• 1 Corinthians 6:12
  Flee Sexual Immorality
  “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.
• 1 Corinthians 10:23
  Do All to the Glory of God
  “All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up.

I left the context headers in these verses in order to demonstrate what is at stake in reference to Paul’s saying all things are lawful. His reference to lawful is a spiritual element not a legal argument.

Man makes and amends laws on a wide area of concerns over how society acts. In spiritual terms it is often considered making sin legal. In a society where majority rules, influence peddlers spend enormous energy and money to remove morality from the law because the US constitution has an amendment stating that the government shall not be a theocracy. 

Just because our laws say that you will not be arrested and punished for a certain sin does not alter mankind’s final judgment being settled in the courts of heaven. When a majority does not believe in God’s authority over their lives, they refuse to listen to any truth that is called absolute. 

I believe in the separation of church and state. I believe in the separation of legalities and moral absolutes. I do not want to live in a theocracy. I want to live in Christ without the constraints of the government telling us how to worship.

Politics and religion are said to be strange bedfellows but the truth is that God wants us to love Him and each other by the law of love which is not legislated by man.

Galatians 5:22-24 English Standard Version

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

The flesh doesn’t like to be crucified. 

“What is dead may never die.” The Iron Isles slogan from Game of Thrones

• Romans 6:13
  Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.
• Romans 6:16
  Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
• Romans 6:23
  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
• Romans 7:5
  For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is littered with sin and death. Those who he is writing this message to came from a society filled with hedonistic pleasures. His comment about those passions being aroused by the law meant something different to them at that time because they were not Jews.

I would venture that the majority of my readers do not come from a Jewish background and what we know about the law has been taught to us on two levels, moral and spiritual. If we consider those are influences that help us define sin then we might see it leads to varied and confusing practices in identifying what is right and just.

Moral laws are societal, and are regulated by governing bodies. That varies from state to state and country to country. Spiritual laws are defined by God and are absolute. How we control sin in living in Christ affects our behavior and our relationship with God and each other.

Proverbs 22:6

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.

That same principle is applied across all levels of worship, none more closely than those who do not know or love Jesus Christ. Religious laws are not spiritual, they are moral laws controlled by society.

Jesus died to set us free from the law of sin. That means it is important to know what sin is according to God’s righteous standard and not what mankind calls it.