Old Testament Laws, mixed fabrics, homosexuals and how to interpret the Bible

You’ve been there. You start the new year with the lofty goal of reading through the entire Bible before the next new year and…you run into Leviticus.

Then your wonderful plans get derailed because…well because reading chapter after chapter of the Old Testament Law seems—if you’re being honest—boring and irrelevant.

Yet these laws are in our Bibles. That means they are God’s holy, inspired words. So what do we do with the Old Testament Law? On top of this question, there’s another complication. It seems to be fairly common these days for people to point to the laws God gave Israel in order to discredit Christianity. Here is one such accusation:

Murray McCoy

I am pretty confident every Christian pick and chooses which scriptures they choose to follow and ignore. The same Leviticus that condemns homosexuals also says Christians can't eat prawns nor can they touch or eat pork. Pretty sure I've had hot dogs at every church fundraiser with pork, as a kid. The difference is hot dogs and shrimp are delicious and get a pass whereas homosexuals are different and therefore apparently scary. 

Is Maury right? And if not, then why not?




The Old Testament Law matters. A lot.

“If we believe the Bible is the word of God, then this is one of the massive subjects in Scripture,” says Kevin Bywater, Director and Resident Scholar of the Oxford Study Centre. Bywater has been trying to wrap his mind around this topic for most of his life, and he gave a talk on it at Summit Ministries in Colorado this past summer.

When we say, “the Law,” says Bywater, what we’re talking about are “the legal stipulations and Levitical system affiliated with Moses.” The Law, therefore, includes more than 600 ritual, civil and moral laws (and the punishments for breaking them) associated with Moses.

While he naturally doesn’t have the answer to every single question someone might ask, Bywater believes he has arrived at clarity about some key issues. And these show that there is a coherence to God’s Word we often miss.

What are some of the (inadequate) ways people try to explain the Old Testament Law?



1. The Old Testament Law was part of the Old Covenant that ended with Jesus, so Christians don’t have to follow any of those laws any more. 

Well, says Bywater, we might want to ask ourselves if we are really going to throw out the Ten Commandments, which include prohibitions against murder and adultery. But possibly the most compelling response to this argument is the fact that Jesus himself did not throw out the Law.

When asked what the greatest commandment in the Law was (Matt 22:34-40), Jesus quoted Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18 when he gave his answer. On top of that, Paul says we are to fulfil the Law by obeying the two greatest commands and he says that doing so includes obeying the commands not to covet, steal, murder…i.e., the 10 Commandments (Rom. 13:8-10). So it doesn’t work to simply say we don’t follow laws recorded in the Old Testament anymore.

2. We only have to obey the Old Testament laws that are repeated in the New Testament.

Bywater says he appreciates the instinct of this position but is not convinced of it. First, where does the Bible teach that this is how we’re supposed to treat the Law? If anything, it seems as though the disciples assumed they had to follow all of the Law unless God said they didn’t have to any more (as when Peter sees the vision revealing all foods are “clean”).

Here is another problem: There is no place where the New Testament bans bestiality, whereas the Old Testament does. If we were to say that we only obey repeated laws, that would mean bestiality is permissible.

Few people are likely to argue for that, of course, and it doesn’t seem consistent with the overall sexual ethic God has given us. So while this approach at first seems promising, it is lacking something.



3. We can make sense of the Old Testament Law by understanding that God gave the food laws for reasons pertaining to health and hygiene.

This viewpoint is a common Jewish tradition, says Bywater, but some rabbis question it. The reason why is that this approach is not sufficient for accounting for all of the animals that were banned.

Also, Deut. 14:21 commands the Israelites not to eat anything already dead, but they are allowed to give that animal to a foreigner living in the land. 

Does this mean that God is protecting the health of the Jews, but is deliberately trying to harm Gentiles?

Once again, this seems inconsistent with God’s other instructions for how to treat foreigners. There is no doubt that the Israelites were God’s chosen people, but He also commands them to be kind to foreigners in the land because they were once foreigners in Egypt (Lev. 19:34).

Not all Old Testament laws are equal - and that tells us what matters to God

“If we read the Old Testament with our eyes open, then we’ll see that some things are priorities and some things are not,” says Bywater.

As evidence of this, he points once more to the fact that Jesus specifies two commandments as being the most important. Jesus could have said, “There is no greatest commandment–they all matter equally.” But he doesn’t. He assumes the question is valid and then names the most important, as well as the second most important.

As further evidence that not all commands are equal, Bywater points out that different laws had different levels of punishment. The penalties for some sexual sins could be as serious as death while no such penalties applied to those who ate unclean food. This is probably the first relevant point to bring up to our friend Maury and those who have the same concerns.

Second, Bywater believes it is extremely illuminating to ask this question: When the prophets rebuke Israel and the foreign nations, what sorts of actions do they say God is upset about?

Think about that for a second. When the prophets come in God’s name, with God’s words, and rebuke Israel and the Gentile nations, what is it they rebuke them for?

Is for it eating pork or wearing two different types of fabric? Did God send his messengers to Assyria, Babylon and Egypt and say the people living there were sinning because they had not been circumcised?  No.

Over and over again, what angers God are three primary offences: Idolatry, immorality, and injustice.

For example, in Obadiah 1, the nation of Edom is rebuked for its pride. In Jonah 3, when the king of Ninevah repents at Jonah’s message, he issues a decree calling for the people turn from their evil and their violence. In Judges 2, the author describes how God disciplines the Israelites for following the gods of the nations around them.



Even with His own people, when God sent the prophets to call the Israelites back to Himself, the rituals of the Law were not what concerned Him. What concerned Him were idolatry, immorality, and injustice. Here is another example from Isaiah 1:12-17:

When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations— I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. 

For other examples see Micah 6:8, 1 Sam. 15:22, Ps. 51:16-17, and Heb. 10:5-7. So it is not new teaching when in Mark 7, Jesus says that what defiles people is what comes out of their hearts, not what they put in their mouths.

God has always been concerned with our hearts more than with anything else. Consider also the instance when Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for meticulously tithing mint, dill, and cumin, while neglecting what He terms “the more important matters of the law”—again validating the importance of the Old Testament Law and implying that some parts of it are more important than others (Matt. 23:23).

And what are these “more important matters,” according to Jesus? They are “justice and mercy and faithfulness.” Even elsewhere in the New Testament, says Bywater, idolatry, immorality and injustice are still priorities (see 1 Corinthians).

Back to the Ritual Laws
As already noted, there are differences in the types of Old Testament laws. Some of them are civil. Some outline procedures for rituals and ceremonies.

The point to notice here is that if someone becomes ritually unclean, that does not in itself mean that a person has sinned. Bywater points out that many aspects of daily life in Israel would have made God’s people unclean as a matter of course (Lev. 11-15).

Examples include having a child, touching a dead body, and making love to one’s spouse. Even some of the instructions God commanded the priests to obey (Numbers 19) would make them unclean!

 “It would be hard,” says Bywater, “for the average Israelite to avoid becoming unclean on an average day.” So it is a misunderstanding to equate eating hot dogs to breaking laws governing homosexual behaviour. 

What then is the purpose of these ritual commands?

Bywater believes their main purpose was to distinguish Israel from the nations around them. In many places in Scripture, God said that Israel was his chosen people, set apart from the other nations (see Deut. 7:6 and Ex. 19:4-6).

Social differences, says Bywater, can reinforce religious differences. But these practices do not carry over into the New Covenant. “The New Covenant doesn’t reinforce the national boundaries, nor the civil laws of the nation of Israel,” he says.

Circumcision, calendar, and cuisine get renegotiated, and many of the rituals (circumcision is one example) from the Old Covenant become metaphors in the New Covenant. Another major difference is that being from a particular nation no longer grants people any kind of status (Gal. 3:28).

Of course, all of this barely scratches the surface of the topic of the Old Testament Law.