When the New Testament speaks of God’s “law,” it almost always refers to Moses’s law or law-covenant.[1] This law is one expression of God’s eternal law, which grows out of his unchanging, righteous character. The eternal law manifests itself in different institutional and covenantal forms through the timeline of redemptive history. Indeed, those institutional and covenantal changes mark off one era of redemptive history from another. For example, God’s command for the first couple not to eat from the tree of knowledge pertaining to good and evil reveals the outworking of his eternal law at that moment, but it doesn’t directly bind us today. We, thus, can’t just say, “God’s law is eternal, so let’s apply that Garden command directly to us.” Rather, we need to do the tough work of figuring out how or in what sense such a law would apply.
The same principle applies to the Mosaic law, which clarified the way in which God’s eternal law was to govern ancient Israel at that particular time in history. The law through Moses was distinctive from anything that governed previous generations, and God gave it to ancient Israel and not to every nation on earth. For Christians today,
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