The Law Came in One Piece

Moral, Civil, Ceremonial, and Who Drew Those Lines

The whole argument turns on three words: moral, civil, ceremonial. Ceremonial law ended at the cross, because Christ was the sacrifice it pointed toward. Civil law ended with the nation, because Israel's no longer a nation with its own courts and penalties. Moral law stands forever, because God's character holds, and the moral law is the Ten Commandments.

That's close to how the Westminster Confession puts it. The position has been taught in good faith from thousands of pulpits, and the people who hold it aren't trying to put you back under Moses. They're trying to keep the church from deciding that adultery is a matter of taste. The instinct is right. The framework built to protect it is another matter.

Where the Three Categories Came From

The division is old. It develops in the early church, gets stated cleanly by the medieval theologians, and the Reformers inherit it and build with it. By the seventeenth century it had hardened into confessional language, and by the time it reached most of us it had stopped looking like an interpretation at all.

Years ago I told our church that God gave Moses one law with 613 statutes in it. The Ten Commandments weren't a second law standing beside the rest. They were the title on the front, the famous chapter, the shorthand. And shorthand is easy to mistake for the whole thing. We keep the ten we like. A lot of us would settle for four of them on a good week. Then we add the tithe back in from somewhere else, piece it all together, and before long there are lines drawn around it that Moses didn't draw.

The three categories came from somewhere far more careful than that. Serious people drew them for a serious reason. They're still lines drawn on top of the text rather than lines the text draws.

What Deuteronomy Calls the Ten Commandments

There's a sentence in Deuteronomy the framework has to get around.

So He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. (Deuteronomy 4:13)

Read what the verse calls them. Not a summary of the covenant. Not the moral core sitting inside it. His covenant, with the Ten Commandments named as the thing that word points to.

One verse doesn't decide everything, and this one has limits. Exodus calls the case laws that follow a covenant too, and Deuteronomy 29 cuts another one on the plains of Moab, so the Ten aren't the only covenant document in the Old Testament. What the verse does do is put the burden somewhere specific. A framework that needs the Ten Commandments to be separable from Sinai has to account for a text that holds them up and calls them the covenant itself.

Paul knew that verse. And when he sorted the law, he sorted it by covenant.

Paul Sorts the Law Into Two Columns, Not Three

But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away (2 Corinthians 3:7)

Written and engraved on stones. Paul sets that phrase right beside Moses coming down the mountain with a shining face, which leaves one thing it can be. The tablets. Paul picks up the Ten Commandments and sets them in the column that was fading.

He calls that ministry glorious, and he means it. God gave it, God's glory rested on it, and Moses came down the mountain with his face lit from standing near it. But the light on Moses' face was going out even while he spoke, and Paul builds the whole comparison on that detail. For if what is passing away was glorious, what remains is much more glorious (2 Corinthians 3:11).

Count the categories in that chapter. There are two, and the line between them runs between covenants rather than between kinds of commandment. That's true wherever the New Testament takes the question up. Every time it asks whether you're under the law, it answers about the whole law.

Peter had said as much in Jerusalem years earlier, when the church had to decide what to require of Gentile believers.

Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? (Acts 15:10)

A yoke is one object. It goes on or it doesn't.

The Commandment Paul Quotes to a Church

There's a verse that argues the other way.

"Honor your father and mother," which is the first commandment with promise: that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. (Ephesians 6:2-3)

That's the fifth commandment, quoted by Paul, to a New Covenant church, with its Sinai promise still attached. If the Ten are finished as a covenant, what's he doing here?

The same thing he does in Romans 13, where he names adultery, murder, stealing, false witness and coveting one after another. He quotes the commandments freely and without apology. Then he says they're all summed up in loving your neighbor as yourself, and adds that love is the fulfillment of the law. He cites them the way you'd cite a source you trust. He doesn't reinstall them as the terms you live under.

What Holds the Line Now

That leaves the question under all of this, the one that made anyone draw those lines in the first place. If the covenant's finished, what holds the line?

The moral weight moved when the covenant moved, and it got larger. Love reaches everything those ten commands were protecting, and then keeps going past the end of the list, because a list finishes and a person doesn't. That love grows out of a settled standing rather than toward one. It belongs to people the cross has finished with, and it runs on a different engine than the tablets did. Loving one particular neighbor is harder than keeping a rule about him, for exactly that reason. The rule can be satisfied by Tuesday, and he's still there on Wednesday.

The people who drew those lines were guarding something worth guarding. They wanted a fence around murder, around adultery, around the honoring of a father, and they were right to want one. What their lines couldn't do was write anything where God writes now, on the heart, with no ink at all.