Are Christians still under the Mosaic law?

Question 7080.

The Mosaic law is one of the places where careless answers do the most damage in either direction. Say that Christians are free from it and somebody will hear permission to sin. Say that Christians are bound by it and you have contradicted Paul on almost every page of Galatians. The question deserves a careful answer, and the answer turns on understanding what the Mosaic law was for in the first place.

My position is that believers today are not under the Mosaic law as a rule of life, that the law itself was holy and good and remains profitable to read, and that we are under the higher and more searching commands of Jesus and His apostles. Let me work through the reasoning, because this is not a subject where a conclusion without argument helps anybody.

What the Mosaic law actually was

The Mosaic law is the whole body of instruction given through Moses at Sinai and expounded through to Deuteronomy: six hundred and thirteen commandments by the traditional Jewish count, covering moral conduct, sacrificial worship, priesthood, food, clothing, agriculture, property, warfare, festivals and civil justice. It came as a single covenant package, not as three separable filing cabinets.

Christian teaching has long distinguished moral, ceremonial and civil elements within it, and that distinction is useful for analysis. What I would not do is treat it as a division Scripture itself makes, because the Mosaic law was given as one covenant and Paul consistently treats it as a unit. Circumcise yourself in order to be justified, he warns, and you are obliged to keep the whole law.

Note also to whom it was given. Exodus 19 and 20 place it at Sinai with Israel, a redeemed nation newly out of Egypt. Deuteronomy 5:3 is explicit that the LORD made this covenant not with the fathers but with those standing there. The Mosaic law was national legislation for a particular people in a particular land, and reading it as a universal code detached from that setting was never its intended use.

What the Mosaic law was given to do

Several purposes run through Scripture. The Mosaic law revealed God’s character, since a nation’s laws expose what its lawgiver values. It marked Israel out visibly from surrounding nations through diet, dress and calendar. It regulated worship through a sacrificial system that dealt with ceremonial defilement and taught the seriousness of sin through the cost of blood.

It also functioned diagnostically. Paul says in Romans that through the law comes knowledge of sin, and that he would not have known covetousness except that the law said do not covet. The Mosaic law is a mirror, showing us what we are, and it is very good at that work.

What the Mosaic law was never given to do was justify anybody. Paul is emphatic in Galatians 3:21 that if a law had been given that could give life, righteousness would indeed be by the law. It was not, and it could not. I have written more fully on this under the purposes of the Mosaic law.

The tutor who saw the child to the door

Galatians 3:24 and 25 gives the picture that has shaped my thinking most. The law was our guardian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith; now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

The Greek word is paidagogos, a household servant who escorted a child to school and kept him in order along the way. His authority was real and temporary. When the boy reached maturity the paidagogos was not disgraced or declared wicked; his task was simply finished. That is exactly the status of the Mosaic law in Christian thinking.

The Greek term for law, nomos, appears more than a hundred times in Paul, and this developmental framing runs through his use of it. Not abolished as evil. Completed as intended.

Christ is the end of the law

Romans 10:4 says that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. The word can mean termination or goal, and I think Paul intends both, because the Mosaic law arrived at its destination in Jesus and thereby finished its term.

Jesus said He came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it, and fulfilment is the key idea. He kept every command perfectly, He satisfied every type and shadow in the sacrificial system, and He bore the curse the Mosaic law pronounced on lawbreakers. Nothing was left undone for anybody in Him to complete.

Colossians 2:14 uses a startling image. The record of debt that stood against us, with its legal demands, was cancelled and nailed to the cross. Paul then draws the practical conclusion in the very next verses: therefore let no one pass judgement on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

The Sabbath test case

Nothing tests a person’s actual position on the Mosaic law like the Sabbath, so let me be direct. The fourth commandment is embedded in the Ten, and yet the Sabbath is the one commandment of the ten that the New Testament never repeats as a requirement for the church, while it repeats the substance of the other nine.

More than that, Paul lists Sabbath keeping in Colossians 2 among the shadows and tells the Romans that one person esteems one day above another and another esteems all days alike, with instructions to each not to despise the other. It is difficult to imagine him writing that about murder or adultery. The category is plainly different.

The Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, is not the Sabbath transferred. It is the church’s own commemoration of the resurrection, kept from the earliest days by gathering, breaking bread and giving. I keep it gladly, I would urge every believer to keep it, and I would not tell anyone they are under the Mosaic law to do so.

Israel and the church are not the same body

Behind all of this lies a question of framework. The Mosaic law was the constitution of a nation with a land, a temple, a priesthood and a king, and it contains provisions that make no sense outside that setting. Cities of refuge presuppose Israelite geography. Levirate marriage presupposes tribal inheritance. Gleaning laws presuppose a specific agrarian economy in a particular climate.

Attempts to run modern societies on Mosaic legislation founder on this point, because the covenant was made with one nation and cannot be transplanted whole. God’s programme for Israel and His programme for the church are distinct, which is the position I set out in the article on dispensationalism.

That distinction is not a device for escaping obligation. It is what allows me to read the promises to Israel literally and still know that the church is not a nation, has no land, keeps no festivals by command, and offers no sacrifices because one has been offered for ever. See also the comparison with covenant theology, where this difference does most of its work.

So what does bind the Christian?

Freedom from the Mosaic law is not freedom from command, and I want to say that as strongly as I can. The New Testament contains well over a thousand imperatives for believers, and they are in some ways more searching than Sinai. Sinai said do not murder; Jesus went after the anger behind it. Sinai said do not commit adultery; Jesus went after the look.

Paul calls this the law of Christ, and it is administered by the indwelling Spirit rather than by external sanction. Nine of the ten commandments reappear in New Testament instruction, not because the Mosaic covenant is still in force, but because they express the character of a God who has not changed. Murder is wrong today for the same reason it was wrong before Sinai and would be wrong if Sinai had never happened.

The scholarly discussion around this is worth following if you have the appetite for it, and the translation notes at Romans 7 in the NET Bible lay out the interpretive options on the believer’s relationship to law with unusual clarity.

How I actually read Exodus to Deuteronomy

Not being under the Mosaic law does not mean skipping it. Paul told Timothy that all Scripture is profitable, and he had these books in view when he said it. I read them for what they reveal about God’s holiness, for the astonishing pictures of Jesus in the sacrificial system, for the moral principles underlying particular statutes, and for the sheer weight of what the cross accomplished.

The interpretive discipline is to ask what a given command reveals rather than whether I must perform it. The prohibition on muzzling the ox while it treads out grain is not binding on me, and Paul still draws from it the principle that a worker deserves support. That is the method: principle carried forward, statute left in its covenant.

For the way the Mosaic law continues to speak to believers without governing them, see how the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians, and for the wider framework the article on law and grace.

The two errors to avoid

Some Christians attempt selective observance, keeping the parts they find meaningful. Feast days, dietary rules, Sabbath restrictions, occasionally tassels. I do not doubt the sincerity, and Paul answers it directly: if you take on the Mosaic law you are obliged to keep the whole of it, and he warns the Galatians that going down that road severs them from grace as a method.

The opposite error treats freedom from the Mosaic law as freedom from moral seriousness, which Paul answers just as bluntly in Romans 6. Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means. Grace is not permission; it is power, and it produces the obedience that law could only demand.

Both errors come from the same confusion about function. The Mosaic law was a standard and a diagnosis; it was never a saviour and it is no longer a constitution. Get those categories straight and most of the practical questions answer themselves.

The Ten Commandments question

Somebody always asks about the Ten. If we are not under the covenant given at Sinai, does that mean the ten are gone? The answer is that nine of them reappear in the New Testament as instruction to believers, and the ninth reappears with the motive changed rather than the content.

Do not murder is repeated, and then intensified by Jesus to include the anger that leads to it. Do not steal is repeated with an addition: let the thief work with his hands so that he has something to give away. Honour your parents is repeated by Paul with the promise attached. The moral substance carries forward, not because the covenant is still in force, but because these commands express the character of the God who gave them.

Behaviour like murder and theft was wrong before Sinai, which is why God held Cain and the men of Sodom accountable centuries earlier. Sinai codified what was already true rather than inventing it, and its expiry does not repeal the character it expressed.

Common objections worth answering

The first objection is that Jesus said not one jot or tittle would pass from the law until all was accomplished. Quite so, and the accomplishment is exactly what He came to do. He said in the same breath that He came to fulfil, and He announced from the cross that it was finished.

The second is that this position must lead to loose living. It does not follow, and the evidence of church history is against it. The most fruitful periods of holiness in the English speaking church have generally coincided with clear preaching of grace rather than with renewed emphasis on statute. Fear produces compliance; love produces obedience, and only one of those lasts.

The third is that Gentile believers were given four requirements at the Jerusalem council, which suggests some continuing obligation. Read the passage and notice what it is doing. James is not imposing a covenant; he is removing one, and the four points concern fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers rather than a rule of life for the church.

Why this question keeps returning

Every generation of the church revisits this subject, and I think I understand why. External regulation is easier to administer than internal transformation. A community with a code can measure itself, discipline itself and reassure itself, and a community living by the Spirit has to trust a process it cannot audit.

So the pull towards codification is permanent, and it explains movements as different as medieval monasticism and modern Christian rule keeping about dress, drink and entertainment. The impulse is not always corrupt. It is often a genuine desire for holiness that has reached for the wrong instrument.

The New Testament answer is not to supply a better code but to point again to the indwelling Spirit and the finished work. Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh, Paul says, and he offers it as a real alternative rather than as a pious aspiration.

A note on tithing and other survivals

One practical survival deserves a mention, because it comes up constantly. Tithing is part of the Mosaic system, and the New Testament nowhere commands a tenth of Christian believers. What it commands is generous, regular, cheerful, proportionate giving, decided in the heart rather than calculated against a threshold. I have known believers whose giving under grace far exceeded a tenth and others for whom a tenth would have been beyond reach, and Paul’s principle covers both without embarrassment.

A closing word on reverence

Let me finish where I would want any discussion of this subject to finish, which is with respect rather than dismissal. What was given at Sinai came from God, was written by His own finger on stone, and was carried through the wilderness in a box that men died for touching carelessly. Whatever we conclude about our own obligation, that history deserves reverence from us, and a Christian who speaks flippantly about what God once commanded has misunderstood something more important than a covenant boundary.

So, now what?

Read the Pentateuch this year, and read it as a Christian rather than as a subject of Sinai. Watch for Jesus in the offerings, notice how much of it is about blood and access, and let the sheer detail of holiness press on you. You will come away with a higher view of what your salvation cost, not a longer list of rules.

Then look at your own obedience and ask what is driving it. If you are keeping rules to secure standing, you have put yourself back under a covenant God never made with you. If you are ignoring commands because grace covers it, you have misread grace entirely. What would change this week if you obeyed as a son rather than as a subject?

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s treatment in his Basic Theology sets out the dispensational understanding of law and grace with characteristic clarity, and his older work on the grace of God is still worth the effort. J. Dwight Pentecost develops the relationship between the covenants and the believer’s rule of life in Thy Kingdom Come, and Lewis Sperry Chafer devotes substantial space to the subject in his Systematic Theology, particularly on the distinction between the rule of life given to Israel and that given to the church. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology is valuable for the Israel and church distinction that underlies the whole discussion, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology provides a careful survey of the alternative positions for anybody wanting to hear the other side stated fairly. John Walvoord’s writing on the kingdom is useful for seeing how the Mosaic law relates to the future programme for Israel.

For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Romans 10:4)