The honest answer is shorter than the three-bucket chart you were handed, and it runs through Jesus rather than through a sorting system.
Which Old Testament laws still apply to a Christian? None of them as a legal code. The law given at Sinai was one covenant with one nation, and Jesus fulfilled it as a whole.
What binds us now is the law of Christ, which is love, and the New Testament says love is what the law was reaching for all along. The old laws still teach. They no longer govern.
Some hear that as permission to do whatever they like. Others hear it as throwing away half the Bible. It is neither.
The commandments given at Sinai were the terms of a covenant between God and Israel: priesthood, calendar, sacrifices, food rules and a civil code, bound together in one agreement. I walk through what it contained in our study of the law of Moses. The question here is narrower. What happened to it?
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Matthew 5:17Jesus did not call the law bad or cancel it. He came to fill it full. The next verse sets the limit: not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law “until all is accomplished.” That is a time clause. The law stands until its purpose is completed, and then it has done its job.
Hebrews tells you where that clock was pointing. Writing while the temple still stood, the author says the first covenant is “becoming obsolete and growing old” and is “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13). Not vanished. Ready to. Within a few years it did.
Exodus 19 to 24. Terms given to Israel, sealed with blood.
God promises a new covenant, “not like the covenant that I made with their fathers,” with the law written on the heart instead of on stone.
Luke 22:20. Jesus names the cup as the new covenant in His blood.
Acts 15. The apostles rule that non-Jewish believers are not placed under the law of Moses.
Rome destroys the temple. Sacrifice and priesthood stop, inside the generation Jesus named (Matthew 24:34).
At Sound of Heaven we hold that the covenant transition Jesus announced was completed in the first century, and AD 70 is when the old covenant visibly ended (see Matthew 24 explained). So the “until all is accomplished” of Matthew 5:18 is not still waiting. It was accomplished.
The law was never a buffet you could pick from. It was a covenant, it was fulfilled as a covenant, and it passed as a covenant.
Most of us were taught a tidy system. Split the law into three kinds. Ceremonial laws, meaning sacrifices, festivals, food and purity rules, pointed to Christ and ended with Him. Civil or judicial laws governed Israel as a nation and ended when that nation did. Moral laws reflect God's character and bind everyone forever.
This is not a lazy view. Thomas Aquinas distinguished moral, ceremonial and judicial precepts in the thirteenth century, and the Reformers inherited the scheme. The Westminster Confession, written in the 1640s, puts it about as well as it can be put. Israel's judicial laws “expired together with the State of that people,” the ceremonial laws are “now abrogated, under the new testament,” and “the moral law doth forever bind all.” It explains why Christians eat bacon and still think murder is wrong, and it does it in one breath.
Here is my problem with it. The Bible never uses it.
Three labeled categories, sorted in advance. The moral bucket carries over intact and the other two are set aside.
One law. Leviticus 19:18 says love your neighbor as yourself, and the very next verse forbids mixing two kinds of seed or wearing cloth of two materials. Moses sets them side by side with no labels.
The New Testament treats the law the same way, as a single whole. James 2:10 says whoever fails in one point “has become guilty of all of it.” Paul tells the Galatians that anyone who takes on circumcision “is obligated to keep the whole law” (Galatians 5:3). Nobody in the apostolic writings says keep this third and drop those two.
And the chart breaks on its own prize exhibit. The Sabbath sits inside the Ten Commandments, the center of the moral bucket, yet Paul says no one should pass judgment on you “with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath,” because these are “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Colossians 2:16 to 17). There is more on that in what the Sabbath is in the Bible.
One piece of folklore while we are here: the famous count of 613 commandments comes from later rabbinic tradition in the Talmud, not from Moses. The law never numbers or sorts itself. We do that.
The three categories are a teaching aid built centuries later. They can work as a rough map, but they are not how Scripture settles the question, and they break on the Sabbath.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
If anyone had reason to sort the law into keep and drop piles, it was the apostles. The first great argument in the church was over exactly this question, and Luke gives us the minutes.
Believers from the party of the Pharisees insist that Gentile converts must be circumcised and ordered “to keep the law of Moses.”
Why put “a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?” God cleansed their hearts by faith.
Do not trouble the Gentiles. Ask them only to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from what has been strangled, and from blood.
Many scholars notice they track Leviticus 17 and 18, the rules for foreigners living among Israel. The aim was shared tables between Jewish and Gentile believers, not a new mini code.
Look at what they did not do. They did not hand the Gentiles the Ten Commandments and say this part carries over. They did not sort anything. They laid “no greater burden” on them than four practical requests (Acts 15:28), and when the letter was read in Antioch the church rejoiced. For who these Gentile believers were and why it mattered so much, see who the Gentiles are.
Were Gentile Christians then free to lie and steal? Obviously not. They just did not get their ethics from a slice of Sinai. They got it from Jesus and the Spirit.
Under the Acts 15 ruling, what were Gentile believers not required to do?
The whole meeting was called over circumcision and the law of Moses, and the answer was no. The four requests James listed were the only things asked, and Acts 15:28 calls them no greater burden.
So what does bind a Christian? Paul answers without hesitating. He describes himself as “not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:21). He is not lawless. He is under a different law, and he tells you what it is.
“Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Romans 13:10The verse before it lists commandments, do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet, and Paul says they are all “summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Galatians 6:2 finishes the thought: “Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” We look at that phrase closely in what the law of Christ is.
Jesus came “to fulfill” the law. The verb means to fill up or make complete, a vessel filled to the brim.
The one who loves another “has fulfilled the law.” Same verb, and now the thing doing the fulfilling is love.
“The whole law is fulfilled in one word.” Paul says the whole law, not one bucket of it.
A strengthened form, anaplēroō, to fill up completely. Carrying somebody's load is how you fulfill the law of Christ.
Here is the Sound of Heaven position. The old covenant, including the Ten Commandments as the terms of that covenant, was fulfilled in Jesus and passed away with the end of that age. Christians are not under the law of Moses in any part. We are under the law of Christ, which is love for God and neighbor, taught and lived by Jesus and poured into us by the Spirit, just as Jeremiah 31 promised when it said the law would be written on the heart.
That does not make the Old Testament laws useless. Paul says the law was our guardian until Christ came (Galatians 3:24). A guardian's instructions still tell you something about the father who hired him. Read the laws and you learn what God cared about in that world: the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the poor man's cloak handed back before nightfall. Those concerns do not expire. They are fulfilled in love.
This cuts both ways. If you hear it as permission, you have missed it, because love asks more than Sinai did. Jesus took murder all the way down to contempt in the heart. If you keep the old categories so you still have a few laws to swing, you have missed it too. The question is what love for God and this neighbor requires, and Jesus shows us what that looks like.
Ask how Jesus handled the same concern. He is the final word about God, so the law is read in His light and never the other way round.
Most of these laws guarded somebody. Ask who, and you find what love still carries.
Galatians 5:16 to 23. Walking in the Spirit produces what the law could only command. More on that in how to walk in the Spirit.
Plenty of churches will not say this part. Some Old Testament laws were not simply temporary. They reflected the world they were written in, and Jesus does more than fulfill them. He corrects them.
Scripture is God-breathed, and it came through human authors living in real cultures, revealed step by step and made clear in Christ. When a law fits an ancient Near Eastern society better than the Father Jesus revealed, you do not have to defend it. It is a stage in the story, and Jesus has the last word.
A master who beats a slave who survives a day or two goes unpunished, “for the slave is his money.” The law limited cruelty inside a slave economy. It did not end it. Paul tells Philemon to receive Onesimus “as a beloved brother.”
A woman's vow could be cancelled by her father or her husband. In Christ there is “no male and female” (Galatians 3:28), and Jesus let Mary sit at His feet as a disciple (Luke 10:39).
In certain cities, “you shall save alive nothing that breathes.” Jesus says love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44).
Moses allowed it “because of your hardness of heart,” Jesus says, “but from the beginning it was not so.” Jesus Himself tells you some laws were concessions.
That last card matters most because it is Jesus doing the reading, treating a law of Moses as a concession to hardness rather than a window into the heart of God. Mark 7:19 does something similar with food: “Thus he declared all foods clean.” And Matthew 5 walks through six sayings that begin “You have heard that it was said,” and reframes every one of them.
Some of you grew up with Leviticus quoted at you, or watched it quoted at somebody you love. Laws are easy to aim. People pick the lines that condemn whoever they already disapprove of and skip the ones about their own dinner plate. That is not reading the Bible through Jesus, and the shame it left behind did not come from Him.
Jesus kept His sharpest words for religious leaders who tied heavy burdens on other people's shoulders and would not lift a finger to move them (Matthew 23:4). If a rule was ever used to push you out, bring that to us through our prayer page, or just come sit in the back row one Sunday in Deer Park.
The practical question was which Old Testament laws still apply. The answer is that one Person applies, and He carries everything the law was pointing at.
Jesus did not throw the law away. He filled it. The sacrifices found their substance in His death, the temple in His body and then His people, the commands about the widow and the stranger in a love no statute could force. When the old structure fell in AD 70, nothing that mattered was lost.
So read Leviticus. Read Deuteronomy. Let them show you what God cared about in the ancient world, and let Jesus show you what God is like. Then go love the person in front of you, which is the only way anybody has ever fulfilled the law.
For related ground, see the new covenant, how Jesus fulfilled the law, the Old and New Testaments compared, the great commandment, the Ten Commandments, circumcision of the heart, the covenants of the Bible and what we believe.
The Sinai law was one covenant with Israel, fulfilled as a whole in Jesus and ended with the temple in AD 70; the three-bucket chart is a later teaching aid the text never uses; the apostles placed Gentiles under no part of Moses; and what binds us now is the law of Christ, which is love.
Stuck on a specific law or one of the hard ones? Send it in and somebody at Sound of Heaven will walk through it with you.
None of them as a legal code. The law given at Sinai was a covenant with Israel, and Jesus fulfilled it as a whole. Christians live under the law of Christ, which Paul says is fulfilled in love (Romans 13:10, Galatians 6:2). The old laws still show what God cared about, like justice for the poor, and those concerns carry into a life of love. The code itself, with its sacrifices, food rules and civil penalties, does not carry over.
Not as the terms of the Sinai covenant, which is what they were. Most of what they protect shows up again in the New Testament in the language of love. Romans 13:9 lists several of them and says they are summed up in loving your neighbor as yourself. So a Christian does not murder, steal or commit adultery, because love does no wrong to a neighbor. The Sabbath is the clear exception, since Colossians 2:16 to 17 calls it a shadow whose substance belongs to Christ.
No. He said He came to fulfill it, and the word means to fill up or bring to completion. The next verse says nothing passes from the law until all is accomplished, which is a time clause. The old covenant was ready to vanish away, as Hebrews 8:13 puts it, and it ended with the temple in AD 70. Fulfilled is not the same as abolished. It means finished, with its purpose achieved.
Yes. The food laws of Leviticus 11 belonged to the covenant that set Israel apart from the nations. Mark 7:19 records that Jesus declared all foods clean, Peter's vision in Acts 10 applies the same point to the people those laws once kept apart, and Paul says in Colossians 2:16 that no one should judge you over food and drink. If a believer avoids certain foods for conscience or health, Romans 14 says to respect that and not to impose it on anyone else.
That Gentile believers did not need to be circumcised or placed under the law of Moses. Some believers from the Pharisee party argued they must be, and Peter called that a yoke no one had been able to bear. James proposed asking Gentiles only to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from what was strangled and from blood, which many scholars connect to the Leviticus rules for foreigners living in Israel. The letter called these no greater burden.