A little history on rules. God gave the first rule. "Don't eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil." Quite a long time later, He gave some more, the 10 commandments, which were really a covenant. Because the people did not want to be a part of the covenant, God gave them several hundred more rules, which He Himself said were not good for them, because there was no way that they could keep them. Along comes Jesus, and He talks about all of these rules, and scripture and many other things, but gives one rule, well really two. The first is that if one wants to please God and have eternal life, then they must believe in Him, in the Son of God. The other is to love one another even as He has loved us. The Jesus dies and raises again and ascends into heaven. After the Holy Spirit comes in power, the church is started, and it must be remembered that all of these who were the first members of the church are Jews, who live under all of these hundreds of rules. Now God wants to bring into the church Gentiles. But the apostles are rather reluctant to do so, considering them unclean. Peter has a vision where God tells him to not call unclean what God has cleansed. (More on this later.) So some Gentiles are admitted into the church, which causes no end of troubles for those who are Jews, wondering just how to make these Gentiles into Jews. Of course, these few Gentiles have received the Holy Spirit, so the Jews cannot hardly say that they are not cleansed, nor can they tell them that they are not of the church. But the Jews are not comfortable with this situation.
Several years later, Paul comes to town, and the apostles gather with him to discuss the situation. Paul is very direct, and tells them that if God did not give them (the Gentiles,) any rules, they who were they to give them rules? And what do the apostles do? They pray and take this situation to the Holy Spirit, and come back and decide that the Gentiles should not have any burden put upon them as to rules, other than that they should abstain from meat which has been sacrificed to idols, and from fornication. Hey, no hundreds of rules! Ha, Ha!
Still, there were those who were coming into the church of the Gentiles, that is, those who believed in Jesus, who had no rules, and they were trying to make the Gentiles follow the rules that were given to the Jews, even to having them circumcise themselves. Paul answered these men by saying that circumcision of the flesh is nothing, but circumcision of the heart, and if one receives circumcision of the flesh, then they have been separated from Christ!
So, who is putting rules upon us now?