Romans 13:4,5 - God's servant

13:4

People in authority are God’s servants. As always we need to be careful in interpreting this. It does not mean that we have some rose-tinted view of leaders, for the Bible certainly does not. The Old Testament prophets spent a lot of their time condemning the rulers who had forgotten who they were and what they were there for. As I have said before, Paul is laying out the starting point for our understanding of the world. So our starting point is that we should obey authority.  Notice that in this and the previous verse Paul speaks about those who do right and those who do wrong. If authorities order us to do something that is clearly wrong then we should not obey. “I was only following order” is no excuse. However, there will always be times when something is very much in a grey area. Note also that governments have a duty to punish wrongdoers, this is part of their function.

13:5

So we should obey authorities for the very practical reason that if we don’t we will be punished, but we should also do it because of conscience. Authority is a God instituted structure. When evil is at work it will seek to break down authority structures in society, as we can see very clearly in the West. In a well functioning society there is authority and people respect authority. That should be our starting point.

Sometimes people say leaders should earn respect. This is a wrong teaching! A correct teaching is that we should respect those in authority, and those in authority should live a life worthy of that respect. There is a key difference here. We give respect first without waiting for it to be earned. This applies in marriages, in classrooms, in workplaces, and in society as a whole. All of us are imperfect and if we wait for the teacher, the boss etc to “earn” respect things can break down very quickly and it can make it impossible for the imperfect leader to do the job. Now if the leader is clearly not worthy of respect, is not going about things in a proper manner then action may need to be taken, but the underlying attitude we have, our starting point should be one of respect.