When should a follower of Jesus disobey authority structures like the government? Increasingly, this has become a relevant question for followers of Jesus in the United States. From questions about COVID lockdowns and whether the churches should have closed their doors to DEI policies that pressured believers, followers of Jesus, to affirm or encourage sexual orientations or identities that Scripture calls sinful, many have had to wrestle with this very question. And it’s a question which men and women in the Bible also had to wrestle through.
Right before he went to the cross, Jesus Christ had an interesting exchange with the spineless governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Having grown tired of Jesus’ silence, Pilate told him, “Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” In response to that, Jesus said to him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above” (see John 19:10–11). Here Jesus is speaking to a pagan ruler and he tells him point blank: our authority is derivative. The ultimate authority is God, and the little power you think you have has actually been granted to you from heaven. Now this reality that even secular rulers operate under a sovereign God is something that Paul highlighted in Romans 13:1–7:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.
Now, interestingly enough, when Paul says that the governing authority is God’s servant, he uses the Greek word diakonos. He’ll use the same word to refer to Jesus in Romans 15:8, and to a patron of the church named Phoebe in Romans 16:1. The word is most often translated as servant.
So Paul is indicating that, in some sense, even pagan rulers operate as servants of God. This is even more shocking when we consider the fact that the emperor during the time of Paul’s writing to the church in Rome was Nero, the Roman ruler who became infamous for lighting Christians on fire in his gardens. Nero was no friend to the church, and yet here Paul is encouraging Christians living in Rome to be subject to him because he occupies a divinely appointed position.
The apostles of Jesus weren’t trying to bring the kingdom of God by force or through supporting anarchy. Rather, they emphasized seeking to live as peaceably as possible with all men, including those who persecute us. We do this while prayerfully pursuing a better arrangement. Now, what happens when that better arrangement doesn’t materialize as quickly as we would have hoped? When God’s civil servants call good evil and evil good, as it sometimes happens today in such situations, Christians are always called to obey the higher laws given to us by the Lord, by God, especially when and if they contradict what God has revealed to us in his word. There are some great examples of this in both the Old and the New Testaments. When King Nebuchadnezzar, for example, made a golden image of himself in Daniel 3, and he commanded the whole world to bow down before it in worship, the Hebrew exiles were unwilling to commit idolatry even at the cost of their own lives. Similarly, later in Daniel 6, when King Darius made an ordinance that for 30 days whoever prayed to anyone besides Darius would be cast into the den of lions, Daniel didn’t think to himself, “Gee, you know, 30 days without prayer, that isn’t that long. I guess I can go along with it.” No. Daniel 6:10 says that when Daniel heard about this temporary legislation, “he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.”
Likewise, in the New Testament, when the disciples of our Lord were charged not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus, Peter and John responded by saying, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19–20). Immediately after this, those same disciples went out and prayed to God, asking the Lord for boldness to continue to speak the word of the Lord.
Governing officials have a God-given authority and we should honor and respect them even though we may not always agree with them. But the call to submit to them isn’t universal. The moment an edict steps on God’s laws or imposes idolatry, we are called to obey God rather than men. Like Daniel, we keep praying, and like Peter and John, we keep speaking in the name of Jesus.
