PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL LAW: The Other Side of the Social Contract

In the Bible, God makes covenants with His people.  He promises to do certain things for those who agree to and uphold their end of the covenant.  The Social Contract is no different: it is a covenant between every member of society promising certain rights and privileges.  Unfortunately, the people of the Old Testament were prone to making the same mistakes we make today with respect to the Constitution.  They we quick to reach for the promises of God’s covenant, and quick to blame God when those promises were withheld, but just as we do today, they never looked to the first part of God’s covenant.  We have conveniently forgotten the other side of the Social Contract.  Sadly, we also seem to have forgotten that it is this other side that actually makes the Social Contract work, and without it, society either falls apart or falls into tyranny.

The other side of the Social Contract is duty — duty to every other individual in society.  It is this sense of duty that makes the Social Contract work.  Duty demands that you put the rights of others before your own desires, and that you seek to uphold justice and rebuke those who pervert it.  It is duty that demands we defend the innocent and care for the helpless.  Only after we have done all these things can we then claim any right or protection promised by the Social Contract.  After all, if we will not defend the rights of others first, then why would anyone feel compelled to help us when the time comes to actually defend our own rights?  This is the forgotten side of the Social Contract, the side that actually makes the Social Contract work: duty to our fellow countrymen.

In the Bible, God keeps every promise He makes.  The problem is that His people forgot that the other side of God’s covenants.  God starts out first by saying “IF you will first, then I will.”  But God’s people are just like the majority of us today: they wanted the rewards, but they didn’t want the responsibilities that come with them.  Today, we are just as quick to cry out at the slightest hint that someone may have trespassed against our rights, but we will not lift a finger to attend to our duty to others.  Instead, we think those who benefit at the cost of others are clever and we glorify the ways they pervert the law for personal gain.  We ignore affronts to morality and ridicule anyone who still shows any sign of shame at what we have become.  And when things all go wrong — as they repeatedly did in the Bible — then we are no different from those who rebelled against God: we stand and thump our chests and act as though we have been wronged and claim that it is all proof that God does not exist — or worse, that if He does exist, this is all proof that He cannot be a good God.

It took me some forty-six of my forty-eight years to realize how badly I have sinned against God.  I have been among those who pervert justice while telling myself that it shows how clever I am.  I wasn’t clever, I was evil — still am.  The only difference is I see it now.  I also understand that God does exist.  If He doesn’t, then complaining about what should and should not be is an absurdity.  It would be like a fish complaining that water should not be wet.  But there are those who do not see or understand this, and, sadly, they may never see it because — in their ‘cleverness’ — they have convinced themselves that it is ridiculous to think that morality cannot exist without God.  Some are so depraved as to laugh at the very idea of morality.  They would deny it even exists.  Such people are animals.  They have no place in civil society, and it is why the Bible commanded they be killed.  But then, that is also a sign of rebellion.

Skeptics like to attack Biblical commands to kill people who commit certain crimes.  But they never look at why Scripture commands it.  God tells them — if they will take the time to read on, that is.  The Bible tells us that certain people are to be removed or killed so that we can remove evil from society.  This is part of God’s covenant; part of our duty.  Now, God gives us free will, which means we are free to refuse to obey God’s commands.  We can decide we know better than God and design an entirely new system of justice.  But if we do, then we do not have any claim to God’s promises, nor do we have any justification to accuse God when things go wrong.  To claim that the messes we make when we disobey is proof that God either does not exist or, if He does exist, He cannot possibly be good is to pile crime upon crime.

But I guess we have ‘progressed’ past any need for God’s justice.  I mean, look how great the system we have designed works.  You can commit murder and get out in just a few years, but the person who kills you as you try to add to your thirsty-page rap sheet will be put in jail for life.  We also bettered God where slavery is concerned.  God’s law just recognized that man is evil and evil will always exist, so God told us how to act as both slave and master.  But we ended slavery — showing how much better we are than God.  We ended slavery, then we forced a different group of people to work against their will to support those in whatever favored class we decide is worthy of the wealth they create.  After all, God does not seem to understand that it is acceptable to exploit people based on how productive they are, but it is an abomination to allow it to happen based on skin color.  We have even figured out how to force people to ‘live right,’ something God did not do, and yet another reason to deny that God is all-powerful.  God created a world where people suffer and even harm themselves, but we have fixed this.  Now, we tell people what they can and cannot do and force them to comply.  It is for their own safety, so it is acceptable to stomp on another person’s free will — except when it comes to abortion.  Then the person’s right to choose can never be questioned.

I pray you know that I am being sarcastic, and that I do not believe we have done anything better than God.  I also pray that you will see and understand that we have made a huge mess out of our nation and the world because we have ignored God’s laws.  Whether Revealed or Natural, the universe works according to God’s eternal laws.  We can ignore them for only so long and then they will reassert themselves.  Any sense that we have defeated these laws is nothing but an illusion, and no society can survive if it chooses to believe in an illusion.  So we have a duty to each other.  We first have a duty to seek and accept reality.  Water will wet us and fire will burn, and no amount of clever word play or cognitive dissonance or moral relativism can ever change this.  This means we have a duty to watch over each other and, when our neighbor starts to believe in — or worse — advance these illusions, it is our duty to offer correction.  If they refuse correction, we have a duty to rebuke them and shun them from society.  These are duties everyone one owes to all men, and it starts in our own families.  After that, we have a duty to the Social Contract that defines our State and/or Nation.  In my case, this means I have a duty to Florida first, and then to the United States of America second.  The moment a society forgets or rejects these duties, it has started down a road that must lead either to collapse or tyranny, and less the people repent and turn back to God’s laws, those same laws dictate there can be no other outcome but collapse or tyranny.