The existence of Laws
“Law — the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties.” — Google
Wikipedia says “Law commonly refers to a system of rules created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior…”.
Do we know how laws are made?
But if you look at our society, it seems that the main idea why laws are made is to solve the issues and problems that are our societies and nations facing from time to time.
Laws are made to cope up with uncontrollable behavior of few people, crimes, problems in relationships, creditor and debtor arrangements, etc. Laws are made to solve problems of not just individuals, but societies and nations as a whole. Someone can also add that creating laws to give certain groups, special rights and privileges is another idea why laws are being written, well as far as I know, also to cope up with the circumstances of the members of the community (e.g. senior citizens, persons with disabilities etc.).
But how come we get into this trouble of creating more and more laws?
Let us look at some biblical perspective on this matter. The Bible says “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1:31 NIV). Question! Does God need to tell His creation about any kind of laws? I don’t think so. For the mean time, let’s forget about the first law that God gave them just for the sake of argument — the “Don’t eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden” law. It was a test though.
And God said “it was very good”. There’s just two of them, right? Adam and Eve, whom are ignorant of anything bad or something that could go wrong at any point. They’re just like new born children who couldn’t do bad things unless some sinister one taught them to. And I don’t believe that the animals would behave badly in those days yet.
So there’s no law? At least for this new order of creation. The Bible is silent about any law at that moment in time and so there’s none. Forget about the test yet about the tree in the middle of the Garden. They live in that perfect place and moment where all things are good, just good. No one would think about killing or stealing.
So when did the law exist after? It is after God gave them a test of faith and they failed. God, let the deceiver came and the others watch and see what will be the result of that test. And here we are, we see the result of that failure. Man is undeniably weak in temptations. We know that. And so they had to leave that perfectness God brought to them and, from there, chaos and crisis happened. People now have to live and adjust to a lot of things, balancing behavior over another, race over another and the list goes on and so instead of goodness, badness and filthiness came. Then the law needs to be codified to meet the crisis.
And so we have this situation now where we need to create and create more laws to solve our issues, keep everyone safe and to satisfy ourselves.
What did Jesus say about this? “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you change and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 18:3)
