On two occassions in my career I have been cleared to line up and asked,
"shall I wait for the landing aircraft to land first"?
I have also refused to descend to altitudes below what I considered to be my safety sector altitude on at least two occasions, on one occasion ATC later admitted they had been vectoring the wrong aircraft.
The commander of an aircraft has the ultimate decision on whether to obey any instructions given to him and its this quality that makes a commander, not pedantic hair splitting or point scoring on forums..