Recently, I had an email discussion with a thoughtful Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) pastor who has many questions about our design-law view of things. Below are some excerpts from our discussion that I thought would be helpful to share.

Pastor: When God’s law is defined as a natural mechanism rather than a moral command, the framework shifts from biblical categories to philosophical ones. Natural‑law metaphysics, therapeutic psychology, and functional models of human behavior begin to shape the theology more than Scripture itself. By grounding moral law in the structure of nature, rather than in the character and authority of God, the model appears to adopt philosophical assumptions that Scripture does not teach.

Me: The definitions we give to God’s law do not change reality—a rose by any other name is still the same objective plant. Calling God’s law something else doesn’t change how reality functions; however, changing our concepts, beliefs, and understandings of His law does change us—because of how God’s law functions!

This is how Satan, the father of lies, has power—by getting people to believe lies; those false beliefs then cause real changes in them. Lies believed break love and trust and incite fear and selfishness. When we change our beliefs about something, we cause changes in our brains that change us. [Because he is an SDA pastor, I provided quotes from Ellen G. White (EGW), one of the founders of the SDA Church and officially recognized by the SDA Church as having the special gift of prophecy.]

EGW wrote:

The Comforter is called “the Spirit of truth.” His work is to define and maintain the truth. He first dwells in the heart as the Spirit of truth, and thus He becomes the Comforter. There is comfort and peace in the truth, but no real peace or comfort can be found in falsehood. It is through false theories and traditions that Satan gains his power over the mind. By directing men to false standards, he misshapes the character. Through the Scriptures the Holy Spirit speaks to the mind, and impresses truth upon the heart. Thus He exposes error, and expels it from the soul. It is by the Spirit of truth, working through the word of God, that Christ subdues His chosen people to Himself” (The Desire of Ages, p. 671, emphasis mine).

When one breaks an imposed law, a made-up rule, one does not change themselves, unless they are also breaking design law. The many Christians throughout history who broke made-up human laws that forbade them from sharing the gospel, and who were subsequently arrested, persecuted, and prosecuted, did not damage themselves by breaking made-up laws. Likewise, in the Old Testament, various saved people (Nebuchadnezzar, Naaman, etc.) were not damaged or sinning when they did not participate in the Jewish sacrificial system, because that was a made-up system of rules to model/teach reality—but it was not reality.

So when people choose to think of God’s law as legal, made-up rules that function like human law, and which require Him to enforce them through inflicted punishment, they do not change God or His law, but they do change themselves! Functionally, such teaching solidifies in them the spirit of fear and selfishness and closes the heart to the working of the Holy Spirit.

People who believe the penal/legal model end up placing their faith in the various legal mechanics (blood payment to God or His law, robe of righteousness to hide them from a punishing god, erasure of sins from legal books, Jesus pleading to His Father to beg for pardon, etc.) to protect them from the god they don’t trust. Thus, they cling to these legal mechanics that they have invented to hide and protect them from God because they falsely believe that He is the source of death and that without those mechanics, He would be required, either by His holiness or law, to use His power to kill them.

So, this is not a philosophical argument; it is an outworking of how reality works. This is a design law. As EGW put it:

It is a law both of the intellectual and the spiritual nature that by beholding we become changed. The mind gradually adapts itself to the subjects upon which it is allowed to dwell. It becomes assimilated to that which it is accustomed to love and reverence. Man will never rise higher than his standard of purity or goodness or truth. If self is his loftiest ideal, he will never attain to anything more exalted. Rather, he will constantly sink lower and lower. The grace of God alone has power to exalt man. Left to himself, his course must inevitably be downward (The Great Controversy p. 555, emphasis mine).

This is the law of worship—we become like that which we choose to believe, admire, and find worthy to base our existence upon (Jeremiah 2:5; Romans 1:18–31; 2 Corinthians 3:18). If we choose the penal/legal view of an imperial god who uses power to coerce and enforce, then we become like that god.

Pastor: You assert that morality cannot be commanded. However, Scripture presents God’s moral law as commanded (Deut 6:5; Exod 20), covenantal (Deut 28), and judicial (Rom 3:19–20). The fact that the law cannot produce love does not negate its function as a divine command that establishes obligation and defines transgression. This represents a substantive theological divergence between your framework and the biblical witness.

Me: I think you misunderstood my comment, but I also accept that I communicated poorly there. I did not mean that God cannot verbally communicate through linguistic commands, instructions, directives—of course He can and has. So, yes, we have the biblical record of God giving moral commands, because God would not leave us without instruction, direction, command, or truth.

My point is that verbal commands, edicts, and directives cannot achieve morality. Morality cannot be enforced through imposed law and external law enforcement. To attempt to do this actually causes more sin, more rebellion, more immorality. EGW put it this way:

“The earth was dark through misapprehension of God. That the gloomy shadows might be lightened, that the world might be brought back to God, Satan’s deceptive power was to be broken. This could not be done by force. The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God’s government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened. To know God is to love Him; His character must be manifested in contrast to the character of Satan. This work only one Being in all the universe could do. Only He who knew the height and depth of the love of God could make it known. Upon the world’s dark night the Sun of Righteousness must rise, ‘with healing in His wings.’ Malachi 4:2” (The Desire of Ages, 22, emphasis mine).

“God could have destroyed Satan and his sympathizers as easily as one can cast a pebble to the earth; but He did not do this. Rebellion was not to be overcome by force. Compelling power is found only under Satan’s government. The Lord’s principles are not of this order. His authority rests upon goodness, mercy, and love; and the presentation of these principles is the means to be used. God’s government is moral, and truth and love are to be the prevailing power” (The Desire of Ages, 759, emphasis mine).

There are many more quotes like this, but the point is made: Love, loyalty, devotion, and moral character cannot be achieved through commanding it, through legislation, through imposed law and law enforcement. Thus, again, God’s law does not function like human law, the laws of a creature.

Pastor: Your model appears to exclude the judicial dimension of God’s moral government. Yet Scripture affirms that God is Judge (Gen 18:25; Ps 7:11), that Christ bears the curse of the law (Gal 3:13), and that final judgment is real and decisive (Rev 20:11–15). These are not human constructs but essential biblical categories. The removal of the judicial aspect of divine law significantly alters the structure of biblical soteriology.

Me: How one understands the biblical judgment is directly determined by their assumptions, their preconceived ideas, regarding God’s law. I do not deny the biblical judgment. I deny the human, Roman, distortion that mischaracterizes it. I have written about this in many places; please read my blog The Four Judgments.

Pastor: You describe your position as measurable, testable, and reproducible. Scripture, however, grounds moral truth in divine revelation, covenant, and command—categories that are not empirically verifiable. This epistemological difference shapes how each of us interprets the nature and function of moral law.

Me: Consider your argument functionally. In the context of the Great Controversy, how much truth is on God’s side? 100 percent, correct?

How much truth supports Satan? Zero percent, correct? Then does Satan want people to actually think, reason, examine evidence, find the testable truths? Or does he want them to, with great conviction of religious certainty, exercise faith in declarations, proclamations, claims, and statements?

No doubt, we sinners could not, by use of human reason alone, discover God and His eternal truths. It is a certainty that God must reveal truth to us. However, because God has revealed truth to us, and because it is objective, reality-based truth, then we can examine it, understand it, test it, and draw conclusions from it. This is exactly what Scripture teaches we are to do:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Roman 1:20 NIV84).

Why are men without excuse? It is because they have been given the Ten Commandments or other Scripture? No! It is because God’s invisible qualities and divine nature are clearly seen from what has been made, from nature, from the design laws our Creator has built into the operations of reality!

I teach the integrative evidence-based approach for determining truth, which requires harmony of all three threads of evidence God has provided so that we become mature Christians who have developed by practice the ability to discern right from wrong (Hebrews 5:14). Please see my blog The Integrative Evidence-Based Approach to Finding Truth.

Pastor: While love, worship, liberty, and truth are indeed biblical virtues, they do not function as “laws” in the biblical sense unless they are commanded, covenantal, and judicial. In your model, these categories operate as descriptive principles of how reality functions, rather than as divine commands that establish obligation and define sin. This distinction is central to the concerns I raised.

Me: With all kindness, please hear my compassion for you when I say this: The statement above is diagnostic/evidence that your mind is ensnared in the imposed-law lie. Do you not realize that “principles” is another word for “laws” when the laws are design laws?

The dictionary definition of principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived. The principles of modern physics.”

This is how sin began in heaven, by the transgression of the “principles” of the unwritten design laws of God! EGW wrote:

“The law of God existed before man was created. The angels were governed by it. Satan fell because he transgressed the principles of God’s government. After Adam and Eve were created, God made known to them His law. It was not then written, but was rehearsed to them by Jehovah” (The Story of Redemption,

145, emphasis mine).

“The law of Jehovah dating back to creation, was comprised in the two great principles, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.’ These two great principles embrace the first four commandments, showing the duty of man to God, and the last six, showing the duty of man to his fellowman. The principles were more explicitly stated to man after the fall, and worded to meet the case of fallen intelligences. This was necessary in consequence of the minds of men being blinded by transgression” (Signs of the Times, April 15, 1875 [Reprinted in Review and Herald, May 6, 1875]).

“The law of God existed before the creation of man or else Adam could not have sinned. After the transgression of Adam the principles of the law were not changed, but were definitely arranged and expressed to meet man in his fallen condition” (SDA Bible Commentary, vol. 1, 1104).

“The angels were governed by it [the law]. Satan fell because he transgressed the principles of God’s government. After Adam and Eve were created, God made known to them His law. It was not then written, but was rehearsed to them by Jehovah” (Faith I Live By, 80).

God’s laws do not function like human laws, but it appears your mind is stuck in thinking of “laws” only in terms of human law, imposed rules, and that is why you think these principles are not laws. The truth is that there is not one imposed law in God’s kingdom; that is why Jesus said His kingdom is not of this world, because all worldly kingdoms operate upon imposed law with imposed punishments. Remember, Jesus said this when Israel and the temple with all the imposed laws were still on the earth. Jesus didn’t say, “My kingdom is not of this world—except for Israel, that is how my kingdom works.”

Pastor:  Thank you for directing my attention to your magazine “Salvation and You.” There is much good in it. However, although you affirm the term “substitution,” the content you assign to it is ontological and therapeutic—Christ assumes damaged human nature, purifies it, and reproduces that purified nature in believers. Scripture, however, presents substitution as including guilt‑bearing (Isa 53:6; 1 Pet 2:24), curse‑bearing (Gal 3:13), propitiation (Rom 3:25–26), and imputation (2 Cor 5:21). These forensic and covenantal dimensions are central to the biblical doctrine and are explicitly excluded in your framework. This is not a matter of terminology but of theological substance.

Me: Do you see in your response how you have restricted substitution to a forensic and legal understanding? The guilt of the world did weigh upon Jesus when He took a position that was not naturally His own; and He did experience the curse and agony of sin when He suffered in Gethsemane and was separated from His Father at the cross. And, as I describe in the magazine, He became the “propitiation,” which in the Greek is hilasterion, the word for the lid to the ark of the covenant that Luther translated as “mercy seat,” but which means the place and means of reconciliation. Jesus is the connecting link; He is the means through which God reconciles sinful humanity back to Himself. How? By doing exactly what I described in the magazine. There is nothing forensic in the plan of salvation; everything we think is forensic and which is taught in Christianity as penal/legal is part of the wine of Babylon; it is the corruption of Christianity brought by the Roman Church when it began teaching the lie that God runs His universe like Caesar runs Rome, through imposed laws and imposed punishments, thus making God out to be the source of death. EGW wrote:

“We are not to regard God as waiting to punish the sinner for his sin. The sinner brings the punishment upon himself. His own actions start a train of circumstances that bring the sure result. Every act of transgression reacts upon the sinner, works in him a change of character, and makes it more easy for him to transgress again. By choosing to sin, men separate themselves from God, cut themselves off from the channel of blessing, and the sure result is ruin and death” (Selected Messages, vol. 1, p. 235).

This is just as Scripture teaches! Those who sow the carnal nature from that nature reap destruction (Galatians 6:8); and sin when full grown brings forth death (James 1:15); and the wages of sin (not God) is death (Romans 6:23). And that Christ “since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14 NIV84, emphasis mine); and that “Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10 NIV84, emphasis mine).

The Bible teaches that sin breaks God’s design laws, severs our connection with the Creator, and, without intervention from God, results in death. It teaches that Jesus became our substitute for the purpose of destroying death and Satan, saving humankind—and, indeed, He has destroyed death! But the penal/legal model teaches that God is the wielder of death for justice’s sake—which is really, really sad, for this leads to the form of godliness without power that Paul warned about in 2 Timothy 3:5.