If you’re new to Christianity, you might have expected the opposite—you might have expected Paul to say that “governments are against Christ, therefore we must rise against them and rebel against their worldly ways.” You might imagine Paul saying that, but that’s not what he says.
For others of you, you may have expected such things to have been said of the government in the Bible and yet not really realised why. You’re less surprised by what the apostle Paul says. But you haven’t, up until this point, connected the dots. You haven’t yet seen that the reason why it makes sense to submit to governing authorities is because God has put them in place.
For others of you, you’ve been Christians for many years, and even though you are aware of these parts of the Bible, they don’t really hold the same impact for you because you’re much more concerned with the times in the Bible when it’s necessary to not obey the governing authorities—those times when the authorities tell you to kill babies, or when the authorities tell you to worship idols, or when the authorities say to stop worshipping the living God, or when the authorities tell you to stop teaching in the name of Jesus. These are the four examples in Scripture we have of times when it is right to disobey authorities.
Yet, for some reason, even though there are only these four very limited examples, some of us are much more inclined towards rebelling in any number of other ways against governmental authorities. However, the apostle Paul has no such affirmation. He doesn’t hold back; he gives no exceptions here. I’m not saying that those exceptions don’t exist, but it is relevant that Paul gives no exceptions here. With the full force of what the apostle Paul says: be subject to the governing authorities.
