Sound Doctrine Class 4: The Law (Part 1)

Sound Doctrine Class 4: The Law (Part 1) 1) Categories of Old Testament Laws a) Moral / Ethical Laws of Holiness b) Civil Law for the Nation of Israel c) Ceremonial Laws to deal with sin and to allow a relationship with God d) Covenants i) Unilateral ii) Bi lateral 2) Moral / Ethical Laws (Standards of conduct) are referenced in Genesis (400 2000 years before Moses). a) Preceded the giving of the Law to Moses and Israel. These are God s timeless standards of conduct, not tied to the Old Testament law or a specific covenant between God and man. i) Mankind understood God s requirements for moral conduct long before Moses ascended Mt. Sinai and came down with the 10 Commandments ii) The knowledge of good and evil / right and wrong resulted from Adam and Eve s sin in the Garden of Eden where they took from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen 3:22) iii) Abel offered a righteous and acceptable sacrifice to God, but Cain s offering was not accepted by God. By implication, both men knew what God required and how God would receive their offerings (Ge. 4:4 5) iv) Cain murdered his brother and then lied about it. God cursed him for both of his unrighteous actions (Gen. 4:11) v) The Lord saw the wickedness of man on the earth and responded with His judgment on sin with the flood (Gen. 6:5) vi) God restricted man from eating blood after the flood (Gen 9:4), because life is in the blood (Lev. 17:11) vii) God condemns murder and institutes man s responsibility to execute capital punishment (Gen. 9:6) viii) Public nakedness and drunkenness are identified as shameful or immoral by Noah s sons (Gen. 9:20 23) ix) God establishes marriage as honorable and godly while adultery is deemed sinful and contrary to God s holiness, as exemplified by Abram and Sarai in Egypt (Gen 12:14 20) 1 P age

x) God honors and protects righteousness and justice, but judges wickedness and sin as He reveals His intent to destroy Sodom (Gen. 18:17 21; 19:4 7). xi) Raping and defiling a woman is condemned by the sons of Jacob when their sister Dinah was so treated. Their response of murdering all of the men of Shechem was also condemned by Jacob for exceeding God s standards for crimes and punishments (Gen 34) xii) Joseph s brothers know that selling him and lying about it was a sin and that God would indeed be just to punish them for their actions (Gen. 37:27; 42:21) xiii) God rebukes Eliphaze the Temanite for speaking falsely about God, and instructs him to offer a burnt sacrifice as an act of repentance and honor to the Lord (Job 42:7 8) b) Moral / Ethical Laws in the Mosaic Covenant i) As already established above, God conveyed His moral laws to Adam and they continued to be recognized and enforced prior to the time of Moses ascent of Mt. Sinai. When he did go up on the mountain, the moral law was included and expanded as God initiated His covenant with Israel. However, the moral law was only one part of the total covenant and conditions God established with Moses and Israel. ii) The Ten Commandments are easily the most memorable and most exalted of God s moral laws. They are generally divided into two primary categories, 1) our love for God, and 2) our love for our fellow man (neighbors). (1) Loving God (a) Have no other gods. The LORD God is the only God. There is no other or lesser gods. He alone is the Creator of all things. (b) Make no carved images or idols to worship. God alone is to be worshipped. Any material thing or idea that is not God has no place in our heart of worship. (c) Do not take the LORD s name in vain. He is due the greatest honor and respect in our thoughts and in our speech. When we attribute bad things to the name of the LORD (like smashing our thumb with a hammer) it reveals our heart of believing that God is responsible for evil or bad things and we are cursing him for it. We would be right to place some blame on Satan or Adam, but it is a sin to blame evil or circumstances related to the fall on God. 2 P age

3 P age Ultimately, blaming anything on God that is not from Him is a violation of this commandment. (d) Honor and remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. The 4 th commandment is likely the least understood and most challenging to understand in terms of what an Old or a New Covenant believer is expected to do to honor God in observance of the Sabbath. (i) Literally, it is the name of the last day of the week (Saturday for us). (ii) The day of observance has three distinct characteristics noted in Scripture: 1. Remembering and honoring the God of Creation who created the physical universe and all that it contains in a process that lasted six days (Gen 1). When God declared that creation was very good and fully completed, He then rested on the final day of His week. Therefore, we are to give honor to God by remembering that He is the Creator of life. It did not happen by chance, randomness, or chaotic cosmic explosions. Rather, our existence happened in a beautiful and loving act of God. The day of rest each week is set aside to honor God as our Creator and Maker. 2. God intended for man to have a day of rest to enhance his biological, psychological, and spiritual health. Man wasn t made by God because the Sabbath was lacking without him. Rather, God demonstrated a day of rest in the creation week, because He knows that man (and beasts and the earth) needs a period of rest each week. In other words, God created and instituted the Sabbath to be a blessing for mankind to enjoy (Mark 2:27). 3. The Sabbath stands as a promise of entering into God s rest once we have finished our work in our mortal bodies on the earth. The Sabbath model is: God did all the creative work he intended to do, and then He rested. Likewise, God has created man to do His good work while he is alive, but when a believer dies, he will then enter into God s promised rest in eternity (Heb. 4:9 11). Those who deny the

4 P age resurrection or the divine promise of eternal life dishonor the Sabbath. (iii) Under the Mosaic Covenant, God required Israel to adhere to a strict observance of resting and refraining from customary work on the Sabbath and other holy days. Under the New Covenant, the highly restrictive regulations regarding work are not imposed or restated as a moral law observance. However, the basic principles of honoring the God of creation, recognizing the need for relaxation and connection to God as part of a conscious lifestyle choice, and believing in the promises of God concerning heaven and eternity, are all affirmed in the New Testament. Doing these things fulfills the moral commandment of honoring the Sabbath. (iv) Paul seems to have the Sabbath in mind when he writes to the Romans concerning liberty in Christ. Specifically, he says, One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be convinced in his own mind (Rom 14:5). (2) Loving Others (a) Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land. God is the author of order in the created Universe. Everything He created works in a highly organized and cohesive way with examples in cosmology, biology, chemistry, ecology, and physics, just to name a few. He clearly states that mankind should operate under organizational structures and hierarchies for our good, instructing us to be willingly subject to the governing authorities, believers to the church, wives to husbands, and children to parents. Even when a child reaches adulthood and is expected to be independent, the commandment to honor his father and mother remains as a moral standard of conduct. (b) You shall not murder. Murder is an especially sinful act in taking another human life out of hatred, rage, jealousy, greed, or callous disregard for human life. Therefore, murder is the taking of another life without justification or the authority to do so. This commandment clearly does not refer to 1) soldiers engaged in battle, or 2) the carrying out of capital punishment executed on a person under the laws of a national system. We know that God

5 P age commanded His people to go to war, commanded the execution of entire populations of sinful people, and established provisions for capital punishment within a nation of laws. (c) You shall not commit adultery. God established marriage and He commands fidelity within the marriage. Sexual relations within the heterosexual marriage are God ordained. God tells us to be fruitful and multiply only within the context of marriage. Paul tells husbands and wives not to withhold sex from their spouses. However, outside of the marriage relationship, God defines any sexual relation to be sinful and a violation the moral law of God. (d) You shall not steal. Taking what rightfully belongs to another is stealing and a violation of God s moral law. While stealing from another is immoral, God repeatedly made provisions for the poor for in both the Old and New Testaments, so that they did not have to violate this commandment to survive. Those who are hungry and in need are to be provided for by those who have provisions and are correctly submitted to God. For example, the corners of the fields were left for the poor to glean; similarly, those who were destitute could become servants of another s household. The New Testament establishes generosity of the believer and the church as a fundamental principle of ensuring that those who lack food or clothing will have their needs met by those whom God has blessed with more material or financial means. (e) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. God Himself cannot lie, as He is holy. Therefore, he commands us to uphold the same moral character by not lying to one another. This is especially the case when it comes to falsely accusing a person before the governing authorities, who may act on our false witness to bring institutional harm to an innocent person. (f) You shall not covet. Coveting will corrupt the heart, and it may well lead to even more sins as the covetous person pursues his neighbor s possessions, or his wife. Thus, coveting is not just an isolated sin or failure of moral conduct, but it opens the door to theft, murder, adultery, or bearing false witness in pursuit of a desire to have what we do not have, but may be unable or unwilling to attain by godly means.

(3) Jesus confirmed the consolidation of the moral laws into these two broad, but also fully inclusive categories (Mark 12:30 31): (a) You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, and with all of your strength. This is the first commandment. (b) And the second, like it, is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 3) Civil Law a) When Israel became a nation (Beginning with their exodus from Egypt), they operated as a Theocracy, meaning God was their King. b) There was no separation of God laws from Israel s governance as a nation. Furthermore, Israel was not free to establish civil laws apart from God. c) The Mosaic Covenant, therefore, contains many civil regulations that were only intended to govern the nation of Israel so long as they accepted God as their King. d) Once Israel rejected the Theocracy that existed (Moses to then end of the judges), the civil laws fell to man to establish and enforce, corrupted and perverted from God s original intent. As a result, the kings of Israel and Judah had the civil authority to establish or abolish laws previously given by God to Moses. e) Thus the civil laws in the Mosaic covenant (Torah), in effect, ceased when God gave Israel Saul as their first King for Scripture says they had not rejected Samuel the prophet / judge of Israel, but rather they rejected God as their King and exclusive lawgiver (1 Samuel 8:6 7). f) All other nations, and the national of Israel, might have used God s civil laws as a basis for their own laws, but no nation or people group not operating as a Theocracy can be bound by the civil laws given to Israel in the Mosaic Covenant. 4) Ceremonial Law a) The ceremonial laws given to Moses primarily have to do with how God required His people to remain connected to him through the priests and their duties as they served in the Tabernacle of Meeting. b) Much of the content of the Mosaic Law and the Torah is centered on how God established a process to allow sinful man to live in proper standing with Him, even though He is a holy God who hates sin and has promised judgment on all sinful acts. 6 P age

c) In order to accomplish this, He instructed Moses to build an elaborate, but extremely specific tabernacle for Him to meet with the people through the High Priest, who served as a mediator between God and man. d) The priest had to perform continual ministry to the LORD, and to the people, each day. Their ministry and intercession was exacting and reverent to facilitate the meeting of God with His people. e) The New Testament reveals that Jesus came as the literal fulfilment of all of the ceremonies and ministries the priests had been doing, so that He could be the perfect fulfilment of the role of being a Mediator between God and man. He did this by becoming both the perfect High Priest, and the perfect sacrifice for sins, and He performed His ministry, but in an earthly temple made by human hands, which was only a copy and a shadow of the perfect temple in heaven (Heb. 8 10). f) Once Jesus fulfilled all of the ceremonial laws that would once and for all allow God and man to be in relationship through His shed blood, there was no longer a need for a ceremonial law, an earthly temple, earthly priests, or animal sacrifices. Those things had served only as examples of the true sacrifice that was to come through and by Jesus. 5) Summary of the three Old Testament Law Categories God s Moral Law remains unchanged in that it defines His standards for conduct from Adam, all the way through the time of Christ s return, and the establishment of the new heavens and the new earth. However, no one is able to perfectly fulfill the requirements of God s moral law, as all people sin and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). Therefore, pursuing God s moral laws as a means of salvation, putting God in our debt because of our perceived righteousness, will not produce righteousness or salvation. Homework Read: 1) Exodus 20:1 17 2) Joshua 24:18 24 3) Leviticus 26:1 46 Memorize: The Ten Commandments (3 5 words per commandment) 7 P age