For Christians who are suffering unjustly today, there is little doubt that state courts have not been their ally or friend. Indeed, courts, prosecutors, and judges are the primary reason why they are imprisoned, have lost their children, or have had their wealth or property confiscated. This is not a controversial thesis among those who have experienced it firsthand. It is, rather, a self-evident truth that requires no argument—only documentation.

I write as a man who has passed through the machinery of the state’s judicial arm and emerged on the other side with his faith intact but his illusions shattered. Whatever residual confidence I may have retained in the possibility of earthly justice was methodically dismantled by a system that rewarded perjury, ignored exculpatory evidence, relied on physically impossible forensic theories, and sentenced me to over eleven years in prison for defending myself against a violent mob. The judges were not elected. They were not accountable. They were not interested in the truth. They were interested in political outcomes—and in my case, the desired political outcome was the incarceration of a libertarian Baptist pastor who had dared to exercise his God-given right of self-defense during the Marxist-orchestrated chaos of Chile’s so-called “Social Upheaval.”

If my experience were singular, it might be dismissed as an anomaly. It is not. It is representative of a pattern that extends across centuries, across continents, and across every form of government that fallen man has devised.

The Biblical Testimony

The Bible is remarkably consistent on this point. Judges enforce bad or evil public policies often established by people who are enemies of the Gospel and who might even intend to forcibly change the thinking of those who hold a Christian Worldview. For those ideological aggressors, the prophet Isaiah’s indictment rings true with devastating precision:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)

One may clearly see their aggression in proactive public policies based on gender ideology, special homosexual rights, radical ecology, radical feminism, Marxism, socialism, social security and other welfare taxes, property taxes (especially levied on the elderly), abortion rights, and anti-gun ideology. For cultural Marxists and other hardcore leftists, public policy enacted against the Christian Worldview constitutes progress and social advancement. Furthermore, being able to use judicial power to enforce such policies and sanction violators is, in their estimation, a grand achievement of modern democratic societies—not to mention overtly communist and socialist ones.

Serious, committed Christians, however, look at things differently. The Bible informs them:

There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 8:14)

All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. (Ecclesiastes 7:15)

He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord. (Proverbs 17:15)

Also to punish the just is not good, nor to strike princes for equity. (Proverbs 17:26)

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn. (Proverbs 29:2)

Christian believers do not accept the notion that public policy may define what is right or wrong; only God can do that. The state, as part of the “unholy trinity” discussed in the preceding chapter, often legislates or decrees policies that controvert, oppose, undermine, or attenuate the principles of God’s law and the rest of His word. As a result, serious, committed Christians who are sensitive to right and wrong and who try to “do good” in this world will often run afoul of public policies and thus suffer wrongful treatment at the hands of the judicial power. Accordingly, the righteous, who follow their consciences before God, are often punished. Paradoxically, people who do evil in God’s sight—including looting, burning, and killing—are set at liberty. This travesty of justice is now more commonplace than ever before in Western countries, a result of culture moving further away from embracing the Christian Worldview.

Christ Before the Courts

If the sinless Son of God was falsely accused, tortured, and cruelly killed by the judicial apparatus of the state, why should we expect the courts in modern democratic societies—or communist ones—to treat us any better?

Jesus was falsely accused before Pontius Pilate and Herod, and He obviously suffered torture and death to satisfy the bloodthirstiness of the leaders of false religion (John 18:29 to 19:18; Luke 23:1-24). One might object: “But Christ had to die for us; according to Acts 2:23, it was predetermined. Our situation is different.” Nevertheless, Christ and the Apostle John tell us plainly that the world will hate us just as it hated Him (John 15:18-19), and that we will be persecuted, with many of us dying on account of our relationship with Him. Our duty is to “take our cross” and follow Him (Matthew 10:38; 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; 14:27). Simply being a serious, committed Christian has often resulted in a death sentence. The courts of the modern West have repudiated God’s law as a basis for human legislation and human rights determination, substituting political correctness doctrines and non-biblical ideologies—often not much different in principle from what Pilate and the Herods employed.

Paul and the Apostolic Experience

Not only did Christ suffer at the hands of earthly tribunals. The Apostle Paul was similarly accused and tried (Acts 23:29), as were members of the church at Smyrna: “Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). Note carefully: it is the devil who casts Christians into prison, but he does so through the instrumentality of the state’s judicial power.

Most of the last one-fourth of the book of Acts—from chapter 21, verse 33, through chapter 28, verse 23—describes Paul’s dealings with various religious and secular courts. This is a remarkable literary and theological fact that deserves far more attention than it typically receives. The Holy Spirit devoted approximately twenty-five percent of the primary historical narrative of the early church to documenting Paul’s interactions with the judicial system. And the result? None of these courts ruled in his favor. None of them gave him justice. God permitted that Paul and other believers be tested, and in many cases He let their enemies triumph over them in this life—provoking their cries for vengeance in the world to come: “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10).

The apostles John and Peter likewise suffered imprisonment and abuse (Acts 5:17-30). Paul clearly expresses his low opinion of state tribunals in 1 Corinthians 6:1-8, where he rebukes Christians for bringing lawsuits before unbelievers rather than settling disputes within the church. Peter is equally unflattering in 1 Peter 2:12, 22-23. Jesus Himself summed up the beleaguering situation with His characteristic clarity:

But before all these things, they shall lay their hands on you, and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues, and into prisons, being brought before kings and rulers for my name’s sake. And it shall turn to you for a testimony. (Luke 21:12-13)

Old Testament Precedent

Old Testament saints hardly fared better before state authorities. Consider the sufferings of Joseph (imprisoned on a fabricated charge of sexual assault), Daniel (thrown into a den of lions for praying), Jeremiah (cast into a cistern for prophesying), Mordecai (marked for execution by Haman’s political vendetta), Hosea, Micaiah, and John the Baptist. These men all obeyed God and practiced “doing good” in one way or another. Once again, why should we expect to be treated better in a godless, politically correct society than those living in biblical times? Does public policy work better now than it used to in terms of justice, equity, and social peace? Jesus did not come to bring peace on the earth with the worldlings around Him, but rather “division” or a “sword”—even dividing families (Luke 12:51-53).

The Baptist Heritage of Persecution

The Baptist tradition possesses a particularly rich—and painful—heritage of state persecution that every believer ought to study with care.

John Bunyan, the Bedford tinker who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, spent twelve years in prison for preaching without a license. Twelve years. His allegory of Christian and Faithful at Vanity Fair captures the dynamics of unjust suffering with a precision that resonates across the centuries. The pilgrims entered the fair wearing bright, shining clothes that immediately set them apart. When asked what they wished to buy from the world’s vices, they replied, “We buy the truth” (Proverbs 23:23)—and for that answer, they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by a demonic judge and blind, hard-hearted jurors. Bunyan was writing from experience. But the story of Bunyan’s imprisonment is incomplete without the story of his wife, Elizabeth. When Bunyan was first arrested, his first wife had already died, and Elizabeth—his second wife, then pregnant—was left to care for four stepchildren, including a blind daughter, Mary. Elizabeth Bunyan personally appeared before the judges at the Bedford assizes to plead for her husband’s release. She was rebuffed repeatedly, told that her husband could go free at any time if he would simply agree to stop preaching. She faithfully reported his answer: he would rot in prison before he would stop preaching the Gospel. She suffered a miscarriage from the shock of John’s arrest. For twelve years, Elizabeth Bunyan maintained the household, raised the children, brought food and supplies to the jail, and sustained her husband’s ministry by her faithfulness. She is the model of every prison ministry wife—and the church that served alongside her, the Bedford Meeting, continued to recognize Bunyan as their pastor throughout his imprisonment, supporting his family and carrying his manuscripts to the printer. This is what the body of Christ does for its imprisoned members. This is what Hebrews 13:3 looks like in practice.

Adoniram Judson, among the first five American Baptist foreign missionaries—along with Samuel Newell, Samuel Nott, Gordon Hall, and Luther Rice—endured seventeen months in the infamous Ava prison in Burma (1824–1826), bound in fetters, suspended by his ankles at night, starved, and riddled with fever. His wife Ann Hasseltine Judson did not abandon him. She walked miles daily to bribe guards, smuggle food into the prison, and plead with Burmese officials for his release—all while pregnant, and later, after giving birth in January 1825 to their daughter Maria Elizabeth. Indeed, she carried a nursing infant with her when going to visit her chained husband. She hid his translation of the New Testament in a pillow that she brought to him in prison—a pillow the guards regarded as worthless but which contained the only existing copy of his ongoing Bible translation work. A guard later did take the pillow, threw out the wrapped manuscript, and a Burmese convert named Moung Ing recovered it from the trash. Ann Judson’s health was destroyed by the ordeal; she died of fever in October 1826, less than a year after Adoniram’s release, while he was away negotiating with the Burmese court. But because of her faithfulness—because she refused to abandon her husband to the state’s machinery—the Burmese Bible survived, and the mission that would eventually bring hundreds of thousands of Burmese to Christ was preserved. The sending churches in America—particularly the Triennial Convention, which had been formed in 1814 specifically to support the Judsons once they became Baptists—maintained financial support and prayer throughout the imprisonment, never wavering in their commitment despite the lack of communication during the war.

Isaac Backus (1724–1806), the great Baptist champion of religious liberty in New England, fought tirelessly against the system of compulsory taxation that forced Baptists to pay for the support of Congregationalist churches. But it was his mother, Elizabeth Backus, who first felt the sharp edge of the state’s judicial power. In 1752, Elizabeth Backus was arrested and jailed in the Norwich, Connecticut, town jail for refusing to pay the ecclesiastical tax to the established Congregational state church. She was an elderly woman, a devout Baptist who could not, in conscience, support a church whose theology and practice she believed were contrary to Scripture. The authorities jailed her to make an example of her. They succeeded—but not in the way they intended. Elizabeth Backus’ imprisonment galvanized the Baptist community and became a rallying point for the fight for religious liberty that her son would carry forward for the next half-century. Isaac Backus himself was never imprisoned, but he spent his life battling the same judicial system that had put his mother behind bars, and his tireless advocacy laid the groundwork for the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment.

Obadiah Holmes was publicly whipped in Puritan Massachusetts in 1651 for the crime of conducting Baptist worship—thirty lashes with a three-corded whip that left him unable to sleep except on his knees and elbows for weeks. John Clarke was imprisoned alongside him and fined. Roger Williams was banished from the colony entirely. Centuries of Baptists in England, Holland, and the American colonies suffered fines, imprisonment, and violence at the hands of state-backed churches that could not tolerate the Baptist insistence on religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

The Waldenses—whom Baptists rightly regard as spiritual forebears—endured six centuries of relentless persecution in the Alps of France and Italy (Savoy), hunted by Roman Catholic-backed armies who sought to exterminate their simple, biblical faith. In 1686, the Duke of Savoy expelled the entire Waldensian population from the Piedmont valleys. Three years later, Henri Arnaud (1641–1721)—pastor, military leader, and the man history calls “the Joshua of the Waldenses”—led the legendary Glorieuse Rentrée, the “Glorious Return,” in which eight hundred Waldensian men marched two hundred kilometers across the Alps to reclaim their ancestral valleys by force. Arnaud was a pastor who carried a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, and he saw no contradiction between the two—to the chagrin of many strict followers of John Calvin. The Waldensian wives and mothers who had been scattered across Switzerland and Germany during the exile sustained their families, preserved their faith, and prayed for the return that Arnaud would lead. When the valleys were reclaimed, inspired by the prior champion warrior Janavel, then age 72, who gave courage against aggressors, it was the Waldensian church—not merely Waldensian soldiers—that returned. Henceforth, the continuity of their worship and their witness was maintained by the faithfulness of their women and their congregations throughout the years of exile.