Reposted from The Cripplegate.
Last week Tim Challies linked to a video by Dr. William Fullilove of Reformed Theological Seminary, called “Do Old Testament commands apply today?” His main points, in summary, are that…
1. theologians have divided the Old Testament laws into moral, ceremonial, and civil law,
2. we are bound by some commands because they are moral principles,
3. we do not follow civil and ceremonial laws, rather we have to recognize that “God had a moral principle that he was applying to a specific society” and then in order to apply those laws to ourselves we have to “stop and ask what is the moral principle that God was applying into that world, and then figure out how do I apply that moral principle into my world today” and 4) figuring out the moral principle for today is a “harrowing and messy process” because “there is nothing in the Bible that marks the law as moral or ceremonial or civil, we just have to figure it out” and by studying the Bible we can understand what “would God have us do with this particular command.”
I would like to suggest today that there is a process for figuring out what God wants us to do in obedience to him that is neither messy nor harrowing—rather it is clear and fully revealed.