You Can't Wear Clothes Made of Two Kinds of Material?

A common criticism of Biblical ethics goes like this, Those Christians, they just pick and choose the Bible verses they like while ignoring the rest. Verses that say you can't eat pork or shellfish, wear t-shirts made of two different kinds of fabric, and you must execute a person who breaks the Sabbath.

A person who makes such an argument is just picking the verses they like while ignoring the rest. Ahem, but I digress. The books of the law describe the need for sacrifices to atone for sin, so that worshipers could approach a holy God.

Included in those instructions are rules for ceremonial cleanliness. You could eat certain foods, but not others. You had to wear certain forms of dress. You couldn't come in contact with certain things, and so on.

Ceremonial Cleanliness and Old Testament Law

Some rules were instructions about not imitating the customs of the pagan people around them. Basically, the point was this, God's people were to be pure, compared to a holy God where spiritually unclean and cannot be in his presence without first being purified.

Christ Fulfills the Law and the Prophets

The Old Testament hints that all these rules and regulations pointed towards something else. That's Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the law and the prophets. He declared all foods clean. He touched lepers to heal them.

He raised the dead to life. He fulfilled the laws of the Sabbath. When Jesus died on the cross, atoning for our sins, the temple veil tore from top to bottom, symbolizing that God was no longer separate from his people, nor would he dwell in places built by human hands.

Jesus is our fellowship with God. We now have access to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, the way, the truth, and the life. We're able to keep the commands of the whole Bible when we understand the text.