“Natural Law”

Sunday, August 20, 2023

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

(Romans 1.19-20)

This passage helps us to understand God’s expectations of man in earlier ages.  Clearly, at the present time it’s somewhat of an academic inquiry, since the gospel of Jesus Christ has been shared far and wide.  As Paul told an audience of pagan Athenians,

“Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

(Acts 17.29-31)

But something like God’s attitude toward the Gentiles of old tends to come up in discussions of morality today, when people can’t agree on a basis for their judgments, but nonetheless seek to find a common moral framework.

A bit later in Romans, Paul continues discussing the topic of man’s sinfulness:

For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

(Romans 2.12-16)

God gave a Law to his chosen people Israel, and held them accountable to its provisions; but he did not expect even their gentile neighbors to live up to the very same standard—to say nothing of nations living on the opposite side of the globe!  How could he expect them to, for example, refrain from wearing clothes “made of two kinds of material” (Le 19.19), when he never told them that sort of behavior was prohibited?  Our innate sense of justice tells us it is wrong to penalize people for infractions they did not and could not understand; and it’s that same innate sense of justice, more or less, that formed the standard to which God held ancient gentiles.  From where did our sense of justice come?  God put it in our hearts!

In the modern day, discussions of natural law usually come from one of two motivations.  The first sort comes from those who don’t believe in God at all, but who can’t shake their innate, God-given sense of justice, and so appeal to natural law as a stand-in to explain away their moral value judgments.  This, of course, makes no sense.  Yes, we can observe that even people who disagree about many—perhaps all!—facets of God’s character and commandments, nevertheless tend to agree that things like rape and murder are bad.  “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts” (Ro 2.15), but who wrote it there?  Whose law is it?  To say it is simply natural does not answer these questions, from an atheist, materialist perspective; and furthermore, it does nothing to explain why certain individuals feel no pangs of conscience over the atrocities they’ve committed.  The only option left is to say that something is improperly, unnaturally altered in such people, which gives rise to the very same spiritual quandary the atheist was attempting to avoid by appealing to nature. 

The other sort of person who invokes natural law is one who believes in God, but is either too embarrassed to appeal to God’s authority on matters of right and wrong—which is…strange, to say the least—or else, he holds an opinion on a moral matter, but he can’t adequately explain it, and so he appeals to this nebulous and unquestionable natural law to support his position.  Neither of these makes any sense, either!  The latter approach, hopefully, needs no further rebuke.  As for the former, if you hope to convince an unbeliever of the truth on a specific moral issue, you should perhaps ask yourself, what good is it, to convince him about economic collectivism, or pre-marital sex, or racially-motivated violence, while he rejects Christ and so dooms himself to an eternity in hell?  Viewing heavenly and earthly things in perspective, perhaps you should focus your efforts on convincing such a person of the truth of the gospel, rather than using lies to convince him of the truth on comparatively minor issues. 

Who has the ultimate authority to decide what is right and wrong?  Is it nature?  Nature is not a person, but has often been depicted as a goddess.  If this were so, it would be difficult to escape the conclusion that lady Nature is cruel and indifferent.  All things end in pain, death and decay, and in general the most effective means of staving off that end are the very same behaviors natural law seems to prohibit—such as lies, theft, murder, enslavement, and abandonment.  If that grates against your sensibilities, you must ask yourself: why?  Perhaps your first answer would be, “well, everyone knows that!”  But the obvious follow-up question is, how do they know it?  The answer is that someone planted this knowledge in our hearts; and one day we “will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead” (1Pe 4.5).

Jeremy Nettles

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