A recent conversation brought up the idea that Christians live with the tension between grace which they cannot provide and divine law over which they they have no control. Grace has no meaning without the presence of law to define right and wrong. Neither can law provide a perspective of hope without the presence of grace, the idea of a second chance. Christians must live with this tension because of the need to but who continue to fail to keep the demands of the law and must live with a dependency upon grace.
In the secular world there is a parallel concern between personal freedom and government control. A free society must be defined by the freedom exercised by its citizenry. Its freedom is maintained, however, by the control its government is able to provide. A free citizenry is under the constant tension of deciding how much control it can give its government to maintain the freedom demanded by its citizenry.
How much control will we as Christians give our Creator-God in determining the lifestyle we his creation will follow? How much freedom must we demand in order to be able to respond to our Creator-God as independent thinking individuals? Surely the answers to these questions bring in the awesome concerns of the sovereignty of God, the freedom of man, the consequences of actions, and the inherent power of anyone to decide them.
Though we may struggle with these questions for a lifetime, each day we must make decisions based upon our limited understanding of their interplay. We are limited by our inability to comprehend the infinity that describes the God we say we worship and to whom we are called to give obedience. We are limited by our own mortality and the sinfulness that we have placed upon it. We must make decisions each day based upon an inability to understand the "omni's" of the God we follow and our own limitations as imperfect creatures. It is in this tension that we are forced to deal with issues related to human freedom and divine sovereignty.
In our republic we make laws to protect our freedoms. We seek to play the role of both creator and creature. We seek to create that under which we will require ourselves to live. We govern ourselves. We control ourselves. We control the extent of our freedoms. We freely assert our self-control. In the process we try to determine what will be the guiding principle that determines the laws we make to control our freedoms.
We reject the idea of a theocracy. In doing so we join the ancient Israelites who said they would have a king as did all the other nations around them. They rejected a Divine ruler who spoke through his judges and prophets (I Samuel 8). In doing so we join the crowds led by the Jewish rulers who boldly told Pontius Pilate they had no king but Caesar (John 19) in the midst of their demand that Jesus be crucified.
Rejecting a theocracy, however, is not the same as rejecting a moral basis for law. The matter only focuses upon what moral system we will choose. In the political realm that system will be determined by our grasp of the tension between law and freedom. For the Christian seeking to live in a fallen world, it will be the understanding of the relationship between law and grace.
If our Creator declares laws based upon his nature, then those who claim servanthood before him are obligated to follow those laws. When failure comes, consequences follow and with that grace may also be found. When a nation passes laws based upon its understanding of an orderly and desirable society, then its citizenry are called upon to follow those laws or face the consequences and find at the same time that a second chance might be offered. In neither of these situations, however, is the law abrogated, but it may mediated.
Whether theocracy or otherwise, laws exist to guide a society. Those laws must be based upon an underlying system that defines right and wrong. Who determines that system will reveal who is the ruling body for that society. In our republic there are checks and balances. With God there are no checks and balances. There is only his nature and the consequences of our actions based upon obedience and disobedience - and also that thing called grace.
