Following God's Law

by D. P. Marr

The interpretation of the Law of Moses, I,e., the Law of God, is one of the most heated debate topics among modern Christians. How should one approach this issue? Should we obey the Law or not? Are we to be law-abiding followers of Jesus, or are we not to try to keep it?

Let’s first examine the purpose of the Law. Why did God give Moses the Law, and thereby to the Israelites? The astute Christian will answer that it was an attempt by God to bring mankind into a proper relationship with Himself- a purely holy being. All His precepts are holy, and He even says so many times. The Law brings life to a corrupt and sinful soul, and many of the Old Testament saints believed as much. Do you have any doubt? Read Psalm 119. That song extols the goodness and righteousness of the Law in many different ways.

Yet Paul, and most of his Christian adherents say that the Law is too difficult to keep. It was only a test or a “tutor”.

Let’s follow that logic a bit. This would mean that the omniscient God would give a set of rules to a creation that He knows cannot possibly live up to. So what does He do? He punishes them, sometimes severely, for disobeying it. Is our God sadistic? That is an emphatic No! If it really was too hard, and our God cared about His people, He would have sent His Son as propitiation much sooner, or there wouldn’t have been any penalties for disobedience.

Let’s take a look at an analogy of a human father trying to get his son to obey the rules. First, the father informs the son what is right and wrong behavior. If the son steps out of line and does something wrong, he is punished by the father. Does the mere statement of “I’m sorry” by the son correct the situation? No, some form of punishment is inflicted. Otherwise, the bad behavior will continue. What if the son will not deviate from his bad path, and seemingly “cannot stop” his behavior? Does the father just say, “Oh well, so much for the rules. Let’s throw them away.” No! More severe penalties for the son are in store. It’s the same thing with our legal system. Punishments continue until the behavior stops. That’s why God gave rules: because He knew mankind was capable of following them. Man just chooses not to. The difference is that God will give supernatural help and complete forgiveness to those who want it from Him. This is done in a special, powerful way now through His Son Jesus Christ.

Now I will grant unto you that we cannot follow the Law perfectly in our current condition. We’ve progressed to the point, as a race, that we’ve been corrupted by sinful lifestyles. In other words, sin has gained a strong and binding stranglehold on mankind. We now have a genetic predisposition to sin. That is why Jesus came down from Heaven to pay the penalty for our transgressions. He did this by living a perfect life, completely blameless, and He was therefore deemed a proper, sufficient, innocent sacrifice.

However, note that this is to atone for (cleanse and forgive) our sins mainly. Yet, as a gift to us additionally, Jesus has promised to help us become holy as He is through the work of the Holy Spirit. So does that mean we just sit back and let Him do all the work? No! Faith in Jesus is absolutely essential, but God’s requirements of the Law must be met. If it our obedience was completely up to Jesus, then God would have to blame Jesus for us stepping out of line. Jesus is not delinquent or capable of performing evil. This problem is a separate issue from atonement. To atone is to take the punishment for sin- the guilt. A substitutionary sacrifice. It does not imply that God now thinks that Jesus committed all of mankind’s transgressions. God’s love was so great that the Trinity agreed to let Jesus take the heat for all of mankind’s crimes.

God is an unchanging God. He would not change His plan of salvation, but He can and does make it easier for us because He loves us and knows our infirmities. My point is this: God would not just throw out His Law because we cannot keep it. The Law points the way to holiness- that’s why He instituted it. Yes, if we repent of our sins, we are covered by Jesus’s righteousness. Yet, to say that the Law is done away with is to say that there is no requirement to live by God’s standards. Christians in this path are lulled into a type of spiritual sleep by relying on Christ to correct our behavior. As I have said above, He will certainly help us, but He will not take all of the actions for us. Ultimately, we are responsible for our behavior. If you follow the Paulinist’s line of false reasoning, when we sin as Christians, Jesus has dropped the ball (so to speak), and failed in His duty to keep us from sin. It is blasphemous to place the responsibility for our sinful actions on our beloved Savior.

Yet someone will rightly say that God’s Law is now written on our hearts in the New Covenant. This truth comes from Jeremiah 31:33. However, this verse is often misunderstood. In most cases, now, when we become a Christian, we naturally know what is the right behavior and will desire to follow it. When we were in sin as unbelievers, we didn’t care. This verse from the Old Testament is foreshadowing the work of assistance of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s heart. Nowhere does it say that a new “morality system of consciousness” now exists in the heart of the believer. It’s the same faith for the saints in the Old and New Testaments. Besides, that passage from Jeremiah will only be completely fulfilled starting in the Millennium ruled by Jesus Christ.

I will subsequently prove from Scripture that Jesus says it is imperative to keep the Law.

First and foremost, there is Matthew 5:17-18 which is found in the Sermon on the Mount. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. 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.” These verses clearly say that the Law will continue under Jesus. The only time the Law could possibly be done away with is when Heaven and Earth pass. When does this happen? After Jesus Christ’s second coming (see Revelation 21:1). It may even continue after that. Yet many modern Christians will say that Jesus fulfilled the Law so we don’t have to follow it. This is flat out wrong. By discarding the Law, Jesus would, ini effect, be destroying it. Besides, “fulfill” in these verses is referring to everything Jesus came to accomplish- which includes fulfilling all prophecies concerning Him. It also applies to the fulfillment of all other End Times prophecies. Not only that, but if Jesus nullified the Law, He would be considered a false prophet under Deuteronomy 4:2, in which Moses says: “Ye shall not add unto the word that I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.” (Note: there are some Paulinists who argue that Jesus’s law is somehow different from the Law given through Moses. This cannot be true, as Jesus says “the law and the prophets” in Matt. 5:17, NOT “my law”. The Law of Jesus and the Law of God the Father are one and the same. Jesus just gave greater insight into God’s Law.)

Then there is the time when a rich young ruler asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life in Matthew 19. The man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus says plainly to keep the commandments. When the man asks which ones, Jesus lists a series of them from the Ten Commandments. Now, a lot of commentators will at this point say that Jesus was only testing the young man because the man had said that he had kept them. But Jesus does not deny that the man has indeed obeyed them. Jesus’s way would have been to confront and correct the man if he hadn’t. Furthermore, if keeping the Law was NOT at least part of the way to eternal life, Jesus would have been guilty of lying and dissimulation. Jesus would NOT resort to these actions just to prove a point about salvation. Jesus doesn’t ever lie; that’s a reason why He is the perfect, blameless sacrifice for our sins. What the young man was guilty of was covetousness- a sin that he was not willing to part with, keeping him from eternal life. That was the point of the story.

Jesus in Revelation 2 and 3 also talks about doing works, or face being blotted out of the Book of Life and losing salvation. Keeping the Law is clearly part of doing the works, as is charity to fellow humans. (I may do a separate study on works and their place in salvation in a future article.)

These are the main passages in the New Testament coming from Jesus, yet there are many other places where keeping the Law is implied.

The bottomline is: Do not be fooled by Paul’s erroneous argument that the Law is abrogated, “done away with”, and “nailed to a tree”. Jesus takes Paul to task for Paul’s teachings in the above passage from Revelation (e.g. taking issue with Paul saying it was okay to eat meat sacrificed to idols). Follow God’s Law: it is a central theme of the entire Bible, and it is crucial to your salvation.