In thinking about this idea of the secular church, we need to consider a view that has cropped up in relatively recent history. It concerns the twin ideas of the sacred and the secular. This view maintains that they both operate in the same field, which, so far as Christianity is concerned, entails that Christianity should in a sense be secular. In other words, here you have not a contrast between the church and the world, but rather a view that says that the church should be the world, or at least should be actively engaged in and be characterized by the things that mark the world.

Having discussed the first two options, God alone or Caesar alone, now we need to mention a third option, which acknowledges the authority of the two, but with Caesar as the dominant authority. This is what happened to Pilate. 

To help us think through this whole church and state matter, we need to turn to the trial of the Lord Jesus Christ before the chief representative of the Roman authorities in Palestine, namely Pilate, as recorded in all four of the gospels. We are going to be looking at John’s account in chapter 19. Early in the trial the issue of whether Jesus was a king had come up. Pilate needed to examine Jesus on that charge to see if Jesus really did make himself out to be a king who was challenging Caesar’s authority.

There are few psalms in the Psalter that are more personal, intimate or even introspective than this one. But it is important to see that although David is writing chiefly about himself and his own experience of learning to trust and love God, he does not leave the psalm at that point. Instead, at the end of the psalm, he looks to those about him, to Israel, and challenges them to learn what he had learned and “put [their] hope in God”: “O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore.”

As we saw in yesterday's study, David had learned to subdue pride. This is an important lesson for us to learn, too. In fact, it is the most important of all lessons having to do with Christian character, since pride is the most serious and pervasive of all vices. It is why the Bible has much to say about humility.