The Responsibility of Authority

Authority does not mean control.

Authority means responsibility.

Most people think having authority over something means they get to control it. This is not true. Not even God tries to control our lives, even though he totally can. God gives us choice. Man has decided he can control other people's lives. From government to religion to parents. Man has taken authority structures created by God and twisted them to control people instead of serving them.

Authority is given as a position of servitude.

Government’s express job is to condone good and punish evil. Using scripture as the standard. Good and evil defined by God. Punished as God prescribed.

Church is supposed to hold families accountable to scripture. “This is what scripture says. This is good theology. This is how scripture says to deal with this situation”. Church must hold people to only scripture.

Family is supposed to operate as scripture commands. Children are to honor their parents as they learn to pursue God unto adulthood. Parents are to train up their children in the way they should go and in the admonition of God. Husband and Wife are to love each other as scripture defines. Selflessly, sacrificially, passionately. 

The individual is the ultimate building block of each of these authority structures. And if the individual is not surrendered, submitted, dead to self and living for God, then the authority will fail. Government will not punish evil correctly, church will have wrong doctrine and not hold people accountable to actual scripture, family will fail to love and fail to train children in the way they should go. 

None of these structures, no individual, has the authority to define Truth. Scripture defines Truth, Scripture defines reality. If any person, especially an authority, fails to stand on actual Scripture the system will fail. God designed the system and if He’s not the center of it, it will crumble. 

I keep saying actual scripture. It has been my experience that people, myself included, like to quote their own ethics and then claim biblicity. This is arrogant, this is wrong, this is evil. This is breaking the command to “not add to nor take away” from God's word. This action stems from a wrong worldview. A worldview that lacks a right view of God and a right view of man. God is God. He is almighty. He is the Creator. He writes the rules. We play God’s game if you will. If we don’t fall on our faces and glorify Him the way He has established, we lose. We go to Hell. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. But in all seriousness, your soul is at stake in this game.

God wants a personal relationship with each and every one of us. And until you have that relationship nothing in scripture makes sense without your own intellect twisting it into an acrobatics obstacle course. I have heard many people over my short life play acrobatics with scripture. I do it myself. “Well, this means this in that situation that means that in this situation I’m over here doing this which applies to that over there and he’s over there doing that which applies to this over here blah blah blah”. I usually stop listening to complicated theology because it typically means the person put more of their own thought into it than they did scripture. Personal practice, you can disagree if you’d like.

It irks me when someone tries to tell someone else how to live their life. 

It REALLY irks me when I’m the one being told. Because I’m selfish and think the world revolves around me I can’t fathom how someone else thinks their opinion really matters to me. I need to get over myself. 

But my point here is this: Authority structures are given for a purpose. I’m not my wife's husband so that I can tell her how to live. I’m her husband so I can serve her as Christ served the church. Sometimes washing her feet, sometimes teaching her scripture, sometimes turning over tables at hypocrisy, always dying to myself, always dying to my selfishness, my ambition, my wants and desires, always dying for her benefit. Because I love her. Because Christ loves me. Because some 2000 years ago before I was alive, the God of the universe, died just so I could be in his presence. 

A right authority will always put God first. Actual God first. Not their own made up version of Him. Then others. Never themselves.

Because a right authority seeks to glorify God above all. A right authority knows one day it will die and have to answer for every action it took, every judgment it passed, every command it gave, and opinion it offered. And when our perspective is “How do I glorify God in this moment.” “How do I justify this action to God”, we tend to care a lot less about how other people live their lives before God. We care a lot more about how we can live our own lives more pleasing to him. 

And oddly enough, throughout all of history, communities are far closer and far stronger if they worry about their own relationship with God as an individual before they worry about other people's actions.