Christians Are Submissive. - Romans 13:1-7

In the first days after his conversion, the Jews in Damascus attempted to kill him. In Jerusalem, they plotted again, so he went to Caesarea. In Pisidian Antioch he was persecuted by the high standing men of the city and expelled. In Iconium they threatened to stone him. In Lystra they did stone him and left him for dead. In Philippi he was put in prison for speaking the gospel. In Thessalonica he was chased out of the city because they claimed he acted contrary to Caesar’s decrees. Same thing in Berea. In Corinth they forced him to stand before a judge on account of what he was preaching. All of this happened before he wrote the letter to the Romans. Paul had plenty of experience with authorities that opposed the gospel that he was working to spread. And yet in chapter 13 of Romans he did not tell the believers to raise up an army and depose these leaders that stood against him. That might be what we could expect, but instead Paul tells them to submit. He writes, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities.”

Submission isn’t something that sounds like a blessing to our English-speaking American ears.  To our ears, it sounds like we are being required to give up something that we don’t want to give up. We have been taught to stand our ground and fight back against someone who is trying to get us to submit. We celebrate the Americans of the revolution who refused to submit to British taxes and fought back to earn freedom from the rule of the king. We don’t like thinking about having to submit, but the Bible is chock-full of commands to submit. In Ephesians 5 Paul writes about submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, wives submit to your husbands. In chapter 6 children submit to your parents and slaves to your masters. In Hebrews 13, believers are told to submit to church authority. We aren’t comfortable submitting to anyone. These commands sound to us like punishments of some kind. As Americans who value freedom and liberty, we want to control our own lives and decisions. Since this is what we desire so much, let’s imagine a life without authority, where we have to submit to no one.

                  For example, in the book of Judges, the Israelites had no strong earthly leadership. The constant refrain that we hear over and over again is everyone did as he saw fit. What were the results of this way of living where everyone was their own authority? Moral collapse, spiritual disorganization, God repeatedly having to bring foreign oppression on them to break them out of their sinful ruts, and finally God appointing for Israel a leader who would deliver them out of their oppression. If God did not put in place governing authorities over us, our lives would likely look the same way.

 In the movie The Purge, all crime is legal 1 day a year for a 12-hour period. In the movie when people are given this freedom, everyone does as he sees fit. They riot, loot buildings, and hunt down vulnerable people who have done something to upset them. This is Hollywood, but it does seem to paint a pretty accurate picture of just a taste of what the world would look like if there was no authority to curb our urges.

Paul says that government authorities are “God’s agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” We submit because we know the threat of what the government can do to us if we don’t. If you don’t, you’re going to end up in prison or paying fines or doing community service. But Paul says that it is necessary to submit “not only because of possible punishment, but also as a matter of conscience.” Our conscience recognizes that the authorities that are in place over us are God’s servants. It is written on our hearts that God’s design is for us to submit to their commands, because of the position that He has given to them.

 We might think of submission as some kind of negative word, but that is not what God intended for submission to be. God has actually placed authorities over us as a blessing. He knows what is best for us and has given government in order to be his representatives on earth to his people. Their purpose is not just to maintain societal order, but also to give us all kinds of blessings. The government works to shield and defend us from our enemies. The government builds up our infrastructure which allows us to travel and commute to all of the places that we go. The government also supports our education so that we have well equipped citizens prepared for productive lives in the workplace. The authorities that God has put in place over us provide so many blessings that we may overlook in our everyday lives.

In this section, Paul is focused on government authority, but it could really be any authority. God places parents over children as authority for their good, God places your boss in a position of authority for your good, God has even placed Pastor Lewis in a position of authority over me for my good. All of these authorities God has put in place for our blessing. Every authority is only in the position that they are in because God has put them there. They haven’t achieved it by themselves, only through God’s involvement do they have any authority. Paul writes that “the one in authority is God’s servant for your good.” The design that God has for them is not just that they can use and abuse their authority in whatever way they want. He intends for them to carry out his will as they serve God for the benefit of his people.

But because we live in this creation that has been destroyed by sin, we understand that that’s not the way it always works. Human beings do not always use their authority the way that God intended them to. Like so many other blessings that God has given to us, we’ve tainted this one too. Human authority often acts out of selfish ambition. Humans have a desire to be at the top of the totem pole, and for some leaders, it is this desire that taints their decision making. Humans in authority so often seek to do what is best for themselves or their legacy rather than what is best for the community. There are countless examples in history of sinful people using their positions of authority for truly awful things. God does not approve of this misuse, and he is not responsible for the way that sinful people abuse this gift that he has given us. Leaders continually fail to live up to the standard of the one whom they are representing.

But Paul in this section does not give any qualifiers to how good the authority must be to earn your submission. In fact, the only qualifier we ever get is that we are to obey God rather than man when their commands are opposed to each other. God has not given us the freedom to judge our earthly authority and determine for ourselves what we want to listen to and what we don’t want to listen to. We are to submit even though they so often don’t live up to the standard of the one they are representing.

Paul faced more persecution for his teaching than just about anyone from the authorities that were in place at this time. And yet his reminder for the Romans was that even these authorities that were persecuting him and treating him as their enemy, were put in place by God. He writes, “There is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”  God is the authority over the authority. He is the King of Kings. He is entirely in control of when their kingdoms rise up and when these kingdoms fall. He does not leave it for us to determine where the limits of our submission should be. Actually, he writes, “whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted.” Any time you try to bend the rules or fight against the authority that God has put in place over us, you are not just rebelling against that authority, you are rebelling against God who put them in their positions.

God has given us an example to show us exactly what our submission should look like. Jesus was a perfect example of submission. He was willing to submit to the governing authorities even to the point of his own death. He could’ve commanded an army of angels to defend him, but instead he commanded Peter to put down his sword. He is brought to the high priest to stand trial for the accusations against him. He doesn’t try to flee or resist but calmly answers their questions and listens as lies are searched for to find him guilty. When he is then brought before their governor Pilate, Pilate reminds Jesus that he has the authority to kill him or free him. Jesus responds calmly that all the authority Pilate has over him has been given to him from above. Many mocked and jeered at him to come down from the cross. Jesus could’ve shown them all of his power and saved himself.  These were authorities whose commands were to kill God himself, and Jesus submitted even to them. He was the very same one who gave them all of the authority that they had, and he placed himself underneath them. As God, Jesus did not have to ever submit to these authorities, his position was over all of them. But when he came to earth, Jesus set aside his own authority and placed himself under human authority. He did not endorse their sins, but he endured their decisions because of the authority that they were given. This is an example for us of what perfect submission looks like.

Jesus’ perfect submission led ultimately to our forgiveness. It was his submission that won for us forgiveness from every one of our sins, including our failure to submit to those that God has placed over us. Jesus could have chosen to save himself and reclaim his own rightful place of authority to fight back against these earthly rulers so that he did not have to suffer, and we would have been lost. But he chose to perfectly endure and submit to them so that in his grace we could be saved and given our own position of spiritual authority as royal heirs of God’s holy kingdom.

These verses of Romans from the pen of Paul are shocking. Paul understood very well the way that sinful people can abuse the command that God has given to them, even to the point that they are opposing the spread of the Gospel message or killing God himself. What we might expect from someone that has gone through so much suffering at the hands of their leaders is a command to rise up against them and overthrow their leadership. What Paul gives instead is a reminder to the Romans of who put these leaders in the positions that they are in. Their authority is drawn from the one who hands out all authority. They have been placed in their positions for our good. Follow the example of the one who showed  perfect submission in dying at the hands of a sinful government, so that we could be forgiven for each time we forget who put them in their positions. Amen