Why They Followed the Law (Part 1)
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Getting the Law Wrong?
The entire book of Galatians is consumed with the problem of what to do with the Old Covenant law. What does “following the law” have to do with personal salvation through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ?
A large party of Jewish Christians, most of them likely from Jerusalem and former Pharisees, believed you had to follow the Old Covenant law and repent and believe in Christ (Acts 15:1-5). Luke, in a very understated fashion, observes “Paul and Barnabas had no small discussion and debate with them.” The Apostle has little time for this kind of terrible error. He calls this teaching “a different Gospel,” (Gal 1:6). He speaks of the Galatians “deserting Him who called you,” (Gal 1:5). He said this is a perversion of the Gospel of Christ (Gal 1:7).
Did these Pharisees actually understand the message of the Old Covenant scriptures? Why did God’s people follow the law, anyway?
This article has one simple purpose - to explain what the real impetus was for following God’s law, both then and now. In Galatians, Paul was not arguing against the Old Covenant. He was arguing against the twisted, warped version of the Old Covenant the scribes and Pharisees had been pushing for so long.
If we don’t get this point, we’ll never understand the Old Covenant, we’ll never understand the book of Galatians and we’ll never understand a good bit of the Gospels, either.
Why do people follow God’s law, both then and now? We do it because we love God, and we want to serve Him with our lives. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way
Jesus and the Greatest Commandment (Mark 12:28-34)
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” (Mark 12:28)
This goes to show you that stereotypes aren’t always accurate - a scribe is the one who asks this question. The context which prompted the question is Jesus’ dispute with the Sadducees about the validity of the resurrection (Mk 12:18-27). This man is a Pharisee.1 He’s somebody who is very concerned with the letter of the law. So, naturally, he wants to know what the greatest commandment is - so he can follow it!2
Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:28-31)
Here is the content of Jesus’ answer, from Deuteronomy 6:4-5.3 Consider what it tells us about why God’s people should obey His law.
- Our God is the Lord.
God is your master. He is in complete charge of your life, your soul, your blessings, your cursings, your destiny. If you’re a Christian, God created you as a new person in Christ “for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them,” (Eph 2:10). You were saved in order to serve the Lord, and work for Him.
God is your Lord! If He saved you, then you are now a willing and enthusiastic slave for righteousness.4 This is the foundation for Jesus’ answer.
- The Lord is One
There is only One legitimate Lord you can serve - everything else is a pagan counterfeit. He is the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures. He is the God of the First Covenant and the God of the New Covenant
- You will love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength
You must love God with everything you have, with every fiber of your being! These terms are not synonymous (we could look at each of them individually), but together they express a simple concept - a complete, all-encompassing love for God!5 Anything done for a reason other than this is counterfeit, and God is not pleased by it.
- You will love your neighbor just as you love yourself
Who is your neighbor? In the context of Leviticus 19:18 (which Jesus quoted from), your neighbor is a covenant brother and sister - including a believing Gentile (cf. Lev 19:34). In short, Jesus is talking about “brotherly love,” (cf. 1 Jn 4:20). You should love and value your Christian brothers and sisters just as much as you love and value yourself.
All of the Old Covenant law can be summed up in these two commands (cf. Mt 22:40). God is your Lord, therefore you exist to serve Him. Your Lord is One, therefore any other worship is idolatry. So, you must love God with everything you have. This is the only appropriate motivation for service.
- You serve God because He saved you from yourself, knowing who you are, what you have done, what you are doing now, and what you will do in the future.
- Because you’re so grateful and love Him so much, you’ll want to serve Him with your life.
- And because all this is true, you also love your covenant brothers and sisters - because, together, you’re each part of God’s family.
Jesus refers to these two commandments as one singular commandment6 because, together, they sum up the entire teaching purpose of the law.7 They’re inseparable. If you love God, then you’ll love God’s children, because they’re your brothers and sisters.
And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mk 12:32-33)
Why does the scribe have such insight? Isn’t he supposed to be a legalistic hypocrite!? This is why we must always remember that we can’t read the Bible like it’s cardboard. This is the story of real people, with real minds of their own, who act like real people would actually act. It’s always dangerous to over-generalize about people; it’s true today and it was true then.
Most of the scribes were legalists like the Pharisees, but not all of them were! This scribe seems to be genuinely sincere.8 It is likely God was drawing this man to saving faith. I like to think he repented and believed one day. After all, some of the Pharisees did believe (e.g. Nicodemus, Acts 15:5).
And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any question (Mk 12:34; cf. Mt 22:34-40)
This is Jesus’ inspired statement about why God’s people should obey God’s law; especially the Old Covenant law. You obey God’s law because you love Him, and want to serve Him. Real salvation produces real fruit. That fruit is whole-hearted love for God, which proves itself by action.
More next week …
Notes
1 William L. Lane suggests the man could be a Sadducee, because that group had its own group of legal interpreters (The Gospel of Mark, in NICNT [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974], 431). I doubt this. I’m not aware of any place in the NT where the phrase γραμματεύς refers to the Sadducees; however, the reference to “scribes of the Pharisees” (Mk 2:16) is intriguing, suggesting different sects may have had their own scribes.
Generally, however, the scribes are associated with the Pharisee party. Add to it that Jesus had just handily dispatched the Sadducees’ ridiculous argument against the resurrection. If this particular scribe were a Sadducee, one would not expect him to engage in a discussion over which commandment was first of all! This is a Pharisaical question, through and through. A Sadducee would likely be smarting over the discussion which had just ended. “Most scribes aligned with the Pharisees in their theology, including their teaching on the resurrection and the authority of Scripture,” (Mark L. Strauss, Mark, in ZECNT [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014], 541).
2 There is more to this question, but I don’t have time to go into it here. See Lane (Mark, 431-432) and James R. Edwards, The Gospel According to Mark, in PNTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 370-371.
Lane observed, “Both the question and its presuppositions stem from a piety of human achievement, supported by scribal interpretation of the biblical mandates (Lane, Mark, 431).
3 The UBS-5, TR and BYZ are each identical to the LXX (Rahlfs) here. Very interesting! This phrase can be rendered in a variety of ways, depending on how you interpret the nominatives - just look at the different English translations. I rendered it, “Jesus answered that [the] most important is, ‘Listen, Israel! Our God is Lord. [The] Lord is one.”
4 “Jesus demands a decision and readiness for God, and for God alone, in an unconditional manner. Clearly this cannot be the subject of legal enactment. It is a matter of the will and action. The love which determines the whole disposition of one’s life and places one’s whole personality in the service of God reflects a commitment to God which springs from divine sonship,” (Lane, Mark, 432-433).
5 See Craig A. Evans, Mark 8:27 - 16:20, in WBC, vol. 34b (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 264.
6 The Greek is clear here: μείζων τούτων ἄλλη ἐντολὴ οὐκ ἔστιν (“there is not another command greater than these”). Strauss, however, disputes this point grammatically (Mark, 546 [fn. 11]).
7 Evans suggests they sum up the Decalogue (Mark 8:27 - 16:20, 265). I don’t have time to elaborate that here.
8 Walter W. Wessel, Mark, in EBC, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), 736.
Tyler Robbins 2016 v2
Tyler Robbins is a bi-vocational pastor at Sleater Kinney Road Baptist Church, in Olympia WA. He also works in State government. He blogs as the Eccentric Fundamentalist.
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Thanks, Tyler, for these good thoughts. I look forward to your insights in the days ahead.
G. N. Barkman
I’ve never attended a non-dispensational church, so I can’t speak about whether this is a problem in other circles. But, I will say that there is a pervasive misunderstanding in dispensationalism about why OC saints followed the law. Beginning with Scofield, through Chafer, and down through some flavors of dispensationalism (usually, classical dispensationalism), there has been a false belief that OC saints followed the law to gain merit and be justified before God - or because you fear Him and don’t want to die. This is a terrible error. It misreads the text so badly.
This error is also why (I believe) dispensationalists (at a lay level, at least) often misunderstand the Book of Galatians. They take it to mean Paul is slamming the OC law. He isn’t. He is attacking the false perversion of it that was characteristic of his times; the version the Judaizers were peddling in Galatia. His remarks must be seen in that light. I just finished teaching 1 Pet 1:13-16 in Sunday School, and Peter quotes Leviticus very approvingly. The law is useful and good, provided you interpret it correctly in light of the New Covenant. That is, if you think the NC is actually here (another DT issue!) :)
I was taught some watered-down variations of the Scofield/classical dispensationalist answer throughout the years, here and there. It couldn’t be further from the truth. As the years go by, I am moving further and further away from a more strict dispensationalism. I agree with Ryrie’s infamous sine qua non, but I’m less and less satisfied that the fine details of the system really capture what the Bible teaches. Like Paul Henebury (i.e. “Dr. Reluctant”), I find myself to be a “reluctant dispensationalist.”
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
I’m told that in the streets of Gotham and elsewhere, you’ll find small RVs with Hasidic Jews in them who go around finding non-observant Jews and giving them the materials they need to honor the commandments, or Mitzvahs. The RVs go by the name “Mitzvah tanks”.
It strikes me that most of the Pharisees in Scripture are fulfilling this role, warning the people about not obeying what they think God said in various regards. Many of those times—e.g. hand washing—it appears that what’s really going on is adherence to what Jesus would have called “their traditions.” Follow all these minute laws and…..you’ll be OK with God.
But of course, that’s not what we would conclude from the actual written Torah. So I tend to agree with Tyler that there’s a bit of a disconnect there—perhaps it is that “we dispensationalists” have failed to clue in to the fact that the “Law” of the NT is not that of Moses?
And in the light of the Pharisees running “Mitzvah chariots” at that time, the scribe asking what the greatest commandment may not be simply an academic exercise, but would rather reflect his desire to systematize the Torah—and in doing so, what he’s trying to achieve is to make the Torah simpler to understand, letting the air out of the tires of the Mitzvah tanks. I agree with Tyler that he may have come to Christ.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I am interested to read the rest of the series but my understanding of Galatians is that Paul was criticizing the Galatians (really Judiazers) for introducing the law as a means to justify themselves. IOW it wasn’t a criticism of the law but it was a criticism of placing oneself under its restrictions as a means of being right with God.
Joshp
I think many Christians are confused about the OT. In the pews, I have found many people are very hazy about the OT saint’s motivation for service. Many people seem to assume “you had to keep the law to be blessed …and God said He’d kill people who disobey …and now we’re not under law, but grace” and are just very confused. Dispensationalism badly taught doesn’t help. I’ve taught Galatians myself, and just finished sitting through somebody else teach it - these are recurring issues, in my experience.
I’m not sure whether this is a DT problem. On a side note, I’ve run into very educated people on SI who are hardline classical DTs who believe OT saint’s served God out of fear, so they’d get blessings. I think a watered-down version of this is a defacto position among many Christians. It really stems from a terrible misreading of the OT, both by the congregation and the pastors.
In my experience, I think there are two reasons for this:
- Dispensationalism poorly understand and even more poorly taught
- General ignorance of the OT, both in the pew and the pulpit. How many pastors preach expositorily through OT books?
I’d be very interested to hear a perspective from a non-dispensationalist about how his/her congregation generally understands the law. I know somebody is out there, lurking in the shadows, reading this post. Lemme know what you think! :)
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
Almost all of the preaching I’ve heard on OT saints has been centered on their Godly lives and how those lives are examples for us to follow. Believers have been exhorted to follow their examples, sometimes to the point where I can understand how some come to the conclusion that “obeying produces righteousness”.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
When J. Alec Motyer was questioned about the relationship of Old Testament Israel to the church, after saying something about the discontinuities, he insisted that we are all one people of God. Then he asked us to imagine how the Israelites under Moses would have given their ‘testimony’ to someone who had asked for it. They would have said something like this:
We were in a foreign land, in bondage, under the sentence of death. But our mediator – the one who stands between us and God – came to us with the promise of deliverance. We trusted in the promises of God, took shelter under the blood of the lamb, and he lead us out. Now we are on the way to the Promised Land. We are not there yet, of course, but we have the law to guide us, and through blood sacrifice we also have his presence in our midst. So he will stay with us until we get to our true country, our everlasting home.
Then Dr Motyer concluded: ‘Now think about it. A Christian today could say the same thing, almost word for word.’
–––
Source: A Christian’s Pocket Guide to Loving The Old Testament: One Book, One God, One Story, forward by Tim Keller, p x. Dr Motyer passed into glory this August. A tribute here.
Jim:
I agree with that, whole-heartedly. There are some real discontinuities between the Old and New Covenant, to be sure. But, I see many more continuities on key issues.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
OLD TESTAMENT LAW LIVING
This subject has been (for me) of deep interest in coordinating dispensational matters as well as explaining life under the Mosaic covenant in general. I do not intend to get involved here in individual interpretations of proof texts or simply the personal opinions of bloggers. I would only suggest some load-bearing theological points of the bigger picture, or perhaps a paradigm of what I think a proper approach to the subject might look like.
1. Theocracy.
The idea is that Israel was a kingdom comprised of a theocratic union of “church and state” with a civil religion incumbent on everyone within the covenant. The “pledge of allegiance” was the Great Shema of Deut 6:4-6. This way of life was a product solely of the Law of Moses. Necessary factors would include continuing divine revelation as interpreted by prophetic and priestly functions; there was no individual soul liberty. Approach to God was through the Levitical forms and personnel of the central altar; there was no individual priesthood of the believer. Nor were there satellite temples scattered about. The efficacy of the Levitical sacrifices is a crucial dimension of OT religion. The continuance of divine miracles was also a main pillar that upheld the theocratic state; e.g., the double (and triple) produce of the land the year before it was to lie fallow during the sabbatical and jubilee years.
2. Motivations.
Two components seem to apply here. (1) Motivated by love: i.e., blessings of a physical nature for obedience, such as rain, fertility, family, full barns, et al., and also blessings of a spiritual nature for covenant loyalty and obedience. This latter is a much larger problem. There is a large number of divine promises for “life” or “living,” some of which seem to equate life with justification itself. This requires careful treading of course. Note these texts: Rom 2:13; 7:10; 10:5; Gal 3:12; Lev 18:5; Deut 4:1; 5:28-33; 16:20; 30:6, 19; Ezek 20:11. The usual interpretation as physical life (as in # 1 above) becomes difficult to sustain for some of these references. But the alternative is even more difficult. This life factor would seem to be applicable to understanding the incident of the rich young ruler (Mt 19:16 ff). This narrative could be interpreted in infinitely more than physical categories.
The “love” motivation, in my thought, needs to beware of emotional or glandular implications, a common problem in NT categories of the Christian experience, and a much greater problem when such are extrapolated into the OT milieu. There is a big difference in personal and practical living between the administrations of Law and Grace. It is doubtful people sang “On the Vic’try Side” under Law. Life in general, including the liturgical aspects of the Law, was of an austere nature.
(2) Motivated by “fear.” “Fear” generally appears as a synonym for genuine faith in the God of the covenant. But at times there seems to be a certain sense of being afraid of the penal sanctions inherent in the Law of Moses. There were numerous capital sins under the Law. Most sanctions were of a physical nature, such as illness, famine, pestilence and disease. Even the inevitability of death itself was not welcomed for various reasons. See especially the Book of Ecclesiastes. There was no 1 Cor 15 to turn to.
3. The fundamental difference between Law and Grace.
While all Scripture is God-breathed and thus profitable for all, the NT declares a monumental difference between Law and Grace, Israel and the Church, Moses and Jesus Christ. The dictum “we are not under law but under grace” not only explicates a turning point between the two, but an abolition of the Law that interjects itself into NT theology and spirituality; e.g., salvation, sanctification and the whole distinctly Christian experience.
While the OT believer’s life and outlook had its complex darker side compared to NT living, there were reasons and special occasions for joy and happiness, even exuberance. See the Psalms for example. But I would caution making these his normal spiritual experiences, especially if such incidents are interpreted by essentially NT criteria.
Hopefully food for thought.
Rolland McCune
Dr. McCune mentioned three paradigms for understanding “why they followed the law:
- Theocracy. Of course; certainly no argument there.
- Motivation. This is a point where there is a lot of discontinuity, but there certainly is a lot of continuity, too. See, for example, the admonitions about the Lord’s Supper, what happened to Ananias & Sapphira, Peter’s warning (1 Peter 1:17), or Heb 12:5ff. Some NT theologians (for example, my NT professor) sees the classic warning passages in Hebrews as being warnings about temporal punishment for believers who are not obedient - a sort of parallel to the blessings and cursings from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, but individualized.
- Law & Grace. I’m not convinced this is a very helpful distinction. Ryrie had to devote an entire section to his book about how this doesn’t mean DT’s think there was no grace in the OT. This could be due to critics not understanding the issues, but it likely also means the distinction is a bad one to hang your hat on. It’s ripe for misinterpretation and misunderstanding - a possible reason why many Christians don’t understand the OT. I believe Old Covenant vs. New Covenant is a much better paradigm. I’m curious why you caution against making joy, happiness and exuberance normal spiritual experiences for the OC saint. That seems … odd, to say the least.
You also wrote,
I do not intend to get involved here in individual interpretations of proof texts or simply the personal opinions of bloggers
Hopefully you weren’t referring to me. If you were, then you’ll disregard everything I said, obviously :)
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
Tyler:
No problem with an interchange of ideas. I was thinking more of the structure of OT living rather than extended controversy over individual texts.
RE: NT warnings such as Ananias and Sapphirah, I see little or no real parallel between that scene and OT capital punishment and other sanctions of a physical nature from Mosaism. Nothing of those sorts are part of NT teaching, Christian living or local church discipline. God may shorten a believer’s life because of persistent disobedience, but this is not comparable to Mosaic capital prescriptions and practice. I personally would not appeal to 1 Pet 1:27 or Heb 12:5ff on this.
RE: Law and grace, the NT is quite clear on the antithesis between the two and its far-reaching implications. The accusation of no grace under law nor of some principles of the law under grace is not the crux of the issue. We are talking about administrations of God’s revelation, not about the mere presence of each in Law and Grace. In Law-Grace contexts, the thought about Law is the Law of Moses. The NT is clear that there is no Law of Moses in existence and functioning since the 1st Century AD (Col 2; Gal 3). Talk about discontinuity! Granted, there are NT “carry-over” (Ryrie’s term) principles from Law, held in isolation from the Mosaic legal system itself, but I would not understand them to entail huge load-bearing importations/extrapolations of revelational continuity.
RE: OT Expressions of joy, exuberance, etc. I am certainly not “against ” them as such. I simply would not understand them as necessary or regular items of either OT religion or NT Christianity. I would not hold them up as ongoing components of the Christian experience, or one’s happiness, joy, and exuberance as conscious objects of living for Christ. They are by-products. Many of those emphases are inherited from the holiness, deeper life, Wesleyan and Keswick-type movements of centuries ago. Expressions of love, happiness and spiritual exuberance are most often actually produced by the glands and not the enlightened intellect, which is the control center of the human personality. “The Lord spoke to me about … ,” “I have finally got ‘peace’ about … ” and a host of other cliches Christians often use are experientially suspect and biblically/theologically vacuous. That is what I find odd.
Rolland McCune
A few more random thoughts:
- Warnings.
The large difference I see in the NT is that the discipline for deliberate disobedience is not so much corporate any longer, but individual. More could be said, but my basic point is that there is still a clear mandate to faithfully obey God, at the risk of divine discipline. I think God’s motivations for discipline in the Old Covenant (i.e. the Mosaic Covenant) and the New Covenant in Christ are the same - discipline for our own good. I think Deuteronomy has a whole lot to say about this. I bring out some of it in my next installment, where I do a brief survey of several OT passages.
- Law & Grace.
I agree the real issue is more than the mere presence of law and grace; but one of the reasons I find this a bad description is because it takes so much effort to get people to understand what you’re not talking about. My main point in this short series is to demonstrate that God’s people, in the OC and NC, have always followed His law with the same motivations - we love Him, so we serve Him. My own experience is that the “law vs. grace” distinction simply confuses people. It doesn’t confuse DT theologians or scholars, but it does confuse Pastors and Christians in the pews. I think it’s a bad paradigm, and dispensationalists have not done a good job explaining themselves.
I’ve read Houghton’s book Law and Grace three times - I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s saying, and wouldn’t dare recommend a lay Christian read the thing. I’ve read McClain’s Law and Grace about six times - it’s better, but not by much. I realize some may consider this to be akin to heresy, but there it is. :)
To zoom out to the bigger conceptual framework, I find “law and grace” a bad framework to hang your hat on. As I said before, I think “Old Covenant” and “New Covenant” is a better, richer, an far deeper framework to work with (note - I’m not referring to the artificial divisions in our bible’s table of contents, but the actual covenants!). I think dispensationalists have neglected this framework because there is a great disagreement in DT circles over what on earth to do with the New Covenant. I owe a great deal of my thinking on this to Paul Henebury, and my own preaching through Hebrews and several OT books.
- Exuberance
Not sure how we jumped from this to a discussion of Wesleyan/Keswick topics, but we managed to do it. My short answer is this - “the Lord spoke to me, told me you are wrong, and I have peace about that decision.” (Yes, that is a joke …)
My long answer is this - I assumed you were saying OC saints didn’t live lives characterized by joy, happiness and contentment in the Lord’s salvation. If that isn’t what you meant, no worries. If it was, I’m still confused. I’m with you on the bad evangelical cliches, and so is the Lord - He spoke to me and told me He was.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
We were in a foreign land, in bondage, under the sentence of death. But our mediator – the one who stands between us and God – came to us with the promise of deliverance. We trusted in the promises of God, took shelter under the blood of the lamb, and he lead us out. Now we are on the way to the Promised Land. We are not there yet, of course, but we have the law to guide us, and through blood sacrifice we also have his presence in our midst. So he will stay with us until we get to our true country, our everlasting home.
Then Dr Motyer concluded: ‘Now think about it. A Christian today could say the same thing, almost word for word.’
This perhaps illustrates the issue better than Jim (or Dr. Motyer) intended. The only way a Christian could casy the “same thing almost word for word” is if the meaning of the word changes. Israel was in Egypt; the Christian is not in a “foreign land” in any sense (except ex-pats perhaps). The mediator is actually two different people (Moses vs. Jesus) and one of them was wholly inadequate to the task. The Promised Land is two different lands. The Law is either two different laws or doesn’t guide the Christian.
One of the constant issues is over these basic hermeneutical principles of meaning. Using the same words does not make one mean the same thing. So to me, this seems to prove the point that dispensationalists have long made, and in fact that everyone makes unless they are either academic literature professors or covenant theologians.
The common tread is electing grace
I doubt any conservative Christian really convinces another by appeal to systematic theology. I prefer to first turn to a passage. Let’s go back to the passage in the article (Mk 12:28-34):
- The Pharisee asked what the greatest commandment was
- Jesus replied, “The Lord is your God. The Lord is One.” He explained a covenant member must love God with everything He has.
- He also added, “love your neighbor as yourself.”
- He explained the entire Mosaic Law could be summed up in these two precepts.
Does this not indicate the motivation for following the law is because of who He is, what He’s done for you, which produces whole-hearted love, the practical outworking of which is sincere love for the brethren? Why or why not?
Let’s take this out of the clouds and back to the text.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
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