How did Jesus end the law without abolishing it?

[DennisF]

Let’s look at how a legal contract works.

Scenario 1: Offeror offers the offeree a contract. Offeree has fulfilled the contract. Offeror honour the contract by paying the offeree.

Scenario 2: Offeror offers the offeree a contract. Offeree has breached the contract. Offeree honour the contract by making reparation to the Offeror.

The law of God is the same as a contract. If you can keep all the laws, you will have eternal life.

Matthew 19:16-17 A man came to Jesus and asked, “Good Teacher, what good work must I do to have life that lasts forever?” Jesus said to him, “Why are you asking Me about what is good? There is only One Who is good. If you want to have life that lasts forever, you must obey the Laws.”

If you break the law, you will receive death.

Ezekiel 18:20 The soul who sins shall die.

If obeying the law can bring salvation and eternal life, why is everyone still dying? It is because the death sentence has been passed onto everyone when Adam disobeyed. Everyone is born according to Adam’s fallen image (Everyone is born sinner and all sinners must die).

Genesis 5:3 And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.

Death reigns BEFORE the law.

Romans 5:12-14 This is what happened: Sin came into the world by one man, Adam. Sin brought death with it. Death spread to all men because all have sinned. Sin was in the world before the Law was given. But sin is not held against a person when there is no Law. And yet death had power over men from the time of Adam until the time of Moses. Even the power of death was over those who had not sinned in the same way Adam sinned.

Death reigns DURING the law.

Galatians 3:10 For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.”

Death reigns AFTER the law (For Christians who put themselves back under the law).

There are ignorant Christians who thinks Jesus died on the cross to bring them back into the law (from scenario 2 back into scenario 1 of the legal contract). They are saved by grace through faith but went back to keep the law with their flesh.

Galatians 3:2-3 This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?

The truth is that God has ended the law which is designed to be obey and uphold by the efforts of the flesh.

Romans 10:4 For Christ has brought the Law to an end, so that everyone who believes is put right with God.

God has brought forth a new and better way (that is free of burdens of the law and consciousness of sin through grace by the leading of his Holy Spirit) for us to keep the law. Read Hebrews 8:7-13.

Hebrews 8:7 For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.

Hebrews 8:13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

Important: God is NOT INTERESTED to see how well we can keep the law through the flesh.

Important: God wants to use the law to bring to our awareness that we are sinners who cannot save ourselves.

Under the equivalent of a legal contract, everyone is fulfilling the contract as defaulters (sinners) who has breached the contract, making reparation for damages (death).

We are like mortgagor who took up a mortgage from the bank. Under the law of repayment (an example of the law), we need to make repayment (an example of death - just as everybody pays daily with their life as they age towards death) to the bank. But halfway through the repayment, someone comes along and help us make a one-time huge payment that clears the remaining amount and free us from the debt. That someone did not abolish the law of mortgage but fulfilled it and free us from it.

Jesus fulfilled the law by making full payment for our death through his death on the cross.

Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I (Jesus) have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I (Jesus) have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

It is always a good idea to approach a thorny problem the way they approach problems at schools like MIT and CalTech: go back to the fundaments. In scripture, what is the law of God (Law) anyway? It is a part of the kind of formalized agreement that defines the relationship between God (Yahweh) and man (Adamites - us). That agreement has the form of a suzerainty covenant; George E. Mendenhall discovered this in the mid-1950s after going through many ancient Near East suzerainty treaties between a conquering king and a conquered king. Exodus 20 has the exact same form; it is a suzerainty covenant. The Law is the obligations of the inferior party (Israel, the people of God) and Yahweh. If the obligations are kept, blessings result; if broken, curses. That is what the Law is. The covenant theme is the dominant theme in the whole of scripture, along with its related theme, the kingdom of God.

The best way for most people to have this understanding of Law is to not read anything written by the Apostle Paul - not that he is wrong but that he can easily confuse many people with his erudite sentence structure and plentiful use of metaphors. The Catholic Church understood this during the Middle Ages when they interpreted the Bible for the masses instead of letting them have direct access to it. I do not (along with most Catholics nowadays) believe this is the best policy in literate times like ours, but it might still keep some people from misreading Paul.

 

[DennisF]

"Abolish" and "fulfill" were/are rabbinic technical terms that mean to 'interpret correctly' and 'interpret incorrectly', respectively. It has absolutely nothing to do with getting rid of the law. Jesus came in part to show us how to interpret the OT law correctly.

Well put. Translations also mislead many with expressions like "New Covenant" which can give the impression that the old one has been torn up (or more like, smashed), or the blackboard erased and washed clean, and God is starting over from scratch with a new piece of chalk. This is a mild form of the Marcionite heresy. The word translated "new" is the Greek kainos which is better translated renewed, not (de novo) new. "New heavens and earth" is a renewed earth. When Jesus returns to earth, it will be the one we are living on, not some fantasy. And it will undergo renewal. Given all the plastic islands in the oceans that are square miles in size, and all the farm toxins everywhere, this renewal might taken a thousand years!