This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #508, on the subject of Christians and the Law.
Someone whom I hold dear, a gamer who met me at a convention and played Multiverser there and later online, sent me a complex question in a message. It should be stated that he was once a Christian youth minister but was disillusioned and became a devout pagan. I promised to address the question here.
We begin with the question, in its entirety.
I don’t remember what prompted me to think of this, but I had a thought I wanted your opinion on…as essentially the only Christian I know.
Specifically, I was thinking about Matthew 5:17, “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” Etc. etc.
If the Law has been fulfilled…Does that not have…not the same meaning but the same end result?
Think of it like this. You go to a baseball game, and it gets rained out. The game has been “abolished.”
You go again the following week, and the Yankees get their asses handed to them in nine innings.
In both cases, the game ended, but in one case it was called off early and in the other case it ran its course and was finished in a natural way.
If Jesus fulfilled the law, if his “new and everlasting covenant” supplanted the older, not-everlasting ones…
Doesn’t that mean that Christians are no longer beholden to anything in the Old Testament?
I don’t just mean the Jewish dietary laws and stuff that modern people ignore routinely. I mean all of it.
Like.
Christians have no reason to ever quote the Ten Commandments; the covenant of Moses was fulfilled.
Leviticus, Deuteronomy, all historically interesting but no longer binding?
Those things haven’t “passed from the law,” or at least hadn’t as of Matthew 5:17-20, but if the covenant is fulfilled and a new one is written…isn’t the Law itself no longer the Law?
You’re under a new Constitution now.
I’m still happily Heathen; none of this stuff is incumbent upon me, but something got me thinking about this and you’re pretty much the only person I could imagine talking about this with. So. What do you think?
I am tempted simply to say he is at least very close to completely correct, and leave it at that. However, there are many Christians who would think me a heretic were I to do that, so I have to explain in more detail.
The awkward place to start is to say that almost everyone misunderstands the Law of Moses, and almost always has.
In Exodus 19 (and later in Deuteronomy 5) we have the introduction to that Law, and although it is effectively identical it is poorly understood. It begins, roughly, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the house of Egypt, out of the land of bondage. It then continues You will have no other gods before me. This, though, is the opening structure of what is called a suzerainty treaty, something very common in the ancient middle east but perhaps analogous to some of the politics of the twentieth century.
Here is the set-up: there were a lot of little countries in the world at that time who fought with each other, the winner taking slaves and treasure and ongoing tribute until there was another battle which turned the tide. However, they were surrounded by three giants–Egypt, Syria, and Assyria. Every once in a while one of those would make a move against one of the little countries, and face it, if The U.S. or Russia or China decided to conquer one of the adjacent little countries there wouldn’t be much hope of stopping them. So when this happened, the victim country would send an envoy to one of the other big countries and apprise them of the situation, and that other country launches its military scaring away the aggressor, who really didn’t want to fight one of the other big boys. Then the rescuer sends his envoy into the capital of the country he just saved, and becomes the suzerain. He presents the treaty. It begins, usually very elaborately, “I did all these wonderful things to rescue you.” That’s our opening verse here, I brought you out. It doesn’t have to be longer in Exodus, because the first eighteen chapters tell us about that, and probably a good part of Genesis supports it. The treaty then continues, “Because I did this, this is how you are going to show your gratitude to me,” and that’s the content of the Law of Moses: This is how you show your gratitude to Me for rescuing you and making you My people.
Two things should be evident from this. The first is that that Law never applied to anyone not descended from the people rescued from Egypt, unless they in essence grafted themselves into that people, becoming Jewish.
The second, though, is that the Pharisees had it wrong. Jesus’ message wasn’t really, “I’m throwing out the Law and doing something different.” It was “The way you understand the Law is entirely wrong. It was never something to do to get God to accept you. It was always what you do to show how grateful you are that God has already accepted you. And because it is so badly misunderstood, we’re going to get rid of it and let you show your gratitude however you think does that.”
So we look a bit deeper.
When asked for the most important commandment, Jesus answered it was to love God, and that the second was to love people. That was actually not a new thought; there were rabbis who thought that. But Jesus said that the entire Law was summed up in those two commandments–that is, the Law was a picture of how to show your love for God and for other people. Loving looks like this.
So you are mostly right that we don’t need to quote the Ten Commandments–but that’s because they are effectively descriptions of love. We as Christians don’t refrain from killing because there’s a rule that says don’t kill. We don’t kill because killing is a very unloving action, and we are supposed to express love even to those who hate us. So indeed the Law is irrelevant–except that if we are acting against it, we might need to check whether what we are doing is against the concept of love for God and others. Sometimes it won’t be. You mentioned the dietary laws, and although we know that at least some of them had important health benefits (trichinosis, food poisoning from spoiled shellfish) their point seems to have been that this was a way of showing gratitude, and we don’t have to show gratitude that particular way as long as we show it some way.
I should add a footnote. It is evident in the New Testament that the Jewish Christians continued to keep the Law. However, it is also evident (see Acts 15 and Galatians) that they did not expect the non-Jewish Christians to do so. This supports the argument that the Law doesn’t apply to most of us: the Jewish believers were still Jewish, descendants of those delivered by God from Egypt and so adherents to that treaty. They understood that it was a way to show their gratitude, not a way to win approval, but it was still an obligation upon them. Thus we have examples of Paul making sacrifices and Peter observing the dietary laws, but at the same time we see that the non-Jewish converts did none of these things.
I know I’ve discussed this somewhere else, but am not certain where. I do know that this notion is not my own unique heresy–just to cite one other person, Augustine, who when asked about the rules of conduct demanded by the Gospel described them as “Love God, and do as you please.”
Thus my pagan friend is completely correct that the Law of Moses does not really apply to Christians, and exists more as a reference book for understanding how to love God and others.
I’m going to link to three of my books which I think elucidate different aspects of this.
- Do You Trust Me? demonstrates that all through the Bible from Adam through Moses through David to the New Testament the way of salvation was always by grace through faith.
- About the Fruit explicates a significant amount of Galatians showing that Christianity is not about rules but about love and grace.
- What Does God Expect? A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct shows how to live a Christian life without reference to rules.
I do hope this has been helpful, and to my heathen friend, thanks for asking.
