If you haven't seen the controversial statement Jesus (played by Roumie) in The Chosen series, you'd better see it for yourself.
The thing about this statement, "I am the Law of Moses," is that nowhere in the Bible does Jesus explicitly state that he is the law of Moses. We will examine whether or not he states it tacitly through several statements. Additionally, the Apostle Paul writes tomes about Jesus and the law that would seem to support this summarizing statement explicitly, though he never says it concisely (lawyer that he is, he never says anything in 6 words when he can say it in 60).
There are two singularly important things about the Law of Moses that we have to know before we proceed. First, the written laws that God gave Moses passed to us in the Torah are called the Mosaic Laws or the Law(s) of Moses, but they were never Moses' laws. This is an important distinction: They were always God's laws.
The laws in Leviticus were derivatives of the Ten Commandments given directly to Moses by God's hand. These, in turn, were derivatives of God's single law that he commands at the beginning of their rescue from Egypt (as well as many, many, many other times): Be holy for I am holy.
And because Israel is not God and clearly unholy, he had to give them some specific directions. The Ten Commandments are five laws to be holy in our relationship with God and five laws to be holy with others. However, while God was giving Moses the Ten Commandments, the Israelites were at the base of the mountain breaking them. So God gave Moses the laws and sacrifices in Leviticus as well as the laws to allow the Levite priesthood to stand between Israel and God. The rest of the Torah is a continual saga of Israel breaking the laws and rebelling, God giving Moses more laws, and repeating the cycle until they have more than 600 laws—none of which made them holy.
In his last sermon, Moses basically says they've proven to him over and over that they cannot keep the law(s) because their hearts are hard. Jesus confirms this later, when he points out that Moses gave them some of the procedural laws (referring particularly to how to divorce) because their hearts were hardened.
Later, throughout the generations, the Israelites rebel, reap the consequences, repent and return to revering the law, only to rinse and repeat. More laws creep in, compromising, negating, and even perverting God's laws given to us by Moses. These oral traditions made of men are referred to as Halakah. Both Peter and Jesus refer to these oral traditions as burdensome and even perverted. Paul says in Romans these laws became weakened by flesh, likely referring to the fact that flesh couldn't keep them and because flesh diluted them with additional laws. Jesus specifically addresses the laws with which the leadership of the day confronted him, declaring them man-made laws and that the leaders were guilty of elevating man-made laws to a divine status.
This is the problem: When Jesus arrived on the scene, Israel was led by Nadabs and Abihus who were treating something that is holy as ordinary—neglecting the weightier aspects of the laws—and then treating what man had created as holy. (You will recall that Nadab and Abihu were incinerated for doing this.)
The main commandment God was always concerned with was for us to be holy. The laws of God are 100% about holiness so God can dwell with us, which has always been his goal. Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments with two: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." It is interesting to note that Jesus does not ADD to the law here, he simply summarizing it BY QUOTING IT. (He quotes Deuteronomy 6:4-7 and Leviticus 19:18.)
Jesus makes a clear, distinct statement: Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. (Matthew 5:17) What does it mean, from God's perspective, to fulfill the Law? Does it merely mean that he kept the law? Certainly not, though he did keep all of God's laws perfectly, which was necessary for our salvation. ("For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” - Romans 5:19)
Jesus also kept the law perfectly to demonstrate he was God, because only God is holy. (Hebrews 7:26, Revelation 15:4) Only God could keep his own law perfectly because the law of God is an emanation of his perfect, complete, holy nature.
And God loved his law so much that rather than bend the law or compromise the law even one bit, he'd rather come and take on the full brunt of the law to free us who cannot keep the law. (Galatians 4:4-5 and Romans 8:1-4)
We were never able to keep the law of God—we were never able to be holy through the observance of the law. James 2:10 tells us that if we break even one of the laws one time, we are guilty of breaking the whole law because it is not a just a list of laws but one perfect law of God.
The continual rise of the smoke of the incessant sacrifices all day long as they wandered in the desert should have been sufficient proof that we are desperately in need of God to intervene.
Israel missed the point entirely: they were never going to be able to keep the law! It was always meant to point them to the need for a perfect God to take upon himself the brunt of the whole law. The second thing we must know about the law is that the law never had the power to make us holy. Continual meditation and observance of the law of God would have kept us in the way of the Fear of the Lord and gathering wisdom so we could be in relationship with God, but it would not have made us holy. Even Job, the most righteous man in the Bible, had to repent in dust and ashes! (Galatians 3:21 and Job 42:6)
Only a holy God who imparts his holy nature can make us holy. The Law merely points us to the place where we can receive the atonement a holy God makes in order to dwell with unholy people and to transform us into his holy creation once again.
So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. - Galatians 3:24-25
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. - Romans 8:3-4
Jesus addressed the compromised laws and collection of men's laws that had been elevated to divine status and the religious leaders hated him for it. In doing so, Jesus continually held up to the religious leaders the mirror of God's law and their inability to truly keep it.
Christ was both the Lawgiver and the law-fulfiller. It was his image the law held for centuries that Israel missed entirely. And they missed it while he walked among them perfectly keeping God's law because they worshipped their own laws and the idol those laws created.
From the time of Moses to now, God's law is a mirror to show us God's perfect holiness and our great need. God cannot dwell in the midst of unholiness. So the laws he gave Moses, including the sacrifices, were a pattern to follow to temporarily turn aside the wrath of a holy God who must respond to unholiness since it is utterly opposed to his nature.
Christ comes, keeping his law as only God could. He takes the full brunt of the wrath of God for his great enemy of sin, then rises from the dead so he might be the trailblazer for all who are transformed by his spirit into his image. He is the pattern we follow, now living by the spirit who keeps the law in our hearts. The perfect law that God writes on men’s hearts (Hebrews 8:10) emanates from God‘s holiness and is perfect.
No longer is God's holy law outside us, guarding us. His holiness flows from within our hearts to the outside in acts of righteousness (James 2:24) that demonstrate God's law of holiness, sculpted once again with the transformational power of the Holy Spirit.
This is the revelation of Christ as the culmination of the law:
Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. (Romans 10:4)
A simple way to say it clearly would be "I am the law of Moses."
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