A Reflection by Trevor Bechtel on Sept 28 2025

Good morning, 

It’s been another week in America. It’s interesting thinking about what to say about rule breaking in a world where rules are being questioned day in and day out. You probably all have something different in your mind right now. 

And the thing you have in your mind is probably there because of how you think about rules. 

So there was a really significant shift this week in international opinion about the conflict involving Palestinians in the state of Israel culminating in dozens of diplomats walking out when Israel’s leader began addressing the UN.Some candidates for rule breaking or rule shifting include diplomats walking out of the UN, or the hard shift in international support for Israel’s leader. It is an ancient idea that the word of the leader or ruler of a country is law, and in most of the west Israel’s leader has been treated that way in recent decades, but that a change in that was obvious this week. 

Another example could be the indictment of James Comey. No rule was broken in indicting him, but many norms were overturned to make it happen. Now over the next few months we’ll see if those norms are dead, or if they are upheld. Jimmy Kimmel returned to television this week after having his show paused in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. The things that Kimmel said that led to his suspension were not different than the things he always says. But in the wake of Kirk’s shooting the rules had changed. 

These examples all show something of the slipperiness of rules and norms and how breaking them means something different at different times. They also show that different people have very different approaches to rules and what counts as rules and when something is a rule. I know that Charlie Kirk and I had very different ideas about what God’s rule means and what kind of rules our society should be concerned about. 

So for this installment in our series I thought I would review some of the different kinds of rule breaking in the Bible. 

You might want to follow along using the bibles on your phones … or grab a paper bible. 

We’ve already heard about Daniel, and the scripture read today from Esther provides another good example and I’ll get to both of these but the best place to begin is at the beginning.

The Bible begins, 

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. 

Many think of this as the first rule. God uses God’s word to create light from darkness and order from chaos, the welter and waste of deep waters that God works with in creation. This is a rule both for that chaos to follow, and a rule that expresses God’s sovereignty over creation. Most creation stories from the ancient near east use some degree of violence to enact creation, but God simply speaks. 

The story continues … 

And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day.

In God’s observation of this rule, we see that it is good, and that light will rule the Day and darkness the night. But we also see some immediate push back to God’s rule. The first day doesn’t end with just day and night. Evening and morning are exactly those times when it is neither day not night, neither light nor dark. 

God commands light, and divides it from dark, but the result at the end of the report, and again and again throughout the seven days of creation, is neither. So God’s rule is not a perfectly neat imposition of order onto chaos. God’s rules are similarly not so clear cut. From the very beginning of time creation itself pushes back on God’s order. I don’t imagine that this bothers God, in fact this kind of push and pull is the kind of thing that I think God delights in. God doesn’t want all of God’s rules to be broken; I think God is very serious about idolatry throughout the Bible. But faithful play inside the context of a relationship, which is how this interaction between God and creation feels to me, does not get on God’s nerves. If a rule is broken here it doesn’t displease God, and in that I would argue that we get an important precept about the nature of God’s creation. Rules at every point of space and time, are both made to be followed and to be broken. 

Daniel’s rule breaking is much more deliberate and conscious and faithful, but there are some interesting parallel’s between Genesis 1 and Daniel 6 where the action I described in the children’s story happens. Again in that story there is the combination of a rule as something that needs to be followed and the rule showing sovereignty; in this case of the King over his people. Another commonality is that the sovereign doesn’t mind having their rule broken here. In fact Darius is positively distraught about the rule that he made, but he feels bound by the law of the Medes and Persians, the idea that once a rule is made it can’t be repealed or unenforced. We see a lot of the imperfections of human rules in this story, as both the rule giver and the rule breaker are against the rule. Fortunately, for David he can count on the lions not to eat him. Unfortunately for the people that got Darius into the mess, the lions are hungry. There is a lot about this story that is fantastic. So it is a good example of rule breaking, but we also might not take it quite as seriously because of all the fantastic elements, not to mention the King’s distaste for his own rule. Daniel’s rule breaking is faithful, but it soon becomes clear that he really isn’t a rule breaker in the stick it to the man kind of sense. 

However, the story of Esther and Mordecai is more clear cut. The background to this story is that Esther has married the king, Ahazzyouwherus, in this case, and her uncle Mordecai is on of the King’s advisors. Mordecai discovers a plot that another advisor has made to kill all the Jews, and wants Esther to intercede with the king. This is dangerous for her though because anyone who approaches the king without first being summoned is liable to be killed. Mordecai insists that this is the time to break the law, and insists that all the Jewish people prepare for her defiance of the law. Esther is a model of rule breaking. She understands the facts of the situation, she negotiates her role in engaging the situation, she and all with her engage in self-purification, and then she acts. The Martin Luther King Letter from a Birmingham Jail fans will recognize that I’ve borrowed these steps from his steps for nonviolent action, but I’ve done that because the role of self purification in each feels deeply resonant. Her rule breaking gets her an audience with the King, who does raise his scepter towards her allowing her to approach and ultimately results in the Jews not all being killed. The story concludes with a similar Medes and Persians situation in the resolution and again all the people seeking to bend the king’s hand against the Jews and then some are killed. 

Both of these stories have kings that are able to be reasonable, at least for a moment, and the rule breaking is ultimately overlooked in favor of a better path. 

In Exodus 1 we hear the story of Shiprah and Puah who where midwives given an edict by the King of Egypt to kill all Jewish boys. They refused to obey it and when the King asked them about it they said that the Hebrew women were more vigorous then Egyptian women and had all given birth by the time the midwives could get to them. 

Another similar story happens in Matthew 2 when the three Magi come from the east to meet the baby Jesus. King Herod is frightened by this birth of the King of the Jews and asks the Magi to return to him, but they are warned in a dream not to and instead go home by another path. 

In both of these stories the rule is broken by being ignored. There is an element of trickery in the explanation. 

In Genesis 30 the trickery and deception is on even greater display. Jacob and his uncle Laban had a difficult relationship. Jacob went to work for Laban in order to marry his daughter Rachel. Jacob worked for Laban for seven years but was then tricked into marrying Rachel’s elder sister Leah, causes him to need to work for seven more years to finally marry Rachel. As a part of this working relationship Jacob asks Laban if he can keep any spotted goats or black sheep from Laban’s flocks. Laban agreed and then picked out the spotted goats and black sheep and sent them away with his sons. Jacob then gets some striped wood and put it around the goats and sheep when they were breeding and therefore was able to grow a substantial flock in spite of Laban’s machinations. This is probably more of a story of a bad relationship, or dishonest business practices than rule breaking, but this kind of trickery and deception appears throughout the Bible in one way or another. It’s often the case that some of the best social action involves a kind of misrepresentation. The great anthropologist James C. Scott coined the term hidden transcript to talk about what is actually going on behind the scenes in a interaction between groups and explores many of the ways that a group without power can still employ tactics to resist, and there is a lot of this kind of resistance in the Bible where people trust that God will take their side. 

The final story I’ll include is that of Jesus harvesting food on the sabbath so that people can eat which happens in Matthew 12. Jesus is definitely breaking a rule but not one that a King has set, instead we are back to one of God’s rules that the Pharisees are eager to enforce. There are as we know, many rules in the Bible in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and many of these rules have to do with food. One of the hallmarks of Jesus movement was to care less about these rules than about people eating. Jesus says in response to his rule breaking that the rule was made for the people not the people for the rule. The logic carries on for Jesus followers and most of the food rules are set aside as people think about what it means to follow Jesus. Act 15 tells the story of the Jerusalem council where these laws were set aside. 

A few things to note in conclusion. This is obviously a highly selective reading of the Bible, although it is no more selective than any other reading. Every time we approach the Bible we read it selectively because there is no way to read it all at once. It’s also very biased from a particular perspective. We always bring as much of ourselves into the text as we find out about ourselves by reading the text. There are a whole set of rules for reading the Bible that could take up a whole other series. But with all that said … 

The bible is a book where many rules are made and many rules are broken. Many of these instances of rule breaking oppose kings and empires, and many of them do so from somewhat powerful position as in the case of Daniel and Esther, and in a different way Jacob and Jesus. All of these people find ways to be relevant. All of the stories that I’ve told today work out reasonably well for the rule breakers and a big part of this is that the power people on the other side of the rule breaking are pretty reasonable, perhaps even disposed to like the rule breaking. 

Not all king, emperors, or presidents are so reasonable. And we may not think that we are positioned as well as Daniel or Esther to have an impact. In the end the message of this sermon is just the same as every other sermon, and that is find ways to be faithful. Creation and history, faith and tradition won’t find if those ways include breaking rules.