How Shall They Know? – Uses of the Law: The Law Defines Sin (5)

How Shall They Know?

Uses of the Law: The Law Defines Sin (5)

Romans 7:7

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”

The unbelieving world knows where its discomfort comes from in questions of morality: the Law of God. Under the pretense of the specious doctrine of “separation of Church and State,” unbelievers have managed to eject the Law of God from schools, courthouses, and deliberative assemblies, thus sparing their consciences the pain of guilt, shame, and fear which the Law of God engenders there.

This situation has not always been the case. During the colonial period of America’s history, prior to the Revolution, schools, courtrooms, public assemblies, households—every area of life—knew the presence and expressed the beauty of the Law of God. Over the centuries, however, that presence has been eroded and, now, lost.

And Christians have been complicit in this conspiracy against the defining standard of all moral goodness.

By our failure to teach the Law in the churches, we are raising up generation after generation of believers who are practicing moral relativists when it comes to their own conduct. Whatever they can get away with and rationalize to themselves as “loving” or “forgivable” they will do, encrusting their own consciences with evil works and making it harder for the Spirit of God to do His proper work there.

Much less do we bring the Law of God into questions of public morality. Yes, we rant and fume and fulminate to get the Ten Commandments back in the schools and courtrooms of the land. But we do not live the commandments, and we do not speak of the Law in our conversations with neighbors or in any of the social and cultural arenas where the Law is powerful to bring real goodness and beauty to light.

Our generation will not begin to know what sin is until we begin to show and tell them by our lives and teaching that the Law of God defines the parameters of good and evil.

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Bookstore, then Church Issues.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.