The RP teaching and the Continental Reformed of the 16th and 17th Centuries.
The French Confession of Faith (1559)
Art. 39. We believe that God wishes to have the world governed by laws and magistrates, so that some restraint may be put upon its disordered appetites. And as he has established kingdoms, republics, and all sorts of principalities, either hereditary or otherwise, and all that belongs to a just government, and wishes to be considered as their Author, so he has put the sword into the hands of magistrates to suppress crimes against the first as well as against the second table of the Commandments of God. We must therefore, on his account, not only submit to them as superiors, but honor and hold them in all reverence as his lieutenants and officers, whom he has commissioned to exercise a legitimate and holy authority.
Zacharias Ursinus (1534-1583) German Reformed & the author of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563)
Commenting on his own Catechism he wrote this when commenting on the 4th Commandment:
"A magistrate ought to be a defender of order and discipline among his subjects, as it respects both tables of the Decalogue, and to guard against and prohibit open idolatry and wickedness; and ought also to avoid, as far as it is possible, all offences and occasions to sin that may be given to his subjects by foreigners and sojourners…the particular observance of the Sabbath…had been enjoined upon all men from the very beginning of the world by God himself, although this precept had been lost sight of by other nations, so much so, that it was regarded as the greatest reproach which they could cast upon the Jews to term them Sabbatarians…" |
