More on the 613 Commandments

In March I wrote this piece, in which I questioned whether it was actually even possible now to obey all 613 Mosaic Commandments, as advocated by a Messianic Jew whose work I was reading. Deciding that it was too important a question merely to wing, I spent some weeks, after I finished reading his translation of a Hebrew manuscript of Matthew’s gospel, ploughing through the Pentateuch to answer that question.

I limited my study to the simple question of whether obeying each commandment literally was now possible, since that was what the good rabbi advocated. Before I even began, it was clear to me that even to the observant Jew, the Law codes, as an integral part of the whole torah, were always intended to be studied and meditated upon in order to search the heart of God. They were not simply a burdensome or arbitrary set of rules from a bureaucratic God. That’s why torah was rightly regarded as a wonderful covenant gift from God. See, for example, the prolonged glorying in the law of Psalm 119, which mentions the torah in all 176 of its verses.

Likewise Jesus’s authoritative reformulation of the law, as in the sermon on the mount, reveals the inner meaning of the commandments rather than simply demanding compliance. When he pulls up the Pharisees on neglecting the law that commands the stoning of sons who curse their parents, nothing suggests that he was telling them to buck the Roman prohibition on Jewish capital punishment, given his own mercy on the woman taken in adultery, but rather that he saw it as an eternal expression of God’s honouring of parenthood.

Anyway, as I anticipated in my blog, only a minority of the specific commandments were either possible to keep today, or were not specifically cancelled by New Testament teaching. There were essentially, to my mind, three categories of commandment.

The first included not only the laws relating to the temple and sacrifice, but most of those to do with the categories of clean and unclean. This is simply because the temple and priesthood having been physically abolished (by Jesus himself, remember, in his pronouncement of judgement in the Olivet discourse), these laws cannot be obeyed. There are no priests to pronounce a healed leper clean, nor to cleanse a house with mildew. There is no temple in which a Nazirite may offer the required sacrifice, or a woman be cleansed from the uncleanness of childbirth, let alone to assemble the whole nation for the three annual feasts.

Furthermore, as I reasoned in the previous article, the Lord’s abolition of the food laws for Peter, a Jew, as well as for gentiles, renders the ritual concept of uncleanness (ie things that temporarily put the Israelite back into the profane state of the gentiles) obsolete. Not only have gentiles been pronounced clean, pork and all, but in Christ every believer is made permanently holy by the indwelling Spirit of God, as the temple was made holy by the shekinah. Even the temple might become unclean by idolatrous offerings provoking the departure of the glory of God (“Ichabod”), but God has promised never to withdraw his Spirit – the seal, deposit and guarantee of final salvation – from his children. So what does “unclean” even mean in Christ?

Within the same category, some laws were directly formulated by Moses to counter local idolatrous practice. I doubt that anyone now is tempted to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk, or set up an Asherah pole. And if they did, it would be more likely to be a culinary experiment, or to make a historical film, than in order to detract from true worship of Yahweh.

The second category of commandments I found were those that commanded sanctions for various offences. The stoning of adulterers might indirectly teach the evils of sexual sin, but the actual command – to kill such people – is clearly as impossible and inappropriate for you and me to obey as piercing the ear of our slaves in a slavery-free culture. These civil laws are particularly culturally-conditioned, and for that reason alone not possible to obey to the letter, even if they were not, like Sharia law, contradictory to the laws of the lands in which Christians live.

The third category is what we would term the moral law, derived more or less directly from the ten commandments. What is interesting to me is that our instinctive sense of the universality of these, as opposed to the previous two categories, is very often confirmed either within the OT text, or in the specific teaching of the New Testament. I mentioned in my article how the various Mosaic categories of sexual immorality, and idolatry, are explained as abominations which, before Moses even received the law, had caused the land to vomit out its pagan inhabitants. And so it is not surprising that both idolatry and sexual immorality as taught in the law are condemned throughout the New Testament. God’s teaching has not changed on lesbian archbishops.

Then again, Jesus undoubtedly gives moral teaching that expands, rather than abolishing, the Mosaic teaching on murder, adultery, abuse of others and so on, telling us that he has not come to abolish even a jot or tittle of the law, but to fulfil them. This saying does not contradict either what we have already seen about the impossibility of keeping the “ritual” or “civil” laws of Israel, nor the NT teaching that we are no longer under law, but under grace. For Jesus fulfils all the ritual law in the temple of his body and in his sacrifice once for all, just as he fulfils the requirements of the moral law in purifying our sins past, present and future. His teaching treats the law as it was intended to be understood by believers – as a window into the will of God for our character, and as a warning to the unsaved that God takes sin as seriously as he did when Israel was in the wilderness.

What remains, I conclude, is that the law is the word of God about morality which, by the conviction and power of the Spirit, the true Christian will desire to attain. I might add that it doesn’t forbid the Messianic Jew from maintaining the traditions of his people, so long as it is in the way of the Spirit, not the letter. For a Jewish (especially an Israeli) believer to keep shabbat in solidarity with his people’s tradition, but still to meet with the brethren in Christ on the Lord’s Day, seems absolutely reasonable.

And the fact that Christ is the Passover lamb for the world does not mean the original Passover of Israel by the Lord should not be celebrated by Jews, any more than I should abandon Armistice Day as an English Christian. In fact, the Jewish believer, freed from the law’s demands, can celebrate Passover in good conscience, even though the absence of the Jerusalem temple makes its celebration according to the torah instructions impossible… as, I have found, is keeping the whole 613 commandments to the letter.

My conclusion is hardly a novel understanding, as Christians have taught much the same when condemning both legalism and licence down the millennia. In fact, when I was recently researching the history of my church, and specifically the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith of which one of our own elders was a signatory, I came across what it says about the Law, which would have saved my re-inventing the wheel if I’d read it before, as it agrees entirely with what I conclude above. Here it is, to show that it should never have been a controversy in the 21st century anyway.

Chapter 19: Of the Law of God
1. God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience written in his heart, and a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it. (Genesis 1:27; Ecclesiastes 7:29; Romans 10:5; Galatians 3:10, 12 )

2. The same law that was first written in the heart of man continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness after the fall, and was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments, and written in two tables, the four first containing our duty towards God, and the other six, our duty to man.
( Romans 2:14, 15; Deuteronomy 10:4 )

3. Besides this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly holding forth divers instructions of moral duties, all which ceremonial laws being appointed only
to the time of reformation, are, by Jesus Christ the true Messiah and only law-giver, who was furnished with power from the Father for that end abrogated and taken away.
( Hebrews 10:1; Colossians 2:17; 1 Corinthians 5:7; Colossians 2:14, 16, 17; Ephesians 2:14, 16 )

4. To them also he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now by virtue of that institution; their general equity only being of moral use.
( 1 Corinthians 9:8-10 )

5. The moral law doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof, and that not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it; neither doth Christ in the Gospel any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.
( Romans 13:8-10; James 2:8, 10-12; James 2:10, 11; Matthew 5:17-19; Romans 3:31 )

6. Although true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned, yet it is of great use to them as well as to others, in that as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly; discovering also the sinful pollutions of their natures, hearts, and lives, so as examining themselves thereby, they may come to further conviction of, humiliation for, and hatred against, sin; together with a clearer sight of the need they have of Christ and the perfection of his obedience; it is likewise of use to the regenerate to restrain their corruptions, in that it forbids sin; and the threatenings of it serve to shew what even their sins deserve, and what afflictions in this life they may expect for them, although freed from the
curse and unallayed rigour thereof. The promises of it likewise shew them God’s approbation of obedience, and what blessings they may expect upon the performance thereof, though not as due to them by the law as a covenant of works; so as man’s doing good and refraining from evil, because the law encourageth to the one and deterreth from
the other, is no evidence of his being under the law and not under grace.
( Romans 6:14; Galatians 2:16; Romans 8:1; Romans 10:4; Romans 3:20; Romans 7:7, etc; Romans 6:12-14; 1 Peter
3:8-13 )

7. Neither are the aforementioned uses of the law contrary to the grace of the Gospel, but do sweetly comply with it, the Spirit of Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely and cheerfully which the will of God, revealed in the law, requireth to be done.
( Galatians 3:21; Ezekiel 36:27 )