Or why is it that obeying the 613 commands in the OT is legalism while obeying the 1,050 commands in the NT isn't?
There are a remarkable number of bad legalists around. If one treats the various covenants of the Bible as law, and reads them as law, one discovers that the legalism people argue about (shellfish, for instance), is faux legalism. The shellfish law does not apply to the New Covenant.
So, a good Christian legalist - one who actually understands the law - realizes that the Law of Moses, in its entirety (including the Ten Commandments as such) is not law for Gentile Christians at all. Whether or not it is law for a Jewish Christian is a separate, slightly more complicated matter, the answer to which is that yes,
if the Jew wants to (forlornly) hope for his ancestral right, from God, to a farm in Israel, that he and his family and community must indeed follow the whole of the Law of Moses. 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, the major part of which was specified rites that can no longer be carried out.
But most Christians simply do not read law very well, or do not understand what they are reading. The Law of Moses, on its face, tells anybody who reads it to whom it applies. Jesus preached to Jews in a time when the Temple was still up, and referred to it in that context. He said that not a letter would pass from "the Law" (by which he meant the Law of Moses) until the end of the world. Given the subsequent destruction of the Temple, what Jesus was saying is, in effect, once the Temple and the priesthood are gone, the promise of this land is gone, because you cannot fulfill the law - not because it's too hard, but because it is literally impossible: the daily, ongoing rites of priests of a certain line at one specific altar was a fundamental requirement of the law, and God removed that line of priests from the world, and saw to the destruction of that altar. And so now the Law of Moses literally
cannot be fulfilled, no matter how willing a person might be. God has rendered it physically impossible to do so.
Christians blind themselves through bad reading comprehension skills when they think they're supposed to obey the Law of Moses. 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. The problem is one of legal context. Jesus preached
to Jews in Biblical Israel. He spoke in
their legal context, but by doing so he did not extent the Sinai Covenant to
us. Yes, the Law of Moses is still in effect, but no, it never did apply to us, only to Jews. And Jews cannot follow all of it even if they want to - 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.
This distinction was very hard for Jews to make, and everybody theologizing in the New Testament was a Jew except for Luke.
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. Because Paul was himself a legalist Pharisee, he saw the intricacy of the Law. Because he was writing to a heavily Jewish early Christianity the presence of this "old wineskin" was pervasive. All of the evangelists except Luke (who wasn't a Jew) struggled with it. We read the product of their struggles.
The problem is, we read it without very good comprehension.
Their struggle with
their old law is not the same thing is as our struggle with law itself. All law, even all law in the Bible, is not the Law of Moses. 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. And although there is an overlap, that overlap
does not mean that Christians are, somehow, under the Law of Sinai. We are not, not ever, not even the Ten Commandments.
Now, it happens that a good deal of the essence of the Ten Commandments are emphasized by Jesus in the New Covenant, but Jesus' formulation of them for Christians is different, and the purpose is entirely different: we're not Jews promised, as a tribe, a farm in Israel for obedience, but individuals called individually to follow Christ, and by doing so, obtain a favorable outcome at the final judgment, after which we will go into the City of God to live happily with God the Father and with the regnant Son.
It's really quite different, and the Christian Law, the Law of Jesus, is also quite different.
In both testaments, when reading is done with care, it is clear that there is a hierarchy of laws - that some sins are worse than others. Now, the thing with the Jewish law, of Moses, is that it was communal. The promised reward was earthly: a farm in a secure Israel, for Hebrews of the bloodline. Because all of the Law of Moses was intended to instruct on some facet of life necessary
to live securely in Israel, even the less important laws did need to be followed for there to not be suffering in Israel.
Consider shellfish. God gave that prohibition to Moses and the Hebrews as they were fleeing Egypt to settle in the Promised Land. The Israelites were only promised Canaan. They were never promised the world. God said that if the Hebrews ate as directed, they would not suffer the diseases they suffered in Egypt. THAT was the point of that Law, in that time, for those particular people, living in that place. In a pre-refrigeration, pre-running water, pre-soap, pre-germ theory age, a God who wanted a people he chose to not be ill from the incipient contagion all around in a sewer-free society, admonished them against eating certain foods that would make them sick
there. Shellfish from the hot Mediterranean in the stagnant waters of the Eastern Med, polluted with all of the effluvient of the Egyptian Nile, the raw sewage of millions, swirling slowly up the coast.
Nobody today with any knowledge of hygiene would want to eat the oysters or clams out of Calcutta harbor. God always understood human hygiene, but the Bronze Age escaped slaves he was shepherding did not. Read the dietary, washing, excretion and cleanliness laws of the Torah again and realize what you are reading. A God-King leading a people who know nothing of germs, whose vocabulary is primitive, into a hot land that has been long settled (and is therefore covered with feces and illness). This God wants to protect his people, but they do not know germ theory. So he gives them a set of apparently arbitrary rules of what they can and can't eat, what they must wash, how they must prepare food, how and where they must defecate, what they must do about toxic molds and other illnesses. And he promises them that IF they obey all of these laws, they will not get sick like they did in Egypt.
If the balloon were to go up and we found ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world, without running water, without sewerage, without any medicine, without food standards, if we were living in a subtropical place where the stagnant ocean waters were filled with pollution, we would find that the dietary laws of Moses thread the needle to optimum health for that environment.
The Jews didn't figure that out. It was given to them. If the Promised Land had been Norway, God probably wouldn't have prohibited shellfish, because cold water oysters are not unclean and are very healthy. Eating oysters out of the sewage dump that was the ancient Eastern Mediterranean coast was a good way to die. God knew that, and he SAID so in the law of good: Do this, and you won't get the diseases you had in Egypt.
This was part of a covenant for a specific bloodline, in a specific place and time. It is not, on its written face, a law for all of humanity. So, Christians are not being HYPOCRITICAL when they don't follow the Law of Moses. They are actually being legalistic! That law does not apply to them ON ITS FACE. It SAYS who it applies to, and for what.
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. This choice is usually made out of ignorance. People read the Bible (if they read it at all - most people read parts of it and accept the interpretations of their traditions) see law, see "God said..." and don't read the law as law - to see to whom it applies. "God said not to eat pork..." Actually, God said pork and oysters are fine. He said that Noah after the Flood. God said specifically to Hebrews in Israel that they were not to eat such things there is they did not want to get sick. This was never, ever, a general law for mankind, and if one reads the Scripture verbatim, one sees that that is obvious. Who is subject to the Law of Moses, and why, is right there IN THE TEXT. Also in the text is the struggle of First Century JEWISH Christians, who had been raised under that law, to reconcile their new faith with the Old Law. Some did a better job than others. 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).
But then we casually read today, see Old Testament Law, see Jews struggling with it in the New Testament, and then ASSUME, without any legal foundation, that this somehow must apply to us. That's faux legalism. It's like picking up a textbook of law and starting to apply it, without realizing that you are reading a translation of the political law of China. Doesn't apply to YOU (even if you're Chinese, if you're living in America), and NEVER DID to anybody else, living anywhere.
It's pretty obvious, when the Scriptures are read with a careful legal eye.
What is also obvious is that there is a NEW law in the New Testament. It has SOME of the features of SOME of the Jewish Commandments (the Ten, and others), but it is by no means a restatement of the Jewish Law. It's a fresh, new law, given by Jesus, for those who would follow HIM to the promised land, which is not Israel, but the City of God after final judgment.
This law is shorter. The deadly sins are detailed twice, by Jesus, on the last page of the Bible. The list only has one or two of the Ten Commandments, and includes other things that were not mentioned at all. It's not a restatement of the Law of Moses, but a different set of principles. There is some overlap, because God is the same God, but it comes from a different angle. This is not about a secure earthly farm in a promised land for selected people, but a room in God's city after death and resurrection.
The Law of Jesus is what we are under - he said "Follow me" many times, and he asked "What good does it do you to say you follow me if you don't do what I tell you to do?" If you want to know the Law of God for YOU, you have to set the Old Testament aside and read Jesus. Start with Revelation - it is best laid out there. The images of the end times are irrelevant here. It's what he says in the letters to the Seven Churches at the beginning, and his statement of the deadly sins at the end, that matter. Read the Gospels for a fleshing out of this message.
THAT is the law that people all over the world need to be following if they want to please God.
The notion that there is no law is absurd. The notion that God's law for the world is the Law of Moses is likewise, absurd. And that is all perfectly clear from the actual Scriptures, if they are read legalistically.
