I have noticed a great deal of concentration by Christians on the old Jewish laws set forth in the Old Testament.
Many want the Ten Commandments in the courtrooms and classrooms. Some condemn interracial marriages on the grounds that God told the Israelites not to marry outside their tribe, some think tattoos are a sin, and there are many other examples of this warped logic.
These same people would preach this to you while on a five-mile journey to their favorite restaurant to grab a ham biscuit one Saturday morning.
The apostle Paul addressed this topic in his letter to the Romans, in chapters 7 and 8. Here we find that we as Christians are not subject to the law, because we have died to our sinful natures and those who are dead are not subject to the law.
We find in Galatians 2:20 that we are crucified with Christ, thus dying to our former selves, and we find in Romans 7:1 that man is only subject to the law as long as he is alive.
The law was given to the Jews, God’s chosen people, so the nature of God would be revealed to them and that they might see, in trying to live up to these laws, that salvation was unachievable by human means.
The laws also served to show us that sinfulness is our very nature and that the only atonement comes by the shedding of innocent blood. He set up the sacrificial system (through which the sins of the people were forgiven) as a prophetic portrayal of Christ’s death on the cross as the once and final sacrifice (through which the sins of the people would be forgiven).
Because sinfulness is our very nature and we are therefore incapable of living up to the characteristics of our righteous God, and that in itself being sin, we come to see that the law was given not only to show us the nature of God, but also the nature of man. And the nature of man is that we are depraved and that we are in need of redemption.
When Christ came it was to show us how to live under the new covenant that he would bring through his death and resurrection.
Under this new covenant we are no longer under the law as the Jews. We are exempt from the penalty of sin, death and eternal separation from God, because in our salvation we have died to the sinfulness within us and are new people.
The Old Testament simply shows us where we came from, and the New Testament where we are and where we will be.
So for all you pork eatin’, tattooed, interracial Christian couples who work on Saturday, if you have the spirit of God living in you, have nothing to worry about.

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