Law, Christendom, and the Blueprint

You are on a building site.

Early morning, there is a chill in the air. The ground has been cleared.

For eight weeks we have been pulling things down. The old lies. The rotten timber. The condemned walls. And now the site is empty. Levelled. Ready.

There is a set of plans rolled up on the trestle. You have not opened them yet.

Because last week, at that kitchen table, you finally said it. Christ is King of everything. Of the church, over business, and over the Monday mornings. Not one inch left over.

And it felt good to say that.

But then the man across the table asked you the only question that could stop you. “All right. If Christ is King of the courts, then by what law does He judge them?”

And you went quiet. Because a slogan is not a society. You can shout “Jesus is Lord” over the whole world. But the moment you have to run a single courtroom, you need more than a slogan. You need a blueprint.

And here is the thing they trained you to believe. That the blueprint does not exist. Or worse, that it does, and it is a cage.

You have heard it your whole life. “We are not under law. We are under grace.” The law of God is bondage. It is the old covenant. It is a prison men were set free from. So whatever you build, build it on some other standard. Anything else. Just not that.

Today I am going to show you that the exact opposite is true. The law you were told to run from is the only thing that has ever made God’s redeemed men free. And I am going to show you what it built when men dared to pick it up.

My name is Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk. And this is Exiles No More.

What This Will Give You

First, why there is no such thing as a society without a law. And why the only real question was never “should we impose religion,” but “whose religion is already imposed.”

Second, the answer to the trap. “So you want to stone people for picking up sticks?” You will have the reply that ends that conversation for good, and it is nothing like what they are expecting.

Third, the receipts. What the law of God actually built. The hospital. The university. The end of slavery. The rule of law itself. And I will bring you a witness who is not even a believer.

Fourth, the long game. Why you do not build a civilisation in a weekend, and why that is the most hopeful thing I will say all year.

By the end you will have the plans open on the trestle. You will know that the blueprint is not a cage. It is a whole world of liberty and beauty.

There Is No Neutral Ground

Let me state their case fairly, the way the two-kingdoms man would.

He says God has two words for the world. A word of law, written on every human heart. Natural law. Available to everyone, believer and pagan alike. And a word of grace. The Bible. Special revelation. For the church.

So when it comes to running a country, you reach for the first one, not the second. You do not need Scripture to run a courtroom. You need reason. Conscience. The way things just are. The Bible is for Sunday. Natural law is for the nation.

But we already took that apart in Episode five. Remember? Natural law cannot get three philosophers in a room to agree on what the punishment should be for stealing your neighbour’s shoes. It is a fog.

And here is what is really going on underneath it. When a man says, “we do not need the Bible to run society,” he is not taking religion out of the public square. He is just swapping one god for another.

Stephen Perks says it as plainly as it can be said. There is no such thing as a neutral state. Every state is confessional. Every state has a god. And every state has a law that flows down from that god.

If the god is not Christ, the god is Caesar. If the law is not drawn from the God of the Bible, it is drawn from the god of the state.

So look at the choice you were offered. Were you offered God’s law, or no law? Were you offered a Christian nation, or a neutral one? The problem is, there is no neutral. You were only ever choosing between the law of God and the law of man.

Every legal order on earth enforces somebody’s morality. When the state says you may not steal, that is a moral claim. When it says what a marriage is, that is a moral claim. When it decides whose life is protected and whose is not, that is the deepest moral claim there is.

There is no government anywhere that governs without a god. The only question is which one rules.

So the question was never “should we impose a religion on the nation?” The question is “which religion is already sitting on the throne?” And once you have seen that, you cannot unsee it.

But that just sharpens the next problem. Because the moment you say “I want God’s law,” somebody springs the trap.

The Trap, and the Justice That Springs It

Here is the trap.

You say you want the law of God to shape the laws of the land. And the clever man smiles and says, “Oh. So you want to stone adulterers. You want to execute a man for gathering sticks on a Saturday. You want the whole of Leviticus enforced at the point of a spear?”

It sounds devastating. And it falls apart the second you actually reach for the Scriptures.

Watch the sleight of hand in that sentence. He has piled two completely different kinds of thing into one heap and dared you to defend the heap. So let us disentangle that whole mess.

Half of what he just listed, gathering sticks on a Sabbath, the strange fire, the whole shimmering machinery of Leviticus, was never about running a court of law in the first place. It was about getting a sinful people near a holy God without being consumed.

The sacrifices. The priesthood. The temple. The feast days. Every drop of blood on that altar was an arrow, and every arrow pointed to the green hill far away.

Therefore when Christ climbed that hill and said it is finished, He did not tear those laws up. He fulfilled them.

The Lamb came, so you stopped needing the lamb. The High Priest came, so you stopped needing the priesthood. The temple was a shadow, and you do not salute the shadow once the man himself walks into the room. That whole world of ritual did not fail. It arrived.

So no, I am not asking for the sacrificial system back. To drag it back would be to deny the cross did anything. The blood has been shed. That ledger is closed forever.

Which leaves the other half of his heap. The half he smuggled in. Because underneath all that ritual, God also told Israel what justice between men looks like. And that is a different thing altogether.

Do not murder. And if you do, your life is forfeit. Do not steal. And if you do, you pay it back, double, fourfold, to the man you robbed. Do not move your neighbour’s boundary stone. Do not rig the scales. Do not take a bribe. Do not let a rich man buy a verdict or a poor man riot his way to one.

Now look me in the eye and tell me which of those is “barbaric.” Tell me which one you would like repealed.

That a murderer should answer with his life, Genesis says that before Moses is even born, and it grounds it in something no parliament can vote away: man is made in the image of God. Touch the image bearer, you answer to the image Himself.

That a thief should make his victim whole instead of rotting at the taxpayer’s expense in a cell, that is not cruelty. That is the most humane and divine justice ever written. It looks at the victim. Ours forgets he ever existed.

So here is the reply that ends the conversation. The clever man lumps the whole law of God into one heap of strange, bloody savagery. His game is simple: make you flinch at one strange penalty, and you will drop the lot, justice and all. Then the laws of the nation answer to him, the godless man, not to God Almighty.

Do not flinch, brother. Hold on tight.

The shadows are fulfilled in Christ. They are not coming back, and we do not want them back. But the justice of God, that a life is worth a life, that a thief repays, that the court does not lie and does not take bribes and does not care whether you arrived in a Bentley or on foot, that justice never expired. It was never only for Israel. It is simply what is right, because it flows from the character of a God who does not change.

You are not asking to paste Leviticus onto a statute book. You are asking that the laws of men finally answer to the justice of God.

That is not a cage. That is the fairest courtroom the world has ever seen.

And when you see what that justice produces out in the world, when you see what it builds, you will understand exactly why they needed you to believe it was a cage.

From Theory to the Building Already Standing

We have got the blueprint open on the trestle. The law of God, its justice intact, ready to build with. But I can hear the objection already. “That is a lovely theory, Nathan. But it would never work in the real world.”

So let me take you out of theory altogether. Let me show you the building that is already standing.

The Receipts: What the Law Built

I want to start with a man who is not even a Christian. Tom Holland. The historian.

He set out to write about the worlds he loved. Greece and Rome. The classical world. And he made a discovery that unsettled him. He realised he did not think like a Roman at all.

The Romans admired strength. Cruelty. Domination. They left weak babies on the hillside to die and felt nothing. They crucified slaves by the thousand and called it “order.” And Holland realised that every fibre in his being recoiled from it. That the weak should be protected. That the poor have dignity. That power should answer to something above itself.

Every one of those instincts was Christian. He had been swimming in an ocean of Christian assumptions his whole life. And he had never once noticed the water.

And that is exactly where you live too. You have been breathing Christian air since the day you were born. And calling it “secular.”

So let me hand you the receipts.

Where did the hospital come from? Rome had no hospital for the poor. Why spend good money on the weak? The church built the first one. Basil of Caesarea, in the fourth century. A place where anyone, rich or poor, was cared for. Because they bear the image of God.

Where did the university come from? Bologna. Paris. Oxford. Cambridge. Every one founded by the church. Because Christians believed an orderly God had made an orderly world that a man could actually study and understand. Modern science was born from that one conviction.

Where did the end of slavery come from? Wilberforce. An evangelical, on his knees, driven by the image of God in every enslaved man.

And where did the rule of law come from? The idea that even the king is under the law, not above it? From a thousand years of bishops telling kings to their faces, “You are not God. There is a King above you, and His law binds you too.”

The Honest Reckoning

Now let us be honest, because I am not selling you a fairy tale. Was Christendom perfect? No. There was an Inquisition. There were crusades that turned into massacres. There was corruption and the abuse of power.

But here is the difference that changes everything. When Christendom did evil, it did so in defiance of its holy book. When a bishop tortured a man, he was breaking the law of God, not keeping it. That was a violation. Not an application.

And then look at the alternative. The men who threw God out altogether.

France, 1789. They enthroned a goddess of Reason in Notre Dame. Within five years the blood streamed from the guillotine, and the streets of France ran red. The Terror was unleashed.

The twentieth century went further. The first century in the West to build whole societies on the assumption that there is no God above the state. Soviet Russia. Mao’s China. The killing fields. A hundred and forty-eight million dead at the hand of the communists alone.

So do not ever let a man put you on the back foot. Christendom built hospitals. The alternative built gulags. The university and productive science are what you get when God is God. The gulag is what you get when man is god.

The Long Game

So maybe you are convinced. The law is a blueprint. It built a civilisation once. But you look around at the wreckage and you think, it is too late. The culture is too far gone. The institutions are captured. The church is weak.

Let me tell you how it got built the first time.

Think about the men who actually built the great cathedrals. A mason would cut a stone. Shape it. Set it. Knowing the wall it belonged to would not rise for another fifty years. Knowing he would be dead long before the spire was capped.

Why on earth would a man work like that? Because he was not building for himself. He was building for his grandchildren. And their grandchildren after them.

We live in the exact opposite age. Everything now. This week. By Friday. We plant nothing we cannot harvest by the weekend. And so we build nothing that will last even a hundred years.

Gary North said the dominion man thinks in generations, not news cycles. He plants trees under whose shade he will never sit. Because that is how the kingdom was always going to grow.

It started with twelve men in a backwater of the Roman Empire. No money. No army. No institutions. Following a carpenter the empire had put to death. Three centuries later that empire bent the knee. Not by a revolution. By faithfulness. One changed life, one family, one generation at a time.

Jesus said the kingdom is like leaven a woman hides in the dough. You cannot see it working. But it never stops working. Until the whole lump is changed.

So how does the West come home to Christ, their rightful Lord and King? The same way Rome did. Marriages that last. Families that worship. Businesses run with integrity. Schools that teach the truth. Churches that disciple men.

That is the leaven. And leaven has to be put in the dough by somebody’s hand. So let me put it in yours.

What You Do This Week

I am not going to hand you a blueprint and walk off. Four things. For this week.

One. Read Deuteronomy four, and find the envy of the nations.

Last week I told you to open it. Now read it properly. Deuteronomy chapter four, verses five to eight. Moses is handing Israel the law of God. And listen to how he describes it.

“What great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law?”

Sit with that. The law was not given as a burden to drag the nation down. It was given as a glory that made the watching nations stare over the fence and wish they had it too.

That is your answer to “King by what law?” By the law that makes a nation the envy of the whole earth.

Two. Take one of God’s laws and find the justice in it.

Pick one this week. Restitution for the thief. A life for a murderer. Honest scales. No bribes in court. And ask two questions. What is the justice God is protecting here? And where has my own nation walked away from it?

Do it once and a door opens in your mind. You stop seeing the law as a house of horrors. And you start treating it as a working blueprint, realising, point by point, what replaced God’s law, and how much worse it is.

Three. Name the god of your own nation.

Do not start with a textbook this week. Start with the news. Watch one debate. One headline. One new law that has been passed. And ask the question you now cannot unask. Whose god is being served here? Whose morality is being enforced and called “neutral”?

Because the moment you can name the confession the state is already preaching, the spell breaks. You stop asking whether faith belongs in public. And you start asking whose faith is going to win.

Four. Sit with the question that comes next.

You have got the cleared ground. You have got the blueprint open on the trestle. You have seen the cathedral it built before. But a blueprint builds nothing by itself.

So the last question is the most personal one I will ever ask you. Who picks up the tools?

Because it is one thing to know the earth is yours and the plans are good. It is another thing entirely to be the man who shows up on Monday morning, in the cold, and lays the first stone.

So this week, look honestly at your own life and ask: am I a man who admires the blueprint? Or a man who rolls up his sleeves and builds?

The Blueprint, Not the Cage

Let me leave you with this.

They told you the law of God was a cage. They were lying. The cage is the one you are standing in right now. It is called every man doing what is right in his own eyes.

The law of God is not the bars. It is the blueprint. And a blueprint is not a prison. It is a cathedral waiting to soar up into the sky.

For nine weeks I have been telling you the ground is yours. Now you are holding the plans for what stands on it.

So stop staring at the paper. Pick up the first stone. And lay it.

I am Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk. This is Exiles No More.

You are not an exile. You are an heir. And it is time we all started thinking like heirs.