Every Christian who knows the prohibitions in Leviticus 11:7–8 and Deuteronomy 22:11 while eating delicious ham at an Easter Sunday dinner, after wearing a wool-linen blended garment to church earlier in the day, has implicitly answered a question Christians have had to address for two millennia.1 How does a Christian who upholds the authority of God’s Word avoid breaking the Lord’s commandments concerning food and clothing, which he gave to Israel in the Mosaic Law? There are professing Christians in various isolated groups who, though inconsistently, argue for the perpetuity of those commandments. On the other hand, at the risk of oversimplification, Christians in Reformed churches generally claim that the Mosaic Law consists of three divisions—moral law, ceremonial law, and civil law—with the latter two passing away with the arrival of the New Covenant inaugurated by the coming of Christ Jesus. They contend that believers in Christ are under the moral law but not bound by either the ceremonial or the civil law. We are persuaded that both positions need proper understanding and correction.
1. “And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. You shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you” (Lev. 11:7–8). “You shall not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed, lest the whole yield be forfeited, the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard. You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. You shall not wear cloth of wool and linen mixed together” (Deut. 22:9–11).
We are among those who profess the Reformed faith and contend that theologians artificially impose this tripartite division on the Old Covenant. We believe this because neither the Old nor the New Testament presents the Mosaic Law as divisible into three parts. Our objective is to offer a positive exposition of how God’s Word distinguishes three aspects of the Mosaic Law without dividing them. By adjusting how fellow Reformed Christians view the Old Covenant, our presentation also corrects the first view held by some on the fringes. So, we proceed to offer what we believe is the most exegetically defensible and pastorally necessary way of reading the Law of Moses.
The Threefold Distinction of the Mosaic Law without Division
Christians whose position depends on the threefold segmenting of the Law do not claim that Israel’s code came in three pre-labeled filing cabinets. No Israelite heard or read Leviticus 17–20 and sorted commandments into “moral,” “ceremonial,” and “civil” bins. This three-part distinction is a theological construct derived from Aquinas, not from Moses, Jesus, or Paul.2 John Calvin accepted this “division of the whole law of God published by Moses into moral, ceremonial, and judicial laws.”3
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd rev. ed. (Benziger Brothers, 1920), I-II, qq. 90–108. He attributes his tripartite division of the Mosaic Law to Deut. 6:1—“These are the precepts, and ceremonies, and judgments, which the Lord your God commanded” (Douay-Rheims Version).
3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.XX.14, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 2:1502. Calvin admits more than he seems to realize when he admonishes, “[L]et no one be concerned over the small point that ceremonial and judicial laws pertain also to morals. For the ancient writers who taught this division, although they were not ignorant that these two latter parts had some bearing upon morals, still, because these could be changed or abrogated while morals remained untouched, did not call them moral laws. They applied this name only to the first part, without which the true holiness of morals cannot stand, nor an unchangeable rule of right living.”
This three-part distinction is a theological construct assisting theologians who claim that elements of the singular, cohesive Mosaic Law Covenant remain in effect even after redemptive history has advanced in Christ Jesus. Thus, our particular concern is how the New Testament handles various commands from the Law Covenant. Those who defend the threefold division speak of the Old Covenant as consisting of (1) moral law, (2) ceremonial law, and (3) civil law. This approach runs the risk of lapsing from affirming distinctions within the Law Covenant to reifying separations (i.e., it is one thing to affirm—in some sense—that there are different emphases or aspects to God’s Law, while it is another thing to treat the threefold distinction as hard and fast realities). To avoid this danger, we believe we must reaffirm that the Law Covenant was singular, consisting of three indivisible and thoroughly integrated aspects: moral, ceremonial, and civil.
Defenders of a tripartite division approach tend to treat the Decalogue as the summary of moral law, as if the Decalogue transcends the Old Covenant and is detachable from it and thus endures as the transcultural expression of God’s character, rooted in creation, reflected in the consciences of Gentiles who “do by nature what the law requires” (Rom. 2:14), and reaffirmed in the New Testament rather than abolished by Christ Jesus.4 They regard the ceremonial law as encompassing the sacrificial system, the priesthood, the dietary regulations, the purity codes, and the feast calendar—all of it typologically pointing forward to a fulfillment that has now arrived in Christ. Similarly, they view the civil law as comprising the judicial statutes given specifically to Israel as a covenanted nation-state occupying a particular land under a particular theocratic arrangement—laws that, as the Westminster Confession puts it, “expired together with the state of that people,” though their “general equity” still instructs today.5
4. This approach to the Mosaic Law as divisible, even separable, does not adequately address the Apostle Paul’s candor when he states, “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Eph. 2:14–16).
5. The full statement is, “To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any other, now, further than the general equity thereof may require” (Westminster Confession of Faith, 1646, 19.4).
The Exegetical Warrant for the Indivisibility of the Law Covenant
Does Scripture, including the Pentateuch, justify division of the Law Covenant into moral law, ceremonial law, and civil law? As already indicated, although three categories are warranted, how we represent them is crucial. To treat distinctions within the indivisible Old Covenant as detachable from one another is to go beyond how Scripture speaks. Scripture presents Christ Jesus as putting an end to the entire Law Covenant as a unit when it affirms that he “abolished the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Eph. 2:15). Scripture never represents the Law Covenant as consisting of three discrete sets of laws, two of which have been abrogated, preserving one intact. Instead, Scripture presents the Ten Commandments as the Old Covenant itself, just as Moses explains, “And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone” (Deut. 4:13; 10:4).
When reading the Holiness Code presented in Leviticus 17–20, Moses makes no attempt to compartmentalize the array of commandments and prohibitions. Instead, the Lord’s moral, ceremonial, and civil stipulations are thoroughly intertwined, rendering them completely inseparable even if distinguishable. For example, what everyone acknowledges as timeless moral directives, such as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18), stand side by side with ritual and civil prohibitions against cross-breeding livestock, sowing mixed seed, or wearing garments woven from blended fabrics (Lev. 19:19). This thorough intermingling renders it impossible to isolate the Old Covenant’s moral, ceremonial, and civil commandments from one another without injuring the whole covenant. To break any of God’s commandments is both a moral sin and a covenant violation.
Reflect on how Jesus responds to the Pharisees who objected that his disciples ate with defiled hands because they did not properly observe their handwashing rituals, which they added to the Law Covenant’s holiness codes concerning foods. First, Jesus rebukes them for “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men,” thus forsaking God’s commandments to uphold their own traditions such as Corban while forsaking the Fifth Commandment (Mark 7:1–13). Then Jesus “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19) by announcing that it is not foods that enter the body and are excreted that defile a person, but what defiles arises from the human heart—“evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:21–22). Clearly, Jesus distinguishes two aspects of the Old Covenant—its prohibitions of certain foods as temporary and passing away, contrasted with its prohibitions of intrinsic moral sins. This, however, does not legitimize the threefold division of the covenant into moral, ceremonial, and civil law.
Consider how the book of Hebrews addresses the ceremonial aspects of the Law Covenant. The author insists on the obsolescence of the entire function of the Tabernacle as a matter of theological necessity, because, since it was on the basis of the Levitical priesthood that Israel received the Law Covenant, “when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well” (Heb. 7:12). The entire argument of Hebrews 8–10 presupposes that the tabernacle, the sacrifices, and the Levitical priesthood were “a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities” (Heb. 10:1).6 The earthly shadow was abandoned not because it was worthless but because it became obsolete when the substance arrived. In short, as one moves from the Old Testament era to the New Testament era, there is a key redemptive-historical shift or development, a reality to which the book of Hebrews is very much attuned.
6. Use of “they received the law” (nenomothetētai) and “the law” (nomou metathesis) in Hebrews 7:11–12, clearly refers to the whole Old Covenant, not just one portion of that covenant.
Again, think on how Jesus reaffirms individual commandments from the Old Covenant. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not relax the moral standard of what we know as the Sixth and Seventh Commandments of the Decalogue. Instead, he intensifies them, tracing murder to hatred and adultery to lust (Matt. 5:21–30).7 Yet this intensification does not justify designating the Decalogue as moral law separate from ceremonial law and civil law. To be sure, the Sixth and Seventh Commandments prohibit what is immoral and promote what is moral, but it is not their presence in the Decalogue that establishes this; it is God’s character revealed. Thus, from the Mountain, Jesus does not republish the Decalogue, the Law Covenant. Rather, he inaugurates the New Covenant, which reiterates moral requirements expressed in the now defunct Old Covenant. Again, to grasp all of this one must be attuned to the redemptive-historical which is being revealed in the New Testament documents.
7. It is hardly incidental or serendipitous but redemptive-historically significant that Jesus delivers his message on a mountain. By delivering his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus presents himself as one greater than Moses, who received the Covenant Tablets from God on Mount Sinai, whereas Jesus prepares the people for his inauguration of the New Covenant by repeatedly saying, “You have heard that it was said . . . But I say to you. . .” (Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28, 33–34, 38–39, 43–44).
Consider the Apostle Paul’s appeal to the Fifth Commandment when writing to Gentile churches which were not subjects of the Law Covenant. He explicitly quotes from the Decalogue, stating, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’ (this is the first commandment with a promise), ‘that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land’” (Eph. 6:1–3). And Paul quotes this commandment after he has expressly stated that Christ Jesus “abolished the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Eph. 2:15). Is it not clear that Paul affirms two things simultaneously: (1) the Mosaic Law has been abolished by Christ Jesus so it, as a covenant, no longer holds jurisdiction over God’s people, and (2) the morality of individual commandments expressed within the Law Covenant’s summary, the Ten Words, is not vacated. The morality of the commandment to children does not rest on its inclusion in the Ten Commandments, nor on the Decalogue’s permanence. Rather, its inclusion within the Ten Words codifies morality that was true from the beginning and remains true forever; God’s character as Father, reflected in earthly fathers, obligates children to honor their parents (cf. Eph. 3:14–15). Again, this use of the Fifth Commandment, the first to include a promise, does not justify designating the Decalogue as moral law, separable from ceremonial law and civil law. Moral obligation to obey God saturates the indivisible law’s three aspects—moral, ceremonial, and civil.
There is also the civil material, the case law in Exodus 21–23, the penal sanctions in Deuteronomy, and the land-tenure and inheritance statutes. These were addressed to Israel precisely as a political and territorial entity, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6), occupying the land of promise under direct theocratic administration, foreshadowing the inauguration of God’s coming universal kingdom. The judicial code that governed Israel’s unique role under God’s covenant with the nation necessarily terminated with that arrangement when the Righteous One appeared, who enacts justice through the New Covenant he established by his faithfulness to his appointed mission (Rom. 3:21–26). Thus, with the coming of Christ, though “all authority in heaven and on earth” was given to him (Matt. 28:18), “at present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb. 2:8). What do we see? “We see . . . Jesus, crowned with glory and honor” (Heb. 2:9), extending his dominion beyond Israel to the nations by commissioning his people to disciple the nations (Matt. 28:18–20), gathering “a people for his own possession” (1 Pet. 2:9), whom he ransomed “for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” whom he has made “a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9–10).
Conclusion
The threefold division of the Mosaic Law is an artificial construct that leads to a less-than-satisfying answer every New Testament reader is requiredto ask: what do we do with Sinai now that Christ has come? The moral aspects of the Mosaic Law are not confined to the Decalogue but are intertwined throughout the whole Law Covenant because they were moral from the beginning, long before being codified at Sinai. The ceremonial aspects of the Law Covenant reached their end in Christ’s fulfillment. The civil dimensions of the Mosaic Law have expired as a binding code because the theocratic nation it governed no longer exists in that form, even as its equity continues to instruct us concerning true justice. Christ Jesus put an end to the whole Law Covenant’s jurisdiction, not just to the so-called ceremonial and civil aspects.
Thus, Christians who enjoy ham at Easter dinner after wearing mixed fabrics at a church’s worship service that morning are not, in fact, inconsistent. They rightly discern what this study has sought to demonstrate exegetically: the Mosaic Law was never three laws bundled together, but one law-covenant, woven with moral, ceremonial, and civil threads so tightly interlaced that no faithful Israelite and no New Testament author ever tried to pull them apart. Scripture does not dismantle the Law Covenant piece by piece, retaining the moral while discarding the ceremonial and civil. Scripture announces the Law Covenant’s retirement, precisely because Christ fulfilled it. When the priesthood changed with the arrival of the True Priest, the law changed with the dawning of the New Covenant (Heb. 7:12). The dividing wall came down, and the ordinances that constituted it were abolished (Eph. 2:14–16). Yet nothing in this abolition erased the moral reality that the Law Covenant codified, for that reality did not originate with Sinai and did not expire with it. God’s character, not the Decalogue’s tenure as covenant document, is the ground of enduring moral obligation, which is why Paul rightly quotes the Fifth Commandment to admonish children of Gentile believers who were never under the Sinai covenant at all, and why Jesus can intensify the Sixth and Seventh Commandments while inaugurating a covenant that supersedes the one that first codified them.
This has practical consequences for how believers read the Old Testament. We are not exegetes assigned the task of sorting Leviticus into moral, ceremonial, and civil folders, retaining one and discarding two. We are recipients of the New Covenant who read with great spiritual benefit the Old Covenant as a finished, fulfilled whole, one that reveals God’s unchanging holiness even as its stipulations no longer bind us as law. The threefold distinction, if used wisely, guards us against two errors at once: (1) the error of supposing any part of the Sinai covenant still holds direct jurisdiction over the New Covenant church, and (2) the error of supposing that its passing renders the God who gave it, or the holiness he required, any less binding on those who now belong to Christ. What has passed away is the Law Covenant; what remains is the God whose character it still reveals, and whose people now keep his commandments not as subjects of Moses, but as sons of the Father, indwelt by the Spirit, under the law of Christ.
