Chinese original: 我們今天還需要遵守舊約的誡命嗎？
Question: Do Christians today still need to keep the laws of the Old Testament—for example, the Ten Commandments, sacrifices, or food laws?
Answer: This article was first written in 2016. At the time, I mainly used the traditional threefold division of “moral, ceremonial, and civil law” to explain the Christian relationship to Old Testament law. That classification can still be useful as a way of organizing the material, but after continuing to study the Old Testament laws over the years, I no longer think it should be the starting point for deciding whether a particular law applies today.
A more important set of questions is:
What role did this law play within God’s covenant with Israel? How does the rest of Scripture subsequently treat it? In Christ and the New Testament, is it continued, deepened, transformed, fulfilled, or no longer imposed as a covenant obligation upon all of God’s people?
We Are Not Living Under the Sinai Covenant
God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt and then entered into covenant with them at Sinai. The Old Testament law was therefore first given to Israel as a covenant community.
This matters.
Christians are not ancient Israelites, and the church is not another version of the ancient nation-state of Israel. We therefore cannot simply transfer every Old Testament law directly into the present and practice it in its original form.
The early church soon faced precisely this question: after Gentiles came to faith in Jesus, did they need to be circumcised and keep the whole Mosaic law in order to become part of God’s people?
Acts 15 gives a clear answer: no. Gentiles did not first have to become Jews in order to become Christians.
But that does not mean:
“We are not under the Sinai covenant, so none of the Old Testament commands has anything to do with us.”
Gentile Christians did not need to be circumcised, yet they were still forbidden to worship idols. They did not need to become citizens of ancient Israel, yet adultery, murder, and theft did not suddenly become permissible.
So the question cannot simply be, “Does this command appear in the Old Testament?” The more important question is: How does the rest of Scripture treat it?
Some Requirements Continue—and Are Even Deepened—in the New Testament
Commands such as “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not murder” do not disappear in the New Testament simply because the Sinai covenant has changed.
Jesus sometimes takes such requirements even deeper. He cites the prohibition against adultery and then moves from the outward act to desire and the heart (Matt. 5:27–30). When discussing divorce, he does not merely ask what Moses permitted; he goes back to what God intended “from the beginning” (Matt. 19:3–9).
This distinction is important.
The fact that Mosaic law permits or regulates something does not mean that God encourages it, nor does it necessarily mean that it represents God’s creational ideal. Divorce is a clear example. Moses provided legislation concerning divorce, yet Jesus says that this concession was connected with human hardness of heart: “from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:8).
Likewise, the Old Testament contains laws governing slavery. This means that the law regulated and restricted the institution within its ancient social setting; it does not mean that God commanded people to own slaves or established slaveholding as a creational ideal.
Other behaviors, however, are not merely regulated by the Old Testament but explicitly prohibited—for example, idolatry, adultery, incest, male same-sex intercourse, and bestiality. When we come to the New Testament, we still need to ask how the apostles receive these ethical requirements. We cannot simply assume that everything appearing in the Old Testament has therefore been cancelled.
In other words, “Does the law mention this practice?” and “How does the law evaluate this practice?” are two different questions.
Some Laws Belong to Israel’s Particular Covenant Life
Circumcision is a clear example.
It was extremely important within God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants, yet the New Testament does not require Gentile Christians to be circumcised in order to be saved or to belong to God’s people (Acts 15; Gal. 5).
The Sabbath also deserves careful attention.
The Old Testament clearly commands Israel to keep the Sabbath, but the New Testament does not impose seventh-day Sabbath observance upon all Gentile Christians as a common covenant requirement. Paul even allows believers to differ over the observance of days without judging one another (cf. Rom. 14:5–6; Col. 2:16–17).
This does not mean that a Jewish Christian who continues to observe the Sabbath, festivals, or other Jewish customs is thereby denying Christ. The crucial point is that such practices can no longer function as necessary conditions for salvation, justification, or membership among God’s people.
“No longer required of every Christian as a covenant obligation” is not the same thing as “Christians are forbidden to practice it.”
Some Laws Are Fulfilled in Christ
The sacrificial system presents another kind of case.
It is too simple to say, “The Old Testament required sacrifices; the New Testament cancelled them; therefore they used to apply but no longer do.”
Hebrews gives a much richer account.
The Old Testament priesthood and sacrificial system point toward Christ. Jesus offered himself once for all as the perfect sacrifice, so repeated sacrifices are no longer necessary (Heb. 7:27; 10:10–18).
In other words, the sacrificial system has not become meaningless. Rather, it reaches its fulfillment in Christ.
That is why Christians do not sacrifice animals for atonement today—not because we think the Old Testament sacrificial system was wrong, but because what it anticipated has been accomplished in Christ.
What About Israel’s Civil Laws?
The Old Testament also contains many laws concerning Israel’s social life: cities of refuge, parapets around rooftops, leaving part of a harvest for the poor, and so on.
The church today is not the ancient nation of Israel. It therefore does not enforce Israel’s civil and penal laws in their original form.
But that does not make these laws useless.
Most of us, for example, do not live on flat rooftops where people regularly gather, so we may not literally build a parapet around the roof as Deuteronomy 22:8 requires. Yet the responsibility expressed by the law remains worth considering: if I build or own something, I bear responsibility to prevent foreseeable harm to others.
Likewise, most of us do not own fields in which we can literally “leave the edges” of the harvest (Lev. 19:9–10), but that law reveals something about how God views the poor, property, land, and human responsibility.
So when studying such laws, our task is not mechanically to invent a modern equivalent. We should first ask:
Why did God give Israel this law in that particular setting?
What problem was it addressing?
Whom did it protect?
What does it reveal about what God values?
Does the rest of Scripture further develop, deepen, or transform its requirements?
Is the Moral–Ceremonial–Civil Distinction Still Useful?
Yes—but I would now place it later in the interpretive process.
It can help us organize different kinds of Old Testament laws, but it should not become a shortcut:
Moral law = still valid today;
Ceremonial law = entirely cancelled;
Civil law = completely irrelevant.
The actual picture is more complex.
Idolatry is itself a “religious” matter, yet the New Testament plainly does not cancel the prohibition against idol worship. The Sabbath belongs to the Ten Commandments, yet the New Testament does not require all Gentile Christians to observe it in the form given under the Sinai covenant. Sacrifice is not simply discarded but fulfilled in Christ. Israel’s civil laws are no longer enforced by the church in their original form, yet they still reveal God’s concern for justice, life, the vulnerable, and communal responsibility.
Therefore, classification can be a useful result of interpretation, but it should not replace interpretation.
So, Do Christians Still Need to Keep the Old Testament Law?
If by “keeping the Old Testament law” we mean:
Christians must live as Israelites under the Sinai covenant and keep the entire Mosaic law,
then the answer is no.
But if we mean:
Does the Old Testament law remain Scripture for the church, teaching us about God, his justice and mercy, while some of its ethical requirements continue to govern Christian life?
then the answer is yes—and it remains deeply important.
So when reading an Old Testament law, do not be too quick to ask only:
“Do I still have to keep this command today?”
Ask first:
“Why did God give this law to Israel in that setting? What role did it play within God’s covenant with Israel? How does the rest of Scripture treat it? In Jesus and the New Testament, is this requirement continued, deepened, transformed, fulfilled, or no longer imposed as a common covenant obligation upon all of God’s people?”
Reading the law this way keeps us from simply dividing the Old Testament into two piles—“still valid” and “abolished.” Instead, we learn to see how the whole biblical story moves from Israel toward Christ, and how even these ancient laws can help us know more deeply the God who gave them.