These consequences work themselves out in the character, history and destiny of our society
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
Ancient philosophers and theologians wrote of the order that God inscribed in the world. They named things such as the recurrence of day and night, the orderly motions of the heavenly bodies and the regular alternation of seasons. Scientists have certainly pushed much deeper in our knowledge of the laws of the universe since then, including gravity, the atomic structure of matter, the genetic code and so on.
The ancients classified all of those things under the title “natural law” or “natural laws.” While we certainly know more of them today, we could join the ancients in pointing out that what makes them natural laws is that we cannot violate or change them. Gravity doesn’t stop working because I don’t believe in it or understand it. None of us can change the periodic table by wishing it weren’t true.
There’s another kind of natural law, however. There are natural moral laws like: Telling lies is wrong; stealing is wrong. There are natural spiritual laws like: If you make a promise you should keep it; to praise ourselves undermines our character.
There are more. Perhaps the most important one in American history is the notion that human beings are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
One crucial truth about the character of natural moral and spiritual laws is contained in the term “unalienable.” The truth is that we’re not supposed to violate these moral and spiritual laws, but we can. When we violate them, however, there are consequences that work themselves out in our character, in our history and in our eternal destiny.
Natural physical laws cannot be violated. In that, we see a reflection of God’s constancy. Natural moral and spiritual laws can be violated. In that, we see a reflection of the fact that God invites us above the realm of the automatic and into the realm of the free pursuit of the good. God places us in a world with both kinds of natural law, that we might live in the ordered physical world and be invited into the ordered spiritual world.
Why all these philosophical reflections on natural law?
Here are three more natural moral and spiritual laws: 1) Men should protect their children and the mothers of their children. 2) Mothers should not kill their children. 3) Medicine is for healing, not harming. The first rule for physicians is: “Do no harm.”
Those natural laws are not automatic. We can act against them, and we can vote against them. But we know this from history: If and when a society violates natural moral laws, it has downstream consequences for culture. The more basic the natural law is, and the more manifest is the violation of it, the more a culture comes apart at the seams.
So, the key question as we prepare to vote next week — especially on Amendment 3 — is this: Will we say “yes” to the natural moral and spiritual laws that God has written into the world, or do we choose to face the consequences of saying “no” to the natural law?
