The PuritanBoard - View Single Post - "I did not come to destroy the law or the prophets"

JohnV · #17 (**permalink**) 12-17-2004, 01:09 PM

Aaron:

For what it's worth, here is my understanding of what you bring up in your post, and in relation to some of the things mentioned subsequently.

The text that says that not one jot or tittle sould pass from the law is wholly consistent with the NT theology that Christ came to satisfy all the law for us, so that we are no longer under law but under grace. That does not mean, and I don't think at all that Calvin says either, that any part of the law is just cast out. In fact, when Calvin speaks about the law being abolished, he is speaking about that the law being against us is abolished, as in Eph. 2, I believe. He upholds the teaching in Rom. that says that we were saved while we were yet sinners.

What you are referring to, Aaron, is a kind of dispensational view of the OT/NT relationship. But the OT is still just as much part of revelation in all its detail. On the other hand, it is not the opposite, that there is no distinction betweent the OT and the NT. The entire OT is recast in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Neither the law that is intrinsic in man, being created in the image of God into an ordered world, nor the legislated law added thousands of years later are meant to pass away without there first being a new constitution, so to speak. Christ is that new constitution, and in that new constitution do we find the true meaning of the laws that originally pointed to Him from the beginning.

So I believe you are right, Aaron, in pointing to John 8. We can either read it as a specific abrogation of law, in that promiscuity is no longer a sin for which stoning is the proper punishment, but is to be merely let go with a warning; or we can read it to show us how under the new constitution of Christ there is a fulfilling of the law on behalf of the sinner, so that all the ordinances against her have been abolished in Christ. Notice carefully that in no way does this latter interpretation cast aside even one small law or part of a law, but is wholly consistent with the keeping of all the law.

Now that is the law in relation to us personally. In relation to the state, it is not as though there is another moral standard to go by other than the perfect holiness of the Biblical standard. But we cannot apply, and should not apply, the OT laws without the context of the new constitution to the entire society. We can order the moral grounds and equity of any legislated law upon the the intrinsic laws of the created order as well as the legislated laws of the nation of God's people.

Legislated law is the application of the moral intrinsic law upon the situations in society, and is subject to change and even nullification based upon the equity of the application. (By intrinsic law, again, I mean the law that is founded upon God's character set within man at the ordering of creation. )This is not situational ethics, but is rather its opposite; in the sense that situational ethics allows for a change in ethic based upon the situtation, while the legislation of the society upon an unchanging moral ethic allows latitude in the particular application which suits the situation according to that unchanging moral code. We find that even God changes His own legislation from time to time to the particular situation, so that His glory and His righteousness remains perfectly intact, and that the law will not be misapplied. I think of the David and his men eating the showbread, and that they did not go through any kind of cleansing ceremony, of the daughters of Zelophehad, of Naaman and the widow of Zeraphath, which Jesus mentions, and such like. This, then, coincides completely with John 8, and Jesus sending the woman away with forgiveness. Also the man on the cot let down through the roof tiles. The idea would be the unbreakable moral code upon which legislated law rests.

So we can have a society which punishes a certain offence with very serious consequences to the offender, or we can have a society which punishes that same offence to a lesser degree. This would happen for two basic reasons: first would be that the second society has a lowered its moral standard; the second would be that the society has sustained its moral standard, but has taken into account the particular application to its societal order to maintain that standard. A lesser punishment does not necessarily mean a lowering of the standard.

The concept of theonomy, as I understand it, is a call back to the Biblical standard for law in this nation and others. There is no other standard; there is no other moral; there is no other just principle. Our societies are falling prey to a "new morality", in that they justify the most heinous of crimes, namely abortion, as well as the perversion due to godlessness known as homosexuality, among others. Surely the Biblical standard has gone from the law of the land. In our time, one would think, the basis of law should be harder, not softer, on certain offences, so as to be a deterrant, according to the second use of the law, to restrain evil. This, however, though it should never be done in absence of the third and first uses of the law, namely to call the unregenerate unto the goodness of God's grace, and the reflection of God's holiness, yet neither should the third and first applications of the law be without the second. For either one of these misapplications would constitute another standard than the Word of God. And that is the basic notion of theonomy, as I understand it.