The Right to Rape and Murder?

For some generations now, there has been a major movement to separate law and morality. The two were long seen as essentially alike, derived from the triune God and inseparable. Law and morality were alike given by God and expressions of His nature.

The first major departure from this came with the Marquis de Sade, who expressed openly what his generation believed, namely, that supernatural law, i.e., all law derived from God, was evil because it was against nature. Only what expressed man’s fallen and natural being was valid law. Hence, for Sade the only crime was Christianity; abortion, murder, rape, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, theft, all now moral offenses, were really natural acts and had to be permitted.

The direction of our courts today is Sadean. We have seen abortion and homosexuality made legal, euthanasia in process of becoming so, and groups now promoting man-boy love, bestiality, and other perversions. (I was told of one person that said, “What is wrong with bestiality if it is my dog?”)

Major religious groups, against the plain words of Scripture, now oppose capital punishment. We are told by many that morality is purely a matter of personal values, not of universally valid laws. Victims of crimes are sometimes treated with less respect than the criminals.

Why the surprise? We have denied God as our Law-giver. Emile Durkheim’s thesis that the criminal might be an evolutionary pioneer, exploring a new way of “moral” behavior, has entered deeply into our culture.

Meanwhile, we treat God and His law gingerly, and with an evolutionary point of view. Supposedly the Bible represents some lower level of morality! And we are bewildered that our youth, products of anti-Christian schooling and popular culture, are more and more simply the new barbarians in the streets, dismantling civilization at every turn. We forget that our state schools and our courts of law did the pioneering work, and our youth are simply following their direction.

Before Hitler there came legal positivism in Germany which reduced law to the will of the state and morality to myth. The first victim of tyranny (rule without God) is morality, and our present legal trend is towards the radical separation of Biblical law and morality from the laws of the modern state. Freedom has never existed apart from a Biblical faith, and, in waging a war against Biblical law and morality, the modern state and its courts are working to abolish freedom.

In the 1960s, in Palo Alto, California, I heard a state school teacher insist that, in the modern world, freedom is obsolete because a scientific society cannot exist with the random freedom of individuals. She was more honest than most, who use the language of liberty to work against it.

The antinomianism of the churches feeds this destruction of law and morality. Having rejected God’s law, they have only state law. in the stead of morality, they offer pious gush. 1 Peter 4:17 tells us that “judgment must begin at the house of God.” Have these antinomian churches no fear of God?

If we fail to be faithful, God will raise up other peoples to carry on His triumphant conquest of the nations. If we are ashamed of our Lord and of the Scriptures, God will be ashamed of us. “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve” (Josh. 24:15).