Did you know that a Christian view of law hinges on a secret that God only makes known to those who fear him? I didn’t know that until the cosmic weight of David’s words recorded in Psalm 25:14 hit me like a ton of bricks! “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.”
I preached on this verse in November 2023, but its cosmic proportions—or I should say its metaphysical and cosmological ramifications—were not appreciated as they should have been because, unbeknownst to me, my thinking was more informed by Nietzsche than Jesus Christ. I’ll come back to that later, because I don’t think I’m the only Christian “infected” by Nietzsche.
But I would venture to say that Psalm 25:14, rightly understood, is both the most damning and hopeful verse in the Bible for understanding law (actually everything).
The “Secret” to a Christian View of Law
Law as most often used in the Bible refers to the Ten Commandments. Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament would demonstrate that the law must always be seen and understood in covenantal terms. Consider Deuteronomy 4:11-13:
Then you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire to the midst of heaven, with darkness, cloud, and thick darkness. And the LORD spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of the words, but saw no form; you only heard a voice. So [meaning, “in this way”] He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. (Emphasis supplied)
Of course, this refers back to Exodus 34:28:
And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water [reminding of Jesus in the wilderness!]. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments” (emphasis supplied).
Law divorced from God’s covenant is not a Christian view of law. I say that upon the authority of Galatians 2:16 and 3:21 (KJV):
By the “works of law” no person will be “justified” in God’s sight (Galatians 2:16) because even God did not give us a law that could give life, Galatians 3:21 (KJV): “for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.”
But this is where the cosmology of God’s law comes into play, and I missed it for decades.
The Foundation for Appreciating God’s Secret
Since Adam’s apostasy, all human beings have been, in Paul’s words, “under the curse of the law” (Galatians 3:10), which is death as promised in Genesis 2:17. (See also Romans 5:12 (KJV) stating “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”) Thus, we read in Galatians 3:10:
“For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, ‘Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.’”
In other words, those wanting to be right with God by trying to keep the law outside of a covenantal relationship with God in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, don’t realize they are under a cosmological curse headed in one direction only.
And “all things” pertaining to God’s law must kept because His law was ordained and established for a wholly integrated cosmos that God had put under Adam’s dominion.
But this verse presents an opportunity to consider the metaphysics and cosmology fundamental to a Christian view of the law. But, today I’ll focus only on the cosmological implications. This will help us develop a proper context for thinking about civil laws governing relationship between human beings and between us and the rest of creation.
Adam Presents the Cosmology of a Christian View of Law.
The cosmology of a Christian view of law, as it relates specifically to human beings, begins with Adam.
As a creature, he was dependent on God, as His creator, for life. And the abundance of life for him and for all human beings is to be the kind of creature God intended them to be, each with their distinctive personalities, in order to fulfill the purpose for which each was created.
To this end, God implanted in Adam—concreated him with— a law pertaining to his nature. It was effectively a rule to guide his conduct. It is what we read in Ecclesiastes 7:29, “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright.”
That unseen (metaphysical) reality—the law of human nature imbedded in a covenant relationship with God—was a type of the righteousness of God but in creaturely form. This law was not a burden to him.
Having been created in God’s image, Adam would delight in that law, even as Psalm 40:8 tells us would be true of the last Adam and second Man, Jesus, “I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.” And, of course, the same would be true for Eve who God created from Adam as a revelation of the unity but distinct personalities of God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The remnants of that uprightness concreated in Adam and Eve are described by Paul in Romans 2:15. There we read that even the Gentiles who did not have the Ten Commandments or know of its covenantal nature “shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.”
That seems to me a good way to the state of mind of those in our world who don’t know the secret of the Lord. They can’t find a way to “fit” into a cosmos that, for them, seems at times ordered and at other times disordered, consonant and contradictory.
What Every Human Being Now Needs
None of us needs a better or different “code” of laws and rules by which to live, even a Christian one if it is divorced from and isolated from the “secret” of God, His covenant.
What we need was expressed well by Ray Sutton in his book, That You May Prosper, “What man needs is . . a restoration inside the covenant.” That restoration can only come from God’s side, by God. We can’t restore what we broke, because we are broken; we are under a cosmological curse.
And that restoration requires a particular kind of faith. It is a faith in which a person puts all of life’s proverbial eggs in this one unseen, metaphysical basket pointing him or her beyond nature to a new covenant relationship with God, which can only be affected in the person of Jesus Christ, the only mediator given by God to man.
It is metaphysically impossible for any other merely human being or human institution to exceed their respective creational boundaries (blurring the Creator-creature divide) to become that mediator, that is, to be substituted in place of Christ and bring forth God-approved righteousness in a person.
Vain Thinking about Law
This brings us back to Ecclesiastes 7:29. I previously read the first part of that first, but the second must not be divorced from it. This is the verse in its entirety, “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” Here we come to how Christians should think of civil law, the laws that organize a society of wheats and tares, of Christians and non-Christians.
After 30 years in politics, I would paraphrase the second part of Ecclesiastes 7:39 this way:
Lo, this only have I found: One of those inventions is the foolish and vain thought that a righteous nation that is pleasing to God can come from or be produced by legislative bodies enacting “righteous” laws.
I submit that such thinking reflects the cosmology of Nietzsche applied to how Kant and then Darwin believed the cosmos was formed—laws operating apart from the Spirit of God on “stuff” to make things what they are. This is a cosmos without God. In it, human beings create the meaning of righteousness for a nation apart from God’s covenant and the work of the holy Spirit restoring in its residents a right covenantal relationship with God in Christ.
Inventive, indeed! And it is the understanding of law I labored under for most of that 30 years, and the one I fear so many others are laboring under.
Summing Up
In sum, to be in a right covenantal relationship with God is a cosmology in which a person will grow in a righteousness that will produce an abundance of life that will continue into eternity. That is what the new covenantal relationship with God by Holy Spirit-formed union with the perfectly righteous Christ does—how it works! It’s the Christian’s cosmology.
But the negative side of the covenantal secret—of being outside a rightly ordered covenantal relationship with God—is that it, too, works inexorably, but toward death. The separation from the love of God will continue into eternity for those who do not know this “secret” of God. That’s our now-native cosmology.
Legislative bodies passing laws cannot lift the effects of the cosmological curse they are under through Adam.
“Law is spiritual” (Romans 7:14). And its spiritual nature is also covenantal. That’s how the cosmos works. That is a Christian’s cosmology of law.
Next week we will consider the cosmic-sized consequences of a Christian cosmology of law.
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