What can we learn from Jesus—from one interaction in particular—about God and government? More than we might think. Here’s the familiar story from Mark 12:13-17:

And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians, to trap him in his talk. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But, knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they marveled at him.

This is the third confrontation Jesus has with the Sanhedrin in and around the temple. And this is the second time they’ve laid the bait for Jesus. At the end of chapter 11, the chief priests and scribes and elders confront Jesus about his authority. After avoiding that ruse, Jesus tells a parable against them, which makes them hate Jesus all the more. So here they come, yet again, with another plan to get Jesus in trouble. When in doubt, ask him about politics.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?”
The question they is not sincere. Rather, like Admiral Ackbar says in Return of the Jedi, “It’s a trap!” If Jesus says, “Pay your taxes,” then he’ll be unpopular with the people. They resented the once-a-year poll tax. They hated the Romans. They thought it was idolatry to pay the tax and submit themselves to Rome and do anything that would help further the Roman cause. The tax was despised by the people. But on the other hand, if he says, “Don’t pay your taxes,” he’ll be in trouble with Rome. They’ll squash him as a revolutionary. It’s a “heads I win, tales you lose” kind of question. Answer one way, and the Pharisees are there to get the crowds fired up and turn against you. And the support of the crowd is the only thing preventing the Sanhedrin from arresting Jesus. But answer the other way, and the Herodians are there to go tell the Roman officials, who will seek your arrest.
But Jesus is the master at springing traps. He’s the Messianic mouse that manages to swipe the cheese and live to see another day. So he asks to see the denarius.
A denarius was equivalent to a day’s wage for a working man in Judea. It’s like a hundred dollar bill. He asks to see the coin. We know what this coin looked like. People have found them. The denarius was a silver coin with the head of Tiberius Caesar on it. He was the Roman Emperor from AD 14–37, which fits with the chronology of the Gospels. The coin had a picture of the emperor on one side with these words (in abbreviated form): Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filius Augustus (Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Son of Divine Augustus). The flip side had the inscription Pontifex Maximus (High Priest). You can understand why the Jews hated this tax. Not only did it go to Rome, but the coin itself contained blasphemy. It hailed Caesar as divine.
Look at what Jesus does. He asks to see the coin and then asks whose likeness, whose image, is on it. Obviously, everyone can see whose face is on the thing, so they answer, “Caesar’s.” Which prompts Jesus to utter one of his most famous sentences: “Render [or give] to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
This pithy response says a lot more than you might think. This one sentence gives the beginning of a Christian view of politics and religion. It’s a foundational statement for the Christian way of looking at issues of church and state, issues of God and government. There are at least six implications for our view of church and state in this one sentence—six statements about God and government that flow from this response.
1. Be good citizens, even if you think the government is bad.
In a few days, after this incident, Romans will kill Jesus. In AD 70, they will wipe out the temple. In the years ahead, they will kill the apostles and thousands of other Christians. Before Jesus, Rome had squashed a number of Jewish rebellions. Rome was the ruler, and Judea was a vassal state. The Romans weren’t Nazis. They did a lot of good things and made tremendous accomplishments. They didn’t persecute the Jews nonstop, but they did when they had to. They swindled when they could. It’s safe to say, no matter how much you may dislike American politics (or politicians!) or how much you may think the government is stupid or unjust, Rome was worse. And yet Jesus said to pay your taxes. Caesar’s face is on the coin. He had a right to levy tribute. So pay up the denarius.
2. Allegiance to God and allegiance to your country are not inherently incompatible.
Sometimes Christians talk like you should have no loyalty for your country, as if love for your country is always a bad thing. But Jesus shows it’s possible to honor God and honor Caesar.
This is especially clear if you know some Jewish history. The tax in question in Mark 12 is the poll tax or census tax. It was first instituted in AD 6, not too long before Jesus’s ministry. When it was established, a man by the name of Judas of Galilee led a revolt. What was his motivation? Later, Josephus wrote about Judas of Galilee, “He called his fellow countrymen cowards for being willing to pay tribute to the Romans and for putting up with mortal masters in place of God.” See, Judas and the Zealots believed allegiance to God and allegiance to any earthly government were fundamentally incompatible. As far as they were concerned, if God was your king, you couldn’t have any earthly king. Theocracy was the only way to go.
But Jesus disagreed. By telling the people, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” he was saying there are duties to government that do not infringe on your ultimate duty to God. It’s possible to honor lesser authorities in good conscience because they have been instituted by a greater authority.
If you read all that the New Testament says about governing authorities in places like Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, you see that the normal situation is one of compatible loyalties. The church is not the state and the state is not God, but this does not mean the church must always be against the state. Calvin said about this passage, “It lays down a clear distinction between spiritual and civil government, in order to inform us that outward subjection does not prevent us from having within us a conscience free in the sight of God. . . . In short, Christ declares that it is no violation of the authority of God, or any injury done to his service, if, in respect of outward government, the Jews obey the Romans.” In general, then, it’s possible to be a good Christian and a good American (or good Canadian or good Kenyan or whatever). Patriotism is not bad. Singing your national anthem and getting choked up is not bad. Allegiance to God and allegiance to your country are not inherently incompatible.
3. It is acceptable that there be some measure of separation between church and state.
Church and state occupy overlapping spheres, and government is always ultimately accountable to God. But if we can render some things to Caesar and render other things to God, it must be the case that they are not one and the same, that it is possible to have some separation between the realm of organized religion and the realm of government (see, for example, Andrew Melville’s “two kings and two kingdoms”).
I keep saying “some” because there are all sorts of difficult issues that aren’t going to be solved by Mark 12:17. On the one hand, we shouldn’t pretend that civil legislation is somehow divorced from all moral or religious categories. It can’t be done. If you forbid murder, you are legislating morality. So I’m not saying Christians shouldn’t bring many of their convictions to bear on public policy. But on the other hand, it seems that from this passage, Jesus did not have a vision for the state that meant it had to be ruled by all the laws of God. Jesus was not a theonomist.
In his book Christ and Culture Revisited, D. A. Carson argues that the state and religion (as an organized institution) occupy “distinct, even if overlapping spheres.” This does not mean Christ is not Lord of all, but it means he rules over the different spheres in different ways. After all, Jesus says in John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world.” It won’t be until the end of the age that we will be able to say, “The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of our Christ” (Rev. 11:15). We are more like Israelites in exile in Babylon, maintaining a kingdom within a kingdom, than we are like the Israelites in the promised land where God’s rule and the nation’s rules were identical. That’s the foundational reason theonomy is wrong. We are not Israel in the promised land; we are Israelites as strangers and aliens in the world.
This is one of the big differences between Islam and Christianity, and why it remains to be seen if pure Islam can work in Western nations. I recall an anecdote from D. A. Carson about a Muslim man who said, “I find nothing in the Qur’an that tells us how to live as the minority, and I find nothing in the Bible that tells you how to rule as the majority.” Now that may be a bit of an overstatement, but it’s getting at something profound. Islam developed with the state and religion intertwined, while Christianity was, at the beginning, a persecuted minority religion that accepted the distinction between a spiritual kingdom and a civil kingdom. The rights protected in the First Amendment are not just a nod to tolerance; they are consistent with Christian convictions.
4. God’s people are not tied to any one nation.
When Jesus says, “Go ahead and give to Caesar what belongs to him,” he is effectively saying, “You can support nations that do not formally worship the one true God.” Or to put it a different way: true religion is not bound with only one country. This means the church will be transcultural and transnational.
I like how Mark Dever puts it in his sermon-turned-book on the same text: “Jesus’ approval of paying taxes to Rome was revolutionary. By this, Jesus shows us that the legitimacy of a government is not determined by whether it supports the worship of the one true God, or even allows for it. By Jesus not requiring those who follow Him only to support states which are formally allied to the true God as Old Testament Israel had done, Jesus unhitches His followers from any particular nation” (God and Politics, 27).
Some of you are from a different country. And some of you may have heard or may think that Christianity is just a Western religion or maybe an American religion. But it’s not. It never has been. It started in the Middle East and was always meant to be international. Today there are more Anglicans in church in Nigeria than in England, more Presbyterians in South Korea than in the United States. The promise to Abraham way back in Genesis is that, through his family, God would bless the whole world. The scene around the throne in Revelation is of people from every tribe and language and culture. Christianity is not tied to just one certain nation. Following Christ is not an ethnic thing. You can be from any country and worship Jesus.
5. The state is not God.
So far we’ve been looking at the first half of Jesus statement: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” but now we need to look at the second statement: “Render to God the things that are God’s”. You may think, Well, Jesus certainly is pro-government. He may have given a cute answer by looking at the coin, but all he’s done is side with the Romans. But look more carefully.
By saying, “Give to Caesar what belongs to him, and give to God what belongs to him,” Jesus is making clear that he believes the two are not identical. Remember the inscription on the denarius, “Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Son of Divine Augustus?” Jesus doesn’t buy that at all. If people were listening carefully to his answer, they would have heard him say, “Look, give Caesar his taxes. But Caesar is not God, and God is not Caesar. Tiberius is not divine. Augustus was not divine. They are not what they want you to believe.”
Human government is always run by humans. And as such, there will always be a gravitational pull toward idolatry. Governments, unless there are checks and balances, tend to accrue more and more power. And, if we are not careful, we start to believe that Caesar really may be God, the state really may have all the answers, government may be able to give us everything we need. But Jesus not only tells us to respect the government, he also tells us quite clearly that the state is not ultimate. The government has authority but not comprehensive authority. It doesn’t matter what country you are from, America, China, or Guatemala, your government is not God.
6. We owe our ultimate allegiance to God.
The state’s power is limited. Our allegiance to country or government is never absolute. But our allegiance to God is comprehensive. Do you see the word “likeness” in verse 16? It’s the Greek word eikon from which we get icon. The word can mean image or likeness. It’s the same word used in the Greek Old Testament in Genesis 1:26. Let us make man in our eikon—in our image, after our likeness. What are the things that belong to Caesar? Taxes, respect, honor—that’s what belongs to governing authorities. But what belongs to God? You. Your whole self. Your life. Your existence. Your everything.
Imagine standing before God, and he says, “Come up here. Let me take a look. Whose image, whose likeness do I see?” You are made in the image and likeness of God. You are like a coin—you may be dirty, rusted, nasty looking—but a penny is still worth a penny. And you are still worth something to God, because his likeness has been stamped on you. You belong to him. So the only way to render to God the things that are God’s is to give to God your whole life.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

First off, my usual disclaimer and explanation.
This list is not meant to assess the thousands of good books published in 2020. There are plenty of worthy titles that I am not able to read (and lots I never hear of). This is simply a list of the books (Christian and non-Christian, but all non-fiction) that I thought were the best in the past year. “Best” doesn’t mean I agreed with everything in them; it means I found these books—all published in 2020 (or the very end of 2019)—a strong combination of thoughtful, useful, interesting, helpful, insightful, and challenging. For more discussion on some of these books, check out my podcast Life and Books and Everything with Collin Hansen and Justin Taylor.
Instead of trying to rank the books 1-10 (always a somewhat arbitrary task), I’ll simply list them in alphabetical order by the author’s last name.
Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition (Library of America)
For many people “conservative” is whatever Fox News says or the Republican Party does. For others “conservative” is the easy reason another person’s views can be quickly dismissed. Across the spectrum—whether you are for it or against it—Americans would do well (and American Christians in particular) to understand that conservatism is its own political tradition. As is always the case in a book like this, some chapters are better than others (the first chapter from Russell Kirk is very good), some chapters don’t agree with each other (e.g., the hawkish and the non-interventionists strands of conservative thought), and some probably don’t belong in this volume (like the one from Teddy Roosevelt, who was not a conservative). But taken as a whole, this collection of essays, drawn from the past hundred years, is a good place to start in understanding the conservative intellectual tradition.

Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute)
A fascinating look at the state of the world and why things are much, much better than you think. Want to know about trends in work, in population, in violence, in farming, in technology, in health, and in natural resources? This book has the graphs you need. The big knock on the book, however, is that it is not nearly big enough. The trim size and font should have been twice as big to make a proper coffee table read.

James Eglinton, Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic)
A lecturer in Reformed theology at the University of Edinburgh, Eglinton proves with this book that he is an excellent historian as well as a superb systematician. Eglinton demonstrates a mastery of Dutch sources and Bavinck’s Dutch context. The result is an astute and readable biography of a man who not only excelled as a theologian but also made his name as an ethicist, an educational reformer, a politician, a journalist, a Bible translator, a campaigner for women’s education, and the progenitor of heroes and martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance movement.

Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press)
With admirable self-awareness and an obvious love for literature and learning, Hitz has written a book that celebrates the intellectual life without coming across as snobbish or elitist. Quite the opposite, Hitz argues that the joy of being “lost in thought” is a pleasure available not for the few but for the many.

Philip Jenkins, Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press)
The most important things happening in the world are not always the things that make for breaking news. Case in point: the falling fertility rates across the globe. “For the foreseeable future—for several decades at least—most of the non-African world does face the prospect of a contracting and steeply aging population” (185). Surely, this is big news, and Jenkins writes about the phenomenon with scholarly precision and clarity.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Pitchstone Publishing)
This is not a Christian book, which means there are elements of the analysis that cannot be accepted (e.g., the approval of homosexuality). On the other hand, it also means that the critique of postmodernism and its many attendant theories comes from insiders (academics, classic liberals) rather than from outsiders. If you want to know where Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and intersectionality come from—and why they are massively problematic—this a book to answer many of your questions.

Mark Regnerus, The Future of Christian Marriage (Oxford University Press)
“This is a book about how modern Christians around the world look for a mate within a religious faith that esteems marriage but a world that increasingly yawns at it” (2). Regnerus argues that marriage is a public matter affecting all of society and that for Christianity the importance of faith and family usually rise and fall together. His suggestions for revitalizing Christian marriage provide good advice for parents, pastors, and Christian leaders.

Amity Schlaes, Great Society: A New History (Harper)
Part politics, part economics, and part cultural history—Shlaes covers the key ideas and personalities behind the programs meant to alleviate poverty in America. The book ends in 1976 with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, a metaphor for Shlaes’s largely negative assessment of what the Great Society accomplished.

Scott Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (Crossway)
There may be doctrines as important as the doctrine of Trinity for the existence and wellbeing of the Christian faith, but surely there are none more important. In less than 140 pages, Swain introduces (or reminds) us of the grammar of Trinitarian theology: relations of origin, personal properties, divine simplicity, person, essence, paternity, filiation, and spiration. This book is a great read for the Christian who knows that God is three-in-one and is eager to learn how systematic theology defends and explains this precious truth.
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway)
First, the self was psychologized, then psychology was sexualized, and finally, sex was politicized. This is the history Trueman tells with great verve and sophistication. Tracing the rise of the modern self from Rousseau to the romantic poets, to Marx and Darwin, to Freud and Nietzsche, to the triumph of the erotic and the therapeutic in our own day, Trueman has produced a dense (400 pages), but well-written and remarkably insightful, book that helps us understand why “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” came to be seen as coherent and meaningful.

Honorable Mentions:
Conrad Mbewe, God’s Design for the Church: A Guide for African Pastors and Ministry Leaders (Crossway).
Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Biblical Impurity within First Century Judaism (Baker Academic).
Paul Tripp, Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church (Crossway).
Paul W. Wood, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (Encounter Books).

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

Is there any one aspect of human life that has affected every other aspect of human life more than being male or female?
While my life is certainly not reducible to being a man, everything about my life is shaped by the fact that I am male, not female.  My wife’s whole life is shaped by being a woman and not a man. Each of my nine children (yes, we wanted to start our own baseball team) are unde­niably and monumentally shaped by being boys or girls. And yet how often do we stop to think that it didn’t have to be this way?
God didn’t have to make two different kinds of human beings. He didn’t have to make us so that men and women, on average, come in different shapes and sizes and grow hair in different places and often think and feel in different ways. God could have propagated the human race in some other way besides the differentiated pair of male and female. He could have made Adam sufficient without an Eve. Or he could have made Eve without an Adam. But God decided to make not one man or one woman, or a group of men or a group of women; he made a man and a woman. The one feature of human existence that shapes life as much or more than any other—our biological sex—was God’s choice.
In an ultimate sense, of course, the world had to be made the way it was, in accordance with the immutable will of God and as a necessary expression of his character. I’m not suggesting God made Adam and Eve by a roll of the dice. Actually, I’m reminding us of the opposite. This whole wonderful, beautiful, complicated business of a two-sexed humanity was God’s idea. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). The whole human race is, always has been, and will be for the rest of time, comprised of two differentiated and complementary sexes. This perpetual bifurcated ordering of humanity is not by accident or by caprice but by God’s good design.
And why?
What is at stake in God making us male and female? Nothing less than the gospel, that’s all. The mystery of marriage is profound, Paul says, and it refers to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32). “Mystery” in the New Testament sense refers to something hidden and then revealed. The Bible is saying that God created men and women—two different sexes—so that he might paint a living picture of the differentiated and complementary union of Christ and the church. Ephesians 5 may be about marriage, but we can’t make sense of the underlying logic unless we note God’s intentions in creating marriage as a gospel-shaped union between a differentiated and complementary pair. Any move to abolish all distinctions between men and women is a move (whether intentionally or not) to tear down the building blocks of redemption itself.
Men and women are not interchangeable. The man and the woman—in marriage especially, but in the rest of life as well—complement each other, meaning they are supposed to function according to a divine fitted-ness. This is in keeping with the order­ing of the entire cosmos. Think about the complementary nature of creation itself. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). And that’s not the only pairing in creation. We find other sorts of couples, like the sun and the moon, morn­ing and evening, day and night, the sea and the dry land, and plants and animals, before reaching the climactic couple, a man and a woman. In every pairing, each part belongs with the other, but neither is interchangeable. It makes perfect sense that the com­ing together of heaven and earth in Revelation 21–22 is preceded by the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation 19. That God created us male and female has cosmic and enduring significance. From start to finish, the biblical storyline—and design of creation itself—depends upon the distinction between male and female as different from one another yet fitted each for the other.
Sexual difference is the way of God’s wisdom and grace. It was there in the garden, there in the life of ancient Israel, there in the Gospels, there in the early church, will be there at the wedding supper of the Lamb, and was there in the mind of God before any of this began. To be sure, manhood and womanhood is not the message of the gospel. But it is never far from the storyline of redemptive history. The givenness of being male or female is also a gift—a gift to embrace, a natural order of fittedness and func­tion that embodies the way the world is supposed to work and the way we ought to follow Christ in the world. Let us, then, as male and female image bearers, delight in this design and seek to promote—with our lives and with our lips—all that is good and true and beautiful in God making us men and women.
This article is adapted from the opening chapter and closing section of my new book, Men and Women in the Church: A Short, Biblical, Practical Introduction published by Crossway.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.