Love-based Legal Values?

In his book “The Changing Law” renowned jurist, Lord Denning, showed that the common law was developed over many centuries by judges who based their decisions on the love-based values of Jesus.  As generations of parents instilled those legal values in their children, they became the traditional values in our culture and government institutions.

Today, that tradition is seldom reinforced as it was in the past by reading the bible.  As a result, the only legal values that have ever produced justice, freedom and prosperity are being:

• held with only lukewarm conviction and
• subverted by debased concepts of love peddled in the media

The ancient Greek language of the New Testament had four different words for love:

• Eros – sexual love
• Stergo – devoted love
• Phileo – the love of a friend, or being fond of a person or thing
• Agapao – loving someone as a matter of principle, duty and propriety.

Tellingly, eros was based on the Greek word erao, which meant to ask, beg, or demand.  So the underlying idea of sexual “love” was selfish and potentially brutal – typical of pagan sex.  Perhaps that is why the word eros is never used in the New Testament.  Greeks confused sexual intimacy with love.  Actually, God designed it as an enthralling gift, full of special delights to establish an exclusive life-long marriage bond between a man and a woman.  It was God’s way of helping us to freely express love by lavishing the tenderness, time and attention needed to satisfy each other’s sexual desire.

Stergo was used about things such as the loving devotion of parents for their children, the love of a nation for a particular ruler and even the love of a dog for its master.  Only stergo’s opposite (astorgos) appears in the New Testament.  It is translated “without natural affection” in 2 Tim 3:3, which predicts a tragic breakdown of natural family ties just before Jesus’ second coming.

Phileo referred to the love of a friend, or being fond of a person or thing.  It involved affection, personal attachment and sentiment or feeling.  It appears around fifty times in the New Testament.

Agapao – loving someone as a matter of principle, duty and propriety – was the least emotional or sentimental Greek word for love.  It involved a deliberate and well-judged act of the will.  The New Testament amplifies and ennobles its meaning.  It is how God loves –selflessly, with lavish generosity and undeserved favour.  It is how Jesus loves His Father and His church.  If one word characterizes the New Testament, this is it!

Agapao love is foreign to the general self-centredness of human nature.  We can’t consistently “agapao” others until we can say with conviction: “Despite knowing me inside-out, God loves me personally and so intensely that he gave His only Son for me.”  To be able to say that, we must begin by struggling to obey the first commandment – love God with all your heart.  In the midst of that struggle we discover the inconstancy of our own human love.  We start to open ourselves to experience His “agapao” for us personally.  From many such experiences we gradually learn to “agapao” our neighbours.

Justice is supposed to be the way a community lovingly resolves issues between its members without favouritism.  Freedom and prosperity can only be built on that kind of justice (proved from history in our 58 page eBook “Justice, Freedom and Prosperity,” which is on special at present, click here for details).  The only legal values that have ever produced such genuine justice are the agapao-based values of Jesus which, as Denning showed, underpinned the development of the common law.

It is clear that the values underpinning our recent laws and policies are not based on agapao love.  Instead, we are using values that amount to either sentimental ‘lerv’ or the UN’s brutal humanistic values.  Humanistic legal values were used in the French revolution in 1793 and in most revolutions ever since.  They are undermining our justice, freedom and prosperity.  Examples include:

• Proposals for dealing with illegal immigration.  At one extreme are those who think it is compassionate to allow unrestricted immigration to ABCANZUS.  They neglect the unloving impact of accepting large numbers of people whose beliefs would undermine our love-based legal values and jeopardize justice, freedom and prosperity – not only for our own grandchildren, but also for the crushed people of many nations.  At the other extreme are those who selfishly reject the idea of taking refugees.  They fail to understand that there are very large numbers of persecuted Christians around the world who, if we sought them as immigrants, would value our justice, freedom and prosperity and help us to export those blessings back into the many nations from which they come.
• Proposals to legislate homosexual “marriage.”  On one hand there are the good-hearted people who feel a loving concern for homosexuals.  Unfortunately, their concern is not agapao.  We know that because the Love-Being who designed humans to be love-beings says in Romans 1:18-32 and Revelation 21:8 that homosexuality and several other sins are so harmful to the human spirit that we must turn from such sins or be excluded from God’s eternal kingdom.  God loves sinners, but He is determined to prevent sin ruining the next life as it has this one.  It is, therefore, grossly unloving towards homosexuals to pass laws that condone behaviour that will, if persisted in, jeopardize their eternal future.  This is an issue where it is clear that we must first love God and reverence His Word before we can know the right way to love others.
• Vilification and anti-discrimination laws.  These are the result of ratifying UN “treaties” that impose brutal humanistic legal values on ABCANZUS.  Anti-discrimination laws are tyrannical – designed to impoverish people who try to use their ancient right of free speech on these issues.  The celebrated case of “the two Dannies”, two Christian pastors in Victoria, Australia, is a case in point.
• The increasing volume of law that un-lovingly, and therefore unjustly, requires accused people to prove their innocence.  It is convenient for bureaucrats, but it overturns a centuries-old bulwark of freedom – that the accuser must prove the case against the accused “beyond reasonable doubt.”