God has authority because He is God. His authority is absolute because there is no one above Him and all other things exist only because He created them. He is the One who designed the functions and boundaries of each person and thing, and therefore He has every right to exercise absolute authority over all things.
God is also the Ultimate Judge of all things. He is the One who created the laws of nature as well as the moral laws. Since He is the Creator, Owner and Lawgiver, He has every right to demand anything He wants from all of us. As a judge God is perfect because His laws are perfect and His judgments perfectly balanced between righteousness and mercy. Because of His being the Creator and as One who has this perfect balance in His judgments, He has a perfect right to judge all things. No one can question Him, no one should dare to question Him and every knee should bow before Him and confess that He is Lord of all. The conversation between God and Job is a case in point (Job.38-41).
God is also perfect in His love towards us so that whatever He commands us to do is meant for our ultimate best. He has perfect wisdom to know what is best for us and the perfect ability to do whatever He chooses for us. He never makes a mistake.
This gives us confidence to trust Him and do without question whatever He tells us without even waiting to understand things fully. We can be confident that whatever implications there are for obeying Him, He is able to handle all of them. This creates the perfect stage for exercising His absolute authority over us and our full and unquestioning submission to Him.
The authority of God and the way He exercises it are things we can never fully imitate as created and fallen human beings. The way we submit to Him is also not something that can be imitated when it comes to submitting to any human authority. This is because everyone else other than God is imperfect. It is a simple but extremely profound truth that we are not God!
Whatever form of authority any one of us has, that authority is not absolute because we are created beings with limitations in every aspect of our being. Whatever form of authority others have over us, we cannot submit to them in the same way we are to submit to God. Even when the Bible tells wives to submit to their husbands as to the Lord (Eph.5:22), we know that this is not to be absolute submission because there may come times when a wife has to obey God rather than man (Acts.5:29).
The most perfect among God's creation at that point in time, Lucifer, the archangel or the leader of the angels, had to submit to the authority of God. But when he considered his own abilities and characteristics, especially in comparison to other angels, he forgot about the huge (actually infinite) gap between him and God. He thought there was no need for him to submit to God and he even thought that he could be on the same level as God (Isa.14:13,14). That was what led to his fall, from archangel to Satan.
It is when we become proud in ourselves, thinking about our greatness, our knowledge, our experience, our fame, our achievements, our skills and abilities, etc., especially in comparison with other people, that we fall immediately. We may foolishly try to boost our self-image by being harder in exercising authority over others, but we have already fallen low, and everything we do afterwards will usually make things worse.
This is why 'servant-leadership' is the right way in which people can exercise authority over others, carry out their responsibilities towards the others and keep within proper boundaries. Failure in human authority comes either from neglecting their responsibilities or by going beyond their boundaries of authority.
Hesitation to submit may come from a fear that by submitting one will be acknowledging one's inferiority. This sense of inferiority may exist because one grew up under an abuse of authority by parents. Sometimes those in authority thrive on making people under them feel inferior.
Those who abuse their positions of authority many times try to threaten them with dire consequences if they fail to comply with anything they are asked to do. But we need to learn from the exercise of authority and submission within the Trinity that it is not about superiority or inferiority but about recognising our roles and our responsibilities.
It is not just God's might and authority that we need to consider in order to understand our relationship with Him. While these might cause us to 'fear' Him, to stand in awe of Him and respect Him, it is His goodness that draws us to Him. We think more of His 'love' towards us than His power. But His love is essentially His power in action and His power is His love in action.
The divine kind of love does not love someone because it wants something from that person. This love is completely the opposite, wanting to do something good for the other. In this way, we can understand divine love (agape) as a consistent desire to bless and to do good to the other.
God's laws are designed to lead us to a safe place where we can be blissfully happy, and also to protect us from consequences that will be hurtful for us. His discipline has to be seen as an attempt to bring us back to the good path when we have strayed away. It is in love that He disciplines us, for our good, even though it might appear to us as if it is coming from His anger (Heb.12:4-13).
God exercises His authority only for our good – planning good things for us (Jer.29:11), protecting from going wrong, correcting and disciplining us when we have gone wrong, and turning even the evil that happens to us to do something good for us (Rom.8:28).
This is the part of the exercise of authority by God that we can take away for ourselves when we have to exercise authority over others, and not what He does out of His power and might.
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