by Angus Harley

Why is it that when I read the Reformed view of the ‘moral law’ I’m constantly reminded of the golden plates of Mormonism? I think it is partly because the Reformed view of the Ten Commandments materialized out of thin air like those golden plates, and also because, like the golden plates, the two-stone tablets are the be-all-and-end-all.

I suppose it’s also because of all the tributaries that flow mystically from the idea of moral law. The Ten Commandments are said to be a version of the eternal moral law. Because God must have needed ‘law’ from eternity, and because he is distinguishing it from law that is not moral, non-eternal? Did God need ‘reeled in’ or ‘contained’ from eternity? What actually is meant or indicated by ‘law’? Is ‘law’ just a synonym for command? But then, who was he commanding from eternity, before creation? And if ‘law’ is eternal, why is it not an attribute of God? I thought that all God’s commandments were moral. Can God do anything without it being moral in some fashion? The amoral God, perhaps? So, is the Old Covenant Law not good enough for this other, eternal, and moral, law? Why did God bother putting those golden laws within the Old Covenant, when it is plain that a covenant’s demands (laws) belong to it alone? Was God confused? Why would he add alien law (the Ten) to a Law (the Old Covenant) that they really didn’t belong to?

But to explain away this problem, we are told about another mystical idea: there is another covenant lying underneath the Old Covenant that allows the moral law (which kind of floats above the Old Covenant) to exist in the form of the Ten Commandments within the Old Covenant and its Law. Phew! For the Covenant of Grace is woven into all those glorious Covenants, even the Old Covenant. So the Reformed hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper. Sorry, the plates just keep getting ‘golder’ and ‘golder’!

Such is the mystical suasion of this moral-law/Ten Commandments on some that they see the same Ten Commandments in the New Covenant. It must be those golden spectacles. The NT quotes the Ten Commandments, we are told. But, weren’t the Ten Words part of a Covenant that ended? Don’t they all disappear with that Covenant (2 Cor.3)? It seems not. The golden tablets have mystical power, it seems. They just appear anywhere they like. It doesn’t seem to matter much that after Pentecost the Ten Commandments are never quoted as a whole except negatively in 2 Corinthians 3 as the core of the ministry that kills. 9 out of the 10 as individual commandments are cited, but after Pentecost, each is never cited as one of the Ten. Indeed, the book of Hebrews tells us exactly what the NT thinks about the Law of Moses and its cult. From the New Covenant perspective, the Ten are over, as is the Covenant they came from, and the Law they were set within.

So why are they cited at all, then? Because, in creating a New Covenant, a new law, and new commandments, the Lord understood that the OT Scriptures acted exclusively as a prophetic witness to his greater, New Covenant, heavenly redemption and the new world. So, he could literally choose any piece of OT Scripture to magnify that greater, heavenly Covenant and Law. A law that far surpassed any kind of common-denominator law that the Reformed view conjures up, for it is a law that comes from heaven itself and is heavenly in nature, as opposed to the earthly, two-stone, golden, tablets that were smashed to smithereens by Moses. Is this not why our Lord himself takes Leviticus 19:18, drawing it out of its Old Covenant setting, and resurrecting it within an exclusively, new creation, New Covenant, context of Messianic and sacrificial love (John 13:34)?

Alas, NCTers don’t have golden spectacles or golden tablets!