Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

What Does the Old Testament Law Mean for Us Today?

A popular trend in skeptical circles is to attack Christianity through pronouncements people would perceive as ridiculous or barbarous in its laws with today’s mores. Not surprisingly, most of these come from the Old Testament. Most delicious to them is the fact that the Church no longer observes most of these precepts. I remember seeing a blog post one time about “Ten Things the Bible Says Not to Do, But You Do Anyway,” or something to that effect. The favorites are usually about the laws for kosher food that nobody observes today outside of Judaism or the execution of the following: homosexuals, adulterers, lazy children, children who curse parents, blasphemers, etc. (basically anything they don’t personally think is a big deal).

It’s amazing how many problems a little consultation with the Westminster Standards will solve. (For those of you not familiar with these sublime documents, they were Parliament’s attempt to bridge the differences between Anglicanism and Presbyterianism during the English Civil War. Presbyterians like myself accept these as secondary standards- that is, our guide to beliefs wherever they are not in conflict with Scripture, which is the primary standard).

Well, what does the Confession have to say about laws like this, which for the most part 17th century Britain did not enforce either? Chapter XIX:

“God gave Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which He bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience (para. 1).”

“Besides this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws […] All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the new testament (para. 3).”

“To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require (para. 4).”

So, for many of the unusual things in the Old Testament, we don’t observe them because God told us not to anymore. In the Mosaic law, you’ll find intertwined moral, ceremonial, and civil laws. The moral ones, yes, are as binding today as the day they were proclaimed on Mount Sinai. It’s still wrong to commit adultery or murder or to take God’s name in vain. 

The ceremonial law, however, was fulfilled in Christ. It symbolized how Israel needed to be separated from the rest of the world and carefully kept from all semblance of death and disorder to be fit for the presence of God. The ceremonial laws regarding blood, leprosy, etc. represent wholeness of life or stability in distinction from morality, which God dealt with in other laws. God explicitly did away with the ceremonial law when He gave Peter a vision and told him to eat unclean things, symbolizing that Israel was no longer on its own and that the Gospel was for all nations now. Christ has cleansed us with His blood, so we don’t need to make sacrifices or take baths to make ourselves clean in God’s sight.

Nowhere does Jesus or an Apostle try to force Mosaic civil laws on Rome.

I’m not really familiar with any verse as explicit as Peter’s vision in Acts as far as getting rid of the civil law of Israel, but it’s pretty clear God doesn’t want the Church governed like Israel. Israel was prone enough to corruption from without, so God mandated a wide range of capital punishments for wicked Jews to keep the nation pure. Now, though, He wants the Gospel of reconciliation offered to sinners, not war waged on them. Nowhere does Jesus or an Apostle try to force Mosaic civil laws on Rome.

As for executing homosexuals, that was not the Apostle Paul’s practice although he was proudly Jewish. He told the Corinthians: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind [the KJV is trying to delicately refer to passive and active homosexuals], nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (I Corinthians 6:9-11).

So, a few observations about homosexuality in this passage that are relevant today. Yes, it is still a sin under the New Covenant; Christ’s death did nothing to change that, only to save from it. Second, it appears that Paul extended his ministry to homosexuals (of which there were many in the cult of Apollo in Corinth) just as readily and lovingly as to any other sinner. Finally, it appears they repented and overcame this sin (though no one said it would be any easier than the drunkards overcoming an addiction). So, there’s something for people to learn here on both sides of the cultural contest over homosexuality.

The moral ones, yes, are as binding today as the day they were proclaimed on Mount Sinai.

A lot of the civil code of Israel rubs enlightened Westerners the wrong way, but Jesus made an important observation about it in Matthew 19. Some of the Pharisees thought that, because the civil code allowed for divorce, they could morally divorce their wives for any reason. Jesus tells them that provision about divorce was only because of the “hardness of your hearts.” In other words, God doesn’t normally approve of divorce, but it could lead to worse if He clamped down on it in His civil law. When you look at the Old Testament’s milieu, with slavery and different tiers of justice being universal practice, a lot of the Torah’s civil law appears a compromise between the crude legal codes Israel was familiar with in the Ancient Near East and the higher ideals taught by Christ and the Apostles. The moral law is at all times the great standard of conduct, but the civil law may not always measure up to it. That said, many times it is a thousand times more enlightened than what you’ll find in Babylonian or Assyrian law.

The one problematic thing remaining is when we don’t know if something was a ceremonial or civil law. Generally, if you can tie it back to a duty required by one of the Ten Commandments or a sin forbidden by them, it’s moral. But sometimes there’s room for argument. There are laws against tattooing, blending fabrics, mixing seeds, interbreeding different species, and transvestitism. (Actually, the law against transvestitism is a little more specific than that; the Hebrew literally prohibits women from “bearing the accouterments of a warrior.”) Some of these seem harmless and are possibly even beneficial, like interbreeding horses and donkeys to make mules. In fact, the Jews were perfectly willing to buy mules from Gentiles as long as they didn’t breed them themselves, and God makes reference to mules in the new heavens and new earth in Isaiah. I’m pretty sure from my own research into these issues that you’ll find a commentator on every one of those laws who links it back to one of the Ten Commandments. I really don’t know on some of these, and I advise caution. As R.C. Sproul pointed out, it’s better to treat a ceremonial law like a moral one than a moral one like a ceremonial one.

Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

The Christian’s Checkbook, Part II: The Christian Manifesto

So, we see that giving is a Christian duty, albeit one to be done with willing cheerfulness. In fact, so much stress does the Bible put on giving that at points it sounds downright socialistic. We are told of the earliest Church in Jerusalem that, “All that believed were together and had all things common and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as every man had need” (Acts 2:44-45). Paul writes as a principle of Christian giving, “But by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want, that there may be equality. As it is written, ‘He that had gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack’” (II Corinthians 8:14-15). That sounds an awful lot like the refrain of the Communist Manifesto: “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Most famously, Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions and give to the poor.

Well, I couldn’t affirm or deny the obligation to tithe, but I can categorically state that socialism isn’t really what the Bible has in mind. For one thing, if socialism was God’s ideal, it wouldn’t have such an appalling track record. Socialism has wrecked countless countries and brought misery to their citizens while capitalism has created the richest societies of all time. When God was designing a state to be governed by His direct decree (Old Testament Israel), He made ample provision for the poor but nowhere insisted on socialism. In fact, two of the Ten Commandments, as Dr. Sproul observed, are designed to protect private property. It seems God recognizes what Lord Kames called mankind’s propensity to appropriate. The Pastorals and James have instructions to rich Christians dealing with them as rich Christians, an underlying assumption which makes no sense if all Christians are to give all their belongings to the poor. After the first few chapters of Acts, you don’t see any of this Christian socialism at work as the Church spreads.

Which leaves Paul’s seeming anticipation of the Communist Manifesto. I think what Paul is getting at is found in his explanation in the preceding verse: “For I mean not that other men be eased and you burdened, but by an equality” (II Corinthians 8:13-14, KJV). I think Paul means that Christians should care for one another such that they all have to work about equally strenuously for their daily bread. It’s a qualitative, not a quantitative, equality. If you want to go above and beyond and snag the really well-paying job to provide more abundantly for yourself and your family, you’d just be prospering through diligence like Proverbs praises.

So, how much should Christians give? Tithing is obviously neither wrong nor unreasonable since God required it of believers at one point. If you tithe with a joyful heart, God certainly won’t be displeased. But, really, the New Testament calls us to give as much as we are able. C.S. Lewis thought a good rule of thumb was that we should give such that it cuts into our lifestyle, that is, that we can’t live at the same level of comfort as our peers in our wage level. That’s Christian sacrificial love right there.

Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

Liberals Make a Tragedy and Call It a Right

In a famous pre-battle speech, a barbarian king is said to have told his army that the Romans “make a wilderness and call it peace.” If I may paraphrase this famous dictum, I feel that liberals “make a tragedy and call it a right.” There are many examples, but time restricts me to three.

The first right, which seems to be the most important “right” to many Liberals, namely abortion, is a real tragedy. I’m going to assume here for the sake of brevity that the unborn baby is a distinct lifeform from the mother (for a detailed discussion of this premise, see my post, “When Does Life Begin According to Science?” in the archives). If it is, never in history has the world seen mothers murder their offspring by the millions. Where did this “right” come from? Not from nature, which has designed the woman’s body to take care of the baby first and which gives the mother hormones to make her attached to her baby. Few bonds in nature are stronger than a mother and her altricial young, which is what human babies are. For Liberals to sever this bond en masse is a tragedy of the highest order.

Many of the “rights” liberals insist on are thinly disguised attacks on the traditional family of a married man and woman and their children. It’s called the “traditional” family because throughout human history it’s been the primary means of producing the next generation, nurturing it, and preparing it for adulthood. It seems Liberals can’t stand it because God designed it intending for the husband/father to lead the family and they can’t tell the difference between a difference in roles and a difference of value. To prove that those are two distinct things, consider the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Father. Christ subordinated Himself to the Father in everything He did (“Not My will, but Yours, be done”), but ever since the beginning, the Church has maintained that those who didn’t hold Christ to be of the same value as the Father are heretics. Since Liberals think subordination means lesser value and women and men are equally valuable (which they are), they therefore conclude there should be no distinction in roles between men and women. So Liberals insist on “rights” that blur the distinction between men and women. They insist that men can be just as legitimate spouses to men as women and vice versa. They want the government to take over the father’s traditional role as provider for his children. Their TV shows almost universally portray fathers as lazy, gluttonous incompetents.

Liberals have been fairly successful in removing fathers from many families, but the “men of the house” have proven far from superfluous, as Liberals supposed they would. They are there in God’s plan to provide direction, discipline, protection, provision, and a good example to their children. Children who grow up without this are much more likely to live in poverty or in prison because of crime. They drop out of high school at a higher rate than children with fathers. Even when fathers don’t leave the picture entirely, half of families break up in divorce. This means that too large of a percentage of marriages that begin in happiness with vows of love end with husband and wife going to attorneys to try to take as much of the communal property for themselves as possible. Rights sometimes mean accepting some unpleasant side-effects, as when free speech means someone can offend us, but this widespread heartache, violence, and penury seem an awfully unacceptable price to pay for these so-called “rights.”

Liberals have a term for certain rights they call “entitlement” spending. This is the Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, and other wealth-redistributing taxes. I’ll set aside the question of the morality of what might be accurately described as using the threat of prison to force people to give you money for nothing in return and just focus on the practicality. Right now, we spend more on government programs, the majority of them entitlements, than we take in. Our maximum tax rate is set at a level just above where empirical evidence shows that increases in tax rates lead to decreases in tax revenues (37% as opposed to 33%), so increasing taxes won’t help. The best explanation of this phenomenon, referred to as the Laffer Curve, is the Prager U video, “Lower Taxes, Higher Revenue,” which actually cites one of Obama’s own economists’ study. I recommend viewing it- if Google will let you, that is…

Anyway, the point about the Laffer Curve here is that it means the only way to pay all those entitlements is to borrow and print money, like we’re doing. As history has shown repeatedly, however, when countries keep that up, eventually their creditors or potential creditors lose faith in the country’s ability to pay and stop lending it money. Germany could bail out a relatively small country like Greece, but who can possibly bail out the U.S.? The result is hyperinflation and worthless money. In other words, retirees’ savings will be wiped out, massive unemployment will result, and the U.S. (and probably the whole world) will enter another Great Depression. The entitlements will stop at that point by default, but by then the damage will have been done, and we shall have yet another massive tragedy in the name of “rights.” Incidentally, the poverty rate has barely shifted since LBJ began the War on Poverty, so the debt we’ve racked up this whole time has been for no real purpose. A tragedy masquerading as a right.

Liberal programs are so popular because they’re wrapped up in such pretty packages. Liberals use all the positive words they can think of to press them: “fairness,” “justice,” “choice,” etc. If we take an empirical look at the results, though, liberal policies are anything but pretty.