Are Christians Still Under the Mosaic Law?

Question 07048

The question of whether the Christian is under the Mosaic Law is one of the most practical questions in the whole of Christian doctrine, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. Whole denominations have been formed on particular answers to it, Christian consciences have been weighed down or liberated by particular readings of it, and the difference between a legalistic church and a grace-filled one often comes down to how this question is handled.

The answer Scripture gives is both liberating and demanding. It is liberating because the believer is not under the Mosaic Law as a covenantal code. It is demanding because the believer is under the law of Christ, in whom the moral character of God is expressed with a depth and reach that Sinai only foreshadowed. Getting this right matters for assurance, for worship, for ethics, for giving, for the Christian week, and for the way the Old Testament is read and preached in the church today.

The Mosaic Law: What It Actually Is

The first move in answering the question is to understand what the Mosaic Law actually was. It was not a universal moral code revealed at Sinai for all humanity. It was the covenantal constitution of one nation, Israel, given through Moses at one covenantal moment, after the Exodus and before the entry into the land. Exodus 19 to 24 records its formal giving, and Deuteronomy rehearses and expands it for the generation about to enter Canaan.

The Mosaic Law contained the Decalogue (Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21) as its central summary document, together with civil regulations for the ordering of Israel as a theocratic society, ceremonial regulations for the tabernacle and then temple worship, sacrificial regulations for the priestly system, dietary regulations marking Israel as a distinct people, and festival regulations tied to the agricultural and redemptive calendar of one nation. It also contained national blessings and curses (Deuteronomy 28), which operated at the level of the covenant community as such. The Law was a complete package addressed to one covenantal party.

This matters because the temptation in contemporary Christian thought is to treat the Mosaic Law as if it were a stack of individually bindable regulations, from which the worshipper picks and chooses. That approach misreads what the Law was. Scripture treats it as a covenantal unit. James 2:10 says “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” Galatians 3:10 says the curse of the Law falls upon everyone who does not “abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” The Mosaic Law came as a whole to one people; it ends as a whole for that people and never applied to the Church.

The Covenantal Line: Abrahamic Promise and Mosaic Treaty

Behind the Mosaic Law stands an earlier covenant which shapes how Scripture itself understands the Law’s function. Abraham received from God an unconditional covenant of promise (Genesis 12:1-3; 15:1-21; 17:1-14), guaranteed not by Abraham’s performance but by God’s own word. Genesis 15 depicts this with striking clarity: the divided animals lie on the ground, and the smoking fire pot and flaming torch, signifying God himself, pass between them, while Abram sleeps. The covenant is cut unilaterally. God alone walks the path of blood, signalling that the covenant’s fulfilment is on him alone.

The Mosaic Law, given four hundred and thirty years later (Galatians 3:17), is a different kind of covenant. It takes the form of a suzerain-vassal treaty, a covenantal instrument well attested in the ancient Near East, by which a great king imposes terms on a subject people, with blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. The Mosaic covenant follows this pattern: preamble (Exodus 20:1-2), historical prologue (the Exodus deliverance), stipulations (the Decalogue and the regulations that follow), witnesses, deposit of the treaty, and the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy 28. This is the form of covenant God entered with Israel at Sinai.

The significance for the question of Law and Grace is considerable. The Abrahamic promise precedes the Mosaic Law by centuries and cannot be annulled by it. Paul argues exactly this in Galatians 3:17: “the law, which came 430 years afterwards, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.” The Law was “added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made” (Galatians 3:19). The Law had a defined beginning and a defined end. It served a purpose within the covenantal flow of redemptive history and was never the ground of salvation for anyone.

The New Testament’s Verdict: The Mosaic Covenant Has Ended

The New Testament is unambiguous that the Mosaic Law has ended for the believer. The loadbearing texts all point in the same direction.

Romans 10:4 states that “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” The Greek word telos carries the sense both of termination and of goal. Christ is both the one in whom the Law reaches its intended destination and the one in whom its era as a covenantal administration concludes. For the believer, Christ is the end of Law-righteousness because the righteousness that now counts is imputed through faith in him.

Galatians 3:23-26 uses the image of the household tutor, the paidagōgos, whose role was to escort the heir to his formal education. “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.” The Law’s tutoring era ended when the heir came to his maturity in Christ. Believers are no longer under the tutor.

2 Corinthians 3:7-11 contrasts the ministry of the letter, engraved in stones, which brought condemnation and is described by Paul as “now being brought to an end,” with the ministry of the Spirit, which is permanent and gives life. The Mosaic ministry had a genuine glory, but it has been eclipsed and replaced by the greater glory of the New Covenant.

Hebrews 8:13 is decisive: “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” The writer treats this as the plain consequence of Jeremiah 31’s prophecy of a New Covenant: a new covenant renders the old obsolete.

Beyond these four passages, the whole shape of the New Testament reinforces the point. Acts 15 settles the question that Gentile believers are not to be brought under the Mosaic Law. Galatians is one sustained argument that to add Mosaic obligations to the gospel is to fall away from grace. Colossians 2:16-17 releases believers from food laws, festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths, calling them “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” Hebrews 7 to 10 walks patiently through the end of the Levitical priesthood, the sacrificial system, and the tabernacle order in Christ. The Mosaic covenant is not adjusted, not rebalanced, not reconfigured. It is ended.

Why the Law Cannot Be Subdivided

A common attempt to handle the New Testament’s clear teaching has been to divide the Mosaic Law into three categories, namely moral, civil, and ceremonial, and to argue that the civil and ceremonial have ended while the moral continues. This threefold distinction was developed particularly by Thomas Aquinas and has had a long life in Reformed theology. It is a useful teaching device for explaining what different parts of the Mosaic Law did, but it is not a biblical category Scripture itself uses, and it cannot do the exegetical work the tradition has asked of it.

Scripture treats the Mosaic Law as a unit. When Paul argues for its cessation he does not say “the civil and ceremonial laws have ended while the moral law continues.” He says the Law itself has ended for the believer. When James writes that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it” (James 2:10), he presupposes the unity of the Law. The Sabbath, which the threefold division must classify as moral because it is in the Decalogue, is in fact expressly released in the New Testament alongside food laws and festivals that the threefold division would classify as ceremonial (Colossians 2:16-17). Paul’s own pastoral instruction refuses to distinguish categories: “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” (Romans 14:5).

The threefold distinction also struggles to answer a basic question. If the moral law is still binding on the believer, where is the dividing line? Who decides which commandments are moral and which are civil or ceremonial? The sanctions for murder, adultery, and theft are embedded within Mosaic civil code. The prohibition of idolatry is inseparable from the requirement to destroy idols and altars. The laws of sexual morality sit alongside the laws of the ceremonial impurity of menstruation. The Law does not hand us a moral extract; it hands us a covenantal whole.

A cleaner approach is to recognise that the Mosaic covenant, including the Decalogue as its covenantal summary, was an expression of God’s eternal moral character applied to one nation in one era, and that when the covenant ends, the covenantal code ends with it. What remains is not a surviving fragment of the covenantal code but the moral character of God, which the Law expressed and which continues to bind every human being because God’s character has not changed.

God’s Morality Before Sinai

This is the decisive move, and it is biblically secure. God’s moral law is not invented at Sinai. It is expressed at Sinai, but the same moral realities operate before any tablet was ever written.

Cain knew murder was wrong before the commandment was codified (Genesis 4). Noah’s generation was judged for violence before the first stipulation was inscribed (Genesis 6:11-13). Sodom’s sin was flagrant enough that it “cried out” to God before Sinai (Genesis 18:20). Abraham is commended for obedience to God’s “voice,” “charge,” “commandments,” “statutes,” and “laws” (Genesis 26:5), language that places his walk of obedience centuries before Moses. Job lived as “blameless and upright” in a non-Mosaic context (Job 1:8). The capital sanction for murder is grounded in the imago Dei at creation and given covenantal force in the Noahic covenant (Genesis 9:6), well before Sinai.

Romans 2:14-15 makes the principle explicit: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.” Paul is not saying the Gentiles secretly possess the Mosaic Law. He is saying that the moral reality which the Mosaic Law expressed is written into the constitution of every human being and is testified by conscience. Accountability to God’s moral character is universal, independent of whether any particular person has received the Mosaic Law.

The conclusion is liberating and yet serious. The cessation of the Mosaic covenant does not abolish God’s morality. It abolishes one historically specific covenantal expression of that morality and replaces it with another, namely the law of Christ as taught by the apostles, modelled by the Lord, and written by the Spirit on the believer’s heart in fulfilment of Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 8:10.

The Believer’s Actual Standard: The Law of Christ

If the Mosaic Law has ended as covenantal code, the believer is not lawless. Paul is explicit: he is “not without the law of God but under the law of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:21). The believer’s actual standard is variously described in the New Testament as the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2), the royal law (James 2:8), the law of liberty (James 1:25), and the law of the Spirit of life (Romans 8:2).

These descriptions do not name a new code with a different list of regulations. They name the moral reality revealed in Christ, taught by the apostles, and written by the Spirit on the heart. Christ himself identified its central command: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). Paul says the whole Law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Galatians 5:14). The law of Christ is cruciform love, shaped by the self-giving of Christ on the cross, directed toward God and neighbour.

The practical content of New Covenant ethics covers the same moral territory as nine of the Ten Commandments, often with greater depth than the Mosaic letter required. The exclusive worship of the one true God remains (Acts 17:22-31). The prohibition of idolatry remains and is intensified (1 Corinthians 10:14; 1 John 5:21). The prohibition of taking God’s name in vain remains (Matthew 6:9). The honouring of parents remains and is grounded afresh in the order of creation (Ephesians 6:1-3). The prohibition of murder remains and is internalised to include hatred (Matthew 5:21-22; 1 John 3:15). The prohibition of adultery remains and is internalised to include lust (Matthew 5:27-28). The prohibition of theft remains (Ephesians 4:28). The prohibition of false witness remains (Ephesians 4:25). The prohibition of coveting remains (Colossians 3:5). What is not reissued, and is in fact explicitly released, is the Sabbath as binding observance.

The mechanism of obedience is also different from Sinai. Under the Mosaic covenant the law was external, written on stone, enforced by national sanctions, and taught by the Levitical priesthood. Under the New Covenant the law is internal, written by the Spirit on the heart, motivated by love for the indwelling Christ, and taught through apostolic instruction. This is the structural difference between the two covenants that Hebrews 8 and 2 Corinthians 3 are at pains to draw out. It is not that one covenant is moral and the other is not. One is external and demands compliance from a flesh that cannot deliver it; the other is internal and produces willing obedience from a regenerate heart.

The Sabbath and the Nine-Commandments Problem

This is where the argument is felt most sharply. If the Decalogue were the abiding moral law of God, the New Testament’s release from Sabbath observance would be an awkward anomaly. It either has to be explained away by transferring Sabbath obligation to Sunday (which the New Testament never does), or it has to be acknowledged as an exception the abiding-Decalogue position cannot quite account for. Some solve this by speaking of “nine commandments” binding on the Christian, with the Sabbath removed. But this is unstable, because there is no biblical category of “the Decalogue minus the fourth commandment, still binding.”

The cleaner position is to recognise that the Decalogue is the central covenantal summary of the Mosaic covenant, and that it belongs to that covenantal era. The Sabbath in particular was given as a sign of the Mosaic covenant: “You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations'” (Exodus 31:13). Signs are by definition specific to the covenants they accompany. When the Mosaic covenant ends, the Sabbath sign ends with it, just as circumcision as a covenantal obligation ends (Galatians 5:2-6; 6:15).

The New Testament is explicit. Colossians 2:16-17 tells believers not to let anyone pass judgement on them “in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” Romans 14:5-6 treats the observance of days as a matter of personal conviction rather than covenantal requirement. Hebrews 4 reframes Sabbath rest eschatologically as the believer’s settled rest in Christ, not as a weekly observance to be transferred from one day to another.

The underlying creational principle, that God built rest into the order of creation and that human beings are not designed for ceaseless labour (Genesis 2:2-3), is a creation ordinance that survives. The believer is free from binding Sabbath observance and is also freed for rhythmic rest in the Lord, who himself promised, “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

The first day of the week became the Church’s gathering day by apostolic pattern, marking the resurrection (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2; Revelation 1:10), not by Sabbath transfer. Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection, the day on which the New Testament shows the early Church gathering for worship. Calling Sunday “the Christian Sabbath” and applying the Mosaic Sabbath’s legal seriousness to it imports a category the New Testament does not use.

Tithing, Dietary Laws, and Civil Questions

The same logic applies elsewhere. The Mosaic tithe, in fact a series of tithes supporting the priesthood, the festivals, and the poor in a theocratic state, was a covenantal arrangement for Israel. The New Testament does not reissue it. What it does reissue, and intensifies, is the principle of generous, purposeful, glad-hearted giving, “as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7), in proportion to prosperity (1 Corinthians 16:2), with particular care for the poor (Galatians 2:10) and for those who labour in the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:13-14). A tithe is a useful benchmark for a Christian’s giving and a sensible starting point. It is not a binding obligation.

Dietary laws are released. Jesus himself “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19). Peter’s rooftop vision (Acts 10) makes the point for the early Church, and 1 Timothy 4:3-5 affirms that “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” Christian liberty in diet is a real liberty.

The civil and judicial regulations of the Mosaic Law are likewise not binding on the believer or on the Church. The Church does not impose Mosaic punishments and does not aspire to be a theocracy. Christian citizens are to submit to lawful civil authority where they are (Romans 13; 1 Peter 2). Where contemporary civil codes happen to overlap with Mosaic provisions, this is not because the Mosaic code is being applied but because those moral principles reflect God’s character and are accessible through general revelation and through the New Testament’s reaffirmation. Capital punishment, where it is held to be biblically warranted, is grounded not in Exodus 21 as a Mosaic civil code but in Genesis 9:6 as a Noahic principle predating Sinai by centuries.

The Law Still Preaches, and the Old Testament Remains the Believer’s Bible

It might be thought that the position outlined here somehow demotes the Old Testament. It does not. Paul’s word to Timothy stands: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). The Old Testament remains the inspired Word of God for the believer, fully authoritative, profitable at every point. What changes is the manner of its use.

The Mosaic Law, although not a binding covenantal code upon the believer, continues to preach. It reveals God’s holiness against which all sin is measured. It exposes human sin and drives the unbeliever to the Saviour, which is the ongoing pedagogical usefulness of the Law (Galatians 3:24). It points typologically to Christ in its sacrifices, priesthood, and festivals, each of which finds its fulfilment in him (Hebrews 7 to 10). It models principles of justice and mercy in its civil code. It instructs the Christian conscience through its narrative and ethical content. All of this can be preached without imposing the Mosaic covenant on those who were never under it.

The Reformers spoke of three uses of the Law. The first, as a restraint on sin in general society, continues to operate wherever the moral character of God is reflected in civil order. The second, as a schoolmaster driving the sinner to Christ, continues whenever the Law is preached evangelistically. The third, as a rule of life for the believer, is the point at which the position outlined here departs from some of the older Reformed tradition. For the believer, the rule of life is not the Mosaic code but the law of Christ, which covers the same moral territory with greater depth and reach. The Law still reveals God’s character; the Mosaic code no longer binds the conscience.

Preachers who grasp this can use the Old Testament with confidence. Genesis grounds creation, fall, and the Abrahamic promise. Exodus pictures redemption. Leviticus teaches about the holiness of God and the necessity of atonement, with every sacrifice pointing forward to Christ. The historical books narrate God’s faithfulness in history. The Psalms shape the worshipper’s prayer life. The wisdom books shape the believer’s moral imagination. The prophets preach God’s character against human sin and foreshadow the Messiah. None of this requires the Mosaic covenant to be still in force for the believer. It requires that God’s Word remains profitable, which it does.

Security, Reward, and the Life of Grace

A pastoral concern sometimes accompanies the wholly-ended view, which is that without the Mosaic Law holding the believer to account, the Christian life will dissolve into moral looseness. The concern is misplaced, and the New Testament addresses it directly. The believer is not without accountability. Three categories, properly distinguished, hold the whole picture together.

Justification is the believer’s forensic standing, declared “not guilty” at the moment of saving faith on the basis of Christ’s finished work. This standing is fixed and permanent. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Justification is not in question for the genuine believer at any point after saving faith.

Fellowship is the believer’s ongoing communion with God, which can be disrupted by unconfessed sin and is restored through confession: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Fellowship fluctuates with the condition of the believer’s walk, but it does not touch the fixed standing of justification.

Reward is the believer’s future assessment at the Bema seat of Christ: “For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10). Paul describes this assessment as a testing by fire: “each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done” (1 Corinthians 3:13). Reward or loss of reward follows, but the believer is saved: “If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15).

This threefold framework is the place where DeZago’s point about love-obedience as a basis of future assessment finds its proper home. The believer’s faithful obedience, summed up in love (1 John 4:7-12), is the material of Bema reward, not the basis of eternal security. Future assessment on the basis of love is real, is to be taken seriously, and should shape the believer’s present conduct. Yet it does not modify or qualify the assurance of eternal security, which rests on God’s faithfulness and on the sealing of the Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14) rather than on the believer’s own fidelity.

The life of grace therefore operates on two rails held together by the one gospel. The believer is absolutely secure in Christ, sealed by the Spirit, justified once for all, and loved by the Father with a love that the believer’s failures cannot exhaust. The believer is also genuinely accountable to Christ for how the days of this life have been walked, for how love has been shown, for how the gospel has been served. Both are true together. Neither qualifies the other.

Israel, the Church, and the Millennial Kingdom

The cessation of the Mosaic covenant does not mean God has finished with Israel. The unconditional grant-form covenants made with Abraham, David, and the New Covenant prospectively with Israel (Jeremiah 31:31-34) remain in force. Israel’s national programme is suspended during this Church age, which Romans 11 describes as a period of partial hardening “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in,” after which “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25-26). The national conversion of Israel at the return of Christ will bring the New Covenant’s national benefits to the people to whom it was originally promised.

The millennial kingdom will fulfil the land and throne promises made to Abraham and David (Genesis 15:18-21; 2 Samuel 7:12-16), with Christ reigning from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14; Revelation 20). The reappearance of sacrificial worship in Ezekiel 40 to 48 is best understood not as a return to the Mosaic system but as a memorial system pointing back to the cross under the conditions of the Millennial reign, much as the Lord’s Supper is a memorial under the conditions of the present age.

The Church, by contrast, has never been a Mosaic-covenant community and was never intended to be one. The Church is the New Covenant people of God, gathered in Christ, indwelt by the Spirit, governed by apostolic teaching and by the elders Christ has appointed. The Church benefits from the spiritual blessings of the New Covenant (forgiveness of sins, the indwelling Spirit, the law written on the heart) while awaiting the future national fulfilment of the New Covenant with Israel. The wholly-ended view of the Mosaic Law strengthens rather than weakens this Israel-Church distinction, because it refuses the notion that the Church takes over Israel’s Mosaic-covenantal functions in any form.

So, now what?

The practical consequences of the wholly-ended view are significant and should shape Christian life at several points.

The believer is free from Sabbatarian legalism. Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection gathering, not a Christian Sabbath. The principle of creational rest remains valuable for human flourishing; its imposition as sacred-day obligation does not.

The believer is free from Mosaic food regulations and may eat with thanksgiving what God has given. Christian hospitality, table fellowship, and gratitude for the gifts of creation are the positive fruit of this liberty.

The believer is free from the tithe as binding obligation and is instead summoned to generous, glad-hearted giving in proportion to what God has supplied. The Christian who begins to give from the heart will usually find he gives more than the tithe, not less.

The believer is under the law of Christ, which means the moral substance of God’s character expressed in Christ and applied by the Spirit. This is not a lighter standard than Sinai but a deeper one. The Sermon on the Mount goes further than the letter of the Decalogue in its ethical reach. The Christian is not released from moral seriousness; the Christian is released into a moral seriousness rooted in love for Christ rather than in fear of a covenantal code.

The believer reads the Old Testament as the Word of God, fully inspired and profitable. The Mosaic Law is read not as binding covenantal code but as revelation of God’s character, type and shadow of Christ, exposure of human sin, and instruction for the Christian moral imagination. Christ is seen everywhere, because he is where the whole of Scripture is heading.

The believer is absolutely secure in Christ. The finished work of Christ is the ground; the sealing of the Spirit is the guarantee; the faithfulness of God is the assurance. The Bema examines works for reward, not salvation. The believer is loved by the Father with a love that the failures of any day cannot exhaust, and is summoned to love in return, which is the fulfilment of the law of Christ.

Grace and Law, rightly understood, do not oppose each other in the believer’s life. The Mosaic Law has done its work and has ended as covenantal code. Grace has done its work in Christ and continues to do its work through the indwelling Spirit. The believer lives under grace, shaped by the law of Christ, secured by God’s faithfulness, and accountable to Christ for the life that grace has granted.

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John 1:17

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