Paul presents that nothing is unclean, but by that he does not mean things that have been identified as sin or evil are now acceptable. If we are not under the law, then what are the laws we are not under? Dr. Sproul discusses this as well as what is natural law and what is purposive law.

We continue now with our study of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. We are still working in the fourteenth chapter, and today I will be reading Romans 14:14–23, which is the end of the chapter. I ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him who considers anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. Yet if your brother is grieved because of your food, you are no longer walking in love. Do not destroy with your food the one for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let your good be spoken of as evil; for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he who serves Christ in these things is acceptable to God and approved by men.

Therefore let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another. Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All things indeed are pure, but it is evil for the man who eats with offense. It is good neither to eat meat nor drink wine nor do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is made weak. Do you have faith? Have it to yourself before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not eat from faith; for whatever is not from faith is sin.

You have just heard a recitation, not of the opinions of an ancient Jewish scholar, but of nothing less than the Word of God Himself, which is given to us to reveal His character and what He requires of us. He has, by His eternal right as God, the right to bind our consciences to obedience to His Word. Let it be so with us. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, our Father, as we examine this section of the epistle, in which the Apostle expounds on what it means concretely to love our neighbor and the love that is to be manifest between both weak and strong in Your body the church, we pray that we may understand these things and be convicted of the truth of them. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Nothing Unclean

In this short passage I have just read, Paul continues his instruction about how the stronger brother is to respond to the weaker brethren in the church on matters adiaphorous—that is, matters that, in and of themselves, have no ethical bearing. We are not to be longsuffering with gross and heinous evil or disobedience to the laws that God pronounces. But in those areas where God has left us free, we are to be patient with one another with respect to private, individual scruples.

Paul continues this instruction in verse 14, where he says, “I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus.” Let me pause on that point. Paul is not just giving an educated guess, nor is he expounding on an academic thesis that he is submitting for our approval. He is speaking of an Apostolic conviction. He is speaking on a basis of certainty, which he grounds not in his own research. Rather, the teaching he enjoins upon the church is that which he received directly from Christ.

Paul, as Christ’s chosen Apostle, is passing on that which his Lord and Savior has revealed to him and commissioned him to teach to instruct His body, the church. What Paul introduces here by calling attention to the source of his conviction, the Lord Jesus, is the proposition “that there is nothing unclean of itself.”

When Paul says “there is nothing unclean of itself,” he is not saying that nothing in the world is inherently evil. Adultery is inherently evil. Murder is inherently evil. But, in this context, he is addressing the question of eating and drinking and the disputes that arose concerning that question.

God’s Holy Nation

Let us look again at some of the historical background. We know that in the Old Testament, God called Israel out of all of the nations of the world to be His chosen and particular people, that they might be a light to the rest of the world. He separated them. He sanctified them and called them to be a holy nation, to be different in many respects from the pagan world out of which they were called.

God had a unique relationship with the people of Israel. He bound them to Himself at Sinai by the giving of the law, the Ten Commandments, which were the provisions of the special covenant relationship that God entered into with the Jewish people.

In addition to that law, God added to the laws governing His holy nation ceremonial rites and responsibilities regarding the great feasts that were to be celebrated, such as the Passover. He also gave the children of Israel a list of dietary regulations that they were obliged to keep at all times. You may recall how scrupulous the people of Israel were in the Old Testament about trying to keep the dietary laws that God had imposed upon them.

You may remember, for example, when Israel was sent away as captives to Babylon. The Babylonians did not take everyone from the Jewish people into captivity. Rather, they selected the crème de la crème of the people, the most educated, gifted, artistic, and eloquent, and that group of people was taken to Babylon. It was the intent of the Babylonian monarchy to deconstruct the people they brought into their culture and to assimilate them by cutting them off from their roots, trying to “Babylonianize” them, as it were.

We wonder why Daniel ended up in the lion’s den, or why Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego wound up in the fiery furnace. It was not just because they refused to bow down to the image of the king, but at the heart of that controversy was their refusal to break the dietary laws that God had given to them. Even while they were in exile, they were ready to pay with their lives if necessary to keep themselves from eating foods that God had declared unclean.

Imagine that. Century after century, the children in every Jewish household were indoctrinated on what was permitted for them to eat and what was forbidden to eat. That is true even to this day among Orthodox Jews who are zealous to keep kosher. All of a sudden, when the New Testament economy appeared, the gospel spread to the gentiles. The gentiles are to be assimilated into the church and into the new Israel, the commonwealth of the people of God, and food once considered unclean was now declared clean.

You may remember the episode in the book of Acts when Peter was at Cornelius’ house. God gave Peter a vision, revealing to him that those things which were previously deemed to be unclean were now clean. This issue provoked so much debate among the first generation of Jewish Christians that it was necessary to call the first great council of the church, the Council of Jerusalem. Along with other matters, the council addressed the question of which dietary laws should continue to be imposed upon the gentile community.

You get the picture. After centuries of abstaining from certain foods, all of a sudden God annuls that rule and says, essentially, “Okay, now you’re free to eat, and you can eat those things that the Old Testament did not allow you to eat.” Nothing less than a specific revelation, such as Jesus gave to Peter at Cornelius’ house, would be enough to give them liberty of conscience to depart from that ancient tradition.

Even Peter stumbled at it, despite being the one who was singled out by Christ to receive this annulment of the Old Testament passages and principles. Later on, under the influence and pressure of the Judaizers, who wanted to continue the enforcement of these things, Peter began to change his thinking. It got to the point that the Apostle Paul not only disputed with Peter but rebuked him publicly before the brethren. Only then did Peter keep his courage intact and agree to maintain what had been revealed to him at Cornelius’ house.

Distinctions of the Law

One of the problems we have here concerns our understanding of the law of God. A problem we face frequently in the church is this question: To what extent does the Old Testament law have any bearing upon our lives now? Has the new covenant, with its accent on grace, completely freed us from obeying the Old Testament law?

There are many in the church today who practice what is called antinomianism. They believe that the Old Testament law has no claim whatsoever upon the New Testament Christian. It is true that, as those in Christ, we are no longer under the burden or the curse of the law, but the question is this: Are we still to have our consciences bound by the law of the Old Testament?

Since the Reformation, Reformed theology has made a distinction, which has a purpose that is not entirely happy. The distinction divides the Old Testament law into three parts. The three ways in which the Old Testament law is divided are these: the moral law, the ceremonial law, and the dietary law. The problem I have is with the distinction of the moral law from the ceremonial law and the dietary law. The reason for the distinction is that the church is saying that certain laws in the Old Testament are no longer applicable to the new covenant Christian, including the dietary and ceremonial laws. We do not slaughter animals and offer sacrifices. In fact, if we were to do that, we would be denying the perfect finished work of Jesus, who fulfilled all those things.

We understand that the ceremonies of the Old Testament have been abrogated. They have been fulfilled in Christ and therefore have been set aside. Likewise, we see in this context the abrogation of the Old Testament dietary laws, which are no longer binding on the New Testament Christian. But as for the third element, the moral law, it is argued that it remains intact and we are still bound by the moral law of God.

This is where I have a quibble: For Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel, obeying those ceremonial and dietary laws was a moral issue of the highest magnitude. We have to understand that for the Jew in the Old Testament, keeping every aspect of the law was of great ethical and moral consequence. We have to be careful when we make distinctions like the one I just went through, the three dimensions of the Old Testament law.

God’s Character

There is another element that we face in this first sentence with respect to the abrogation of any Old Testament law. Is it not true that the law of God reflects His character, His holiness? The historical context in which He gave these laws was when He called His people to Himself and said, “Be ye holy even as I am holy.”

We understand that God’s law is not arbitrary. He did not just write up a list of dos and don’ts for His own amusement, but He has a holy and sacred purpose for every law that He legislates. That law, in some way, comes out of His character.

The next question is this: Are not the nature and character of God immutable? We would say with the church of all ages that one attribute of God that can never be negotiated is His immutability. He does not change.

Do you see the problem? If the law reflects God’s character, and if His character never changes, then how is it possible that the laws of the Old Testament could ever be abrogated? Sometimes I ask you questions that you may not even be asking. But in case you are, in case you ever try to deal with this—because these are the issues that come up in a text like this—here is how we would answer that.

In the first place, we see that the New Testament does, in fact, abrogate certain laws of the Old Testament, and that it is God Himself who abrogates them. If God abrogates a law, dear friends, it is abrogated. We go back to the question: Does that not then cast a shadow on His immutable character? Not necessarily.

Here is where the theologians arrive to the rescue by coming up with fine distinctions, which is the prerogative of all theologians. In theology, with respect to the moral law of God, we make a distinction between two kinds of law: God’s natural law and God’s purposive law. That can be confusing, so let me take a moment to explain the significance of that distinction.

Natural and Purposive Law

Let us start with the second one first. The purposive law reflects the law that is not part of God’s natural law. What is misleading about that definition is that all of God’s law is purposive in the sense that He has a sacred and holy purpose for every law that He legislates. So, why the distinction?

To answer that question, let us now look more carefully at this idea of the natural law of God. Let me warn you that I am using the term natural law here in a way that is different from how the term is frequently used in the history of philosophy and jurisprudence.

Some of you may remember when Clarence Thomas was before the Senate judiciary committee being examined for confirmation to become a justice of the Supreme Court. In the middle of those hearings, Senator Joseph Biden asked a provocative question of Clarence Thomas. He asked him, “Do you believe in natural law?” Clarence Thomas said, “Yes.” He affirmed his commitment to natural law theory, which provoked a hostile response not only from Senator Biden but from other members of that committee. The idea was, “Who in this day and age still believes in natural law?” There are almost no law schools left in the United States—although there are some—that still teach natural law.

What was meant there was the ordinary meaning of the term natural law, or the lex naturalis, which goes back to ancient Rome and even before that to Greece and the history of philosophy. Natural law says that there are moral principles of conduct, foundational principles of ethics, that are built into the nature of things and can be found in the jus gentium, the “law of nations.”

If you look at all the civilized nations of the world, they all have some law against murder in the first degree, against theft, and against other crimes, reflecting a common understanding of conscience that is built into the nature of things and that reveals certain principles of behavior. That is called natural law. Historically, that natural law has been thought by philosophers—not just Christian philosophers, but philosophers of all types—to be a manifestation of the eternal law of God, the lex aeternitatis.

God is eternally a God of law. His law is revealed to us not only in the Bible in the Ten Commandments, but as we have already examined when we looked at the second chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul reminded the Roman Christians that God has not left Himself without a witness. He has planted His law in the conscience of every creature, and His law can be seen not only from the Bible but from nature itself. That is what is normally meant by the term natural law.

That is not what I am talking about here. I spent all that time to tell you what I do not mean.
Here, when the distinction is made between the natural law of God and the purposive law of God, it is not related to the debate about a transcendent framework for the laws that are enacted in various nations.

Rather, in this context, the natural law of God refers to those laws that God gives us that are based upon His own holy nature. They are immutable for this reason: For God to abrogate a law that comes out of His own nature, such as the law against idolatry, or to say, “Now, after all this time, it is okay to practice idolatry; you may have other gods before Me,” or for Him to lay aside the first or second commandments, would be compromising His own character. Do you see that?

There are laws God gives in history for a particular redemptive purpose that is not necessarily rooted in His eternal, immutable being. For example, God gave the dietary laws to Israel for a reason for a period of time. When that time was fulfilled, God could annul that law without doing any damage to His own character. God’s character was in no way compromised when He put an end to the offering of bulls and goats in the ceremonial rites of the Old Testament.

I hope we understand that distinction, because many people in the first century did not understand it, and they struggled.

Separation from Evil

Many in the first century struggled because they had spent their whole lives being careful not to eat or drink certain things. The problem was exacerbated in the gentile community, as I mentioned last time. In pagan religions, both wine and meat were used in the pagan sacrifices. Wine was used as an oblation offered to the pagan deities in an action of idolatry, and meat was offered on the altars for the deities.

In these rites, the deities did not come down from Mount Olympus and drink the wine and eat the meat. After the pagan religious observances were finished, the perfectly good meat and wine were taken into the marketplace and sold. Some Christians liked the bargain prices at which these things were being sold, and others said: “How can you eat meat that has been tainted by being used at one point for a pagan rite? How can you drink the wine that has been used in an offering to a pagan god or goddess?” That was the issue.

By the way, the issue with respect to wine in the first century church was not an issue about wine itself—that is, whether or not it was okay to drink wine. It was an issue over whether it was okay to drink wine that had been used in pagan ceremonies. That was the issue here.

There is a problem that we face between what we call primary and secondary separation. It is another distinction that taxes our minds, but an important one—one that many of us stumble upon from time to time. Someone once asked me, “Should we pay our taxes if the government uses our taxes to support abortion on demand?” My answer to him was, “Yes.” He said, “How can we help support the government in this evil thing?” What that person was calling for was not separating himself from abortion. If I separate myself or my family from abortion, that is primary separation. If I separate myself from anyone that has anything to do with abortion, that is secondary separation. Do you see the difference?

If we were consistent in secondary separation from evil, then we would have to leave the planet, because there is no way to keep ourselves unscathed in a secondary way from what the rest of the world does. If I pay a merchant for his cloth, and he takes what I pay him and uses it in some ungodly way, I am not responsible for what he does with the money after I give it to him, just as I am not responsible for what a corrupt government does with my taxes after I pay them. That is the difference between primary and secondary separation. This was a matter of conscience in the early Christian community.

Paul says in this text that with respect to food and drink, nothing is unclean of itself. None of these issues of food and drink deal with intrinsic uncleanness. The reason some of these foods were declared unclean by God is not because they were intrinsically dirty, but because extrinsically, God had declared that they should not be used. This was part of His program to make the Jewish people clearly different, both internally and externally, to the watching world.

Neither Right nor Safe

Paul makes it clear that he is not talking about whether things are inherently sinful or not when he repeats this principle: “But to him who considers anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.”

I mentioned the illustration last time of my former colleague, who began to believe that he was sinfully addicted to too much ping-pong. He did not want to go to the next step and say that ping-pong is inherently evil and that no one ought to ever be engaged in playing that sport. The principle is that no one should be so engaged in playing ping-pong that he neglects his family, work, and all the rest. It is like golf, and I’ll apply my own principle here: Men who play golf and shoot over eighty are neglecting their golf; men who play golf and shoot under eighty are neglecting their work.

The principle Paul is explaining is clear: If I think something is a sin, even if it is not, but I believe it to be sin, then it is a sin for me to do it. If I think that certain food is prohibited by God, even if God does not prohibit it, but I go ahead and eat it, then I have committed a sin. Why? Because I did something that, although wrongly, erroneously, and ignorantly, I nevertheless believed to be sin. The sin is not eating the food, wearing makeup, or playing ping-pong. The sin is found in doing something that you thought was evil. In a word, you acted against your conscience.

We remember Luther at the Diet of Worms. When he was called upon to recant of his writings and teachings before that imperial hearing, he replied, “Unless I am convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason, I cannot recant.” Why? “Because my conscience is held captive by the Word of God.” He went on to say, “To act against conscience is neither right nor safe.” Luther understood the principle that Paul expounds here in this text. To act against conscience is neither right nor safe.

Neither Paul nor Luther were espousing what I call “Jiminy Cricket theology,” where we say, “Let your conscience be your guide,” and as long as we have a clean conscience, we can do whatever we want. No, dear friends.

There are psychopathic murderers out there. There are people who commit the most vicious, dastardly deeds, who feel no remorse or guilt whatsoever for their actions. If they were dragged into court and held on trial for first-degree murder and their defense plea was, “I can’t be guilty because I don’t feel guilty,” that would not amount to a very strong defense. Our consciences, the Bible tells us, can be seared. Our consciences can be distorted.

As I have told you before, Jeremiah rebuked the children of Israel for their repeated sins. This was because, he said, they had the “forehead of the harlot,” meaning they had lost the capacity to blush. They had sinned so often and so hardened their hearts that they no longer felt any pangs of guilt when they sinned. That did not excuse them. The fact that their consciences said it was okay did not mean it was okay.

We cannot reverse these such that if your conscience says, “Go ahead and do it,” then you are free to do it. If your conscience is informed by Hollywood or popular music that tells you, “If it feels good, it is good,” and that is your creed, that will never excuse you on the day of judgment before God. If you do what you want to do and feel it is alright to do because you want to do it—as if that were the law by which God will judge us—that will never get you past the final judgment.

It is the flip side that Paul is concerned about in this text. If my conscience tells me that something is evil, even if it is a misinformed conscience, nevertheless I may not act against it. It is not right to do something you believe to be sin. That is what Luther was saying. It is not safe to do something you believe to be sin.

Do Not Destroy Your Brother

“To him who considers anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.” So far, I have been able to work my way through one complete verse of chapter 14. So, let us press on to verse 15: “Yet if your brother is grieved because of your food, you are no longer walking in love. Do not destroy with your food the one for whom Christ died.”

Remember, you are the stronger brother. You know it is okay to eat that food, but you do not parade your freedom in the face of your weaker brother, who is convinced that it is not proper to eat that food. Be sensitive. Be careful of the weakness of your brother in his scrupulosity, as we talked about last time.

“Do not destroy with your food the one for whom Christ died.” This is your brother or sister in faith who is walking around with a misinformed conscience and who has an uninformed scruple about eating meat and drink.

Do Not Be Spoken of as Evil

“Therefore do not let your good be spoken of as evil.” This is another important ethical principle. We have to bend over backwards, to try as much as we possibly can, not to give the appearance of evil.

You cannot do that perfectly. There are some people who will think you are doing evil no matter how careful you are in your behavior and demeanor. But again, as much as it lies within us, we need to be careful that our good is not spoken of in evil terms.

If we took that as an absolute, we would have to stop preaching the gospel all together, because there are people so hostile to the preaching of the gospel that they despise every time it is preached. Even though the preaching of the gospel is a good thing, people will speak evil of it just as they spoke evil of Jesus and the Apostles. We cannot control that. But we do not have to throw gasoline on the fire by going out of our way to cause offense to the people who are watching us.

Seek Righteousness

“For the kingdom of God is not in eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” If we could just learn this, all the disputes about trivial matters that tear churches apart would not happen. If only we could get the principle that the kingdom of God is not about eating, it is not about drinking, it is not about lipstick. It is not about these simple externals. That is not what the kingdom of God is about. What is the kingdom of God about? It is about righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Let me explicate this triad of virtues that describes what the kingdom of God is about. First, it is about righteousness. I wish I had time for three lectures on this, because, as I have said before, if you listen to the jargon of the Christian community and the piety that we hear in the church, you might see that the goal of many Christians is to be spiritual.

But the goal of the kingdom of God is not spirituality. The goal of the Christian life is not spirituality. Do not misunderstand me. Spirituality is a good thing, but it is not the goal. It is a means to the goal. The goal of the Christian life, beloved, is righteousness. That is what we are supposed to be seeking. That is what we are supposed to be striving for—to be righteous people.

You may say: “Wait a minute, that’s what the Pharisees did. They were the ones who majored in the pursuit of righteousness. We’re not going to be Pharisees, parading our righteousness around and exhibiting this attitude of being ‘holier than thou’ to everybody else.”

But it was Jesus who said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). Our priority number one, our protos, not just first in a list of temporal things but first in terms of importance, is the pursuit of the kingdom of God and His righteousness.

It was the same Jesus who said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). Yet we know that all our righteousness is as filthy rags. The whole epistle to the Romans was written to show that the only way we can stand before God is if we are clothed not in our own righteousness but in the righteousness of Christ, which we receive by faith.

Since we have Christ’s righteousness by faith, why would we bother seeking our own? Because justification is not the end of the Christian life; it is the beginning, and it is to be followed by a rigorous pursuit of sanctification, becoming truly holy. We are to be changed people, and we should be seeking to do that which is right. That is what righteousness is. To be a mature Christian is to live according to the principles of God. Righteousness is not defined in trivial categories of eating and drinking.

Churches are destructive when they elevate trivial matters to be the true test of Christian living. “You’re really a Christian if you don’t go to movies and you don’t dance.” It is such nonsense. Anyone can refrain from those things. It is the fruit of the Spirit that Christ wants to see from His people: love, patience, longsuffering, meekness, and humility. That is hard, is it not? But that is what righteousness is about. Paul is telling the people at the church at Rome, “Grow up.”

True Peace and Joy

Paul continues by mentioning righteousness and peace. There is the false peace of which Jeremiah spoke when the false prophets cried, “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace (Jer. 6:14). There are so-called peacemakers in the church that say: “Doctrine divides. We never can enter into debates about that. We have to keep the peace.”

That is what Luther called a “carnal” peace. It is a peace born of the flesh, a peace born out of fear of conflict, a peace born out of cowardice. But on the other hand, we are not to be bellicose people who are looking for a fight, contentious over every minor point, and wanting to fight and divide the church over the drop of a hat. This is where immature people major in minors.

Paul said that the kingdom of God is about righteousness. The kingdom of God is about a godly peace. The kingdom of God is not made up of sourpusses. Someone said to me at the door today, “You know, what I notice about your preaching, R.C., is every time you’re going to give a zinger to the people, right before you give the zinger, you smile.” A spoonful of sugar, you know?

We should be happy people. The kingdom of God is about joy, the joy that has been shed abroad in our hearts because we have been redeemed by the Lord our God. Why would we be glum and fuss over who eats meat and who drinks wine? That is not what the kingdom of God is about, Paul is saying. It is about loving the things of God and loving those for whom Christ died. That is the recipe for mature Christian unity. Let us pray.

Father, the weightier things of the law, justice and mercy, are difficult for us. The pursuit of righteousness remains difficult for us. But give to us a hunger and thirst for righteousness, that we might be filled and that You might be glorified. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.