Obedience to Lawful Authorities (Romans 13:1-7)
The election has produced a lot of discussion on this site regarding the limits of obedience.
Let me remind you of recent history. There were three major tyrannies of the 20th century. Each was worse than any previous tyrannies in terms of the executions of innocent people: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's China. How did they end?
Hitler's Germany was destroyed by his incomparable foolishness. He started three wars that he did not win: one in 1939 and two in 1941. Citizens under his jurisdiction suffered as a result of those wars. There were numerous attempts to assassinate him. All of them failed. Stalin also was never overthrown. But, decade by decade, his tyrannical regime became bureaucratic, poverty-stricken, and finally was no longer believed in by its own rulers. It went out of existence on December 25, 1991. Communist China was an incomparable tyranny until the death of Mao in 1976. In 1978, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, announced the freeing up of the agricultural sector, and this policy began to be implemented in 1979. This launched the greatest economic growth of any large nation in the history of man.
None of these regimes was at any time seriously threatened by domestic subversion, let alone by an organized revolution. If anyone in any of those regimes thought that people could topple the regime through resistance or violence, he lived in a fantasy world. If he acted on his belief, or even talked about it, he probably died in a concentration camp or a prison. It was utter nonsense to believe that any of those three regimes could be overturned by revolutionary violence.
Most citizens under those regimes survived. Tens of millions didn't, but most did. They went about their business, doing whatever they could to improve their conditions within the tyrannical framework that had been imposed on them by socialist revolutionaries. All three regimes were imposed by socialist revolutionaries at the top. Two of these regimes collapsed from the top. The third regime, communist China, is still controlled at the top, but it is a threat to the rest of the world only because of the enormous productivity generated by the decentralization of the economy, which was imposed unilaterally from the top.
The Apostle Paul lived under the Roman empire. He probably died in a prison in Rome. He died for his beliefs. He wrote a letter to the church at Rome. This became his most influential letter. His letters led to the creation of Western Civilization more directly than copies of books by Plato and Aristotle did, contrary to college-level textbooks on Western civilization, which hardly anyone reads these days.
Around 1205, the year he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton began dividing the Bible into chapters. In 1215, he co-authored the Magna Carta. Only medieval scholars remember him. The college textbook writers do not regard hm as important.
In what Langton designated as chapter 13 in Romans, Paul spelled out the obligations of Christians to obey lawfully constituted authorities (plural). Here are the first seven verses (designated by Robert Estiene/Stephanus in 1551):
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (English Standard Version)
For my comments on this passage, see Chapter 11, "Legitimate Governments," here.