Authorities

             Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.  (Romans 13:1)

                This is a tough one, especially for Americans. We tend to think that if we don’t like a government official, we can start a revolution. This is the tone of the rhetoric I hear about our elected officials and about those involved in the Lindsey Clancy debate. When we look at this passage, we tend to think, “Oh, it’s saying we have to obey the emperor, the king, or the president. We have to brown-nose for the pleasure of some megalomaniac human being – a Pharaoh, a Nebuchadnezzar, a Napoleon, a Hitler, or a (name your favorite “demon ”).

                The question that comes to mind is whether the “governing authorities” are these people we seem to love to hate. Yes, there have been megalomaniac humans who thought themselves gods, but each of them lived within a culture and had advisors around them. In many cases, there were pagan gods to be considered. I don’t mean that those gods actually existed and would have stepped in; there was a general belief that if someone went too far, the gods might intervene. They weren’t entirely autonomous. They could be manipulated, and if they stepped too far out of bounds, assassinated. There was some authority over them, just as our Constitution and the state constitutions (etc.) exercise authority over our nation, states, counties, and cities. The authorities Paul describes undoubtedly include human beings, but need not be limited thereto.

In fact, it would be unwise to restrict them to human beings because that would require that we claim all that human authorities do is acceptable to God. He called Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus His servant. He put them in power and they had authority, but they were also under authorities.

In the United States, the federal and state constitutions are supposed to be the authorities under which all human government functions. The people involved may have a great deal of influence, but if our focus centers on them alone, neither the government nor we will be acting under the authority God established. We will be in rebellion against it. If our response is to attack the people in authority or the system of authority God set up, we will be committing treason. We do not have the right to take “justice” into our own hands. We are warned to submit to authorities. That means that if one authority is acting contrary to the requirements of a higher authority, we are to take the matter to the higher authority. But if we simply don’t like what one authority is doing, we’re still to submit  to the highest authority.