A leader who doesn’t view himself as being inside an accountability structure effectively becomes a law unto himself. He teaches everyone under him to fear him, when it’s only God whom we should fear. Loyalty to a leader is indeed a good thing, but good loyalty is loyalty to his leadership under God and anyone else under whom God has placed him, like fellow elders or a congregation. Good loyalty says, “I’m committed to you and your success as a leader, and that means I cannot follow you into folly or unrighteousness, because it’s bad for both you and us.”

Good Authority Is Not Unaccountable but Submits to a Higher Authority
Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”—John 1:49
The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.—John 5:19
I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. —John 8:28
Jesus is king. Jesus obeys. How do we hold those two truths together? And what does it teach us about any authority we’ve been personally given?
Passages like these three in John’s Gospel offer us far more than “principles of good leadership.” We should be careful about merely trying to draw moral principles from passages that focus on the identity of the incarnate Christ and his relationship with the heavenly Father. Still, these passages do offer us such principles. For instance: good authority is never unaccountable, but always submits to a higher authority.
Jesus, the God-man, came to be declared king. Yet throughout his ministry on earth, he submitted himself perfectly to his Father in heaven. He spoke only what his heavenly Father taught him to speak, and did only what his heavenly Father taught him to do. Or as the apostle Paul put it, “the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3).
Does Jesus Christ’s submission demean him? Only if righteousness and rule are demeaning.
Authority and submission are two sides of one coin. To be in authority you must be under it, and to be under it is to be in it. Furthermore, we exercise authority in order to uphold something that is righteous or true, and when we submit we render the judgment that that something is righteous or true.
Jesus’s submission to the heavenly Father was the declaration that God is righteous and true. For Jesus to rule, furthermore, he had to conform himself perfectly to the rule of the heavenly Father. He could rule like Adam was supposed to rule by submitting in a way Adam and Israel never submitted. By submitting, then, he ruled together with the heavenly Father in perfect righteousness.
Another Illustration: A Symphony Orchestra
Let me offer a less exalted illustration of how good authority always submits to a higher authority. My friend Susan offered me this one. Susan has played viola in a number of orchestras over the years. Generally speaking, a standard symphony orchestra has ten first violins, ten second violins, ten violas, eight cellos, and six double basses. Typically, the most skilled player plays the “first chair” of each section, also called the “principal,” and everyone in the section follows that principal. All the viola players follow the principal viola player, all the cellos the principal cellist, and so on. The principal of each section, in turn, follows the first chair of the first violins, called the “concertmaster,” who follows the orchestra conductor. The concertmaster tunes the entire orchestra before a concert, and then leads every string section when it comes to matters like timing, bowing, and so forth.
String players can adjust their bowing in a multitude of ways, each of which gives a piece of music a different interpretation. When do you bow up? When down? What style? How hard onto the strings? How lightly off? A piece written by Bach might call for one kind of bowing, Beethoven another, Debussy still another. But the point is, all the strings must bow together. And it’s up to the concertmaster to make this judgment, based on his or her understanding of the conductor’s direction. The principals of each section follow the concertmaster, and the players in every section follow their principals.
Everything in an orchestra, in fact, works according to such a hierarchy. People sitting in the even-numbered chairs (2, 4, and 6) turn the pages for people sitting in the odd chairs (1, 3, and 5), who rank slightly higher. If someone in a lower ranking chair has a question, she doesn’t raise her hand and ask the conductor. She asks the person in the chair in front of her.
If that person can’t answer, the question is passed forward person by person until it reaches the principal of that section. From there, a question would go to the concertmaster, and if the concertmaster cannot answer it, only then does it go to the conductor. If an orchestra tried to operate like a democracy, with all the members having their own say and choosing their own tuning, timing, and bowing, the music would sound terrible. Only by working within a strict hierarchy does an orchestra sound unified and glorious.
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Perhaps the simplicity of God’s design and direction is even an apologetic for the truth of the faith. It is, actually, the simplest way to live. The simplest way to think. The simplest way to be. It is when we begin to tinker with this design and direction that we find complexity after complexity added to life.

I remember the day many years ago when I was introduced to the universal remote.
Maybe you remember the days when, sitting down to watch a movie, you took your shoes off, kicked back, took a deep breath, ready to relax and then you’re suddenly barraged with remote after remote. One for the TV. One for the DVD player. One for the speakers. One for… well, you couldn’t remember what that one was for, but you had it nearby just in case. And then you went through a complicated system of button-pushing, hoping to remember all the codes and orders and settings and then, after 10 minutes, to finally start the movie.
And then the universal remote. One remote to rule them all. One thing that controlled everything else. It was like heaven opened and the beautiful light of simplicity shone through the darkness of complexity.
I’m sure there have been other moments like that for you, just as there have been for me. It’s the moment when you’re trying to sift through a myriad of issues or instructions or regulations and then you suddenly come upon a new way – a different way – that allows you to cut through all the bureaucracy and red tape and get straight to the point. And once again, it’s beautiful.
Beautifully simple.
In an increasingly complex world, we look for moments like that. We will even pay for moments like that. To find a simpler way. A straight way.
And if you can keep that feeling of beautiful simplicity in your mind for a moment, consider this:
The way of sin is infinitely more complicated than the way of righteousness. Here are just a few examples:

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All of your personal sins, the sin of Adam and the condemnation that you and I deserve, Jesus carried on his shoulders, being led away as a sheep to the slaughter (see Isa. 53) as he releases you, dear believer, forever, forgiving your sins and securing a place for you in glory. As we celebrate the passion and suffering of Jesus, leading to his glorious resurrection, meditate on the glorious truth of Jesus in your place.

For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous (Rom. 5:19).

One of the more important contrasts in the Bible is between the first Adam in the original garden of Eden, and the last Adam, Jesus Christ, who came as God’s gift to to the world to save people from their sins. This great contrast helps us to understand that what Adam lost, Christ has regained—and more. The most vivid of these contrasts in shown to us in the arrest of Jesus in John’s gospel as Jesus purposefully steps into our place of judgment.
Two Gardens
The Bible presents Jesus Christ as the last Adam and promised savior of his people to come and regain, in our place, perfectly, what the first Adam lost. This being so, we shouldn’t be surprised that a garden scene is described in the Bible before the penalty of death is executed by the last Adam.
In John 18:1-11, a great contrast is drawn between the two garden scenes of the first and last Adam. John begins by telling us that Jesus went out over the Brook Kidron where there was a garden which he and his disciples entered. That John doesn’t mention Gethsemane is a purposeful omission to let the single word “garden” captivate the reader. What kind of garden was this?
The first man Adam lost everything in the original garden.
When we think of a garden, we think of a beautiful place of plants, shady trees, and that which is pleasant. John’s mention of Kidron, however, should not go unnoticed. Throughout the Old Testament Kidron was known, particularly by the designation of Jeremiah, as a place of dead bodies and ashes. Jeremiah 31:40 states,

“The whole valley of the dead bodies and the ashes, and all the fields as far as the brook Kidron, to the corner of the Horse Gate toward the east, shall be sacred to the Lord.”

The valley of dead bones, death and ashes was a place consecrated by the Lord for precisely what John 18 describes.
The first man Adam lost everything in the original garden. The garden was a place of beauty and peace. In was in this garden, however, that the crown of God’s creation, made in his image ,was seduced away into rebellion and ruin. God said to Adam,

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen. 2:17)

That’s exactly what happened: the garden became a place of exile and death.
The first Adam hid from God’s judgment.
To keep with the contrast in John, the reader should be reminded that the original garden scene came with a day of reckoning. Genesis 3:8 describes God coming into the garden in the “cool of the day.” This has been one of the most misunderstood verses in all of the Bible. God was not taking a casual stroll to enjoy the breeze, only to discover the half-eaten piece of fruit in the hand of Adam. Genesis 3:8 describes the final Day of Judgment in the original garden. Adam heard the sound of God’s glory coming forth in the “spirit” (ruach) of [judgment] day. What did Adam do? He ran as fast as he could the other way and hid.
Fast forward to John 18, and we have the same scene. John presents the last Adam as crossing over the valley in the shadow of death for us, into the place of dead bodies and ashes. Jesus is standing in our place to pick up the pieces where the first Adam once fell. The whole thing is meant to recall the first garden scene, provoking the question: What would have happened had God unleashed the fury of his wrath in full in the original garden and not planned a covenant of grace?
The sad story of the human race would end in eternal judgment apart from God’s grace.
The original garden scene in Genesis ended with mercy; God shed blood to cover Adam’s sin in anticipation of the last Adam to come. But we do have some idea of what would have been like had God decided to judge Adam and his posterity without mercy in the original garden.
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