Submit, and Sometimes Refuse

Learning to tell the difference

Romans 13:1 (NIV) "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."

Acts 5:29 (NIV) "Peter and the other apostles replied: 'We must obey God rather than human beings!'"

INTRODUCTION

Here are two commands, sitting a few pages apart in the same Bible. One tells a disciple of Christ to submit to the governing authorities. The other has the apostles telling the same authorities, essentially, no. I used to assume one of these had to be the "real" teaching and the other some kind of exception clause, tucked away for emergencies. I don't think that's right anymore. I think Scripture is genuinely holding both, on purpose, and expecting disciples to learn the harder skill of knowing which one the moment in front of them actually calls for.

That's a much less comfortable position than picking a side. It would be easier if the Bible just said "submit" and left it there or just said "resist unjust authority" and left it there. Instead, it hands us two commands and a job: discernment. Most of the political confusion I see in the church, including plenty I've felt myself, comes from people who are very good at quoting one of these verses and have never seriously wrestled with the other.

I want to say clearly what this article is and isn't trying to do. It isn't trying to hand you a formula that resolves every hard case, and it isn't ultimately about any individual leader or party. The real conflict underneath both texts are bigger than personalities, it's the ongoing contest between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness, and the representatives of that second kingdom aren't always who we assume. Plenty of political leaders who profess Christ still make decisions that run contrary to the gospel; plenty who don't profess Christ govern in ways a disciple can submit to with a clear conscience. So, this piece isn't offering an answer key. It's an invitation to think, to get curious, and to sit with the tension a bit longer than we usually allows ourselves to.

SUBMIT: The Ordinary Rule

Paul wasn't writing Romans 13 from a position of political comfort. He was writing to believers living under Nero, a ruler who would eventually have Paul executed. So, when Paul says to submit to governing authorities because God has established them, he isn't naive about what kind of authority he means. He means that one too.

I find that genuinely hard to sit with. Paul's logic isn't "submit because this government deserves it." It's "submit because government, even flawed government, does something restraining chaos that society actually needs" and he roots the command in the office, not the character of whoever currently holds it (Romans 13:3-4). That's a very different foundation than the one most of us build our political opinions on, which tends to be: does this leader deserve my respect? Paul isn't asking that question.

Verse 7 makes it concrete in a way I find almost uncomfortably practical: pay what's owed. Taxes, yes, but also revenue, respect, honour. I think that last one is where most of us quietly fail Romans 13 without ever breaking a law. It's possible to pay every tax on time and still fail this verse completely, if what you're withholding is basic honour toward people you didn't vote for.

REFUSE: The Rare Exception

And yet Acts 5 exists. The Sanhedrin is not a foreign occupier, but the legitimate religious authority of the day orders the apostles to stop preaching about Jesus. Peter's answer isn't rebellion for the sake of it. It's narrow and specific: when a human authority commands what God has forbidden, or forbids what God has commanded, obedience shifts.

What strikes me reading this now is how narrow the trigger actually is. It's not "when the government does something I find unwise." It's not "when I disagree with the policy." It's the much rarer moment where a government command and a command of God are in direct, specific conflict. Daniel refusing the king's food. The Hebrew midwives refusing to kill infants. The apostles refusing to stop preaching the gospel. Every one of those is a named command from God, directly contradicted by a named command from the state. That's a narrower, more specific thing than a general sense that something is unjust, a sense that may well be accurate, and may well be worth acting on in other ways, but that doesn't by itself amount to the kind of conflict Acts 5 describes.

I think this is the detail that gets lost in how we actually talk about Acts 5 today. It's tempting to reach for "we must obey God rather than human beings" any time a law annoys us. But that line was spoken by people about to be flogged for it, and their response to the flogging was to rejoice, not to organise a resistance movement (Acts 5:40-41). That's a very particular kind of costly, narrow conviction not a general permission slip.

TELLING THE DIFFERENCE

So how do you actually know which one applies? I don't think there's a formula, but I think there's a question worth sitting with: is this a genuine conflict between a specific command of God and a specific command of the state or is it a policy I dislike, a tax I resent, a leader I find distasteful? Almost everything that frustrates me about government, if I'm honest, falls into the second category. Romans 13 has something to say to that frustration, and it usually isn't what I want to hear.

There's a real danger on both sides of this, and history has examples of each. A church that treats Romans 13 as absolute can end up with nothing prophetic left to say when it most needs one. But a church that treats Acts 5 as its default setting has its own failure mode: every inconvenient law becomes a matter of conscience, and "civil disobedience" quietly becomes a cover for ordinary political preference dressed up in biblical language. I've watched both happen, and I'll admit I find the second one easier to fall into than I'd like to admit, mostly because it feels more spiritual than it actually is.

A QUESTION ADAM ASKED ME

My friend Adam raised something while we were working through this piece that I don't think I can resolve, and I'd rather put it to you unresolved than pretend I've settled it. He asked: what actually distinguishes a government's authority from a mafia’s? Both demand money under threat of force. Both claim to offer protection from outside threats, and in fairness, often do. Both are capable of lying to, intimidating, and coercing entire communities for their own benefit. Both will talk about "freedom," so long as it's freedom within limits they get to set, often arbitrarily. And history gives us plenty of cases where the two have simply merged organised crime embedded inside the state itself, rather than operating against it.

Adam also pointed me toward some modern history that sharpens the question rather than answering it. Prohibition in the United States didn't fail because Americans suddenly became lawless; it failed because a large share of ordinary, otherwise law-abiding people decided the government had overreached, and found it easier to deal with organised crime than to comply until the state itself admitted the policy and rolled it back. Much the same pattern shows up wherever a government tries to control prices or trade beyond what a population will accept: the Soviet Union's black markets, Venezuela's today, any economy where the "legal" channel the state has defined becomes the one nobody can actually use. Scripture has very little to say directly about price controls beyond a consistent concern for honest scales and honest weights so, Romans 13 doesn't obviously resolve whether submitting to that kind of regulation is required, especially when the regulators themselves aren't living under the rules they've written.

I don't have a tidy way to fold that into the Romans 13 / Acts 5 framework above, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they do. My instinct is that it sits closer to Romans 13's territory than Acts 5's, a law you think is unwise, even badly unwise, is still a different thing from a law that commands what God forbids. But Adam's question is a genuinely good one, and I'd rather leave it open for you to turn over than force it into a tidier shape than it deserves.

A HARDER TEST CASE

Here's a version of this that I think exposes the framework properly, rather than just restating it, and it's not hypothetical for many believers. Think of a disciple of Jesus living in a country like Nigeria, where more than one religion is represented in the population, where political and legal authority is often held by leaders from a particular religious community, and where those authorities pass laws that some disciples experience as being in tension with the gospel. How does a disciple reconcile Romans 13 and Acts 5 here?

My first instinct, and I suspect most people's, is to treat the religious identity of the lawmaker as the deciding factor a leader from another faith proposing law that disciples find uncomfortable feels, on its face, like exactly the kind of thing Acts 5 was written for. But I don't think that instinct survives contact with the text, and I don't think it survives contact with our own history either. Paul wrote "submit to governing authorities" to disciples living under Nero, whose authority was not merely non-Christian but actively bound up with a civic religion that required public worship of the emperor as a god. If the mere fact of a non-Christian authority triggered the Acts 5 exception, Paul's own command in Romans 13 would have made no sense to write. And on the other side of the ledger, we've all seen leaders who profess Christ make decisions in office that run flatly against the gospel, the label on the leader has never been a reliable test of anything. So, the test can't be who is making the law, or what they call themselves. It has to stay where Acts 5 actually puts it: does this specific requirement command what God forbids, or forbid what God commands?

That reframes the question usefully, I think. A legal system shaped by another faith's tradition will contain a great deal that overlaps with ordinary civil order, contract law, property law, public conduct, family provisions much of which a disciple can live under the same way the early church paid taxes that funded pagan temples, without that payment constituting an act of worship. Submission there isn't compromise; it's Romans 13 doing exactly what it was written to do, even when submission costs something.

But some provisions inside such a system would cross the line the apostles actually drew a law compelling a Christian to renounce Christ, to participate in another religion's worship, to stay silent about the gospel, or criminalising conversion in a way that punishes a disciple specifically for following Jesus. Those aren't matters of cultural discomfort. They're the same shape as Daniel's food or the apostles' preaching: a specific state command directly opposing a specific command of God. That's where "we must obey God rather than human beings" actually applies and it applies there whether the authority commanding it is Rome, a modern secular state, a government shaped by another world religion, or a government led by people who call themselves Christian. The test was never about which faith, or which label, holds power. It's about whether a particular command puts a disciple in the position of having to choose between obeying the state and obeying God. Framed that way, these stops being a story about "us" and "them," and becomes what it actually is one front in the larger contest between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness, a contest that runs through every nation and, if we're honest, through every one of us.

CLOSING THOUGHT

What both texts seem to be asking of a disciple isn't loyalty to a side. It's the harder, slower discipline of paying attention, noticing which situation you're actually in before reaching for a verse to justify the reaction you already wanted to have. Submission as the default, because government restrains something real even when it's imperfect. Refusal as the rare, costly exception, reserved for the moments where God's command and the state's command genuinely collide offered respectfully, and willing to bear the consequences, the way Peter did.

Genuine Acts 5 moments are rarer than our rhetoric suggests, not because they announce themselves clearly when they arrive, but because telling one apart from an ordinary grievance takes exactly the kind of close, patient attention most of us would rather skip. That's the whole difficulty this piece has been circling: the test is simple to state and genuinely hard to apply, and most of the confusion I named at the start comes from people who've mastered the first without ever attempting the second.

Most weeks, for most of us, that means Romans 13: paying what's owed, speaking plainly without contempt, refusing the cultural pressure to treat the other side as the enemy.

I don't have a tidy answer to hand you at the end of this, and I don't think that's a failure of the piece, I think it's the point. The goal here was never to settle the question for you. It was to get you thinking, to make you a little more curious than you were before you started reading, and to leave you turning it over. For Christ's sake, look around at the conflicting claims, the competing loyalties, the actual text in front of you and only once you've looked closely enough to know, decide which verse applies.