God’s Law and Natural Law

Just around the corner from my house in suburban Chicago stands a new Buddhist temple. Large and ornate, it is tangible evidence of the growing popularity of other religions in the United States. Gone is the day when Christians in North America were insulated from other religious traditions of the world. Our pluralistic environment has forced us to grapple with a series of vital issues: How can we know Jesus is the only way to salvation? Can people be saved while members of other religious traditions? What about people who never have heard the Gospel?

We cannot answer all these questions here. Our purpose is more modest: to remind us of the importance of “natural law” as we consider many of these issues. The idea that God has revealed to all people something of His moral will has been part of most Christian traditions for centuries. And the concept is all the more important in our current pluralistic climate.

Paul provides some support for the idea in Romans 2. In verses 12 and 13, he introduces the topic of the law into his argument in Romans for the first time. For Paul, a Jew, and his readers, people familiar with the Old Testament, the identity of this law would have been clear: God’s revelation through Moses to the people of Israel, now embedded in the first five books of the Bible. Those who have “sinned without law” in verse 12 are therefore Gentiles, for God did not give them the law. And those who have “sinned in the law,” correspondingly, are Jews. Paul’s main purpose here is to burst any sense of Jewish complacency. Jews who were given the law will be judged for their sin. Only if they follow the law will they be counted as righteous before God (v. 13; and, Paul implies, that doing must be perfect—an impossibility).

But in verses 14 and 15, Paul qualifies his simple distinction between Jews and Gentiles on the basis of possession of the law. True, he suggests, Gentiles do not have the law of Moses. But by doing things that the law requires, Gentiles reveal that they “are a law to themselves.” In saying this, Paul means that Gentiles have a “law” of their own. It is not the law of Moses, and, of course, it does not contain all the detail of that law. But Gentiles have access to the basic moral demands of God. Paul does not fully explain how they can know these demands. But his allusion to “conscience” in verse 15 might suggest that these moral requirements are built into every human being.

In addition to God’s written law, then, there is a “natural law” God has built into creation. It is accessible to all people, and all are accountable to follow it. No one can be saved by this law, for it does not include the Gospel or come with the grace that enables people to believe. Paul notes that all people will find when they stand before God in the judgment that some of their thoughts accuse them and others excuse them—and the presence of even one “accusing” thought will be enough to condemn a person. But although this natural law cannot save, it does have two functions that are very significant in our pluralistic world.

First, the natural law provides a universal moral norm. The founders of America believed, and enshrined into some of our foundational documents, the idea that a set of moral principles applicable to all people existed and could be made the basis for positive law. The loss of this concept has contributed to the moral relativism of our age and has undercut the moral authority of our courts. Our society still generally recognizes that certain things are “wrong,” and wrong for everybody: murder, theft, child pornography, and so forth. But this list is growing shorter every day. A reassertion of the natural law of God could help to stem the tide of moral relativism. As Christians become ever more marginalized in the culture, we might fail to impose our idea of natural law on society in general. But at least we can have a secure foundation from which to proclaim the universal moral requirements of the God of the Bible. Certain things are wrong not just because they are inconvenient or because a particular society does not like them—they are wrong because God has decreed them to be wrong.

A second very important function of natural law is that it creates a basis for God’s righteous judgment. We often agonize over the fate of people around the world who have “never heard.” I don’t want to minimize this problem, but the Biblical teaching about natural law essentially claims that everyone has heard. God has provided evidence about Himself in the world He has created (Rom. 1:19–21). And He has revealed His basic moral will to all people. All human beings, then, wherever they live and whatever their religious upbringing, have heard something about God and His will for them. They therefore have “no excuse” when they turn from God to idols and ignore His laws (see 1:20 and 2:1).

This teaching certainly does not answer all our questions about people in other religions. But it can encourage us to recognize that, for all our differences, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, animists, secularists, and others all bear the image of God and therefore possess evidence about God and His will for us. Like Paul in Athens (Acts 17), we can build on this platform of universal human experience as we seek to convince others that God has decisively revealed Himself in the Lord Jesus Christ.