The Natural Law: Always and Everywhere

Viva Christo Rey!

Have you ever noticed how every town in the world has a main street which is called just that: “Main Street”? This seems to be an unwritten law in every community.

Brothers and sisters, there is a law not written on paper but written in the heart of each and every human person. This law we call “the natural moral law” or simply “the natural law.”

Now, because a person is human, he just knows that certain things are right and just:
• worshipping God
• honoring your parents
• helping your brothers and sisters
• helping your neighbor who is in need
• telling the truth
• respecting the property of other people
• being happy with the good things that God has given you and not wanting somebody else’s things

Do you notice how these commands that I have just named are very similar to the Ten Commandments?
• I am the Lord, your God, you shall not have strange gods before Me.
• Keep holy the Lord’s Day.
• Honor your father and your mother
• You shall not kill.
• You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
• You shall not steal.
• You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.

This is because the Ten Commandments are a direct way of saying the natural law, which God has put into your heart and into the heart of every human person.

Finally, no one on earth—not even the government—has authority to make anyone act against the Ten Commandments. No one has any right to make a person act against the natural law. Furthermore, the Ten Commandments have been revealed to everybody and are valid in every place and for all time. Everyone has to obey them. Everybody should want to obey them. They come straight from the Heart of God, a Heart so lovingly solicitous for the true well-being, the salvation, of each one of us!

The Most Fundamental Law

You will be My people, and I will be your God.

These are the words of the Covenant, the words of the Covenant of God with his people, the people who came from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel); they are found in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible.
To keep the Covenant means to keep (or obey or observe) the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. But what are the Commandments? The Ten Commandments are the natural moral law expressed explicitly. The natural moral law is written in the heart of each and every man. The ancients (that is, the ancient Greeks and Romans) knew of the natural law. The Romans Cicero and Sophocles wrote about it. Even though they did not know it’s Author, the ancients of the Roman Republic sought to practice the natural moral law. Indeed, in God’s Providence, the Roman Republic defeated the Carthaginians, who were avid practitioners of everything that goes against the natural law, namely ritual child-sacrifice.
Now, the Hebrews were probably the most concrete-thinking people in history. They were not philosophically minded like the ancient Greeks and Romans. Therefore, through Moses, God revealed to them the natural law in the most explicit and concrete way possible: on the Stone Tablets of the Law. They were to teach these Commandments to their children and their children’s children—down through the generations, in other words.
Even so, the Hebrews still managed to break the natural law and the Commandments and the Covenant. Specifically, they did this by joining in the abominable practices of the nations: Baal worship and it’s accompanying demonic ritual of child-sacrifice. The Prophet Hosea bemoans this practice explicitly:

Thus says the Lord, “When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the farther they went from me, sacrificing to the Baals and burning incense to idols.”

Okay, Hosea’s text doesn’t mention that it was child sacrifice; however, the text of the Prophet Jeremiah does. Jeremiah specifically tells us that, when Jericho was being rebuilt, a Hebrew official named Hiel sacrificed his two sons to Baal and buried them underneath the foundations of the city. There are more examples of this, and they will be mentioned in future blog entries of “These Live for All Time.”
So I am always astounded when some people object: “The God of the Old Testament was ‘mean’; he was not a God of Love, because of the battles he commanded and because sometimes had to put pagan civilizations under the ban." Yet God did these things precisely because He is the God of Love. He does not want His People to adopt the ways of demon-worship, which involve sacrificing precious human beings—usually mere children—to Satan. This is why God told His people not to inter-marry and mix with the pagans. He knew that such inter-marriages would only bring down his people to the satanic level of the pagans, which would only multiply the amount of false worship and murder of innocent human beings. God loves life. The Sixth Commandment forbids murder and so does the natural law, the first principle of which is expressed as: “Do good and avoid evil.” And there are immediately knowable secondary precepts that spring from this first principle, such as Love your offspring. Do not murder. Do not lie; do tell the truth.
Today, in much of the world—even in the once God-fearing U.S.A.—the natural law is broken. The United States of America no longer has laws forbidding abortion, the culture encourages the contraceptive mentality, and the Courts are trying to eradicate marriage (a permanent society between one man and one woman for the procreation and education of children) from the face of the earth. Furthermore, we export our abortion-providing technology and our contraceptives to poor developing Third World nations. What makes us think we have the right to tell them to have less children!?
We have become a lawless society that cannot even keep the most basic and fundamental and necessary of all laws: the natural moral law. Furthermore, our massive government bureaucracies seek to spread our lawlessness to the ends of the world. We should not be surprised that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is falling apart at the seams!

It's very near to you!

This command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. … No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out (Dt. 3:11, 14).

These words of the prophet Moses ring true today as they did for the ancient Israelites. You and I know the Ten Commandments. We know when we have done good and when we have done evil. We don’t need an explanation to know that it is wrong (or evil) to lie, cheat, steal, fornicate, murder, and blaspheme. As soon as one knows the meaning of each of these words, he knows that it is wrong; that it is evil and a very bad sin. Even young children know almost instinctively that it is wrong to disobey or disrespect Mom and Dad and that it is wrong to strike another human being. The natural law is written in the human heart.

Why "Natural" Law?

Why is the law of morality that God has written into our hearts called "the natural law"?

Actually, a mind much greater than mine has already answered this question. In the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas says: "This law is called natural because ..." and then he gives the answer. However, for our blogging purposes, let me try to put it in my own words. I have no book in front of me as I write:

The natural law is known by human reason, which is the very thing [reason] that makes our nature what it is. That's why it's called "the natural law." It is known through our nature, which is called "rational animal."