Dr. Joe Boot and Pastor Joel Webben dissect theonomy, clarifying it as God's universal law rooted in Genesis and Exodus rather than a pejorative label for dominionism. They address evangelical aversion to divine statutes, arguing Jesus fulfilled rather than abolished the law, which now guides sanctification under the New Covenant. The discussion critiques natural law theory as insufficient without special revelation and analyzes Second Thessalonians 2 regarding the "man of lawlessness." Ultimately, the episode challenges Christians to embrace God's law as a loving standard for culture and personal holiness, rejecting fear-based abandonment of biblical authority. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome Back to Theology Applied00:04:22
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Thanks.
Hi, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webben with Right Response Ministries, and I am very privileged to welcome back as a returning guest to our show, Dr. Joseph Boot of the Ezra Institute.
He is the founder and president.
They are located near Toronto in Canada, but they are opening other branches and chapters, if you will, in the UK and also in the United States and Tennessee.
And so we're excited to have him come back on the show.
We have talked in the past when he came on our show about post millennial eschatology, but here we are focusing our attention exclusively on theonomy.
We're talking about what is theonomy, define theonomy, all these different things.
There's just a lot.
There's a spectrum.
A wide spectrum of opinion and people who differ.
Greg Bonson doesn't agree with everything with Gary North and these guys, and then some of the more modern day theonomists or general equity theonomists.
What does that mean?
And the big thing that we come to in this conversation that I think is so relevant for us to hear today is why do people have such an aversion, Christians especially, such an aversion with the law of God?
Why do we not see the law of God as an extension of his kindness and his love?
Toward us and toward human beings, not just Christian people, but all people made in the image of God, that the law of God is the law of liberty and that it leads towards life.
Why do we not see that anymore?
Why are we ashamed and turned off by the law of God?
If you're looking for an episode on that topic, this is the place to be.
Tune in now.
Big news, really big news.
Our next Right Response Conference is in the works.
We've got a number of things already lined up and organized.
This is what we've got so far.
The whole conference, three days long, on post millennialism and theonomy.
And the speakers Dr. James White, Dr. Joseph Boot, Gary DeMar, and of course, yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
We've got a great lineup.
We've got great topics.
If you want to find out dates and location and registration and anything else, go and visit our website, rightresponseconference.com.
Rightresponseconference.com.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and I am very privileged to welcome back to our show a returning guest, Dr. Joe Boot with the Ezra Institute.
Joe Boot, would you just introduce yourself for any of our new listeners who may not be aware of you and your ministry?
Sure, Joel.
Thanks ever so much for having me back on the show.
It's great to be with you again.
I apologize that I'm slightly dark in the background here.
We've got a very complicated bunch of things going on right now, so I'm not in my usual spot.
But yes, the Ezra Institute, we are a Christian world and life view ministry, cultural apologetics.
We're essentially a think tank that was launched in Canada back in 2008.
And since I planted that ministry, the team has grown.
Our focus is teaching, writing, speaking, publishing on a Christian philosophy, Christian world and life view, and an effective cultural apologetic to address the challenges of our time in terms of a comprehensive gospel and in terms of the reality of the kingdom of God.
And we have an office in Canada, in the Niagara region of Ontario.
And this year, we are in the process of launching an office in.
The United States, in Tennessee, and the United Kingdom, just north of London in the UK.
Great.
Praise God.
Simply Means God's Law00:08:53
Well, what I wanted to discuss with you is all things theonomy.
We've talked about postmillennialism the last time that you came on the show, and I'm sure that that may come up, but I really want us to focus our attention on theonomy.
And I wanted to begin by kind of just addressing the elephant in the room.
Not everybody tends to be a fan, Dr. Boot.
It seems like some people have a strong aversion towards theonomy, or at least the term.
Brings up certain connotations for people that are probably misinformed, but nonetheless, people kind of recoil.
They immediately think when you say theonomy that you're going to start rounding up Muslims and publicly hanging them or whatever it might be.
And so, I wanted to just first start with definitions.
If we could just, I think there's a spectrum of theonomic thought, just like there is with any theology.
Not everybody who holds to covenant theology, there are multiple different expressions of covenant theology.
And so I wanted to talk about the different variations of theonomic thought.
But first, could we just get at kind of the 30,000 foot view, a general definition?
What is theonomy?
Well, part of the problem has become with the term is that it's a bit like if for somebody to be called a theonomist is a bit like being called a charismatic or an evangelical these days.
Both of those terms need qualifying.
Because of exactly as you've described it, the diversity of opinion that exists around these terms.
And also, the term has become pejorative, really, so that it's almost used as an insult these days.
And so, I think that sort of atmosphere around the word, the sort of connotation of the word, has come about because it's almost become a pejorative expression.
And it does need qualification.
But very simply, theonomy, theos, theonomos means God's law.
So the word itself simply means God's law.
And I think in many respects, that's how we should define it.
Theonomy just means God's law.
And what are we going to do with God's law becomes the question.
Now, What has tended to happen is that the term has become associated with a movement, and it's generally tied to other terms like dominionism, reconstructionism, to post millennialism, and then words like reconstruction and so on.
And this all helps to generate this kind of boogeyman image for theonomy.
But it really simply means God's law.
And when at the beginning of creation, the place I start is at the beginning of creation, God speaks in Genesis 1 the 10 words, let there be.
And this is 10 times that God speaks the creative word.
And then in the book of Exodus, in Exodus 20, and of course republished there in Deuteronomy 5.
The scripture actually says that God spoke the ten words.
We talk about the ten commandments, but he spoke the ten words.
And God spoke from the glory cloud.
It wasn't Moses speaking.
The people drew near close to the mountain and they heard the voice of God, and God spoke, and he wrote with his own finger the ten words.
What we call the Ten Commandments.
And I think the reason that that's interesting is that the Ten Words of Creation and the Ten Words from the Glory Cloud are both directly the Word of God.
Creation is the instantiation of the Word of God.
Every Word of God is a law word.
So God's Word, God's law word, holds all of creation together.
In Him, all things consist, all things.
Hold together.
And so the let there be is both a command, it's God's law, and it's a promise that what God has spoken into being is going to be maintained.
Let there be.
So there's a guarantee, there's the creative command, and then there's a promise inherent in that that what God has created, He's going to maintain and sustain.
And God speaks 10 words again when He speaks His commandments, His law to the covenant people.
And the fact that the creation word and the commandments are both 10 words spoken by God himself is very, very important biblically.
And I think fundamentally that's what theonomy is about.
It's about a recognition that God governs his world, his creation, by law.
And there are, of course, a variety of spheres of law.
God distinguishes and separates in the book of Genesis, he differentiates and separates different spheres of law.
Life and creation, and there are different spheres of law, but God governs the totality of His creation by law.
And we're reminded of that with the 10 words in the book of Exodus that this is, we might call it the standing law, the Decalogue.
This is the law of God that binds every person, just as the creation law binds all of the creation word, binds all of creation.
So God's covenant word, His covenant law, That he spoke from the glory cloud, those 10 words bind all human beings.
To me, that's what theonomy is.
But you're wanting, I'm sure, in part to tease out some of the accretions around this.
I like the way John Frame actually describes it.
He says that theonomy, this emphasis on the law of God in the history of the church, and there's nothing new about it, to differing degrees, different.
Thinkers, different church fathers, different reformers, different Puritans focused attention on the law of God.
And so John Frame describes theonomy, if you want to think of it as in terms of a movement, as a tendency within the reformed tradition, as an emphasis within the reformed tradition to, when we think about social life and the political life of man, to emphasize the relevance.
The centrality, the importance of the law of God.
And I think that very specifically, we can say that theonomy, in this sense, within the Reformed tradition, is a theory within Christian ethics.
So I like to talk about theonomy from a cosmological point of view: that God's word is law, his every word is law, there's his creation law, there's his moral law, and they're bound together.
And that is the way we are required to live within.
God's creation, and we violate God's law at our peril.
In the more narrow sense, we can say that theonomy is a view within Christian ethics that says we must pay particular and peculiar attention to the law of God when we not only wrestle with the meaning of sanctification as Christians, as a measure of our sanctification, but when we think about cultural, social, and political life.
Amen.
Yeah, I mean, it just seems to be illogical.
And impotent to think that God would sanctify individuals who believe the gospel and are seeking to obey his law, and yet that would have little to no effect on the societies in which they live.
To me, it just seems like the logical next step in this equation that if people believe the gospel and if they're seeking to live lives that glorify God, right?
Grace Fulfills the Law00:11:51
Jesus says, John 14, if you love me, you'll obey me.
So, our response of obedience, we love because he first loved us.
1 John 4 19.
So God loves us in the beloved, gives us spiritual eyes to see that love for us, that salvific love.
We're born again by the work of the Spirit, regenerate, endowed with the gifts of faith and repentance, really just two sides of a singular coin, turning from sin and turning to Christ with knowledge, assent, and implicit trust.
And then in that, we love God.
And the very next question is, God, how do I. Manifest my love for you?
How do I, how do you, if I'm seeking to love you in response to your great love for me, it would seem to beckon the question well, I want to love you, therefore I want to do that which you would actually deem as loving.
What do you see as loving?
Obey my commands.
Well, does Christ have any commands?
Well, in fact, he has at least two.
Okay, well, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
So can I then take it into My own liberty that, okay, I must love God and love people, but now the onus is on me, a blank canvas for my own creative freedom and license to determine what is loving God and how I love neighbor.
Or does God flesh that out further?
Does He exposit, you know, this summary law that's later fleshed out further?
And we would say, well, it is the two tables of a law that we find in God's moral law in the Decalogue.
And then, well, what about all these civil laws?
The civil law seems to be a further expression of the moral law of God to the nation state of Israel.
And although we are not a nation state in the same sense that Israel was, I mean, it's just Reformed Confessional 101, both at Westminster and the 1689 that I would prescribe to, both speak of the civil law and its general equity being applied.
And for me, it's very personal.
I want to defend this because I'm a pastor and I feed my family.
And that's precisely what the Apostle Paul does he takes the general equity of not muzzling the ox while he treads the grain and says, God is.
Concern for more than oxen, that in the same way, the general equity of this is the worker deserves the wages.
And let's apply this to pastors.
And I don't think the Apostle Paul is saying it only applies to pastors and it would have no application unless I, with apostolic authority, explicitly wrote it down and scripturated it.
But no, I think he's saying he's showing us a method of this is how to use the law of God.
And I think, you know, he's making an argument from the lesser to the greater in a sense that he's saying it applies even.
To pastors.
And certainly, I think he would say, especially pastors, but it seems to imply that he's saying this principle applies to all vocation.
Outside of vocational ministry, workers deserve wages.
And he's using the civil law of God to do it.
And with children obeying their parents, belonging to the moral law, the fifth commandment, the crazy thing to me is that under the new covenant, the Apostle Paul, this is after the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and even the outpoint of the Spirit, the new covenant is here and in effect inaugurated by Christ.
And the Apostle doesn't blush for a moment saying that the law is still.
It's still imposed.
And he also, without equivocation, says that the promise, and this is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well, the promise is still good.
And we start to blush, I think, in our gospel centered, everything reformed quasi camp that we're like, well, but is that the prosperity gospel?
And I want to say, no, that's the Bible.
That's the Bible.
Is that part of what you're getting at?
Yeah, what you've done there is taken the discussion a step further.
Beyond the generalities of the abiding authority of God's law, which of course, let's remember that Jesus fully assumed.
In fact, there in Matthew 5 17, following Jesus' absolutely explicit that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.
Certainly, one of the implications of that word, fulfill, play rue, is to put into force.
And that's clear from the fact that he says, heaven and earth isn't going to pass away.
Not one punctuation mark, I should say, of the law is going to pass till.
Everything has been accomplished till everything is fulfilled, and um, and he says, Those who teach and do these things will be called great, not in the older covenant but in the kingdom of heaven.
And those who teach people to disobey them and do likewise will be the least.
So, there is you're actually talking about people now who claim to be inside the covenant who actually are believers but who actually uh teach people to disobey God's commands.
Now, you the issue of love there is.
That you've raised is absolutely central because, of course, the central, the core meaning of the moral aspect of our lives is love love to God and love to neighbor.
And Jesus summarizes the law in those terms.
And he says, If you love me, you will obey my commandments.
And Paul basically says the same thing in Romans 13 when he says, Love does no wrong to its neighbor, therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.
And he lists a number of the commandments from the Decalogue.
He says, Love is doing this.
So, oftentimes when we speak of loving our neighbor, or especially when we think about loving our enemy, we tend to have in mind as evangelicals, you know, working up feelings of emotional affection for people.
That's not what love to our neighbor means.
Love of neighbor, love even of enemy, means to obey God's law with respect to them.
And that's what the scripture is driving at.
And so, the reality of the abiding validity of the law that you've touched on is actually given to us very much in the language of the gospel in Jeremiah.
Chapter 31, which is quoted again in Hebrews chapter 8, where we're told that the meaning of the new covenant is that the law of God is going to, that was written on tablets of stone, is now in the new covenant written on the tables of our hearts.
It's written into the core of our being.
So the law is not abolished.
The location of the law has changed.
The location of the law is no longer the ark of the covenant, it's in the new temple.
The people of God inscribed into our hearts.
That is the new covenant.
And so you're right in thinking and saying that it would seem like an almost bizarre contradiction to think that now that we are in Christ, the very law that Jesus used to defeat the temptation of Satan, the very law which he has said is not going to pass away, should somehow now be utterly abandoned so that my arbitrary ideas and my arbitrary thoughts about what love really looks like. Can be applied by me.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's basically what we're saying.
And people wouldn't put it into those terms, but that is precisely, I think, the heart of the matter is that people are saying God used to tell people what love is.
God used to be the standard.
And now we are the standard, right?
That the law of God has been replaced by autonomy and the God of Yahweh has been replaced by demos.
Might makes right.
And the 50% plus one can impose their will on the minority.
And And I like what you said.
I think it's really helpful that it's not that the law was abrogated, it was fulfilled by Christ, but it's not that the law was abrogated by Christ and done away with.
He says precisely the opposite, but the law was just relocated.
I like the way that it went from the Ark of the Covenant, it went from something outside of us to something inside of us.
And that's precisely what makes the New Covenant.
The New Covenant is not merely bigger or wider in its scope, but it's deeper and better in the depth of its promises.
And precisely one of those is that I will cause you.
To walk in my statutes.
I will put the fear of myself within you.
I will write my law on your hearts.
No longer will one say to the other, you know, know the Lord, for you shall all know me, from the least to the greatest.
And that seems to be the major transitioning component from the old to the new is not the doing away of God's law, but the relocation of the law of God to where it would be even more intimately known by God's people that we couldn't miss it.
Precisely.
Precisely.
But we're missing it.
Dr. Boot, we are missing it, it seems.
What's going on with that?
Well, we're not seeing the law as a gift of grace.
And, you know, when God covenants with man, it's a form of treaty of an ancient kind that is a greater with a lesser.
And therefore, his covenanting with us is an act of grace.
And when Jesus sits at the table, the Passover feast, and he cuts covenant with the disciples, he is, of course, introducing a new priesthood.
We do know that the book of Hebrews is clear that the Aaronic priesthood is lesser than the priesthood and the order of Melchizedek.
Of course, we're reminded in scripture that Abraham paid a tithe to the priest king of Salem and Levi in his loins.
Exactly.
We're the Levi in his loins.
And so there is a greater priesthood that has come now in and through the Lord Jesus Christ.
And that's, of course, a priesthood to which we belong.
We are priests, prophets, priests, and kings in the Lord Jesus Christ.
We're a royal priesthood, a holy nation.
So there's been a change in the priesthood.
And the blood that now cleanses us from sin, in a way that the blood of bulls and goats couldn't, is the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And that's the cup of the new covenant.
But you'll notice that Jesus.
Don't introduce a new Ten Commandments when he cuts covenant with his disciples.
What he adds is there's a new commandment I'm giving to you love one another as I have loved you.
So there is something about the way in which Christians love and serve and treat one another, this internalizing, this radical internalizing of the reality of the gospel.
But in Jesus as the greater Moses, remember that the life of Jesus recapitulates.
The journey of Israel.
So cry out of Egypt, I have called my son.
The Lord Jesus, of course, after his birth in Bethlehem because of the persecution of Herod, they're down in Egypt.
They come out of Egypt.
Christ goes through the waters just like Israel at his baptism.
Then he goes out into the wilderness just like Israel to be tempted, to be tested.
Unlike Israel, he defeats temptation, he overcomes in the wilderness.
Then he goes up onto the mountain as the greater Moses.
He doesn't contradict Moses.
He doesn't say, You've heard Moses said, but I need to correct that and tell you this.
He says, You have heard that it was said, but I say to you, and what Jesus does is the greater Moses interpret the law over against the distorted interpretations of the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus and the Pharisees00:09:45
And every time he raises the bar, yeah, exactly.
It's expositional preaching.
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is taking Old Testament texts, the Word of God, and not doing away with it and saying, Well, the Word of God is no longer relevant, and so I'm going to give you a topical sermon of my own fancy.
No, it's an expositional sermon.
Here is the Old Testament text, and this is its meaning because Jesus was coming into a context where it had been stripped of its meaning.
And it had been reinterpreted by the scribes and the leaders in Israel, the men of the law, reinterpreted in such a way that it could be kept by them but could not be kept by the common people.
And Jesus comes and shows how.
The Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes were actually not keeping the law.
And in some sense, they were keeping the letter, but denying the very spirit and the heart of the law, the equity of the law, and also convicted.
That's kind of what Jesus accuses them of.
Right.
He accuses them of neither knowing the scriptures nor the power of God.
So often Christians tend to think that, oh, you see, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees because they were such law.
They were all focused on law.
No, Jesus actually accused them of breaking the law.
In fact, in, I think it's.
I think it's Mark 7, Matthew, or the other way around, Matthew 15, somewhere there, where Jesus is dealing with parents, caring for parents.
And he actually rebukes the Pharisees for setting aside God's commandments.
And he says, Many other such things you do.
So that was Jesus, Rabbi Jesus's issue with the Pharisees was their faulty interpretation of the law.
Right.
Not that they were legalistic, but they were actually.
Antinomian, they were against law, they were lawless.
Real quick, would you agree that Second Thessalonians?
So, as I've been you know evolving in my doctrine of post millennial eschatology and these kinds of things, I've come to where I would now stand that the man of lawlessness in Second Thessalonians chapter 2 is probably, although I may not be able to pinpoint the precise individual, but I would see this as a partial preterist, as something that's already been fulfilled, and that it's not some Roman emperor, not some Gentile pagan, but the man of lawlessness.
Who sits in the temple, that this is before the temple fell in AD 70 and the destruction of the temple, and that it was a Jew, that was perhaps even the high priest, that the apostle was saying, that guy who represents all the law of Israel is actually he himself, the lawless one.
What do you think about that interpretation?
Yeah, I myself am partial preterist, so I would broadly go along with that.
I think what's significant is that when the Bible speaks about sin, Sin is defined in the Bible as lawlessness.
And Satan is the lawless one.
And Antichrist is the man of lawlessness.
So, those things should immediately alert us to the issue that there is a problem with lawlessness.
Lawlessness is the essence of what it means to be Antichrist.
And of course, the Apostle Paul, you took us to Thessalonians there.
You've mentioned the Apostle Paul's use of the case law.
His application, of course, about you mentioned parents and honoring our parents that it may go well with us.
And he interestingly, he changes the promise, he adapts the promise at the end.
He says, instead of saying that it may go well with you and live long in the land, he says that you may live long in the earth.
So you see the expansion of the implication of the law there from a local promise in Canaan.
To this cosmic promise.
And Paul, as you said, was totally comfortable with taking a case law about the ox treading out the grain and applying that to Christian ministry.
And he was equally unashamed of taking the law and applying it to the civil context.
In 1 Timothy 1, I think this is one of the most important texts for a proper understanding, a truly theonomic reading of Scripture.
In 1 Timothy 1 7, Well, starting at verse 8, he says, We know that the law is good, provided one uses it legitimately.
We know that the law is not meant for a righteous person, but for the lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and irreverent, for those who kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral and homosexuals, for kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and for whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching.
And listen to this based on the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was entrusted to me.
Paul actually says there, not only is he citing multiple commands out of the Decalogue and applying it in a civil sense, who is the law made for?
He actually says that this is based on the gospel.
This isn't some law gospel radical dualism.
This is rooted in the reality of the gospel of the kingdom.
And the gospel of the kingdom is about the rule and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Have you ever heard of a king who has no kingdom and a kingdom with no law?
Christ is the king.
He has a kingdom, and his kingdom is governed by law.
It's the rule of law.
And it's the same law for the stranger and the alien as well as for the covenant member, for the true Israelite.
And so Paul is totally unashamed of making direct applications of the law to the civil sphere.
And he's saying that this is in accordance with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And then he takes the case laws and he applies the general equity of those laws into a variety of circumstances.
So, in some respects, we could look at it as in saying that God, who is the giver of his law, of course, God is above law, God is the law giver.
He's not subject to law, but he binds himself to his covenant.
With us.
And in history, all law is temporal law.
And of course, this is where the Thomists and the natural law theorists and the natural theologians go wrong.
They want an eternal, abstract principle of law that everybody's reason somehow participates in.
And they think that they don't really need God's revealed law because men of right reason will participate somehow in eternal law through natural law.
But God's law is actually.
God positivizes, makes concrete, applies the law of love in giving the Decalogue.
And then it's the responsibility of magistrates and, of course, Moses and those who are going to govern the people to then take minimal cases where the law of God is actually applied.
And so, of course, that is where we get to the nitty gritty of all of this.
And this is often where great offense is caused by God's law.
Because it's not left in the abstract as sort of eternal rational principles in the Greek sense, but it's concretized and it's positivized.
And the first positivization of the law of love is God Himself in the Decalogue.
And then human beings have the responsibility and obligation to take God's revealed law, to look at all of the cases where faithful people, especially what we see revealed in Scripture, Not just what maybe Alfred the Great did with it, that's the first codification of common law, which of course is all of our tradition in England, America, Canada.
It's Alfred the Great who embarks on the first codification of common law, and it builds up case by case over year after year after year.
And of course, that's the beauty of the inheritance of the common law and of the Of the tradition that we have in the West that's given to us directly from Israel.
It comes to us from Israel, this duty to positivize and apply the reality of God's law.
We've come to a point in our history, probably mainly because of the cultural pressure all around us, where it is a tragedy to see so many Christians who either we can have sympathy, we should say, with those who have not been exposed to the reality of God's law anymore.
The law of God used to be hanging on the The walls of Crown Courts in England and Canada.
It used to be part of our Sunday liturgies.
The Ten Commandments would have been displayed in most of our churches.
Many of those things have slowly disappeared.
We can have sympathy with the Christian who's not really been taught God's law.
What is more difficult to understand is where evangelicals who should know better have an antipathy towards this law of liberty, as James calls it, the law of love.
Mirroring Culture with God's Law00:13:28
God's gift to us as not the source of life, that's the Lord Jesus Christ through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, but the way of life.
That's why God says, This is the way, walk in it.
That's really, really helpful.
Real quick, addressing, I know that we need to come to a close here in a moment, but addressing the concept of natural law and guys like John Locke and those kinds of things.
So if I were to borrow that term for a moment, I would apply that term, and I'm sure it'd be more helpful to use another term, but I would say that natural law, if I find it anywhere in the scripture, it would be Romans chapter not one being natural revelation, but Romans chapter two.
That the Gentiles, even those who have received no measure of special revelation, God's revealed law in his law word, they've still received a measure of God's moral law simply by virtue of being fallen creatures, yes, but a vestige of the image of God still remaining, creatures made in the image of God living in God's world.
By virtue of living in God's world with God's order and God's rules for his world, working as they do, and the law of God being written on their hearts and the conscience of man, even though he lies and attempts to suppress the truth and deeds of unrighteousness, there's still a sense in which the Gentile, who's never received a missionary, never received an apostolic message or a scroll or anything else, he is a law unto himself so that he is rightly judged.
He's without an apologia.
And I'm going back and forth between Romans 2 and 1 here, but he has no excuse because.
This is what I always say to people when they get upset about God's law.
Really, they're upset that they're upset about the fact that there's a God in heaven that he has a standard.
They don't think that the God who created the entire world and created them has the right to have a standard.
And what I always say is, well, do you have a standard?
And you impose your standard, not, oh, this is the rule that I live by.
No, nobody does that.
That's hypocritical.
That's not honest.
You have a standard and you impose it on others.
That's why you get offended, right?
When others do to you what you would.
Say that I would never do to anybody else.
That's why you're horribly offended because they did not uphold your standard.
You didn't make them.
You didn't create them from the dust of the ground.
You didn't knit them together in their mother's womb or anything.
And yet you think that you have the right to impose a standard to them without even being able to objectively determine whether or not your standard is actually moral, whether or not it's actually good.
Your standard is very likely flawed.
And my point is that the Apostle Paul seems to say that the Gentiles, they themselves have a standard and they can't even keep their own standard.
How in the world do they think that they could stand before a thrice holy God?
And so, therefore, they are guilty, whether they've ever received a single page of scripture or not, simply by natural revelation and the law of God.
It's two components.
It's God revealing his eternal power and divine nature by what he has made, that which is physical, the cosmos outside of them, but then also within them and the way that God has created them in his very image, that image tarnished by the fall, but a vestige of the image of God remaining nonetheless.
And so, my point is, I would want to say that.
If natural law is anything, it's that.
It's Romans 2, what Paul's getting at.
But then what I would say is that the natural law that Paul's getting at in Romans 2, there seems to be no distinction between that and moral law, the 10 commandments found in the Decalogue.
It seems that there's not one commandment, and I would include even the Sabbath, again, by virtue of natural revelation.
There are people who rejected God, they were deist or they were agnostic, who still recognized that just with agriculture, farming the land for six years and then giving it a break on the seventh was good for producing more crops, right?
That just the fabric of the world and the way that God designed it spoke to a Sabbath rest and a one in seven principle.
And so, my point is, I really think that if there is natural law that comes apart from special revelation, It would be the Ten Commandments that there is a God, and therefore we should love Him and worship Him and have no other gods before Him, and that this God, no one has seen Him.
That seems apparently obvious, natural that we could conclude no one's seen Him.
Therefore, we shouldn't try to construct visible images, but rather worship through faith.
Faith does not come by seeing, but rather by hearing and hearing the Word of Christ, and that we should worship this God not in a trivial or trite manner, but with sincerity, not taking His name in vain.
The Sabbath principle I've already addressed, and then Paul explicitly cites many of the laws regarding neighbors, such as murder.
In Romans chapter 2, with the Gentiles.
So, my point is if there is natural law, I would see it as synonymous with moral law revealed by two parts natural revelation and the Imago Dei.
And then that's simply, in my assessment, simply confirmed through revealed special revelation in the Decalogue, the law, the moral law given to Moses on the mountain.
So, I guess my point is to say that the guy who tries to get away from moral law and adopt natural law.
He seems to be doing it as a deist or an agnostic to somehow lower the bar, but I don't see how it would.
How would you respond to that?
Yeah, no, I think that part of the challenge with the expressions natural law, natural theology is, of course, they do tend to mean different things to different people.
And because of the Western tradition and the influence of the very powerful influence of Greek thought in the Western tradition, even in the Western theological tradition, Sometimes the word nature comes with a certain freight that the Bible doesn't actually bring with it, that you and I wouldn't carry.
So I prefer to use terms like creation law, creational law, or creational norms.
Because, as I expressed at the beginning, every word of God is law and every aspect of creation is governed by his law.
Yes, Paul says the work of God's law is known in man.
It's part of the fact that we're creatures of God.
There is that understanding.
Abiding testimony, not just within the creation, as Psalm 19, of course, speaks about and talks about the way in which, even though there's no verbal speech, there is knowledge that goes forth from the reality of creation.
The prophet Isaiah points out that God teaches the farmer.
So there is an encounter with God's normative structure.
The problem, of course, is that in a fallen and a broken world where man is a sinner, God never left man simply to look at nature in a neutral, autonomous way and interpret it for himself.
There was always, from the very beginning, verbal revelation.
And I don't think we can underestimate either the way in which the spread of the, I mean, don't forget we're all descended from one human family.
So the man's knowledge of what God requires is also going to be orally passed on and spread in those terms.
So there's both a cultural transmission.
But God has to, of course, call out a special people for himself where he's going to republish the reality of that law.
And that's what the, I think, Ten Commandments represents.
I think the danger, and I think sometimes this is what's happened with some of the, some Christians, some evangelicals, some even reformed people today who are uncomfortable with or hostile towards discussion around God's law and its abiding validity and its applicability, is they almost sort of see Natural law as a place that they could retreat to, that's going to be more neutral, it's going to be more acceptable to non Christian people because it's just nature and it's man's reason that engages with it.
Whereas, how can a specific concrete positivized law like the Decalogue and the case law that comes with it be in any way universal?
And of course, what you find though with the rationalistic philosophers and the natural law theorists is they actually can't agree on what natural law really is.
What is it actually teaching?
What is the body of laws?
That natural law is actually delivered to man.
And in a Darwinist framework, you look at a Hindu framework or a pantheistic framework, you look at the law structures that have been present in indigenous cultures and so on.
I wouldn't want to live in one.
The idolatrous, idol worshipping, child sacrificing, sexually promiscuous cultures that it took the evangelization of the world.
To bring to bear the reality of God's law.
And that's an inheritance we can't squander.
Left only to our own reason because of our fallen state.
As Paul says in Romans 8, man is at enmity with God.
He cannot submit himself to the law of God.
He won't do so.
That's why we need the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Well, this has been wonderfully helpful, Dr. Boot.
There's so much more that we could talk about, but I think the best solution is to call it quits for today and just have you back every single week from here on.
Can I get your commitment?
No, but we'd love to.
We'll have you back on again and take some of these because there's so much more we could say.
We've just kind of scratched the surface and we could talk about many scriptures.
And I think a helpful discussion would be to talk more about okay, why is there, what's behind some of the hostility and so on?
I think that would be a very interesting discussion to have.
I think so.
Because when you consider Psalm 1, Psalm 19, Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, which is a song, a celebration of the beauty, the wonder, the gift, the The privileged gift of God's law.
When you think that the role of the prophets was to call people back to God's law, to remind them of the covenant law.
When you think about Proverbs and the wisdom literature, and you see that that's a father teaching his son God's law.
And then when you think about the Lord Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration and who appears with him on the mountain to speak about the exodus that he was about to accomplish that's the word there the exodus it is Moses and Elijah.
It's the unity of the law and the prophets with the Lord Jesus Christ.
And I think.
When we start to see the beauty and the glory of this and the gift of the gracious gift of God's law to us as his people, we don't take the, when we wash, when we go to do our ablutions, we don't take the law functions in many respects for us like a mirror.
And we don't pull the mirror off the wall as Christians and wash our face in the mirror.
No, when you go to the washroom, you wash with water, but the mirror shows you your condition.
And the law of God is not that which washes us.
The blood of Christ washes and cleanses us.
But the mirror, the law functions as that mirror for us, even as believers, to guide our sanctification.
And we're obligated to teach it and instruct not just our children, not just our churches, but the culture, all the nations in the gift of God's law.
And look what's happened, Joel, in their culture now in the West, where we have neglected that.
As goes the church, so goes the world.
Amen.
And I think just landing the plane with what you said earlier, the law being synonymous with love.
You know, we say, well, don't impose the law on unbelievers.
It's not universal.
This is just the law for Christians.
But if we see the law as loving, then it simply raises the question what am I called to do with my unbelieving neighbor?
Am I called to love him?
Right?
That there would be no qualms, no pushback if we said, but we're called to love our brothers.
The scripture talks about that.
1 John talks about if anyone hates his brother, fellow Christians must love fellow Christians.
That's one of the signs that we've truly been born again and that the love of Christ abides in us.
But are we called to love?
Unbelievers and every gospel centered Tim Keller loving guy would come out of the woodworks and say, Yes, we're called to love not just Christians, but love the culture.
Is pointing the culture and society and even unbelievers back to the law of God loving, but we don't see that.
And I think that reveals that shows our hand.
We don't see the law of God as something that is loving that brings about flourishing and life and prosperity, but rather binding and oppressive.
And that's why we don't want to share it with the unbeliever because we want to love.
The unbeliever and not hurt him.
And we see the law of God is harmful.
That's really what I think it comes down to.
And it's destroyed churches and it's destroyed society and culture.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Boot, God bless you.
Please continue with your ministry.
We're praying for you.
My privilege.
Thanks for having me.
God bless.
Thanks so much for listening.
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