This is a question that has bothered me a bit. There seems to be some disagreement between whether or not the Law was abolished.
Jesus said in Matthew 5: 17 “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.”
And then Paul says in Ephesians 2:15 “by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace,”
Do these verses contradict each other?
Paul emphasizes the “commandments and regulations” being abolished. So one can assume that these are the things that have been done away with. Of course he wouldn’t mean all commandments. Only a fool would think that Paul is telling us we are allowed to murder and worship idols because he says the commandments have been abolished. It seems that what he means is those rules and restrictions specific to the jewish people, such as circumcision and tassels and abstaining from pork etc. Such minutiae are no longer needed to maintain a covenant relationship with God because now we have Jesus to go through.
However, this doesn’t mean that the entire Covenant is to be discarded. Jesus clearly says that he has come to fulfill that covenant. One of the definitions of “fulfill” from Merriam Webster is “to convert into reality, to develop the full potentialities of”. This is how I see it working. The old covenant was a prototype, a model of how a covenant relationship between God and Man should be. But men were not good enough, not faithful enough to make it work correctly. So God had to come and put the covenant into effect as the perfect man. And because he was perfect and put the covenant into effect perfectly he was able to eliminate some of those more tedious rules and reguations. They aren’t necessary anymore if you access the covenant through Jesus, the perfect man.
