Matthew 7:7a, 9

"Ask, and it shall be given you...what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread will he give him a stone?"

The "ask and you shall receive" thing can easily, of course, be read wrongly. It can be understood (common sensically) that what is not meant is that God will grant you whatever you ask for as though He were a genie in a bottle. Or an ATM machine. But wouldn't we like an ATM? Or a genie? There is a strong desire for that unfettered access to great power and wealth. Therefore, there is a desire to bend the words just a little.. Why? Do we think God will take our understanding of the words, slap his forehead, thank us for showing Him the light, and give us whatever we ask for however poorly it fits our needs or His plans? Seems unlikely.

Instead, Jesus sets a limit to this proposition immediately. He compares this relationship to the father/child relationship. If your child asks for fish will you give a serpent instead. Clearly not. Of course, those who want to see this set of verses as stating that God will give whatever we ask can point again and say "See? If I ask for a million dollars, He won't give me measles." But what Jesus has to say in verse nine can easily be read in the converse manner as well. That is, of course if you ask God for bread, you won't get a stone, but what if you ask God for a stone or a serpent? What if you ask for something bad for yourself? Will He put aside eternal wisdom, throw up His hands and give what you ask? Well, if your child were to ask for a rattlesnake, would you give it?

Generally, when children ask their parents for bad things - drugs, alcohol, "please mom, can't we host an orgy in our living room? You'd be the coolest mom on the block..." and their parents hand them over, we think they are bad parents. God's goodness is found in what He gives AND what He witholds. We would all agree that this is true of human parents, but it is no less true of the Almighty.

Romans 13:1 (Oxford)

"Every person must submit to the authorities in power, for all authority comes from God, and the existing authorities are instituted by him."

Of course, immediately, you can see troubles coming from this. Jesus may well have said "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" but submitting to authorities - different from just paying taxes - seems like a statement that requires some qualification. But then, Paul wasn't big on qualifying his statements. So if the "existing authorities" command you to sin? Do you obey figuring that God knew what He was doing when he put these people in power? Or do you resist?

The question may not need qualification, but good Bible reading practices require a reading that is contextual. Paul was a lawbreaker. He could have earned free nights in a hotel with the number of times he was booked into prisons or just punished corporeally for his crimes. Then they executed him. Never was there a worse citizen than Paul - after all, if being deemed fit for execution isn't a sign that you simply don't fit in, I don't know what is. If there was a worse citizen, then maybe it was Jesus - he got executed too. Or maybe it was Moses. He was so bad, he had to leave Egypt and make his own nation. He certainly wasn't about to obey Pharaoh.

In fact, some of the greatest heroes of the faith were jailbirds and victims of execution. What is meant by Paul, then, cannot be seen as a blind obedience. He must mean something else. The rest of the chapter doesn't really shed the type of light that I'd like - doesn't tell me specifically in which way one is supposed to obey human authorities. As a baseline, I suppose we may infer that one should obey in all things that don't touch upon your salvation/force you to sin.

So, in a classic example, if the law requires you to return escaped slaves to a condition of servitude, this may be seen as a sin and ignored. The same if the law requires that you discriminate on the basis of skin color.

But there are a thousand issues that some may find leave them on the border of sinning if they obey - the morning after pill offends many pharmacists, for instance. They think it sinful to use or dispense. What should they do? One wishes Paul had delved into some gray area thinking on this one.