The Law of God Versus Lawless Theology

Many people claim that the moral law of the Old Testament was given for Israel alone, not for the Gentiles. They base their claim on the fact that only Israel received the written law from Moses. 

That claim is wrong. 

In a familiar passage, Genesis chapters 18 and 19, we have the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even people with no biblical education know the basics of the story. Why were they destroyed? God says of them, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave" (Genesis 18:20). This account is of an event more than four centuries before God gave Moses the Law on Mount Sinai. So, if there was no moral law before Sinai, by what standard did the people of Sodom and Gomorrah sin, and sin so gravely that they would be erased from the face of the earth? 

The antinomian has no answer. His assertion is based on the logical fallacy of a false equivalency, the equating of the Law per se with the recording of the Law. The antinomian is correct in his claim that there was no written record of God's Law, because that privilege was reserved for the nation of Israel: "What advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God" (Romans 3:1-2). While all men have the law of God recorded in our consciences (Romans 2:15), the Jews have had the additional blessing of the Law in written form. Thus they were doubly blessed, doubly accountable, and - ultimately - doubly punished (Isaiah 40:2). 

The problem for the antinomian is that, without God's law (I John 3:4), there is no objective standard of right and wrong, and, therefore, no standard by which to proclaim that a person is a sinner. Yet, even the antinomian claims that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). He tries to have it both ways, sinfulness without law.

I suggest that is why the American church has become so impotent in the face of a depraved and self-destructing culture. She has repudiated the one thing given by God to construct a godly society, his Law. The cry of today's average evangelical is, "Any law except God's Law!," and that is what we have received, a godless society, just like they wanted.