God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
[Jesus] did not consider the political dominance of the Romans to be any infringement of the sovereignty of God. It is not the rule of foreigners over the nation, but the rule of all ungodly powers in the inner life of men, that the sovereignty of God aims at removing (Gustaf Dalman).
I have often joked that those who interpret Romans 13 as meaning that we should do whatever Caesar tells us to unless it is sinful should be consistent and take the same view of Hebrews 13:17… They’d presumably do whatever [the pastor] tells them to do unless it were sinful! It's funny how we can instinctively see the limitations of delegated authority more easily in the church than the government. Such is the impact of the slow but ever-greater incursions of statism (Anthony Forsyth).
