The deadly drug raid fuelling speculation about what the US is doing in Mexico

Psalm 2 is a royal coronation psalm with messianic dimensions, but its opening verses establish a timeless theological principle: nations and power-structures that operate in defiance of God's moral order — raging, plotting, seizing territory through violence — are engaged in a futile rebellion against the ultimate Sovereign. The principle applies to any configuration of human power that displaces lawful governance with brute force.

Cartels are precisely this: transnational power-structures that rage against legal authority, plot covertly, and hold territory by violence.

The cartels operating in Mexico represent organized human power that has explicitly rejected both Mexican governmental authority and any higher moral law, seizing economic and territorial control through murder and intimidation. The covert nature of the US response — hidden from even allied governments — illustrates how conventional state power has been unable to bring these raging entities to heel through normal means.

Psalm 2 reminds believers that such raging is ultimately futile against God's sovereign purposes, even when it appears to triumph in the short term.

Paul's instruction in Romans 13 presupposes that God has ordained governing authorities as his servants for the restraint of evil and the protection of the good. The plain grammatical-historical sense is that civil authority — the sword-bearing state — is a divinely instituted mechanism for societal order.

The corollary, which Paul takes for granted, is that when entities violently resist and undermine legitimate governing authority, they are operating in defiance of God's ordained structure for human civilization.

Cartels are not merely criminals — they are counter-governing structures that have systematically dismantled the Mexican state's authority in their territories, killing officials, bribing institutions, and creating zones where Romans 13 authority simply does not function. The US operating covertly without Mexican governmental knowledge further illustrates how thoroughly the ordained structure of sovereign authority has broken down in these regions.

Both the cartel's defiance of government and the shadow nature of the US response signal a collapse of the ordered world Romans 13 describes as God's gift to humanity.

Micah 7 is a lament over a society so thoroughly corrupted that every level of authority — prince, judge, great man — has been compromised by the pursuit of evil. Micah's specific language of officials who 'ask for a bribe' and powerful men who pursue evil desires, all working together in a web ('they weave it together'), describes systemic institutional corruption rather than isolated wrongdoing.

This was Micah's diagnosis of Israel's late monarchic period, but it applies as a wisdom observation to any society where corruption has become the operating system of power.

The cartel crisis in Mexico is inseparable from institutional corruption at every level — police, judiciary, and political officials have been systematically bribed, threatened, or co-opted. The fact that a covert US operation apparently had to bypass Mexican governmental channels because of concerns about information security reflects precisely this reality: 'the prince and the judge ask for a bribe.' Micah's weaving metaphor is apt — cartel power and official corruption are so interlocked they cannot be separated, making normal law enforcement impossible.