Theopedia

Jesus and the Law

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

— Matthew 5:17 (ESV)

Definition

Christ’s relationship to the law of Moses is one of fulfillment: he obeyed it perfectly in his own life, bore its curse in his death, and by his authority as Messiah abrogated its ceremonial ordinances and judicial statutes, which belonged to Israel’s now-ended national life.1 Its moral law, summarized in the Ten Commandments and first written on Adam’s heart at creation, remains a perpetual rule of righteousness binding all people; Christ did not dissolve this obligation but strengthened it, and believers keep it not as a covenant of works but as a rule of grateful obedience.2

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession devotes its nineteenth chapter, “Of the Law of God,” to Christ’s relationship to the law. It roots the moral law in creation itself: God gave Adam “a law of universal obedience written in his heart,” binding him and all his posterity to “personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience.”3 That same law, “the same law that was first written in the heart of man,” was later “delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments.”4

Alongside the moral law, God gave Israel ceremonial ordinances, “prefiguring Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits.” The confession states plainly what became of them:

All which ceremonial laws being appointed only to the time of reformation, are, by Jesus Christ the true Messiah and only law-giver, who was furnished with power from the Father for that end, abrogated and taken away.1

Israel’s judicial laws met a similar end, though on different grounds: they “expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now by virtue of that institution,” though “their general equity only” remains of moral use.5

The moral law stands apart from both, and the confession is emphatic that the gospel does not weaken its claim on believers:

The moral law doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof… neither doth Christ in the Gospel any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.2

Believers are “not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned,” yet the law remains useful to them “as a rule of life,” convicting them of sin, restraining corruption, and showing them “God’s approbation of obedience.”6 Far from opposing grace, this use of the law “sweetly compl[ies] with” the gospel, since the Spirit of Christ enables the will “to do that freely and cheerfully which the will of God, revealed in the law, requireth to be done.”7

Biblical Basis

Jesus states his own relationship to the law himself: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). Set against scribes and Pharisees who might have charged him with undermining Scripture’s authority, this claim grounds Jesus’s own teaching in the Law and the Prophets rather than against them, even as he goes on to give a definitive interpretation of the law’s demands (“You have heard… but I tell you,” Matt. 5:21-48).8

Paul states the same relationship from the other side, as something accomplished in Christ rather than merely taught by him: “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 10:4). What “end” (Greek telos) means here is debated, since the term can carry the sense of termination or of goal, and the word more often carries the sense of “end” than “goal” elsewhere in Scripture. Christ terminates the law’s role as a path to a righteousness of one’s own, not the moral law’s continuing authority.9 Believers, in turn, can be said to fulfill the law’s own substance by love: “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Rom. 13:8), because love, not merely formal compliance, is what the law’s commandments were always aiming at.10

Galatians describes the law’s temporary custodial role in similar terms: it was Israel’s “guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith” (Gal. 3:24). Paul elsewhere quotes Leviticus 18:5 for the law-covenant’s own “doing to live” principle: “the one who does them shall live by them” (Gal. 3:12). That principle stated what perfect obedience to the law-covenant would have earned; once human inability met that standard, the same law-covenant became, in Paul’s telling, “an enslaving guardian until Christ.”11 The law also performs a more searching office: “through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20), stopping every mouth and holding the whole world accountable to God (Rom. 3:19).

Doctrinal Significance

What Christ taught about the law is one thing; what his own obedience to it accomplished is another. Reformed theology has long held that Christ’s lifelong keeping of the law, and not only his suffering and death, forms part of the righteousness credited to believers. Francis Turretin put the point this way:

The common opinion and the one received in our churches is that the satisfaction of Christ, which is imputed to us for righteousness before God, embraces not only the sufferings which he endured either in his life or at his death, but also the obedience of his whole life, or the just and holy actions by which he perfectly fulfilled the demands of the law in our place.12

On this account, Christ’s fulfillment of the law has a double edge: his suffering satisfies the law’s penalty for sin, while his active, lifelong obedience supplies the very righteousness the law demands and that no sinner could produce for themselves (see Justification and Imputation).

The ceremonial law’s own fulfillment works differently. Its ordinances, Calvin writes, amounted to a “shadowy and ineffectual observance,” a temporary form of the covenant that had to “be annulled and become antiquated… to make room for Christ, the surety and mediator of a better covenant.”13 What the ceremonies pictured in figure, Christ supplies in substance; their abrogation is not the loss of something the law demanded, but the arrival of what they had pointed to all along.

Historical Development

The Reformation: distinguishing the law’s parts

Calvin gave the classic Reformation statement of how the law divides into moral, ceremonial, and judicial parts, and of why only the first endures. The ceremonial law, he wrote, “was a tutelage by which the Lord was pleased to exercise, as it were, the childhood of that people,” and so “might be abrogated without at all interfering with piety.” The judicial law likewise “delivered certain forms of equity and justice” suited to Israel’s own polity; once removed, “the duties and precepts of charity can still remain perpetual” without it. The moral law is different in kind: “contained under two heads,” love for God and love for neighbor, it “is the true and eternal rule of righteousness prescribed to the men of all nations and of all times.”14 Calvin read the law’s own history through this lens: by the “tutelage of the Law,” as Paul says, “the Jews were conducted to Christ, before he was exhibited in the flesh,” much as an heir still in his minority is placed under a guardian’s authority.13

Reformed and Lutheran orthodoxy: the law’s continuing uses

Later Reformed and Lutheran theologians systematized Calvin’s insight into a “threefold use of the law”: a civil use restraining sin in society at large, a pedagogical use exposing sin and driving the sinner to Christ, and a normative use, the tertius usus legis, guiding the Christian life. Both traditions accepted the distinction, but placed the weight differently. Lutheran theology stressed the second, pedagogical use, admitting the third “with a certain reserve,” since believers were held to be no longer under the law in that sense; the Reformed tradition gave fuller weight to the third use, treating the law’s guidance of the redeemed life at length in works like the Heidelberg Catechism’s own eleven Lord’s Days on the subject.15

Opposing Views

Antinomianism denies that the moral law binds believers as a rule of life at all, holding that union with Christ or the freedom of grace sets the believer free even from the law’s third, normative use.15 The confession’s own emphasis, that Christ “doth not dissolve, but much strengthen” the law’s binding force even for the justified, is a direct answer to this position.2

Theonomy holds that Israel’s judicial laws, including their prescribed penalties, remain binding on modern civil governments as standing law rather than merely as an expression of “general equity.”5 This reads the same texts that the confession treats as expired national legislation as still-standing case law for civil order today; see Theonomy for the fuller argument.

The New Perspective on Paul reframes Paul’s statements about the law and “works of the law” as concerned less with earning salvation than with the covenantal boundary markers, such as circumcision and food laws, that distinguished Jews from Gentiles. N. T. Wright, a leading proponent, describes justification as a two-stage event: “Present justification declares, on the basis of faith, what future justification will affirm publicly… on the basis of the entire life.”16 On this reading, “covenantal nomism,” one enters God’s covenant by grace but remains in it through covenant faithfulness, including obedience to the law, rather than the law having been terminated as a way of relating to God at Christ.17 See New Perspective on Paul for the full treatment of this dispute.

Objections and Responses

If Christ is “the end of the law” (Rom. 10:4), doesn’t that mean the law’s authority over believers has simply ended, not merely its power to justify? The confession’s own answer is that Christ’s work terminates one thing about the law while confirming another: it ends the law’s role as a ladder to a righteousness of one’s own, while leaving the moral law’s claim on believers’ lives fully intact, in fact “strengthen[ed]” rather than relaxed.2 Paul’s own argument in Romans moves the same way, from the law’s inability to justify (Rom. 10:4-5) to love as the ongoing fulfillment of its commands (Rom. 13:8-10).10

If believers are not under the law as a covenant of works, doesn’t continued obedience to it become optional? The confession denies this directly: the law’s third use is not a return to a covenant of works but a rule of life proper to those already justified by grace, “informing them of the will of God and their duty” without making their standing before God depend on how well they keep it.6 This is precisely the use of the law that Antinomianism denies and that Reformed orthodoxy, against the Lutheran tradition’s greater reserve on the point, has consistently affirmed.15

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  2. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 5. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 1. ↩

  4. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 2. ↩

  5. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 4. ↩ ↩2

  6. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 6. ↩ ↩2

  7. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 7. ↩

  8. Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 5, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament.” ↩

  9. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 267-68. ↩

  10. McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” 266. ↩ ↩2

  11. Jason S. DeRouchie, “The Use of Leviticus 18:5 in Galatians 3:12: A Redemptive-Historical Reassessment,” Themelios 45, no. 2 (2020): 240. ↩

  12. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 2:445, quoted in McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ,” 70. ↩

  13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), 2.11.4-5. ↩ ↩2

  14. Calvin, Institutes, 4.20.14-15. ↩

  15. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 599-600. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  16. N. T. Wright, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 325-26. ↩

  17. Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 325. ↩