THE LAW OF CHRIST

[Gideon300]

Christ said that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God, so the Law of Christ is in complete accordance with everything that God spoke to Moses. Likewise, Christ spent his ministry teaching his followers to obey the Law of Moses by word and by example, so that is the Law of Christ.

The Law of Moses is perfect (Psalm 19:7), it is of liberty (Psalm 119:45), and it blesses those who obey it (Psalm 119:1-3), so James 1:25 speaking about he perfect law of liberty is not saying anything about the Law of Moses that wasn't already said in the Psalms. In James 2:1-11, he criticized them for committing the sin of favoritism, so he was not limiting what he was speaking about to just ten of God's commandments. The reason why the commandments to love God and our neighbor are the greatest two commandments is because they are inclusive of all of the other commandments, which is why Jesus said in Matthew 22:36-40 that all of the other commandments hang on them.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has the character traits that the Law of Moses was given in order to tech us how to embody and the way to love Him is by embodying His character traits, such as the way to love justice is by being a doer of justice, the way to love holiness is by being a doer of God's instructions for how to be holy as He is holy, and so forth. So the goal of everything that God has instructed is to teach us how to love different aspects of His character traits, which is why the Bible repeatedly states in both the OT and the NT that the way to love God is by obeying His commandments. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact likeness of His character (Hebrews 1:3), which he embodied through his works by setting a sinless example for us to follow of how to walk in obedience to the Law of Moses, so the way to love the Son is exactly the same as the way to love the Father.

So you expect people to burn down their houses if they get the flu? That's in the law. "Hear O Israel", not "Hear O gentiles". Read Acts 15. And Galatians. Colossians as well.

 

[Soyeong]

So you expect people to burn down their houses if they get the flu? That's in the law.

No, it's not. The flu is not even mentioned in the Bible.

"Hear O Israel", not "Hear O gentiles".

In Ephesians 2:12-19, Gentiles were at one time separated from Christ, alienated from Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in this world, which is in accordance with Gentiles at one time not being doers of the Torah, but through faith in Christ all of that is no longer true in that Gentiles are no longer strangers or aliens but are fellow citizens of Israel along with the saints in the household of God, which is in accordance with Gentiles becoming doers of the Torah. Israel was given the role of being a light and a blessing to the nations, so there is no sense in rejecting the light and the blessing because Israel was given that role.

Read Acts 15. And Galatians. Colossians as well.

In Deuteronomy 13, the way that God instructed to determine that someone is a false prophet is if they speak against obeying the Torah, so it is either incorrect to interpret what you referenced as speaking against obeying the Torah (my position) or they were written by false prophets, but either way followers of Christ should follow the example that he set for his followers to follow of how to walk in obedience to the Torah.

 

[Gideon300]

No, it's not. The flu is not even mentioned in the Bible.


In Ephesians 2:12-19, Gentiles were at one time separated from Christ, alienated from Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in this world, which is in accordance with Gentiles at one time not being doers of the Torah, but through faith in Christ all of that is no longer true in that Gentiles are no longer strangers or aliens but are fellow citizens of Israel along with the saints in the household of God, which is in accordance with Gentiles becoming doers of the Torah. Israel was given the role of being a light and a blessing to the nations, so there is no sense in rejecting the light and the blessing because Israel was given that role.


In Deuteronomy 13, the way that God instructed to determine that someone is a false prophet is if they speak against obeying the Torah, so it is either incorrect to interpret what you referenced as speaking against obeying the Torah (my position) or they were written by false prophets, but either way followers of Christ should follow the example that he set for his followers to follow of how to walk in obedience to the Torah.

The Levitical law gives instructions regarding the response to any contagious disease. I used the flu as a modern example. Not so many people get leprosy these days.

God does not save people in order to place them back under the law that killed them in the first place. I've said this many times before: the law is the shadow. You live in the shadows. That is why you can't/won't see the truth of the new covenant. Come into the light and you will see how wrong you are.

 

[2Christ]

In Deuteronomy 13, the way that God instructed to determine that someone is a false prophet is if they speak against obeying the Torah, so it is either incorrect to interpret what you referenced as speaking against obeying the Torah (my position) or they were written by false prophets, but either way followers of Christ should follow the example that he set for his followers to follow of how to walk in obedience to the Torah.

the torah? really ? see this: Deu 13:4 Ye shall walk after Jehovah your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.

 

[Soyeong]

The Levitical law gives instructions regarding the response to any contagious disease. I used the flu as a modern example. Not so many people get leprosy these days.

The Hebrew word "tzaraat" does not have an English equivalent and it certainly does not refer to any contagious disease or to leprosy. "Leprosy" is used because they needed an English word to fill the gap, so it is perhaps the closest word in English, but it is nevertheless a different concept. For example, if tzaraat spread to cover their entire body from head to toe, then the priest was to declared them to be clean. A house was not considered to have tzaraat until the moment that the priest declared it to have it, so people could remove their possessions from their house up until that point, moreover, a house can not get the flu. In Matthew 8:2, he did not ask for Jesus to heal him, but rather he said that if Jesus was willing, then he could make him clean.

God does not save people in order to place them back under the law that killed them in the first place.

Jesus saves us from our sin (Matthew 1:21) and it is by the Torah that we have knowledge of what sin is (Romans 3:20), so Jesus graciously teaching us to experience being a doer of the Torah is intrinsically the way that he is giving us his gift of saving us from not being a doer of it at it is contradictory for someone to think that they need salvation from sin while also thinking that they have no obligation to refrain from doing what the Torah reveals to be sin.

I've said this many times before: the law is the shadow. You live in the shadows. That is why you can't/won't see the truth of the new covenant. Come into the light and you will see how wrong you are.

In 1 Corinthians 5:6-8, Paul spoke in regard to how Passover foreshadowed Christ by drawing a connection of him being our Passover lamb, however, instead of concluding that we no longer need to celebrate Passover, he concluded that we should therefore continue to celebrate it, so the fact that Passover is a foreshadow of Christ does not diminish its importance but rather it amplifies it. The Torah teaches us how to point to Christ and as his followers we should live in a way that points towards him by following the example that he set for his followers to follow of how to walk in obedience to it rather than a way that points away from him. The Torah is truth (Psalm 119:142), the Torah is light (Proverbs 6:23), and the New Covenant still involves following the Torah (Jeremiah 31:33).

 

[Soyeong]

yes this is what i said. the same thing. except for the law of Moses WE CANNOT FOLLOW MOST OF IT. why wont you understand this?
prove to me that the under the new covenant we have to keep the full law of Moses, it is impossible it was for the israelites of that time. there is no temple and we dont have to sacrifice to atone for sin. did i miss something?

There is nothing sinful about not following laws that we legitimately can't keep and that should not prevent us from getting to experience obedience to the laws that we can legitimately keep. For example, in Deuteronomy 17:18, it specifically instructs the king to write a copy of the Torah, so only the king can get to legitimately experience obedience to that law and everyone who is not the king has a legitimate reason for not following it. Not even Jesus got to experience obedience to the laws in regard to giving birth or to having a period, but again there is nothing wrong with that. The Israelites were give a number of laws that had the condition "when you enter the land" while they were still wandering the wilderness for 40 years that a generation did not get to keep, but that did not prevent them from getting to keep them as soon as they entered the land. The condition for the Israelites to return to the land after they had been exiled to Babylon was to return to obedience to the Torah, which contains instructions in regard to Temple practice which they could not obey while they were in exile, so that did not prevent them from getting to obey the laws that they could obey.

Scripture is precise about what "the covenant" originally meant at Sinai, and that precision matters for understanding what gets renewed and what doesn't.

God's own naming convention is explicit. The tables of stone are called "the tables of the covenant" (Deuteronomy 9:9, 11), and the content written on them is called "the covenant" itself: "And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments" (Exodus 34:27-28). Moses says it again plainly: "he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone" (Deuteronomy 4:13).

This is distinct from the broader law Moses wrote afterward — the statutes and judgments covering sacrifice, civil order, and ceremony. That book was placed beside the ark as a witness: "Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee" (Deuteronomy 31:26). Only the Decalogue itself went inside the ark (Deuteronomy 10:4-5).

God's character traits are eternal, so there is a reality of what is true about who God is that we true before He gave any laws, that has been revealed through His laws, and that is true regardless of which covenant someone is under if any. For example, God's righteousness is eternal (Psalm 119:142), therefore all of His righteous laws are eternal (Psalm 119:160), so anyone who has the goal of embodying God's righteousness will consider any instructions that He has given for how to do that to be eternally and cumulatively valid. It is not the case that that someone were have no obligation to embody God's righteousness if they were not in a covenant relationship with Him, so it is missing the point to focus on the specifics of God's covenants instead of on what they teach us that is eternally true about who God is.

"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel... not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt... But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" (Jeremiah 31:31-33).

The covenant "in the day I took them by the hand out of Egypt" is the Exodus 19-20/34 giving of the Decalogue — the very tables just discussed. So the contrast Jeremiah draws is most precisely a contrast in location and inscription, not content: the same commandments, moved from stone to the heart. The new covenant does not discard the Ten Commandments; it internalizes them.

The Hebrew word "Torah" used in Jeremiah 31:33 refers to all of the Law of Moses, not to just the Decalogue. In Deuteronomy 30, it forms the basis for the New Covenant by prophesying about a time when the Israelites would return from exile, God would circumcise their hearts, and they would return to obedience to the Torah, which is what Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:26-27 are in regard to. In Ezekiel 36:26-27, God will take away our hearts of stone, give us hearts of flesh, and send His Spirit to lead us to obey the "mishpatim" and the "chukim, which again are not limited to just the Decalogue but are the two main categories of law in the Law of Moses.

Christ said: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:17-18). Whoever breaks "one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:19). Christ's own testimony here is the highest witness available on the question, and it does not describe abolition.

The phrase "the Law and the Prophets" is like saying "the Gospels and the Epistles" and refers to everything within a large body of text, not to just the Decalogue.

The one clear apostolic ruling on the broader law of Moses— from Peter and James at Jerusalem, addresses this directly: Gentile believers are not required to be circumcised or to keep the law of Moses, but only to "abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood" (Acts 15:19-21, 24). This ruling concerns the ceremonial and boundary-marker provisions of the wider law, not the Decalogue, which Jeremiah's new covenant already carries forward by writing it on the heart.

While it is possible to interpret Acts 15:19-21 as ruling against followers of Christ following over 99% (609/613) of what he taught, I don't think that it makes much sense to do that. Do you think that Acts 15:19-21 contains an exhaustive list for mature believers? It is would be contradictory to treat it as being an exhaustive list for mature believers in order to limit which ways Gentile followers of Christ should follow Christ while also treating it as being a non-exhaustive list by taking the position that there are obviously other ways that followers of Christ should follow Christ, such as with the greatest two commandments, the Decalogue, or those things spoken against in Romans 1:29-31, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and Galatians 5:19-21, or Titus 3:1-3. Moreover, the the reason why the commandments to love God and our neighbor are the greatest two commandments is because they are inclusive of all of the other commandments, so the moment that you include those you also include everything else in the Law of Moses.

The new covenant is the Ten Commandments, the covenant proper is renewed in inward form rather than on stone. The wider law of Moses, kept beside the ark as a witness against Israel's transgressions, is a separate document with a separate history, and its ceremonial provisions are what the apostolic council in Acts 15 releases Gentile believers from. The moral content of the covenant itself is not set aside; it is fulfilled and internalized.

My position on this is solid and is from scripture.

Is God's holiness eternal or did it fail to get renewed under the New Covenant? In 1 Peter 1:16, we are told to be holy for God is holy, which is a quote from Leviticus where God was giving instructions for how to do that, such as by refraining from eating unclean animals (Leviticus 11:44-45) or by following "ceremonial or boundary-marker provisions". If our goal is to embody God's character traits, then the only way that we should cease to follow God's instructions for how to be holy as He is holy would be if He were to cease to be holy under the New Covenant. Morality is based on God's character traits, which means that God's instructions for how to be holy as He is holy are moral laws as well as everything else in the Law of Moses, so none of it has been set aside.

 

[Soyeong]

the torah? really ? see this: Deu 13:4 Ye shall walk after Jehovah your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.

Indeed, that verse uses the Hebrew word "mitzvot" and there are 613 "mitzvot" in the Law of Moses. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has the character traits that the Law of Moses was given in order to teach us how to embody, such as how to be holy as He is holy, which is why Deuteronomy 13 associates false prophets who speak against obeying God's commandments with those who lead people to follow other gods. The only way that we should follow a different set of laws for how to embody a different set of character traits would be if the New Covenant were made with a different god with a different set of character traits, but it is made with the same God with the same character traits and therefore the same eternal and cumulatively valid instructions for how to embody His character traits (Jeremiah 31:33, Ezekiel 36:26-27).

 

[2Christ]

There is nothing sinful about not following laws that we legitimately can't keep and that should not prevent us from getting to experience obedience to the laws that we can legitimately keep. For example, in Deuteronomy 17:18, it specifically instructs the king to write a copy of the Torah, so only the king can get to legitimately experience obedience to that law and everyone who is not the king has a legitimate reason for not following it. Not even Jesus got to experience obedience to the laws in regard to giving birth or to having a period, but again there is nothing wrong with that. The Israelites were give a number of laws that had the condition "when you enter the land" while they were still wandering the wilderness for 40 years that a generation did not get to keep, but that did not prevent them from getting to keep them as soon as they entered the land. The condition for the Israelites to return to the land after they had been exiled to Babylon was to return to obedience to the Torah, which contains instructions in regard to Temple practice which they could not obey while they were in exile, so that did not prevent them from getting to obey the laws that they could obey.


God's character traits are eternal, so there is a reality of what is true about who God is that we true before He gave any laws, that has been revealed through His laws, and that is true regardless of which covenant someone is under if any. For example, God's righteousness is eternal (Psalm 119:142), therefore all of His righteous laws are eternal (Psalm 119:160), so anyone who has the goal of embodying God's righteousness will consider any instructions that He has given for how to do that to be eternally and cumulatively valid. It is not the case that that someone were have no obligation to embody God's righteousness if they were not in a covenant relationship with Him, so it is missing the point to focus on the specifics of God's covenants instead of on what they teach us that is eternally true about who God is.


The Hebrew word "Torah" used in Jeremiah 31:33 refers to all of the Law of Moses, not to just the Decalogue. In Deuteronomy 30, it forms the basis for the New Covenant by prophesying about a time when the Israelites would return from exile, God would circumcise their hearts, and they would return to obedience to the Torah, which is what Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:26-27 are in regard to. In Ezekiel 36:26-27, God will take away our hearts of stone, give us hearts of flesh, and send His Spirit to lead us to obey the "mishpatim" and the "chukim, which again are not limited to just the Decalogue but are the two main categories of law in the Law of Moses.


The phrase "the Law and the Prophets" is like saying "the Gospels and the Epistles" and refers to everything within a large body of text, not to just the Decalogue.


While it is possible to interpret Acts 15:19-21 as ruling against followers of Christ following over 99% (609/613) of what he taught, I don't think that it makes much sense to do that. Do you think that Acts 15:19-21 contains an exhaustive list for mature believers? It is would be contradictory to treat it as being an exhaustive list for mature believers in order to limit which ways Gentile followers of Christ should follow Christ while also treating it as being a non-exhaustive list by taking the position that there are obviously other ways that followers of Christ should follow Christ, such as with the greatest two commandments, the Decalogue, or those things spoken against in Romans 1:29-31, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and Galatians 5:19-21, or Titus 3:1-3. Moreover, the the reason why the commandments to love God and our neighbor are the greatest two commandments is because they are inclusive of all of the other commandments, so the moment that you include those you also include everything else in the Law of Moses.


Is God's holiness eternal or did it fail to get renewed under the New Covenant? In 1 Peter 1:16, we are told to be holy for God is holy, which is a quote from Leviticus where God was giving instructions for how to do that, such as by refraining from eating unclean animals (Leviticus 11:44-45) or by following "ceremonial or boundary-marker provisions". If our goal is to embody God's character traits, then the only way that we should cease to follow God's instructions for how to be holy as He is holy would be if He were to cease to be holy under the New Covenant. Morality is based on God's character traits, which means that God's instructions for how to be holy as He is holy are moral laws as well as everything else in the Law of Moses, so none of it has been set aside.

The new covenant speaks of the ten commandment not because I said so but because God declared the ten commandments to be the covenant, it is written in many places in the O.T. and it is certain. However you are correct that we can still follow some of the mosaic laws if they are applicable today, and why not I think it's a good thing and why not. but this is not populat as you know its already difficult proving we have to keep the commandments imagine telling people to keep the rest of the law of Moses. I understand what you say about God's character traits and it it important. personally if you follow the ten ahd follow the mindset of jesus as seen in scrioture, you certainly keep the rest pf teese applicable laws. is it so? what do you think.

Cheers