How Should Christians read the Law?
The problem with reading the law
Any one who has ever done a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan often finds the book of Genesis a reasonable read, Exodus is fine until you get to chapters 21 and then you get a load of laws about goring oxen and curtain hooks needed for building the tabernacle.
Then Leviticus arrives. Oh boy! It’s a real downer on anyone with eczema – out of the community until you’re healed. Women with periods, unclean. Tattoos – right out. And then the crème de la crème – to pardon the pun – no cooked goat in mother’s milk. Didn’t Jesus say that everything was clean to eat anyway? We haven’t even got to Deuteronomy and this isn’t giving much direction to an urbanite in 21st century Hong Kong. Let’s write those laws off. They’re just civil law.
And then there’s all those laws on sacrifice and atonement for sins which Jesus has fulfilled already in the cross. So those bits are irrelevant. That’s ceremonial law.
What can we keep? The 10 commandments. Finally, a reasonable set of principles that I can put on my child’s desk and ask them to obey and they’ll understand. That is – apart from the bit about Sabbath (which is it about not working on Sunday… or Saturday? And I’ve got some work deadlines anyway so let’s forget that one) and taking God’s name in vain – which we’ll take to mean using Jesus as a swear word. But all in all, “Don’t murder” – sounds doable. “Don’t commit adultery” – I can live with that. Great! There we have a relevant moral law.
This describes many people’s experience of the law. And many great Christian thinkers starting with Reformer John Calvin have divided the law into the categories of civil, ceremonial and moral law thus reinforcing this kind of experience. And it seems to fit at first glance. Jesus has removed all the need for atoning sacrifices. None of us are killing lambs before we take communion in church. Laws about destroying mouldy flats we simply ignore.
But the problem with this schema is this isn’t how the law comes to us. Moses simply does not break down the laws into this nice neat categories: “Okay guys, we’ve just had the civil laws, now we’re moving on to the moral ones.” That is not how it works.
Also, many of the laws themselves defy such categorization. Is refusing to glean every last bit of grain from your field so the poor can eat from it a moral law or a civil law? The Sabbath – moral or civil or ceremonial? No idols – moral or ceremonial? It simply is inadequate as an approach.
So how does Jesus view the Law?
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” Matt 5:17-18.
“He [Jesus] said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Luke 24:24
Jesus doesn’t say it’s irrelevant at all, he says he came to fulfil the law not do away with it. So the law still has relevance for us today. But what does Jesus fulfilling the law mean?
Here are 3 key ways Jesus’ fulfils the law:
(1) Jesus obeyed the law perfectly.
(2) Jesus brought out the full meaning of the law in his life and teaching.
(3) Jesus’ came to bring a completion to the law, satisfying all its demands and the penalty of law-breaking for sinners who could not.
This means that Jesus is the interpretative lens through which we interpret the OT law. He is both the best interpreter of the law, the greatest example of how to obey the law and the only hope for us to ever meet the law’s requirements for he has satisfied them in our place. For Christians, Jesus is now the main character and the law is supporting cast. In looking at the law, we understand Jesus better and in looking at Jesus, we understand the law better.
How does Jesus’ interpret the law? He summarises the 10 commandments like this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength” and “love your neighbour as yourself.” Love is the central defining theme of the law. The apostle Paul says “whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Rom 13:9-10
But what does love mean? We need to look at the life of Jesus to see love in action. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16).
So how do we read the law through the lens of Jesus?
Let’s get practical. Take the laws about sending those with skin diseases outside the community. How does the law help us understand Jesus? The law shows us how the general effects of sin pollute, distort, and destroy even our physical bodies. To be unclean was not a sin just as eating your dinner in the toilet is not a sin (a modern version of an impure place) but the sense of defilement, of dirtiness was a reminder that we as humans are not who we were made to be. Almost everyone in the community at some point became unclean. Everyone needed cleansing.
By looking at the life of Jesus, we see that he reached out to the unclean, to the lepers, to those excluded from the community. And he was willing to touch them. At great social and potential physical cost to himself. And as he touched them he did not became unclean, but rather he made them clean. He brought purification to unclean people.
How does Jesus help us understand that specific law? As we read the laws of uncleanness, we should read ourselves into them. We are unclean people who are not who we should be. We need cleansing. We should be outside of the community. And Jesus is the one who reaches down to touch us and cleanse us and make us whole again. Jesus fulfils the law.
How should we then respond? Our response then is to consider how we treat those we regard as unclean whether by the clothes they wear, the way they talk, the social or ethnic group they come from or the social manners they display. Outside the camp should be us. But Jesus goes out of the camp to draw us back into the community. So we should be those who also reach out to the unclean in our society. We need to be those willing to risk our own sense of social impurity by reaching the marginalised, the broken and the hurting and bringing the cleansing, healing love of Jesus to them.
This law is now no longer irrelevant. Nor is it merely a ceremonial or civil law. It is an absolutely moral law because its heartbeat is to show us firstly how we have received cleansing and secondly, how we are to be instruments of God’s cleansing, healing power to the world.