Sinclair Ferguson

But it shouldn't surprise us that in every culture there will be echoes of those laws that God built into our constitution.

And Paul seems to me to be alluding to that here in Romans chapter 2.

Actually, the marrow of modern divinity put this rather well.

Listen to this.

Adam heard as much of the law in the garden as Israel did at Sinai, but only in fewer words and without thunder.

You see what he's saying?

And then we move on to the next stage.

Here is fallen man.

His mind is darkened.

His heart is twisted.

The law of God has been written into his life because he is the image of God.

He reflects the character of God, but now it's distorted.

It's as though the mirror is smashed and broken and the law of God is no longer clear.

Sometimes, yes, you know, if you read some of the scholarly work, you will notice that especially unbelieving scholars are always looking for parallels to the Ten Commandments in the ancient Near East to try to show that the Ten Commandments are dependent on the laws of the ancient Near East.

And stubbornly resist the notion, no,

Of course there will be similarities between the law of God and the laws of the ancient Near East and different countries because the works of the law, however damaged they may seem to be, are still written on the human heart.

So what happens at Mount Sinai is that what was written on the heart and has now become unclear

is now made clear by God by writing it on tablets of stone so that we can be in no doubt what the law of God that was originally written in our hearts was meant to say.

But it was also given to a community, a particular ethnic community.

And so there are certain particularly ethnic dimensions that surround it.