Picking and Choosing

Back in April, Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason wrote a helpful post about the Old Testament law. Koukl says critics accuse Christians of picking and choosing from Old Testament laws. They claim we apply some and not others, and do so at our own convenience.

So how should we answer people who object to the use of a verse from Leviticus to condemn, say, homosexuality, because “Christians are no longer under law”?

Local or Universal?

It’s a good question, and Koukl’s answer is both scriptural and logical: that some commands in the Law of Moses are specific to Judaism while others are what he calls “universals”. Koukl then poses the question “How do we know which is which?” He offers several answers: sometimes it’s obvious on reflection, sometimes the context gives us a clue, and sometimes the New Testament repeats the command, indicating it is binding under both old and new covenants.

I like his third answer best. It’s hard to argue ingenuously with a command unambiguously directed to Christians. His first and second answers are less helpful. What is “obvious on reflection” to you may not be equally obvious to me. For example, I don’t find the verse he cites a particularly effective illustration of the obvious. Likewise, clues we find in context may be more evident to some than others. The important thing is that we can point to God condemning an act that the Law of Moses condemns either prior to or after the period in which law was the operative principle in the world (from Sinai to roughly AD30). If we can do that, we are dealing with a universal.

What use is the Law of Moses to the Christian then, if it is not binding on us? Well, it’s explanatory. That is to say, we can use the law to clarify terminology and statements made in the New Testament that we might otherwise find difficult to understand.

Sin the New Testament Does Not Specifically Condemn

Let’s leave aside the homosexuality example, because Leviticus 18:22 is not critical to proving God condemns homosexual acts; we have Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Jude 1:7 for that, notwithstanding the nonsense some liberal Christians have written about them. We might also add 1 Corinthians 7:2, which provides the positive antidote to out-of-control sexual desire: a lifelong, faithful, heterosexual Christian partnership.

How about something like cross-dressing? That’s a little tougher to find in the NT. As critics of Christians opposed to transvestitism or transgender self-expression are fond of pointing out, Deuteronomy 22:5 “is the only verse in all of Scripture that directly references gender-based notions of clothing”. To the best of my knowledge, they are correct about that.

Oops. That’s the Law of Moses. Christians are not under law. How do we deal with that in the absence of a specific New Testament or pre-law command that a man should not put on women’s clothing or vice versa?

The πορνεία Problem

The New Testament is full of commands to avoid something called πορνεία (and variants thereon). That’s a Greek word translated as “fornication” in the venerable KJV, and “sexual immorality” or “sexual sin” in most popular modern versions of the Bible. It’s a generic term that encompasses all kinds of sexual misconduct, including but not limited to homosexuality, lesbianism, adultery, sex outside of marriage, bestiality, incest and so on. Christians are told repeatedly to abstain from everything that might be classified as πορνεία, to absolutely run away from it.

Though πορνεία is a generic term that covers much territory, certain NT passages make clear in the context exactly which specific sexual sin they are condemning. 1 Corinthians 5 is a fine example. The general term πορνεία appears first, immediately followed with apostolic clarification: “a man has his father’s wife”. Okay, so we’re talking about incest in that instance, and incest of an exceptionally distasteful sort. Other passages employ πορνεία more generally, without adding a whole list of specific offenses included in it. In order to understand exactly what else falls under the banner of πορνεία and in order to avoid displeasing God by engaging in it, the obedient Christian will ask himself the question “How would a Jew in the first century have understood this term?”

The Explanatory Value of the Law

This is where the explanatory value of the Law of Moses becomes important in understanding the will of God for believers. The first century Jew would immediately open the Law of Moses and say, “What sort of sexual misconduct does the law condemn?” It’s not difficult to put together a list. That list includes this verse: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak.” Israelites weren’t supposed to cross-dress. God did not like that.

There is more than one reason for this. In many cases, cross-dressing is a form of sexual immorality even modern experts recognize called paraphilia, in which a person becomes sexually aroused by putting on clothing inappropriate to his biology. That’s the creepy business behind most male transvestitism, and it’s one reason Christians wouldn’t be caught dead at drag shows. Sexual arousal is not a biblical form of self-expression; it’s appropriate within marriage and nowhere else. The New Testament directs us away from all such conduct. Any right-thinking Christian in the first century understood that πορνεία includes cross-dressing, not because he was a legalist, but because he had the OT law to explain to him the intended meaning of πορνεία when he came across it in the writings of Paul or others.

Under Moses?

Even where cross-dressing is not an intentional act of sexual self-stimulation, the fact is that it is a lie. It is a rejection of what God has given, an envious attempt to mimic someone else’s sexual identity instead of gratefully accepting what God decreed for us at birth. The NT gives Christians plenty of reasons to reject both dishonesty and envy in whatever forms they may tempt us.

In using the law this way, we are not putting the believer back under Moses. Rather, we are appealing to Moses to explain Paul, Peter, John, Jude or James, just as any first century Gentile may have had to do to understand what an apostle was teaching. We are using Moses like a dictionary, not like a law book.

That’s fair use, and that’s why Christians can legitimately quote Deuteronomy 22:5 in the ongoing trans debate. It’s not just picking and choosing.