When ‘obedience’ becomes a battle
from Voice for Justice UK:
Obedience … it’s one of those words we all know and think the meaning is so obvious it doesn’t need definition, but actually that’s wrong. Obedience is a word that has many layers of meaning, and functions at many different levels. If you look up the word online, you find the definition, ‘compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority.’ Which is okay, as a start, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
For instance, ‘obedience’ today may indicate coerced compliance with the ideological demands of our increasingly totalitarian state. But it may also mean the willing acceptance of discipline, in the pursuit of excellence. Athletes, for example, will be ‘obedient’ to their coach, because they want to win, and actively seek a discipline that will help them best develop their strengths. In the same way, soldiers are obedient in training, because they know that their lives and the lives of their comrades will, if they find themselves in conflict, depend on their ability to follow orders and work together.
Perhaps not so different is the obedience required of a believer, who chooses to follow the rules laid down by God, because compliance leads to life and salvation, while wilful disobedience results in bondage to sin and death.
And just as ‘obedience’ has many shades of meaning, so the reasons why people obey can be equally multi-layered. The most obvious reason, of course, is fear of the consequences if we don’t comply. Put at its most basic, people are ‘obedient’ because they want to avoid punishment – and that’s true for every stage of life, from the four-year-old who restrains himself from stealing his schoolmate’s sweets, to the businessman or woman struggling to complete their tax returns satisfactorily, because they don’t want to end up in jail! And some political systems, such as communist regimes and dictatorships, are of course built on enforced compliance and punishment. That’s how they function. In this kind of scenario, it takes real courage to stand up and resist.
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