So, the other day someone asked me about something I said in the past about whether or not we, as believers, can hold non-believers to specific covenant standards which are not also legal cultural standards and my answer is absolutely not. Let me explain:
The Commandments/Torah is the constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Torah, we are presented with God’s ways, His values of what it means to love Him and our neighbors. They were put forth for those who had gathered around Sinai after having been freed from slavery, as they swore multiple times “All that the Lord has commanded we shall do.” This was the price tag for having God as their King–His Kingdom, His rules. That’s fairly straightforward–and the rules applied both to the natural born sons of Israel and the mixed multitude who followed God out of Egypt. If you belong to the family, you keep the house rules.
And so the Commandments of God have applied to every generation of believers. As Yeshua/Jesus reminded us, the Torah commandments all hang from (are attached to) the two greatest commandments of loving God and one another–whether we are natural born citizens or grafted in. We live God’s ways now, doing His will on Earth as it is in Heaven, as a mark of our covenant loyalty towards Him, and we receive eternal life in the world to come. That’s the agreement we made when we accepted the death of Yeshua on our behalf.
So what about non-Covenant members? Do we get to enforce Covenant requirements on people outside the Covenant? Does the Torah anywhere tell anyone to go out conquering for the purpose of enforcing His laws on the rest of the world? No, it does not. The Commandments are our obligation to keep because the giver of the Commandments is our King. People outside the Covenant do not recognize His authority over their lives and are not bound by Covenant loyalty to obey Him. Of course, they don’t have any promise of the world to come either.
We live in exile, in nations that are not governed by God’s ordinances (yes, even modern-day Israel). Don’t get me wrong, many of the laws of the nations we are all of us exiled to are good laws, and are straight out from, based on or at least mirror God’s laws–and when we live under such laws it is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t the same as having a Government exclusively under God as there existed during the times of kings like David and Hezekiah. When believers have power/input into forming and changing laws, I think that’s great and we should take advantage of the process, but we have to realize the practical limits of our authority when other human beings are concerned and no such secular laws prohibiting behavior exist. Unbelievers live solely under secular laws, or under the laws of their particular religion–they can be fairly held to those standards. And they, just like us, have the option of lobbying and working for changes to secular laws that they don’t like. We should not be shocked when they try to change laws any more than they should be shocked when we try to do it!
Non-covenant members are required to keep the laws of the nations within which they live, but we can’t go around forcing them on top of all that to keep the commandments that we agreed to keep out of gratitude and loyalty towards God for our salvation after the second exodus out of sin and death. It’s like forcing a childless person to take care of children that they never agreed to have in the first place. Like, “Oh here I have a household of children, but you need to take care of them because it’s only fair.” Well, that is silly–they don’t get the love and hugs and kisses that a parent gets, and so why are they being saddled with the obligations?
Concretely, the commandments themselves–why are we able to keep them? Because we have been delivered from the authority of sin and death. Before I was saved, I was involved in quite a few heinous sins. Not only did I not see them as inherently wrong, but I couldn’t stop them if I wanted to. Coming into Covenant with God through Messiah changed me and changed that–only then did I begin to see the things I was doing as wrong and begin to resist and finally overcome them to the point where I am no longer tempted in those ways. But unsaved I couldn’t do it–I wasn’t a partaker of the New Creation life that has been writing the commandments on my heart one by one over the years. Expecting an unsaved individual to live a saved life is like expecting a Kindergartener to do advanced calculus. It took me twelve years of math before I could even begin to do calculus, and another two before I could perform differential equations. We can’t expect people who haven’t been redeemed to have the same level of concern for and authority over sin in their lives that only comes from God. It’s cruel and unfair. really, it implies that what we have been able to do, we have done through the flesh, by the merit of our own strength.
So no, I don’t hold non-Covenant people to Covenant standards, and especially when, even now, I struggle with Covenant standards after twenty years. Until I am perfectly loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, trustworthy, gentle and self-controlled, how can I look down on anyone? And how especially can I look down on anyone who does not have the guiding Spirit of God within? No, I don’t look down on them. I ache for them–and long and pray for the day when they are set free as well.
I do not dare to mock them for being slaves to this or that sin as though the Cross doesn’t weigh into their ability to identify and resist those sins.
Yes, there are a lot of unbelievers out there who are far more moral than believers–I am not saying otherwise. But I am saying that we can’t force people to live according to the standards of the Kingdom of Heaven when they haven’t even bothered to apply for citizenship and are perfectly happy living in the one they were born into.
If you want more information about how the commandments apply to us as Citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, check out my books The Bridge and King Kingdom Citizen.
