The modern human of western values is in the process of trying to re-write moral laws. What was once right is now wrong, what was once bad is acceptable, what was once a grey area is a display of the self – an expression of authenticity.
Where do these modern moral laws come from?
Much has been written on this. But basically, they come from an unmoored genesis of morality, with the only alternative being the individual as the morality maker, doing their own little dance and making it rain good stuff.
How stark a contrast this thinking is with Rom. 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. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” (Rom. 7:7)
Our age is comprised of a mostly therapeutic worldview, where pain is wrong and feeling good is a moral obligation. The basis of this worldview is a shifting subjectivity rather than seeing the world as a moral world where there is inherent good and inherent evil within an action or attitude.
What’s this mean? It means our age does not really know what is right and wrong for they do not have someone outside of themselves telling them what is right and wrong. The moderner is a law unto themselves. But get enough of them together and they set the law for everyone else too. Like kids playing in a playground, setting the rules to their games – all the while unawares they are fenced in and supervised by another who has set the rules already.
This has and will cause a sort of lawlessness. But God speaks to us from outside of our world. He speaks as the creator and lawgiver with authority and holiness. Now we know by what moral standard our world is measured against.
But being left with a knowledge of our darkness is a burden unbearable, and it only becomes all the more unbearable the more we look into the law of God. Even living according to our own laws is unbearable.
To this God speaks through Christ. He offers us a righteousness outside of ourselves. Just as the law comes from outside showing the darkness inside, so too does righteousness come from outside of us. It comes from Christ and is received by faith.
Set free from the master of sin, we are not our own but belong body and soul, in life and death to God and to our saviour Jesus Christ, to live for him in holiness according to his ways by the power of His Spirit.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 