“Let everyone submit to the governing authorities, since there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are instituted by God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Many of the things we find in the Scriptures are fairly light and easy. The teachings in the New Testament are mostly straightforward and encouraging. But occasionally you find something that is both hard and controversial. You find something that, depending on the season, some people will support and others will hate, only to find them switching sides when the season changes. As we get into Romans 13 today, we find just such a passage. Paul starts talking politics…in a book about religion. How much worse could it get? Let’s put on our thinking caps and steel-toed boots and find out.

Let me say out of the gate here that we are barely going to scratch the surface of all there is to explore here. Let’s also take a second to put this in its proper context. If you’ll remember back to the beginning of chapter 12, Paul is talking about how followers of Jesus should live in light of all that God has done for us. In view of God’s mercies, he says, we should make our very lives living sacrifices to God. We should live in such a way that sees us wholly dedicated to Him and Him alone. Everything he has said since then has been applying that idea to an expanding circle of places.

He started with just ourselves. We will be able to submit our life to God as a living sacrifice only when we learn to think differently. When our minds are renewed, we will be able to know and understand what God wants us to do. From here, Paul goes to the church. Everybody is gifted differently, but in spite of that, we are to be one united body in Christ. Only when the church is operating with the proper unity in diversity will our lives be fully His. Next, Paul heads out to the world at large. The church is still in view at this point, but in the second half of chapter 12, as we just finished walking through on Tuesday, Paul gives us a whole series of commands aimed at showing us practically what it looks like to be living sacrifices in the world around us.

The last place Paul goes here before turning to wrap things up with a reminder that love is the means by which we accomplish this, and that love is only possible when we have put on Christ, is to explore what it looks like to operate as a living sacrifice with respect to the government. Politics is hard for Christians. It’s hard to know exactly where to land. Yes, there are different political parties to consider, but there’s also the question of how involved and invested we should be in it. Should we vote? (Yes.) Should we get involved? How involved? Should we advocate for this or that candidate? Should we run ourselves? How should we interact with people in the other party? How should we react to fellow followers of Jesus who have aligned themselves with the other party? Does being a follower of Jesus obligate you to a certain party? If a candidate from your party doesn’t personally align with your values, but a candidate from the other party happens to, can you vote for that person instead even though it gives the other party more power?

This is made all the more difficult in a culture where secularism as a worldview has advanced as far as it has. The trouble with secularism when it comes to politics is that in rejecting belief in a God who is ultimate over and above our political preferences and parties, we will make something else ultimate instead of Him. We can’t make it through this life completely on our own. We need to have someone or something to which we can turn when things get hard, something that can help us see our needs met when our efforts are proving insufficient. If no God exists to fill this role, we’ll look to the next largest entity instead: government.

Government means politics. When secularism dominates a culture, politics becomes ultimate for many, many people. It substitutes in the place religion once filled. When this happens, achieving political outcomes becomes existentially significant. Rather than seeing people from opposing political parties as fellow citizens who believe differently on this or that issue, they become mortal enemies. If they achieve their policy goals, we can’t achieve ours. But if achieving ours is existentially significant, then this isn’t just a “too bad” thing. It is a major threat to our tribe. Political enemies in this framework are not just wrong, they are evil. They are a threat to all that is good and right. They must not simply be stopped. They must be destroyed by any means necessary. If we can’t do it at the ballot box, there are other, more permanent, means that are necessary to consider.

Political parties weren’t Paul’s concern here, though. He was focused more on the big picture. This is because he knew believers then were operating in a context in which they didn’t have any political power and didn’t have any means of gaining any political power for themselves. They were at the mercy of the State which in this case was the Roman Empire long before Constantine legalized Christianity and made it the official religion of the Empire. Christians were a persecuted minority living under the rule of a bunch of pagans who at best didn’t understand their worldview, and at worst sought to persecute it out of existence. It wasn’t that the Roman Empire was godless, it was that it actively worshiped other gods, and saw Christianity as not merely another option, but as an active threat to the harmony and stability of the Empire.

Into this situation, Paul had three things to say. The first is a command. The second two are justifications of that command. The rest, which we will explore more next week, is an application of that command. The command is this: “Let everyone submit to the governing authorities.” What does this mean?

The command itself here isn’t very complicated. Where there are governing authorities operating in a position of power over you, you should submit to their authority and do what they say. You should follow the laws of the land. You should not live in open rebellion against their authority. You should show them the respect they deserve as governing authorities. That is, even if you don’t like or respect the person, you should respect the office itself, extending that respect to the officeholder regardless of how you feel about them personally.

Okay, but what about…? There are all sorts of those that pop up here, aren’t there? Let’s just mention the most obvious for Christians. What about when a governing authority commands you to do something that violates the command or character of Christ? Paul doesn’t say. From the broader witness of Paul in other places and the rest of the New Testament authors, the answer is that our submission to the authority of God supersedes our submission to the authority of the State. But if we choose a path of insubordination with respect to the State, we should expect the State to wield the authority it nonetheless has at our expense. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail offers much wisdom for this particular situation.

But that’s not what Paul is thinking about here. All he says here is that we are to respect the authority of the State by submitting to that authority. Will there be instances in which the State abuses that authority such that we must resist in order to remain on the path of Christ? Possibly, but even in the most godless States, those situations aren’t common.

The reason we should respect the authority of the State is what Paul outlines in the next two statements. The first is this: “…there is no authority except from God.” Let that one sit on you for a second. If there were to be an authority other than God, that would imply that there are other powers in this world that could meaningfully rival His. Now, surely there have been many governments and rules over the centuries of human history who believed their power and authority to rival God’s, but they were delusional in this belief and all of them eventually fell out of power, demonstrating the folly of their thinking. Those that still exist will yet go the way of those that came before them.

As Christians, we rather emphatically don’t believe there are any authorities in this world other than God. He alone has the power and the dominion and the sovereignty and the glory forever and ever. Amen. If this is the case, though, then the next thing Paul says follows logically from it. “…the authorities that exist are instituted by God.”

Let that one sit on you for a second, because it is an even bigger, more challenging idea with a whole lot more whatabouts to consider. We aren’t going to consider all those today as this post is already getting long. For now it is enough only to consider the weight and truthfulness of that statement. Even if you happen to live under a government you don’t agree with or like, if you are a follower of Jesus, you must nonetheless acknowledge that government’s authority came from God. Because if it didn’t, then there is an authority in this world that can rival His. There is literally nothing in the whole of the Scriptures to support such a notion, and a great deal to contradict it. We may not understand why God allowed a particular governing authority to come to power, but just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean He didn’t do it, and it doesn’t mean we are exempt from respecting it as a function of our trust in Him.

In my lifetime, I’ve watched the pendulum on whether Christians should support or oppose government power and authority swing back and forth pretty wildly depending on who is in power. When George W. Bush was President, many prominent pastors leaned hard into this verse to justify their argument that believers should unquestioningly support the Iraq war. Yet when Obama came into office, those same pastors did not use this verse to insist that Christians should support his efforts to reform the healthcare system in the country. Personal policy preferences don’t give us license to ignore a particular command depending on who is in power and what they want to do. Nor should we blindly and unthinkingly go along with everything the government says just because we generally like the current leader.

We submit to governing authorities, but only and ever as a function of our larger and prior submission to Christ. We are loyal first to Him, and then respectful to those leaders He has chosen in His sovereignty to put in place over us for a given season. We may not like or understand the moves He has allowed, but if our trust is in Him, and if our eternity is secured in Heaven, then we don’t have much to worry about. There may come a time when we have to resist, but as we will talk about more in future posts, we should expect our resistance to be met with legal consequences from which God will not save us. He will walk with us through them, but our personal convenience is not His highest priority. So, let us stand firm on the foundation of Christ, show respect to those He has picked to lead us, and follow Him and His ways regardless of who is politically in charge.