Moral and Ceremonial

How are Christians supposed to relate to the Law of Moses? Acts 15 gives us a play-by-play of the discussion in Jerusalem on that subject between the apostles and elders of the early church in that city. It ended like this: “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us,” they wrote to the church in Antioch, “to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.”

I suppose I have always found their decision settled the matter conclusively for me.

The Role of Law

Other Christians view the role of law a little differently. We should not be surprised to find that many of our brothers and sisters in denominations that make no distinction between Israel and the Church put greater emphasis on the role of the Law of Moses in the life of the believer than I might. Here’s how one such commentator deals with the matter:

“The thing that was annulled and made obsolete was the system of blood sacrifices. The ceremonial aspects of the Law were fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But the moral aspects of the Law retain their authority in the life of the believer.”

How do we reconcile words like “retain their authority” with Paul’s plain statement to the Galatians that “Before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed”? He goes on, “So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” Again, the apostle writes, “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.”

Nowhere does Paul make any distinction between the ceremonial aspects of the law and the moral aspects. It is simply “not under the law”.

Not Quite So Clear-Cut

There is a major difficulty with making a clear-cut distinction between the moral and ceremonial aspects of the Law of Moses, and that is this: the law does not neatly categorize its rules as one or the other. For example, the laws concerning animal sacrifice are unarguably ceremonial. That’s not hard to see. Even observant Jews today do not practice them. But many laws that are self-evidently moral also do not “retain their authority” for Christians today. If they do, it’s hard to see how we might apply them without running into major legal trouble.

Consider: A couple of weeks back right here on this blog, we had a few posts on the subject of prophecy. No small number of Christians today are convinced they have a mandate from scripture to teach children to prophesy authoritatively, and encourage them to dignify their subjective impressions and the resulting pronouncements by attaching the name of the Lord to them. Yet the Law of Moses unambiguously commands Israel to put the false prophet to death:

“But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.”

If the death and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled only the ceremonial aspects of the law and the moral aspects of the law “retain their authority” for us, how do we evade our responsibility to carry out this self-evidently moral command? Yet nobody, evangelical, high church or Jew would dare practice that, would they?

Another Example

Or how about this provision of the law: would you call it moral or ceremonial?

“If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband's brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.”

I would say it’s moral. I think most people would. Yet I’m not about to start practicing it any time soon. Are you?

We could cite numerous other examples of this sort of thing in the Law of Moses. The words “moral” and “ceremonial” flow trippingly off the tongue, but they are not as easy to apply as it may initially appear. This may be why the early church was so careful not to put new Gentile believers under law. The law was “a yoke … that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear”. Even the four “rules” they asked the Gentiles to respect are framed more as gentle suggestions than heavily-redacted legal code. “If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.”

Love and Legalism

We are justified by faith, and we live by faith. I cannot reasonably call the Law of Moses an “authority” when Paul manifestly does not. That does not mean I ignore the moral aspects of the law or, far less, that I deliberately flout it, but that I use it quite differently than any Jew ever would have. As I wrote a couple years back in another context,

“Law still serves a useful purpose for the Christian to the extent that it provides us with unambiguous direction as to what sorts of behavior God likes and doesn’t like in his creatures. The more we have that clear in our minds and hearts, the more we are enabled to love God and our fellow man as we should. Scouring the law for clues to the Lord’s preferences for human behavior serves the same purpose as following a loved one around a mall with the hidden agenda of doing something nice for them later on. It’s a way of using the law lovingly rather than legalistically.”

That’s how it works for me at least. I use the Law of Moses as a reference text, not an authority. There are enough commands in the New Testament to keep me busy for the rest of my life without adding to them a “yoke” and a “burden” that the apostles and elders of the early church wisely refused to impose on new believers.