The idea that God could set aside or change His moral law is
blatantly unbiblical and repugnant to the Father’s love for the Son.
First, according to the Bible, the law is a transcription of
God’s holiness, righteousness, and perfection. This is why the Law instructs us
to be holy, righteous, and perfect because God is holy, righteous, and perfect (Lev.
11:44-45, 19:2, 20:7, 26; something the New Testament unapologetically repeats –
e.g. Matt. 5:48, 1 Pet. 1:16).
In light of this, to say that God’s moral norms have changed
necessarily presupposes either that God Himself has changed or that God is at
variance with Himself. Both of these notions are contradicted by Scripture, the
former by what James says, i.e. that with “God there is neither variableness, nor
shadow cast by turning” —the same James, by the way, who defines sin as
transgression of the Law (Jms. 2:9), even citing in the process the summary of
God’s moral law found in the Decalogue (Jms. 2:8-13)— and the second is
contradicted by what Paul told Timothy, namely, that God cannot deny Himself (2
Tim. 2:13)—the same Paul who also referred to the Old Testament as inspired by
God and therefore “profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, for
training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for
every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16). The immutability and absolute consistency of
God are everywhere presupposed in Scripture, easily deducible from sundry
truths of Scripture, and are explicitly asserted in Scripture. When this is coupled
with the fact that the law is a revelation of God Himself, of His righteous
character, of His holiness, of his goodness, then it follows that the moral law
has neither been set aside nor changed. (BTW, any Christian who rejects the
eternally binding nature of the moral law should forever forego arguing for
God’s existence on the basis of absolute, universal, invariant laws of
morality. When a Christian says that morality has changed, he has said nothing other
than what atheists are forced to say by the dictates of their philosophy,
though Christians can’t reason consistently by that assumption any better than atheists can. Autonomy is just as philosophically
preposterous for a Christian as it is for an atheist, though the former have
even less excuse for it, which is saying a lot since Paul says non-Christians
have NO excuse – Rom. 1:20.)
Second, given God’s free and gracious decision to save man,
the work of Christ in satisfying divine justice by his vicarious, sacrificial,
atoning death became an absolute necessity. This clearly follows from our
Lord’s own plea to the Father that if there be any other way to redeem lost
sinners that the Father would remove from Christ the cup of His wrath (Matt.
26:39; Mk. 14:36; Lk. 22:42). The very fact that the Father did not remove the
cup, as He surely would have had there been any other way, shows that there was
no other way. However, if God can change or set aside His moral law as some allege,
then there would have been another way to rescue sinners, i.e. God could have
simply changed or set aside His law by which sinners are consigned to wrath for
their sins, and then he could have waived his hand and declared bygones to be
bygones (“For where there is no law, there is no transgression” – Rom. 4:15).
In effect, those who say God’s moral laws are mutable and dispensable are
obligated by the demands of consistency to say that the Father delivered the
Son of His love over to death when He didn’t have to do so, and that He
rejected the Son’s request in spite of there being another way of saving
sinners that would have spared His beloved Son the accursed death of the cross.
Accordingly, any denial of the ethical continuity of Scripture from
Genesis to Revelation ought to be completely rejected by those who hold to the
orthodox doctrine of God as unchangeable and self-consistent and of Christ as
the beloved Son of the Father.
