Freedom Under God’s Law

We have forgotten in recent years that freedom is a religious fact. It is Jesus Christ who makes us free from the bondage of sin to be free men (Jn. 8:31-36). The greatest form of bondage and slavery is to sin. To be in Christ is freedom, and the law of God is “the perfect law of liberty” (Jas. 1:25; 2:12).

There are many kinds of law, Buddhist, Shinto, Islamic, humanistic and so on, but all these are prescriptions for tyranny. We see political leaders offer us solutions to our problems in the form of a legal scenario, but these answers lead only to an ever-increasing enslavement to a power state.

All laws are a description of good and evil, definitions of right and wrong in terms of a particular faith or philosophy. Can we trust National Socialism or Marxism to define good and evil for us, or can we depend on homosexuals, abortionists, and like persons for a good description of moral ultimates? More bluntly can we allow anyone except the triune God through His word to define law and morality for us?

We have in recent generations preferred to forget that the definer of law and morality is always the God of that society, the final arbiter of law, morality, and truth. How can any Christian look to any other source than God and His enscriptured word for such an arbiter and definer? 

We live in a society in which the legal powers specifically and systematically deny the validity of God’s law and reject God as Savior and Law-giver. Worse yet, most churches are antinomian, and they assent to this rejection.

Now we can readily grant that the United States has often been indifferent to Christ and the Bible. It has seen much hypocrisy in high places. All the same, despite much lip service by politicians, our legal system still reflected its Biblical origin. It was only in the latter part of the nineteenth century that law schools began to undermine the Biblical foundations of law, and it was only after World War II that the U.S. Supreme Court began to dismantle the Biblical nature of U.S. law. That dismantling job is now nearly finished.

The doctrine of Christ’s atonement is basic to the legal systems of what was once Christendom. This doctrine stresses the essential requirement of restitution. Christ makes restitution to God for us, and we make restitution to one another.

Now we see a variety of alien models for law. The Marxist model sees guilt as a class matter, the attribute of the rich and the middle classes, who supposedly oppress the poor. The racist model sees guilt as pertaining to race, black or white, who are thus the source of evil. The therapeutic model sees mental sickness, created by various agencies, as responsible for crime, and crime is seen, not as requiring restitution or punishment, but as therapy. The list of alternatives to the Biblical perspective can be extended, but it is enough to say that crime increases under these false solutions.

If God does not define good and evil for us, we are under His judgment. There is no good outside God, nor any definition of it apart from His word. In fact, if we reject God’s definition of law, of good and evil, we have rejected God. Have we not then made something or someone else our “angel of light” and our source or “minister of righteousness” or justice (2 Cor. 11:14-15)?

We are deeply in trouble, and it is a disaster of our own making.