My discussion in recent weeks about the relevance of God’s covenant secret to a Christian view of law might have left some wondering why I am “trying to answer questions you never asked.” C.S. Lewis, “What Christians Believe” in Mere Christianity.
But Lewis warned that the answers he provided “are purely practical, though they do not look as if they were.” (Emphasis supplied) He said they provide “directions for dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the journey” but “they do not make sense until a man has reached those places.”
In my opinion, we have come to a particular “cross-road” and “obstacle” in our endeavors as voters, policy and legal advocates, donors to those advocacy organizations, and, in general, as Christian citizens living in the United States. It seems that the way Christians have been doing things over the last fifty years has had no salutary directional effect. Ethical, social and governmental fragmentation, if not dissolution, are on the horizon if not arrested.
That’s why I been discoursing on God’s covenant “secret” relative to law. Psalm 25:14. Frustration and urgency may allow us to see that the relevance of covenants to law now “make sense.” I hope to make the topic more sensible and relevant today.
Evaluating Our Efforts in Law and Politics Honestly
We could blow the topic off. We could assume this cross-road is the result of not doing a good enough job in our political engagement. But, I can tell you that more money and energy have been spent in the last decade on engagement, planning, polling, focus group analyses, and well-orchestrated get out the vote efforts than I’ve seen in my 30 years of engagement. By those metrics, doing “better” at these things is not the issue.
We also now have several well-funded Christian legal advocacy organizations showing up in our courtrooms on all the significant societal and religious issues. Why last week we got a “big win” in the U.S. Supreme Court according to a large Christian worldview organization. I dissented from that conclusion.
Therefore, I think Christians need to look at something more fundamental, God’s secret, His covenant.
Some Covenant Concept Will Inform Your View of Life and Law
Christians necessarily live and operate under some understanding what God’s covenant secret is. That is a part of a Christian cosmology, our understanding of how the world works.
And, as I explained last week, the covenant most fundamental to Christian living at this point is the covenant of grace between God the Father and God the Son. It’s metaphysical foundation, as I explained, is that God’s being is Triune, making an “agreement” possible.
Is the Prevailing Covenant View Yours?
One view is that the purpose of God’s covenant of grace is to save a comparatively small number of folks, historically speaking, from Hell; take them to Heaven; and otherwise let the Devil run God’s original very good creation into the ground.
While bluntly stated, that seems to be the majority view in evangelical circles today but, that also seems to turn the covenant of grace into God’s official abandonment of the intention He had for creation in the first place. That’s a big win for the works of the Devil over creation!
It also makes engagement in restoring a Christ-centered foundation to law and and its application to public policy vain per se. The best Christians can hope to do is slow the approaching evil on our way off history’s stage.
To me, this covenant view seems to reduce Christ’s work of destroying the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) to a Jesus-themed Buzz Lightyear taking a few of us into infinity and beyond.
Is the Minority Covenant View Yours?
A different view of the purpose of God’s covenant would say the decline is the inexorable working out of the metaphysics and cosmology of Nietzsche.
But how does an evaluation of our situation in terms of a Nietzschean cosmology represent a “covenantal” view of the world and law? How does it relate to the covenant of grace I detailed last week?
Perhaps more importantly and as a practical matter, how could this understanding of law and public policy in relation to the covenant of grace make our engagement in those spheres salutary, a restoration of the good not just forestalling an evil? Alternatively, we might ask if a covenant-of-grace understanding will keep our work in these spheres from being in vain.
Those are the questions I suspect you’ve wanted me to answer and here it is!
The Works Scripture Categorize as Salutary vis-a-vis “in Vain”
A verse critical to answering these questions is 1 Corinthians 15:58 (KJV): “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” (Emphasis supplied).
To avoid vain labors, they must first conform to the work the Lord is doing which is according to the covenant of grace. Moreover, our labor “in the Lord” as it relates to law, which is spiritual and covenantal, must be in the context of that covenant. Work divorced from that context is not “in the Lord” as it is not the work the Lord is doing; it will be in vain.
How I Once Thought About Kingdom Work in Law and Public Policy
That thought should be sobering enough, but consider with me familiar words of Jesus that I misemployed for years to justify what I did in politics and law, Matthew 6:33-34:
[S]eek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
I thought advancing the Kingdom of God and and His righteousness was working hard to enact laws that conformed to a moral “Code of Conduct” prescribed by God. I was not worried about “tomorrow” in relation to clothing, food, and shelter, but in relation to our nation’s “social environment.” That motivation can easily become nothing but “Make America Great Again.” I now find that approach wrong for three reasons.
Why My Thinking Was Wrong
First, the Kingdom of God referenced in Jesus’s words is composed of the “ekkelsia” meaning literally, those called out, which we tend to limit to the word church and its ecclesiology. But cosmologically-speaking, they alone have been “translated into the Kingdom of [God’s] dear son” (Colossians 1:13, KJV). According to the remainder of that verse, the rest of mankind and the institutions they influence are “under the power of darkness,” meaning under the curse and, in relation to the Devil, they have been “taken captive by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26).
Second, because it is God’s kingdom, its pursuit can’t be separated from the pursuit of God’s righteousness. To seek the one is to necessarily seek the other. That is the cosmology of God’s kingdom, grounded in who Christ is, which is learned from and grounded in the covenant of grace.
Third, for reasons I explained last week, the righteousness we are to pursue first, as in an order of priority, does not find its end or its means in legislative enactments, no matter how righteous they may seem to us or what harms they may in the moment limit. The words of the Apostle Paul relative to this point in Romans 10:2-4 still sting in my ears and prick my heart:
“For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end (telos) of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.”
In other words, the righteousness that we should seek first in order of priority as citizens of God’s kingdom and by which it matures and expands is of a nature we could not even aspire to in our corrupt and polluted condition under the curse. The wages of sin put this kind of righteousness way over our pay grade, as a presidential candidate once quipped.
The Way We Work For Righteousness May Be In Vain
To the preceding verses we must add Roman 3:21-22: “[T]he righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe.”
In other words, the law prescribed in the Ten Commandments bore witness to the righteousness of God, but it was not the real thing itself. The real thing was manifested in the life of Jesus Christ, and his righteousness is ours only “by faith of Jesus Christ.” Romans 9:30 is to the same effect; it refers to the “righteousness which is of faith” (emphasis supplied).
Only that which is done by faith in the content and purpose of God’s covenant of grace is a righteous work in God’s eye that He will honor and from which He will bring salutary effects. Consider Hebrews 11:6 (KJV): “[W]ithout faith it is impossible to please him” (Hebrews 11:6, KJV). And if “he that he eateth not of faith” is guilty of “sin” (Romans 14:23, KJV), what might God say of those who confess God but believe righteous legislation results from having the political power to enact them and that human laws alone ensure justice for wrongdoing?
What God’s Covenant Law Does
And additional consideration that may thwart our engagement is that the knowledge of God’s law cannot impart kingdom life, as was made abundantly clear by Paul’s life; he was “an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a pharisee” (Philippians 3:5). Paul knew the words of the law, even some of their import, but he did not know the Christ to whom the law pointed.
In fact, because God’s relationship with Adam as the first representative head of humanity was covenantal and was broken, God’s law now actually “works wrath” (Romans 4:15). The verb translated “works” is an indicative statement—a statement of fact. Therefore, it is making a cosmological statement; it explains how the world works when it is under the cosmic curse of sin.
So, if God’s law does not create the life that is righteous in God’s sight apart from the work of the Spirit in a person in relation to that knowledge, is it not vain to think the laws we enact or that judges pronounce will in themselves effect any righteousness that would rightly shape persons, the society they form, and the institutions they establish? It is evolutionist who believe laws can shape things independent of God and his works.
Therefore, I believe that thinking the laws we enact will, in themselves, have a salutary effect on those under the cosmic curse of sin is akin to those earlier described by Paul as being “ignorant of God's righteousness” (Romans 10:2).
Practical Application
So, what does the Christian view of law and public policy mean in light of God’s covenant of grace in its real world application? What does it mean to those of us concerned about the direction in which our nation is headed?
I believe it means the objectives of those involved in legal and public policy advocacy must be informed by what God the Father and God the Son are doing toward the consummation of their everlasting covenant of grace. And it must be done by faith, not by grasping after power as if we can confess God while embracing the cosmology of Machiavelli’s Prince and Nietzsche’s Übermensch. To embrace that cosmology to “win” is to dig the hole we are in deeper.
And those who support their work need to evaluate it in the same way. What covenant view does their work, not just their words, seem to embrace?
The foregoing assumes, of course, that God’s covenantal purpose is to destroy the works of the devil, not just slow them down until we can escape, and put all things under the feet of Jesus.
But, if that is the kind of work God is doing according to the covenant of grace, conforming to it means we need to have some idea of what that kind of work looks like. That is the topic I hope to take up next week.
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