The Believer and the Law

Introduction

Few questions divide sincere Christians more persistently than the believer's relationship to the law of Moses. The answers on offer are not merely academic preferences. They determine whether a man reads Leviticus as binding legislation, as abolished irrelevance, or as something else again, and they determine what he tells a new convert who asks whether he must keep the Sabbath.

This paper argues that the law of Moses was given as a single covenant and reached its terminus in Christ, that the believer therefore stands under the law of Christ rather than under Sinai, and that this transfer neither licenses sin nor leaves the Christian without a standard, because the law of Christ is more demanding than the code it replaced and is written on the heart by the Spirit rather than on stone.

The position is that of New Covenant Theology, articulated for a wide readership by Charles Leiter, who rejects the customary division of the Mosaic law into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories on the ground that Scripture never makes that division, and who defines the law of Christ as Christ Himself as the standard, with love as His command, obeyed in the power of the Spirit.¹

The Foundation: A Change of Covenant

The argument does not rest primarily on the phrase “law of Christ”, which is rare, but on the covenant-transfer texts, which are not. Paul argues from marriage that death dissolves jurisdiction: a wife is bound to her husband while he lives and released at his death, and “you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ”.² He states the believer's standing without qualification: “you are not under law but under grace”, and again, “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law”.³

The same claim appears structurally in Hebrews. The argument turns on priesthood: “when the priesthood is changed, of necessity there takes place a change of law also”, and the first covenant has been made “obsolete” and is “ready to disappear”.⁴ Paul makes the same point with the tutor: the law functioned as a guardian for a defined period, and “now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor”.⁵ Notably, he describes the Sinai administration itself as a ministry that was “fading away”.⁶

These texts speak of the law as a unit with a beginning and an end, not as a composite from which one category is retained while two expire. That observation is the exegetical basis for rejecting the threefold division, to which we now turn.

The Threefold Division

The historic Reformed position divides the Mosaic law into moral, ceremonial, and judicial precepts, holds that the ceremonial laws were abrogated and the judicial expired with the state of Israel, and maintains that the moral law “doth forever bind all”.⁷ The case for it is stronger than its critics often allow, and it should be stated at full strength before it is answered.

The Decalogue is marked off within the narrative itself. It is spoken audibly by God to the whole assembly, and Moses records that God “added no more”; it is written by the finger of God; and it is placed inside the ark rather than beside it, while the remaining legislation comes through Moses as mediator.⁸ A reader who says Scripture nowhere distinguishes among the commandments has not accounted for these features. The distinction is not invented by systematicians; it is dramatized by the text.

The reply is that these features establish prominence rather than separability. The Decalogue is the covenant document of Sinai, which is precisely why it is deposited in the ark, and a covenant summary is not thereby a freestanding moral code that survives its own covenant. The threefold categories remain useful descriptions of subject matter. What they cannot bear is the further claim that one category continues to bind by its own authority after the covenant that promulgated it has been declared obsolete.

Matthew 5:17-20

No text is more contested, and none is more frequently asserted rather than argued. Jesus says, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.”⁹

The verb translated fulfill carries several possible senses: to confirm and establish, to obey perfectly, to bring to an intended goal, or to fill up the meaning by authoritative interpretation. Matthew's own usage settles the primary sense. Every previous occurrence of the verb in this Gospel is prophetic-fulfillment language, and the object here is “the Law or the Prophets” taken together as a single prophetic witness.¹⁰ Jesus is claiming to be the goal toward which the whole prior revelation was moving, with authoritative interpretation as the mode in which that goal is expressed in the verses that follow.

Verse 18 requires more care than it usually receives. “Until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” There are two temporal clauses, and they are not obviously the same terminus. The first is durative and rhetorical. The second, and controlling one, is an events-clause: until the things happen. Read within Matthew's fulfillment frame, that terminus is Christ's own redemptive accomplishment. The verse therefore asserts the law's inviolability until a terminus rather than its permanence without one.

Two honest concessions belong here. First, the verse does not announce that the terminus has arrived, and “heaven and earth” elsewhere in Matthew carries genuinely eschatological weight, so this reading is defensible rather than compelled.¹¹ Second, verse 19 is the harder problem: “whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” The most natural antecedent of “these commandments” is the commandments of the law just mentioned, and the verb is ordinary obedience language. The position taken here requires reading the phrase forward to the commands Jesus is about to give, which is possible in a Gospel that ends by charging the disciples to teach all that He commanded, but it is the most contested move in the argument and should be labeled as such rather than slipped past.¹²

The strongest support for the present reading is not verse 18 but the six antitheses that follow, and they do not all behave the same way. The sayings on murder and adultery intensify the commandments toward their intent and read comfortably as correction of a shallow externalism.¹³ The sayings on divorce, oaths, and retaliation do not. There Jesus restricts what Deuteronomy permitted, forbids outright what the law regulated, and sets aside a judicial statute.¹⁴ That is not the work of an expositor clarifying Moses. It is the work of one who legislates in His own name, and it is done in continuity with the law's true trajectory rather than against it. Fulfillment of this kind neither abolishes nor perpetuates. It supersedes by completing.

The Law of Christ

Precision is required about the phrase itself, because overstatement here invites an easy rebuttal. The exact expression occurs once, where Paul writes that bearing one another's burdens fulfills the law of Christ.¹⁵ A different construction appears where Paul describes himself as not being without the law of God but “under the law of Christ”; the term there is an adjective of legal standing, used elsewhere in the New Testament of a “lawful” assembly.¹⁶ The concept therefore appears twice, in two constructions, and the exact nominal phrase once.

The second passage is the more useful of the two for the present argument, because it is explicitly jurisdictional. Paul is describing which authority he stands under while adapting his practice among Jews and Gentiles, and he places himself under Christ's jurisdiction rather than under the law from which he has been released. An objection arises from the immediate context, since Paul cites Deuteronomy in the same chapter to support the right of ministers to material provision.¹⁷ The objection assumes that a terminated covenant becomes unusable, which is not the claim. Scripture remains authoritative and instructive as revelation even where its stipulations no longer bind as covenant law, which is precisely how Paul uses it: he draws a principle from the text, and he explicitly says it was written for our sakes.

What, then, does the law of Christ contain? Leiter's answer is that it is Christ Himself as the standard, expressed in the command to love and empowered by the Spirit.¹⁸ The New Testament supports that shape. Jesus gives a “new commandment” to love as He has loved; John reduces the commandment to belief in Christ and love of one another; and Paul twice states that love fulfills the law.¹⁹

What Actually Changes

If the content substantially overlaps, a fair question arises: what has changed besides vocabulary? Three things.

First, the mode of transmission. Most of the Decalogue reappears in the New Testament as binding on Christians, but it arrives through Christ and His apostles rather than through Sinai's continuing jurisdiction. Precision matters here more than the usual formulation allows. Six of the ten are cited directly in the New Testament as commands, two more are unmistakably commanded though not quoted, and one, the prohibition of taking the Lord's name in vain, has no direct New Testament reissuance at all, though related material addresses oaths and the dishonoring of God's name by conduct.²⁰ The tenth is instructive precisely because it is repeated: a command reissued by apostolic authority binds the Christian whether or not Moses also gave it.

Second, the Sabbath is not carried forward, and this is the clearest case of a Mosaic institution that does not transfer. Paul places Sabbath days among shadows whose substance is Christ, and treats the observance of days as a matter of individual conscience, which would be unthinkable for a command he regarded as perpetually binding on all men.²¹ The Jerusalem council, deciding what to require of Gentile believers, does not mention it.²² Israel's own Scriptures describe the Sabbath as a sign specific to that covenant and locate its promulgation at Sinai: “You came down on Mount Sinai... and You made known to them Your holy sabbath.”²³

The strongest objection is that the seventh day is blessed and sanctified at creation, long before Israel existed, and that Exodus grounds the command in that creation week.²⁴ That objection should be conceded in part rather than deflected. Exodus does ground the command in creation, and pointing to Deuteronomy's alternative rationale in the exodus does not remove it.²⁵ The distinction that answers it is between the pattern God appeals to and the covenant that imposes the obligation. Genesis records that God rested, blessed, and sanctified; it records no command given to any man, no Sabbath observance by any patriarch, and does not use the term. A creation pattern can ground a later covenant stipulation without itself constituting a standing obligation on all humanity.

Third, and most importantly, the law of Christ is not merely a different list but a different mechanism. The new covenant promise was never a better set of tablets but an internal work: “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it”, and “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes”.²⁶ Paul describes the outcome precisely: God condemned sin in the flesh “so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit”.²⁷ The requirement is met in the believer, not by his renewed effort at an external code, but by the Spirit producing what the code could only demand.

The Antinomian Objection

The charge is predictable and deserves a direct answer: if the Mosaic law is terminated, what restrains the believer? Three replies.

The first is that the standard has risen rather than fallen. The Sermon on the Mount requires a righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees, reaches the anger behind the murder and the lust behind the adultery, and closes by commanding perfection. No one who has read it can claim that release from Moses is a relaxation of demand.

The second concerns James, which supplies the hardest texts for this position and should be met rather than avoided. James speaks of “the perfect law, the law of liberty”, calls love of neighbor “the royal law”, and warns that a man who stumbles at one point is guilty of all while quoting two commandments of the Decalogue.²⁸ The reading proposed here is that the law of liberty is the law of Christ, that James cites the two commandments as they come to the church through Christ's law of love, and that his argument concerns the indivisibility of that standard rather than the continuing jurisdiction of Sinai. That reading is contested and a candid writer says so; what cannot be maintained is that these verses simply support the position without needing an argument.

The third reply concerns the practical worry that a Christian is left with a checklist and no guidance where the New Testament is silent. This misunderstands what the law of Christ is. A code addresses cases; a person establishes a standard. The believer who asks what love requires of him, in a situation the epistles never contemplated, is not without direction, because he has the character of Christ, the whole of Scripture as instruction, the indwelling Spirit, and a community charged with bearing his burdens. That is a fuller resource than a list, not a thinner one.

Sanctification

The role of the law of Christ in sanctification follows from all of this. It functions as the shape of a life already secured rather than as the condition of securing it. The believer obeys because he has been transferred, not in order to be transferred, and the commands of Christ describe what the Spirit is producing in him rather than what he must generate to be accepted.

This ordering has pastoral consequences that are not abstract. A man who reads commands as terms of acceptance experiences every failure as a threat to his standing, and the result is either despair or the quiet self-deception of lowered standards. A man who knows his standing was settled at the cross can afford to look honestly at a command that exposes him, because the exposure costs him nothing he was relying on. Obedience then becomes what it was always meant to be, the response of a son rather than the anxiety of a servant.

Conclusion

The law of Moses was given as one covenant, served its appointed purpose, and reached its end in Christ. The believer is not under it. He is under the law of Christ, which is Christ Himself as standard, love as command, and the Spirit as power. The strongest case for this reading is not any single proof text but the convergence of the covenant-transfer passages, and its most honest form concedes what it cannot prove: that Matthew 5:18 permits this reading without compelling it, and that verse 19 remains a genuine difficulty. What the position does explain, better than its rivals, is why the New Testament can simultaneously declare the believer free from the law and hold him to a standard higher than Sinai ever imposed. The freedom is from a covenant. The standard is a person.