For many Christians today, Old Testament Law is a bit of a fog. It feels mysterious, irrelevant, brutal, or some combination of those things. And, in any case, didn’t Jesus overturn it?
Though you might expect a robust defence of the Law from me, as an Old Testament specialist, I can’t dispute that there’s an element of truth in each of those things. Yes, it is at times mysterious – or, at least, hard to understand. This is because it is speaking to a culture so ancient and so alien to our own that it can be hard to find points of connection with our own. Yes, it is brutal, at times. This was a Bronze Age society. They had no prisons or probation officers. Punishments feel harsh to us. But perhaps such a perspective is shaped by a society which is already constrained by effective law and order. Many of us, thankfully, have little direct experience of living in a country where violence is unchecked; where rapacious sexual desire is unrestrained, and where constraints are not imposed to limit the more harmful expressions of greed and desire. Those who have experienced this – in either the ancient world or our own – will testify that where such laws are not in place, the strong eat the weak alive, and society breaks down into lethal anarchy.
Jesus and the Law
What about the allegation of irrelevance – that Jesus makes the Law redundant? Again, true, in part. Certainly, as the New Testament clearly teaches (eg Acts 10:14-15; Galatians 3:1-9), the Old Testament Law does not bind Christians as it bound the Israelites of Moses’ time or the Jews of the first century.
But none of these allegations is wholly true, either. The Law was never intended to provide a complete set of laws to govern all conceivable circumstances. In this way, it operates rather differently from the laws that we have today, in Britain at least. British law seeks to close every loophole, remove every ambiguity. Old Testament law functions to offer paradigms and ‘for-instances’, providing worked examples of how to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might, and how to love your neighbour as yourself (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:17-18; compare with Mark 12:30-31).
