What Is God’s Law?
The previous semesters have asked who God’s covenant people are and how His promises reach their fulfillment in Jesus Christ. That naturally brings us to another foundational question: How are God’s people supposed to live?
Christians rightly affirm that God calls His people to holiness and obedience. But does that mean followers of Jesus remain under the Mosaic Old Covenant Law? If Hebrews calls that covenant “obsolete,” does that mean Christians are somehow without God’s Law? And if the covenant has changed, what has actually taken its place?
These questions have often produced opposite reactions. Some theological systems have emphasized continuity so strongly that Christians can appear to be placed back under portions of the Mosaic Covenant. Dispensationalism, on the other hand, correctly recognized significant discontinuity between the covenants, but often carried discontinuity too far in other areas, particularly in separating Israel and the Church. New Covenant Theology seeks to preserve both the continuity and the discontinuity that Scripture itself gives us.
The New Testament does not present Jesus merely as another interpreter of Moses. He is the Mediator of a “better covenant” established on “better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). Hebrews tells us that a change in the priesthood necessarily brings “a change of the law” (Hebrews 7:12), and that in making the covenant new, God made the first covenant “obsolete” (Hebrews 8:13). Paul likewise contrasts the covenant written on stone with the far greater ministry of the Spirit under the New Covenant (2 Corinthians 3).
None of this means that God’s people are now free to live however they please. The question is not law or no law, but which covenant governs us, who our Lawgiver is, and how obedience works under the New Covenant. Jesus Christ is our King. His teaching, the apostolic instruction He authorized, and the transforming work of the Holy Spirit reveal how His people are to live. God does not merely place commands before His people from the outside. Under the New Covenant He works within them, writing His will upon their hearts and conforming them to the image of His Son.
Throughout this semester we will therefore examine the relationship between the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant, what Scripture means when it calls the former covenant obsolete, why Paul describes the New Covenant as more glorious, how Christians should understand the Ten Commandments and the Sabbath, and how our heavenly Father actually trains His children in righteousness.
The goal is not to escape obedience, but to understand obedience through Jesus Christ. We are not trying to become less concerned with holiness. We are asking how holiness is produced in those who belong to the New Covenant and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
Week 1– Has anything good come from dispensationalism?
Week 2– Did Jesus bring us out of the Old Covenant and into a Covenant similar to the Abrahamic Covenant?
Week 4– Is the Old Covenant really “obsolete” and can Christians claim the New Covenant as our own?
Week 5– Is the New Covenant even “more glorious” than the 10 Commandments? (A study of 2 Corinthians 3 and the Sabbath)
Week 6- How does God teach His children how to do what’s right? (A study of Hebrews 12)
Week 7- Is living in the New Covenant like learning to ride a bicycle?
