God has always been holy, righteous, and good, so He has always had such a conduct, and His law is holy, righteous, and good (Romans 7:12) because it is based off of His holiness, righteousness, and goodness, and it is His instructions for how to have such a conduct. So the way to have such a conduct existed from the beginning and exists independently of any covenant. Even before God has made any covenants with man, there still existed a way to act in line with His character, which was later revealed to Moses. Because God's law is based off of who He is, it can not change unless God's character changes.
Through faith in Messiah, we are now fellow citizens of Israel (Ephesians 2:19), true Israel is made up of those who have faith in the promise (Romans 9:8-6), and Gentiles are now included as part of God's chosen people, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, and a treasure of God's own possession (1 Peter 2:9-10), so what was once once said about Israel (Deuteronomy 7:6) now includes Gentiles, and all those who identify as a member of God's chosen people should follow the commands that God has given to His chosen people, Israel. The New Covenant was only made with the house of Judah and the house of Israel (Jeremiah 31:33), so it is only through being grafted into Israel that we are able to be part of it. However, even for those who are not grafted into Israel, God's instructions for how to act in line with His character are about how to identify with Him, not how to identify with Jews, so it doesn't matter who those instructions were given to or what covenant we are under, anyone who identifies as a follower of God and seeks to know how to do what is holy, righteous, and good can find out by reading the Mosaic law. Furthermore, this same law is incorporated into the New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:33) and as part of it we are still told to do what is holy, righteous, and good (1 Peter 1:14-16, 1 John 3:10, Ephesians 2:10). For example, 1 Peter 1:14-16 tells us to have a holy conduct because God is holy (not because the Jews are holy) and verse 16 references Leviticus 11:44-45, where God was giving His dietary laws as part of His instructions for how to have a holy conduct.
He will then find that, thanks to the destruction of the Temple and the priesthood by the Romans in 69 AD, it is no longer possible to fully obey the Law of Moses
Note that sacrifices did not stop with the death, resurrection, or ascension of Jesus, but continued up until the destruction of the temple. Paul continued to offer sacrifices as part of His vow (Acts 18:18, Numbers 6) and was on his way to pay for the expenses of others who had taken that same vow to show that he continued to live in obedience to the law (Acts 21:24). The Bible also prophecies of a period when a third temple will be built when sacrifices will resume. Also note that when Israel was in exile in Babylon the condition to return was for them to obey His law, which included obeying His Feasts while their wasn't a temple, so obeying what they could by faith counted as full obedience.
Jesus did not tell the people of the New Covenant to do that. He didn't even do that when he spoke about certain of those laws
Every prophet came with the message to repent from their sins and turn back to God's law, and Jesus was no different. The law is what reveals to us what sin is (Romans 3:20), without the law we wouldn't even know what sin is (Romans 7:7), and sin is defined as lawlessness (1 John 3:4), so simply telling us to repent from our sins, which is a central part of the Gospel message, is telling to turn away from lawlessness and turn back to obedience to God's law. Our salvation is from sin, so our salvation is from disobedience to the law for the purpose of coming into obedience to it. We are saved by grace through faith, not be doing good works, but rather we are made new creations in Messiah for the purpose of doing good works (Ephesians 2:8-10) and all OT Scripture (which primarily includes God's law) , is God breathed and profitable for equipping us to do every good work (2 Timothy 3:16). Messiah redeemed from lawlessness (Titus 2:14) for the purpose of coming into obedience to to the law and our sanctification is about being made to be more like Messiah in his obedience to the law. Messiah died so that we might obey that law and thereby meet its righteous requirement (Romans 8:4).
1 John 2:4-6 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
Jesus taught how to walk in obedience to God's law both by word and by sinless example and we are told to walk in the same way that he walked, to follow his example (1 Peter 2:21-22) to imitate him (1 Corinthians 11:1), and to be like Him (Philippians 2:5). Furthermore, these verses associate Jesus' commands with walking in the same way that he walked, so he didn't command anything other than obedience to the law of Moses. Indeed, he said His teachings were not his own, but that of the one who sent him (John 7:16), so Jesus did not teach anything that was not in accordance with the law that the Father had commanded to Moses. A central part of Christian theology is that Jesus was sinless, which means he obeyed the law perfectly, so while he didn't always obey man made traditions for how to obey God's law, he did always obey God's law.
And so now the Law of Moses literally cannot be fulfilled, no matter how willing a person might be.
According to Galatians 5:14, loving your neighbor fulfills the entire law, so fulfilling the entire law is something everyone since Moses can do and does not refer only to perfect obedience or to something unique that Jesus did. Jesus summarized the law as being instructions about how to love God and how to love your neighbor, so love fulfills the law because that is showing a full understanding of what the law is essentially about. After Jesus said he came to fulfill the law in Matthew 5:17, he then proceeded to fulfill it six times throughout the rest of the chapter by teaching how to fully understand and obey it.
Paul understood this, which is why we see him apparently struggling with "the Law" and its goodness, and its superfluity, on the one hand, and Christian salvation without it, on the other.
Paul said that our faith upholds God's law (Romans 3:31) and that he delighted in obeying it as David did (Psalms 1:1-2) and that it was the good that he sought to do, which he contrasted with the law of sin and death (Romans 7:12-24), so his struggle was not between God's law and salvation, but between the law of sin and death and salvation. God's law has many purposes, but obedience to it through our own effort as the means to our salvation was never one of them.
which means that it is really useless for them to follow any of it, as the promised farm in Israel is only in return for following all of it.
Living by faith in obedience to God's law was about much, much more than farmland.
Jesus independently gives plenty of law of God to Christians. These laws are new laws for the New Covenant. Quite a few of those laws overlap somewhat the Law of Moses, so one can see the parallels and see what God was getting at. But most of those laws do not overlap.
Jesus did not teach anything that was brand new or anything not in accordance with God's instructions. When he was quoting Scripture, he said "it is written", but when he was quoting the teachers of the law of his day, he said "you have heard that it was said", so in Matthew 5, Jesus was not teaching anything brand new, but was correcting what the teachers of the law were saying. For example:
Matthew 5:43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
While the law certainly does command us to love our neighbor (Leviticus 19:18), it does not command us to hate our enemies - that is what the teachers of the law were wrongly teaching. If Jesus had been adding or subtracting from God's law, then he would have sinned in violation of Deuteronomy 4:2 and been in just as much of a need of a Savior from his sin as the rest of us. If Jesus could change around which things were sin, then him being sinless would be of no importance, but rather he was sent because God upheld His law.
It's really quite different, and the Christian Law, the Law of Jesus, is also quite different.
Jesus was not in disagreement with the Father or the Spirit about what conduct we should have, so the law of Messiah is the same as the law of the Spirit, which is the same as the law of the Father, which was given to Moses. Jesus said he came only to do the Father's will (John 6:38) and his commands were the same as he walked out. God's law is spiritual (Romans 7:14), the Spirit has the role of leading us in obedience to the law (Ezekiel 36:26-27), the spirit has the role of leading us in truth (John 4:24), and God's law is truth (Psalms 119:142). The law is the way (Jeremiah 6:16-19), the truth, and the life (Deuteronomy 30:15), Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6), the law is God's word, and Messiah is God's word made flesh.
Tzara'at was a sign of an internal moral condition, not something acquired through eating contaminated food. While there are night and day parallels in the health factor between eating kosher and non-kosher food, we should be very careful before we say that that was the only purpose God had in commanding dietary laws, otherwise we might end up like the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 8-10, their knowledge puffed them up and erroneously led to to think that it was ok to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols because they through idols were nothing when they were really demons. For example, eating is one of the most common things that we do and when we pause before everything we eat to consider whether it is something that God would have us do, then it helps to train us in holiness and to train us to keep our focus on God throughout our other activities as well.
Where Christians fall down is in being hypocritical about the law of the New Testament, in pretending that because the Apostles and Jesus set aside various portions of "The Law" (of Moses) for them, that NO law applies to them.
At no point did either Jesus or the Apostles set aside any portion of the law of Moses. Doing that would have been sinning and according to Deuteronomy 13:4-6, the way to tell that someone is a false prophet who was not speaking for God, even if they performed signs and wonders, is if they tried to lead them away from obeying what God had commanded them, so if you think Jesus or the Apostles did that, then you should consider them to be false prophets and not inspired by God. Neither Paul nor the Jerusalem Council had any authority to countermand God or to tell Gentiles not to obey any of God's commands, so they never did that, but if you interpret them as trying to do that, then you should still obey God instead of them.
Actually, God said pork and oysters are fine. He said that Noah after the Flood
In
Genesis 7, Noah was told to take seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean animals, but he was not told how to distinguish between the two, which implies that he had already been given prior instructions about the differences between the two, and knew that unclean animals were not to be eaten or offered as sacrifices (
Genesis 8:20), which is in agreed with
Leviticus 11:46-47. God's word does not change (
Psalms 105:8 Psalms 119:89-92,
Isaiah 40:8), Jesus is the word of God (
John 1:14,
Revelation 19:13), and Jesus has always been the same (
Hebrews 13:8). So there is and has always been a difference between clean and unclean animals, and we have never been permitted to eat unclean animals.
In regard to
Genesis 9:3, the word "reh'mes" refers to a specific category of animal, which Noah was given permission to eat.
"The noun (remes) and the associated verb (rms) each occur 17 times in the Old Testament, ten times each in
Genesis 1-9. This word group is distinct from both the wild (predatory) beasts and domesticated flocks and herds. Neither verb nor noun is ever used to refer to larger wild animals or to domesticated animals. In no place is remes a catch-all category for all creatures. It is is one category of creature only. The division of Hebrew terms used up to this point in Genesis reflects the nature of the animal..."
"These animals were typically characterized as being the prey of hunters and wild beasts," - John H. Walton (PhD, Hebrew Union College)
This would mean that Noah could not eat all things, but only those that were remes, and this is in agreement with God's statement to Noah (
Genesis 9:2). Not coincidentally, the animals considered remes are all fit the description of animals that are considered clean in
Leviticus 11 and
Deuteronomy 14. So Noah was not given permission to eat unclean animals, he just needed permission to eat clean animals, which he didn't have while they were on the ark, otherwise they wouldn't be around today.
Genesis 6:20-21 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in
to you to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up.
It shall serve as food for you and for them.”
The goal of bringing animals on the ark was to preserve them from extinction, so God temporarily restricted Noah from eating clean animals by commanding him to keep them alive and to eat the same food as they did.
"God here does not bestow on men more than he had previously given, but only restored what had been taken away, that they might again enter on the possession of those things from which they had been excluded." - John Calvin
Some realized that Christians in general - Gentiles - are not under the Law of Moses at all (none quite realized that Gentiles NEVER WERE under the Law of Moses, but that is plain from the text itself).
If Gentiles were never under the law of Moses, then they have no need of a savior. According to Romans 6:8-14, the law that we are not under is the one where sin and death no longer have dominion over us, so we are not under the law of sin and death, which is the opposite of the law of Moses.
