Law and Order by Whose Definition?

We have all heard phrases describing different types of ruling systems. Dictatorships, oligarchies, republics, democracies, constitutional monarchies, etc have existed at one time or another in our world. There is also the one we use to describe the animal world, and unfortunately can be said to exist in human society: the law of fang and claw.

Have you ever heard someone tell another person to act more civilized? What does it mean to be civilized? What marks someone as being more civilized than someone else? Ultimately who has the right to say what is civilized living and what is not?

The book of Judges in the Old Testament concludes with an interesting and perhaps indicting verse.

Jdg 21:25 There was no king in Israel at that time. Everyone did whatever they pleased.

Everyone did what they pleased because there was no king in the land. The implication is that general law had its origin in the throne, and without a king each man made his own standard as he desired.

The word of the king determined the standards for society. For the Old Testament Hebrew writer, the king represented a source of defining authority. The king determined the standard by which society would operate.

As Israelite history showed, not everyone agreed with the king’s laws and commands. The primary role of the prophet was to stand in judgment on the character of the king. It was believed the character of the king would determine the character of the nation. The ongoing conflict between king and prophet became one of the great dynamics of Old Testament history. The prophets never called for an outright rejection of the earthly kingship, but they did seek in every way to remind king and people there was a higher Authority, the one true King of Israel and the world. Obedience to him and his will was above all else.

When the earthly king and his heirs persisted in rejecting the ways of the Great King, then judgment came down upon them. The nation of Israel was punished and ultimately carried into exile and captivity. The nation took on the character of their king and that fell far short of the demands of God the King. With a king with a sinful character or no king at all, the people were left no direction that would carry them into obedience to their true Ruler.

“Everyone did whatever they pleased.” When what pleases one against the wishes of someone else, the law of fang and claw can take over. The one who makes the rules does not do so because of a higher authority setting the boundaries and defining character. The rules are made by the one who is strong enough to force all others into submission. Appeal to a higher authority is irrelevant. Majority thought is irrelevant. Long term consequences and potential future results are irrelevant. All that matters is the immediate acquisition of power and control.

Where no higher power is recognized and each individual demands to have the right to do what is most desired, society becomes subject to the law of fang and claw. Right and wrong become defined by who has the biggest knife and gun. Everyone will have a morality, but the focus of that morality will be on the desires of the individual, the social trend of the day, or upon the dictates of that higher authority.

The more the focus is upon personal rights, the closer we move to the law of the fang and claw. The more we appeal to a higher authority untouchable by the social trends of the day, the more we can appeal to the highest authority of all, a God who has revealed himself in sacrificial love.

Jesus told his disciples on the night before he was crucified,

Joh 14:21 "Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. My Father will love those who love me; I too will love them and reveal myself to them."

Self-sacrificial love results in perfect obedience. Jesus set the example. He calls us to follow.

Obeying the Law

It is expected of every citizen and guest in our country. Obey the laws of the land. We tend to obey some as a matter of convenience, as in highway speed limits. In spite of our sometimes appeal to grace in such cases, we feel society has a much better chance of staying civilized if everyone obeys the laws, liked or not.

Some laws were passed we now know did not contribute to a healthy society. We have also seen laws overturned or rejected because later legislatures or courts felt those laws were not beneficial to the citizenry. Every generation has battled with what constitutes a legal system that promotes the best culture for society as a whole. Each generation has had to define the absolutes that would be the foundation for a healthy society.

Our three branch government was designed to help the citizenry reach the best set of laws for the country with the least amount of bloodshed. The American Civil War showed even then it was not always possible. Yet we still believe a strong executive branch working in conjunction with a strong legislative branch subject to a fair and independent judicial branch will in the long run give us a society offering the most benefit to the most people. Nonetheless, as Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, “America is a dream.” It is a work still in process.

Jesus declared the laws of God would be valid as long as time endures. (Matthew 5:17-19) Jesus and the Pharisees both had high views of the Law, but the friction came when the purpose of the Law was expressed. The best examples were the laws surrounding the observance of the Sabbath.

One of the Ten Commandments, honoring the Sabbath, was seen in Jewish history as a sign of the covenant between God and his people. (Exodus 31:16-17) Countless secondary laws were generated to explain and protect the holiness of the seventh day. The legalistic Pharisees saw these laws as protecting the holiness of the Law and the holiness of God.

Jesus turned all this upside down when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28) As important as it was to honor the day acknowledging God as Creator of all that exists, Jesus still insisted the law could not stand in the way of doing what was right.

Rather than pointing to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament (Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5), Jesus said there were two greater commandments that superseded these ten words. These two revolved around the concept of love as defined by the nature of God. (Matthew 22:35-40) Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

Obedience to the law in the eyes of Jesus must begin with a recognition God deserves our first and our best. As such we acknowledge his authority over everything else. It is not a matter of saying, “Hey, God, we love you,” and then go do what we want. Recognizing God for who he is translates into a mindset, a value system, and a lifestyle that say all we do is designed to honor the One who created us and loved us first. (I John 4:10-12, 19)

Jesus refused to allow this first and greatest commandment to stand alone without outward expression. Your neighbor must be the recipient of a love defined by how God has taught you to love yourself. God loved you enough to allow his Son to die in your place as the punishment for your sins instead of you catching the penalty. To love your neighbor in such a way is far more than just making sure you keep your dogs out of his roses!

Jesus told a parable of one who lived out the law of loving one’s neighbor. In that brief story the main character risked everything to help one who in a reverse situation would have rejected him. (Luke 10) That is loving your neighbor – help even those who would not help you.

Obey the law. Obey the right laws and you won’t have to worry about the others.

Christian Tension

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.

A Matter of Absolutes

The recent court case in Canada involving the death of four women raises the eternal questions concerning what is right and what is wrong and who gets to decide. This is no light matter as it is at the heart of the story recorded in chapters two and three of Genesis that includes the first sin committed in the Garden of Eden by those elders of ours. As the story goes, God says this is right and that is wrong. Those first people made the decision that they had as much right to decide those issues as their Creator. We've been struggling with that question ever since.

Can the appeal to moral absolutes bring order to society? Can we have an orderly society without an appeal to moral absolutes? How do we have an orderly society when different people appeal to different sets of absolutes? That is a major issue in the Canadian murder case. Though the defense said a terrible accident occurred, the moral absolutes to which some appeal in their interpretation of their religious law say that if the surviving family members are guilty of killing the victims, they were in their rights to protect the honor of their family against the sins of those who strayed. Note that leading Islamic leaders in Canada, America, and in Middle Eastern Muslim countries reject any foundation for honor killing in Islamic law.

The conflict of differing moral absolutes will increase in western culture as it is impacted by those whose moral bases come from a different tradition of whatever origin. Each national system of justice will have to determine if it can exist with competing moral traditions. If not, then someone on some basis will have to decide which moral system prevails regardless of the roots of that system.

When there is no such moral authority to which a group can appeal, the result is the image given in the last verse of the Book of Judges in the Bible. "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes." (RSV) In such circumstances the law of survival soon becomes paramount. Call it the survival of the fittest, the Law of the Claw and Fang, or might makes right. The results are the same. The strongest in will and physical resources will almost always determine what is right and what is wrong, what are to be the laws of the land.

Without moral absolutes built into the foundation of a nation that determine what is right and wrong, then an appeal can be made to any system to justify what someone wants to do. Perhaps the appeal can be made to situational ethics. The circumstances determine the response. Decisions could be culturally based, varying across societies and generations. Left to this standard we are forced to redefine our concepts of order and chaos.

The case in Canada called into question the proper response to a situation when two systems of absolutes confronted one another if indeed the deaths were not accidental. In this case what constitutes justifiable homicide. Does saving family honor justify killing the one who is seen as bringing shame on the family? Though the defense claimed accidental death, the court decided the family members' deaths were the result of premeditated murder. In other cultures the premeditation would have been seen as justifiable for the sake of family honor. Under Canadian law such reasoning was rejected.

When moral absolutes are allowed to come into conflict, we walk a dangerous path that has an end in "each man did what was right in his own eyes." For a society to remain orderly and not sink into a survival of the fittest, a moral code of absolutes must be established and followed. If change occurs, it cannot be because someone finds the change makes life more convenient. That leads quickly to might makes right. Even when it is the majority who feels that change is necessary, an appeal to the present circumstances can only lead to long term disorder.

How are we to live as Christians in a secular nation in a secular world? A recent survey revealed that 80% of Americans consider themselves Christian. Do all of these 80% follow the same moral absolutes? If not, then what are the bases for the differences and to what authority are they appealing to support their beliefs - the value of the individual, the value of humanity, of creation, the authority of the Divine? Can being Christian in terms of the moral absolutes to which one appeals have so many variations and still be Christian?

Our own country must also struggle with this question. Was our constitution based upon moral absolutes? To what authority do these absolutes appeal? Has that authority changed since the 1780's? If so, are we ready to admit it. If it has changed, what is the authority under which we now operate and does it prescribe moral absolutes?

For the Christian in day to day life, there must be an appeal to moral absolutes that have their ground in divine revelation. By the very definition of absolute, these cannot change on human whim or by changes in situation and circumstances, nor even by human government action. It is the individual who must change, not the law. As surely as each individual nation must decide what will be the absolutes upon which its laws will be based and its society guided, so must every individual for his or her personal behavior. When moral absolutes are rejected by society, then chaos and disorder will reign and the power to say what is right and what is wrong for the common good will reside only in the hands of those willing to use fang and claw.