One idea in Romans is that the law of God is responsible for
the existence of sin. As Paul puts it: “I would not have known what it is to
covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity
in the commandment, produced all kinds of covetousness” (Romans 7:7-8). Does this mean that without the commandment,
humans would not covet at all, and that it is only the existence of the
commandment that tempts us to covet things? Or does Paul simply mean that
without the law, humans would not know that coveting was a sin? The latter
seems not to be the case, since Paul speaks of sin creating covetousness in
response to the commandment. But the former interpretation also seems strange,
since if humans behaved perfectly without the commandments, why create them?
It is possible that the meaning of Paul’s statement lies
between these two possibilities. Humans would likely end up sinning if not
given guidelines for how to live, but when something becomes outlawed it often
becomes more tempting. In a sense, God laying out the commandments is similar
to when He forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
If God had not specifically forbidden the fruit, Adam and Eve would undoubtedly
have eaten it, not because of any particular desire, but because they ate all
the fruit in the garden. However, when the fruit is banned it suddenly becomes
very difficult for them to restrain themselves. This is partly because the
devil (representative of sin) sees an opportunity to make them do something
bad. However, it is also partly due to some aspect of human nature that desires
what it is not allowed to have. We see this desire in the modern day, for
example with underage substance use, which is partly caused by teenagers
wanting to be ‘rebellious’ and ‘cool’.
Paul justifies God’s
laws in introducing such temptation by saying: “where sin increased, grace
abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). I believe he means that by making sin
tempting, God creates the opportunity for to resist it, and thus attain grace.
If sin were neither forbidden nor tempting, it would not be an achievement to avoid
it. By this argument God does not seem concerned with actually reducing the
number of harmful actions that people commit, but rather seems to be creating a
way to test them.
Can we learn anything about how we should be making laws in
modern society from Paul’s argument? He presents a very relevant paradox: making
something illegal in an attempt to prevent it may well make it more tempting,
particularly for youth. Do making things such as drug use and underage drinking
illegal actually help prevent them? Also, is it a problem that these laws in a
sense act largely as tests, imposing punishments on people who have often
harmed no one but themselves?
I'm really fascinated with your progression of thought in this discussion starter, and I just wanted to address a few of the questions you pose in the last paragraph as well as offer a real life instance of 'the commandment creating the sin' that's a little different from just regular drug and underage drinking laws.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 1920s and early 1930s, the United States had a constitutional prohibition on the sale, production, and importation of alcoholic beverages. (This didn't actually prohibit the consumption of alcohol, but it made it incredibly difficult to obtain, effectively making it impossible to drink legally.) When you were describing how Paul's statements imply that humans sin naturally but are more likely to do so when it is tempting, all I could imagine was the Prohibition. Instead of just causing people to drink more, the Prohibition also caused a massive upswing in the bootlegging business, enabling the creation of networks of markets for the then 'illegal' alcohol. Similar to your explanation of temptation in the garden of Eden, people would have drank and made alcohol for a variety of reasons had the Prohibition not been implemented, but during the Prohibition, people made, sold, and drank alcohol specifically to get around the law and make a profit, giving in to the temptation of the 'sin.'
(I believe that Prohibition is a better example of the 'commandment creating the sin' than underage drinking or drug use, at least for the purpose of rigorous examination. There are clearly marked start and end points of the Prohibition, and using these, we can track the Prohibition's effects and its failures. With underage drinking, the law about what age is 'legal' has shifted so many times that it's difficult to look at the direct effects of the law; the same problem comes up with drug laws and state vs. federal regulation.)
So, in answer to your question about whether we can learn anything about making laws in modern society, I definitely think that we can learn something, but we certainly haven't yet. To some degree, creating laws just for the sake of naming something 'illegal' is counterproductive; the illegality draws people (like potential bootleggers) to the 'sin' and promotes breaking the law if there is are incentives to it that outweigh the potential punishments. For Prohibition, repealing the amendment in 1933 corrected the mistake and led to the decline of the bootleggers, because the work was no longer attractive without the law creating the 'sin.' With this, we can see the direct cause and effect of illegality and 'sin,' and how when a thing is no longer illegal, it might no longer be tempting.
As for the test-element of these laws, I certainly think it's a problem in the real-world. If a law is passed just to 'test' people, and the punishment is severe, then a simple test of choice and restraint has the potential to impact and harm nearly every aspect of a person's life. (For this reason, I believe that drug laws on marijuana should be altered so that it is decriminalized, but that's only tangentially related.) For God's laws related to sin, I believe that it's less of a problem, because 'salvation by faith alone' is still a part of the covenant and enables believers to mitigate the effects of their sin.