Do Christians have to obey the Old Testament Law? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 35

The Old Testament Law, the Sabbath, and the Question of Christian Obligation

Welcome to the God Questions podcast, your questions, biblical answers. On today's episode, we're going to be discussing another controversial issue. Imagine that. It's a question we get a lot related to, essentially, do Christians have to obey the Old Testament law?

And what does it mean that Jesus fulfilled the law? We get a lot of people who want to argue with us on these related issues, whether it's the Sabbath day, which is most common. Several Christian groups out there firmly believe that Christians are obligated to observe the Sabbath, to not do any work on that day, or to attend church on that day.

And they can't even agree on which day they're considering the Sabbath. So that's an interesting aspect of it. But then also the food laws. A lot of people want to make certain aspects of the Old Testament law applicable to us today, but not all of it.

So we're going to be discussing some of these issues. With me, I have our regulars, Kevin, our managing editor, and Jeff, the administrator of BibleRef .com. So let's start off with just a couple of scriptures, which for me, are key on this issue.

When I look at Romans 10 .4, which says, "'For Christ is the end of the law, "'for righteousness to everyone who believes.'". Then we have Ephesians 2 .15, which says that, "'Christ abolished the law of commandments "'expressed in ordinances, that he might create "'in himself one new man in place of the two, "'and so making peace.'".

And also Galatians 3 .23 -25, which says, "'Now before faith came, we were held captive "'under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith.

"'would be revealed.

"'So then the law was our guardian until Christ came, "'in order that we might be justified by faith. "'But now that faith has come, "'we are no longer under a guardian.'".

Amen.

Christ Fulfilled the Law by Living Perfectly

So let's start off the main conversation here. So Kevin, what does it mean that Christ fulfilled the law?

It means that Jesus Christ lived the perfect life. And scripture calls him the Holy One. That's one of his titles in the Old Testament, the Messiah referred to as the Holy One of Israel. And Jesus, before he was even born, the angel Gabriel, speaking to Mary, says that that Holy One who will be born of you will be called the Son of God.

He is holy. And when the Bible says he's holy, it means exactly that. He never sinned. He was sinless. And in his sinlessness, he kept the entire law of God because the law of God was the standard of holiness.

This is how you measure up to the holiness and righteousness of God, how well you keep the law. And Jesus did that throughout his whole life. And we see him keeping the law by keeping the Sabbaths, by keeping the feasts.

We see him observing the feasts several times, making trips to Jerusalem for that. We see him observing Passover. And then all of the rest of the law, he was an observant Jew. And he did so to such an extent that he did it perfectly.

It's hard for us even to imagine, but he went his whole life without ever speaking a wrong word, without ever having a wrong thought, without ever having a wrong motivation for what he was doing. And then he kept the law perfectly in all of its detail.

It just boggles the mind. But here was the Son of God in the flesh, walking among us and keeping the law. Now he was accused several times of breaking the Sabbath. That was one of the favorite accusations that the Pharisees and the Sadducees like to bring against him.

But as he was being accused of those things, we see very clearly Jesus was not breaking the Sabbath. He was only breaking their rules that they had added to the Sabbath. The Pharisaical rules that had been added to God's law were the problem.

And so Jesus had no problem with breaking man's rule, but he always kept God's rule. And he did so perfectly, 100%. So here was the perfect man, the innocent one. He was declared to be innocent by his judge at his several trials that he had at the end of his life there.

Pilate said three times that he finds no fault in him. There's nothing here. You guys are trumping things up. And yet he was crucified as a common criminal. The only person who never deserved to die, died in our place.

He fulfilled the law as he said he would do. Matthew 5, 17, I did not come to destroy the law and the prophets. I came to fulfill them. He did so perfectly. He says close to the end there, as he's praying to the father, I have accomplished everything that you have sent me to accomplish.

He fulfilled it perfectly. The only person who never deserved to die, died anyway. He did that on our behalf. He kept the law for us.

Why the Jerusalem Council Did Not Put Gentiles Under the Mosaic Law

When I look at a passage like Acts 15, I see this is very key in the discussion that here at what became known as the Jerusalem Council, all the apostles are together trying to decide, okay, all these Gentiles are coming to faith in Christ.

What do we require them to do? And as you see several times in the Old Testament, the keeping of the Sabbath, for example, was one of the biggest differences between the Jews and the Gentiles. Well, so when the apostles come up with, here's a letter we're going to send to the Gentile churches, explaining to them what we think we should do, the items that they put on the list, so this is Acts chapter 15, verses 19 to 21.

Therefore, my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled and from blood.

So for those who want to say, well, Gentiles are under just the Ten Commandments, or Gentiles are under the entire Old Testament law other than the ceremonial law with all the sacrifices. Well, that's not the instructions the apostles gave.

Again, this meeting in Jerusalem was explicitly to decide what aspects of the law are still binding on Christians, and the things they choose were unusual, and we could go into that more, but essentially, these are the things that Gentiles need to do to be able to keep peace with their Jewish brothers in Christ.

These are the things they need to avoid to avoid offending, causing Jewish believers to stumble. So that was the list they came up with, and even later in some of Paul's writings, he kind of expresses these aren't the things that you are bound to do other than the fact you don't want to cause your brother to stumble.

So it's just an interesting dynamic to see that in a passage that's designed, what aspect of Jewish customs of the Old Testament law should believers obey? They don't give the Sabbath command. They don't give the food commands, but they give us a list of things, how to keep peace, essentially, in the body of Christ.

The Law Was for Israel, Not a System of Salvation

Now, Jeff, my question for you is kind of, what, in your experience, what is the reason why people want to keep going back, trying to put people back under the law? Why has this seemingly been a constant issue for the Christian church for nearly 2 ,000 years?

It's good that you bring up that this has been an issue for a long time. We literally read in the pages of the Bible this exact debate going on, where people are misunderstanding the purpose of Old Testament law and what it's supposed to mean.

And I think misunderstanding is the best way to think of it. When people are seeking to convince others about Old Testament law, there's sincerity behind it. They believe that this is an important issue.

And in my experience, it seems like the thing that it usually comes down to is a misunderstanding of what the Old Testament law was meant for in the first place. If I was to tell you that God told people, if you do A, B, and C, you cannot go to heaven, just as an example.

And we see some language like that in the New Testament. People who are defined by certain sins in their life and their lifestyle, they're excluded from heaven. If I was to tell you that that's what God thinks and then come by later and say, okay, now God no longer says, if you do A, B, and C, you cannot go to heaven.

That would be very, very difficult to square with the biblical concept of God. And a lot of people who are struggling with this issue of Old Testament law, that's the mindset that they have. That what is being done is we're saying, God used to say, these are things that are not compatible with salvation.

And then later God said, well, now they are compatible with salvation. And that's a drastic misunderstanding. The Old Testament law was never about eternal salvation. It was never about the individual's relationship with God.

It was all about the nation of Israel and their relationship to God. Most of what's included in Old Testament law basically serves the purpose of making Israel a unique nation, to set them apart, to demonstrate that they are different.

So one of the things that people get hung up on is the idea that if you say that the law has been fulfilled or that the law is no longer binding on Christians, that what you're saying is that God changed his mind for the standards of what it means to be moral and righteous and godly.

And it's exactly the opposite. And you can pick up some of that in Jesus' conversations when he talks about this, even when he speaks about food. And he says, it's not food going into you that makes you unclean.

The food goes into you and it comes right out of you. It's the heart. In other words, the real moral problem that a person would have had, even under the Old Testament law, was am I obeying or disobeying this on the basis of my submission to God?

That was the ultimate measure of those things. So I think it's helpful when we have conversations about this is to go back and look and say, first, let's understand what the law was about and what it was not about.

If we're gonna argue that the law was about God's standards for heaven and hell and eternity, that's a completely different issue. And that's not what it's about. So for most people, I think once you start to grasp that understanding that this was a set of rules, laws, and guidelines given to Israel that still teaches us something, it still includes God's moral principles.

It's not that nothing in it is valuable. That definitely helps people to understand where this is coming from and why this is not as much of a theological change as they think it is.

Yeah, and if people are saved through the law, I mean, if that was the law's purpose to actually save people, then how was Abraham saved? How was Noah saved? These people lived before the law was even given.

And Paul, of course, brings up Abraham brilliantly and points to him and says he was justified before there was ever such a thing as the law of Moses. He was justified by faith, Genesis 15, six. And that's how it has always been.

God is looking for faith in the revelation that he has given to that point.

And that's where a lot of people get hung up is an assumption that what we're talking about is some kind of a major change in God's relationship to mankind. Now, obviously, I'm not saying that the new covenant doesn't represent a change.

It does in its own way. But in a sense, when you step back and look at all of scripture and all that God has given, in a sense, the relationship has not changed. He has always looked for exactly what you were saying, Kevin.

It has always been on the basis of faith, submission, so on and so forth. In other words, is this person willing to say, whatever God has told me, whatever he has given me, whatever he's provided me with, I'm going to respond as God would want me to respond.

That's what Abraham did. That's what Noah did. That's what Adam and Eve should have done and chose not to do. At the current time, that means following the full revelation that he's given us, which is the Messiah.

That's Jesus Christ. We look back to a fulfillment of those things. People in the Old Testament were looking forward to a fulfillment. They weren't operating under the actual final law. Even in Jeremiah, we see that God explicitly says, I'm going to send a new covenant.

When I do that, it's not going to be one person pointing at another and saying, this is what you do, and this is what you don't do, but I'm going to write it in people's hearts. Another thing that I know a lot of people get concerned over when we talk about change and so on and so forth is the idea of, if we're going to say that the Old Testament law doesn't apply, does that mean that we are saying whatever the Old Testament says, I'm supposed to ignore?

In other words, the Old Testament says, do not, for example, have meals that include shellfish. Don't wear clothes that have two different threads in them. Do not murder, do not covet. Well, if I'm going to say the Old Testament doesn't mean anything anymore, then that means I'm ignoring all of it.

There again is another misunderstanding. The new covenant includes all of the moral principles that God expects us to follow. And we learn those from the Old Testament. We learn those from the old covenant.

We just have to remember that what we're talking about when we say that the Old Testament law has been fulfilled is simply to say that the purpose of that law, that towards which it was intended has now been completed.

We're not saying nothing in the law applies ever again, and no echo of it applies anywhere again. An example that I've brought up when we've had conversations about this in the past is to look at the United States, for example.

United States had a form of government before our current constitution. It was called the Articles of Confederacy. The current constitution that we have with the Bill of Rights came after that. Well, there were a lot of things in the Articles of Confederacy that are also in the current constitution.

If I look at some part of the Articles of Confederacy and say, well, it says that people have the right to a jury trial, but the Articles of Confederacy don't apply to me anymore. I am not saying that doesn't mean that we don't have that right in the current constitution.

It just means that that particular deliverance of the law is not what applies. And that's a lot of what we're saying in the conversation that we have when we talk about the Old Testament being fulfilled.

We're not saying that the principles themselves don't apply. We're just saying that that exact law itself is no longer the reason that that principle applies.

The Law of Christ and the Greatest Commandments

Yeah, exactly. So let me drop a big theological word. This word is antinomianism, which essentially is a combination of two words. It means against the law. And so many people have been accused of antinomianism over the years.

And anyone who says the Old Testament law has been fulfilled or is no longer binding gets accused of this. But ultimately, what the New Testament teaches is that we're under a new covenant. And that new covenant includes the law of Christ.

I think in Galatians, it mentions, you carry one another's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ. And there's other passages that mention the law of Christ. Well, what exactly is this law? Well, I think Jesus himself refers to it when one of the scribes comes to him and asks the teacher, what is the greatest commandment?

And Jesus responds, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. And if you obey those two commandments, you are fulfilling the entire law.

So what Jesus is trying to point us is taking our eyes off of having literally hundreds of commands down to the minutia of what it means to love God and love others as yourself, and just focus on actually doing those things.

And if we look at the 10 commandments, the 10 best known commands of the Old Testament, we see that several of them are clearly about loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the majority are about loving your neighbor as yourself.

So obviously, if you love God with all your heart, you're not gonna worship idols. You're not gonna take the Lord's name in vain. If you love others as you love yourself, you're not going to murder, you're not gonna commit adultery, steal, lie, covet, et cetera.

So the law of Christ, to me, what it seems the New Testament is teaching is these two commands. So obviously, those two commands involve other commands, many of which are represented by laws revealed in the Old Testament law.

But with the law that we're under, it's like Jeff was explaining, it's like we're under the Constitution rather than the Articles of Confederacy, even though there is a lot of overlap. But so we are not under the law, Old Testament, the Mosaic law, but we are under the law of Christ, love your neighbor, or love God, love your neighbor.

And then many of the commands in the Old Testament fit under those commands, and it's clear and easy to see how and why they fit. But this is a very important distinction to make is the New Covenant by saying, by us saying in the New Covenant, we're not under the Old Testament law.

We're not saying we're not under law. We're saying we're not under that law. We're under the law of Christ. And this is a very different way to approach our relationship with God and others rather than a huge checklist of all these things we have to do.

It's like, no, let's focus on what it means to love God and to love others. We do those two things, everything else will be fulfilled by us obeying those two commands.

Jesus on the Spirit of the Law Versus Legalism

I think that when we see what Christ had to say in his conversations with the legalists of his time is really, really helpful in us understanding that. When he talks in the Sermon on the Mount, one of the distinctions that he was drawing is the difference between rote following of legalistic rules.

In other words, a legalistic rule is do not commit adultery. It's a physical thing. You either physically do it or you physically don't. And part of the point that Jesus was making was, yeah, that's what the law says.

And you've been told don't commit adultery. But I'm telling you, if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery with her in your heart. It's the same thing when he talks about food.

Food goes in one end and out the other. It's not the food that makes you unclean, morally unclean. It's the attitude that you have. It goes beyond that. And that's why the ultimate commandment is loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

So this misunderstanding is not something that just popped up when Christians showed up and started talking about the new covenant. This was a misunderstanding that people of God had had long before, even then, that he was trying to dispel.

And that clarification that Jesus made on the law, where he was kind of talking about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, that just puts us all in a world of hurt. I mean, none of us are off the hook.

Because we may say, well, you know, I have never murdered anybody, so I'm good on that one. I can check that one off. But Jesus said, if you have hatred in your brother in your heart, then you are guilty of murder in God's eyes.

See, there's more to it than that. All of us need a savior. The law was there to show us that we cannot do this on our own. We cannot keep the law. Jesus did that for us. He's the savior that we need.

He's that savior that the law was designed to point us to. The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. And once he came and offered that sacrifice, the law said, there you go. That's what we've been waiting for.

Excellent point, Kevin. The purpose of the law, understanding that the purpose of the law was to bring us to Christ, to help us to realize we cannot fulfill God's perfect and holy commandments on our own, and therefore we need a savior.

That is exactly what the purpose of the law was, as other purposes as well. But that's the reason God instituted it, to point people to their need for the coming Messiah. Now, as we discuss these things, we'd be amiss to not at least mention, spend a little time and talk about the Sabbaths, because by far, of all the issues that we deal with that got questions related to this issue, the Sabbath is the one that's most common.

And Seventh-day Adventists, other Seventh-day groups that insist that Christians are to obey the Sabbath, and most often they will point to, well, it's one of the 10 commandments. And I don't know how many times I've heard people say, why the one commandment that it says to remember is the one we most often forget.

And so the Sabbath day in the Old Testament, it's not just in the 10 commandments, Moses clarified in many other verses as well. It's like, do no work on the seventh day of the week. So from sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday, you're not to do any work, whether it's your career or any sort of manual labor.

It's supposed to be a day of rest. So even today, the people who insist on Sabbath observance, they don't observe it to that extent. They don't observe it the way the Old Testament law requires. They will to a certain extent, but often today we view the Sabbath as a principle of setting aside a day to worship God.

And I'm wholeheartedly in favor of that, but that is not the Sabbath command. That is not what the Old Testament law, especially the 10 commandments, is about not working on that one particular day. There's no command that that is to be the day we worship.

And Christians, again, primarily, other than our seventh day brothers and sisters, we worship on Sunday, not Saturday. So just keeping our eyes on, okay, if we're going to say that we're under the 10 commandments, then that's a whole nother thing than we're willing to say today.

So even the 10 commandments were fulfilled by Christ. But again, some people will point to the Sabbath command as an example of loving God with all your heart by following his example, by resting one day a week.

And I have no problem with that conviction, but it's a difference between I'm setting aside a day to worship God and to rest because Christ is our Sabbath rest. Christ is the one who has fulfilled the law.

Or are we doing it in some sort of legalistic observance? And so it's a different heart attitude and perspective that we have to have. So to Sabbath day observance is not something that God requires of us.

If I even just look at Romans 14, five, which says, one person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. And this is, there's several other verses that express the same principle, is that you are to, we are responsible to God.

We are to obey God as he has convicted us to live. And if that means setting aside a day, then by all means do that. But if that is not your conviction under grace, under the freedom we have in Christ, we are not legalistically required to observe the Sabbath day.

Is that not a part of the law of Christ that he expects as we talked about from Acts chapter 15? So very controversial. And believe me, there may not be a more heated issue that we get attacked on than the Sabbath day and our views on it, but it's pretty clear in scripture.

The New Testament does not require Sabbath observance for the followers of Jesus Christ. After the book of Acts, where the apostles were often going to the synagogue on the Sabbath to try to reach Jews with the gospel, there's no occurrence of Christians setting aside Saturday as their day of worship, and there's no description of them setting aside a day where there's absolutely no work to be done.

And I think that's very clear example, evidence of Christ fulfilling the law, including the Sabbath command.

The Sabbath as Covenant Sign and the Problem of Selective Obedience

Yeah.

When God made covenants with people, he established a sign that the people were under that covenant. So for the Abrahamic covenant, the sign was circumcision. If you are, if the males that are being circumcised are saying, I am part of the Abrahamic covenant.

For the Mosaic covenant, the sign was Sabbath keeping. For the Jews to keep the Sabbath, it was a sign that they were under the Mosaic covenant. It was a sign given for the nation of Israel in the promised land that they were under that covenant.

That covenant has been replaced, been fulfilled by the new covenant in Christ.

And I think another point that needs to be mentioned, at least so that it's there, is that, Kevin, what you were just saying is the idea that when somebody takes on a sign of following this particular covenant, that they're obligated to it.

New Testament talks about if you're gonna choose actively to participate in circumcision, you're taking on the obligations of the law and so on and so forth. One of the things that I think is worth pointing out, and you could consider this a challenge more so than a criticism, is that when I've had conversations with people about keeping the Old Testament law, I typically find that there's lots of talk about things like the Sabbath, lots of talk of pork and shellfish, and there's very little talk of things like lever at marriage or not wearing clothes that are made from two different cloths and dowry prices and all these other little minutia, cutting the corners of the beard and so on and so forth.

It's interesting that when Jesus was having conversations about the real meaning of the law, a lot of what he did was confronting legalists with their hypocrisy by saying, now, wait a minute, you follow this aspect of the law to an absolute T, and yet you have all sorts of ways of setting these other ones aside.

And hypocrisy is not a measure of truth. You can be a hypocrite and not follow the things that you preach, and the things you preach could very well be true. And yet, there is something to be said for what happens when somebody actually does or does not make an attempt to follow this.

In my experience, and as the challenge to people who are struggling with this, most people who I find who want to support Christians keeping all of the Old Testament law will talk about Sabbath, will talk about kosher food and so on and so forth.

And yet, are they really following every single minutia of the law? Are they wearing cotton poly blends in their polo shirts? Are they participating in leveret marriage? Are they cutting the sides of their beards and so on and so forth?

Now, in practice, what typically happens, the beards, for example, is you will talk about that with somebody and they'll say, well, you have to understand that there was a context of pagan worship and ritual this and ritual that.

And my response is to say, okay, well, see, there we go. Now, all of a sudden, there's context and there's meaning and there's nuance behind this. But when we wanna talk about something like shellfish or the Sabbath, those things don't apply.

So I think what we see in the example of Jesus and what's seen in both the Old and the New Testaments, a person's intent is really what matters. If you're going to claim that you're going to follow the law, then you better follow the law and every single bit of it.

If you're not gonna follow every bit of it, then it's reasonable to ask, but what and why? So as a believer who says we are not obligated under the law, we're in a position to be able to say, we have a consistent way of looking at this.

We understand what the purpose of the law was and what it wasn't and how it was fulfilled. And even in Paul's day, there were those who did not understand that and we had to try to seek to improve their understanding for why this works.

Excellent point, Jeff. And it's very, very hypocritical. Well, say take the food laws, for example, where in the exact same context of when the food laws appear, they'll wanna put us under those laws, but then the very next verses, previous verses, other laws, which are in the same context, same principles, completely ignore those because those don't apply.

So the law is a unit. The entire law was given. It's God's covenant with Israel. And Kevin, to your point earlier about the Sabbath being the sign, Exodus 31, 17 is a verse I often have to go back to with Seventh-day Adventists and so forth, where it says the Sabbath is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel.

That in six days, the Lord made the heaven and the earth. On the seventh day, he rested and refreshed. So this verse specifically says the Sabbath, as you said, Kevin, is a sign between God and Israel.

It was never a sign between, it was never a universal command expected of all humanity. And once that sign was fulfilled in Christ, it is no longer binding on anyone. That's not to say if you choose to observe a Sabbath as part of your love for God, by all means, do so.

You are free to do so. But in Christ, we are also free not to do so. So I think that's kind of our whole point with this conversation is that in Christ, we have freedom from the law. We're no longer under the law, in the sense of the Old Testament law.

The law that we are under, the law of Christ, is to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then to love our neighbor as yourself. And in doing those things, we will fulfill all that God requires of us in terms of law-keeping.

So that's our main point here today. Hope that we made that clear. Obviously, if you have any questions about this, you can submit them at our website. There's several articles on Sabbath-keeping and the Old Testament law and all the different questions we've tried to touch on briefly so far today.

So hope our conversation has been encouraging to you, edifying. Please, as always, study God's word on your own to confirm whether what we've shared with you today is true.

Yes, amen.

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