The Westminster Confession, when dealing with how Christians ought to understand the place of the Old Covenant civil law (that is, the laws God gave Israel’s government at the founding of the nation), argues that we are bound by the “general equity” of these laws. That is, I believe, that we are called to apply that law faithfully, but in light of differing cultural situations. In Israel one was called upon to build a fence around one’s roof. Since few of us congregate on our roofs like they did then, a general equity application might be that we ought to have fences around our swimming pools. The point is to make our families and guests more safe. Make sense?
I suspect that we might should have a similar conception about what we ought to do with the moral law of God. I’m afraid that too often we think that because our circumstances have changed, that we no longer need to watch out for particular sins. Exhibit A is the internet, and gossip. We know the Bible is replete with warnings against the sins of gossip. We also have a mental picture of what gossip is- two ladies huddled over coffee, or the back yard fence, swapping stories about the single woman down the block. We come to conclude that if we’re not ladies and we’re not drinking coffee and we’re not talking about the single woman down the block, we must not be gossiping. Or, we think that if we don’t fashion idols out of stone or rock, that we’ve escaped the judgment of the second commandment, all while talking about how “my” god would never judge this one of that one because he’s a god of grace.
The law of God is a mirror. It reveals to us our sin. And sinners that we are, we seek to hide from the ugly truth by muddying up that mirror. What we ought instead to be doing is seeking the general equity. Is the defining quality about gossip the coffee, or even the person of whom we are speaking? Or is it instead the tearing down of the reputation of another? Is the defining quality of idolatry the materials used to construct the idol, or is it our insistence that we will give to our god the qualities we wish, rather than submitting to whom He has shown Himself to be?
Though this second principle is not as widely known as the first R.C. Sproul Jr. Principle of Hermeneutics, it is nevertheless like unto it. It goes like this, “Wherever we find the sinner in a given account in the Bible, that’s us.” If the story has more than one sinner, we are all of them. We are both the prodigal son, and the older son. That is, we squander what God has given us, and we resent that our Father forgives others. We are both the gnat strangler and the camel swallower. We have specks in our eyes, and logs in our eyes. If we were wise, we would tend our own gardens. We would realize that the greatest gift we could bring to the church is not to create Speck_In_His_Eye_Discernment_Ministry.com, but would be to get busy with the logs in our own. To get them out, we need to look in the mirror, honestly.