Submission to authorities
“I urge you,” Paul says, “in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God— this is your spiritual act of worship” (12:1). A very important part of our spiritual service to God is the respect and obedience we pay to his representatives, the authorities whom he has placed over us, as prescribed in his Fourth Commandment. Paul, therefore, now directs our attention to this important phase of Christian living.
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelli ng against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
Paul utters a profound truth when, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he makes the observation that there is no authority except that which God has established. In the final analysis, everyone and everything belongs to God. He is the Creator; we are his creatures. He holds all authority. It is he and he alone who divides out authority to his representatives on earth as he sees fit. Because God made the world and everything in it, he could rightly say to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28). In reality, God was simply delegating his own authority to Adam and Eve when he put them in charge of his lower creatures.
In the same way, God has delegated certain aspects of his authority at various levels and in various areas to provide an ordered structure in human society. At its base, the Fourth Commandment deals with the authority God has given to those who represent him here on earth.
Obviously, not everyone has the same area of responsibility. For example, parents have a different area of responsibility regarding their children than do their children’s teachers in school, but both are God’s representatives and therefore deserve honor and respect as such in their areas of responsibility.
Paul, however, is not directing his remarks only, or even primarily, to children. Respect for authority is required of all. “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities,” he says, “for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”
In the context in which Paul is writing, his directives to the Romans especially include respect for secular government. That is perhaps the more remarkable when we realize that in Paul’s day the civil government of Rome was undoubtedly totally pagan. In fact, if we were right in assuming, as we did in the introduction to this commentary, that this letter to the Romans was written from Corinth in the winter of A.D. 58, then Nero would have been the Roman emperor—hardly a model of kind and benevolent leadership! And yet Paul says, “He who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”
The “judgment” he is speaking of no doubt refers primarily to the punishment the courts would mete out to a criminal or lawbreaker. But the rebel against secular authority is, in a very real sense, on a collision course with God himself, the author and designator of all authority.
Paul pulls no punches. He bases his demand for obedience to government squarely on God’s right to put authority figures over us. But the apostle employs yet another approach, and that is to invite willing and cheerful obedience by calling attention to God’s good and gracious purpose for placing authorities over us.