Finally, I’d be wary of any “pastor” who wasn’t familiar with 1 Peter 2:13-17 :
“Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men. Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God. Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king.”
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GO BACK TO ENGLAND!! If that is what our Fore Fathers had done we would STILL be under British law. WHEN does just defense come into play. Will you submit to the Anti-Christ when he is put in power??? Will you take his number, he will after all be the authority instituted by men. YOU are in big trouble!!
Having never been to England, it will be difficult for me to go back.
However, to answer your question, I'll quote a bit by James Patrick Holding, that you can find here:
The Bible quite often tells us to respect and obey the laws of men. So what, say the critics, about this:
Acts 5:29 "We ought to obey God rather then men."
This is almost a qualifier for a Golden Duh Award, but not quite. Note well: in Acts, the "law" being set down countermanded God's requirements. The Jews told Peter and Co. to shut up and stop spreading the Gospel; that was opposite to Jesus' command to spread it. The other verses do not say, "unless they countermand God's commands" - but we are given credit for having the intelligence to realize that God's orders should not be overruled by any human intervention!
Indeed, the citation of the other verses as contradictory reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of when and why each was written -- truly enough, context is key, but here it is again a case of more than merely textual context.
Consider the social context of the verses from Romans usually cited in this regard (Rom. 13: 1, 7). When Paul penned this letter, Nero was emperor, but he was still in the realm of sanity and was a fairly good ruler; Christians were not being persecuted by Rome. Paul is not here concerned with the hypothetical possibility which eventually became reality: That the government would turn against the Christian faith. Had these words been penned ten years later, the instructions would assuredly have been tempered quite differently, and be more along the lines of Acts 5:29, where a choice did indeed have to be made between obeying God and man -- because as of the time when this passage was written, there was no human law which was in contradiction to the will of God. Paul could truly say "obey the law" without qualification, because there was no law on the books at the time that was objectionable from a Christian perspective: Christians weren't being persecuted or told to give up or compromise their faith; they were under the protective classification of being a Jewish sect. (This also applies to Matthew 22:21, Titus 3:1 and 1 Pet. 2:13.) As is often the case, skeptics are taking a general principle with a specific historical context and turning it into a timeless universal in order to find contradiction.