“…the value (ethical and social weight) of a precept is comprehended by the severity of the sanction attached to it…” (Joe Boot, The Mission of God)
Every society has a heartbeat. Under every social order, there is an invisible pulse that drives its visible manifestations. One of the clearest places where we see this pulse manifested is in the legal system. This is especially true in nations like the United States, where the people vote for their own representatives and lawmakers. If you want to know the heart of a society, start examining its legal system. You will find the heartbeat somewhere under all that technical legal jargon.
The Civil Law Reveals the Heart of a Society
The civil law, along with the severity of its various penalties, reveals a society’s heart. What we call crime, and the varied severity with which we treat it, exposes our collective values. For example, murder is one of the highest crimes in civilized nations. As such, it carries with it the strictest punishments, whether execution (preferable) or life in prison.
The severity with which we punish the murderer speaks volumes about how we value human life. This is why we punish murder more strictly than we punish theft. The heart of our society is that a person is worth more than material goods. Theft is not acceptable, but the thief can be restored to society. The murderer cannot be restored to society. They both took something that wasn’t theirs to take. However, the murderer has taken what he can never return.
There are many ways that our current legal system reveals an ugly picture of our cultural heartbeat. The most obvious example is abortion. The federal government along with many state governments are trying to codify it into the law as a right. For some fifty years now, we have been shouting through our legal system that we value some lives more than others. Countless women and abortion providers, along with those who encouraged and aided them, have taken what they can never return.
What does it say about our view of human life when we support and celebrate the practice of discarding it? At the same time, many of these same women want you to go riot in the streets whenever a life is taken in one of our cities. Of course, not just any life, but a life that the media and politicians tell you to care about. Our social hatred for murder is not based on the value of life, but on political agendas and narratives. That is why some lives are mourned and spark national outcries, while others are discarded proudly.
We respond to some murders by saying, “How dare you take that life!” We respond to others by saying, “How dare you try to prevent us from taking that life!” The value of life is no longer important to our society, and it shows out in our current legal code. It is no longer whether life is valuable, but which life is valuable. We have a rotten social heart.
God’s Civil Law is a Revelation of His Heart
With this in mind, it is no leap in logic to say that we can look at the civil law which God gave to Israel, and there we can find His heart. In His law, He reveals His heart and His intention for the heart of His people. Sometimes we forget that God pre-packaged and handed an entire civil, legal, and penal system to His people. We have lawmakers, but He was the original Lawmaker. Did He give His legal system to His people as an overbearing taskmaster, or as a revelation of His own heart? The latter is true.
As you read the laws and matching penalties God detailed for Israel, ask yourself what they reveal about God’s heart. What do they say about His view of human life? What do they say about His view of a person’s right to his own property and his responsibility toward his neighbor? What do they say about how God views the responsibility of the men of His society to care well for the women? Ask yourself how God tells His people to treat sickness and disease, and what that says about human dignity. The questions could go on. Ask these kinds of questions and you will never read Leviticus the same again.
This kind of thinking leads to an important question. If God’s heart is revealed in the legal code He gave to His Old Testament people, is that legal code still relevant today? Christ came to fulfill the Law, not abolish it. God does not change. His heart does not change. This brings up the question of theonomy. Should nations pattern their legal systems after the Old Testament law code of God?
I believe theonomy in general is inevitable for the Christian. The question isn’t whether you will be a theonomist, but what stripe of theonomy you are going to hold to. If the heart of God is revealed in His legal system, can we really justify throwing the whole thing out? We can debate what transfers over and how, but at the very least we must work at extracting the heart of God in the Law and applying it to our own.
Some will say, “Yes, but the Law is for God’s people (the Church), not for whole nations. It is how God wants His people to live.” For now, I will give one simple response. At the least, we should still want as much of His legal standard as possible applied to even the secular societies within which we live. Though the culture may not be regenerate, only good can come from applying the heart of God to it. In doing so, the Spirit may even draw men to Himself. In doing so, the Church only stands to have greater freedom and opportunities for the advance of the Kingdom.
Near to the Heart of God
If the legal and penal code of a society is the manifestation of its heart, and the Law of God is a revelation of His own heart, then the logical conclusion follows. The more a society aligns its laws with that of God’s, the closer that society comes to His very heart.
First, when a society aligns itself with God’s Law, it evidences that there are enough regenerate persons within it to have caused that to happen. Ten righteous people would have made the difference for Sodom between God’s judgment and His patience.
Second, when a society aligns itself with God’s Law, the Gospel of God is not only something that the Church proclaims, but also something that permeates the atmosphere. For an individual, the jump to converted Christian out of a pagan ecosystem is much more extreme than the step from a Christian ecosystem.
Third, a society aligned with God's Word will experience greater measures of common grace. If you live in such a society, whether you are personally regenerate or not, you will experience the goodness of God as a natural consequence. Even the lost, whose eternal state lies in misery, will find their temporal state to be sweeter. As a side note to this, those who still reject Christ in the midst of such a Christian ecosystem display an even greater tragedy, as they have no excuse. In their cautionary tales, one can hear the echoes of Hebrews 6:4-8.
May we see our nation return to the heart of God in its legal system. And may we work in every way possible to affect that change.
Introducing The Afterthought - On this episode, “Even Atheists are Waking up to the Good of Christian Culture.”