The man who argues against the command for slaves to obey earthly masters, and to submit to their rule is, first of all, proud. This is what is at the bottom of his refusal to take his position in that society. He cannot bring himself to submit to another. He is always going to struggle against this idea, and he will twist and turn in his efforts to defend his unwillingness, but at root is the problem of pride. Christianity contained within it the principle of the equality of all men before God, and that would eventually lead to the overthrow of the institution, but in Paul’s day there was no sign of that yet, and the believer must accept the injustices of this world, knowing that the God of justice will deal with all these things at the judgment seat of Christ. It is a bad sign when someone cannot suffer the least amount of injustice in the interests of testimony to the gospel.
‘Knowing nothing.’ What he thinks he knows is in error. His thinking has become clouded with self-considerations, and this has blurred his vision and prevented him from evaluating anything correctly. ‘Doting’ – that means he has become rather like somebody with a diseased appetite, who has a craving. People who want to run away from the clear teaching of God – perhaps they claim to be born again – have this urge, like a kind of morbid appetite, to twist all the words around and to argue about them. By making absolutely everything debatable, they can rob these simple instructions of their force. There are many people around in evangelical circles who do this. They say, ‘Oh yes, but …’, and the debate begins, and they muddy the waters and confuse everything, and twist everything around and bring in all sorts of complications, and by doing this, they can destroy the force of what is being said. Sadly, there are many evangelical leaders who are into this. Some like to say that everybody thinks different things about everything in the churches of Christ. Our doctrinal views are as different as our fingerprints. This is how it's done. This is the very kind of person the apostle is referring to here as being not only proud and knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words. ‘Because you can find a different opinion over just about everything among Christians and all duties and all things, it is quite clear that nothing is intended by God to be definite.’ You have a kind of morbid desire to make an issue and an argument and to bring debate and confusion into everything, and then you can empty the word of God of its authority and its force, because you end up saying, ‘All good Christians differ about these things. Who is to say who is right? God obviously didn't mean us to have just one way of doing everything.’ They are taking the authority away from the word of God. They want to be free to live as they like, do as they like, get around the rules of the Scripture. As one man put it, ‘There is no Book of Leviticus in the New Testament. There is no book of clear-cut rules. There's just much advice, and even that is very controversial, and good and godly people all go different ways on it, so you need not feel absolutely bound to obey anything.’ That is more or less what is coming across.