Why Do Some Churches Say You Need to Keep the Mosaic Law?

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Why Do Some Churches Say You Need to Keep the Mosaic Law?

May 5, 2025

Questions about why some churches say you need to keep the Mosaic Law and the gospel of Christ to be saved, and whether or not it’s inappropriate for Christians to celebrate Passover since it’s a celebration from Judaism and the Messiah has already come.

* Why do some churches say you need to keep the Mosaic Law and the gospel of Christ to be saved?

* Is it inappropriate for a Christian to celebrate Passover since it’s a celebration from Judaism and the Messiah has already come?

Transcript

This is Stand to Reason's hashtag SDRask Podcast with Greg Koukl and Amy Hall. Welcome to you. Welcome to you, Greg.

I don't know why you're laughing already. I was trying to make Amy chuckle when she started out, but she, she just, she's so professional. She just worked.

But I'm not professional. That's why I'm laughing. All right.

What are we doing today? All right. We have some questions about the law today and this first one comes from Bobby. All right.

Why does some denomination preach? You need to keep the old law, the Mosaic Law, and the gospel of Christ for your salvation. Are they saying Christ didn't shed enough blood on the cross? Well, I, I, um, I don't know how they would justify this bad teacher. I was teaching to put it simply.

Um, my first thought was, why would they teach this? And my answer that came to my head was because they're badly mistaken. You know, it's interesting. Paul's first letter allegedly was to the Galatians.

And this was the first letter allegedly, not allegedly to the Galatians. Just so people know. Oh, all right.

Yes. Um, yeah, his letter to the Galatians was many say his very first letter and the entire letter was meant to deal with this problem. Is it the law plus Jesus, the first council of the church recorded in Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council was to deal with this problem? Is it, uh, especially with regards to gentiles? Even after that, there might have been some question about whether the Jews were to follow certain aspects of the law and certainly aspects of it.

It's not problematic to pursue it if you want to for cultural reasons, pass over, et cetera, uh, and many of the feasts. But of course, you can't do the sacrificial elements because the physically impossible. There is no longer any sacrificial system, which it seems to me, not long after, well, let me back it up.

So to get my, my modifiers in the wrong place again. And it seems to me ought to be obvious because not long after the book of Hebrews was written to declare the end of the Old Testament sacrificial system, the temple was destroyed. So God's exclamation mark was placed on that theological statement.

All right. Um, Jeremiah 31 31 introduces a section on the new covenant. And this is a Hebrew prophet saying, I will make with you a new covenant.

Now here in the term new covenant, less like New Testament, we, we bandy it about a little bit. So it begins to lose its significance. But think of it in the context of Jeremiah's statement.

They have a covenant to Jews. They have the Mosaic covenant with all the provisions there. And he says, I will make with you, you know that covenant, a new one, not like the one which you received in Sinai from Moses, which you broke.

So the idea that the Old Testament or the Old Law is defunct as a vehicle for justification. Or as a vehicle for a focus of the faith that we were putting in the God, putting in the God who justifies us ought to be, um, it ought to clearly be antiquated. I'm not sure if I said that right.

It ought to be obvious that that doesn't apply anymore based on everything. The New Testament says about the Old Testament pertaining to, um, behaviors of Christians. I don't understand then why people argue and I get it.

There are ones who do that. Well, you, here is the Old Testament. Here are the 10 commandments.

Now the 10 commandments represent, I think in every case, but one, universals. So they are moral obligations for all human beings everywhere. I think the exception is the Sabbath and I think it's accepted even in the New Testament, but nevertheless, the point is these are moral obligations that apply to humanity.

But there's a whole bunch more obligations, hundreds of laws in the Mosaic covenant that were obligatory upon the Jews to keep. And if we are to keep the law, then we keep the whole law. If we aren't to keep the whole law, then we are not to keep any.

We have no obligation to keep any of the law as such, that is in virtue of it being the Mosaic law. Now, like I said, in any law in any country, in any state, there are going to be universals reflected in the law, homicide, theft, stuff like that. You're going to find that in every law because these reflect universals, but then you're also going to have things that are conventions, which side of the street you drive on, whether you can turn right after a full stop on a red light or something like that.

Well, these are not universal moral obligations. These are just conventions of the people. And the universals that we find in the Mosaic law, nine of the Ten Commandments on my view, do apply to us because they apply to everybody, but not because they're in the law.

It's because of the universals. They're in the law because of the universals. They are not universals because they're in the law.

This is a dead end street when people say law plus Jesus because the law is not capable. The whole reason that you have Jesus is to provide, make a provision for when we don't keep the law. That we can't keep the law.

That's where mercy and forgiveness come in. Whatever moral obligations that we have as human beings under God, we never keep those. Now we need to be rescued, and Jesus is the rescuer.

And ironically, and I know you've already opened your Bible probably to the Book of Romans. I don't know where you're going to say that. By grace, you are saved to faith that's not of yourselves, not of works, lest anyone boast.

Second, or make that Ephesians 2, 8, 9. So that was the first verse, by the way. I ever remember from the Bible because it's so cogent, so potent, so important, so powerful as a transforming factor. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have received our introduction into the faith in which we stand, and we rejoice or exalt in the glory of God.

Paul's really excited because we are now not at war with God anymore in virtue of the law, decrees which are hostile against us, Colossians 2. Rather, that has all been resolved. It's been satisfied. We are forgiven.

Therefore, we're not at war with God. He's not mad at us anymore. That passage I just cited was Romans 5, the first couple verses.

I'm just rattling these things off of the top of my head because they're all over the place. Now, sometimes people get a little confused with James chapter 2, and there's other passages that talk about the importance of Godliness, and I don't disallow that. I affirm that, but what we have to get straight on is the pecking order.

What is the basis of our acceptance with God, and it isn't ourselves, because that fails every single time. And by the way, when you start working with seeing the aberrant groups, whether they are completely off the reservation like LDS or Jehovah's Witnesses, or whether they're largely on the reservation, but they still have a confusion here, whether it's Protestants or Roman Catholics. This is something that gets sacrificed.

The grace of God gets undermined, and human effort begins to intrude in the picture. It's that camel gets his nose under the tent, and it's just so hard for human beings to avoid that. It's we are bent on trying to work our way into pleasing God as salvation, however you want to characterize it.

It's just this human condition because, and going back to the Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, when there is our merit involved, this accrues something to us that we like. That's why the verse ends that, no one should boast. No, you don't boast before, pardon me, before God, because you can't commend yourself before God with anything.

Once the books are open, Revelation 20, there it is. There's the mess of our lives that we have to account for, and it ain't going to be a pretty picture. That's why we must have a rescuer, and when the rescuer is involved, he rescues us, not by works, done or right, just by the washing regeneration of the Holy Spirit.

That's Titus 3. See, they're all over the place, these verses, because it's such an important concept. And so much of the New Testament is actually explicitly addresses the idea of our relationship to the Mosaic Law, because it was a big deal. They were trying to figure this out at the time.

So if you just go through the New Testament and you look at what it says about our relationship to the Law, you'll go a long way in understanding what is going on here. Even in the case of the Old Covenant, I ended up going to Romans after all, first Greg. This isn't Romans 9. When Paul says that Israel, he says the Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith, but Israel pursuing a law of righteousness did not arrive at that law.

Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works, they stumbled over the stumbling stone. So even in the case when they were under the Mosaic Covenant, their salvation was still by faith, even though they were required to follow the Old Testament law, they weren't earning their salvation, even in that case. So one thing I want to explain is that, well first let me say I do have a theory as to why this is gaining ground this idea that we have to follow the Mosaic Law.

My theory is that, I don't know, maybe a decade ago or so, people started accusing Christians of being hypocritical by saying that homosexuality was wrong. And what they would say is, you know, there's that clip that they would play from the West Wing where he would accuse them and be like, well why don't you do this? Why don't you, why do you wear mixed fibers and why do you eat shellfish? And he'd go through this whole list of things from the Mosaic Law. And my theory is that Christians said, yeah, why don't we? We want to be faithful to God.

So therefore we are going to follow the Old Testament laws, which as you pointed out Greg, they can't do because the law, the covenant is one covenant. If you are not doing the temple service, then you are breaking the covenant. You can't just follow part of it.

Nevertheless, I think people wanting to follow God asked themselves the same question and said, all right then we will do that. And so they decided they were going to follow some of the Mosaic Laws. Now, what they've missed is all the New Testament that addresses this, and in particular Romans 7, which does explain that just as when you die, you're released from the law concerning your spouse, when we died with Christ, we were released from the law.

That's what it says explicitly when we died with Christ. That was so that we could be joined to him and raised with him so that we could bear fruit for God, meaning that now we're in a new covenant of sanctification. And the way God sanctifies us is by giving us the Holy Spirit, we put our sin to death, and he's making us like Christ.

So as you said, there are all these moral laws and those moral laws to point us to who God is, what he's like. And now we are conformed to that, not because of the old covenant, but because that's what we were created to do, to become like Christ. And so as you pointed out, Greg, the moral laws and the moral principles behind all the laws in the Old Testament, they still represent what's moral and we're still being conformed to that, but not in virtue of the Mosaic Covenant.

Right. You probably know where this verse is, but there's a very terse statement Paul makes. Maybe it's in Galatians.

He says, if it's by grace, it's not by law. If it's by law, it's not by grace. In other words, he sets these two against each other to show that these are opposing each other in terms of methodologies.

There's another place where he says, if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. Galatians is very hard-hitting. Paul is really hitting this idea of the law hard because that's what was going on then.

And Paul goes berserk. He gets very angry because he's... He gets mad at Peter for goodness sake, afraid of the first pope and rails on him. And as Hebrews says, and Hebrews 9, it's 8 or 9, I can't remember, but the old covenant is obsolete.

And this is because when, again, when we die in a race with Christ, we are released from the law so that we can bear fruit for God. So God still has the same goal, but what he was revealing with the law was sin and need for salvation in Christ and need for forgiveness and grace. That was all being revealed in the law.

Now, just in case somebody has a question about the Sabbath, I also want to just briefly say, a big purpose of the law was to act as a shadow of what was going to come, what Jesus would be and who he would be and what he would do. So, again, Hebrews talks about how all of the Old Testament sacrificial system was meant to be a shadow and then Christ would be the substance. So, typological, a typology of what was to come, right? So, in Colossians, in Colossians 2, Paul's talking about how Jesus, again, is better than all these other things.

And he talks about, let's see, he forgave us all our transgressions, he canceled out the certificate of debt. And then in verse 16, he says, therefore, no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink on respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day. Things which are a mere shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Excellent. So, we have the substance, therefore, we do not need to follow the shadows. The shadows had a purpose, they weren't wrong, but their purpose is now fulfilled.

Got it. All right, so that brings us to the second question here from Elijah, and he asks, is it inappropriate for a Christian to celebrate Passover since it is celebration from Judaism and the Messiah has already come? Yeah, the answer to that is no, I made a reference to that earlier. These are all many of the celebrations that we find as part.

I can't speak to each one of them because I'm not familiar with everyone, but I'm thinking about booths. For example, I'm thinking about Passover, certainly. These are celebrations that, arguably, God gave to the Jews for an eternal practice or an everlasting practice to celebrate the work that God has done in their midst.

And, of course, Passover is the most defining historical moment of the Old Testament, just like the Resurrection is in the New Testament because Passover was that event, that procured the liberation of the Jews from slavery so they could go on their own and be freed from that and then be completely beholden to their God who gave them his law at Sinai soon after the Exodus, or as part of the Exodus journey. Celebrating that, though, is a reminder, is meant to be when you read the texts there in Exodus. It's clear that God wanted the Jews to continue to celebrate it, not because it had any efficacy and salvation, but because it was a reminder of what God did on their behalf in this very powerful manifestation.

Just like when I mentioned the New Testament example or parallel counterpart was the Resurrection, so we have the Lord's Table. We celebrate the Lord's death until He comes. So it's a remembrance of the past and expectation of the future, and there's a sense that this particular event, the Exodus initiated by the Passover, is similar.

They are celebrating the Lord's rescue of them and their release from slavery. There's all kinds of typology one could, without much difficulty, see relative to Christ, but the key here is that it's not tied to a sacrificial system, which wasn't even happening at the time. The law wasn't even given at the time that the Passover, for example, was instituted, and it's not efficacious.

There's no connection between the practice of Passover for the Jews and any salvific element. It is simply a memorial. Now, of course, it was efficacious at the time because it protected them from, you mean the first? It protected them, was the blood on the door posts, which they don't do now.

But the event of the Passover that was connected with the blood, that was what they wanted, God wanted them to remember and repeat time and time and time again as a remembrance of God's rescue out of that circumstance. I see no difficulty with that or any other. Now, if there was an Old Testament sacrificial system being re-enacted under some guys, that would be a problem, you know, because, wait, now that's done with it.

And this also makes me uncomfortable with the Catholic Mass. I was raised Catholic, and what they called the Mass was the way they referred to it was the sacrifice of the Mass, because in every Mass, the host becomes a blessing. It comes to Jesus, not being disparaging here, I'm just describing.

And then the host is broken and sacrificed at the sacrifice of the Mass. It almost appears, at least in the mannerisms, that there's a re-sacrificing. Now, people could take exception.

Well, that's not really what's going on. Well, all I got to tell you is it's called the sacrifice or was of the Mass, and that is what happened. Now, there might have been a deeper understanding of grace and whatever, but it just seemed like this is the message that was being communicated to that ritual.

Point being here with any group, Jewish or Christian denomination, if they're acting in a way to re-enact the efficacy of some physical thing, like the sacrifice of Christ, it ordered for their benefit. It is implicitly stating that the sacrifice of Christ is not adequate and something must be added to it, which is what the book of Galatians addresses and many other passages as well. It's either Christ or the law, but not both.

And I will say, my answer to this question would be, is it inappropriate to celebrate Passover? I would say it depends, and the reason why I would say that, and I would say most of the time, it's not inappropriate, but look at Paul, Paul says both things. So what you'll find is that he in Galatians, he gets very upset when people are saying you have to be circumcised, and he gets really mad. I mean, some matters you will see Paul in the entire New Testament.

And then you find out that when he was with Timothy, he had Timothy circumcised. So how do you explain that? The answer is, it depends on the meaning that you put into what you're doing. If you're saying that it's necessary for salvation, then you're cursed.

You've rejected the grace of Christ. But if you're doing it for a cultural reason, or you're doing it... Of a sensitivity? Yes. In our case.

For example, Paul says, you know, in 1 Corinthians 9, for though I am free from all men, I've made myself a slave to all, so that I may win more. To the Jews, I became as a Jew, so that I might win Jews. To those who are under the law as under the law, though not being myself under the law.

So that I might win those who are under the law. So in other words, there's nothing wrong with participating in this cultural event as long as you're not putting that meaning on it as if it were necessary for your salvation. So let's say you have Jewish friends and you want to join in their Passover.

I don't see a problem with that. Maybe even commemorate the Exodus. None of that is a problem.

It only becomes a problem when you say it's obligatory. Paul's Common In Galatian 5, regarding circumcision, is that if you are circumcised, then you have fallen from grace and then he qualifies it, those who are seeking to be justified by law. And that's the point you were making.

That if your circumcision is for the sake of justification, if that's the way you see this, then you don't understand grace. You've fallen from grace, this is his point. But if the circumcision is for an entirely different reason, health reasons, most American males are circumcised.

It's just the custom. I don't even know if it really makes a difference health-wise, but that's just the custom now. And Paul's point, though, in Galatians 5, was seeking circumcision for that reason.

Justification by faith. I'm sorry, by justification, according to circumcision, he said that's inconsistent with God's grace. And just remember, Paul, you can just look through Acts.

When Paul was in Israel, he followed the law. Just like when we're in another country, we follow their law. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

All right, anything else before I close this up? I think we're done here. Thank you, Elijah, and thank you. Bobby, we appreciate hearing from you.

Send us your question on X with the hashtag STRS. Or go to our website at str.org. All you have to do is just look for our hashtag STRS podcast page, and you'll see a link there to send us a question. We really look forward to hearing from you.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Coco for Stand to Reason.