Legal but unethical?

The Meloon family started a boat building company in the 1920s that flourished, fashioning both pleasure boats and small boats for the military during times of war. The Meloons, committed believers, were awarded a contract to build 3,000 boats during the Korean War. The government’s boat inspector demanded a bribe to approve the vessels’ delivery. The Meloons’ faith couldn’t comply.

Six hundred boats were rejected. The Meloons were forced into bankruptcy—a legal procedure allowing them to walk away from their debts forever. But they didn’t. Twenty years later, every creditor was repaid. Why? Because the Bible says, “The wicked borrow and do not repay.” Bankruptcy was legal, but it wasn’t biblically ethical. What God said weighed more heavily on the Meloons than a legal escape route.

On the flip side, there are times when something is illegal but ethically biblical. The midwives of Israel found themselves in this predicament when Pharaoh instructed them to kill every male son born to Hebrew women. It became illegal to deliver a boy child in the Jewish slums of Cairo. Yet, the midwives feared Yahweh more than Pharaoh and risked their lives to do what was biblically ethical, yet illegal.

Times haven’t changed much. What is biblically unethical is increasingly being made legal and what is biblically ethical is being made illegal. Biblical literacy has never been more important. Today’s lawmakers, in a pluralistic miasma, attempt to make the terms “legal” and “ethical” equivalent, because they are politically unable to recognize one religious ethical system superior to another. The result: a nation with no absolute truth, where the only governing authority is the written law. The law books get fuller and fuller as morality sinks lower and lower.

For believers, the times dictate that we clearly understand that “legal” isn’t necessarily “biblically ethical,” and vice versa. Apart from biblical literacy, there’s no way to accurately discern God’s best. The Meloons knew the biblical truth about repaying one’s debts, and the midwives knew that all newborns are made in God’s image and therefore unfit for discretionary disposal. They acted on what they knew.

Abortion is legal, but biblically unethical, as are gambling, pornography, marijuana use (in some states), same-sex-marriage, adultery, and lying in the political arena. Preaching and acting on these beliefs is becoming more and more punishable but remains biblically ethical.

What can we do? Here are three things: