In your book Four Portraits, you write "For new-covenant believers living in the kingdom age, God’s standards are discerned through the Spirit, who reveals God’s character and mediates his will, and through the life of Jesus, who lived in full submission to God’s purpose.
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What role does the Law play in the life of a new-covenant believer?
Thank you!
- Acts 21:21 and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Mosehs, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs. 22 “What, then, is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. 23 “Therefore do this that we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow; 24 take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law. 25 “But concerning the Gentiles who have believed, we wrote, having decided that they should abstain from meat sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication.”
- Rom 2NLT 12 When the Gentiles sin, they will be destroyed, even though they never had God’s written law. And the Jews, who do have God’s law, will be judged by that law when they fail to obey it. 13 For merely listening to the law doesn’t make us right with God. It is obeying the law that makes us right in his sight.
- Good question! I like Christopher Wright's assertion that the OT law is paradigmatic for Christians. By this I understand him to mean that we are not bound by the individual stipulations of it, since it was given to Israel not the church, and because it was fulfilled in Christ. But the law teaches us about God's nature and purpose and so provides a model or paradigm for how to walk with him.
