Loyalty to God | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 5, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 10.

Loyalty to God.

SOMETIMES, in order to obey God, we may be under the necessity of disregarding the authority of men. There is a realm of spirit which civil authority has no right to enter, and where God alone is to be heard and obeyed. Civil governments are designed to define our civil obligations and to regulate our civil intercourse with each other. But we sustain relations to God, and are under obligations to him, with which no civil authority has any right to interfere, and which it cannot annul. If the civil power presumes to enter this spiritual domain, and enjoin what God has clearly forbidden, it violates the rights of conscience, its authority is usurped, and it cannot properly be recognized. This was the great principle on which the apostles acted. When human and divine authority came in conflict, they chose to “obey God rather than men.” But the principle is older than the apostles. It was asserted and maintained in the royal court of Babylon, when the three Hebrew youths positively refused to worship the image which the king had set up, preferring to suffer the penalty of the law, should God not see fit to deliver them. Civil authority may make a thing legally binding, but it cannot make it morally right.

There is a law for the regulation of our moral conduct which is far above all human law, and to which our moral conduct should conform. Human laws, it is presumed, are intended, at least in Christian countries, to conform to this higher law, but this is not always the case. There are many things sanctioned by human laws to-day, as interpreted by courts of justice, that are in direct conflict with the law of God. While we should be subject to those who are in authority over us, we should remember that their authority is limited, and that no human authority has a right to require us to do wrong. Our highest allegiance is to God. It was this which led the martyrs to the stake. They refused to be untrue to God to please men.—Methodist Recorder.