Authority and Submission

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ROMANS 13:1

In the summers of 1948 and 1949, on Kuling Mountain near Foochow, Watchman Nee gathered the workers for what proved to be the last training of his life. The messages he gave there were afterwards published as Spiritual Authority, and they are among the most penetrating — and the most dangerous — things he ever said.

Authority is the first principle of the universe

Nee’s starting point was that the deepest issue in the universe is not sin but authority. Sin is a symptom. Rebellion is the disease. He traced it to the fall of Lucifer, in whom the first act of rebellion was a declaration of independence:

I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God …I will be like the most High. ISAIAH 14:13–14

Five times I will. Nothing immoral is proposed. What is proposed is self-government. And that, Nee argued, is the essence of all sin: not chiefly the doing of wrong things, but the refusal to be under. The same pattern appears in Eden. The serpent’s offer was autonomy — ye shall be as gods (Genesis 3:5) — and the fruit was merely the mechanism. Against this stands the obedience of the Son.

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. PHILIPPIANS 2:8

Christ, who was equal with God, took the position of submission and never once left it. That, in Nee’s teaching, is the restoration of the moral order of the universe.

Delegated authority

From this he drew his second point: God exercises His authority through delegates. Parents in the home. Elders in the church. Masters over servants. Rulers in the state. Husbands in the marriage. These are not merely convenient social arrangements; they are, in his view, appointments through which God governs, and how a man treats them reveals how he regards God. He took his examples chiefly from the Old Testament. Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who challenged Moses and were swallowed by the earth. Miriam, struck with leprosy for speaking against her brother. Ham, cursed through his son for exposing his father’s shame while his two brothers walked backwards with a garment. Above all David, who twice had Saul in his hand and would not touch him, though Saul was murderous, disobedient and already rejected by God — for who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and be guiltless? (1 Samuel 26:9). David’s restraint is the model. The authority was corrupt; the office was still God’s. And David left the removal of Saul to God, which God duly accomplished without David’s help.

Submission and obedience are not the same

Here Nee made a distinction that saves the whole teaching from becoming monstrous, and it deserves emphasis. Obedience is a matter of conduct; submission is a matter of attitude. Obedience is conditional — there are commands a believer must not obey. Submission is unconditional in spirit, in the sense that we never adopt the posture of a rebel. When the Sanhedrin forbade the apostles to preach, Peter and John did not obey.

We ought to obey God rather than men. ACTS 5:29

But they did not revile the council, organise against it, or set themselves up as an alternative authority. They declined to obey, and they accepted the beating. That is submission without obedience, and Nee held it up as the pattern: where a delegated authority commands what God forbids, the believer must refuse — and must refuse in a spirit that is not rebellious, accepting whatever consequences follow.

A necessary and serious warning

This teaching has been abused, and any honest presentation of it must say so clearly. In some circles influenced by these messages — and in many others that never heard of Watchman Nee — the doctrine of delegated authority has been used to shield leaders from accountability, to silence legitimate questions, to characterise every criticism as rebellion, and to keep the abused in submission to their abusers. The results have been grievous: congregations manipulated, finances unexamined, sin covered, and the vulnerable told that God required their silence. Nothing in Scripture supports this, and several things in Scripture forbid it. Paul withstood Peter to the face and said so publicly (Galatians 2:11). The Bereans were commended for checking an apostle’s preaching against the Scriptures (Acts 17:11). Elders are to be examined before appointment and rebuked before all if they sin (1 Timothy 5:19– 20). The shepherds of God’s flock are explicitly forbidden to lord it over those in their charge (1 Peter 5:3). And the entire prophetic literature of the Old Testament consists of men sent by God to confront kings and priests. Nee himself submitted to a discipline he believed unjust, and did so for years without defending himself, which lends his teaching a moral weight it would otherwise lack. But the safeguard must be stated as plainly as the principle: authority is never a licence, and submission is never a substitute for truth. A leader who uses this doctrine to protect himself has, by that very act, stepped outside the authority he claims.

Where it is learned

Nee’s teaching on authority was given to full-time workers, but he was insistent that the training ground is not the ministry. It is the ordinary household. The New Testament bears this out. Every extended passage on authority in the epistles is domestic and occupational before it is ecclesiastical: wives and husbands, children and parents, servants and masters.

Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. EPHESIANS 6:5–6

Nee drew attention to the phrase not with eyeservice. The test of submission is what a man does when the authority is not watching. Work performed well only under observation is not obedience; it is management of appearances. He also noticed the extraordinary clause that follows in Colossians: and whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men (Colossians 3:23). The believer is never, finally, serving his employer. He is serving Christ through an arrangement Christ has permitted. This transforms ordinary work — and it also protects the worker, since a man whose real Master is in heaven cannot be owned by anyone on earth. Peter takes the same principle into genuinely difficult territory:

Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. 1 PETER 2:18

The froward — the crooked, the unreasonable. And Peter’s ground for this is not that the master deserves it, but that Christ endured injustice without retaliating and left us an example. Two things must be said to hold this rightly. The first is that Peter is describing an attitude within suffering, not a prohibition on seeking redress. Paul used his Roman citizenship and appealed to Caesar. A believer may lawfully leave a bad employer, report a crime, or seek protection. The second follows from the previous section of this chapter: nothing here authorises anyone to remain in danger. Where there is abuse, the biblical response is not silent endurance but rescue, and any teacher who uses these verses to keep a person in harm’s way has inverted their meaning entirely.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Examine your heart for the rebellion beneath your sins — the preference for self-government — rather than only the sins themselves. 2. Identify one authority in your life you routinely criticise in your heart. Whatever its failings, deal with your own attitude first. 3. Where you must disobey, do it openly, respectfully, and accept the consequences without agitating. 4. If you hold authority, ask whether you have ever used the language of submission to avoid being questioned. Repent of it specifically. 5. Read 1 Peter 5:1–4 alongside this chapter and let it govern how you lead.

A PRAYER

Father, You are God and I am not. I confess how much of my sin is simply the wish to govern myself.

Teach me the mind of Christ, who was equal with You and yet took the lowest place, obedient unto death.

Where I must stand against what is wrong, give me courage without bitterness and firmness without pride. And where I hold any authority over others, guard me from ever using Your name to protect myself. Amen.