Dr. Sproul continues his review of the law with a discussion on situational ethics and when it is acceptable to break a commandment. Who is my neighbor and is there such a thing as the "brotherhood of man?"

We will continue our study of Romans 13. God willing, we will finish this chapter today so that we can plunge into chapter 14 next time. I am going to read Romans 13:8–14, which is the end of the chapter. I will ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.

This is the gospel in a nutshell, dear friends, and a teaching that is vital for our personal growth and sanctification. It is the Word of the Lord for His people. Please be seated. Let us pray.

O Lord, how we love Your law, for Your Word is law. It is the light that guides our feet and shines upon our pathway. We thank You that Your law comes to us out of the infinite depth of Your knowledge and wisdom and reflects not only the perfection of Your character, but Your gracious condescending love for us, for which the law is given for our blessing and edification. Help us to understand the context of this law in Your love as the Apostle sets it forth. For we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.

The Perpetual Obligation of Love

Last time, we looked briefly at the beginning of verse 8, “Owe no one anything except to love one another.” I referred to all the attempts that have been made to use this as the proof text that would prohibit Christians from entering into any kind of indebtedness. I hope I was able to demonstrate last time that is not the point of this text.

The text does make mention of an obligation, of something that we owe, a debt that can never be fully remitted in this world. We can pay our debt to the bank. We can pay our debt to the store. We can pay our debt to the credit card company. But our debt in this world to love our neighbor is never discharged until we cross into heaven. This is a perpetual obligation, an indebtedness that is given to us in the Great Commandment, which calls us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, strength, and soul, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Immediately, the Apostle links this obligation of love to the Ten Commandments. The conclusion he reaches is this: “For he who loves another has fulfilled the law.” I want to come back to that in just a moment. Then he mentions certain commandments: “‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ ‘You shall not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

When Paul lists some of the Ten Commandments, the ones he mentions are those that are often described, particularly by our Lutheran friends, as coming from the second table of the law. The Scriptures refer to the giving of the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone.

If we look at the beginning of the Ten Commandments, the first few prescribe our duty and behavior with respect to God. We are to have no other Gods before Him, we are not to make any graven images of Him, we are to keep ourselves from idolatry, we are to make sure that His name is not taken in vain, we are to keep the Sabbath, and so on. These commandments early in the Ten Commandments prescribe our responsibility to God on a vertical plane.

Then the focus of the Ten Commandments moves to our responsibility of how we are to treat each other as human beings, particularly with respect to no adultery, no murder, no stealing, no coveting, and no false witness. For that reason, some have divided the tablets into two. The first tablet has to do with our obligations to God, the second tablet has to do with our obligations to our human counterparts.

That may be the reason for the two tablets of stone that God gave to Moses, that inscribed on one were the obligations to God and on the other the obligations to man. Again, this is a popular understanding of why the Ten Commandments came in two tablets. I do not hold that position, of course. But I do not have to—I am not a Lutheran.

I think the reason for the two tablets was that the law given at Sinai was given in the context of the most sacred covenant, mediated by Moses, into which the people of Israel entered. The stipulations of that covenant relationship were expressed in the Ten Commandments. As was the custom in antiquity when entering a formal covenant, the agreement was always made in duplicate; one for the sovereign, the other for the vassal.

That is why one of the copies of the Ten Commandments would have been perpetually kept in the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies. One table was for God; the other was for us, so that if there were any dispute as to the obligations and the terms of the covenant, God could take out His copy and say: “Here’s what it says. Thou shalt not . . .” But neither our Lutheran friends nor I know for sure why the commandments were given in two tablets.

Whatever we conclude on that question, the commandments that are mentioned in this text prescribe behavior on the horizontal plane and describe our behavior toward each other. Paul is saying that whoever loves another has fulfilled the law. This is not any serious departure from what our Lord Himself taught on the matter, or from the Great Commandment that concludes with the statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).

Situational Ethics

This brief passage in Romans 13:8–10 has created much consternation in American liberal Christianity, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, and was popularized by the publication of the book Situation Ethics by Joseph Fletcher. The basic thesis of that book was borrowed from a more sophisticated treatment of ethics by the Princeton scholar Paul Lehmann in his Ethics in a Christian Context.

Fletcher developed the famous concept of situation ethics, in which he reduced the entire law of God to one essential precept: the law of love. He expressed the law of love in this manner: We must always do what love requires in every given situation. Hence the name, Situation Ethics.

Let me step back for a moment and say that in order for any ethical principle or divine precept given to us to be obeyed, it requires a context in which it is obeyed. God’s law is given to us to be followed in real-life situations. So, in that sense, all ethics are situational. But that is not what Fletcher was getting at. Fletcher was saying more than just that ethics have to be enacted in a real-life situation. He was saying that what God requires is determined by the situation. There is only one absolute law, and that is the law of love, which, translated, is to do what love requires in every given situation. He would quote as an example Saint Augustine, who famously said, “Love God and do as you please.”

An even worse application of that comes from the lips of my friend Martin Luther, who declared to his friends, “Sin boldly.” When Luther, in his customary boldness, made that statement, he was not enticing people to sin. What he was getting at was this: If you are going to sin, remember you have a Savior who has paid for your sins. We do not have to spend the rest of our lives in total misery if we have sinned, because we have a Savior who has delivered us from the consequences. It is certainly not the most prudent way to communicate that idea by abbreviating it to, “Sin boldly.” Most of us do not need encouragement to sin in such a manner.

Love’s Law and God’s Law

Going back to Augustine’s statement, “Love God and do as you please,” Fletcher was getting at this: If we look at concrete life situations and the laws that are written in the Bible, we can envision certain ethical situations where it is acceptable to God to break some of the commandments.

One of Fletcher’s most famous illustrations, the one that I would use for my students in my ethics class in seminary, was the case of a husband and wife who were interred in a concentration camp during World War II. The guards wanted to have a sexual relationship with the woman, who was isolated from her husband, and they told her that unless she submitted to their advances, they would kill her husband. Knowing that her husband’s life was at stake, she acquiesced to the desires of the guards. When the camp was liberated, she told her husband what she had done. Her husband was horrified that his wife had committed adultery and, therefore, sued her for divorce.

That was an example that Joseph Fletcher incorporated in his book, and I passed it on to my seminary students. I said, “Well, what do you think?” At first blush, they all agreed that the woman had, in fact, committed adultery. Then I asked the next question: “If it happened in a different way, if the woman were attacked by the guards and a gun was put to her head, if she was wrestled to the ground and raped, would the husband then have the right to sue her for divorce on the grounds of adultery?” All of my students said: “Oh no, that’s different. You can’t accuse somebody of adultery if they’re a victim of rape.”

I said: “What is rape except sexual submission by coercion, by force? What greater force could be exhibited against a woman of virtue than to require that she submit or her husband would be killed? That is a worse form of coercion than if the gun were pointed at her own head.” At second glance, when the students considered it from that perspective, they backed up and said: “Maybe we should change our minds. Maybe we don’t support this man’s lawsuit for adultery.” I said, “I hope not.”

Fletcher would say that, in that situation, love not only permitted adultery, but required it. No. Love never requires adultery. What happened to the woman in this example was not adultery; it was rape. There is a huge difference ethically. But Fletcher used that almost bizarre illustration to argue his point that love can set aside the law of God in unique human situations.

Think of two young people who are in love and struggling with physical temptations. The oldest and most effective seductive line of young men is, “If you love me, you will . . .” According to Joseph Fletcher’s logic, that is a legitimate seductive device. But that is not right.

The law of love, as Augustine understood it, is simple. When Augustine said, “Love God and do as you please,” and as he expressed that statement in its fullness, he was saying this: If your decisions and the way you treat your fellow person are always motivated by a singular love for God, then you do not have to worry about the law, because the law reflects what is pleasing to God. If you love God, you can do as you please, because you will be doing what pleases God. It is that simple. “Love God and do as you please” means that if you really love Him, what will please you is what pleases Him, and what pleases Him is revealed in His law.

The rule of love for every situation is this: Love God and do what the love of God requires in every human situation. The Apostle Paul, speaking of the love of God, said on one occasion, “Let not fornication be once named among you, as befitting saints.” In other words, the Apostle was saying, “I can’t envision any earthly situation that would justify disobedience to God’s law of purity.”

I hope I am being clear and not confusing by explaining all these variant options that appear in our culture. But when Paul talks about love here, he talks about love fulfilling something. He is talking about the purpose or goal of the law, where the law ultimately takes us. And where it takes us is to the love of our neighbor.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

Further on, Paul says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Augustine commented on that as well. There is a question associated with this text. We know that a large part of our fallen nature involves a kind of distorted self-love, which is rooted and grounded in selfishness. So, some interpret the Great Commandment to love your neighbor as you love yourself to mean that you are to love your neighbor as much as you sinfully love yourself.

Others look at this text and say that there is a legitimate, virtuous kind of self-love that is not a sin or a violation of the law of God, and that it is perfectly natural for human beings, even unfallen human beings, to have a simple affection for themselves. We are called to deny ourselves in certain situations, but we are not called to hold ourselves in absolute contempt. This is because we are made in the image of God, and there is a certain dignity that God assigns to us. We can easily inflate that importance and self-worth, as Paul has already addressed in his letter to the Romans. At the same time, the idea that the love of self is inherently evil is not implicit in the Great Commandment.

We do not know which way is intended by the law. Either view could possibly be right. In any case, we know that we have a kind of self-love and that we are to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.

The Universal Neighborhood

The other question is: What does it mean to love your neighbor? Who is your neighbor? Jesus was given that question in an attempt to get Him to exegete the Great Commandment found in the Old Testament, which calls us to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.

Jesus, as a rabbi, could have answered that question very simply and directly by saying, “When the Bible says, ‘Love your neighbor,’ the Bible is saying to love everybody, because everybody is your neighbor.” Your neighbor is not just someone that lives next door, down the street, or in your neighborhood.

Parenthetically, we hear this distortive idea that the basic essence of Christianity is the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. I have to keep repeating that the Bible nowhere teaches the universal brotherhood of man. The brotherhood is something special in Scripture. It is the situation enjoyed by all that share the same elder brother, namely, Jesus Christ, who is the only begotten Son of the Father. When we become redeemed we are, by adoption, brought into the family of God.

The idea that we are all brothers and God is the Father of us all dilutes the special character of the redemption that Christ works to bring us into the family of God. Jesus told us that by nature we are children of Satan and belong to Satan’s family.

I am laboring the point that we are not all brothers. The unbeliever out there in my community is not my brother, but he is my neighbor. What the Bible does teach is the universal neighborhood of man, and that the law of the neighborhood, of which God is the supreme mayor, is the law of love that is to be given to everyone.

Who is my neighbor? Jesus does not say: “Everyone is your neighbor. All people are neighbors.” He answered that question differently. Do you know how He answered the question, “Who is my neighbor?” He said: “Who’s your neighbor? A man went down from Jericho and fell among thieves, and the thieves beat him, robbed him, and left him in the road for dead.” Then Jesus told the story of the priest and the Pharisee who cross the street to the other side and ignore the bleeding fellow. But a Samaritan, who had no business dealings with the Jews, saw this man in the street and took compassion on him. He went out of his way, bound up his wounds, took him to the inn, paid the innkeeper for his continual treatment there, and then went on his way. Jesus answered the question of “Who is my neighbor” with the parable of the good Samaritan, and we see that this biblical responsibility extends to all people.

Love Does No Harm

A quick recapitulation of the horizontal aspect of the law reminds us that the love we are to have for our neighbor, which is revealed in the law, includes the things in Romans 13:8–14.

If we love our neighbor, if we love our fellow human beings, we will not commit adultery, because adultery is the hatred of our neighbor. It is the destruction of our friends and our family. I remember counseling a case of adultery in a church where I worked over thirty years ago, where a woman entered an ungodly relationship with a married man. I confronted them. She protested, saying to me: “This is none of your business. This is nobody’s business but the two of us.” I counseled seventeen different people because of the trauma that was brought into their lives by this adulterous relationship—mothers and fathers, children and best friends. Adultery does not express love to one’s neighbor.

You shall not murder or steal. You do not love your neighbor and then help yourself to his possessions.

If you love your neighbor, you do not slander him. You do not poison people against him. You do not talk about him behind his back. That kind of behavior violates the specific laws of God, but violates the law of love most of all. I cannot love you and slander you at the same time.

I once read a book on slander. It said to imagine that you are walking down the streets of New York, as some of us have, and it is a dark night, so you decide to take a shortcut. You enter an alley, and suddenly you see someone come out of the shadows with a knife raised. What is your reaction? What do you do? If you have any sense, you turn around, run out of the alley, and get back into the light. Right?

Then the author goes on to talk about how some people will come up to you and say, “Let me tell you something in love.” He said that almost every time someone comes to you and says, “I would like to tell you something in love,” what they then tell you has no love in it. It is just a license for vicious personal attacks. When someone says to you, “Let me tell you something in love,” you ought to run for your life like you just met somebody with a knife in the alley. Do not bear false witness.

You shall not covet. I have asked this question before: If you were given the responsibility to write a charter, a constitution for a new nation, and you had only ten bedrock laws by which to frame this nation, what laws would you include? Maybe you would include a law that would protect the sanctity of life and prohibit murder. Maybe you would include a law to protect private property and prohibit theft. Would you think to include, in your top ten laws, a law against covetousness? God did, because He knows what happens to people when one is jealous of another. He knows how destructive envy can be. How do you explain people walking through a parking lot, taking out their keys, and willfully scratching someone else’s car? That is worse than stealing it.

You can understand when a person steals someone else’s property, because that person is saying, “I want that so much, I must have it.” But it is something else to say, “Well, if I can’t have it, you can’t either.” Vandalism is the worst form of envy and covetousness. God understood that. God understands what destroys human relationships. God understands what destroys and fractures love.

Paul sums this up by saying, “Love does no harm to a neighbor.” Is that not a simple way of putting it? If you love your neighbor, you do not harm your neighbor by stealing from him or slandering him, being jealous of him, bearing false witness, or backstabbing. No, if you love somebody, you do not want to harm him. That is the way we are supposed to live as Christians. We are supposed to be known by the love that we have for one another.

“Therefore,” Paul concludes, “love is the fulfillment of the law.” Granted, this is a quick, short, and terse treatment of that theme here in Romans. Paul wrote an entire chapter to the Corinthians in which he explained to them what it means to love. That text in 1 Corinthians 13 is not a treatise on romance, but a treatise on loving one’s neighbor and what that means.

High Time to Awake

The tone changes in verse 11, and I am going to plunge on: “And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.”

As Paul enjoins a certain kind of behavior and prohibits another, he prefaces this section by reminding the people what time it is. Paul says, essentially: “I say this to you knowing the time, knowing that it’s high time to wake up. It’s not a time to take a nap. This is a time that requires vigilance, alertness and diligence.” Why? “For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.”

Let us unpack that. Is this another example where the Apostle believed that the return of Jesus was going to come fully and finally within his lifetime, and then later had to change his theology of the future, as many critics assume? What is Paul talking about when he says that their salvation is nearer than it ever was?

Some see a reference in this text to the closeness of the advent of Christ that Paul anticipated in the first century. He may have been thinking about the destruction of Jerusalem, saying: “Wake up, wake up, it’s closer than you think. Any day now, the judgment of God is going to come upon you.” However, most commentators say, and I think rightly so, that Paul is talking about the consummation of our salvation when we pass into glory.

How old are you? Let me ask another question: How old were you ten years ago? I can answer that for you. You were ten years younger than you are now. How old will you be ten years from now? Again, you can do the simple math, given your age at the moment. But the deeper question is: Where will you be ten years from now? Where will you be twenty years from now?

Do you ever think about it, or wonder how long you are going to live? I have never done that so much in my whole life as I have been doing it now. I say: “Lord, please, I can’t wait to get home, but give me ten to twenty more years in this pulpit. Get this church built. Hurry up.” I say to Vesta, “I wish I were forty-five.” Do you ever do that? I do not know whether I will still be standing right here in this pulpit twenty years from now—and we still may not be done with Romans. That is a real possibility.

But let me cut the Gordian knot here and ask, “Where will I be in fifty years?” There is no doubt about that. I am not going to be in this pulpit fifty years from now. Where will you be? Some of you young people, God willing, will still be here. Where will you be in one hundred years?

In the fullness of time, one hundred years is not that long, and fifty years is only half of that. Ten years is only a tenth of it. I do not care how old you are. It is time to wake up because the day is approaching. The end of our lives is approaching. That is what I think Paul is talking about here.

Salvation’s Fullness

“Our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.” What does that mean? Salvation is nearer now than when we first believed? I thought that when we first believed, we were saved. Is that not the way we talk as Christians? When were you saved? We say, “Well, I was saved February 13, 1957, at eleven o’clock.” Then the preacher says, “You’re a lot closer to salvation now than you were when you were first saved.” First saved? How many times do I have to be saved? First time, second time, third time, fourth time?

What Paul is dealing with here are the tenses of the verb. It is a Greek word, sōzō, which means “to save.” In this biblical text, that word appears in every one of the tenses of Greek verbs, which are far more than we find in the English language. There is a sense in which you were saved from the foundation of the world. There is the sense in which you were saved. There is a sense in which you were being saved. There is a sense in which you have been saved. There is the simple aorist tense, you are saved. There is the present act, you are being saved. There is the future, you shall be saved. There is the future perfect, you shall have been saved.

Salvation is unfolded biblically in all those different increments. And in the ultimate sense, salvation is not just something that you experienced when you were born again. That was one aspect of salvation. But the fullness of your salvation does not take place until your glorification, until you enter heaven.

Paul is addressing believers. He says that the fullness of your salvation is much closer today than it was when you first believed. You know, that is not bad news. That is good news; the fullness of our salvation comes closer to us with every passing hour. But that has implications.

The Light of Day

Paul uses an illustration from the normal daily movement of the sun, the difference between night and day. He says, “The night is far spent.” He is describing the time that has passed already as the nighttime. We are now in the last watch of the night. The dawn of the fullness of our salvation is about to break through. The time of darkness is passing, and the time of the fullness of living in the light is at hand.

This metaphor is used over and over in the Scriptures that by nature we are “children of darkness.” The Bible uses that metaphor to describe sin. By nature, we love darkness rather than the light, because our deeds are evil. Orlando is the City Beautiful until the lights go out. Downtown Orlando, in the wee hours of the night, has been one of the worst crime centers in the United States of America.

Things happen in the darkness that do not happen in the light of day. People love darkness because it conceals us from exposure. But when we are brought into the fullness of the day, then we are known for what we are.

Paul says: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.”

Make No Provision for Sin

Earlier, in the very first chapter of the letter to the Romans, we saw the thematic introduction to the doctrine of justification. I mentioned that when Luther understood the gospel of justification by faith for the first time, through the interpretive eyes of his patron saint, Augustine, he wrote in essence, “When I saw the gospel, the gates of paradise opened, and I walked through.”

One impact of the book of Romans in church history was that God used the epistle of Paul to awaken Luther and bring about the Protestant Reformation. Now, we come to another one of those impactful passages.

There was a young man who, in defiance of God and of his mother’s Christian commitment, lived a life of unbridled licentiousness. He fathered a child out of wedlock. He involved himself in the gross practices of the pagans of his day. He was a brilliant student of philosophy, but he was as corrupt in the flesh as he was brilliant in his intellectual acumen.

One day this man was standing in a garden where children were playing. They had a refrain as they were playing, which was simply, “Tolle lege, tolle lege, tolle lege,” which means, “Pick up and read.” When Aurelius Augustine heard those children’s words, his eyes fell upon a large Bible that was chained. He let the Bible fall open anywhere, and his eyes fell upon the printed page.

Here is what Augustine read: “. . . not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.” Like a lightning bolt, the Word of God pierced his heart. This was the text used by the almighty God to convert the soul of Augustine, whose ministry continues even to this day.

“Not in revelry and drunkenness.” The reference in the text is to the practice of pagan religion under the aegis of the god Bacchus, who was the god of the grape and the vine. He was the sponsor of the ancient Bacchanalia, which was an orgiastic feast involving gluttony, unbridled sexual behavior, and intentional drunkenness. In the drunken stupor, the pangs of conscience could be silenced, and people could engage in unbridled sin. The Bacchanalia is what Paul has in view in this text.

Augustine’s eyes fell upon the text, and it said, “Not in this debauchery, Augustine, not in this kind of lifestyle, not in this kind of hedonism, not in this kind of unrestrained licentiousness, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.”

This is an odd use of the term from which the word providence comes. Do not provide opportunities for sin. The old country preacher said, “If you’re trying to get over drunkenness, don’t tie your horse to the post in front of the saloon.” Do not make provision. If you struggle with sexual temptation, do not subscribe to Playboy or other such things. Do not make provision for human sin and weakness.

Luther put it this way: “I can’t stop the birds from flying around in the air near me, but I don’t have to let them nest in my hair.” That is what Paul means by not making provisions to accommodate our base desires. Instead, provide for your soul. Put on Christ. Walk as people who walk in daylight. Let us pray.

Father, we thank You for this Word, for this application of what Your love requires. Give us such a desire to please You that we would see your law not as an abstract list of prohibitions but as things that express what Your love requires, that which is pleasing to You and helpful to our neighbors. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, who loved Your law more than any of us could even comprehend. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.