Right after asking believers to bless persecutors and leave vengeance to God, Paul turns to a subject that sounds entirely different. 1"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities." The command covers every government and every ruler. Rome, when this letter arrived, was governed by Nero, a name that would come to mean something monstrous within a few years. Paul writes the sentence anyway.
His reasoning is a claim about where authority comes from. No authority exists except from God. Every ruler who has ever held power, whether he served God or never knew him, sits in a chair God set up. This was not a new idea when Paul wrote it. Daniel had told a pagan king to his face that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will (Daniel 4:17). Paul stands inside that older conviction and does not invent a new one.
Twice in the passage Paul calls the ruling authority God's servant. 4"he is God's servant for your good." The Greek word, diakonos, is the one that names a deacon serving inside the church, and it does not change meaning when it crosses from sanctuary to statehouse. A magistrate doing justice and a deacon carrying bread to the poor are described as doing the same kind of thing, serving at God's direction for purposes God set, whether either recognizes it.
3"For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad." Government exists, on Paul's description, to reward what is right and restrain what is wrong, and 4"he does not bear the sword in vain." The sword belongs to what government is for.
Then a small phrase. 5"one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience." Paul could have stopped at fear of punishment. He adds something deeper, submission that comes from a clean conscience. A citizen who pays taxes only because an audit is possible has understood little of what Paul is teaching. A citizen who pays them because government's basic function is God's appointment has understood a great deal.
Paul's word choice is careful. To be subject is to recognize your place under an authority God has set over you and to honor what that authority is for. It does not mean doing whatever it demands without exception. Peter and the apostles, hauled before the governing authorities of their own day, said plainly, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29), and nothing about that moment contradicts what Paul writes to Rome. Ordinary submission, paying taxes, honoring rightful authority, living peaceably under its laws, is the normal Christian posture, and it sits under a higher one, allegiance to the God who set the authority up and who stands above it.
Paul ends where the passage began, with the most unglamorous evidence of all. 7"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." A tax bill paid on time is an act of worship as much as anything in chapter 12. The mercy that led Paul to ask for living sacrifices is asking now for something as plain as an honest payment, offered to a government that is neither perfect nor fully aware whom it serves.
Ask where your posture toward the people who govern you has been contempt, and where it has been thankfulness. Pray for them by name this week.
Prayer
Father, you set up every authority that has governed us, whether it knew you or not, and we submit to what you have appointed for the sake of conscience. Where our leaders serve justice, let us honor them. Where our first allegiance to you must come before anything a government asks, give us the courage Peter had. Thank you that no ruler sits above the throne you occupy. In Jesus' name, amen.