Grace and Law III: Was there Law before Mt. Sinai

The Law, the Gospel, and the Believer

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snider and joining me for a number of weeks is Steve Crampton. Steve is a member at Christ Church in New Albany, Mississippi. Steve is a board member for Media Gratte and Steve is a constitutional lawyer.

So we've asked Steve to join us for this series on the law and the gospel. We're going to be using Ernie Reisinger's book as kind of a general guide for our topic to keep us on course. And we talked about this in our introductory episodes when we looked at the right approach to the law.

And I took us through just a few verses in Psalm 119. Let me read them again. Because having the right perspective, I think, you know, approach. So there's this great mountain range of moral law but what angle we use to walk up to it certainly defines to a large degree the view that we have of it.

So I think getting a good start is about 90 of the work. And so the verses we looked at were in Psalm 119 verse 57 and following. It says, And so wonderful elements of Christian obedience. We have that God has become our portion and living on that, the grateful heart promises to keep His words, needs to still seek His favor, and then takes a careful look at our feet.

Are my feet on the path of obedience? And so we're going to be talking about the law, the gospel, and the believer because it is connected with so much that is important as we think of the centrality of obedience to a Lord as a believer, the connection between obedience and God's commands.

Before we get there, I thought that we should probably put this hat on because the Yankees, as we film, and Steve is the only guy that will get on the podcast with me who's actually a Yankees fan. TJ is definitely not.

So I thought that since the Yankees have the best record in all of MLB, we probably have to celebrate it right now because by the time this hits the people, they'll probably be in line. And I brought myself a cup.

So now I'm ready. All right, Steve? So, looking at this critical theme.

Now we're ready. So, Reisinger points us with some questions to kind of tee up the whole subject matter. This is in his introduction at pages 21 and 22. Let me just read those questions for us. Do those under grace have a duty to keep the Ten Commandments as a rule of law or a rule of life?

Does the gospel of Christ abrogate the Ten Commandments? Does the law have any role in the work of evangelism? What is the difference between the moral, the ceremonial, and the civil law? What is the proper relationship between God's law and God's love?

What are some of the rules or principles for a right understanding of the commandments? What is the relationship between Moses and Christ? What is the relationship between the law and the Savior? What is the relationship between the law and grace?

And finally, what is the gospel and its relationship to the law? Now we probably won't answer all of those today.

No, no, no. Yeah, Reisinger wants to let us know that these are questions that he hopes to answer. And with that list of questions demonstrates how central this is to the Christian life. Well, what we want to do in this episode and in the next episode is to look at the existence of God's moral law prior to the giving of the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.

So from the beginning to Sinai, we don't have a codified, a written-out law. And so we're trying to wrestle with this issue of, well, what law then existed? And it's a pretty significant question because it will help us to understand the nature of law later.

And as Reisinger points out in these chapters, getting a right presupposition is so helpful in not getting off course later in our logical arguments. So in today's episode, we're going to look at the first place in the book of Romans where Paul speaks about the existence of law prior to the Ten Commandments.

Law Written on the Heart in Romans 2

And it's found in Romans 2, and I want to read verse 12 through verse 16. Paul writes this,. For all who have sinned without the law, now that's the Gentiles, will also perish without the law. And all who have sinned under the law, that's the Jew, will be judged by the law.

For it is not the hearers of the law who are just before God, but the doers of the law will be justified. For when the Gentiles who do not have the law do instinctively the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves.

In that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them. On the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus.

So let's just kind of stop and consider the context. In Romans 1, 2, and 3, Paul is fundamentally preparing us for the good news of Christ, the death of Christ, the life of Christ that he's going to hit in chapter 3, and then the nature of faith in chapter 4, union with Christ, and the wonderful benefits that follow throughout those chapters.

But in chapters 1, 2, and the first half of 3, it's the bad news. All humanity has failed. You know, the irreligious nations which worship creation, they recognize there is a God, but they deny what they see in creation and live for themselves.

They're guilty. The moral man, like the Gentile here, who lives up to his conscience at times, but then at other times, of course, he fails because no one does perfectly what they know they ought to do.

The fact that he cannot meet the standard of his conscience, which is, of course, a lower standard than God's standard. Well, if you fail the low standard, then no hope of passing the higher standard.

So he is rightfully condemned by God. Then, of course, the Jew who has the Scripture has a much higher standard, and the Jew also fails. Even though the Jew comes Sabbath after Sabbath and hears the law taught, that does not make them fundamentally right because what makes a man fundamentally right, if we're talking about performance, is doing the law, not hearing the law.

And doing the law perfectly.

Right, right.

But the argument that Reisinger uses here is that in verse 14 and 15, Paul notes that without any copy of the Bible, the Gentiles do have a sense of right and wrong. Where does that come from? It comes from a conscience, a law written on the soul, so to speak, a law written in the mind.

And the conscience either, he says, accuses or defends us. Either it says, this is a good thing or this is a bad thing. And all humanity has that.

Yes.

So C .S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, took off on that point and actually constructed an argument that pointed unbelievers, and I hope all of us, back to God based on that notion of what has variously been called natural law or the law of nature.

Lewis likes to point out it really ought to be called the law of human nature. Because when we think of natural laws such as gravity, it's not like the stone can actually disobey the law that draws that stone to the ground and so forth.

Natural laws in that sense are really only descriptions of what always happens. But in the law of nature or natural law, humans uniquely have that ability, that option of disobeying. And so Lewis builds from this.

By the way, my wife and I were just in the nursery this last weekend, and it occurs to me that however much children, toddlers don't understand the complexities of law, they certainly know basic fairness.

You can't just come and take the toy from me, for example. Lewis uses the example of a drowning child, right, that's fallen through on the ice. Well, if you're just going with basic instinct, the instinct is self-preservation should be a no-brainer.

I'm not venturing out on that ice to try to save that child. And yet, in the conscience of the Gentile as well as of the Jew, we are somehow drawn and kind of pointed to saying, the right thing to do is to venture my life out there to save that drowning child.

How do you explain that, Lewis argues, other than by saying God has created in us that image of God, that morality, however dimly we might see it, that again points back to we're not just accidents. If we were purely materialistic, driven solely by, say, the herd instinct is another example they use, it would never get you to the point where you would risk your life to save another.

And so that idea is clearly there. And as Romans 2 points out, the Gentiles understood. You might vary on some of the finer points, you know, the outer limits, so to speak, of what it is. But the notion, thou shalt not murder, seems to be universal in every culture at every time under any circumstances.

And it's interesting to me, Lewis also noted, natural law, he said, is hard, as hard as nails. And it does seem, when you come down to doing the right thing versus the selfish thing, almost always it entails some hardness, some sacrifice.

Aslan is another example used in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. If you'll recall, when Edmund had botched things miserably by his own treachery, Aslan assures him that it will be made right. He says, all shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

So you have that hardness, but almost inescapable, it seems to me, is the recognition of some kind of natural law, if you will, the law of nature, a conscience, a recognition of a morality that transcends the written word.

Yeah, and Lewis and others aren't arguing that the existence of conscience in humanity is always the same, that each culture thinks right and wrong is, you know, the same. One culture, he says, thinks these things are okay, and another culture would say, well, no, no, these things are okay.

But the argument is that there is an existence of morality in every human, regardless of how your culture has altered that or shaped it, but the existence of morality is universal, and that argues for a personal and moral being behind our existence.

Yes.

One commentator summarizes Romans 2 like this, when the Gentiles, who have no knowledge of the law, act in accordance with it by the light of nature, they show they have a law in themselves. And so that's the main point here, that there is a moral law within all humanity that preexists the codification of it, the writing down of the moral law in the Ten Commandments.

And if I may, just as a footnote, our Declaration of Independence actually refers back in the preamble to the laws of nature and of nature's God, which is an appeal to that natural law saying to the other nations that it's according to those fundamental unwritten laws that we have a right even to give birth to a new nation.

So I mean it really has been long recognized and even debated with some of the firing points, but I think Lewis's argument at the end of the day is really irrefutable that we do have a conscience, however twisted it may be.

One other constitutional law note, there was a case, Lawrence against Texas in 2003, where the Supreme Court in part of its rationale struck down a Texas law that forbidden sodomy saying in part that laws cannot be based solely on a recognition of immorality, sort of throwing out, if you will, the natural law.

Interestingly enough, one of the briefs in support of the petitioners who won that case argued totally from a moral perspective, saying the right thing to do is to strike this law down, which is a moral law.

So my point there is we all appeal to some sort of morality, whether we're on one side or the other. It's just a universal.

The New Covenant and the Law Written on the Heart

Reisinger goes on to point out that later in the scriptures, throughout the Old Testament in Jeremiah, we find the Old Testament foreshadowing the coming of Christ and the implementation of a new covenant with superior privileges and blessings.

This is later repeated often in the New Testament, particularly in Hebrews. Hebrews 8, verse 10. Hebrews 10, verse 16 mention God writing the law on the heart in the work of regeneration or the new birth as part of the provision of a new covenant.

So let me read just one example of this. Hebrews 8, verse 10 says,. So here we have another statement of God putting something on the heart of a people with regard to His law. But here's my question for you, Steve.

How is this different, this gift to the believer, which is specific to the child of God, how is that different than the universal law that exists in the conscience of all humanity?

It seems to me what we have in Scripture is God giving Adam and Eve the law perfectly in an unwritten form. But after the fall, the law, as Reisinger puts it, is defaced, greatly defaced, but not totally obliterated.

So what you have then is the remains, if you will, of that law that was perfectly implanted originally, and that's the natural law that guides the Gentile, and many of us in our conscience, we sort of understand for greater or lesser senses.

And at the regeneration, God—well, let me stop first and say at Sinai, He gives us the Ten Commandments, kind of reissues them, as it were, in an abbreviated form, the Ten Words, as it's sometimes called, right?

And then in the new birth, we get that law more perfectly implanted, not just in the mind, but also in the heart, where we are drawn to love it, not just to obey it in some external sort of sense, not just a dim kind of recollection.

Yeah, I'm not sure this is right, what I'm doing here, as the Gentiles in the conscience might experience, but rather a clear understanding of what God's perfect law is, and remarkably to me, a love for that law that yearns to follow and obey and serve our God in that way.

Yeah, I think that, you know, the whole issue—the metaphor of the heart there is really our guiding principle. There is a supernatural—not a natural, but a supernatural implanting of life in the new birth.

The Spirit of God, you know, brings life where there was spiritual death, and with that, there come new appetites, new inclinations that flow from the new life. They are not perfect yet, because, you know, the process of sanctification and then ultimately glorification will bring perfection there, but the transformation has a beginning point.

You know, there is life, the seed has been planted, life sprouts, and, you know, this life is a responsiveness to our God, and now we love what we see to be right, and we hate what we see to be wrong.

The conscience does not include that necessarily. You know, we all can remember, if we're Christians, we can remember days where, as an unbeliever, we might have wanted to, you know, to lash out in revenge, you know, in bitterness, to hold a grudge, to do something that looks like it'll be fun, but we know it will bring shame, and so, you know, you have this conflict.

Your conscience is crying out, this is not a right course of action. But your heart says, but I wish it was. You know, I wish I could do that. I love what I cannot have here. With the believer, the heart is now—we think of it this way.

The law for the believer is not a straitjacket that keeps me from reaching things I'm not supposed to have, but the law is a principle within. The new heart loves obedience, and while I can sin, I do not love sin the way I used to.

Yes, and it seems to me there's an added joy, satisfaction, completeness, if you will, in the soul when we do what we know we ought to do, and we love it. There is, like, I think, an added blessing, a spiritual pouring out of God's hand upon us when we are where we ought to be.

And one of the books that we're reading along with the Risinger is The Grace of Law by Ernest Kevin, and one of the old writers there pointed out that when we recognize that the moral law is not made, as you say, to be a straitjacket or to somehow limit man in an artificial way and make life miserable, in fact, it is our guide for the greatest blessing and perfection of man.

It's what we're made for at the end of the day. So, you know, the fish out of water may think he's free, but he's dying. So man outside the path of the moral law is, in fact, on the path of death. And when we're in the middle of it, there is a kind of confirmation, it seems to me, that we are where we ought to be.

Practical Implications of Natural Law and Human Guilt

So one of the, you know, we just kind of draw this together before we look next week at Romans 4 and 5. Some of the practical applications would be that regardless of how confused human conscience is because of the impact of sin, the existence of a sense of right and wrong within every human is evidence that moral law exists as written on the heart, on the conscience.

Adam had it without sin, Adam and Eve, without the impact of sin. But after their choice to, you know, to go against the Creator, even their offspring have it greatly defaced, as you mentioned, but not obliterated.

Another practical application is the uniqueness of humanity. We are classified, you know, scientifically as animal life. We're not, you know, we're not vegetable or mineral. So we can, if we're not careful, we can kind of think of ourselves as not really distinct from animals.

But we are fundamentally distinct, not because, you know, of pride, and I think I have a right to be above everything else, but because of the choice of God to give us a soul that is evidenced in this morality that is not in the unreasoning creatures, as the old writers would say.

So angels and humanity created with the capacity of a relationship to the Creator, reasoning creatures, the law affects us and we are unique. And therefore, the guilt of humanity is undeniable, even if they haven't heard of the Bible or of its Christ.

We know that even our imperfect measure of right and wrong, our conscience, we have willingly gone against it. And therefore, we have no way of saying to God, you can't point out my sin because you didn't give me a Bible.

Well, I gave a conscience and you broke that. So next week, we're going to look at Romans 4 and 5, where Paul deals more with this issue. And Reisinger is going to give evidence of the actually of the principles of the Ten Commandments prior to their being written.

And we hope you'll be able to join us.