Natural Law

January 1, 2013

But the covenant of creation is a covenant that was made with absolutely all mankind in Adam. The covenant of grace is made with those who are elect in the second Adam. These cannot be the same covenants because they are not made with the same people. The covenant of grace is made with a distinct subset of those with whom the covenant of creation was made. It must therefore be a distinct covenant. The question is this: there is a remainder left over after the covenant of grace is established? Are these people in the remainder under any covenantal obligations to God at all? The answer has to be yes.

I wonder if this is the best approach to this question. Because this way of framing it suggests that God has made a covenant with unbelievers. I don’t think the Bible implies that.

What seems to me to be the case, rather, is that at the creation, God created two believers, Adam and Eve. His covenant was with them, and the covenants that God makes are always with believers.

But it does not follow that the non-elect, non-believing world have zero obligations to God. We do not need a “natural law” theory to provide a foundation for such a thought. When men and women apostatize from God, they are guilty for the apostasy (covenant-breaking) and for every act of apostasy which they forthwith commit, just as a man who commits adultery has truly broken covenant, and is guilty on every subsequent point of unfaithfulness on that very ground.

The problem with the sins of unbelievers is not that they are violations of natural law. The problem is that they are acting in rebellion against, not simply and only the righteous demands of a divine law, but the grace of God in Christ Jesus. That rebellion is enacted, not only by the refusal to believe with the heart and confess with the mouth the resurrected Lord (Rom 10), but also by every single act that violates the ethos of His kingdom.

This provides all the ground we need to speak to the moral issues of our day, and (equally importantly) it guards us from speaking to moral issues in a way detached from the gospel. I see no evidence in Scripture that God’s people are assigned a task of calling people to account for their actions in any fashion that is not directly “evangelistic.” It is precisely the covenant of grace that is at issue with the world of unbelief; it is precisely with Christ the risen Saviour that this world has to do; and it is He, as such, who will judge the world. That is the message of Paul in Athens; and it is the message we find again and again in the New Testament.

The people of God have no stake whatsoever in getting men to conform to “natural law.” They have the full weight of God’s mission to call men to Christ, including the “ethical” and “moral” patterns of His life-bringing kingdom.

And yes, this does include our so-called “political” discourse (as if the discourse of Christians who are ambassadors of the universal King could be anything but political).

I agree with Wilson: Our interface with the wounded world, morally sick and evil, is a discourse founded upon theocracy (which, note well, is not the same as ecclesiocracy, i.e. the civil rule of the institutional Church).

But of what sort of theocracy are we speaking? God rules in Christ, and this rule is all-inclusive; and it is always directly connected to the covenant of grace. (Indeed, passages such as Matthew 11:11 clearly imply that the kingdom of God is essentially synonymous with the new covenant.)

Jesus Christ came as the embodiment of the reign of God. He did not come as the dispenser of natural law, but as the mediator of the covenant of grace, the suffering Saviour destined to be raised. It is this King who rules the nations, and precisely as such.