LAW OF NATURE AND DIVINE LAW

I was cleaning out my filing cabinet and came across an overhead (remember those?) from an old presentation I made back in the 1980s. I did not write the section on Divine Law and don't remember where I got it, so I am unable to give proper credits. What I do know is that overhead was part of a larger session of the sanctity of human life. At one point I addressed absolute truth that forms a proper understanding of ethics and morality. At the time, our culture was shaking off the last vestiges of a previous Christian moral consensus. In the wake of the cultural revolution of the 1960s North America had rejected absolute truth for relative truth and ethics were situational.  Only bitter fruit of relativism was the inevitable result.

I thought I would post the contents of that old overhead. Now, over 30 years later, spiritual confusion in rampant, precisely because North America (and Canada in particular) overthrew Christianity and the Judeo-Christian moral consensus that accompanied it. See below:

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THE LAW OF NATURE

"Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature,’ they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law–with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it."

C.S. Lewis 
Mere Christianity
(London, England, Geoffry Bless, 1961), pp.4-5.

DIVINE LAW

Gradual revelation of Divine Law was written into nature, next upon man's conscience, then the fundamental principles upon tablets of stone. Later the entire Scriptures contained a larger and more complete edition. In due time Jesus appeared as the perfect embodiment of the truth which he illustrated in his own sinless life. It was divine purpose that the law, at last, should be written in the hearts of men and the final illustration of its precepts be found in their outward lives.

• Divine law is revealed in nature (Psalm 19.2-3, Psalm 97.6, Romans 1.20)
• Divine Law is written in the conscience (Romans 2.15, 13.5)
• Divine Law is written on tablets of stone (Exodus 24.12, written by the hand of God - 31.18, cp. 32.15 & 16, 34.1, see ten commandments Exodus 34.28).
• Divine Law in the entire Scriptures (Romans 15.4, 1Corinthians 10.11, 2 Timothy 3.16,)
• Divine Law illustrated in Christ (John 1.14, 8.32, 18.37, Galations 4.4, cf. Isaiah 40.5)
• Divine Law written on the human heart (Hebrews 8.10, 10.16, Jeremiah 31.33, 2Corinthians 3.3,
• Divine Law to be shown to all people by Christians and their lives. (Matthew 22.35-40, John 13.34-35, 15.9-12, 1John 2.5, 3.11 & 23, cf. Matthew 25.34-40, 1 Thessalonians 3.12)

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Christ's true followers must proclaim that absolute truth exists and that truth is found in Jesus Christ. Say it often in private and public. It's all that left worth defending.