Obedience to Old Testament Commands

Every once in a while I hear the question asked: what are Christians supposed to do with the commands from the Old Testament? Are we supposed toobey them? Are they just good advice? Or are they binding? Do we treatall OT commands the same?

We probably don’t mind obeying some laws but may be offendedby others.

Some of the commands seem good to us, so we don’t mindfollowing them. Almost nobody thinks you should murder or steal or commitadultery, so we don't balk that the OT prohibits these things. Everyone understands why God would prohibit covetousness and idolworship. And even though it may seem peculiar that God cares whether we rest on a certainday of the week, it doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal for the OT to specify that the Sabbath be kept.

But then there are the commands that offend us. Maybe they’rethe commands regarding the punishment of the commands above—Sabbath doesn’tseem like that big of a deal, so it seems crazy to many of us that thepunishment for violating the Sabbath would be death. Or maybe they’rethe commands regarding current hot-button issues, things that were historicallytaboo but are now accepted as normal, like various types of consensual sex, homosexual orotherwise.

So what do we do with these kinds of commands, the ones we don't want to keep? Most of us ignore them (I don't know anyone who doesn't ignore at least some of them). But is this right?

Most Christians obey some OT laws but not others—is this inconsistent?

Oftentimes the charge against Christians (this charge is sometimes fromoutsiders but sometimes just an uneasy feeling within ourselves) is thatwe are hypocritical because of our habit of obeying parts of the OT while ignoring others. I’venever known a Christian who always keeps the Sabbath, from sundown Friday to sundownSaturday. I do know some Christians who sometimes keep a Sabbath, but I’ve never known a Christian who put to death the others around them whodon’t keep the Sabbath. I’ve never known a Christian who refuses to wearclothing made from two kinds of fabric. I’ve never known a Christian whoregularly brings animals to be sacrificed at the temple. I’ve never known aChristian who regularly kept any of these or many other of the 613 OT laws.

The cop-out answer to this charge of hypocrisy is that notkeeping laws does not make someone a hypocrite. Insisting that others keep alaw while you break it is hypocrisy, but as long as Christians are not insistingthat the laws they break must not be broken, they are not actually hypocrites.However, this argument probably doesn’t satisfy very many people because theheart of the question remains:

How can we pick and choose which laws to obey?

By just picking which laws to obey we can simply disguiseour own preferences with “biblical” mandates and bludgeon others with themwhile throwing out any law that contradicts our own preferences or “commonsense.” To avoid doing that, people throughout history have made varioussystematic attempts at understanding how we should deal with OT commands. Hereare six of the most common along with reasons that I find them each inadequate:

1. Throw the whole Bible out. Thisis an extreme position that could only be persuasively argued for if all otherattempts at understanding the OT commands failed. I don’t think all otherattempts fail, so I think this one is unnecessary.
2. Throw the whole OldTestament out. The New Testament holds the OT in very high regard (for example,Paul says “the law is good” and Jesus says, “Don’t think I came to destroy thelaw or the prophets [in other words, the Old Testament]; I came not to destroythem but fulfill them”), and the early church did too. So to disregard thewhole OT would be to break with the very people we claim to be following andlistening to.
3. Keep only fundamental partsof the Old Testament, like the Ten Commandments. Besides this being an arbitrary choice (why one part and not another?), one of the problems with this approachis that almost no one obeys all of the Ten Commandments. For example, one ofthe commandments has to do with the Sabbath. Some Christians may be confused aboutour need to keep the Sabbath, but the majority of us seem to understand it asnot being a binding rule (and certainly not one that should be punishable bydeath). Even the "fundamental" commands from the OT seem not to be all that fundamental.
4. Keep the Old Testament butexplain away its hard commands as being cultural artifacts having nothing to dowith what God really wanted. This is a very complicated approach, and because it’sso complicated, there are many slightly different ways of doing it that we aregrouping together here for lack of time/space/interest in addressing them all. Wehave another post coming in a week or two that will explore this idea further,so we’re going to skip it for now other than to point out that explaining awayOT commands in this way is such a complex procedure that attempting to do itfor the entire OT at once seems to be egregiously optimistic.
5. Allegorize the OldTestament. One of the most popular ways of interpreting the OT by the earlychurch was through allegory—through explaining that the text really meantsomething other than what it seemed to mean on first reading because there was adeeper, spiritual meaning behind the obvious, physical meaning. The NT makesuse of allegory (at least to some degree, depending on exactly how we define “allegory”),so we cannot simply reject it as an interpretive method. However, even the earlychurch’s primary champion of allegory (Origen) was not seeking to deny the literalmeaning of the text—he simply argued that there was additional meaningthat we ought not ignore. As such, the question over use of allegory isirrelevant to whether we obey the literal meaning of OT commands.
6. Divide OT commands intoceremonial, civil, and moral categories and ignore all but the moral laws. The resultof this interpretation ends up being somewhat close to the result of we argue forbelow, but the reasoning seems faulty and unhelpful. First, these categoriesare absent both from the OT and the NT, so determining which laws fall intowhich category seems somewhat arbitrary. Second, the NT argues that to disobeypart of the law is to break the whole law. If the law is a single, unifiedthing, then we cannot simply pick and choose whether to obey parts of it ornot. We need to decide whether to obey the whole thing or ignore the wholething.

These six explanations have shortcomings, but there's a seventh that I find quite appealing: 

The OT law is like a contract—and Christiansare not party to that contract.

One of the things we seem to forget when we read the commandsfrom the OT is that they were part of a covenant between God and a specific groupof people, Israel. The whole structure of the Book of Deuteronomy is similar toa certain type of treaty that we find in other places in the ancient Near East—itlists two parties, the commitments for each party, and the penalties forbreaking the commitments. This contract applied to Israel, but it did not apply to other countries because the contract was not made with those other countries. Similarly, this contract does not apply to the majority of Christians today because the majority of Christians today are not Jews. (There are Christians who understand the NT to teach that the church is Israel, which might imply that we somehow also become party to this contract. However, even if they were right, the second part of the argument below would still hold.)

Besides this covenant not applying to most Christians becausemost Christians aren’t Israelites, this covenant doesn’t apply because it hasbeen superseded by a new covenant. The covenant from the OT is often referredto as the “Old Covenant” (covenant = testament; hence the “Old Testament”)because of the “New Covenant” that was promised ahead of time by the prophetJeremiah (see Jeremiah chapter 31 or Hebrews chapters 7-8). Jesus referenced and initiated this New Covenant at the Last Supper, and the Book of Hebrews indicates that thisNew Covenant makes the Old Covenant obsolete. (Whether or not the New Covenant is fully in effect is a matter of some debate because some language surrounding the covenant has not come to fruition, such as "they will all know [God], from the least of them to the greatest." However, this does not seem to hinder Hebrews' argument.)

When an old covenant is superseded, its demands are no longer binding. The old contract has been canceled and replaced by a new one. My wife and I live in an apartment--if we sign a new contract, the terms of the old contract become irrelevant. In the same way, Hebrews argues that the Old Covenant is no longer contractually binding, even on Israelites.

Without the law, how do we know what to do? We listen to the Spirit.

In addition to Hebrews making this argument that the Old Testament’scommands have been superseded, Paul makes a similar argument in the Book of Galatians. In Galatians 5, several chapters into the argument, he helpfully explains that Christiansdo not need a law because we have the Holy Spirit who teaches us to do what Godwants. In fact, it should be obvious what the Spirit wants us to do because theSpirit is only opposed to evil. If something is evil, the Spirit doesn’t wantit. The Spirit only and always wills good things, like love, joy, peace,patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Paul argues that it's obvious which actions promote these things and which contradict them.

In short, because of the Holy Spirit empowering us, we no longer need the contract from the Old Testament. Mostof us weren’t party to the contract in the first place, and none of us are now.The Old Testament has many commands that we continue to obey, but we areobeying because of the Spirit and our pursuit of life-giving good, not because we are trying to live according to OT law.