The Old Covenant

That God made a covenant with Israel in no way means that the moral revelation that accompanied that covenant was obligatory only for Jews before the coming of Christ, yet many will speak as if it does.  Evangelical Christians, in particular, are forced to say that Old Testament morality is largely obsolete if they want to remain evangelicals, because the framework of evangelical ethics disintegrates when people admit the fallacies and errors in this belief.

The Old Covenant, or the Mosaic Covenant, as it is also called, details moral obligations the Israelites were to uphold (Deuteronomy 4:1-8), with destruction, affliction, and dispersion throughout other nations being the ultimate terrestrial punishments God promised to mete on a collectively sinful Jewish society (Deuteronomy 28:15-68).  Certainly, since I am not an ancient Jew with whom God made this covenant, I cannot be the recipient of these calamities as covenant plagues.  However, I can still be accountable for the majority of the moral demands Yahweh made to the Jews.

Evangelicals, on one hand, decry moral relativism (but often because it contradicts their conservative moral beliefs, not because it is logically impossible), but, on the other hand, literally teach that moral obligations depend on where and when you were born.  They almost invariably hold that the punishments of Mosaic Law, as well as a variety of actions condemned therein, were sinful for the Old Testament Israelites, but are not obligatory for Christians today.  Thus, they are by definition cultural relativists!  Though they will deny this title, it describes the exact moral philosophy they embrace.  They do believe that moral obligations are objectively binding, but that the obligations themselves are not uniform across history and geography and are subject to change.

This directly contradicts Deuteronomy 4:8, which says that one purpose behind God revealing his laws to the Jews, including the penal laws, was that they were meant to be recognized as just by surrounding nations.  The fact that morality is rooted in God's nature is also a fatal blow to the moral framework of evangelicals, since God's nature is plainly said to never change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17).  Unless God changes, his moral nature cannot change, and if his moral nature does not change, human moral obligations cannot change.

The morality of the Old Covenant is inflexibly binding wherever it is not clearly limited by geography or time by the very nature of the command itself (a modern American cannot make sacrifices at the temple when there is no temple and he/she does not live in Israel, for example, and the death of Jesus does indeed nullify the need for animal sacrifices, which could never actually rectify human sin in an ultimate sense).  Jesus said that heaven and earth would pass away before these inflexible moral requirements do (Matthew 5:18).  Clearly, the Jesus presented in Matthew was very much against the idea that a major rift exists between Old Testament and New Testament ethics.

Ask evangelicals where the New Testament directly condemns a variety of sins prohibited in the Old Testament.  They often cannot point to even a single verse.  Yet still they might insist that those things really are still wrong, despite being condemned nowhere in the New Testament.  In the case of certain sins, they may rightly point out, for example, that the New Testament does have a passage that condemns rape (1 Corinthians 7:3-5; see Deuteronomy 22:25-27) and one that condemns the slave trade (1 Timothy 1:9-11; see Exodus 21:16).  But is far from obvious that the deity spoken of in the New Testament condemns things like bestiality (Exodus 22:19), torturing someone to extract information (Deuteronomy 19:15), or executing someone for theft (Exodus 22:1-4).  Actually, the New Testament does not condemn these things at all, as only the Old Testament does.

One can ironically see that evangelicals who deny that Old Testament laws (laws that don't pertain to things like sickness or the temple) are no longer binding might even be far more likely to teach something like eternal conscious torment for all unsaved beings (in the afterlife), that the abomination of Roman crucifixion was somehow just when imposed on the thieves crucified with Jesus, or that torturing people for information is permissible.  They discard the only standard in the Bible which condemns these things, and then proclaim that they emphasize mercy and grace, when the things they defend might never be just to begin with.  Their hypocrisy is apparent.  They might claim that New Testament morality, vague and unclear as it often is without illumination from the Old Testament [1], replaces judgment with mercy, and then literally say that Roman crucifixion, with all of its affiliated degradations and cruelties (which are condemned in Mosaic Law), was in some way just.

And while it might seem superficially kind to denounce something like stoning people for adultery, their proposed alternatives to criminal punishment are actually far harsher than those prescribed in the Bible--life in prison is far crueler than a swift execution (Exodus 21:12), 1-40 lashes (Deuteronomy 25:1-3), or servitude without abuse (Exodus 22:3, 21:26-27).  That they do not realize this testifies only to their stupidity and ignorance.  Biblically, there is nothing cruel about Mosaic punishments whatsoever; cruelty would be going beyond them.  I am merely showing that even if Biblical punishments were cruel, the primary American alternative is still far crueler.

Never does the New Testament revoke the penal laws of the Old Testament.  Never does it say that God's character dramatically changed.  Of course there are some differences in the obligations of the ancient Jews and of those in the modern world--there is no obligation to sacrifice an animal, for instance.  But unless a New Testament passage directly rescinds a law (as most Christians would claim was done with the dietary and ceremonial laws [2]) or a law is impossible to carry out (like the example of animal sacrifices at the temple), it remains objectively binding for all people.  And since God's nature has not changed, the core moral obligations of all humans have not changed.

Yes, the Old Covenant was made with Israel.  But just as Yahweh is not only Israel's deity, but also the deity whom all people are obligated to worship, so too is the morality revealed to Israel obligatory to non-Israelites.  Modern Christians are not exempt from doing what is intrinsically right; justice does not fluctuate from generation to generation.  The intelligence and self-education of Christians, however, do fluctuate wildly from one generation to another.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/on-new-testament-morals.html

[2].  Though I am a total agnostic on whether or not the dietary laws of Mosaic Law are still binding, as numerous factors are relevant to the issue, most theonomists do not believe that Scripture demands continued compliance with the ceremonial and/or dietary laws.  Even if they are not currently obligatory, this has nothing to do with the authority of the penal or other laws.