Worship, as an offering made to God, ought to be the offering which God wishes to receive from human persons. This is seen immediately in Genesis, in the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, one of which is accepted by God, the other of which is rejected. Consistent with this, extremely detailed instructions were given for the design of the place of worship, and the structure and patterns of worship itself, in the Law. In terms of order, these commandments even take precedence over many of the moral commandments given in the Law. In fact, the commandment to celebrate the Passover precedes the actual Passover in Exodus 12. These commandments regarding worship are taken incredibly seriously by the text, with Aaron’s…
One element of the Law which the vast majority of Christians see as being obsolete or annulled following the death and resurrection of Christ is the system of death penalties prescribed for a variety of offenses therein. While there are still many Christians who see the death penalty as appropriate in cases of murder, or other very specific crimes, relatively few would argue for its application in cases of, for example, disrespect to parents, or the fraud of a woman being found not to be a virgin on her wedding night. The fact that Christians do not embrace a literal application of these commandments from the Law is then often used in argument in an attempt to relativize the seriousness…
The most common answers to this question, that ‘that part’ of the Law doesn’t apply anymore, or that Acts 15 said that only four commandments apply to Christians, have been seen in previous posts in this series to not be valid from the perspective of how the New Testament understands the Law as applying to Christians. Why is it, then, that Christians do not follow the kosher laws regarding food in the Old Testament? In fact, many of the foods that Orthodox Christians in particular are allowed to eat during fast periods are food which were considered unclean under the commandments of the Law. It must first be said that there is no good evidence that the Apostles, including St.…
Acts 15, which presents the proceedings of what has become known as the Council of Jerusalem, that apostolic gathering which became the paradigm for future church councils, is considered to be the central passage in the New Testament to an understanding of how the apostles viewed the continued relevance, or irrelevance, of the Law to the life of the church. A group of pharisees who had become embraced Jesus as the Messiah were putting forth the argument that the Gentiles who were by that time entering into the nascent Christian church should be subject to not just the Old Testament Law, but to their pharisaic interpretation thereof. The gathered apostles, prominently Ss. Paul, Peter, and James, found against this party,…
