The ordinances of the Old Testament were put in place to teach the Israelites what it is like to be in a relationship with their God. They had spent so much time in Egypt that they had taken on the mannerisms and nuances of Egyptian life. Worshipping goats and bulls, wearing egyptian trinkets and idols, all of that. God was saying to them, hey I want to be in relationship with you… but you… you can’t be like them… you can’t just do whatever you want. I want you to be set apart… I want people to know you are in relationship with me. I want you to be cleansed of all those things that you are doing that worship a false God… including the God of your own ego.
And why don’t we follow these laws anymore?
Well we do follow some of them right? The 10 commandments for instance. Jesus came along and gave us something greater. We weren’t getting it right. He didn’t do away with it, he fulfilled it. He showed us how to be in communion with God, and even deeper and intense relationship than the Law could provide. He fulfilled the law, didn’t do away with it.
We don’t follow temple law, because the temple is no longer a building but something internal in our bodies… but we follow the spirit of it right? We have to let the Holy Spirit make us clean inside so that God can come reside in there and we have to work in cooperation with that. The dietary laws he did away with too, showing us that we weren’t getting the message. We weren’t seeing it as a way to draw closer to God, a discipline. The moral law though? He increased.
He said this is what it means to be in relationship with God… this is the full revelation of the entirety of the Law and the Prophets… love… love for God and love for your fellow man. That made it even harder to follow. 613 rules were supposed to free you. Just like playing the piano… the more you did it? The less you had to think about it. Instead, they began to use it as a way to avoid love… not a way to make love a part of their very existence.
I don’t believe it was that God just cared what we ate… but that God wanted us to get a sense of what it meant to be set apart. The pagans do this? Well we don’t. They worship these? Well we sacrifice them to the only true God. They wear these clothes? Ok, we won’t. We’ll wear only this.
God does not change… but the Scriptures are an organic progression of theological thought. God was revealing himself to the people over time. They did not have a full understanding of him, but they wrote down their journey. As we journey through with them, we find that evolution of thought and understanding of revelation growing… after the Babylonian exile we see them writing down more and more, trying to make sense of what it means to be God’s people. Why did we suffer? Why were we captured? We don’t even have a temple now, didn’t God say David’s throne would last forever? Etc.
It is in Christ that we find all those answers. That’s what it means to be fulfilled. He came to show us not the letter of the Law, the Pharisees and Scribes had that down… he came to show us how we were supposed to be living it. Loving one another. Living a life counter culturally to the point where people had no doubt that we were follows of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Just another point, we are no longer a developing nation with lack of knowledge of farming and social structures. Many of those laws were specific to the development of that nation as they went from a society of slaves to a royal Kingdom. We are no longer a people of the sacrificial temple, Jesus Christ was the one time sacrifice for all. In his fulfillment he showed us a greater way, a greater temple, a greater sacrifice, a more difficult code of morality (not a lesser one).
), and I just wish to humbly add a footnote to it: