What I believe,   part 3

The Law of God and the Law of Man

Some people argue that they can separate what they do as Christians from what the government does, and they say that Christ was only telling us how to act as people. They say, "I will not hit back when my neighbour hurts me alone, but if my country needs me to kill its enemies, then I must go and fight." The problem here is that we must find the line between where our work for God stops and where our work for our country (the "empty idol") starts.

The same problem comes up in the courts. We are each asked to spend some time in the courts, saying who is right and who is wrong, and punishing those who are wrong. And when someone robs from us, we think it is okay to take action against such people in the courts. But again we must choose between the law of God and the law of man. We cannot get away from it.

The soldier's question – The Gospel, or the Army Rules? The law of God, or the law of man? – is the question that we each must face, as the Jews did in the days of Samuel. Christ himself had to face it, as did his followers. It now stands before each one of us who wants to be a true Christian.

The law of Christ about not hitting back had always touched my heart. But the law of an eye for an eye touched the animal part of me. Something deep inside of me knew that if I lived by the law of Christ I would be alone and I would be used roughly by others, and if I lived by the law of man, I could laugh and have friends. Because I could feel this, I had not even tried to look into the meaning of the law of Christ. It had been easier to say that it was an impossible law and to leave it there.

I will now look at just one part of what Christ said – the part about judging other people. The law courts, where I worked for a time, were so much a part of protecting my wealth, that I could not make myself see anything wrong with them. I was able to read Christ's teaching about not judging without even thinking of the courts.

But when I started to think seriously about the teaching that we should not fight against evil people, it became clear that the courts were a big part of the way we fight against evil people. I started to think about how Christ must feel about courts. In the past I had believed he was only talking about us judging friends or other people through our words. But what if he was talking about all people, and what if he was talking about judging with more than words? What if he was talking about the courts themselves?

In Luke 6:37-49 we read the first words that Christ said after he told us not to fight against evil people (in Luke 6:27-36).

He said, "Forgive as your Father in heaven forgives. Judge not, and you will not be judged. Do not send a person to be punished, and you will not be sent to be punished yourself."

Could this mean that we should not have law courts to judge evil people? I only needed to ask the question, and I could hear my heart starting to say that this was true.

I know how what I am saying now surprises people at first. It surprised me too, because I never for one minute believed that there was anything wrong with having courts. I was so stupid that after I started to believe in Christ, and after I had started to read the Gospels as a believer, I would joke to my friends who worked as lawyers or judges about how they were judging when Christ had told them not to judge. I was so confident that Christ did not mean for them to obey those words that I believed what I was saying was funny. Now I feel bad to think that I was laughing at the teachings of the Son of God.

To help people understand why I have now changed my belief, I will go through, step by step, the way I came to understand that these words about not fighting against evil people were clearly pointing to the business of courts.

After coming to believe that Christ did not want us to fight against evil people, the first thing that came to my mind, as I said above, was the courts, and how we use them to fight against evil people. Christ says to return good for evil, but courts return evil for evil. Christ says to forgive… not one time, not seven times, but to forgive without end. He says to love our enemies and to do good to them that hate us. The courts do not forgive. They punish those that they believe are enemies of good people.

And we are told that the courts are God's instrument, carrying out his will. One argument is that Christ was not thinking of courts when he said this. He was just a simple man talking about people working together in small groups. He did not know much about courts. But when I looked at the Gospels, I could see that from the time he was born until his death, courts (both religious and political) had been fighting against him.

There were times when he clearly talked about courts, and he talked about them like they were evil. He told his disciples that they would be brought before courts because they were Christians, and he said that he himself would be handed over to a court and judged by it. He told his followers how they should act in court, and he acted in the same way himself. In fighting against evil people, the courts often punished good people too.

In the story of the Jewish court judging a woman who was guilty of adultery, Christ did not agree with the court. Even when he knew the woman was guilty, he went against the rule of the court, and it seemed that his enemies knew ahead of time that he would do that.

Many times he said that man's laws and man's courts could not judge, because the people doing the judging were themselves guilty. He said that, with dirt in our own eyes, we will never be able to take dirt out of the eyes of others. And he said that when blind people follow blind leaders they both fall into a hole.

But could there be room to use a court to protect good people from bad people without going against Christ? In Matthew 5, Jesus says, "If anyone takes you to court and takes your coat from you, let them have your shirt too." From this it seems that he does not want his followers to turn to the courts for such help.

Let us return to the saying about not judging. Is it possible he was not thinking about courts at all when he said this? In Matthew 5-6 he started by saying what the Jewish law courts said: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And then he went on to say, "Judge not." It seems clear from this that he was talking about law courts. In Luke he not only told us not to judge, but not to send a person to be punished either. This seems to have been added to make it clear that he was talking about the judging that takes place in a court.

But let us say that I am trying to make it mean something that Christ did not mean. How did Christ's first followers understand what he was saying? What did they think about law courts?

James writes, "He that says something evil against his brother and judges his brother is saying something evil against the law and judging the law. If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is only one law giver who is able to save or to destroy. Who are you that judges another?"

The word used by James for "says something evil against (his brother)" (katalaleo) should read "says (his brother) did not obey a law."*

*Our study of the Greek word used here is not clear enough to say this with confidence. D.M.

The words following this are easier to understand if we see that the "law" they talk about is the teaching of Christ (the law of God). I would read it as saying that when you take someone to court for breaking a law of the land, you are, at the same time, taking action against the law of God that came through Christ. Instead of doing what Christ has told us to do, we are judging what he has told us to do and by doing this, we are making ourselves smarter than God, the one law giver who is eternally able to save or to destroy us.

All of this is talking about people using their own reasoning to change what Christ has said about not using law courts to punish evil people. Is our faith in the one true God to punish evil, or is it in the king's courts?

In James 2:5-13, he writes, "Did not God choose the poor of this world, who are rich in faith, to receive the kingdom that he has promised to them that love him? But you have hated the poor. Do not rich people fight against you and bring you to the courts? Do they not laugh at that holy name by which you are called? If you obey the King's law (Love others as you love yourself), you will do well. But if you try harder to be friends with the rich than with the poor, the law will say that you are guilty. If you keep the whole law, but break one rule, you are guilty of it all. For the One who made a rule against adultery also said, Do not kill. If you are not guilty of adultery, but you kill, you too are a law breaker. So talk and act like people who will be judged by the law of freedom. For the one who does not forgive will be judged without forgiveness, and forgiveness laughs at judging."

We do not need the courts (the "empty thing") if we follow the King's law (that is, the King of kings' law).

The last words ("forgiveness laughs at judging") have often been changed to "Forgiveness is taught in the courts." The reason for doing this is to make us believe that some courts are Christian, and that Christian courts are kinder than other courts.

Going back over the words from James, we see that he was saying that rich people bring Christians before the law courts. He said that we do not need the courts if we follow the King's law (that is to say, God's law, which is to love others). He said that there is no one perfect enough to judge others. Maybe he was thinking of the woman brought to Jesus to be killed when he said that the ones who would have killed her were no better than the woman herself, because killing is as bad as (if not worse than) adultery. And a better wording for the last line is that "Forgiveness destroys the courts!"

When writing to the Romans, Paul said, "You who judge others do not have a good reason to do this; for where you judge another person, you judge yourself; because you that judge do the same things yourself. And we know that God will judge truly against people who do such things. So think about this the next time you judge another person and do the same things yourself: Do you think you will be able to run away from God judging you? Or do you hate his Spirit of love and forgiveness, without knowing that it is all that can save you?"

This is what I found in the writings of the first followers of Christ. And we know from their lives that it was not very often that the courts were on their side. If they were not clear enough in talking against the courts, it would only be because they were in enough danger with the courts already. In studying other early Christian writers (Athenagoras and Origen) I learned that they believed the difference between themselves and others was that they never forced people to do anything; never killed people who were wrong; and never went to court against others, but only turned the other cheek when taken to court themselves. All the early martyrs said much the same thing. Up to the time of Constantine*, Christians thought all courts were evil. They would never go to court against anyone. For them, the words of Christ, "Judge not, that you should not be judged" were understood as I now understand them: "Do not take action against people in court if you do not want God to take action against you."

*Constantine was the Roman king. When he became a Christian, he did not stop being king. He just said that the Roman kingdom and God's kingdom were one and the same now. It is from this that problems about drawing the line between the governments and laws of man and the government and law of God has come. D.M.

But because there are courts in every Christian country, and because it is now widely believed that Christ was only telling us not to point out things that are wrong in others (outside of courts), I was slow to believe my understanding was the right one. I believed there must be good reasons for the way that these words are now being taught in the church.

So I studied the writings of the church experts. And I found that from the time of Constantine* to the present they all argued that Christ was only telling us not to point out things that are wrong in others. But if this is true, then how can any Christian obey him? For it is our job as Christians to teach the truth and to destroy the lies.

Some experts wrote about the need to judge if a thing is right or wrong. Some tried to fix it by listing things Christians could judge and then listing things they could not judge.

Others worked around the problem by saying it was a rule only for Jews. But no one said a word against the courts. If the question of Christ's stand on courts came up at all, it was only to say that it was not worth writing about, because we all know that we must have courts. And this teaching is so widely believed today, that as soon as a Christian sits in the chair of a court judge, he or she is free not only to judge but to have people killed, and no one will question it.

What I must ask these experts is this: If Christ believed that it was evil for a Christian to say something bad about another person, often by accident or without thinking, why did he not believe it was evil for a Christian judge to put in writing something saying that a person is bad, and to add to it a cruel plan to punish the person?

Millions of people have been judged and punished by such judges over the years, but the Church experts have fenced the judges off and protected them from ever being questioned for their actions. Why is this so?

Because I was starting to think that the experts were not acting in good faith, I turned for a closer look at the words that the first writers used – something I should have done in the first place. I found that the Greek word for "judge" (krino) has many different meanings. The way it is used most often is in saying that a person is guilty, or in saying how a person must be punished, in a court of law. And I found that it never has the meaning of just saying something bad about another person. In the Bible, too, it is often used when talking about actions in a court. At times it is used to talk about knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong; but again, it is never used for one person talking against another person. So why do the "experts" say this is what Jesus was talking about when he told us not to judge?

In Luke's Gospel, he uses a second word (katadikazo) with the word for "judge", and I found from the dictionary that this second word is never used in any other way than to talk about testing, judging, and punishing a person in a court of law. The same is true of how the word is used in the Bible. In James 5:6, it says that the rich people killed Christ by taking him to court. And it is not used in any other way in all of the Bible.

So what does all this mean? When we think about all of the cruelest actions that people have done to each other through the history of the world, we find that most of them were carried out with the full blessing of the laws and courts of one country or another. In the Gospels, each word of which we say is holy, Jesus clearly says, "You have had a law that says 'An eye for an eye', but I give you a new law: 'Do not fight against evil people.' Obey this rule, all of you: do not return evil for evil, but do good always to all people, and forgive everyone."

I now understand that Jesus was saying, "Do not go to law against another person, and do not punish people through the courts."

My heart says clearly: Do not kill other people. Science says that the more you kill, the more evil there will be. Reason says that you cannot stop evil with more evil. The Word of God, which I believe, says the same. Reading the words, "Judge not, so that you will not be judged. Do not send a person to be punished, so that you will not be sent to be punished yourself.

Forgive, and God will forgive you", I had been saying that this was the Word of God at the same time that I had been saying that the courts that do not obey this are instruments of God. I had honestly believed that I could be a Christian and a judge at the same time. How could I have ever been so blind!

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