The NXR Podcast - January 03, 2023


THEOLOGY APPLIED - The Theonomy Controversy ｜ with Dr. Joe Boot

Topics
theononomy conference law and love
Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
Paul Joe Boot Jesus Christ Josh Firm Sabbath Joel Webin Gentile Levi Jamie White John Locke Tim Keller Gentiles Proverbs Niagara Abraham Alfred Isaiah
DAILY TRUTH - How Do We Conquer Sin？ DAILY TRUTH - We Are Not Promised Tomorrow

Episode Stats


Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

167.98

Word count

8,179

Sentence count

279

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Joe Boot with The Ezra Institute joins Pastor Joel Webin to discuss theonomy and why many in the body of Christ fiercely oppose it. Dr. Boot will be speaking at the Ezra Institute's upcoming conference on Theonomy and Post-Millennialism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 All right, listen, guys, I get it.
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00:00:38 Thank you so much.
00:00:39 God bless.
00:00:40 Hi, and welcome back to Theology Applied.
00:00:42 I am your host, Pastor Joel Webin
00:00:44 with Right Response Ministries.
00:00:45 I hope that you and your family
00:00:47 had a very merry Christmas,
00:00:49 and I hope that in celebrating Christmas,
00:00:52 because December 25th fell on the Lord's Day this year,
00:00:56 I hope that part of your celebration involved you going to a biblically faithful church in worship.
00:01:02 We have one true holy day as Christians, and that is the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath,
00:01:08 the day that Christ rose from the dead.
00:01:10 I think it's entirely permissible and even proper in many regards to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ
00:01:17 with Christmas, but not at the expense of worshiping on the Lord's Day.
00:01:21 So I hope that you are in church.
00:01:24 That being said, today's episode deals with the law of God.
00:01:28 We talk about theonomy and why many in the body of Christ fiercely oppose it.
00:01:34 Our guest is none other than Dr. Joe Boot, who will be speaking at our upcoming conference.
00:01:40 Now, many of you have already registered and many of you have tried to register and sadly
00:01:44 were unable because our conference has sold out.
00:01:48 We have had to cap our conference at 550 people, which is already a little over our seating
00:01:54 capacity for the venue that we have.
00:01:57 We have given it our very best to try to find another venue, and in the Lord's providence,
00:02:02 that has not been able to occur.
00:02:05 So we are keeping the conference as is with Dr. Joe Boot and Dr. James White and Dale
00:02:11 Partridge and myself, all things theonomy and post-millennialism, but I do want you
00:02:16 to get excited. Even if you weren't able to get a ticket, we have at least a couple hundred more
00:02:22 people that wanted to come to this conference, try to purchase a ticket. But the good news is
00:02:26 we've officially decided that we're going to do the conference again the following year. So in
00:02:32 2024, probably sometime in March or April, we're going to hold the conference again. We're going
00:02:38 to do our best to double the speaker list, double the size of the venue. It'll be bigger and better
00:02:44 than ever before. So hang in there, hold tight. And in the meantime, you can satisfy your appetite
00:02:51 for theonomy and post-millennialism by listening to this episode.
00:02:55 Applying God's word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.
00:03:05 All right, welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied. I am your host, Pastor Joel
00:03:09 Webin with Right Response Ministries, and I am very privileged to welcome back to our show a
00:03:14 returning guest, Dr. Joe Boot with the Ezra Institute. Joe Boot, would you just introduce
00:03:19 yourself or any of our new listeners who may not be aware of you and your ministry? Sure, Joel.
00:03:24 Thanks ever so much for having me back on the show. It's great to be with you again.
00:03:29 I apologize that I'm slightly dark in the background here. We've got a very complicated
00:03:35 There's a bunch of things going on right now, so I'm not in my usual spot.
00:03:38 But, yes, the Ezra Institute, we are a Christian world and life view ministry, cultural apologetics.
00:03:46 We're essentially a think tank that was launched in Canada back in 2008.
00:03:54 And since I planted that ministry, the team has grown.
00:03:58 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.
00:04:18 And we have an office in Canada, in the Niagara region of Ontario.
00:04:27 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.
00:04:40 Great. Praise God.
00:04:42 Well, what I wanted to discuss with you is all things theonomy.
00:04:46 We've talked about post-millennialism the last time that you came on the show, and I'm sure that
00:04:50 that may come up, but I really want us to focus our attention on theonomy. And I wanted to begin
00:04:55 by kind of just addressing the elephant in the room. Not everybody tends to be a fan, Dr. Boot.
00:05:00 It seems like some people have a strong aversion towards theonomy, or at least the term. It brings
00:05:06 up certain connotations for people that are probably misinformed, but nonetheless, people
00:05:11 kind of recoil. They immediately think when you say theonomy that you're going to start rounding
00:05:18 up Muslims and publicly hanging them or whatever it might be. And so I wanted to just first start 0.98
00:05:25 with definitions. If we could just, I think there's a spectrum of theonomic thought, just
00:05:31 like there is with any theology, not everybody who holds to covenant theology. There are multiple
00:05:37 different expressions of covenant theology and so i wanted to talk about the different um variations
00:05:43 of of theonomic thought but first could we just get at kind of the 30 000 foot view a general
00:05:49 definition what is theonomy well part of the problem uh has become with with the the term
00:05:56 is that it's a bit like if for somebody to be called a theonomist is a bit like being called
00:06:01 a charismatic or an evangelical uh these days both of those terms need qualifying
00:06:10 uh because of exactly as you've described it that the uh diversity of opinion that exists
00:06:18 around these these terms um and also that the term has become pejorative really so that it's
00:06:27 almost used as an insult uh these days uh and so i think that sort of atmosphere around the word
00:06:35 the sort of connotation of the word uh has come about because it's almost become a pejorative
00:06:41 expression and uh it does need qualification but very simply theonomy uh theos uh theonomos means
00:06:52 god's law so the word itself simply means god's law and uh i think in many respects that's the
00:07:03 that's how we should define it theonomy just means god's law and uh what what are we going
00:07:11 to do with god's law becomes the question now what has uh tended to happen is that the that
00:07:21 term has become associated with a movement, and it's generally tied to other terms like
00:07:28 dominionism, which is often linked to post-millennialism, and then words like
00:07:35 reconstruction and so on. And this all helps to generate this kind of boogeyman image for
00:07:42 theonomy, but it really simply means God's law. And when at the beginning of creation,
00:07:52 the place I start is at the beginning of creation, God speaks in Genesis 1, the 10 words,
00:08:00 let there be. And this is 10 times that God speaks the creative word. And then in the book
00:08:12 of Exodus, in Exodus 20, and of course republished there in Deuteronomy 5,
00:08:19 the scripture actually says that God spoke the 10 words. We talk about the 10 commandments,
00:08:26 but he spoke the 10 words and god spoke from the glory cloud it wasn't moses speaking
00:08:36 the people drew near close to the mountain and and and they heard the the voice of god and god
00:08:45 spoke and he and he wrote with his own finger uh the the 10 words what we call the 10 commandments
00:08:51 And I think the reason that that's interesting is that the 10 words of creation and the 10 words from the glory cloud are both directly the word of God.
00:09:07 Creation is the instantiation of the word of God.
00:09:10 Every word of God is a law word.
00:09:14 So God's word, God's law word, holds all of creation together.
00:09:19 In him, all things consist, all things hold together.
00:09:23 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.
00:09:35 Let there be.
00:09:36 So 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.
00:09:44 And God speaks 10 words again when he speaks his commandments, his law to the covenant people.
00:09:53 And the fact that the creation word and the commandments are both 10 words spoken by God himself is very, very important biblically.
00:10:05 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 life and creation.
00:10:26 And so there are different spheres of law, but God governs the totality of his creation by law.
00:10:34 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.
00:10:45 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.
00:10:54 So God's covenant word, his covenant law that he spoke from the glory cloud, those 10 words bind all human beings.
00:11:04 To me, that's what theonomy is.
00:11:07 But you're wanting, I'm sure, in part to tease out some of the accretions around this.
00:11:16 I like the way John Frame actually describes it.
00:11:18 He says that, you know, 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.
00:11:40 And so John Frame describes theonomy, if you want to think of it in terms of a movement, as a tendency within the Reformed tradition, as an emphasis within the Reformed tradition, 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.
00:12:08 and uh i think that uh i mean it was very specifically we can say that theonomy in this
00:12:16 sense within the reformed tradition is a theory within christian ethics so i like to talk about
00:12:21 theonomy from a cosmological point of view that god's word is law his every word is law there's
00:12:27 his creation law there's his moral law um and they're bound together and that is the way we
00:12:35 are required to live within God's creation and we violate God's law at our peril. In the more
00:12:42 narrow sense, we can say that theonomy is a view within Christian ethics that says we must pay
00:12:48 particular and peculiar attention to the law of God when we not only wrestle with the meaning
00:12:56 of sanctification as Christians, as a measure of our sanctification, but when we think about
00:13:00 cultural, social, and political life. Amen. Yeah, I mean, it just seems to be illogical
00:13:09 and impotent to think that God would sanctify individuals who believe the gospel and are
00:13:16 seeking to obey his law, and yet that would have little to no effect on the societies in which
00:13:23 they live. To me, it just seems like the logical next step in this equation that if people believe
00:13:32 the gospel and if they're seeking to live lives that glorify God, right? Jesus says, John 14,
00:13:37 if you love me, you'll obey me. So our response of obedience, we love because he first loved us,
00:13:45 1 John 4, 19. So God loves us in the beloved, gives us spiritual eyes to see that love for us,
00:13:52 that salvific love. We're born again by the work of the Spirit, regenerate, endowed with the gifts
00:13:59 of faith and repentance, really just two sides of a singular coin, turning from sin and turning
00:14:04 to Christ with knowledge, assent, and implicit trust. And then in that, we love God. And the
00:14:12 very next question is, God, how do I manifest my love for you? How do you, if I'm seeking to love
00:14:20 you in response to your great love for me, it would seem to beckon the question, well, I want
00:14:29 to love you, therefore I want to do that which you would actually deem as loving. What do you see
00:14:34 as loving? Obey my commands. Does Christ have any commands? Well, in fact, he has at least two.
00:14:41 Okay, well, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and loving our neighbor
00:14:44 as ourself. So can I then take it into my own liberty that, okay, I must love God and love
00:14:52 people, but now the onus is on me, a blank canvas for my own creative freedom and license to
00:14:59 determine what is loving God and how I love neighbor, or does God flesh that out further?
00:15:04 Does he exposit this summary law that's later fleshed out further? And we would say, well,
00:15:11 it is, the two tables of the law that we find in God's moral law in the Decalogue. And then,
00:15:16 well, what about all these civil laws? Well, the civil law seems to be a further expression of the
00:15:21 moral law of God to the nation state of Israel. And although we are not a nation state in the
00:15:27 same sense that Israel was, I mean, it's just Reformed Confessional 101, both the Westminster
00:15:34 and the 1689 that I would prescribe to both speak of the civil law and its general equity being
00:15:40 applied. And for me, it's very personal. I want to defend this because I'm a pastor and I feed
00:15:44 my family. And that's precisely what the apostle Paul does is he takes the general equity of not
00:15:49 muzzling the ox while he treads the grain and says, God is concerned for more than oxen that
00:15:55 in the same way, the general equity of this is the worker deserves the wages. And let's apply this
00:15:59 to pastors. And I don't think the apostle Paul is saying it only applies to pastors
00:16:03 and it would have no application unless I, with apostolic authority, explicitly wrote it down
00:16:08 and scripture rated it, but no, I think he's saying, he's showing us a method of this is how
00:16:14 to use the law of God. And I think, you know, he's making an argument from the lesser to the
00:16:19 greater in a sense that he's saying it applies even to pastors. And certainly I think he would 0.71
00:16:25 say especially pastors, but it seems to imply that he's saying this principle applies to all
00:16:29 vocation. Outside of vocational ministry, workers deserve wages and he's using the civil law of God
00:16:36 to do it. And with children obeying their parents, belonging to the moral law, the fifth commandment,
00:16:41 the crazy thing to me is that under the new covenant, the apostle Paul, this is after the
00:16:46 life, death, resurrection, ascension, and even the outpoint of the spirit, the new covenant is here
00:16:51 and in effect inaugurated by Christ. And the apostle doesn't blush for a moment saying that
00:16:56 the law is still imposed. And he also, without equivocation, says that the promise, and this is
00:17:05 the first commandment with a promise that it may go well the promise is still good and and and we
00:17:09 start to blush i think in our gospel centered everything reformed quasi camp that that we're
00:17:15 like well but but is that the prosperity gospel and i want to say no that's the the bible that's
00:17:20 the bible what what is is that part of what you're getting at yeah what you've um i mean what you've
00:17:27 done there is is taken taken the discussion a step further um beyond the generalities of the
00:17:35 abiding authority of god's law which of course let's remember that jesus fully assumed um in
00:17:41 fact uh there in matthew 5 17 following jesus is absolutely explicit that he came not to abolish
00:17:48 the law but to fulfill it certainly one of the implications of that word fulfill play root
00:17:53 is to put into force um and that's clear from the fact that he says heaven and earth isn't going to
00:18:00 pass away not not one punctuation mark i should say of the law is going to pass till everything
00:18:05 has been accomplished till everything is fulfilled and um and he says those who teach and do these
00:18:13 things will be called great not in the older covenant but in the kingdom of heaven and those
00:18:19 who teach people to disobey them and do likewise will be the least so there is you're actually
00:18:25 talking about people now who claim to be inside the covenant who actually are believers but who
00:18:30 actually uh teach people to disobey god's commands now you the issue of love there is that you've
00:18:37 raised is absolutely central because of course the central the core meaning of the uh the moral
00:18:44 aspect of our lives is love love to god and love to neighbor and jesus summarizes the law in those
00:18:50 terms and he says if you love me you will obey my commandments and paul basically says the same
00:18:57 thing in romans 13 when he says love does no wrong to its neighbor therefore love is the fulfillment
00:19:03 of the law and he lifts he lists a number of the commandments from the decalogue he says love is
00:19:08 doing this so oftentimes when we speak of loving our neighbor or especially when we think about
00:19:14 loving our enemy we tend to have in mind as evangelicals you know working up feelings of
00:19:18 emotional affection for people. That's not what love to our neighbor means. Love of neighbor,
00:19:25 love even of enemy means to obey God's law with respect to them. And that's what the scripture
00:19:31 is driving at. And so the reality of the abiding validity of the law that you've touched on is
00:19:38 actually given to us in very much in the language of the gospel in Jeremiah chapter 31, which is
00:19:45 quoted again in Hebrews chapter eight, where we're told that the meaning of the new covenant
00:19:50 is that the law of God is going to, that was written on tablets of stone is now in the new
00:19:56 covenant written on the tables of our hearts. It's written into the core of our being. So the
00:20:03 law is not abolished. The location of the law has changed. The location of the law is no longer the
00:20:09 Ark of the Covenant. It's in the new temple, the people of God inscribed into our hearts. That is
00:20:17 the new covenant. And so you're right in thinking and saying that it would seem like an almost
00:20:23 bizarre contradiction to think that now that we are in Christ, the very law that Jesus used to
00:20:31 defeat the temptation of Satan, very law which he has said is not going to pass away, should somehow
00:20:39 now be utterly abandoned so that my arbitrary ideas and my arbitrary thoughts about what love
00:20:44 really looks like right um can be applied by me right well i mean that that's basically what
00:20:49 we're saying and people wouldn't put it into those terms but that is precisely i think the
00:20:54 heart of the matter is that people are saying god used to tell people what love is god used to be
00:21:00 the standard and now we are the standard right that the that the law of god has been replaced
00:21:06 by autonomy and the God of Yahweh has been replaced by demos, you know, might makes right
00:21:13 and the, you know, the 50% plus one can impose their will on the minority. And I like what you
00:21:21 said. I think it's really helpful that it's not that the law was abrogated, it was fulfilled by
00:21:25 Christ, but it's not that the law was abrogated by Christ and done away with. He says precisely
00:21:30 the opposite, but the law was just relocated. I like the way that it went from the Ark of the
00:21:38 Covenant. It went from something outside of us to something inside of us, and that's precisely what
00:21:41 makes the New Covenant. The New Covenant is not merely bigger or wider in its scope, but it's
00:21:46 deeper and better in the depth of its promises, and precisely one of those is that I will cause
00:21:52 you to walk in my statutes. I will put the fear of myself within you. I will write my law on your
00:21:58 hearts no longer will one say to the other you know know the lord for you shall all know me from
00:22:02 the least to the greatest and that that seems to be the the major transitioning component from the
00:22:08 old to the new is not the doing away of god's law but the the relocation of the law of god to where
00:22:14 we would it would be even more intimately known by god's people that we couldn't miss it precisely
00:22:21 precisely but we're missing it dr we're we are missing it it seems uh what what's going on with
00:22:29 that well we we we we're not seeing the the law as a gift of grace um and uh you know when god
00:22:37 covenants with man uh it's it's a it's a it it's a form of of treaty uh of an ancient kind um that
00:22:48 is a greater with a lesser and therefore his covenanting with us is an act of grace and when
00:22:55 jesus sits at the the table the the passover feast and he cuts covenant with the disciples
00:23:03 he he is of course introducing a new priesthood we do know that the book of hebrews is clear that
00:23:12 the Aaronic priesthood, is lesser than the priesthood and the order of Melchizedek.
00:23:19 Of course, we're reminded in scripture that Abraham paid a tithe to the priest king of Salem. 0.91
00:23:26 And Levi in his loins.
00:23:29 Exactly.
00:23:30 We're the Levi in his loins.
00:23:32 And so there is a greater priesthood that has come now in and through the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:23:37 And that's, of course, a priesthood to which we belong.
00:23:39 we are priests uh in the prophets priests and kings in the lord jesus christ we're a royal
00:23:46 priesthood a holy nation so there's been a change in the priesthood and uh the blood that now
00:23:53 cleanses us from sin in a way that the blood of bulls and goats couldn't is the blood of the lord
00:23:58 jesus christ and that's the cup of the new covenant but you'll notice that jesus doesn't
00:24:02 introduce a new 10 commandments when he cuts covenant with his disciples what he adds is
00:24:08 there's a new commandment i am giving to you love one another as i have loved you so there is
00:24:16 something about the the way in which christians love and serve and treat one another uh this
00:24:22 internalizing this radical internalizing of the reality of the gospel but uh in in this great in
00:24:28 the in jesus is the greater moses remember that the life of jesus recapitulates the journey of
00:24:34 Israel. So, cry out of Egypt, I have called my son. The Lord Jesus, of course, after his birth
00:24:42 in Bethlehem because of the persecution of Herod, they're down in Egypt. They come out of Egypt.
00:24:48 Christ goes through the waters, just like Israel, at his baptism. Then he goes out into the
00:24:54 wilderness, just like Israel, to be tempted, to be tested. Unlike Israel, he defeats temptation. 0.93
00:25:02 he overcomes in the wilderness then he goes up onto the mountain as the greater moses
00:25:07 he doesn't contradict moses he doesn't say you've heard moses said but i'm i need to correct that
00:25:13 and tell you this he says you have heard that it was said but i say to you and what jesus does is
00:25:19 the greater moses is interpret that's right the law over against the distorted interpretations
00:25:26 of the scribes and pharisees and he every time he raises the bar he's yeah exactly he is it's
00:25:30 expositional preaching. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is, he's taking Old Testament texts,
00:25:35 the Word of God, and not doing away with it and saying, well, the Word of God is no longer
00:25:38 relevant, and so I'm going to give you a topical sermon of my own fancy. No, it's an expositional
00:25:42 sermon. Here is the Old Testament text, and this is its meaning because Jesus was coming into a
00:25:49 context where it had been stripped of its meaning, and it had been reinterpreted by the scribes and
00:25:58 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.
00:26:08 And Jesus comes and shows how the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes were actually not keeping the law.
00:26:17 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 convicting the people.
00:26:24 That's precisely what Jesus accuses them of.
00:26:26 Right.
00:26:26 he accuses them of neither knowing the scriptures nor the power of god so often christians tend to
00:26:33 think that oh you see jesus rebuked the pharisees because they were such law they were all focused
00:26:37 on law no jesus actually accused them of breaking the law uh in fact in uh in i think it's um
00:26:45 uh i think it's mark 7 maybe um matthew or or the other way around matthew 15 somewhere there
00:26:52 where jesus is dealing with parents caring for parents and uh he actually rebukes the pharisees
00:27:01 for setting aside god's commandments and he says many other such things you do um so that was jesus
00:27:10 rabbi jesus's issue with the pharisees was their faulty uh interpretation of the law right not that
00:27:17 they were legalistic but they were actually a antinomian they were against law they were lawless
00:27:21 Real quick, would you agree that 2 Thessalonians, so as I've been 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 2 Thessalonians 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,
00:27:50 but the man of lawlessness who sits in the temple that this is before the temple fell in 80 70 and
00:27:57 the destruction of the temple and that it was a jew that was perhaps even the high priest that
00:28:01 the apostle was saying that guy who represents all the law of israel is actually he himself the
00:28:07 lawless one what do you think about that interpretation yeah i i'm myself impartial
00:28:14 preterist so i i would uh i would broadly go along with that i think what's what's significant
00:28:19 is that uh when the bible speaks when when the bible speaks about sin it defines sin is defined
00:28:27 in the bible as lawlessness and satan is the lawless one and antichrist is the man of lawlessness
00:28:36 so those things should immediately alert us to the issue that there is a problem with lawlessness
00:28:44 Lawlessness is the essence of what it means to be anti-Christ.
00:28:48 And, of course, the Apostle Paul, you took us to Thessalonians there.
00:28:53 You've mentioned the Apostle Paul's use of the case law.
00:28:58 His application, of course, about you mentioned parents and honoring our parents.
00:29:06 Let it may go well with us.
00:29:08 And interestingly, he changes, he adapts the promise at the end.
00:29:12 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.
00:29:18 So you see the expansion of the implication of the law there from a local promise in Canaan to this cosmic promise.
00:29:28 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.
00:29:39 And he was equally unashamed of taking the law and applying it to the civil context.
00:29:45 In 1 Timothy chapter 1, I think this is one of the most important texts for a proper understanding, a truly theonomic reading of Scripture.
00:29:54 In 1 Timothy 1, 7, well, starting at verse 8, he says,
00:29:59 We know that the law is good, provided one uses it legitimately.
00:30:04 ultimately we know that the law is not meant for a righteous person but for the lawless and
00:30:08 rebellious for the ungodly and sinful for the unholy and irreverent for those who kill their 0.99
00:30:14 fathers and mothers for murderers for the sexually immoral and homosexuals for kidnappers liars 0.99
00:30:20 perjurers and for whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching and listen to this based on 1.00
00:30:27 the glorious gospel of the blessed god which was entrusted to me paul actually says there
00:30:33 not only is he citing multiple commands out of the decalogue and applying it in a civil sense
00:30:39 who is the law made for he actually says that this is based on the gospel this isn't some law gospel
00:30:46 radical dualism this is this is rooted in the reality of the gospel of the kingdom and the
00:30:52 gospel of the kingdom is about the rule and reign of the lord jesus christ if you ever ever heard of
00:30:56 a king who has no kingdom and a kingdom with no law. Christ is the king. He has a kingdom and his
00:31:04 kingdom is governed by law. It's the rule of law. And it's the same law for the stranger and the
00:31:09 alien, as well as for the covenant member, for the true Israelite. And so Paul is totally
00:31:20 unashamed of making direct applications of the law to the civil sphere. And he's saying that this
00:31:26 is in accordance with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then he takes the case laws
00:31:31 and he applies the general equity of those laws into a variety of circumstances. So in some
00:31:36 respects, we could look at it in saying that God, who is the giver of his law, of course, God is
00:31:43 above law god is god is the law giver he's not subject to law but he binds himself to his covenant
00:31:50 with us and in history all law is temporal law and of course this is where the tomists and the
00:31:57 natural law theorists and the natural theologians go wrong they want they want an eternal uh abstract
00:32:04 principle of law that everybody's reason somehow participates in and they think that they can
00:32:09 they don't really need god's revealed law because the men of right reason will participate it's
00:32:15 somehow in eternal law through natural law but god's law is actually god positivizes makes
00:32:25 concrete applies the law of love in giving the decalogue and then it's the responsibility of
00:32:34 magistrates and the of course Moses and those who are going to govern the people to then take
00:32:43 minimal cases in these where the law of God is actually applied and so of course that is where
00:32:52 we get to the nitty-gritty of all of this and this is often where great offense is caused by
00:32:57 God's law because it's not left in the abstract as sort of eternal rational principles in the
00:33:03 Greek sense, but it's concretized and it's positivized. And the first positivization
00:33:10 of the law of love is God himself in the Decalogue. And then human beings have the
00:33:18 responsibility and obligation to take God's revealed law, to look at all of the cases where
00:33:25 faithful people, especially what we see revealed in scripture, not just what maybe Alfred the
00:33:32 great did with it that's the first codification of of um common law which of course is all of
00:33:37 our tradition in in the uh england america canada um you have the the uh it's it's alfred the great
00:33:46 who who embarks on the first codification of uh common law uh and uh and and it builds up case
00:33:54 by case over year after year after year and of course that's the the beauty of the of the
00:34:01 inheritance of the common law and of the tradition that we have in the West that's given to us
00:34:07 directly from Israel. It comes to us from Israel, this duty to positivize and apply the reality of
00:34:14 God's law. We've come to a point in our history, probably mainly because of the cultural pressure 0.55
00:34:20 all around us, where it is a tragedy to see so many Christians who either, we can have sympathy,
00:34:30 we should say, with those who have not been exposed to the reality of God's law anymore.
00:34:35 The law of God used to be hanging on the walls of crown courts in England and Canada. It used
00:34:43 to be part of our Sunday liturgies. The Ten Commandments would have been displayed in most
00:34:47 of our churches. Many of those things have slowly disappeared. We can have sympathy with the
00:34:53 Christian who's not really been taught God's law. What is more difficult to understand is where 0.60
00:34:59 evangelicals who should know better have an antipathy towards this law of liberty as james
00:35:06 calls it the law of love uh this this law that um is the god's gift to us as not the source of life
00:35:16 that's the lord jesus christ through the regenerating power of the holy spirit but the
00:35:20 way of life that's why god says this is the way walk in it that's really really helpful
00:35:26 real quick addressing i know that we need to come to a close here in a moment but addressing the
00:35:31 the concept of natural law and guys like john locke and those kinds of things so if if i were
00:35:37 to borrow that term for a moment i would i would apply that term and i'm sure it'd be more helpful
00:35:42 to use another term but i would say that natural law if i find it anywhere in the scripture it
00:35:47 would be romans chapter not one being natural revelation but romans chapter two that the
00:35:52 Gentiles, even those who have received no measure of special revelation, God's revealed law in his
00:35:58 law word, they've still received a measure of God's moral law simply by virtue of being
00:36:07 fallen creatures, yes, but a vestige of the image of God still remaining, creatures made in the
00:36:12 image of God living in God's world. By virtue of living in God's world with God's order and God's
00:36:17 rules for his world, working as they do, and the law of God being written on their hearts
00:36:22 and the conscience of man, even though he lies and attempts to suppress the truth and 0.97
00:36:27 deeds of unrighteousness, there's still a sense in which the Gentile who's never received
00:36:31 a missionary, never received an apostolic message or a scroll or anything else, he is 0.76
00:36:36 a law unto himself so that he is rightly judged.
00:36:40 He's without an apologia, and I'm going back and forth between Romans 2 and 1 here, but
00:36:44 he has no excuse because this is what i always say to people when they get upset about god's
00:36:49 law really they're upset that they're they're upset about the fact that there's a god in heaven
00:36:53 that he has a standard they don't think that the god who created the entire world and created them
00:36:58 has the right to have a standard and and what i always say is well do you have a standard
00:37:03 and you impose your standard not oh this is the rule that i live by no you no nobody does that 0.85
00:37:09 that's hypocritical. That's not honest. You have a standard and you impose it on others. That's 0.84
00:37:14 why you get offended, right? When others do to you what you would say that I would never do to
00:37:22 anybody else. That's why you're horribly offended because they did not uphold your standard. You
00:37:26 didn't make them. You didn't create them from the dust of the ground. You didn't knit them together
00:37:31 in their mother's womb or anything. And yet you think that you have the right to impose a standard
00:37:35 to them without even being able to objectively determine whether or not your standard is
00:37:40 actually moral, whether or not it's actually good.
00:37:43 Your standard is very likely flawed.
00:37:46 And my point is that the apostle Paul seems to say that the Gentiles, they themselves 0.96
00:37:50 have a standard and they can't even keep their own standard. 0.95
00:37:53 How in the world do they think that they could stand before a thrice holy God?
00:37:56 And so therefore they are guilty whether they've ever received a single page of scripture or
00:38:01 not, simply by natural revelation and the law of God. It's two components. It's God revealing his
00:38:07 eternal power and divine nature by what he has made, that which is physical, the cosmos outside
00:38:13 of them, but then also within them and the way that God has created them in his very image,
00:38:18 that image tarnished by the fall, but a vestige of the image of God remaining nonetheless. And so
00:38:24 my point is, I would want to say that if natural law is anything, it's that. It's Romans 2,
00:38:30 what Paul's getting at. But then what I would say is that the natural law that Paul's getting at in
00:38:34 Romans 2, there seems to be no distinction between that and moral law, the 10 commandments found in
00:38:40 the Decalogue. It seems that there's not one commandment, and I would include even the Sabbath,
00:38:44 again, by virtue of natural revelation. There are people who rejected God, they were deist or they
00:38:49 were agnostic, who still recognize that just with agriculture, farming the land for six years and
00:38:56 then giving it a break on the seventh was good for producing more crops, right?
00:39:00 That just the fabric of the world and the way that God designed it spoke to a Sabbath
00:39:05 rest and a one in seven principle.
00:39:09 And so my point is, I really think that if there is natural law that comes apart from
00:39:13 special revelation, it would be the 10 commandments, that there is a God and therefore we should
00:39:19 love him and worship him and have no other gods before him.
00:39:22 And that this God, no one has seen him.
00:39:24 That seems apparently obvious, natural that we could conclude no one's seen him.
00:39:28 Therefore, we shouldn't try to construct visible images, but rather worship through faith.
00:39:33 Faith does not come by seeing, but rather by hearing and hearing the word of Christ.
00:39:36 And that we should worship this God, not in a trivial or trite manner, but with sincerity,
00:39:40 not taking his name in vain.
00:39:42 The Sabbath principle I've already addressed.
00:39:43 And then Paul explicitly cites many of the laws regarding neighbors, such as murder in 0.99
00:39:49 Romans chapter two with the Gentiles. 0.90
00:39:50 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.
00:40:02 And then that's simply, in my assessment, simply confirmed through revealed special revelation in the Decalogue, in the law, the moral law given to Moses on the mountain.
00:40:13 so so my i guess my point is to say that the guy who tries to get away from from moral law and adopt
00:40:21 natural law he seems to be doing it as a deist or agnostic to somehow lower the bar but i don't see
00:40:27 how it would what how would you respond to that yeah no i think that um the the part of the
00:40:34 challenge with the the expressions natural law um um natural theology is of course they do tend
00:40:41 to mean different things to different people. And because of the Western tradition and the influence
00:40:48 of the very powerful influence of Greek thought in the Western tradition, even in the Western
00:40:52 theological tradition, sometimes the word nature comes with a certain freight that the Bible
00:40:59 doesn't actually bring with it that you and I wouldn't carry. So I prefer to use terms like
00:41:03 creation uh law creational law or um uh creational norms uh because i as i expressed at the beginning
00:41:14 or every word of god is law and every aspect of creation is governed by his law yes the paul says
00:41:20 the work of god's law uh is known in man it's part of the very the fact that we're creatures of god
00:41:28 There is that abiding testimony, not just within the creation of 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.
00:41:48 The prophet Isaiah points out that God teaches the farmer.
00:41:52 So there is an encounter with God's normative structure.
00:41:56 Right. 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.
00:42:09 There was always, from the very beginning, verbal revelation.
00:42:13 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.
00:42:22 So the man's knowledge of what God requires is also going to be orally passed on and spread in those terms.
00:42:32 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.
00:42:43 And that's what the, I think, Ten Commandments represents.
00:42:46 I think the danger, and I think sometimes this is what's happened with 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.
00:43:11 it's going to be more acceptable to non-Christian people because it's just nature and it's man's
00:43:15 reason that engages with it whereas this this um how can a specific concrete positivized law like
00:43:23 the decalogue and the case law that comes with it be in any way universal and of course what you
00:43:29 find though with the rationalistic philosophers and the natural law theorists is they actually
00:43:33 can't agree on what natural law really is what what what is it actually teaching what is the
00:43:39 body of laws that natural law is actually delivered to man and in a in a in a darwinist
00:43:45 framework and you look at you look at a a hindu framework or pantheistic framework you look at 0.97
00:43:51 the law structures that have been present in indigenous cultures and so on i wouldn't want 1.00
00:43:56 to live in one right the the the you know idolatrous idol worshiping child sacrificing 1.00
00:44:03 um uh sexually promiscuous uh cultures that it took the evangelization of the world to bring 0.77
00:44:12 to bear the reality of god's law and that's an inheritance we can't squander left only to our 0.57
00:44:17 own reason because of our fallen state as paul says in romans eight man is an enmity with god
00:44:23 he cannot submit himself to the law of god he won't do so that's why we need the regenerating
00:44:28 work of the of the holy spirit amen well this has been wonderfully helpful dr boot i there's so much
00:44:35 more that we could talk about um but i think the best solution is to call it quits for today and
00:44:39 just have you back every single week from here on can i get your commitment no but we'd love that
00:44:45 in the future we'll have you back on again and and take some of these that because there's so
00:44:50 much more we could say we've just kind of scratched the surface and we could talk about many scriptures
00:44:53 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?
00:45:01 I think that would be a very interesting discussion to have.
00:45:04 I think so.
00:45:04 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 privileged gift of God's law.
00:45:19 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.
00:45:26 When you think about Proverbs and the wisdom literature, and you see that that's a father teaching his son God's law.
00:45:33 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.
00:45:42 That's the word there. The exodus. It is Moses and Elijah.
00:45:48 it's the unity of the law and the prophets with the lord jesus christ and i think when we start
00:45:52 to see the beauty and the glory of this and and the gift of the gracious gift of of god's law to
00:45:59 us as his people we don't take the we don't when we when we wash when we're when we go to do our
00:46:06 ablutions we don't take that the law functions in many respects for us like a mirror and we don't
00:46:11 pull the mirror off the wall as christians and wash our face in the mirror no we we when you go
00:46:16 go to the washroom you wash with water but the mirror shows you your condition and the the law 0.72
00:46:23 of God is not that which washes us the blood of Christ washes and cleanses us but the mirror
00:46:29 that the law functions as that mirror for us even as believers to guide our sanctification
00:46:34 and we're obligated to teach it and instruct not just our children not just our churches but the
00:46:41 culture all the nations in the gift of god's law and look what's happened joel in that culture now
00:46:48 in the west where we have neglected that as goes the church so goes the world amen and i i think
00:46:54 just landing the plane with with what you said earlier the law being synonymous with love um
00:47:01 you know we say well don't impose the law on unbelievers it's not universal this is just the
00:47:06 law for Christians. But if we see the law as loving, then it simply raises the question,
00:47:11 what am I called to do with my unbelieving neighbor? Am I called to love him? There would
00:47:16 be no qualms, no pushback if we said, but we're called to love our brothers. The scripture talks
00:47:22 about that. First John talks about if anyone hates his brother, fellow Christians must love
00:47:26 fellow Christians. That's one of the signs that we've truly been born again and that the love of
00:47:29 Christ abides in us, but are we called to love unbelievers? And every gospel-centered Tim Keller
00:47:37 loving guy would come out of the woodworks and say, yes, we're called to love not just Christians,
00:47:41 but love the culture is pointing the culture and society and even unbelievers back to the law of
00:47:49 God loving. But we don't see that. And I think that reveals, that shows our hand. We don't see
00:47:54 the law of God as something that is loving, that brings about flourishing and life and prosperity.
00:47:59 but rather binding and oppressive. 1.00
00:48:02 And that's why we don't want to share it with the unbeliever 0.91
00:48:04 because we want to love the unbeliever and not hurt him. 0.91
00:48:07 And we see the law of God is harmful.
00:48:10 That's really what I think it comes down to
00:48:12 and it's destroyed churches
00:48:14 and it's destroyed society and culture.
00:48:16 Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:48:18 Dr. Boot, God bless you.
00:48:20 Please continue with your ministry.
00:48:21 We're praying for you.
00:48:23 My privilege.
00:48:23 Thanks for having me.
00:48:24 God bless.
00:48:24 Thanks so much for listening.
00:48:26 But real quick, before you go,
00:48:27 do us a small favor.
00:48:29 take a moment and leave us a five-star review if you enjoyed the show. This is undoubtedly
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