In the same way, the whole of Scripture presents not isolated moral commands or theological fragments out of harmony, but a unified composition—creation, law, gospel, and lordship—all resolved and fulfilled in Christ. Christian ethics cannot be understood apart from this grand moral symphony. The ethical commands may take shape in unique contexts and specific genres, yet the same moral law resonates throughout Scripture.
To interpret the Bible’s moral commands correctly requires sound exegesis in light of the Bible’s unfolding narrative—to put a moral command in the context of its original setting, to understand the genre it comes to us in its current covenantal context (whether in commands, principles, wisdom, or paradigms), and then within the whole canonical storyline. The purpose of this short essay is quite simple: To trace the narrative arc of Christian ethics in view of the entire Bible. When this is done correctly, we will see that the Bible’s moral storyline is not a disjointed or contradictory collection of moral edicts, but a consistent narrative that portrays one moral order, revealed through the unfolding of divine revelation and covenantal sequences. This essay will trace the Bible’s moral storyline—from creation to Christ—to demonstrate that Christian ethics is not an arbitrary collection of rules, but the embodiment of God’s moral order in redemption.
The Moral Storyline of Scripture
The beginning of all moral considerations is God’s action to create and bring order within creation. An even cursory glance at Genesis 1 reveals immense moral significance, the first of which is that God’s order is teleological—moral design and purpose are embedded within creation. Purpose and design are imposed by a divine givenness shaped by the divine wisdom of God. There are two moral actions in Genesis 1. First, God creates an order pregnant with moral direction. He establishes a “law of nature” whereby he dictates the boundaries of creation (Job 28:26; Jer 5:22). God establishes the laws of creation by ordaining things to be as they are, in keeping with his divine wisdom, and to continue in their appointed pathways. Second, God decrees moral ordinances within that order. In Genesis 1, we see the ordinances take shape: existence, self-knowledge, identity, family, sociality, vocation, and cultural productivity. God calls His creatures to work in conformity with the moral grain of creation order. Significantly, the cadence of Genesis 1 is described by a deeply moral word, “good.” God’s decree that creation is “good” declares that the created order is rightly ordered as it ought to be, and moral agents are therefore called to live in accordance with that order. As Bradford Littlejohn writes, “every order of creature is drawn into motion by seeking the perfection that belongs to it, a perfection that is its own unique mode of imitating the divine perfection.” When God looks upon his creation and deems it “good,” we see that every creature should act consistently with the nature that the Creator designed for it. The rest of the Bible’s moral unfolding follows from the foundations established in Genesis 1. This explains why the apostle Paul says in 1 Timothy 4:4, “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” The narrative of God’s moral order throughout the rest of Scripture is refracted through the moral significance of creation order.
As we all know, the moral order God affixed was disobeyed by our ancestors, Adam and Eve, in Genesis 3. Casting off God’s rule and moral commands, humanity is subjected to the decaying effects of moral rebellion: Resistance, revolt, and vicious human interactions follow. Where Genesis 1 envisions moral authority, man’s revolt signifies his willed overturning of God’s moral order along with the besetting proclivities of idolatry, scarcity, strife, and conflict.
After the flood, God establishes his covenant with Noah. There is a two-fold purpose for the Noahic Covenant: (1) to re-establish a creation order platform constrained by the realities of human fallenness and (2) to provide a creational platform for the redemptive covenants, grounded in God’s eternal plan of redemption, to occur. The moral commission in Genesis 1 is recommissioned in the Noahic Covenant, except that membership in the Noahic Covenant offers no promise of eschatological glory. The same moral realities of Genesis 1 remain, however. Human beings are still called to marry and work, and due to sin, establish systems for adjudicating injustices.
The mission of God’s redemption is simultaneously a mission of moral reclamation, whichis why God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12 holds deep moral significance. God’s calling of Abraham is, along with the redemption of a people, a call for moral witness and moral redemption. Notice that in Genesis 18:17–19, God’s covenant with Abraham calls for Abraham to repristinate God’s moral order:
The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.” (ESV)
God calls for a redeemed people to manifest moral excellence in hopes that the nations would be drawn to a people embodying “righteousness and justice.” God then establishes his covenant with the descendants of Abraham, the nation of Israel. Israel is called to a covenant of moral goodness and to recapitulate God’s original vision for creation and moral order. But Israel, too, like its Edenic progenitors, persists in disobedience and rebellion against YHWH. Here is where the Mosaic Covenant, and in particular, the Decalogue or Ten Commandments, should not be seen as the introduction of an entirely novel law-code, but rather as the republication and codification of the moral order and natural law already embedded in creation. They give explicit, covenantal expression to principles that were always binding on humanity— such as honoring parents, rejecting murder, and keeping marriage pure—because these commands flow from the very structure of creation itself. For example, murder (the 6th Commandment) was not permissible before the Ten Commandments. With questions regarding how the Sabbath reflects creation order principles and its differing application for New Covenant Christians set aside for now, the Ten Commandments distill the original tenets of creation order into a crystalline form.
In Leviticus, God reveals the ultimate standard for the Bible’s moral storyline—the moral mission of Israel is meant to reflect the moral glory of YHWH. Leviticus 20:26 declares, “You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” Biblical morality reflects God’s holiness. As God is unchanging, so is His moral law unchanging as well.
The rest of the Old Testament—from the Davidic Covenant to the wisdom literature and the Prophets—is the unfolding of the moral saga begun in Genesis 1 played out in each of their historical contexts and unique moral genres. Along the way, ethical norms and moral logic unfold, giving explanation and purpose to the structure of Genesis’s moral landscape. Moral laws require moral maxims to execute and obey them. For example, Psalm 34:14 states, “Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” While the truth of this passage seems intuitive, it conveys what moral norms are intended for—they are directives and clues by which we guide our conduct to achieve what is good and conducive to flourishing as a reflection of God’s own holiness. To put this in terms of ethical discourse, all moral action is rational action that satisfies or fulfills our nature and conforms to the order of creation as decreed by God. Moral rectitude is thus not an arbitrary pathway whereby we can choose “A” or “B” and hope for the best outcome. Aligning ourselves with God’s moral path is the only sure guarantee of reaching our intended purpose.
There are also clues in the Old Testament that God’s moral order—begun in Genesis and reconstituted in the Noahic Covenant—is enduring, universal, intelligible, objective, and authoritative. The abiding authority of moral order persists. Psalm 19 is a classic passage that speaks of God’s continued moral witness through the testimony of creation. There, we read that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” Even with the decaying and desecrating effects of Genesis 3, creation’s moral intelligibility is not extinguished. Notice, too, in reading the whole chapter, the seamless integration of God’s moral law in Psalm 19, in that it moves from creational moral knowledge to covenantal moral knowledge to personal moral knowledge. The same moral law is known in three media.
As we reach the New Testament, the absolute fullness of moral revelation dawns in the person of Jesus Christ. The identity of the moral architect becomes incarnate. An impersonal deity or abstract force does not hold the universe together. As Colossians 1 and John 1 teach, the ordering principle of the universe, the “Logos,” is Jesus Christ. “All things were made through him” (John 1:2) and “by him all things were created … all things were created through him and for him … in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16–17). The present moral order subsists as it does because Jesus Christ establishes and upholds it.
Here is where confusion can enter, because it is sometimes thought that Jesus introduces a new moral law. He does not. He brings the moral law to its fulfillment (Matt 5:17). Jesus extends and deepens the elements of moral order. He unveils it in full. For example, the command to love God and love one’s neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:37–39) is not a new moral law. Both commands are present in the Old Testament (Lev 19:18; Deut 6:4–5). What is new is not the content of morality but the clarity and power of its fulfillment in Christ. What changes about the moral law is not its substance, but our deepening knowledge of it and the ability to obey it. New Testament ethics portray the animating Christian ethic as one of love borne through charity, forgiveness, mercy, love of enemies, and self-sacrifice. The life of Christian obedience is possible because the Holy Spirit awakens and stirs us to conformity with Christ (Rom 8:29). None of these Spirit-given norms, however, changes the substance of the moral law.
While New Testament Christians are not under the law code as a covenantal reality, we are not “released” from the obligations of all measures of “law,” as the definition of “law” inherently refers to a standard or measure of conformity. Rather, the locus of the law is no longer on the law-code itself, but the “law of Christ” and the “law of the Spirit of life” that Paul speaks of in Galatians 6:2, 1 Corinthians 9:21, and Romans 8:2. Another facet of New Testament morality that reflects Old Testament morality is that our obedience brings glory to God (Ps 86:12; 1 Cor 6:12–20). The gospel transforms us into moral people. Titus 2:11–14 declares:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
The life of grace does not evacuate the contents of creation order and its moral mandates—it vindicates and ratifies it. Grace enables us to experience creation as God originally envisioned. According to Herman Bavinck, regeneration does not suspend the abiding validity of the moral goods or moral norms; rather, the heavenly good should “animate the moral life, control it, subject it, and make it its instrument” so that the task of ethics “is therefore to describe how regenerate people are to manifest their eternal heavenly life in the form of the temporal earthly life.” Or as Carl F. H. Henry said, “The ethics of redemption is not a new morality that reflects a fundamental change in the will of God regarding the essential content of the good. It preserves in full force his rule of righteousness.”
Elsewhere in the New Testament, the abiding authority of God’s creational and Noahic creation order is upheld. Jesus cites the order of creation explicitly in Matthew 19:4–6 as part of his defense of marriage. This is quite significant, as Jesus maintains that even in the New Covenant era, the creation order remains intelligible and authoritative. The apostle Paul likewise refers to the witness of creation order as giving evidence of God’s existence and moral laws (Rom 1:18–32). Paul also maintains that non-Christians have the ability for true moral knowledge because it is “written on the heart” (Rom 2:14–15).
Moral Hermeneutics for a Whole-Bible Approach to Ethics
In thinking about how we apply the moral law of the whole Bible as New Covenant Christians, a helpful strategy is to deploy some hermeneutical “test” questions:
1. Creation Order Test: How does this moral issue uphold God’s creational design?
2. Natural Law Test: How is this moral issue consistent with moral goods knowable by reason?
3. Redemptive Revelation Test: How does this moral issue align with biblical principles in light of Christ?
When Christians read the Bible for moral guidance, the first question to ask is: What good does this passage encourage, and what evil does it warn against? From there, we should look at how the passage speaks—whether as a clear command, a guiding principle, a story to learn from, or a rule to follow. We then need to ask whether what it teaches aligns with God’s design in creation and if it has implications for our lives together in society. It is also important to notice how the passage reasons—does it call us to virtue, to duty, to wise ends, or to consider the consequences? Next, we should place the text within the broader context of the Bible, examining how it relates to God’s covenants and how Christ brings it to fulfillment. We must also weigh how binding it is—whether it is required, recommended, optional, or left to wisdom. Finally, Christians should ask how the Spirit enables us to obey, how the teachings point to genuine human flourishing, how they relate to contemporary moral debates, and what they mean for the life of the church. In this way, interpreting the Bible’s moral teaching is not just an academic exercise but an act of submitting our lives to God’s Word.
Christian ethics is nothing less than living as creatures redeemed by Christ, reflecting God’s glory by aligning our lives with the order He declared “good” from the beginning.
This article originally appeared in Lexington Road on December 1, 2025.
