Are We Still Bound To The Ten Commandments?

Rev. Dr. Klass Runia Th. D., Trowel and Sword, November 1958 – Jan/Feb 1959 

Preamble: Dr. Runia arrived in Australia in 1956 to take up the position of Systematic Theology at RTC. According to “A Church En Route” he is remembered for outstanding scholarship, which shines through in the article below despite the fact English was not his native language. Even so, he deals comprehensively with the question of how we should view the Ten Commandments, and the insights put forward in this article are just as relevant today as they were sixty-five years ago. In his own words, “This paragraph has become longer than I wanted and expected. But the problem is too important and too intricate to be dealt with in a few sentences.” We trust that you will agree.

The Question

A few weeks ago I received a letter from one of our readers asking me to write in “Trowel and Sword” about this question. The reason was that he had had a talk with some friends belonging to another Church. According to these friends we as Christians of the New Testament dispensation have nothing to do with the law. We belong to Christ and are bound to Him only. We do not live under the law, but under grace. The law has been our tutor (tuchtmeester) unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith is come, we are no longer under a tutor (Galatians 3:25,25). They also appealed to Romans 7:1-6. Our reader had pointed out that we have to read the law as redeemed children of God and that the law will guide us as such, but the friends had said: We have received the Holy Spirit and He will guide us into all the truth. If we live close to the Lord Jesus and have communion with Him by reading the Bible and by prayer, we automatically will not kill, steal, etc., but we will seek to love God and our neighbour.

It cannot be denied, that we face an important question here. In our Reformed confessions the significance of the law for our days is fully recognised. It plays an important part especially in the Heidelberg Catechism. Both in the Lord’s Day’s 2 and 34ff. the Catechism deals with the law, the one time as a mirror to detect our sinfulness, the other time to be the guide of our Christian life. Is our Catechism wrong in doing this?  Has the O.T. law had its day? Are we as Reformed Christians trapped in a legalistic system, that is contrary to the spirit of the N.T.? Is there a lack of trust in the Holy Spirit with us?

Especially in the English speaking world many a Christian shares the views of the friends of our reader. And it is a good thing for us that our old, trusted positions are challenged! Too many things have been accepted, in a traditional way, without being our conscious possession. We are not allowed to say beforehand: the others are wrong. The only thing we can and must do is: to turn to the Bible again and to listen to the message of God in the Bible. What does the Bible say here?

The Attitude of the Lord Jesus

The key text for understanding the attitude of the Lord Jesus towards the O.T.  law is undoubtedly Matthew 5:17. “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to fulfil.” Actually this is a twofold statement. First Jesus says it negatively: “not to destroy”. So His attitude to the law and the prophets, that is: the Old Testament, is not at all disapproving. He is not a destroyer. No. He is a builder. I came to fulfil. That is the positive part of the statement. The great question now is: what does Jesus mean by: “to fulfil”? Does He mean that He Himself will fulfil, will keep the law, so that we are free from the law? No doubt it means that He came to keep the law. And that He did this for us. But I do not think that we are allowed to say, that this keeping of the law by the Lord Jesus means that now we have nothing to do with the law.

We have only to look at the context: In all the following verses of this long chapter Jesus does nothing else than telling us what the law actually means. By many examples He shows that the law of God covers man’s whole life. Not only his deeds and words, but also his thoughts. This is therefore the first meaning of “to fulfil”, that Jesus comes to tell us the deepest meaning of the divine law. It is true, in His explanation of the law we hear many critical sounds, but… this does not mean any criticism of the law itself, but only against the devaluation of the law in the rabbinical system.

He Himself fully acknowledges the law as divine and as binding. He gives us extensive exegesis and says: this is what you should do. In one word: He fully maintains the claim of the divine law.

When therefore a Pharisaic lawyer comes to Him and asks Him: “Master which is the greatest commandment in the law”, Jesus does not give a brand new commandment but He turns to the Mosaic law and takes from it two statements, pronouncing them as THE contents of the law: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”, and: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt. 22:34ff). The former of these commandments is taken from Deut. 6:5, the latter from Lev. 19:18. We can also point to other texts: Matt. 23:23, where He charges the Pharisees with “having left undone the weightier matters of the law” Matt. 5:20.

However, does this mean that Jesus accepts everything without more? Are all the aspects of the O.T. law accepted as equally binding? And then our answer must be: No, there is already a shift noticeable. The reason of this shift is: Jesus own coming. Read Matt. 6:16-18 (about fasting) and 9:14-17 (also about fasting, followed by the profound saying that new wine should not be put into old wine-skins). Through Jesus’ coming a completely new situation has come into existence.

He is the Messiah and in his coming the Messianic Kingdom has come in principle. Therefore all that was ceremonial in the O.T. law, all that pointed to Him, has to be discarded. How can the sons of the bride chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? Matt. 9:15. How can a piece of undressed cloth be put on a new garment? How can new wine be put into old wineskins? (verses 16,17). 

But all this is not a revolutionary putting aside of the divine law! The law is only placed into a new relation to the new Messianic situation. In this relation some of the aspects of the law get a different meaning, are even abrogated, but there is no indication whatsoever, that the law as such, THE LAW AS THE DIVINE RULE OF LIFE, is put aside. On the contrary: He himself dies on the cross to fulfil the law and to bear its curse. In this way He makes true His own words, spoken to John the Baptist: “It becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15). “All righteousness”, that means all that is demanded by God. He himself fulfils it. And He is doing it for all those who believe in Him, that they too may enter into the kingdom of God, that they all may become His children, who wholeheartedly want to live according to His demands.

(Continued in Jan/Feb 1959)

The Attitude of Paul

All the afore-mentioned statements of Jesus were spoken by Him before His death on the Cross. Somebody might say: All these words hold true only for the period before His death on the cross. His death was THE great turning point. Through His death everything has been changed, so that we now have nothing to do with the law.

Is that so? We cannot do better than turn to the apostle Paul, who more than all the other apostles has occupied himself with the problem of the law. In the first place he knew the struggle with the law out of his own experiences. Had he not been a Pharisee himself? Better than anybody he knew the danger that was threatening the Jew in this regard, namely to use the law as a means of self-made salvation. On this aspect he is writing in his epistle to the Romans.

Further there was the constant struggle with the Judaists (sic) who tried to destroy his preaching of the gospel of grace, by imposing the whole Old Testamentic (sic) law, especially the demand of circumcision, on the newly converted Gentiles. Against these Judaists (sic) he writes in his epistle to the Galatians.

What is his attitude?

It is not an easy thing to say that in a few words. Every simplification does injustice to his profound and comprehensive views. Though the problem of the law indeed is THE great problem of his life, yet he is not a single-rack man and never becomes one sided. There are several lines in his thoughts on the law.

1. He utterly rejects every possibility for man to obtain salvation through the law, Rom. 2:20 “By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in His (God’s) sight”. There is but one way of salvation: the righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ, which now has been manifested apart from the law, though it was witnessed already by the law and the prophets (verses 21,22). His conclusion is very clear and leaves no room for any misunderstanding: “We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (28). Also Abraham, the great ancestor of all the Jews, did not receive the promise through the law, but through the righteousness of faith (4:13). Cf. also Gal’ 3:11. So the whole system, set up by the Jews to use the law as a ladder to heaven, is fully discarded.

2. Is then the law of no importance at all? On the contrary. It indeed is the way of life for everybody who will fulfil it (Gal. 3:12). Yes we all actually should do it. But we cannot do it. So we all are liable to eternal punishment, having deserved the curse of the law. But Christ has come to fulfil the law in our place and to redeem us from the curse, having become a curse for us (Gal 3:13). Therefore the law is not any longer our master. “But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were held: so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter” (Rom. 7:6).

Here the question comes to us: what does Paul mean by the word law? The answer must be: the THORA, (sic) that is the whole Mosaic law, the whole complex of laws as they have been given at Mount Sinai, with their moral, ceremonial and political aspects. In other words, Paul is not speaking of the Ten Commandments, or of the law of God in a general way, but of the law in its very specific form, as it has been given to Israel after the exodus. (Cf. Gal. 3:17, Rom. 5:20). 

Why did God give this law to His people? Paul himself answers this question, and that in a twofold way. (a) This law was given to Israel to make it aware of its sins. It was given that sin might be recognised as sin (cf. Rom. 7:8-11). (b) The law was a tutor (tuchtmeester, paedagoog) (sic) unto Christ. It was intended to awake the desire for Christ in the people by its innumerable commandments and its minute provisions. In this regard it was really a hard master.

This last function, however, it has lost, when Christ Himself came. As to this Christ indeed is the end of the law (Rom. 10:4). The Greek word used here by Paul has the same double meaning as the English word end, namely last part and goal. As a tutor the law has no say over us any more (Gal. 3:25). We are no longer under the law (Gal. 5:18).

3. On the ground of this we are not surprised that exactly Paul is the great advocate of Christian Liberty. Constantly he says to the Romans and the Galatians: ye are free. Ye are no longer servants, but ye are free children. Read Gal. 4:4,5,31, where he stresses that Christ who was born under the law, redeemed us, which (sic) were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And then he writes those famous words: “With freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage” (cf. Rom. 8:2). Yes, Paul does not permit this freedom to be infringed by anything. Fierce therefore is his opposition to the doctrines of the Judaists, who want all the converted Gentiles to be circumcised. Warningly he says that everyone who has himself circumcised is a debtor to do the whole law (namely of Moses). (5:2ff). “But if ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law (verse 18).

4. Does this letter mean, that Paul in appealing to the Spirit rejects the law in every respect, that he even does not know of the law as a divine rule of life? Is there no good in the law at all? – Whosoever draws this conclusion, has not yet seen the full picture. Such a one is simplifying Paul’s doctrine.

Exactly in Romans 7, where he speaking of the freedom of the law, he is stressing time and again, that the law itself is “holy and righteous, and good” (12). Read also verse 7 and verse 13 (“that which is good”). And in verse 14 he says: “The law is spiritual”. 

Now you may say of course: but we do not deny that the law is good. Was it not given by God Himself? We only assert, that it has no binding power now.

But listen then again to Paul. He has still more to say. Read Rom.8 and Gal.5. They are the chapters in which Paul constantly speaks of the freedom we have won through Christ, and of the guidance we receive from the Spirit. And what do we find there? Exactly there Paul is referring to the law! 

Rom.8:2, “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ made me free from the law of sin and of death”. 8:4, In Christ God condemned sin in the flesh, that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but in the Spirit”. 8:7, “The mind of the flesh is not subject to the law of God, followed by the contrasting  verse 9 “but ye are not of the flesh, but in the Spirit”.

Of great importance is particularly Gal. 5:13ff. First in verse 13 Paul reasserts emphatically: “For ye, brethren, were called for freedom”. That is the starting point and Paul does not want to minimise it in any way. But then he goes on and says: “only use not your freedom for an occasion to the flesh, but through love be servants one to another”. Why is that necessary? And then the remarkable answer is: “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”.

To point out the Christian way of life, Paul too falls back on the Mosaic law! Paul can do this, because he first has freed the law from the legalistic system, which was made of it by the Jews. Paul knows Jesus Christ. He knows: Jesus Christ has fulfilled the whole law. Now all the shadows can disappear. But also: now the law in its original meaning has been restored, namely to be a rule of life, of the new life of thankfulness. And so in the same chapter where he says: “If ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law” (Gal.5:18). He also, after having mentioned the fruit of the Spirit (22), can write: “Against such there is no law”, or better translated: “against such the law is not” (23). And likewise in the following chapter he speaks of the “law of Christ” (6:2).

Read further also Rom. 13:8-10, where Paul several of the Ten Commandments mentions (sic), and that in such a way, that they are seen as still binding. Yes his conclusion is this very positive statement: “Love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”.

Our final conclusion therefore must be: “The New Testament accepts the law in a positive sense, but…. within the framework of Christs’s work! He who has been redeemed by Christ, may now serve his God in newness of heart and according to His divine will, revealed in His law. He may live, as the Isrealites should have lived according to the law. For are not exactly the Ten Commandments prefaced by the divine proclamation of redemption: I am Jehovah thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt? 

The rejection of the law by appealing to the Spirit is a very dangerous way. There is the permanent danger that (our) own conceptions are conceived of as revelations of the Spirit. But how do we know what the Spirit is saying to us? Does He speak directly? Or does He speak through the revealed Word? Why does the friend of our reader, who asked the question of this article, know that he should not steal, kill, etc.? Is it not, because the Spirit has spoken to him too through the Old Testament law? The Spirit will guide us into all the truth. Indeed. We never may doubt of this promise. But also: He shall not speak from Himself, but He shall take it of Christ. And where do we find Christ? In that Word, that is a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path. That is the Word  of both Old and New Testament, of both Law and Gospel.

This paragraph has become longer than I wanted and expected. But the problem is too important and too intricate to be dealt with in a few sentences. I would ask you all to read it with your Bible in your hand. For the Bible itself must have the last word.

K. Runia