“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.”

Mathew 5:17

Overview

Jesus came not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, and it is often a question on what the fulfilment of the law consists of as well as what is means for us as Christians now Jesus has resurrected and ascended into Heaven.

From my own experiences it can be fairly common to meet people who have an incredibly liberal view of the law, one that determines that for we are no longer bound by the law but under the grace of Christ Jesus therefore the law no longer quite applies – a common argument for this being the case of homosexual acts where one may declare “Surely it is loving to embrace them within the Church for the fact they commit homosexual acts no longer matter”, a passage of scripture that can often be referenced is the story of Jesus and the adulteress in being John 8:7 by specifically saying “did not Jesus state that whoever has not sinned can throw the first stone?”, which if more often than not stated with the absence of the part where Jesus says to the woman “go and sin no more“.

Here we have an overview of the argument so often used to ignore the standards of living encouraged by the law that is instead replaced with a sense of cheap grace, one that perhaps inadvertently can lead the Church conforming to the culture, where the Church does what the moral standards of the day seem fit, instead of the culture conforming to the Church, thus having a possible consequence of the Church being peeled away from Truth for the perceived emotional comfort of the society it finds itself in so often with the excuse of such acts to be under the guise of “love thy neighbour”, and when we ask what is “love”, the response often being “love is love”.

And so, it is we have now laid the foundation for which we can begin to conduct our study in the proper place of the Law in our lives.

The Law Today

We can begin by looking at John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. This being an introduction to the coming of Christ, specifically declaring Christ as the Word, and as Christ being part of the Holy Trinity He has been of the Father since the beginning. It is also standard of the understanding of the Church to recognise that the Bible is the Word of God, of which we can deduce if Christ is the Word, and the Bible is the Word of God, we can see that from Christs divinity came indeed the Law itself.

We can see in the law the punishment for murder in Exodus 21:12: “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death” – and in the same manner for when a homosexual act we see in Leviticus 20:13: “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads”.  In these commands it is not important right now we look into why some of these are wrong (though perhaps shall do in a later article on identity), but for the purpose of the post we must ask why the punishment is for the individuals involved to be put to death – in a society in which homosexual acts are celebrated, why does the Bible state they be put to death? The answer to our question is that the consequence matches the severity of the act itself, and though we now do not put those who commit such actions to death in the New (Luke 5:30-32), the severity of the act remains.

The next part we will look at is Matthew 5:17 where Jesus declares: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them”. Here is a clear declaration by Christ Himself stating that the Law has not been abolished, but rather fulfilled.

But what is meant that the Law is fulfilled? As in Romans 7:7: “What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet”” The law is what makes us aware of our sin, it is a ruler in which we can measure ourselves against, a standard to be upheld. For the Law to be fulfilled the standards laid out by the Law must be lived up to, in which Christ, being perfect, lived up such a standard, the standard of perfection that no man other than Christ Himself could do.

In John 14:23 Jesus declares: “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them”. Again, if we see that Jesus is the Word, and that He has come to not abolish the Law, but to fulfil them, and that as Christians we are followers of Christ who as the Son of God is perfect, then we find ourselves through following Christ to also be following the Law. It should also be raised that a part of the substance of what “love” is, is to be followers of the Law.  

So it is here that I end my first article, giving a brief overview of some arguments we find ourselves against when it comes to the validity of the Law in our current age, as well as offering some pieces of Scripture that I hope will aid the reader in seeing that the Moral Law is still relevant for us as Christians today as it has been since the beginning.