Follow the Law

When a legislator promulgates a law, is he himself subject to that law? When we are talking about people legislating for other people, as does Congress, we are very prone to say yes. When the Congress specifically exempts itself from the laws it passes, we see that as hypocrisy. But God is a Legislator; He is a law-giver. Is He, also, subject to His own laws? There is only one Biblical answer, and it is no:

Worship

Paul and Barnabas were horrified when pagan people offered them worship:

"Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people.  Which when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out, and saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein:  Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways.  Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.  And with these sayings scarce restrained they the people, that they had not done sacrifice unto them." (Acts 14:13-18).

But wait, where is the problem here in receiving worship?:

"The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. " (Revelation 4:10-11).

Easy-peasy. Why would anyone expect there to be a general rule touching upon the propriety of divine worship which isn't contingent upon the object's status as creature or Creator? There is no such rule; divine worship is not malum in se, wrong in itself; it depends on Who or whom is being worshipped.

In some respects, we are told to be like God: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." (Matthew 5:48). Just as God sends His rain on the just and the unjust, we can do whatever our specialty is even in favor of people who are ungrateful and unappreciative. But don't try too hard with this business of emulating God, or you'll be slapped down. We do not abide by the same rules.

Divine Command

Where did the moral imperatives that human beings live under come from? Did God discover these and hand them on, or did He institute them? The Bible says that He is the law-giver:

Given its harmony with scripture, it's easy to see why Divine Command ethics is popular with Christians. It is not however the only viewpoint. It's not characteristic of Divine Command ethics that the rules must be the same for us as for God, and so the fact that they are not, in scripture, is not a problem. And it leaves God's freedom to legislate unimpaired.

But there are dissenters. One alternative theory was proposed by Robert Lewis Dabney in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Malum in Se

In secular law, a distinction is made between actions which are wrong and immoral in themselves, which would be wrong whether they were illegal or not, and malum prohibitum, actions which are wrong because prohibited by law. Failing to stop at a red light, for example, is not inherently wrong, but only becomes so after a social agreement that red means stop and green means go. This is a meaningful distinction within its proper category of use, but one Southern clergyman, Robert Lewis Dabney, had the brainstorm that it could be shoe-horned into Biblical ethics, legitimizing slavery in the process. Does the overly literal reader get the impression that God doesn't like slavery? You know, "If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing." (Exodus 21:2). Or,

Does it feel like the noose is tightening, Pharaoh? Not so fast! We are going to veer off in a surprising direction here. Who do we know that enslaves people? Why, God, of course. Paul calls himself the slave of God: "Paul, a servant [doulos, slave] of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness. . ." (Titus 1:1). Indeed He owns us all, He bought us, the whole church! So God is a slave-owner, and therefore slave-owners are above reproach.

This Copernican Revolution in Christian ethics inverts the previous standards. The moral rightness or wrongness of given actions becomes, not a consequence of the decree of God, but rather an inherent quality belonging to those actions in and of themselves. God discovers them just as we do and can no more change them than can we. Either slavery is malum in se, wrong in itself, in which case God cannot be a slave-owner as we know He is, or slavery is not wrong at all. It is morally innocent and anyone can be a slave-owner, just like God.

This system takes away God's freedom to make rules for His children. Does God really believe the more the merrier; does He invite us to join Him at the slave-owners' table? I doubt it, given that Jesus said a man cannot serve two masters; the slave of God cannot also be the slave of a man. But there are plenty of occasions in God's providential governance of the world in which He arranges outcomes which would be considered morally questionable if they were brought about by unguided human agency. Deuteronomy 28 contains an extensive catalogue of things God intends to do to those who do not measure up to His commands. Servitude is included: "Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee." (Deuteronomy 28:48).

So does that make it right for us to do all these things to our fellows, absent God's command? The intentional infliction of medical illness is one of the things Dr. Mengele was accused of. But God does that, too: "The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish." (Deuteronomy 28:22). Try spooning your anthrax powder into envelopes and sending them to people; see what happens. You'll spend a long time in jail, and a longer time in hell. The rules are not the same for us and God. There is nothing to Dabney's argument; the moral law is not equally applicable to God, as is implied by the procedure of making God's actions regulatory for man. If God does it, it cannot be malum in se and therefore we should feel free to follow suit, regardless of what God explicitly instructed us to do? In Noah's day, God exterminated the entire human race save only for eight people. Do not try this at home.

Problem of Evil

This idea that moral offense is an intrinsic property of given actions rather than a meaning extrinsically assigned to them in the freedom of God leads inevitably to the conclusion that what it is wrong for us to do, it is also wrong for God to do. This would include, for example, mass murder such as occurred in Noah's day. But the cases are so unalike that this seems a strange conclusion. No human being stands in such relation to his fellows that he can give life, "See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand." (Deuteronomy 32:39). Even your own parents did not make you alive in the same sense as God does; should He blow out your guttering flame, go out it will.

You hear about the 'problem of evil' not only from believers concerned, for instance, that a sweet, elderly saint died slowly and painfully from cancer, but most prominently from atheists who build the case that, since God commits genocide, He ought to be deposed. Indeed, God has accomplished genocide so total that no one even remembers the name of the ancient people who displeased Him. But how can God carry out His providential governance of the world without seeing to it that bad things happen to bad people?

If you inquire further, you will often find that the standard of ethics being employed by the detractors is something like, 'you must not cause any pain to any sentient being.' Truly if that's the standard, God violates it right and left. But justice cannot be done without causing pain to any sentient being. Truly some sentient beings deserve what they get.

But would 'evil world' even have been doable, or would it collapse into a dust-storm of contradiction? God made the whole structure, the whole fabric of the world, to be harmonious and complete. He not only legislated the rules, He made the world in which they operate. Would 'evil world' have been makeable,— a world where thievery, lying, and cheating are encouraged rather than legislated against? Would that not be a world of constant strife, where all the bad faith transactions continually going on would lead to endless conflict with resultant inescapable human misery? Would not mere consequentialism rise up against the God who tried to make this world and tie His hands? What does it mean to say that God was free to make thievery good rather than bad? As He made the world, so He made the consequences; in 'evil world,' I imagine, thievery would work, for the thief at least. And yes, it would be a miserable world, for those exiled in it. The world of the antediluvian world-makers must have been going swimmingly in their view; they didn't see the problem. As children of God, we would have seen it.

Pied Piper

Has anyone ever generalized Robert Lewis Dabney's ethical system, so that not only slave-owning, but mass murder and other things normally thought beyond the pale are discovered to be just fine? As it happens, Douglas Wilson made the great discovery that, in this system, there is no bar to outright antinomianism. Are Christian youth frustrated that their parents won't let them do what the cool kids do, namely drink, smoke, and cuss? No problem, God can do those things! If He can, why not us?

We see the results displayed in this group's beach-head in Ogden, Utah. Wilson is always complaining that his experience, growing up, was of not sitting at the cool kids' table. His approach appeals, of course, not to new converts who are zealous for the things of the Lord, but to children raised in Christian homes, who never chose these disciplines for themselves, and frankly don't see the point. The value proposition he is offering is antinomianism, and it sells like hot-cakes.

The Bible is unambiguous on this point of purity of thought, word and deed. "But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth." (Colossians 3:8). They just don't want to do it. Far better just to do what He says and ask questions later.