Love Your Neighbor (Romans 13:5–8) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul

0:00 Well, tonight we're going to continue with our study of Paul's letter to the church at Rome, and we're still in the thirteenth chapter. And I'm going to begin at verse 5 and read through verse 10, and if possible I might even be able to go beyond that, but you know my limitations don't normally let us go that far. and so let's look at Romans chapter 13 beginning at verse 5 and reading through verse 10 and allows the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God. Therefore, you must be subject not only because of wrath, but also for conscience's sake. For because of this, you also pay taxes, for they are God's ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render, therefore, to all their due, taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.

1:29 For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet. And if there's any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. This is the Word of God for God's people. Please be seated.

2:06 Let us pray. Again, O Lord, we would be instructed not by human wisdom, but by that revelation that comes to us from Your omniscience. And this evening, as we direct our attention once again to this sacred text, we ask that You would help us understand it correctly and embrace it with our minds and with our hearts. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. We've seen in the beginning of chapter 13 Paul's critical teaching of the role of civil government, which is instituted by God, and here we are told that the rulers, the secular rulers of this world, are God's ministers. And in our last time together, I tried to draw applications of this text to questions of civil obedience as well as questions of capital punishment and theories of just warfare inasmuch as this is the classical locus of the text by which God gives to the civil magistrate the power of the sword. And having looked at that section, we are warned that the civil magistrate does not bear that sword in vain, and he is not to be an enemy to good works but to evil, and that we ought to have a certain healthy fear of civil authority. And again, not simply out of fear of punishment, but the apostle now forges ahead here, therefore you should be subject not only because of wrath, not because you simply are afraid of the terror of the law enforcement agencies of your nation, but also for conscience's sake. Let me just pause on that. What Paul is

4:14 saying is that our responsibility to bend over backwards, to be submissive to the civil magistrates, even when those magistrates are oppressive, even if we disagree radically with them, nevertheless we render obedience to those magistrates as a matter of conscience. because our consciences are to be held captive by the Word of God. And if God Himself authorizes these rulers and have placed them over us, again, unless they require us to do something God forbids or commands us to do something God forbids or forbids us from doing something God commands, then we are to render this obedience not out of a matter of fearing their power, but out of conscience sake, as a matter of principle.

5:21 Have I just made a statement that needs to be translated into another language to be understood by a contemporary congregation? When is the last time you heard anybody tell you that you have to live by principle, that this is at the heart of Christian ethics and of Christian life, that we are to live by conscience as people of principle, not out of expediency, not simply doing willy-nilly whatever our hearts desire, but we are to be in the main submissive people, submissive ultimately to the law of God and to every other authority that God places over us. Now, Paul now turns his attention to the question of the payment of taxes.

6:21 This is one of my favorite issues. Render therefore… oh, for because of this, that is because of conscience, you also pay taxes. For they, that is these magistrates, are God's ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due, taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. You know, I really admire the Apostle Paul for his faithfulness to Christ and his courage to tell the people of God to do their duty, even when that duty was something they absolutely despised. Keep in mind that the Roman government, in their taxation and tribute policies was indeed an oppressive government.

7:24 And the people who were receiving this admonition from the Apostle Paul were people who had been oppressed and crushed by the burden of Roman taxation. Paul says, pay your taxes. They might be unfair. They might be oppressive. They may be unjust. But in the first instance, remember that God gives to the civil magistrate the right to levy taxes, because the civil magistrate has to have his reign and rule financed. And since governments usually don't produce anything, Most of their revenue, if not all, is dependent upon not the voluntary contributions of the constituent members of their nations, but by the imposition of taxes, and which taxation is also exercised and enforced by that sword that we heard about a little while ago. In the United States, if we refuse to pay our taxes, we don't have to worry about the government coming after us with a sword. His weapons are a little bit more advanced than that.

8:57 But in any case, every government in every society throughout history has been involved in some form of the levying of taxes. It is the government's right to levy taxes, and it is our responsibility to pay those taxes. Now let me add something here. Any government to whom God gives the right to levy taxes also receives from God the responsibility to levy taxes that are just, that are righteous. I don't know if there's ever been a civil government in the history of the world that has maintained a righteous system of taxation for any period of time. If you go into the pages of the Old Testament, you will see one of the things about which God is passionate, in which He speaks to His people through the prophets, is the oppression that was brought upon the poor by the rich. But the rich that are referred to, that are selling the poor for a pair of shoes, for example, as Amos complains, were not the merchants of Israel, but they were the rulers of the nation. It was the kings and the princes who were using their power to extort burdensome payments from the poor.

10:36 We remember the incident of eminent domain that was exercised by Ahab when he confiscated Naboth's vineyard. Here was a man who had labored strenuously to produce his vineyard, and the king saw that it was a productive operation, and so he basically nationalized it by taking it to his own possession. And God's wrath was poured out against that exercise of eminent domain. But in any case, we see throughout the pages of the Old Testament unjust, unrighteous, and oppressive burdens of taxation given to the people. And we are also witnesses of the biblical testimony of the Old Testament that God hates that, whether it's by a Jewish king, a Babylonian king, a Roman emperor, or the Congress of the United States of America.

11:40 doesn't matter what civil magistrate. Every magistrate is called to levy taxes in a just and righteous manner. And we know that throughout church history and throughout the history of Western civilization, we've seen all different forms of government. You've seen autocratic governments where the authority and the power is invested in one person, a tyrant, a dictator. You see oligarchies that come along where all of the power and authority is vested in a few people. The idea of the monarchy where you have a king or a queen exercising authority over subjects. You see democracies whereby the authority and the power is vested in the people wherein the ultimate authority is in the majority of those whose rulers represent them.

12:46 Now, of those various types that I've already mentioned, which one is ours? Are we in an autocracy? That's not a rhetorical question I'm asking. Are we in an autocracy? No. Are we in a monarchy? No. Are we in an oligarchy? No. Are we in a democracy? No! Who said yes? The fathers of this nation went to great pains to make sure that the structure of government in this nation was not a democracy but a republic. What's the difference? In a democracy, rule is vested in people, the majority. In a republic, ultimate authority rests in law. The whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to guard against what Alexis de Tocqueville warned would destroy the American experiment through the tyranny of the majority. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is this, that if everybody in the country except one agrees to stamp out free speech, the First Amendment rules over that majority. And the private rights of individuals are to be guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, therefore, to protect against the tyranny of the majority. I think the founders of this country were very farsighted, in my opinion not farsighted enough. The one thing they failed to protect was the individual's rights against unjust taxation. And what I mean by unjust taxation is taxation through a progressive, unequal tax system.

14:50 Now, when God placed His tax upon the people of Israel, He imposed a tithe, and not everybody paid the same amount. The rich people paid a whole lot more than the poor people, but everybody paid the same percentage. Not so in our country. In our country, we have politicized economics where we don't have a flat system of percentage, but some people are required to pay a higher percentage of others. And you know what we call that? Social justice, when in fact it's manifest injustice. And what happens that is so evil and so destructive, that it gives people in the nation the right to impose or vote for taxes on other people that they're not voting on themselves.

15:58 That's what I mean when I say the politicization of economics. And it creates the politics of envy where one group is set against another. And anytime that's happened in the history of the world, it ends in the destruction of the nation. And it will end in the destruction of our nation if we don't do something about it. However, I'm not here tonight simply to bring a critique against the American taxation system. I just wish that all we had to pay taxes on were tea and we could go back to the king. But again, I need to vote when I vote according to principle. I ought not to use the power of the ballot to pick your pocket. Let me give a simple illustration.

16:46 We have three guys in the room, and we all decide we ought to have a nice public park in Sanford. And it's going to cost $100,000 for this nice little park. And so we decide to vote on the allocation of costs. And I make the suggestion, tell you what let's do. I'll pay $1,000. I say to my buddy, you pay $1,000. And this fellow over here, we're going to vote that he pays $98,000. How do you like that? This is for the public good now, Park, for everybody's benefit. I'm going to pay $1,000. My buddy's going to pay $1,000. This other guy's going to pay $98,000. I say, okay. All in favor, say aye.

17:33 I say aye. My friend says aye. The other guy says, nay, you lose. That's what happens when we have the right to exercise a tyranny of the majority, and Christians ought never be involved in that sort of thing, ever. And so we ought to be involved with the paying of our taxes as a matter of conscience, and yet at the same time being scrupulous in supporting righteousness and justice in whatever system we're engaged in. Now, the idea of justice is deeply embedded in this text where, Paul tells us, render therefore to all their due. Taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, times, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. There's a little word in this portion of the text that I have to be honest with you jumps right off the page to me when I read it, and yet I am aware that unless people are rooted and grounded in the history of Western philosophy would probably read over this text a thousand times and never have that word jump out at them the way it jumps out at me. Some of you may remember Mortimer Adler, who was a very important philosopher of 20th century America, and Professor Adler published a book on the great ideas of Western civilization, ideas like truth, ideas like wisdom, ideas like justice, where he talked about concepts that we read about in the newspaper every day, words that we use in our normal vocabulary every day, yet, he said, if we are put to the test, we would be hard-pressed to render an adequate definition of the term.

19:43 Now, one of the responsibilities I had in the days where I was teaching seminary was to teach, in addition to Christian theology, I was given the responsibility to teach Christian ethics. And one of the things as an exercise I would do with my students is I would give them a pop quiz, which they all love. I would say, I want you to take out a piece of paper and please write a succinct, concise, accurate definition of justice. And they looked at me in a way similar to the way you're looking at me tonight, although you have a sort of look of delight that you aren't being given the same test. You would think a term like justice would be easy to define. Most of the answers were based upon some concept of merit, that justice involves rewarding goodness according to its merit and punishing wickedness according to its demerit. And so this merit structure that many of us conceive of as being the heart of justice is what I would get from the students. Tell them to ask them this question. You have a beauty contest.

21:12 Thank you. And you bill this contest as an opportunity for contestants to vie for the crown of Miss America or Miss Sanford or Miss whatever, and that the qualities by which the winner will be judged will principally be physical beauty. There may be some room for congeniality and talent, but the main criterion by which the winner will be judged will be their beauty. And then the judges come to the contest and they see that an ugly duckling has entered the contest, and they feel sorry for her.

22:07 And so they decide to vote for her to be Miss Sanford or Miss Florida. My question, is that just? Well, if we use a merit system, we would say that the decision that this person is voted the winner of the contest had nothing to do with merit, nothing to do with good behavior. The woman was not crowned Miss Sanford because she deserved it through some kind of moral uprightness. And so the question of justice may be irrelevant. unless we use the definition of justice that was offered to the Western world by Aristotle, where he said the principle of justice is this in its most simple explanation.

23:06 It is giving to people what is their due. Now, if you advertise a contest where the prize will be awarded on the basis of beauty, who is due the victory? the one who is most beautiful. That person is due the reward, even though there's no merit or virtue in being beautiful. Nevertheless, the terms of the contest were defined in terms of an aesthetic criterion, and whoever meets that criterion in its greatest dimension is now do the prize.

24:00 You're following what I'm saying here? If that's correct, then righteousness and justice have an awful lot to do with the question of do-ness. Let me give an illustration of that which may trouble some of you. I hope you'll just sit loose with it and think about it. one of the great ethical debates that we face in Christian ethics is the question about the sanctity of truth. And the question is this, are we always in every circumstance obligated to give the unvarnished truth? And there are many Christian ethicists who answer that question in the affirmative and say, yes, that righteousness demands that you always tell the truth with no exception. Then you go to the biblical examples of Rahab who lied to protect Joshua and his people and who makes the roll call of the saints for her valorous action in the New Testament. Even better, you look at the midwives of Egypt who were instructed by the edict of Pharaoh to call the guards as soon as they knew that a Hebrew woman was about to give birth, so that the edict to destroy the firstborn males would be carried out. But the midwives disobeyed. And to protect these newborn babies lied to the soldiers, saying that the midwives, you know, that the women were quick on the stool and all of that business. And so they practiced deceit to the authorities and saved the lives of the babies.

26:08 And we were told in the text, and because of that, God blessed them. And so many students of ethics say there is a place for the righteous lie. There is a place for the just telling of a lie. I once told the experience of the landlady that I had in Holland who hollowed out a place under her living room floor and had provisions in there and a fan and water and stuff to hide her teenage son and the son next door from the Gestapo who would come in unannounced and look for youngsters of that age and take them and ship them off to labor camps in Germany for the war effort. And one day she heard the soldiers coming and she quickly put the two young men down underneath the floor and hid them, and the guards came in and said, Are there any young men here? What was her moral obligation?

27:14 Oh yes, I have two of them hidden underneath the floor. Now the principle of giving truth to whom it is due, giving truth where righteousness and justice require it, would not only allow that woman to deceive those soldiers, but require her to do it. Does that make sense to you? In other words, when we talk about truth, the biblical principle would be this. We should always tell the truth where righteousness and justice require it. But righteousness and justice do not always require it, as in these cases of warfare and the like that I've just mentioned. But the principle here that is used that defines justice and righteousness is this principle of that which is due, that which is owed, that which is obligatory. And what Paul is saying here is we are obliged to pay our taxes. We must give the state what is due the state.

28:29 And justice and righteousness require that we submit to their taxes. That's what he's saying here when he says, I love having this fan up here in the pulpit. It keeps me a little bit cool, but it also blows the pages all over the place. He said, render to all their due, taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs are due, fear to whom fear is due, honor to whom honor is due. Honor is due the king. Even if the king is not honorable, he is to be honored. It is his due. we are to honor our father and mother because honor is due our parents. They may not deserve it. They may not have earned it. They have not merited it. That's why we can't reduce Christian justice and righteousness to the simple formula of merit and demerit.

29:43 They may not earn it at all, but by God's decree it is their due, and I am to give honor to whom honor is due. I've told the story I think at least on one occasion where my friend John Guest, when he came to the United States for the first time, he had been in this country for less than two weeks when I first met him and had dinner with him, and he told me as an aspiring evangelist in the United States that he wasn't sure if he was going to be able to communicate the gospel in America. And I said, why? What's the problem? Well, last week he said, I was visiting antique stores in Germantown in Philadelphia, and I was going to these stores that specialized in Revolutionary War memorabilia. He said, and I walked in this one such store and I saw these placards on the wall, don't tread on me. No taxation without representation. But the next one is what really arrested my attention. It said in bold letters, we serve no sovereign here.

31:10 He says, is that really the American mentality? He said, how in the world can I preach the gospel of the kingdom of God to a people who have a built-in antipathy and allergy towards sovereignty. We don't have a king. We haven't been trained in giving honor and respect to those in authority over us. I also, too, told you the story on another occasion when I was in graduate school and how the professor would come in after the students were assembled in the amphitheater and there was a podium in the front of the amphitheater, and he would walk to that podium, step up onto the podium, and face the students. And as soon as that happened, that was a silent signal for every student to stand up when he came into the room.

32:17 And then he would nod and give us the signal to be seated. We sat down. then he would deliver his lecture with no interruption. God forbid that any student would ever raise their hand. And when he was finished, he would close his book, step off the podium, and everybody would stand up again, and he'd go out the room, and that was it. Not only did I experience that in the classroom, but I went to the church for the first time in Holland. And the minister came in from the side, and as soon as he appeared, everybody in the congregation stood up. And when he nodded, they all sat down. When he finished his sermon, everybody stood up. He nodded, walked out. That was it. Didn't shake your hand at the back of the church or any of that. And I said, what kind of place is this? and then one day it was very warm in my classroom in Amsterdam. And of course, you wouldn't go to the class without a coat and tie. I had my coat and tie on, but it was very warm, so I took my coat off and put it on the chair next to me. And I was way up back in the back of the amphitheater, and in the middle of his lecture, Dr. Burkauer stopped. He looked up at me, and here's what he said, would the American please put his coat back on? Now, he didn't know who I was from a cake of soap, but he knew that the only kind of person that would dare to take off their coat in the middle of his lecture had to be an American. We're so casual, so cavalier, so foreign is the concept of honor to our culture. Yet the biblical culture of ethics is built on honor, giving honor where honor is due. To your boss, to your parents,

34:28 to the civil magistrates, and yes, to your pastor. Well, let's go on. Verse 8, O no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. Now, what follows here is an exposition of the way in which love fulfills the law, and I'll treat that, God willing, next week. But let me look at the first part of this sentence because this is a passage that has been, I'm afraid, so, so widely misused in the church and in our days. Many people come to verse 8, O no man anything but to love him, and see that as a biblical mandate against the incurring of debt, and that we are told that it is unchristian to borrow money, to build churches, to build our homes, to buy an automobile, and so on, based upon this text. Oh, no man anything but to love Him. And that would seem to indicate that we ought never to incur any kind of indebtedness. Now, if you look at the whole scope of sacred Scriptures, you will see that there are vast provisions for taking on debt, and also that there are guidelines to protect people who are in debt in Scripture. On the first instance, there are strong prohibitions against oppressive usury. What is usury? Usury is an exploitively high interest rate that bleeds people dry. If our culture were exposed to the law of Israel, the level of interest rates that are routinely charged by credit card companies would clearly be seen as usurious and would come under the judgment of God. They're way too high,

36:38 and they exploit people and their weaknesses. And so you have that principle in the Scripture with respect to lending and rates of interest. You also have strong considerations for the poor who give as collateral for their indebtedness personal garments. We read the mandate that if a person puts up as his collateral his garment, which he needs to keep warm at night, that the creditor can keep that garment during the day, but is required by biblical law to give it back to the man for the coldness of the evening. But if you look at all of those different scenarios, you will see that they are all based upon a culture, they were ordained by God, that allowed borrowing and lending, as long as the lending and borrowing was not exploitive and oppressive. Now, is that all dismissed now when Paul says, O man, O no man, anything but to love him. Now there may have been commentators in the history of the church who have taken that to be the meaning of verse 8, that verse 8 prohibits incurring debt of any kind. Like I said, there may have been commentators in church history who have interpreted this text in that manner.

38:20 I'm just not aware of them. I don't know of any who do that. Any commentator I've ever looked at and consulted on this portion of the text says that the basic point that the apostle is making is that we operate only under one perpetual debt or obligation, and that is to love our brothers. And what he's talking about here about not owing anything except love is, has this application towards borrowing and lending. The point of the text is this, in the structure in which it was written. If you borrow something, and you borrow money, and you owe it, there's no sin in that. the sin comes when? When you don't pay it. when you don't fulfill your obligation.

39:21 I wish you could spend a day in the accounting room at Ligonier Ministries to see how many people order products, receive their invoices, and never pay for it. It's epidemic. Now there is where people are taking advantage of loans and then not fulfilling their obligation. It doesn't just happen at our ministry. It happens in every ministry in the world, every ministry in America. It happens in every department store. And of all people, Christians, when they incur debt as a matter of principle and as a matter of conscience, must move heaven and earth to honor their obligations. If you owe somebody something, dear friends, pay what you owe.

40:17 Pay your bills. pay them on time. You enter into a contract, fulfill the terms of the contract. That's not difficult. That's basic integrity as far as our duty to live in righteousness. And again, this is connected to what the apostle had just said when he says, render taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs are due, fear to whom fear is due, honor to whom honor is due, payment to whom payment is due.

41:01 It's fundamental. And it now is wrapped, as we will see God willing next week, in the overarching principle of love, of love. If I borrow from you, if I borrow your rake, and you live next to me, and I borrow your rake and I don't return it,

41:22 I'm not loving you. I'm using you. And all of these practical applications of righteousness and justice that Paul is explaining here are rooted and grounded in, again, that overarching responsibility we have to love our neighbor as ourselves. These are nothing more, nothing less than practical applications of the golden rule. But God willing, we will explore that in greater detail next week. Let's pray. Father, give to Your people sensitive consciences that we might understand what principles of righteousness and justice entail, and give us the moral strength to do it, to render what is due to all people?

42:33 Honor, fear, taxes, customs, payment. And most of all, that as a matter of conscience, we would exercise love to our neighbors. We ask it in Jesus' name.