The government’s job description: To administer the justice requisite for protecting human life, secure the conditions necessary for fulfilling the dominion mandate, and provide a platform for God’s people to declare God’s perfect judgment and salvation.
Some governments are better, and some are worse. So says the Bible. The Pharaoh of Joseph’s day was better; the Pharaoh of Moses’s day was worse.
Governments are God’s servants, one passage tells us (Rom. 13:1–7). Yet they’re also imposters, says another, because they rage and take their stands against God and his messiah (Ps. 2:1–3).
So, what makes a good government good? A good government provides a basic protective justice for all its citizens, including God’s people, whether it recognizes them as God’s people or not. (Think of Cyrus sending the Jews back from exile.) That means Christians should care about good government both for their neighbor’s sake and for the church’s sake.
With the other offices we’re discussing in part IV, the focus is on your individual authority—as with a husband, a parent, a manager, or an elder. Yet government and church are a little different, because we’re thinking about exercising authority in a group where we may or may not have
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