Thayer Thursday – What is the role of the Old Testament for Christians?
A central and confusing teaching of the New Testament is that through the death & resurrection of Jesus on the cross, we are no longer supervised by, or required to observe the Old Covenant Laws (cf. Romans 7:4; Galatians 2:19, 3:35; Hebrews 8:7-13; and others).
Instead we now follow the Holy Spirit: the “law” written on our hearts – in an intimate relationship with the living God of this universe.
So what does this mean?
Well, one of the best ways to describe it is how Paul explained this very question to the Galatian churches in his letter to them.
Think about what was like when you lived with your parents as a child. Your parents made you clean your room, be home by a certain time, do your chores, and complete all your homework. As long as you were living with them, you had to obey these rules.
Now that you’ve grow up and moved into a house of your own, you no longer have to follow the rules that your parents gave you when you lived under their roof.
However…
Just because you don’t HAVE to follow those doesn’t mean that they aren’t good rules!
By making you do your homework and clean your room your parents were teaching you responsibility. The boundaries they gave you were teaching you things that would be important for you to know later in life. All of those rules your parents gave you were to help you when you grew up and eventually moved out of their house.
This is kind of what it’s like after Jesus came and died on the cross for us. In his life, death and resurrection, he fulfilled for us all of the Old Testament laws, all of the rules and regulations that people were supposed to live by in the Old Testament.
And through being united with Him in faith, we enter into the long-awaited New Covenant (Ezek. 36, Jer. 31, Joel 2) and thus have “grown up and moved out of our parent’s house.”
So now, we don’t follow the rules from the Old Testament as our household rules to live by. Instead, since we’ve moved out of the house, God has given us His Holy Spirit and tells us in our hearts (individually and collectively as we live in community with the larger Body of believers) what we’re supposed to do.
This does not mean that the Old Covenant – including the 10 commandments – is to be forgotten!
Rather, Jesus and Paul both boiled the entire Old Testament Laws into two commands which inform all of our actions: love God, and love your neighbor.
Love, produced and prompted by the Holy Spirit in our lives becomes our compass. It becomes, as Ben Witherington says, “… the perfect expression and fulfillment of what the law aims at and desires of God’s people.”[1]
In other words: the Old Covenant laws – including the 10 commandments–are not useless. For in them, we see the character and heart of God through his dealings with his Covenant people for centuries.
We see expressions of the love that He wants us to have for Him and our neighbor.
In them we see God’s revelation to His creation about the kind of people He wanted them to become – an inner transformation which He promised He would accomplish…and one that is ultimately produced in our hearts through our joining in faith in the death & resurrection of His Son and the gift of His Holy Spirit.
So rather than living “up to” the commands of the law, we live “out of” the new person God has made us.
[1]Ben Witherington, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, A Scoio-Rhetorical Commentary, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 317.
Categories: Biblical Scholarship, Biblical Theology, Blog, Hebrew Bible, New Testament
Chris,
I’m curious about the perspective you present here. The thing that generally confuses me about traditional Christian interpretations of the OT Law is the seemingly arbitrary way in which it is said to apply to the believer.
For instance, generally Christians say that homosexuality is definitely prohibited within a NT paradigm. However, having marital relations with your wife while she is menstruating is almost universally “done away with.” Would you agree with this position? If so, why? Both of these things are listed in the same list of immoral sexual relations in Leviticus 18.
My other question would be that you say “God has given us His Holy Spirit and tells us in our hearts (individually and collectively as we live in community with the larger Body of believers) what we’re supposed to do.” What if God “tells” me and/or my community something different than he “tells” you and/or your community? Who’s to say who’s right?
Jacob
by Jacob I. on Sep 2, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Jacob,
These are great questions. Please forgive the long response, but as this tends to be a topic that is easily misunderstood I’m apt to err on the side of being verbose rather than misunderstood:
First, as regards homosexuality, the key reason scripturally I believe it is prohibited is because it is explicitly stated in the New Testament as an unnatural relation (not the way God intended it to be) in Romans 1. Paul, who is arguably the New Testament champion of a fully formed theology of following the Holy Spirit as opposed to the Law, used as his argument not Leviticus 18, but the natural order of creation for his sexual ethic. Paul is not referencing Torah for His argument – but how God originally intended creation to be. In other words, I disagree with homosexual practice as an appropriate act for a believer in Jesus not because it’s prohibited in Leviticus, but because we find it explicitly stated in the New Testament – written to followers of Christ who had the Holy Spirit to guide them – that it is not in line with God’s desire for His creation [in addition, I would also point back to Genesis (which I think Paul is implicitly doing) and God’s creation of mankind: His original intention for man and woman to be united together]. This in part answers your second question: One of the ways we know whether or not we are following the Holy Spirit properly is if it is in accordance with what scripture teaches. This of course brings with it the questions of our hermeneutical procedure, but given that God inspired the writing of all of scripture: 1.) we see throughout the New Testament what it practically looks like to live out of the Holy Spirit as opposed to either our flesh or to the Law; and 2.) As I stated in the original post: we also see the character and heart of God represented in the Old Testament and how we are called to live out that reality. As we look back to the Old Testament from this side of the work of Jesus on the cross we can understand who God is and what He requires of His people (Just as Jesus did in His summation of all the Law and Prophets in: “Love the Lord your God, and Love your neighbor as yourself.”)
Other than what we have explicitly stated in scripture, the second question you ask I believe gets to the heart of a fundamental blind spot we have in the church today. It is also, in my personal experience, the biggest stumbling block to having a fully formed theology of the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers and in the life of the Church. Many people are afraid that a nebulous “hearing from the Holy Spirit” with no foundation for truth is what is meant by what I’m arguing for as a proper understanding of the New Covenant. Because of this fear we’re apt to dismiss the whole process as lost before we begin. However if we expand our view of God and hold to a proper understanding of scripture – I think we can overcome this obstacle.
For the sake of space, I’ll boil this down to two scenarios. First, the Holy Spirit could tell me to do one thing and tell you to do another – even as regards the same situation. For instance, the Holy Spirit could tell me to serve at a soup kitchen this week and tell you not to. Or He could tell you to help an individual out financially while He tells me not to. A difference in response to the same question does not necessitate a contradiction within the will of God as expressed to us through the Holy Spirit. He could very well lead your local church to do one thing and our local church to do another. This does not mean that He is divided against Himself, but that He is simply working in different areas with different people/communities in different ways. So in this situation it is not that one is “right” and one is “wrong” but that God is simply choosing to express His love through His people in different ways at different times and in different places.
Second, on disagreements between two or more people where a difference in response from the Holy Spirit would necessitate a contradiction within God Himself: First in a spirit of prayer with open ears to the Holy Spirit, we should ask (within of course a proper understanding of the entirety of scripture as I’m advocating in my original post): does God, through what He has revealed in scripture, have anything to say on the topic? If we see that one of the choices is explicitly or implicitly (i.e. the fruit of the Spirit vs. the fruit of the flesh) prohibited within scripture, we can come to unity as regards the prohibition. Second, if scripture doesn’t explicitly prohibit or command a specific action, and we are still in disagreement (assuming for the sake of argument there’s only two choices and that God is definitely saying to do one of them), then we must together understand that one or more of us are either misunderstanding or not listening to the Holy Spirit. We must then spend time together in prayer asking for direction and that He would change our hearts so that we submit to His will and not our own. However, this is not something we tend to think about, much less give the Holy Spirit room to do in our lives. Instead, we take scripture out of context to produce proof texts to support our position, rely solely on statistical data (a pragmatic approach), and/or use other methods to argue that the other person(s) is wrong and we are right. Evangelical churches have (rightly) emphasized the text of scripture since the reformation. However, one of the unfortunate consequences of this war for the validity and authority God has chosen to convey in scripture is that we have undervalued the active and present role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers and in the life of the church (or relegated that authority solely to what is conveyed in scripture). Many in the church have effectively replaced the role of the Holy Spirit with the book of the Bible and not learned what it means to listen to His guidance in our lives and in the lives of the community. So when we are faced with a disagreement that scripture is either silent on or difficult to discern, we’ve forgotten that the Holy Spirit’s voice is not kept under lock and key between the covers of our Bibles and we end up struggling to come to agreement. There absolutely is authority in the Library of the Bible, but only in that it has been “God breathed.” We’ve mistakenly placed our authority in pages rather than in the God who breathed them. One of the consequences of this is that we have practically (though I’m sure unintentionally and not explicitly) removed the Holy Spirit from having direct influence over our lives and decisions. I’m convinced that if we had a fuller understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit, God Himself, in the life of the believer and the community of believers (The New Covenant!), we would have far more unity than we currently do (both in what is contained within the scriptures and what is not addressed). Instead, we have largely chosen to practically forget Him or simply make Him out to be the impersonal “it” power in the life of a believer. We cannot stand in the presence of the Holy God of this universe in the person of the Holy Spirit and remain in disunity. He is not divided. If we are divided, then we should humbly stand before God together and seek His will – allowing Him to speak.
In short: who’s to say who’s right? He is. But are we willing to listen and hear that we may be wrong? This is not easy. Disagreements will occur, and it will be messy at times. Even Paul & Barnabas disagreed on an issue (Acts 15). The key, however, is mutual submission, unity, humility, and openness to the voice of the Holy Spirit – a voice the church needs to once again learn to hear, a voice it ignores at its own peril.
by Thayer on Sep 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm