Limits to Authority
Apostle Paul said that human authority has limits. In Romans 13, often falsely cited by civil authorities looking for a legalistic pretext for evil, Paul says later in the chapter that all you really owe anyone on this earth is agape. They can’t demand to be your god, and they are certainly no representative of His divine will. Their grant of authority from Heaven is limited to merely keeping order. Pay no attention to Bible studies written by people who don’t love Jesus.
Yes, we are warned they can take your human life. Let them. At some point your commitment to Christ will trump their demands. Notice that Romans 13 comes from the man who was willing to use partisan disputes to disrupt a government meeting (Pharisees versus Sadducees), and played off one civil authority against another (Judea versus Rome). While that did bring him to the attention of Rome and eventually cost him his life, it was all in obedience to a yet higher authority.
You are the only one who can decide where God draws the boundaries for you. No one on this earth speaks for God when His voice is in your heart. How often have you caught civil authorities lying? Church authorities? Too often there’s no difference between church and state in terms of how they try to establish a regimen of control over human behavior. The penalties differ in the USA, for now, but in times past the church authorities used the secular sword to enforce their will. This is a false legacy going back in Church History at least as far as Constantine. Only a harlot would ride the Beast.
Nobody is suggesting you should disrupt anything. If God requires that of you, then jump in with both feet and forget the parachute. However, the bulk of New Testament teaching on handling persecution is to expect moments when our Father will open the door for His Word, and the rest of the time you try to avoid human attention. This requires you notice where God is driving the cattle when you hide in the herd from predators. Don’t pick sides in political disputes, because none of that can accomplish the will of God. No human agency kneels before the God of Creation. The will of God is for people to leave this world, and we spend our lives in preparation for the departure.
Clearly this calls for a paradox: You must be virtually militant about your otherworldly focus. Don’t trust any human agency, including the person in the mirror. Keep your conscious awareness in your heart, so that you can distinguish between your fleshly nature and the soul God made. Keep nailing your flesh to the Cross; keep denying it the things you should not have in your life. And that means not fearing what civil governments can do to you.
Jesus could have done a lot of worldly good if He had chosen to, but He did not agitate for change, nor try to alter the natural course of things (Matthew 12:15-21). The world has no clue about what is morally good or right. Indeed, the world outside of Christ is utterly incapable of doing good. There might be a lot of things people do that eases our path of service, but nothing will be credited them eternally unless they act with Christ in their hearts. Their only blessing is standing in the shadow of our covering.
The world is one big relentless lie of Satan. Always, always, always — follow your own convictions. You may be forced to act on what some human agency says is true, but never actually believe it.
