Keeping laws cannot
save us, as we were reminded earlier this week. God gave his law to Israel for the purpose of demonstrating to mankind our total inability to consistently abide by whatever rules we might make for ourselves, not so
that we could accumulate sufficient spiritual brownie points to inspire St. Peter
to open the gate of heaven just a crack and let us squeak through.
That being understood,
laws still serve a very useful purpose. They cannot by themselves reclaim a
single lost human heart, but a society in which the majority of citizens
recognize and respect the rule of law will do notably better over the long term
than a society that operates only on the principle of the will to power.
We are currently
observing the abandonment of the rule of law south of the (Canadian) border.
Reframing the Framers
Law is ever and always
about the original intent of the lawgiver(s). It is utter nonsense to suggest that only the
currently acceptable technical construction of words on a page matters. When we deliberately sever legal language from what we know of the minds
and hearts of the people who penned it, we are engaging in a kind of fraud. At its
most innocent the resulting interpretation of the text is logically incoherent; at its most malignant it can be treasonous.
Now of course everyone
in the U.S. still pays lip service to rule of law as a concept, but in practice
it has been discreetly abandoned. This has largely been accomplished by
ignoring the ample historical evidence testifying to the intentions of the founding fathers responsible
for the framing of the U.S. constitution. We can only understand what men of other generations meant by the words they used if we take the time to look at the other things Franklin, Hamilton, Washington and the rest of the Framers wrote. Supplying our own politically-charged modern redefinitions of their terminology might get us what we want, but we cannot in honesty claim constitutional authority for them.
The Will to Power
The Left would argue
that in employing the executive order as his primary means of enacting his
democratic mandate, President Trump is not respecting the intent of the Founders and the systemic checks and balances they set in place in the best
interests of the American people. They might even have a point if their own
president had not set Mr. Trump the convenient precedent of doing
precisely the same thing. One must play the game by the rules as they are currently
being interpreted, right?
Meanwhile, the Right
correctly points out that the 9th circuit judicial ruling that quashed the
president’s order for a temporary travel ban is even more egregious, and that
no lower court has the legitimate constitutional clout to defy the president on this particular issue.
In such a context,
appeals to the precise language of the constitution are meaningless. Both sides
are really just playing politics, not seriously seeking to discern authorial
intent. It is not law or truth but the will to power that is at work
here ... and I believe we will shortly see whose will is most powerful.
Technical Compliance and Murder
Israel found itself in
the same boat at many points in its chequered history. Nominally, they were a
nation subject to the law of God. Even the king was required to respect the
written opinion of Heaven in his dealings. King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard
for a vegetable garden, but rule of law stood in his way, so he went to bed and sulked. He rightly understood that even the king serves the written word.
I guarantee President
Trump is not sulking in his bed this morning, but that is neither here nor
there. We live in a different age.
But Ahab’s wife
Jezebel was not from Israel. She was a Sidonian princess who worshiped Baal. The law of Moses meant as little to her as the intent of the Founders appears
to mean to Judge James Robart. She very efficiently arranged to have Naboth
falsely accused of cursing God and the king and stoned to death. She used the
technical mechanism of the law of Moses to accomplish what she was unwilling or
unable to do with her own hands. There was the appearance of justice: two witnesses were found in compliance with
rule of law, and the legal penalty for cursing God was meted out on Naboth, the alleged
lawbreaker. It was all technically above board.
But the spirit of the
law had been crushed like a bug. Its intent had been thwarted, though its
letter had been respected.
The Inexorable Logic of Power Politics
From a Sidonian perspective
Jezebel’s thinking was perfectly logical. Her metric was nothing more elegant
than this: “Do you now govern Israel?”
Who’s on the throne?
Who’s got the clout? That’s all that matters.
Will to power.
God’s opinion on all this? “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the walls of Jezreel.” Judge Robart may come to a less grisly ending. We’ll see.
Servants and Shepherds
What can we learn from this? As Christians
we are not subject to the law of Moses. As Gentile Christians we are definitely
not under law — read Acts 15 if you have any concerns about that.
Even if we were, it would be unhelpful to treat the New Testament as our own
legal document or “constitution of the Church”, picking away at the technical
definitions, deconstructing the Greek syntax and finding for ourselves convenient
penumbras and implications entirely foreign to the spirit of its Writer.
The spirit, you say? That’s awfully tricky
to discern, isn’t it?
Not really. Ahab was a wicked man, and had no interest in inquiring of the oracles of God in his day to understand what God wanted from the kings he allowed to occupy the throne of Israel. But had he done so, he would have found quite easily that the kings of Israel were never intended by God to behave themselves like they saw the kings of the nations around them doing. Their authority simply did not operate that way. Their job description was something else entirely: they were servants of the law and of the people. They were shepherds of the nation, put in place to lead God’s people out and bring them in safely again.
Discerning the Spirit
If Ahab had wanted to know the will of God
with respect to Naboth’s vineyard, it was easily accessible. Kings have no greater right to any particular plot of dirt than anyone else. And hey, if Ahab couldn’t find his answer
in the writings of the prophet Samuel, he could certainly find it by asking the
prophet Elijah, who made frequent appearances in Samaria and never failed to
have a godly opinion about the goings-on in Ahab’s palace.
It was not hard to find the will of God if
Ahab had been willing to look for it, and it isn’t really that tough for us
either. If we insist on reading the New Testament technically and pedantically,
we will always be able to find some clever way to get what we want out of it.
If we keep our eyes on the character of God, however, some interpretations are
a great deal more in keeping with God’s well-established character
than others.
Asking “What exactly do these words say?”
is never enough. We need to ask what God intended by them. Otherwise we’re just playing word games.
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