Do the Old Testament laws still apply to Christians today?

Christians don't keep most of the Old Testament laws. We don't sacrifice animals. We eat shellfish. We don't insist on circumcision. We mix fabrics. To anyone reading the Bible for the first time this looks inconsistent — the same book we claim to follow contains hundreds of commands we cheerfully ignore.

The Church has read the Mosaic Law as having three aspects — ceremonial, civil and moral — and that reading was not invented to get Christians off the hook. It comes from watching how the New Testament itself handles different laws. The book of Hebrews spends chapters on the sacrifices and concludes that they are finished, because the one they pointed to has come. Peter, a Jew who had never in his life eaten anything unclean, is shown a sheet let down from heaven full of forbidden animals and told to kill and eat. And when Jewish believers insisted that Gentile converts be circumcised, Paul refused, took the dispute to the apostles in Jerusalem, and won. Yet the same Paul quotes the commandments against theft, adultery and covetousness as binding on the churches he writes to. The apostles plainly did not treat every command in the same way, and the threefold division is simply the Church's attempt to say why.

Ceremonial Law: 

The ceremonial law covered two things: how Israel approached God, and how Israel was marked off from everyone else. Approach meant the sacrifices, the priesthood, and the rituals that made a person clean or unclean. Being marked off meant the food laws and circumcision. None of it was ever an end in itself. The writer of Hebrews says what it was for.

Hebrews 10:1 (NKJV)

For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect.

A shadow is not nothing. It tells you that something real is on its way and roughly what shape it will be. But no one goes on studying the shadow once the man himself has walked into the room. Israel's sacrifices pointed forward to Christ's. The food laws marked Israel out as a people belonging to God while the nations around them belonged to other gods. Circumcision was the mark cut into a man's body to show whose covenant he stood in.

Christ has come, and each of these has done its work. His death ended the sacrifices, because a sacrifice that actually takes sin away leaves nothing for the next one to do. Circumcision ended because the covenant it belonged to has been replaced by a better one. And the food laws ended because the line they drew has moved: God's people are no longer one nation kept separate from the rest, but men and women drawn out of every nation on earth. None of this was God changing His mind about worship. It was the end of a system that had been temporary from the day it was given.

Civil Law: 

The civil law governed Israel's life as a nation. Some of it sounds strange to modern ears — rules about mixed fabrics, beard-cutting, leaving the corners of a harvested field for the poor. Some of it sounds entirely familiar — court procedure, penalties for crimes, property and inheritance. All of it was written for one people, in one land, under one covenant, with God Himself as their king.

A Christian in India or Birmingham is not a citizen of that nation and never was. The laws do not bind him. What they still do is show him what God cares about in public life: honest weights, protection for the poor, courts that cannot be bought, punishment that fits the crime. The statute expired; the concern behind it did not.

The Moral Law: 

The moral law is different in kind. It reflects what God is eternally like — His holiness, His justice, His love — and it is summarised in the Ten Commandments. It did not begin at Sinai. Murder was wrong before God ever wrote it on stone, because murder is an offence against the character of the God who made men in His own image.

Matthew 5:17 (NKJV)

Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfil.

Jesus is often said to have raised the law's standard. He did not raise it; He uncovered it. The teachers of His day had shrunk the commandments down to outward conduct — you have not killed anyone, so the sixth commandment is satisfied. Jesus took them back to what the command had always required and showed them the anger sitting underneath the murder, the lust underneath the adultery. The standard never moved. It had been buried, and He dug it out.

Then He kept it — completely, and as the representative of His people, so that what He achieved before God counts as theirs. Not because they managed anything, but because they are joined to Him. This is why a Christian does not keep the moral law in order to be accepted by God. He has already been accepted. He keeps it because it is the shape of the life he was saved into.

That leaves one question. If no part of the law can save anyone, what is it still for? It does what a mirror does.

Romans 7:7 (NKJV)

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, “You shall not covet.”

Paul is describing his own experience. He had wanted things that were not his all his life and had never once called it sin, because nothing had told him it was. The commandments made it clear. A man who has never seen the standard has no idea that he needs rescuing, and every attempt to rescue himself will strike him as reasonable. The law ends that.

So the answer is not that Christians pick the laws they like. It is that the law was given in three parts and Christ met each one. The sacrifices and the marks of separation were pointing to Him, and He has come. The nation those courts governed is gone, and its statutes went with it. The moral law stands, because God has not changed, and Christ kept it perfectly in the place of everyone who trusts Him. That is why a Christian eats what he likes and still cannot lie, cheat or betray his wife.