when they were forbidden by the civil magistrates to do so. Neither were the soldiers that nailed Christ to the cross innocent because they acted under orders of a Roman governor. It is true that crime is generally sin, but it is never sin simply because the act is prohibited by the civil law. The martyrs were criminals in the eyes of the civil authorities, but God recognized them as witnesses to His truth. Subject to the Powers That Be
But it may be asked: Is not civil government ordained of God? And is not submission to “the powers that be” a Christian duty?—“Yes, verily; Christians are exhorted to submit themselves—‘to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake’” (1 Peter 2:13); but this does not mean that we are to disobey God in order to obey men. The apostle himself suffered martyrdom because of loyalty to the divine law when it came into conflict with the Roman law. He had years before enunciated the principle in these words: “We ought to obey God rather than men;” and in due time he died rather than prove untrue to this principle. Civil government is ordained of God, but not in a sense that makes it superior to God, nor in a sense that its sphere is unlimited, and that it may command men under sin. Neither is it ordained of God in the sense that the particular form or a certain ruler is selected in every case by the Lord, but in the sense that the genius of civil government is ordained by the very act of the Creator in implanting in man those characteristics which inevitably draw him into organized civil society. Marriage is ordained of God; but ordinarily men and women are left free by the Lord to make their own selection of companions, and also to choose the particular form by which their union shall be consummated. So it is in the matter of civil government; one people choose a king, another people select a president. It is equally true in both cases that “the powers that be are ordained of God.” To take any other view of this question than this one, would be to make the Creator responsible for all the governmental oppression and wrong that has ever cursed this world, degrade Him from the throne of universal dominion, and put in His seat the man of sin. But this can never be. The Creator is and must ever remain the sole moral Governor, even those men whom He permits to exercise civil authority over their fellow men being always and in every place amenable to His law, which is holy, just, and good, and by which all men shall one day be judged.