Introduction to the Law

​When people think of God what attributes come to mind: omniscience, omnipresence, mercy, or wrath? Do people relegate some attributes to the Old Testament God rather than the New Testament? We Christians know that God is the same and does not change (the immutable attribute), but sometimes we fall into a worldly pitfall and think of God differently in Leviticus than we do in Romans. In order to understand the law and all its intricacies, we must first understand why we need a law in the first place. As with everything else, our reasons begin in Genesis. 

​In Genesis 1 we see the order in which God created all things. We see His omniscience when He names things like “Day” and “Night”, but we also see Him not name things like the stars and the planetary bodies. This is not a glaring oversight, but it is to show His sovereignty. False gods in the middle-east would name the stars or perhaps the stars would be gods themselves, according to their respective tradition. In Judaism and Christianity, outer space (also known as the second heaven) is considered almost unimportant, except to show the power and infinite nature of God. Everything of significance occurs upon either earth or Heaven (the third Heaven, where God is). 

​We also see in Genesis the fall of Adam and Eve. They were tempted by the serpent and gave in. First of all they gave in because they didn’t know the scriptures, but also because of their covetous desire. It was in their fall that sin entered the world, thus ensuring the need for a law. At their time they had only one law: do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The fact that this law was broken illuminates why every other law was broken from this time forward. 

​As we begin our study of the law it is important to keep these two things in mind, first that God is the same today as He was when He gave the law to Moses. Also that our salvation is contingent upon Messiah always and that keeping the law either during the time of the Old Testament or today will not assure you of salvation, only grace through faith in Jesus. Second, that we all fell in creation and that the law will be predicated upon the assumption of our knowledge of this. Job had no knowledge of Genesis, we however, do. Let’s use this knowledge to interpret the law through a historic and Biblical lens, to better understand what it meant for Old Testament believers and modern ones.