What Makes Anything Right or Wrong?
Good and evil are woven into reality itself; your power to choose is genuinely your own; and the law of men is only ever a servant of the moral order — never its author.
There is a confusion abroad, common even among the devout: the quiet habit of treating “legal” as a synonym for good and “illegal” as a synonym for evil. If a thing is permitted, the reflex assumes it must be acceptable; if forbidden by statute, that it must be wrong. The assumption survives even in people who, pressed, can immediately name a dozen prophets who defied unjust laws. The reflex is almost always there, just beneath the surface.
It is a category error, and dissolving it requires answering three questions most people never separate: What is goodness, and where does it come from? What makes me genuinely responsible for my own choices? And what, then, is the law of men — that its verdicts should be mistaken for the measure of right and wrong? The Restoration answers all three with unusual precision, and the answers fit together into a single architecture in which human legislation simply does not appear as a moral standard at all.
This is not an argument for lawlessness. It is an argument for putting law exactly where revelation puts it: as an instrument, honorable when it serves the good, “of evil” when it betrays it.
First — Good and Evil Are Real
Some suppose that “good” is simply whatever God wills and “evil” whatever crosses it — as though morality were the mood of a cosmic ruler. The Restoration teaches something far stronger and far more stable. Good and evil are not subjective. They are objective features of reality itself, grounded in eternal law and in what scripture calls light and truth.
“And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.”
Truth is a description of reality — things as they are. And the moral law is woven into that reality the way the physical law is. The light of Christ “proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space” and is “in all things” (D&C 88:13); by that same light every soul is given to judge good from evil — “as plain… as the daylight is from the dark night” (Moroni 7:15–16).
Notice what this does to the old dilemma — is a thing good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? The Restoration answers cleanly, taking neither horn. God did not invent good by decree, nor does He stand under a law that masters Him. Rather, God perfectly and eternally embodies the good; His glory is light and truth (D&C 93:36). Goodness and God are inseparable — but goodness is real, not arbitrary. What is good would remain good even if one denied God; the difference is that God never denies it and never departs from it by a hair.
Hold onto that, because it is the hinge of everything that follows. If goodness is not constituted even by the will of God — who only ever perfectly embodies it — then it is most certainly not constituted by the vote of a legislature or the signature of a king. The highest will in existence cannot make a thing good by willing it. A parliament most assuredly cannot make a thing good by legalizing it.
Second — And Your Choices Are Genuinely Yours
A fixed moral order only matters if there is a real agent freely facing it. So the second question is sharper than it looks: what makes you actually responsible for what you choose? And here a doctrine most of Christendom takes for granted quietly destroys the very accountability it wants to assert.
The doctrine is creatio ex nihilo — creation from absolute nothing. It became standard Christian theology only in the second and third centuries, under Platonic and Gnostic pressure; it is nowhere explicitly taught in the Bible. And pressed to its conclusion, it dissolves moral agency. For if God created your will from nothing, then He knew — before creating it — every choice it would ever make; He created it anyway, with all outcomes foreseen; and He then holds you accountable for choices made by a will He designed, whose every verdict He authored in advance. That is not accountability. It is divine theater — a play whose script was finished before the actors existed.
The honest Calvinist follows the logic to its end and does not flinch:
Westminster Confession of Faith 3:7
“The rest of mankind God was pleased… for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath.”
God ordained the reprobate to wrath — created the will that would reject Him, knowing it would, then condemns it for the rejection He built into it. Calvin himself called this the decretum horribile, the horrible decree, and admitted he could not escape it on his own premises. He was right about that. The premises are the problem, and the premise is ex nihilo.
The Restoration cut the knot not by cleverness but by revelation:
“Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be… Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man.”
Intelligence — the irreducible core of what you are — was never created and cannot be. It is co-eternal with God. He did not manufacture you from nothing; He organized you, gave you a spirit body, set a plan, sent a Savior, and placed you in mortality with agency intact — but the you that chooses was always there. So when you accept or reject the light, the choice is genuinely yours. Not God’s design playing itself out. Yours.
This is what makes both condemnation and grace coherent. A refusal of light that is “plainly manifest” belongs to the one who refuses it — it is not a decree unspooling on schedule. And grace offered to a genuinely free agent is real grace, real cooperation, not a mechanism applied to a pre-programmed outcome. Nothing is rigged from the factory floor. There is a real you, freely facing a real good — which is the only condition under which the question “is it right?” means anything at all.
Third — Sin Is the Real Agent’s Turn From the Real Good
Now the definition of sin falls into place — and it is fatal to the legal-equals-moral reflex, because it never once mentions the law of men. Sin is measured against God’s purpose:
“For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
Sin, then, is anything detrimental to that purpose — the willful disobedience of God’s commandments, or the failure to act righteously despite knowing the truth. Its essence is the free rejection of light and truth by a free agent: “that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience” (D&C 93:39). The Lord “cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance” (D&C 1:31) — and the sin He cannot allow is the turning from light, not the breaking of a municipal code.
Read the whole definition and search it for the word legal. It is not there. The standard is God’s purpose, His commandments, light and truth, reality as it actually is. The law of men appears nowhere in the equation — which means anyone who has genuinely grasped the doctrine cannot make legality the test of righteousness, because legality was never in the definition to begin with.
The Correlation — Where the Law of Men Actually Stands
Put the three together and the place of human law snaps into focus. Good and evil are fixed in reality. You are a genuine agent, accountable for a genuine choice. Sin is your free turn from God’s purpose. Human law, therefore, is neither the source of the good nor the measure of it. It is an instrument — a tool built by fallible men, righteous only insofar as it tracks the objective order above it.
This is not a private inference; it is exactly how the revelations rank law. The Lord justifies the law of the land — but conditionally, and the condition is fidelity to a higher standard:
“And that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before me… And as pertaining to law of man, whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil.”
The Lord does not say “law is good because it is law.” He says a law is justifiable when it supports freedom and right — and whatever in human law exceeds or falls short of that standard “cometh of evil.” A statute can be perfectly legal and still come of evil; the Doctrine and Covenants says so in as many words. Government is honored for its function — securing life, liberty, and the free exercise of conscience (D&C 134:1–2) — not worshiped for what it is. And the Savior drew the boundary in a sentence: render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21) — a division that only makes sense if Caesar’s claims and God’s are different claims, and the second outranks the first.
So the moral chain of command is fixed: reality; then God, who embodies it; then His commandments; then — far down the order, derivative and provisional — the laws of men. Legality is a fact about the bottom rung. Righteousness is a fact about the top. To read righteousness off of legality is to read the height of a building from the color of its basement door.
“But Romans 13” — The Verse That Proves the Point
The reflex usually reaches for Paul: “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1). But read one verse further and the text refutes the use it is put to:
“For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil… for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid.”
Paul grounds the authority of government in its job: to praise the good and punish the evil. That argument presupposes a good and an evil that exist before and above the government and define its task — otherwise the sentence is empty. A ruler is “the minister of God… for good” precisely because there is a fixed good he is meant to serve. The moment a government inverts that function — rewarding evil, punishing good, commanding the very sin it exists to restrain — it is no longer doing the thing that, by Paul’s own argument, made it God’s minister. The verse most often quoted to equate legality with righteousness in fact makes righteousness the standard by which government itself is judged.
Paul knew this in his own body. He wrote those words and was then executed by the very state he told the Romans to honor — legally, by Rome, for preaching Christ. He never imagined that “subject to the powers” meant “the powers define the good.” He meant: be peaceable, be orderly, do not rebel for self-interest — while obeying God first when the two collide. Which is exactly what he did, to the block.
Why the Confusion Persists
If the doctrine is this clear, why is the reflex so common — even among the faithful? Not from ignorance of scripture, but because several true and good instincts get quietly over-extended into a false equation. Name them and the reflex loses its grip.
The twelfth Article of Faith, abbreviated. “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law” (Articles of Faith 1:12). Memorized young and compressed by repetition, it can collapse in the mind from “be a peaceable, law-abiding citizen” into “the law is righteousness.” But the article is a pledge of civic good faith — we are not anarchists or revolutionaries — not a claim that statutes are holy. It describes how a disciple generally behaves toward government; it does not crown government the author of good and evil.
The container mistaken for the contents. The rule of law — that disputes are settled by stable public rules rather than by force or whim — is a genuine and fragile good, and sustaining that system is right. But the goodness of the procedure is not the goodness of every law the procedure produces. Honoring the institution of law is not endorsing its every output.
The comfort of an external rule. Moral discernment is hard work. “Is it legal?” has a quick, public, outsourced answer; “is it right?” demands the Spirit, the scriptures, and personal accountability. It is tempting to let the statute book do the work the conscience was made for — but agency was given precisely so that we would do that work ourselves.
A heritage of loyalty. A people once driven out under color of law, then long suspected of disloyalty, learned to prize being visibly law-abiding — and rightly so. But a wise loyalty to country is not the same as a reflex that sanctifies whatever happens to be on the books this decade. The very Saints who built that heritage were the victims of a perfectly legal order to destroy them. They, of all people, knew the difference.
The Witness of the Prophets
Scripture is, on this point, a chronicle of righteous men and women breaking unjust laws — and being honored by God for it. In every case the act was illegal and righteous at the same time, which is impossible if legality and righteousness are the same thing.
Legal — and Damnable; Illegal — and Holy
- The Hebrew midwives — defied Pharaoh’s lawful order to kill the newborn boys; “the midwives feared God, and did not as the king… commanded” (Exodus 1:17). God dealt well with them.
- Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — broke the king’s decree to bow: “we will not serve thy gods” (Daniel 3:18). The furnace, not the law, was on the right side of God.
- Daniel — kept praying in open violation of a signed, irrevocable statute (Daniel 6:10). The lions’ den was the legal penalty; heaven shut the lions’ mouths.
- Esther — approached the king unsummoned against the law, on pain of death: “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). Her lawbreaking saved a nation.
- Peter and the Apostles — ordered by the lawful council to stop preaching, answered: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29; cf. 4:19).
- Abinadi — preached against King Noah’s wicked court under sentence of death and would not recall his words (Mosiah 17:9–10) — an executed criminal under the law of Noah, a prophet under the law of God.
And at the center of it all stands the Savior. Jesus healed on the Sabbath in deliberate defiance of the rulers’ reading of the law — “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He was tried by a legally constituted court, convicted under established law, and executed with full procedural legality. The single most evil act in human history was perfectly legal. If legality were righteousness, Calvary was justice. Every Christian knows it was the opposite.
Then there are the Saints themselves. On October 27, 1838, the governor of Missouri issued Executive Order 44 — a binding, official command that the Latter-day Saints be “exterminated or driven from the State.” It was the law. Obedience to it would have been the sin. The Restoration was preserved by a people who knew, in their own flesh, that a legal order can be wholly of the devil.
The Other Edge of the Blade
One guardrail, because a half-learned version of this truth becomes its own error. To say “legal does not mean good” is not to say “illegal means good.” That is the same mistake inverted — still reading morality off of legal status, only flipping the sign. The standard is never the law in either direction. The standard is the objective order: light and truth, God’s purpose, the eternal life of His children.
Most laws, in a tolerable society, do track the good — against murder, theft, fraud, violence — and obeying them is righteous because they are right, not merely because they are laws. We sustain just law genuinely and gladly (D&C 134:5). Defiance is warranted only at the narrow point where human law commands a sin or forbids a commandment — and even then, notice how the prophets did it. They did not riot, plunder, or excuse themselves into lawlessness. They quietly refused the unrighteous command and then bore the penalty — the furnace, the den, the prison, the fire, the cross. Righteous defiance accepts the cost; it does not pretend the cost away. That is the difference between a martyr and a malcontent.
So the rule is not “obey” and it is not “rebel.” The rule is “discern” — measure every law against the fixed order above it, obey it because and when it is right, and stand against it, ready to suffer, only when it demands what God forbids.
Conclusion
Three foundations, one architecture. Good and evil are fixed points in reality, not the moods of any ruler — not even the will of God, who does not invent the good but perfectly is it. You are a genuine agent, an intelligence God organized but never manufactured, so your choices are truly your own and your accountability is real. And sin is your free turn from that reality — from light and truth, from the purpose that would bring God’s children home. Human law stands nowhere in that structure as a measure; it is a tool held against the standard, honorable when it serves it, “of evil” when it betrays it.
Legal and illegal are facts about paperwork. Right and wrong are facts about eternity. They are not the same kind of thing, and no legislature has the authority to make them so. To choose the good is not blind obedience to whatever is permitted; it is clear-eyed partnership with reality itself — and with the God who perfectly embodies it.
A people who worship a Savior executed under the law should be the last on earth to mistake the law for the measure of the good. Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But never give Caesar what belongs only to God — the authority to say what is right.