Law and Liberty
June/July 2004
No results were found while searching for “[% query %]”
An oft-quoted statement has it that we can’t legislate morality. We are told that it is useless and even wrong to enact certain kinds of legislation because they involve trying to make people moral by law, and this, it is insisted, is an impossibility. Whenever various groups try to effect reforms, they are met with the words, “You can’t legislate morality.”
To the extent the state limits the liberty of people governed by God’s law, it is an obstacle to their service in furthering the Kingdom of God.
The flesh is our corrupted, sinful nature we have inherited from our first father, Adam. Because it is at odds with God and His law, it is at odds with itself. The flesh pursues license; it finds bondage. This is true in the unbeliever; it is also true in the Christian.
The Chalcedon Foundation endorses the whole of God’s Word for the whole of life, hence the motto: Faith for All of Life
Law and liberty are two words that impress on the mind in a particular way. It is important to think of “law and liberty” together, rather than “law or liberty,” as if they are opposed. The idea of liberty without law is man’s dream since Eden, whereas the Bible provides God’s law as the foundation for liberty. Hence, law and liberty.
Today’s church may find it difficult to identify with David’s pious sentiment. For too long the dominating ethical perspective has viewed liberty apart from God’s law. In place of God’s law, various “paths to freedom” are suggested: love, the Holy Spirit, personal feeling.
I don’t think that any true, believing Christian in America would doubt that atheists, communists, and liberals are involved in a crusade to reduce Christianity to a non-entity, with all of our governmental institutions thoroughly cleansed of Christian presence and influence. Among them are many members of the judiciary, the psychiatric establishment, and leaders in government education.
Is it possible to operate a profitable business and still be a good Christian?
It is a bold move to highlight a sentence by a famous theologian and to claim that this one statement summarizes what that theologian represents.
A well-known Christian journalist recently commented that the supporters of the Ten Commandments monument in Alabama forgot the book of Galatians. Didn’t they realize that anyone who wants to be under the law is under a curse?
In 1707 the transvestite governor of colonial New York had Francis Makemie thrown into jail. His crime? Rev. Makemie had preached the gospel without a license. But Makemie argued and won his case in court, establishing an important precedent of religious liberty.
The future belongs to God’s people; through them liberty will flourish in the earth. Yet this is often forgotten by modern evangelicalism, whose vision of the future has been shaped by the Left Behind fairy tale.
Francis Scott Key was once known by every schoolboy in the nation as America’s “Poet, Patriot, Christian,” yet most children today could not identify him as our national anthem’s author, much less know of his zealous Christian faith.3 But were it not for Key’s faith in Christ, it is unlikely The Star-Spangled Banner would have ever been composed.
America today is in the throes of a judicial crisis. State and federal judges have run amok, seeking to reinvent every aspect of American life. They nullify laws and referenda, legislate from the bench, and invent new “rights” whenever the mood strikes them.