The 4th (and all the other) Commandments, and the Conscience

Continuing in Tom Chantry’s Ten Commandments series, comes the issue of how morality is defined (reference this lesson).  One of the arguments put forth by some who deny that the 4th commandment is moral, comes from the reasoning that our idea of what’s right and wrong must be innate, the things that we knew even in our pre-Christian life. After all, someone will say, “even as a lost man I knew that murder was wrong, that stealing and adultery are wrong; but I didn’t innately know the 4th commandment (of setting aside one day out of seven unto the Lord) – therefore, this commandment must not really be part of the moral law.” But is this really so?

In any society, children do not innately know that stealing or lying is wrong, or that it’s a good thing to share with others—these things must be taught. Furthermore: many adults today (in our society as well as elsewhere in the world) do not “innately” understand the 1st or 2nd commandments either – the fact that there is one God, and that we should not bow down to an idol. The tenth commandment (do not covet) is also often not innately understood. The conscience is a wonderful gift from God–that which can convict us of sin. But it alone, apart from revelation, cannot inform us of what is right or wrong. In unsaved people, the conscience becomes hardened as the truth is suppressed. As Hodgins noted in the 1689 Confession series regarding the conscience, we need to “gospelize” our conscience, to educate and correctly inform it regarding right and wrong; reference here also such passages as 1 Corinthians 8: someone can think that they are sinning when they eat meat that was sacrificed to idols.

As Chantry pointed out in this post from last year, Americans of a few generations ago DID have a sense of doing wrong and violating the 4th commandment. The children’s historical fiction story “Johnny Tremaine,” written in the mid-20th century, even includes this conscience regarding the 4th commandment, in the actual plot of a Revolutionary War story.

If your awareness of Christian practice goes back more than one generation, you’ll have to admit that the Sabbath once pricked the conscience of men. We are all familiar with the now-despised “blue laws” which prohibited certain activities on Sunday. Yes, America was once a place in which work on Sunday was not only uncommon, but illegal. Did such a practice have any relationship to the conscience?

If you haven’t read Johnny Tremain you really should; only rarely does children’s literature reach such heights. What is fascinating, though, is that Esther Forbes, an unbeliever writing in mid-20th century Boston, so clearly recognized that even the impious in her own city just two centuries before had known the pangs of conscience when they broke the Sabbath. She actually turned that guilt into a major plot device!

We also know well the myth of the noble savage, versus what primitive civilizations – without the influence of Christianity – are actually like. This further makes the point that our ideas of morality, what our conscience thinks of as right and wrong, actually come from our society and what we are taught. It is actually societal standards, and not our own general ideas, that provide the basic understanding of morality to unbelievers.

As Christians, then, we are not to look to our own conscience, what we “innately” realize about right and wrong, but to study the word of God.  Biblical morality is the morality set forth by revelation from God, what is contained in the word of God.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: General Christian Morality versus a Biblical Perspective

As I come across various statements from Christians I know, I often tend to evaluate their words from the biblical point of view, as part of the continual process of the renewal of our minds, that we may grow in discernment (Romans 12:2).

Consider the following example, casual words from a church pastor.  Upset about the ever increasing wickedness of our society, he mentioned a particular news story that especially shocked him, and then declared that we surely deserve the same judgment as Sodom; and if we don’t get that (judgment, what happened to Sodom) we’ll have to do some apologizing to Sodom.

From the biblical perspective, however, two thoughts come to mind.  First, God promised Abraham (Genesis 18) that if even ten righteous persons were found in Sodom, he would spare the place for their sake.  Obviously, as bad as things now appear in our society, through God’s great mercy and gracious provision our society has far more than just ten righteous people.

Then, too, I thought about the nature of divine judgment, and an important point that S. Lewis Johnson made at least a few times, including in his Genesis and Romans series.  (I previously blogged the quote here.)  People today look at increasing wickedness in our society, including homosexuality and other sins mentioned in Romans 1, and think: surely we will experience God’s judgment upon our nation.  However, the biblical way to understand it, as Paul described in Romans 1, is that the increasing wickedness IS ITSELF the judgment of God.  It is not that the country is likely to experience judgment, but that we as a society already ARE under God’s judgment.

The weaker person — focused on this world and morality, and lacking strong biblical knowledge (and a generally low view of scripture) — sees the obvious moral breakdown in society, and talks of how nice life was 50 years ago and how society has completely turned itself upside down since then.  Again, though, the Bible and actual world history give us a much clearer picture:  the world is getting worse, not better; yet our society’s immorality is nothing new.  Ancient and medieval civilizations flourished and then fell into serious moral decline, yet for the most part (with rare exceptions such as Pompey in A.D. 79) they did not experience the particular judgment of Sodom: this is the age of grace, after all, in which God is calling out His people (the church) from among the nations (and each of these societies presumably had at least ten righteous people).

A right understanding of the kingdom theme, especially as taught in Daniel 2, helps us understand the normal rise and fall of the Gentile nations, in this the age of the Gentiles.  From my overall experience, the people I’ve interacted with, I would further argue that the premillennialist has the best understanding of this very issue.  After all, since non-premillennialists think that Daniel 2 is referring to what happened at Christ’s First Coming — a spiritual kingdom in the midst of those ancient human kingdoms — along with a simple concept of this life, then death and heaven, then the resurrection and Eternal state, the Bible (in this mindset) has no connection to real world history.  Since the New Testament has prime importance, and the Bible is deemed to be primarily about soteriology, the non-premillennialist has less reason to even consider and study the Bible beyond such limited scope – and why bother, since God’s word really doesn’t have anything to say beyond the message of salvation.