WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT MORAL LAW TODAY?

There is a great need in the church today for a biblical, Christian philosophy of history. Most of us are short-sighted and narrow-minded. We are so preoccupied with current affairs in the present century, that neither the past nor the future has any great interest for us. We cannot see the wood for the trees. We need to step back and try to take in the whole counsel of God, His everlasting purpose to redeem a people for Himself through Jesus Christ. Our philosophy of history must make room not only for the centuries after Christ but for the centuries before Him, not only for Abraham and Moses but for Adam, through whom sin and judgment entered the world, and for Christ, through whom salvation has come. If we include the beginning of history, we must include its consummation also, when Christ returns in power and great glory, to take his power and reign. The God revealed in the Bible is working to a plan. He ‘accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will’ (Eph.1:11).

……The purpose of the law was, as it were, to lift the lid off man’s respectability and disclose what he is really like underneath – sinful, rebellious, guilty, under the judgment of God, and helpless to save himself.

And the law must still be allowed to do its God-given duty today. One of the great faults of the contemporary church is the tendency to soft-pedal sin and judgment. Like false prophets we ‘heal the wound of God’s people lightly’ (Jer.6:14; 8:11). This is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: ‘It is only when one submits to the law that one can speak of grace….I don’t think it is Christian to want to get to the New Testament too soon and too directly.’ We must never bypass the law and come straight to the gospel. To do so is to contradict the plan of God in biblical history.

Is this not why the gospel is unappreciated today? Some ignore it, others ridicule it. So in our modern evangelism we cast our pearls (the costliest pearl being the gospel) before swine. People cannot see the beauty of the pearl, because they have no appreciation of the filth of the pigsty. No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first of all revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness if the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.

Not until the law has bruised and smitten us will we admit our need of the gospel to bind up our wounds. Not until the law has arrested and imprisoned us will we pine for Christ to set us free. Not until the law has condemned and killed us will we call upon Christ for justification and life. Not until the law has driven us to despair of ourselves will we ever believe in Jesus. Not until the law has humbled us even to hell will we turn to the gospel to raise us to heaven.

In Galatians 3:15-22 the apostle Paul reviewed 2,000 years of Old Testament history, from Abraham through Moses to Christ. He also showed how these great biblical names are related to one another in the unfolding purpose of God, how God gave to Abraham a promise, and to Moses a law, and how through Christ He fulfilled the promise which the law had revealed as indispensable. For the law condemned the sinner to death, while the promise offered him justification and eternal life.

Now Paul elaborates his theme and shows that this progression from the promise through the law to the fulfilment of the promise is more than the history of the Old Testament and of the Jewish nation. It is the biography of every man, at least of every Christian man. Everybody is either held captive by the law because he is still awaiting the fulfilment of the promise or delivered from the law because he has inherited the promise. More simply, everybody is living either in the Old Testament or in the New, and derives his religion either from Moses or from Jesus. In the language of this paragraph he is either ‘under law’ or ‘in Christ’.

God’s purpose for our spiritual pilgrimage is that we should pass through the law into an experience of the promise. The tragedy is that so many people separate them by wanting one without the other. Some try to go to Jesus without first meeting Moses. They want to skip the Old Testament, to inherit the promise of justification in Christ without the prior pain of condemnation by the law. Others go to Moses and the law to be condemned, but they stay in this unhappy bondage. They are still living in the Old Testament. Their religion is a grievous yoke, hard to be borne. They have never gone to Christ, to be set free.

(John Stott, The Message of Galatians, pp.92ff.)