Understanding What Jesus Said About The Law
I get asked this question a lot. Not in a dramatic way, just casually. Someone brings it up after a sermon or during a Bible study when the conversation drifts toward something like, if everything in the Old Testament is still binding, why do we only keep the Ten Commandments and not worry about dietary restrictions or clothing regulations? It's a reasonable question. Most people don't know what to make of Matthew 5:17 when they first read it, so here's the straightforward breakdown of what's actually going on. Matthew 5:17 is the verse everyone quotes. "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." That's it. Two sentences in the Sermon on the Mount. Everything after that gets messier. Jesus immediately follows that statement by saying that not the smallest letter or stroke will pass from the Law until everything is accomplished, and that anyone who relaxes even one of these commandments will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Taken at face value, that sounds pretty absolute. The Law isn't going anywhere. But then you read the rest of the New Testament and the picture shifts. Paul spends an enormous amount of energy arguing that Gentile converts don't need to be circumcised or follow the Mosaic dietary laws. Acts 15 records the Jerusalem council making an official decision on this exact issue. James 2 quotes Leviticus about not murdering and not committing adultery but says nothing about kosher food or Sabbath hour regulations. The early church clearly distinguished between moral principles that carried over and ceremonial or civil provisions from the Old Covenant that didn't.
The key word is fulfill. Jesus didn't say he came to amend the Law or update it. Fulfill means to bring something to its intended end point. Think of it less like repealing a statute and more like completing a blueprint. The Temple system with its sacrifices was always pointing toward something. When that thing showed up, the pointing stopped being necessary. That's the framework most theologians work with, and it's the one that actually matches what the New Testament writers did. There's also the context of what kind of law we're talking about. Jewish tradition itself divided the Torah into moral law, civil law, and ceremonial law. The moral core, the Decalogue, shows up repeatedly in the New Testament with full force intact. The civil provisions about property, penalties, and governance were tied to the nation-state of Israel and lost their binding context when that political structure was dissolved. The ceremonial statutes about sacrifice, purity, and feast days were fulfilled in Christ's death and resurrection. This isn't a modern invention. You find this tripartite division in Augustine, Aquinas, and almost every major Reformation theologian. Martin Luther was explicit about it. I ran into this practically when I was pastoring a small congregation about eight years ago. We had a believer who became convinced that since Jesus said not one stroke of the Law passes away, we needed to observe the Jewish feasts literally. Not symbolically, not spiritually, but as actual calendar-bound observances. He started pushing for Passover seders and tabernacles festivals in our Sunday schedule. The problem wasn't that his hermeneutic was sloppy, it was that he kept isolating individual verses from the broader canonical trajectory. My approach was to sit down and go through Acts 15 line by line with him, then move to Romans 14 and Colossians 2 where Paul directly addresses festival and food legislation for the church. It took about three sessions. He wasn't hostile, just genuinely confused about the distinction between fulfillment and continuation. That's probably most of the people asking this question.
There are edge cases that trip people up. Hebrews 8 and 9 are the heaviest weapons against a strict continuity reading. The author explicitly calls the old covenant obsolete and says God made the first one flawed enough that a new one was necessary. If the Law were unchanged and fully applicable, that argument falls apart entirely. Yet Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians who were tempted to slide back into temple practices. The warning is serious. They weren't being told to keep the old system alongside the new one. They were being told the old one had expired. On the other side, Jesus himself reinterpreted several commandments in ways that actually intensified them rather than relaxed them. You have heard it said, but I say to you. Murder isn't enough, anger counts. Lust isn't just action, desire counts. This isn't abolition, it's escalation. The standard went up, not down. That's an important distinction that gets lost in casual debate. The Law wasn't discarded, but its application was transformed from external compliance to internal transformation, which is exactly what Jeremiah 31 predicted the new covenant would do. So where does that leave us. The moral will of God expressed in the Law remains binding on believers. The ceremonial and civil scaffolding around it served a temporary purpose and has been fulfilled. Jesus didn't repeal the Law, he completed it. And the early church, guided by the Holy Spirit, worked out the practical implications of that completion without treating the Old Testament as a current legal code. That's the position that holds up under scrutiny. The rest tends to either flatten the text or ignore large chunks of it.
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