Part 1 excerpt: Our Lord says, "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy them but to fulfill them. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men to do so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
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In a recent book entitled The Interaction of Law and Religion, Harold J. Berman, who is a professor of law at Harvard University, and one of the most outstanding professors there, has developed a very significant thesis. His thesis in the book is that Western culture has had a massive loss of confidence in law and a massive loss of confidence in religion. He sees that one of the causes is the radical separation of one from the other, and his conclusion is that you cannot have law, or rules for behavior, without religion, because it is religion that provides the absolute base for morality and law. The man is not a Christian, but certainly, we would have to agree with his thesis. He fears that Western culture is doomed to relativism in law because of the loss of an absolute. We have broken away from religion, from the concept of God, from absolute truth, and therefore we are stuck with existential relativism when it comes to making laws. He says that law and religion will stand together or law and religion will fall together. Religion-less law could never command authority; there must be a transcendent value, a super-rational absolute. In his book, he quotes professor Thomas Frank of NYU. Frank says, "Law has become undisguisedly a pragmatic human process. It is made by men, and it lays no claim to divine origin or eternal validity." This leads professor Frank to the view that a judge in a court reaching a decision is not propounding a truth but is rather experimenting in the solution of a problem. If his decision is reversed by a higher court, or if it is subsequently overruled, that doesn't mean it was wrong, only that it was, or became in the course of time, unsatisfactory.
"Having broken away from religion," Frank states, "Law is now characterized by existential relativism. Indeed, it is now generally recognized that no judicial decision is ever final, that the law follows the event, is not eternal or certain, is made by man and is not divine or true."
Berman goes on to say, "If law is merely an experiment, and if judicial decisions are merely hunches, why should individuals or groups of people observe those legal rules or commands if they do not conform to their own interests?" He's right. Why am I quoting all of that? To tell you this: we are endeavoring, in our society, to have rules without an absolute. Court after court after court overturns some other ruling. When you abandon God and theology, you abandon truth. Trying to make laws without truth or an ultimate value is impossible. You cannot build a consistent legal system on philosophical humanism, a fluctuating, changing principle of what is right and what is wrong.
In the latest issue of Esquire Magazine, there is an article by a man named Peter Steinfels. The article is entitled "The Reasonable Right." He says this, "How can moral principles be grounded and social institutions ultimately legitimated in the absence of a religiously-based culture?" The answer is that they cannot. So some people are hinting at the issue, secular people like Steinfels and Berman and others. The are hinting at this issue: if there is no absolute truth, and no absolute word, and no God who sets the standard, then there can be no real law. You'll never get people to keep laws that are only judicial guesses.
So we ask ourselves, "What is the absolute source of truth? What is the absolute standard of morality? What is the absolute rule of justice? Where does this evil society, floating on a sea of relativism, find its anchor?" That's the question. Is there a standard to live by? Is there an absolute authority? Is there an unchanging authority, and inviolable law? In the verses I just read to you from Matthew 5:17-20, we find that, indeed, there is. That law is none other than the law of God. Jesus said that not one jot or tittle will pass from that law until everything is fulfilled. He did not come in any whit to set it aside but to fulfill it. Anyone who teaches another to break the least of those commandments is the least in the Kingdom. In other words, God has laid down an absolute, eternal, abiding law. In fact, in John 17:17, Jesus said to the Father, "Thy word is truth."
Recently, people have been questioning this in terms of Christianity, and more particularly, in my own case. A lady called the other day from a magazine which will be printing another article on whether the Bible ought to be believed in terms of the home. She said to me, "It seems to me that you don't realize times have changed. The Bible doesn't fit today anymore." I said, "That isn't the way it is; the way it is is that today doesn't fit the Bible anymore. It's today that's wrong, not the Bible."
Someone else said to me, on a radio program, "That's your interpretation. Everyone has their own interpretation, and that's the way you interpret it." The point is this: if the Bible confronts you where you don't want to be confronted, then say, "The Bible is out-of-date," or, "The Bible needs to be reinterpreted." Don't face the reality that maybe you are out-of-date and need to be reinterpreted. That's the perspective. People today want to reinterpret the Bible, to deny its authority. Chapters we once believed to be written by God are now said to be written by some rabbi who added it in. Portions of the Scripture that we don't agree with or abide by, we just shuffle off, out of the picture. We reinterpret the verses to say what we want them to say; we say, "That's cultural and doesn't relate to today." Anything at all to evade allowing the Bible to confront us in our time and place in the history of the world. Jesus is saying that not one jot or tittle will pass from it, every bit of it will be fulfilled. He did not abrogate or annul one whit of it, and anyone who teaches anyone else to disobey the smallest command in the Bible will be the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. Nothing ever changes in the Bible, nothing! We will see in our study that this is Jesus' view of God's law. By the way, whatever Jesus thinks of the Bible is what I want to think of it. Frankly, I get weary of the fact that people are constantly overturning historical interpretations, things that the church has believed for centuries, throwing them out if they conflict with the evil of today. They want to deny that the Bible is inerrant, they want to say, "There are errors in the Bible and that's one of them," or, "The Bible isn't really all inspired, or it certainly isn't authoritative. It's just a cultural thing. You can't take everything it says," so we redefine Scripture to fit our sin.
That's what's happening in our society today. The sad thing is, if you think it's tough on a society like ours, a secular society, to find an anchor, it's even tough on so-called Christianity because so-called Christianity is busy about denying the Bible. Without an absolute base, there will be no standard of behavior, and we will drift along like the world - without an anchor.
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Poster Comment:
Part 1 of a 4 part series of sermons from John MacArthur. Text and video at source link.
