JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today’s podcast focuses on the law of Moses and the Christian. As we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, Moses saw a day coming when God’s people would obey the law. By this he meant the law recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Yet Christ has come. How has this coming changed the way God’s people relate to the law of Moses? Tom and Jason talk about the 3 R’s New Testament authors used when thinking about the law. They also talk about two images Jason uses to help Christians understand how we ought to relate to the law now that we live in the New covenant era. We’ve put a link to Jason’s new book, Delighting in the Old Testament: Through Christ and for Christ in the show notes. This book will be a great help as you consider how Jesus makes Moses’s law matter.

TK: Welcome to GearTalk, Jason. We are back together and we are actually on the same continent right now.

JD: Praise the Lord. Delighted to be back from Ethiopia. What a successful and sweet trip to see God working, a team unified, children ministered to, and trainees equipped. It really was an all-around very sweet experience.

TK: Right now, how’s your body feeling as far as jet lag and all that? Are we going to get the 100% Jason today or are we getting the 80% Jason or the 20% Jason?

JD: I think it’s more like the 80% Jason, a little weary still, but God is kind.

TK: Alright, I love it, 80% is great. I trust this is going to be a blessing today. We’ve been looking in the book you wrote Delighting in the Old Testament. We’ve been putting a link in our show notes for this. There’s a section on the law I found really helpful, Jason. I’m thinking of the section that says Part 4: Living Well: How Jesus Makes Moses’s Law Matter. So I want to kick off with what you said in these introductory comments because it can seem a little bit contradictory. I’m on page 192, and I’m just going to read your comments: “While most people in Moses’s old covenant audience were stubborn, rebellious, unbelieving, and spiritually disabled,” and then you list verses from Deuteronomy 9 and 29, then you say, “Moses anticipated a day when Yahweh’s redeemed community would hear and heed all the words he was commanding in Deuteronomy,” and then you quote Deuteronomy 30 verse 8: “And you shall again obey the voice of the Lord and keep all his commandments that I command you today.” So when we talked a few weeks ago, you had said that Moses’s words there, he’s seeing the new covenant people, correct?

JD: Correct. He’s looking ahead beyond his present audience. He’s been shepherding them for 40 years at this point, and his key words, as he already noted for them, were stubborn, rebellious, and unbelieving. In Deuteronomy 31, he’ll say they’ve been stubborn: “You’ve been stubborn since the day I knew you. How much more after my death?” God even declares to Moses, “You’re about to die, and this people will rise up and whore after other gods in the land.” And then God just says, “My anger will be kindled against them, and I will cast them out.” That is the future of the old covenant from Moses’s perspective. As Paul would reflect, the old covenant from God’s ultimate design bore a ministry of death, a ministry of condemnation. But that was not God’s final word. He would bring healing. The great physician would show up at the end of the age on the other side of Israel’s death and truly work a resurrection, transforming people’s hearts and empowering them to live and be and do like they were never able to live and be and do in the Old Covenant age. Certainly there was a remnant, but as Paul himself would declare in Romans 11, he says, “Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking.” And there I think he’s referring to they failed to reach life, they failed to reach the declaration of righteousness, both of which within the old covenant were the goal and not the ground or the basis of that relationship. He says the elect obtained it, people like Moses and Joshua, Rahab and Ruth. They did attain what they were supposed to, what they were seeking, because they attained it by faith. But the rest, Paul says, were hardened. God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see, ears that would not hear, all the way down to Paul’s very day. And with that statement “down to this day,” he’s actually quoting Deuteronomy 29:4 where Moses said, “You’ve seen all that I did against the Egyptians, the plagues, the power. Yet to this day, God has not given you a heart to know or eyes to see or ears to hear.” Israel had a stubborn heart and God did not overcome that stubbornness. Indeed, he made it more hard in order to make the old covenant come to an end and show the absolute need for the great new covenant mediator Jesus.

TK: So Moses is seeing a people who will obey the law. He said their hearts will be changed. He’s seeing us. So we have that in Deuteronomy. Then we also have verses like this in the New Testament. We have Matthew chapter 5 where Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, until heaven and Earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” And then he talks about someone who would relax one of the laws, and he says whoever does this, relaxes them, will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven. So I have that in Matthew. Then I have Romans 6:14 where it says, “Sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.” So now I’m not under law, under grace. Jesus said something about relaxing the law, and I can’t do that. And then Romans 13 says, “Owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So as a believer, how do I hold all these things together and make sense of them? And at the same time, Moses’s words of there’s a people coming who will obey the law.

JD: Right. So we have Jesus saying I didn’t come to abolish the Old Testament, but to fulfill it.

TK: I can’t throw it away. I can’t say the Old Testament doesn’t matter. I’m a new covenant believer, that’s old history.

JD: Right. Yet Paul is explicit: we’re not under the law, that is, under the law covenant. Moses isn’t our highest master. Jesus is. And through Jesus, we are under grace. And yet the Christians should still seek to fulfill what the law was all about, namely the law of love. So “owe no one anything except to love one another, for the one who loves has fulfilled the law.” So it really is the right question. How do we put all of these together? On the one hand, Moses is viewed as something we’re not under, and yet on the other hand, Moses is lastingly relevant, and we’re supposed to in some way be heeding what he called us to heed. How are all of these to be lined up? And I don’t think the answer is to say that people like Jesus or Paul were confused and sometimes saying one thing, sometimes saying another. So we step back prayerfully with our Bibles open and ask, OK, how do we put this together?

Moses viewed his audience as an audience that was hard-hearted, unable to keep the law. Yet he envisioned a day after the exile, during the days of the New covenant prophetic mediator, that Israel would heed God’s voice. Moses commanded, “Hear, O Israel.” But he says God didn’t give you ears to hear. But there’s a future day coming when he says you will hear the words that I command you and you will keep everything that I am commanding you today.

TK: So you will be law-keepers and that’s it.

JD: Yeah, there’s a future day of law keeping. So this is Moses’s perspective, and Jesus and Paul, I’m going to propose, have the exact same perspective. Moses is not our governor, our Lord. We are not directly under him because we’re part of the new covenant, not the old. So Moses is not our direct guide or judge, but through Jesus, when Moses’s law is understood through the person of Christ, all of a sudden Moses’s law can be seen as a wise guide for us, clarifying for us in another time and another covenant how broad and deep love for God and love for neighbor was. And not only is it a guide, it points ahead for us to celebrate who Jesus is as the great justifier of the sheep, that he is the perfectly righteous one who perfectly obeyed where no other man could obey. Jesus is the great God-man who embodies right living in his entire person. And it’s that right living upon which we now stand. He secured the righteousness. He secured the life that was merely promised in the old covenant. Paul in Romans 7:10, the command that promised life to me brought death until he met Jesus on the road to Damascus and by faith embraced the life that Jesus had secured. And now that becomes the foundation of every Christian’s existence. God being 100% for us. And our entire pursuit of obedience to the law of Christ is on a different foundation than it was for the majority of the Old Covenant saints. They with hard hearts approached obedience as if by works. We approach it through the context of faith, and now Moses’s law can matter, guiding us, but we always have to consider it in light of Christ, in light of the one who has fulfilled the law’s demands. And as we’re going to see, when we consider the law through Jesus, we recognize that that law in being fulfilled can experience at times alterations. The law could be maintained, it could be transformed, but it can also be annulled. And through that lens of Christ, that’s how we approach Moses’s law now to understand how it matters.

TK: So I’m just kind of summarizing your introductory comments, and you just said it, but I’m going to read a sentence here. You had a thesis. And you say the thesis is this: the Mosaic law does not directly bind the Christian in a legal manner, but we treat all the Old Testament laws as profitable and instructive when we read them through the lens of Christ.

JD: That’s right. That’s where we’re heading today. And so I hope that we can guide our people in understanding a Christian’s proper relationship to Moses’s law. And to do that, I find it quite helpful to capture 3 R’s in English, R as in the letter, that Brian Rosner put forth in his book. I believe it was called The Commandments of God.

TK: That’s right, Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God. Yep.

JD: There we go, “Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God” in the New Studies in Biblical Theology series. And I’m not going to unpack his commentary, but rather use my own commentary. But I am going to start with his three R statements because I find them quite helpful and clear for Christians today. Does that sound good, Tom?

TK: It does. I think starting with the three R’s and then kind of as you unpack them, you have two really helpful images that have helped me a lot as I’ve talked to people. In my mind then, keeping these three R’s, OK, these are categories I need to have and then to be able to visualize. OK, what does it look like as I think about these old covenant laws? And already know what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like something that I’d say doesn’t matter. I don’t care or it’s silly. I can’t as a believer have that category.

JD: That’s right.

TK: So I think this is really helpful to walk this through. So let’s start with these three R’s.

JD: OK, the three R’s are repudiate, replace, and reappropriate. So #1, the biblical authors, in a very real sense, repudiate the Mosaic Law covenant. Here’s Paul in Galatians 3. He can just say before faith came, we were held captive under the law. That is the law of Moses that came 430 years after Abraham. We were held captive. He portrays the era of the law as an imprisonment that people could not get out of. They were bound as a slave under the law of Moses. They were imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came. So the law was a prison until faith came, that is, until Christ came. So we’re moving between eras. Paul is talking from a redemptive historical perspective. The era before Jesus is the era before faith, when lack of belief characterized the people. And it’s an era of enslavement to the law. When you give a good law to a hard-hearted people, it becomes a legalistic means to trying to win God’s favor and it will never work. We can never be good enough and it destroyed the people. But then, Paul says, “But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you’re all sons of God through faith.” So he repudiates that old covenant law. We are no longer under the Mosaic administration. It is behind us now that we’ve met Jesus by faith.

Paul’s language in 2nd Corinthians 3: The Old covenant law bore a ministry of death, a ministry of condemnation. That’s what resulted from Moses’s work for the majority of Israel. They broke the covenant because their hearts weren’t changed. What the law was powerless to do, weakened as it was by the flesh, God in turn did through Jesus. So old covenant ministry of death, ministry of condemnation, Second Corinthians 3:7 and 9, but it’s overcome or superseded by a new covenant ministry of righteousness. Righteousness is about right order in the world, wherein God is always at the top. God’s righteousness is ultimately his passion for right order. That is his passion to see himself glorified in all things and everything underneath him in its proper place. So we are righteous insofar as we reflect God’s passion for his own glory, his own renown, and that’s what we failed to do. We have lacked that glory. We’ve failed to display him rightly, and because of that, we need a savior. The Old Covenant resulted in people’s condemnation rather than declaring them right or supplying them life because they couldn’t perfectly obey, and yet that was what the law demanded, a perfect obedience, and Jesus secured that perfect obedience being born under the law at the proper time.

TK: So with that, as I think about the law and the three R’s here and again repudiate, the biblical authors replace the Mosaic Law and reappropriate, I can’t just think of it simplistically and only have this repudiate category then. Because that’s only going to be part of the story.

JD: It really is only part of the story, and yet many Christians stop there and all of a sudden they don’t think Moses matters at all for us. And so they camp out in the New Testament, failing to recognize how often the New Testament authors are actually drawing on Moses’s law and applying it to the church. So we’re going to get there. But yes, it’s absolutely important, I think, to start with repudiate but recognize that we can’t stop there. God’s purpose for the Mosaic law was that it would ultimately multiply transgression, expose sin, bring wrath in order to show that one is justified by faith apart from works of law. And so in a book like hebrews, what we read is in speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. That’s what we’re talking about. This repudiation of the old covenant law, the law, the writer of hebrews says, made nothing perfect. But in Christ, what do we find? According to the Book of hebrews, we find better hope, a better covenant, better promises, better sacrifices, better possession, a better country, a better life and a better resurrection. All of those betters, I mean, just type it into a concordance and anyone listening to this podcast can can read them all.

So in short, that’s what I want to get just for summarizing the first reality: biblical authors repudiate the Mosaic Law covenant. But that’s not it. That doesn’t mean—I mean if we stopped there, we might think oh we have no law. But that’s not the case at all. We are not antinomian. We are those who follow the biblical authors in replacing Moses’s law with the new covenant Law of Christ. So it’s to that R, that replacement, that we now want to go, Tom.

TK: All right. And the way you said it, so the first one, biblical authors repudiate the Mosaic Law covenant, and you used a big word there. You said antinomian, can you tell us what you mean by that before we move forward?

JD: Great. Anti is against, nomos is the Greek word for law, and there’s a large movement that embraces the work of God, of Christ’s gracious work of salvation, that follows it by saying pretty much we can live as we want. We have no law. We are free from the bonds of legal demands, and so they claim that by grace Jesus justifies us, makes us right with God. But they fail to recognize that by grace, Jesus also sanctifies us. That part of what he purchased at the cross was not only our right standing with God, but our holiness, our pursuit progressively over a lifetime of a greater likeness to the Lord Jesus. And antinomian means no law. I have freedom to live as

I will, and that’s not the biblical picture. Indeed, the biblical picture is we have replaced Moses’s law with what’s called the law of Christ.

TK: All right, so that’s what number two in the three R’s is: biblical authors replace Moses’s law with the new covenant Law of Christ.

JD: Yes. So we’re thinking about texts like Romans 6:14. You’re not under law, but you are under grace. Now, what would that mean? God’s grace doesn’t make our pursuit of God or our working unnecessary. What I want to suggest is that it’s actually God’s grace that makes our pursuit of God or our working even possible. Paul would say I worked harder than all of them.

TK: Right, right.

JD: But it was not I, but the grace of God that was in me. Romans 10:4, the end of the law is Christ. This is where it was heading all along. The end of the law is Christ for righteousness to everyone who believes. As a written legal code, not one of the 613 stipulations in the Mosaic law directly bind Christians today. That’s what I’m proposing. The Jews count 613 commands, whether positive commands or negative prohibitions. And I’m saying that none of them are the direct overseer of Christians, because we’re not under that law. Christ has come and he is like the—the law was pointing to Jesus as its goal. But Jesus is also the end, the temporal completion of the era when the old covenant law was the governor of God’s people. We’ve been set free from that prison and so now what it means is that we are bound under the law of Christ.

Here’s Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 9:20 and 21. Paul, who is a Jewish believer, but his identity is less Jewish and more—oh, I mean it has less to do with his physical biology and more to do with his new profession and identity with Jesus the ultimate Jew. So he can say things like “a Jew is not one outwardly but a Jew is one inwardly by the Spirit with a circumcised heart.” And so he says “to the Jews I became as a Jew in order to win Jews.” he would not eat offensive meat when he was around them, he would follow Jewish patterns and principles. He knew the customs. “To those under the law, I became as one under the law.” But then he adds, “though not being under the law myself.” That is, he was not under the law of Moses. Moses was not his governor. But why did he become as if he were under the law? he says it’s that he might win those under the law.

But to those outside the law, to the Gentiles who never had the Mosaic covenant, who were not bound by Moses ever, he says “to those outside the law, I actually became as one outside the law.” he was very comfortable, it appears, eating bacon, whereas his Jewish contemporaries wouldn’t do it. But he recognized that in Christ’s overcoming all that was unclean, that included his overcoming the ultimate unclean animal, the serpent himself, and therefore it destroyed this distinction of unclean and clean. Jesus made all things right in overcoming—in the overcoming work he did at the cross and therefore Paul was actually absolutely free. To those who were outside, become like those outside. But then he adds, “not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ.” So he’s not under the law of Moses, but he nevertheless is still under the Law of God, that is the law of Christ, and he would be bound by this law that he might win those outside the law. Paul in Galatians 6:2, “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

TK: So Jason, would it be fair to say if I imagine I have—like I imagine I’m watching Paul and he has two things in front of him, one on the left side, I’m just imagining that Moses’ tablets, the 10 Commandments and everything connected to that, let’s say you said 613. And then I have Christ on the right hand side, and I’m imagining Paul and I’m watching him how he makes his decisions on—you mentioned how he behaves towards a Jew, how he behaves towards a Gentile, what he eats or whatever. What you’re saying, if I’m hearing right, is he’s not making his decision based on “I’m passing directly through the law of Moses.” Instead, he’s passing through Christ.

JD: That’s right, he is assessing the lasting validity of Moses only in light of the person and work of Christ. And in Christ’s coming, he gives clarity for a new people living under a new covenant what God’s lasting eternal law means. When he commanded Adam and Eve in the garden to not eat of the tree of the knowledge pertaining to good and evil, that was a specific law for a specific time that you and I are not called to keep.

TK: This is what it looks like, yeah.

JD: And yet it doesn’t mean there isn’t lasting value that we can’t benefit from assessing what was given to Adam and Eve. Similarly, God gave specific legislation through Moses for a people living at a specific time under a specific covenant, and I’m proposing we’re not under any of that legislation. The 10 Commandments do not govern us directly. They don’t govern our country, nor should they govern the church. But all of the 10 Commandments, and indeed all 613 of the commands do relate to us, but only in light of what Christ has done and who he is. And we’ve got to evaluate every single one of those commandments in light of who Jesus is and what he has done.

And that really moves us into our third category. Biblical authors actually do reappropriate Moses’ law through Christ. Let me just give us three quick examples here, Tom. In Ephesians 6, Paul will say “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother (this is the first commandment with a promise), that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

TK: Right, so he’s seemingly—I mean, not seemingly. He’s applying an Old Testament law, law of Moses, to new covenant believers right there.

JD: That’s right. But he’s assuming the coming of Christ, the relationship, all of those spiritual blessings that have been secured in Jesus from Ephesians chapter one, like regeneration and adoption and election. All of these are already at work as he’s making statements to the church.

1 Timothy 5:17 and 18, he simply says “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,’ and, ‘The laborer deserves his wages.'”

TK: Again, from the law of Moses.

JD: That’s right. He’s calling on Deuteronomy and applying it to the church. But he’s doing it in light of the progress of redemptive history secured by Jesus. He’s taking a principle from the old covenant law and now applying it to the need to pay elders who are serving.

Again, Peter, 1 Peter chapter 1: “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.'” Peter draws on the book of Leviticus, the legislation in Leviticus, and has no hesitation applying it to Christians who have already been born again to a living hope. So he believes there is power and lasting validity—power to obey and lasting validity of Moses’s law for Christians who are now placed in Jesus and for whom God is 100% for them.

So all of these uses stand behind texts like “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction,” says Paul, “that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). Or 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17, “All Scripture”—and principally what Paul was talking about there was the Old Testament scriptures—“All of it is breathed out by God and is useful, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” So he’s seeing the Old Testament text as a means for believers, that is, believers in Jesus—those who approach the Old Testament through the lens of Christ find profitable guidance not only for themselves, but they can even correct straying brothers and sisters through the law of Moses. But we have to understand how to do it, because through Jesus sometimes the law is maintained, sometimes the law is transformed, and other times it’s actually annulled.

TK: All right, so we’re moving from the three R’s. We said again repudiate, replace, reappropriate, and this is an image you’ve used in this book already. We talked about it, but a lens—can you kind of walk us through what we’re—so we can picture in our minds what we’re looking at here as you talk about the law moving from old covenant law to how a believer would access the law.

JD: We’re considering Jesus like the lens in a set of glasses. We have to look through the lens in order to see rightly. And yet what we’re seeing is what’s actually there. We’re seeing what’s in the Old Testament. And yet we’re now being able to see it because our spiritual disability has been fixed. What’s at stake in the lens, using the lens with Moses’s law, is considering that third category of how do we reappropriate Moses through Christ. And we have on the left side the law of Moses.

TK: And just if you imagine a lens from glasses, take the glasses frame away, just one of the glasses. And as you imagine it, stand it up on end. So it’s the lens is standing up and down.

JD: So we have a lens that’s standing up and down. That lens represents the person and work of Jesus. On the left side before the lens is that age of imprisonment. It’s the law of Moses where we get laws like the Sabbath or don’t commit adultery or build a parapet, that is a little fence around your flat roof so that your neighbor doesn’t fall off and die. All the laws related to clean and unclean food—these are all old covenant laws. Then on the right side of the lens we have the law of Christ. And what we’re considering is, what lasting benefit does the law of Moses have when we consider, for example, the adultery command? And we consider its lasting relevance, we find that when we come over to the law of Christ side and picture a beam of light moving from the law of Moses side to the law of Christ as it goes through the lens, that light even gets focused—more intense, more refined. But if it goes through the center of the lens, it comes through very much in a straight line. And by that I’m referring to how the law is often maintained from the old to the new. It looks very much the same. “Don’t commit adultery” under the law of Moses looks very much the same as “don’t commit adultery” under the law of Christ.

I do think that we have a new power in keeping the law that not even the remnant of the Old Testament had, and that is because for two reasons: one, we look backwards and we see the person of Jesus. He is an exceptional pattern for us for how wide and how high the love for neighbor and love for God was to look. He just shows us. And so we get a text as we find at the end of 1 John chapter 2, where we read these words: “Whoever says he abides in Jesus ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” So there’s Jesus as our pattern, and that provides a fuel that not even Abraham or Isaiah had. But it’s more than that. Jesus is more than a pattern because when he died, he died to purify for himself a people who would be godly. And Titus chapter 2, and in doing so, we have a new power. We have promises that have been purchased through the blood of Christ. The pattern is there, but the power comes because now we have a God who is 100% for us.

For Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, for people like Jeremiah and Habakkuk, they were looking ahead to the day when the ultimate reality that stood behind the symbol of the sacrifices would come. For us, we look backward. Jesus has arrived, and we have a God who, in light of what Jesus has already accomplished, not in light of what he would do, but in light of what he’s done—we have a God who’s 100% for us. And we need that God 100% for us with all authority in heaven and on earth on our side when it comes to pursuing holiness, conquering sin, overcoming prejudice, bitterness, lust, laziness. How do we do that? We need a God who is already 100% for us. I’ve said it many times, recalling words that my former pastor said: the only sin that we can conquer is forgiven sin. We need God for us. And so even when something like the command to don’t commit adultery comes through the lens of Christ, the light of that law does not get bent. It just goes right through the center of the lens, but there’s still an intensification. It’s not given to any new people—it was across the board. It wasn’t only for Israel that they couldn’t commit adultery. It was built on the very rubric of nature—the faithfulness of a husband and a wife. The only way relationship will work is that they would maintain a faithfulness. And consistently throughout scripture where we see immorality or warped views of marriage, it does not end well. It’s destructive, it’s broken. And so while there is no extension to new players when we read that law, there still is a focusing and intensification because we have a new pattern and a new power.

Other laws like the parapet law, for example. I’ve got that in my lens.

TK: Building a little fence around your flat roof you mentioned.

JD: Yeah. So all of a sudden that was for a specific time, and you in Wisconsin and I in Kansas City here in the United States, we rarely have such flat-roofed houses and we’re not spending time on a flat roof. But we do have decks and some people have pools. And all of a sudden we can see a principle that even if the specific words don’t apply to us, the law is maintained through the image of just what does it look like to care for your neighbor and how you build your structures? The law is maintained with extension into numerous other contexts. I think this is exactly what happens when we consider how Paul is using the Old Testament text. If prohibitions against murder and adultery and theft and coveting are just maintained without extension, when we come to Moses’s charge not to muzzle an ox while it’s threshing, Christ’s work actually extends that principle’s application to include the paying of wages to ministers.

TK: So that’s how he got there.

JD: That’s right. It’s the same law, but now he’s extending the principle into new contexts with new applicable agents who are going to carry out that law. We’re not under the old covenant. We don’t have flat roofs or we may not even be working in the field where we might muzzle an ox. But the point is the principle stands and so the law is maintained through Jesus with extension into new peoples and to new contexts, but it’s the same. It’s the same principle. Nothing’s changed, just as it was manifest in the old covenant. Now it’s manifest in the law of Christ. So maintaining with and without extension.

TK: I think a help for that—if you owned a house, if you didn’t, you could think of it in terms of a vehicle. Whatever the reason, you would for instance do something on your vehicle isn’t because ultimately the Department of Motor Vehicles requires it. Even though that’s a very real thing, we live in a place where the government—the reason you would do something safe is because you love neighbor. That’s what the parapet building was about. You care for people, you love people because they’re made in God’s image. And so that thought of reading a command like that, and instead of just thinking that’s strange, they lived with houses with flat roofs, glad we don’t, and then dismissing it—there’s supposed to be a thought of, OK, how does that apply to me? And the fact that, you know, like you said, like maybe I have a swimming pool or maybe something else. And huh, that seems dangerous. I wonder if that law, because of the coming of Christ, I need to think carefully about what I would do with my swimming pool.

JD: That’s right. I think that God—that the Old Testament laws are part of Christian scripture designed exactly for that end. Where we don’t see long lists of laws in the new covenant, the basic principle, as Jesus said, the greatest commandment: love God. And another is like it: love your neighbor as you love yourself. How do we know what that’s supposed to look like? The 613 commands and prohibitions of the old covenant provide us an exceptional context for discerning the wide-ranging relevance of the law. And yet we read it through Christ having a new pattern and a new power, and also considering does Jesus coming change anything about that law? Is there any way in which it was anticipating him? And now because he has come, he fulfills it in a way that would not simply maintain the law like a straight line through the center of the lens, but actually be on the corners of the lens where that light as it enters the lens actually gets bent. And there’s a different angle to the lasting relevance of the law, where in that law is either transformed or even annulled when it comes through the law of Christ.

Those are questions I think every believer as they’re doing their devotions in Leviticus, in Numbers, Deuteronomy should be asking. Because this is Christian Scripture and God wants these laws to have lasting relevance to us, but not in a way that Moses is our direct guide or our direct judge, but in a way that we are now free living by faith under grace, empowered in ways most of the Old Testament, the old covenant members were not empowered because their hearts were still hard and their eyes were blind and their ears were deaf. But now through Jesus, what would be the lasting relevance of these laws? What does it tell us about God’s character in light of the coming of Christ? How do we see things reworked? What is the principle of love behind that law? Those are the kinds of questions we should be asking as we enter into these old covenant laws.

TK: So let me ask you, on the left-hand side of the lens, so the law of Moses side, it’s clearly a major law in the Old Testament: Sabbath. Keeping Sabbath. What we’re arguing here is Sabbath does not directly apply to the Christian through the law of Moses, as if Christ didn’t come. But if that law is passing through the lens of Christ, Jason, how would you say what happens to that law?

JD: The law, I believe, is—

TK: Does it directly pass through like it’s in the middle of the lens and nothing changed?

JD: No, I think it gets bent because the Sabbath is directly related to the redemptive historical progression. This is the progression of salvation history. From the beginning, God created in six days, worked six days, and then he rested on the seventh. He wasn’t lazy and he wasn’t weary. Rather, he had sat down in his throne and all was at peace with him, and he was at peace with the world. Then the fall came. God was still sovereign, but now he went back to work to reestablish right order. And to do that, he raised up Israel and even gave them a pattern of 6 plus 1, 6 plus 1 to recall for them what the goal was. Through Israel, the world was to be blessed. God was to reconstitute right order again through Israel.

Jesus comes where Israel the nation failed. Israel the person, Jesus, representing the people, came and did what Israel was supposed to do, and he becomes the agent of reestablishing right order. So Jesus can say, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, I will give you rest.” And that applies not only to the Jewish people, but to Gentile people, all of whom by faith can be adopted, transformed, given new birth certificates associated with the heavenly Jerusalem as their mother. And now we have a new father, our Eternal Father, Jesus Christ, and his bride, the wife of the lamb, the new heavenly Jerusalem. And we experience right order in reality. Now God is over on the throne of our lives. And one day all evil will be put down. But at the resurrection, Jesus inaugurated a new rest. He is, as it says, just a few verses after he calls “Come to me, all you who are labor and heavy laden, I will give you rest,” he declares just a few verses later, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath.” He is reconstituting Sabbath on a global universal scale. And so he marked that Sabbath on a Sunday, on the Lord’s Day, and so most of us gather on Sunday to celebrate the rest that he has secured, and to remind one another in this cursed and broken world—yes, that hope of rest is real.

We have it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One day is not the Sabbath. No. The goal of Israel’s existence—6 plus 1, 6 plus 1, 6 days of work, one day of rest—it’s been reached. Now people, some from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, can be gathered in and enjoy that rest of God with Yahweh on the throne, right order fully realized. It is a transforming of the law, so the light of the Sabbath law comes through the lens of Christ at one of the ends and in the process that light gets bent and the law is transformed into the sustaining rest.

We see a similar example, Tom, in Moses in Deuteronomy 22:22, calling for a capital punishment due to an offense of a man who sleeps in an immoral way with a woman. In Deuteronomy under the Mosaic law, it’s a capital offense. Paul quotes that text at the end of 1 Corinthians 5. When you have this man sleeping with his father’s wife and the entire church knows it, Paul applies it to the context of excommunication. The law gets transformed when Paul says ,“Purge out the evil from your midst” and he in doing so, he’s quoting Deuteronomy.

TK: He doesn’t say kill the man, though.

JD: He doesn’t say kill the man. The law has been transformed such that in the same way that death would have knocked him out of the old covenant community, now excommunication knocks him out of the new covenant community. And yet Paul applies the law, yet in a transformed way. And so I’m proposing that it would be improper to read the 10 Commandments and say, “Look, Sabbath was on a Saturday. Now it’s on a Sunday.” I don’t think you can prove that from the New Testament text anywhere. And yet, many Christians assert that. No, the Sabbath is seven days a week. The goal has been reached. Rest is now realized. It’s been inaugurated, initiated, but it will be finalized when all evil, all darkness, all curse is set aside. But it’s already now something we can enjoy. We can enjoy peace with God, hope in God, happiness in God today, 100%, because he is seated on the throne in the person of Christ, and he has overcome all evil. The Sabbath law, the capital punishment law are examples of through Christ, Moses still matters, but not in exactly the same way. The law has been transformed.

TK: So we have—and you already mentioned it, but we have laws in the Old Testament, certain ones like unclean food would be a good example, that we see the New Testament believers—and you said it earlier, Paul was eating like a Gentile when he was with Gentiles. So in that sense you—somebody could say well, he had no vision and he just abandoned that. But I think what you’re going to say is, no, actually, he did have the law, the law of Moses in mind, even when he’s eating bacon. You would say that?

JD: That’s right. Whereas the unclean animals of the Old Testament distinguished the Israelite from the non-Israelite, the Mosaic Covenant member from the non-Mosaic Covenant member, in the new covenant now all of a sudden Jesus has, through his work in overcoming the serpent who is the ultimate unclean animal, he has declared all foods clean. There’s no unclean animals anymore. And so, whereas not eating bacon used to distinguish God’s people, now the eating of bacon actually helps distinguish God’s people. By doing so, we are declaring victory. So I jokingly call bacon victory food.

TK: I have been with you in the boundary waters and enjoyed that victory food with you and our boys together.

JD: There we go. It was—God has done something, and in declaring that food clean, it also gave us a recognition to someone like Peter in Acts 10 and 11 that well, if all foods are clean, then that means there’s no barrier between the Jew and the Gentile. The new covenant is now broader and in the language of the Old Testament, the tent of Jerusalem needs to be widened. The pegs need to be spread out because now the people of God are going to be more. It’s going to include a number of folks that used to be recognized as Gentiles who are now being transformed by faith, given new identities associated with a new citizenship, a new address, a new family. And so in this instance, what was an old covenant law has been annulled. There’s certain foods that you can’t eat—that’s not the case anymore because Jesus has fulfilled the law. But in fulfilling it, he doesn’t maintain the law. He doesn’t transform this law. He actually annuls the law. And it still supplies us, though, a context for understanding something about the holiness of God, for understanding what it was exactly that Jesus did that allows us to eat bacon, whereas the Old Testament Israelites could not eat it. That law has been transformed through the work of Christ. And in my book I actually go into an extended case study of this issue along with the Sabbath and some other laws and give clarity as to why I believe the work of Christ at the cross actually would have very naturally been understood to alter the diet of Israel due to the relationship between unclean food and the unclean serpent in the garden.

TK: Jason, you have one more image here I’d like to talk about. So we pictured the lens standing up and the law of Moses on one side and the law of Christ on the other. Christ is the lens. You’ve also used a river and I’ll take it there that another way to picture what we’re talking about. So can you briefly just walk us through that image?

JD: Yes, we’ve got a river and at the top of the picture, the river is tiny. And as it comes closer to you, the river widens. Now it may appear that it’s just, you know, the same river the same width, but in the background there’s a bridge, and it only has one arch to it. But the nearer, the closer bridge has to have two arches due to the width of the river. And so my goal here was to actually say that on one side of the river is the old covenant. On the other side of the river is the new covenant. Jesus Christ provides the bridge. But for certain laws, the distance between the old and the new is wider, demanding—I mean, when Jesus fulfills that law, the gap between what the law looked like in the old and what it looks like in the new is actually further. It’s—

TK: Would you say Sabbath would fall into that category?

JD: Yeah. So the Sabbath law is a great example of when you have laws that are transformed. All of a sudden what they—the law appeared like in the old covenant, it looks different in the new. Whereas something like the command “don’t commit murder” in the old covenant, it’s as if the—there’s still a river because I’ve talked about the intensification. We now have a new pattern and a new power, but so—so it’s not like the old and the new are blurred. No, it’s still the old covenant and that’s a different law—a different covenantal relationship than the new covenant. There is a river between the two. But sometimes the laws are so close together, like the river is so skinny, the bridge of Christ, it doesn’t have to do much. The change between the old covenant law and the New covenant law is so small. It really—what honoring God by not murdering someone in the old covenant looks the same as honoring God by not murdering someone in the new covenant. The law itself is not changed, but it’s still two different covenantal administrations within Scripture. We are not under the old, we are under the new covenant law of Christ. And so there’s still a river that’s separating the two, and Christ is the one who ties the two together. But sometimes the closeness between the old and new covenant law is—it’s nearer than at other times. That’s what I’m trying to communicate through that image.

TK: Well, I think it’s really helpful. This chapter—in some ways it’s easier to live without the categories we’ve talked about today. Because I can just—if I’m not thinking this way, I can read the Old Testament and just say that was old, I’m sure glad I live in the new and not really deal with it at all. And what we’re saying here is you actually do need to think about these things. The New Testament believers, the apostles and the New Testament, Jesus himself, they were using the Old Testament law, so I can’t have that category where I just say it doesn’t matter. Those are silly things that belong to a different age. But I do need to reckon with the coming of Christ and that I live in a new era, the new covenant age. So, Jason, what would be just a very quick—if I’ve never thought this way before as a believer, how do I start?

JD: Well, I’d keep in mind passages like this—Romans 13:8 and 9: “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” Open up your heart and your mind to say, OK, any of the commandments—all of the commandments are about love of neighbor. And God’s called me to do that. Jesus said it was the second greatest command. And I can’t do it without Jesus’s help and I want to know what that should look like day in and day out.

And so your question is, where do people start? They could start in the Old Testament or they could start in the New. To start in the New means ever learning who Jesus is and what he’s accomplished so that you have a proper understanding of the lens by which to interpret the Old Testament. As that Old Testament comes through the lens of Christ, as that Old Testament law in all of its commands and its prohibitions comes through Jesus, you’re able to assess would this be the kind of law that would be maintained, transformed or annulled? And you assess that by comparing it to other laws. So first and foremost, Tom, I would say understand over and over again how the New Testament authors are using their Old Testament and recognize that from Jesus to Paul to Peter and John, we have examples of these Christian leaders led by the Person of Christ using their Bibles for Christians. So become convinced of it. Be convinced that the Old Testament is Christian scripture that includes lasting relevance for us.

Then you go back to the Old Testament. In your reading Exodus, and you come to a single law, and you’re asking yourself, how might this matter? And in my book, I give three steps and we can talk about that on a later podcast—3 steps for considering the lasting relevance of the law. Understanding what it meant in its original context, then considering it theologically, and then finally establishing the lasting principle. And honestly, Tom, I think that would be an excellent podcast in and of itself, where with a number of laws we actually work them through that process to help people begin to think more about in their devotions or in their sermon prep or in their lesson prep for Bible study or small group. What process should they be thinking about when it comes to rightly understanding Jesus as the lens through which to appropriate Moses?

TK: That’s really good. I think for a lot of us, what happens—just what we talked about today is a whole world of Scripture opens up of, “Wow, that belongs to me as a believer. It doesn’t just belong to a people in a different time and age, but actually that’s mine and I need to start accessing it.”

JD: That’s right. I mean what we’re trying to see is 75% of the Christian Scripture is opened up to us. And on this podcast, we’ve been focusing specifically on Moses’s law. Things that range from the book of Exodus all the way up to Deuteronomy—613 commands and prohibitions that we’re proposing still matter for us, but only through Jesus. And so it is worthy of another podcast to consider practically what this looks like on the ground step by step with a number of examples.

TK: Alright, let’s do that next time. I will again put the link to the book in the show notes. It is such a help to be able to read it and carefully process the arguments being made here and just to see this is—this is not actually a radical new proposal. This is actually what the Bible is doing. Thanks for walking us through this today, Jason. Great being together.

JD: Thanks, Tom. Good to be with you.

TK: All right. See ya.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. Go to our show notes for a link to Jason DeRouchie’s book Delighting in the Old Testament. You’ll find a large number of resources, including lectures, outlines, articles and sermons at jasonderouchie.com. You’ll find many resources for teaching and preaching in a number of languages at handstotheplow.org.