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Even
he who is lawless is blessed by the laws that govern society, for
his lawlessness works to his advantage only when most people are
law-abiding. A thief would have a hard time of it if most people
were thieves. The ideal situation for a shoplifter would be if he
were the only one in the business. Thieves want to steal from others
but they do not want others to steal from them, and the fewer there
are plying their trade the more there is to steal and with minimum
risk. The law-breaker actually believes in the law,
for
others.
He
wants everyone to keep the law except himself. No one would want to
run a red light in a city where most people did it. He might get
killed!
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Laws
are not only expedient but essential. No society could endure
without laws, and William E. Gladstone, the famed British jurist,
was right when he said that good laws make it easier to do right and
harder to do wrong. We are all like children in one respect: life
goes better for us when we know what is expected of us. This is why
Will Durant, the historian, saw laws as liberating: “Man
became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.”
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Since
law is part of the fabric of life we all have some kind of
philosophy of law, which finds expression in such things as our
attitude toward a policeman, traffic regulations, and paying taxes.
This essay sets forth a
Christian
view
of law, one that recognizes the God of heaven as the great lawgiver
and as the author of all just laws. God created law when he created
man and society, and he has never left the nations of the world
without law. God could not make man free without making him
responsible to law. In being responsible to God as his creator man
is always responsible to law. Lawlessness is more than the breaking
of laws; it is rebellion against God. There is a
Christian
philosophy
of law in that the Christian faith, more than any other religion,
esteems the “powers that be” as an institution of God
and the agents thereof as ministers of God. The apostle Paul in
Rom. 13 sets forth the loftiest view of civil government to be
found anywhere in the entire history of religions.
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Beginning
with the admonition “Let every person be subject to the
governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God,
and those that exist have been instituted by God,” he goes on
to draw an amazing conclusion: “Therefore he who resists the
authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist
will incur judgment.” Recognizing that it was the
pax
Romana
(Roman
peace) that saved the world from chaos and actually protected those
who bore the gospel to the nations of the world, the apostle goes on
to say: “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad.
Would you have no fear of him who is in authority?” Paul here
recognizes two axioms of jurisprudence:
no
law
is
self-enforcing;
there must, be rulers to enforce it;
and
no
law
is
effective
apart from punishment for violating it.
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This
is why he goes on to say that if the Christian will “do what
is good,” that is, obey the law, he will receive the ruler’s
approval, for “he is God’s servant for your good.”
Since lawlessness has its retribution and rightly so, the apostle
warns the believers: “But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he
does not bear the sword in vain, for he is the servant of God to
execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Note that it is
God’s
wrath
that the ruler executes as God’s minister. So God is
maintaining order in the state he has ordained through those who
rule over it.
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The
apostle would have us realize that God has not only ordained civil
government but that those who rule in the affairs of men are
ministers of God. The king, the president, the judge, the policeman
ministers
of God!
Those
who rail at the president, lie to the judge, and watch for the
patrolman as they speed along the highway hardly share Paul’s
view of such agents:
they
are ministers of God for your good.
But
they are also the agents of God’s wrath. If you break the law
you pay a fine or go to jail. You might even pay with your life.
He
does not bear the sword in vain!
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We
need to teach our children (assuming that we have learned it
ourselves!) that in obeying the law they are obeying God and in
breaking the law they are disobeying God.
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This
theme runs throughout the Christian scriptures, for early on Jesus
taught his disciples that they were to “Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are
God’s” (Lk. 20:25). Strictly speaking, everything
belongs to God, but here Jesus honors the domain of the state. If we
benefit from Caesar’s rule, including the use of his money, we
should honor his right to impose taxes, Jesus is saying. But
Caesar’s domain is limited, for we render to God what is
especially his, particularly our hearts and wills.
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Peter
joins Paul in seeing the ruler as “sent by God to punish those
who do wrong and to praise those who do right,” and he enjoins
the believer to “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every
human institution” (1 Pet. 2:13-14). The apostle goes on to
say that God should be feared and the emperor honored. The believer
is even urged to pray for the rulers so that “we may lead a
quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way”
(1 Tim. 2:1-2), which means that Christians should be the most
exemplary citizens of all. Justin Martyr, a few decades after the
apostolic age, saw his fellow Christians living such lives:
“Everywhere, we, more readily than all men, endeavor to pay to
those appointed by you the taxes, both ordinary and extraordinary,
as we have been taught by Jesus. We worship only God, but in other
things we will gladly serve you, acknowledging you as kings and
rulers of men, and praying that, with your kingly power, you may be
found to possess also sound judgment.” It is evident that the
early Christians had a positive attitude toward civil government,
even when those governments were less than what they should have
been.
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In
our day, when states and laws alike are being challenged the world
over, we need a renewed understanding of the nature of law. In a
sense the idea of law seems uncomplicated, for there are basically
only two kinds. One might be defined as a “uniformly acting
force which determines the regular sequence of events, which would
include what we call “the laws of nature,” such as
gravity, as well as those forces within us that seem determinative,
such as Paul had in mind when he wrote: “I see in my members
another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to
the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:23). He
uses
law
three
times in this passage, all of which refer to forces or drives
within. While this meaning of law is relevant to us all, it is not
our concern in this essay.
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In
working out a meaningful view of law it is the other kind of law
that concerns us: “a rule of conduct enjoined by a competent
authority and enforced, if need be, by penalties.” These laws
fall into two categories, those imposed by civil government and
those that have their source in the revelation of God. Laws imposed
by either God or man might begin as customs determined by experience
rather than by fiat or arbitrary rule. Stealing did not become wrong
when God ruled “Thou shalt not steal,” but he gave the
rule because it was wrong, proved to be so by long years of human
experience. Cain murdered his brother Abel long before the Ten
Commandments were engraved on stone (but not before they were placed
within the conscience of man!), but he was well aware that he had
done wrong. He had violated both the law of God and of man, for man
had “learned” both by experience and by moral reason
that he was not to kill. So, when it came time to give statutes to
his covenant people, God imposed injunctions against theft and
murder in the Ten Commandments. But theft and murder were already
wrong, made so by God’s “eternal” moral law
planted in the heart and mind of man.
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That
is why Paul urged obedience to civil authorities on the ground of
“for the sake of conscience” as well as to avoid the
wrath of God (Rom. 13:5). Unless our consciences have become seared
and warped by self-will, we “know” a lot about right and
wrong without being told. It is part of our nature as creatures of
God. There is moral reason, which could be called
law,
given
us by God, that tells us we are not to steal or commit murder.
Positive law (posited by God or man) makes natural or moral law more
pointed and unambiguous. Written law, whether by God or man, spells
out in detail what we already sense, perhaps vaguely.
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It
is this that makes a law a good and just law, that it reflect the
natural and moral law of God. And this can be our only reason for
disobeying civil government, when it clearly and persistently (we
should give a bad law time to correct itself through legal means)
violates the law of God. While the Greeks saw law as a creation of
the state, they recognized a higher law to which the state must give
account. In Sophocles’
Antigone
the
heroine of the play insists on burying the body of her dead brother
even though the king had ruled against it. Antigone appealed to the
“unwritten statues of heaven, not of today or yesterday, but
from all time” as her justification for disobeying the king.
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That
is a good example of the moral law within us:
a
person’s right to be buried,
whether
at sea or in the earth. One doesn’t have to find it on the
statute books or in the Bible. Like Antigone, we find it in the
unwritten statutes of heaven. It is part of the moral law of
respect
for persons,
even
in death. Add to that an even greater moral law,
reverence
for God,
and
we have the essence of all law. This is why we have the basis of all
law in the Ten Commandments, for all ten of them speak either to
reverence for God or respect for persons.
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This
is why it is wrong to speak of the Ten Commandments as being
abolished or being “nailed to the Cross,” as we
mistakenly ascribe to Scripture. They transcend time and
circumstance and are for all people in all ages, as Paul recognizes
in Rom. 13:8-10, where he applies them to Jews and Gentiles alike to
whom he was writing. After repeating several of the Ten Commandments
and adding “and any other commandment,” he says they are
all summed up in one sentence, “You shall love your neighbor
as yourself.” We make Paul speak nonsense if we have him
referring to laws that were abolished. He is rather informing us
that all of God’s law is a matter of
love:
reverence
for God and respect for persons, and these are both eternal and
universal.
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This
of course includes the prophets and virtually all of the Old
Testament, except the portions that clearly apply to Israel only,
for they are expansions of the Ten Commandments, the eternal laws of
God. Zech. 7:12 catches this truth in telling us that the prophets
by the Spirit spoke “the law” to the people. When Micah
6:8 says, “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what
does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?,” he is not only
summarizing “the law” as given in the Ten Commandments
but is giving the essence of all law, whether human or divine. To
discard such basic truths as this because they are in the Old
Testament is to miss the point of God’s revelation.
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The
Bible in fact makes “the law” the
sine
qua non
(the
essential condition) in the life of all men, “the lawless and
disobedient, the ungodly and sinners,” and goes on to name the
unholy, the profane, murderers, the immoral, sodomites, kidnappers,
liars, perjurers, noting that the law is for them, to mark them as
sinners before God. And this, says Paul, is “in accordance
with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been
entrusted” (1 Tim. 1:8-11).
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While
Paul was bold enough to claim that he was “blameless”
before such a law (Philip. 3:6), he recognized that “the
righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law” (Rom.
3:21). But in that context he saw the law bearing witness to that
grace and that through law comes the knowledge of sin. He himself
would not have realized the devastating nature of sin except by the
law, he says in Rom. 7:7. It was when “the commandment came”
that he was smitten before God and thus turned to man’s only
hope, the grace of God as revealed in Christ, which means of course
that he was not so “blameless” after all. The law blamed
him and brought him to God. God intends that the law have such a
mission in the life of all sinners: drive them in their desperation
to the grace of God. —the
Editor