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(FYI, this turned out to be a lot longer than I expected it to be.)
Last night I finished From the Finger of God by Philip S. Ross, and I thought I’d write a quick review of my thoughts, in part because I thought it’d help cement in my mind the principles from it, lest I immediately forget everything that I read. I do this with some concern that I’ll write something remarkably stupid and show that I did not understand essential parts of the book. I also have raw, disorganized notes that I made mostly from speech-to-text for my own reference. You can read that if you want, but it would be difficult to do so.
This book’s subtitle is “The Biblical and Theological Basis for the Threefold Division of the Law” (being the Mosaic Law), which is why I wanted to read it. For a very long time I’ve felt like my grasp of the threefold division is pretty weak. I understood the what but not quite the why. If the Torah often uses terms like “forever” and “everlasting”, how is that consistent with the modern church’s nearly-uniform view that some laws are not directly applicable today? With respect, I never really bought the Dispensationalist idea that the law was just for a different time. From Hebrews, I certainly understood why the sacrifice was no longer practiced. Of course, Christ also made all meats clean, for which we can be grateful. And I always heard that the things like mixed fabrics was included as part of the ceremonial law, but I never really understood why. I never knew how we could tell which laws were ceremonial and which were moral.
The book is unfortunately fairly difficult to read for a few reasons, which is why I’m afraid I’ll come off like a moron in this post. One example is the untranslated (even untransliterated) Hebrew and Greek peppered throughout the book. Usually a term will be translated once and the reader is expected to remember these funny symbols and distinguish them from the other funny symbols in the different order for the rest of the book. There was one particularly important one that I was able to remember– When Christ said He came not to abolish the law but to fulfill, that Greek word for “fulfill” was “πληρόω”, which I said in my head as “ranpow”. But Perplexity says it’s actually transliterated as “plēroō”. There’s probably a lesson in that, but I don’t know what it is.
I just had a realization, though– “plēroō” actually makes sense because the “plērōma” is the “fullness”, and that’s a term the Gnostics used to describe the Father god and the eons emanating from him. That’s not really important now, though.
Anyway, another reason this book is difficult is that there’s a lot of material to wade through, since Ross addresses a lot of objections to the Threefold Division as they come up while exegeting different pericopes. (A “pericope” is basically a unit of text in scripture, one story or bit of reasoning.) Some of these objections are good and need to be addressed. Others are truly bizarre– The kind of nonsense that can only be conjured by an academic. Addressing these wasn’t really my concern in reading the book, but I can hardly fault him for doing so.
All that being said, I do think that Ross accomplished his objection of giving the basis for the threefold division of the law and I don’t mean to be hypercritical of him. The first thing that this book did was completely dismantle the idea that I had that “the law is one big whole and you can’t break them into different parts or say that some are more important than others”. This was never the case, and from the beginning there were laws that expired, such as collecting manna, which was only relevant during the Exodus itself, not after the Israelites came into the land. Furthermore, the OT prophets clearly thought that taking care of the poor far outweighed the sacrifices (“I desire mercy and not sacrifice”), as did Christ when He criticized the Pharisees by saying that they ignored the “weightier” matters of the law. If some parts of the law are “weightier” than others, that should factor in pretty significantly to how we think of the law.
As a sidenote, when I took Philosophy I in college, my professor was dismissive of Christians’ use of the phrase “Ten Commandments” because, as she put it according to my memory, “They’re not commandments, they’re precepts, and there are 613 of them.” Well, that’s pretty dumb, because from the beginning those ten specific commandments are set apart from the rest in Exodus 20. They are the only commandments that the Israelites heard spoken by the voice of God and the only ones written onto tablets by the finger of God, and the phrase “Ten Commandments” comes from Exodus 34:28. I enjoyed her class, but as they say these days, that was a bad take. There’s really no reason to doubt that the Ten Commandments are distinctive and held as the highest laws of the Torah.
But that actually leads directly into the first main point, being that the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) are the moral law. The moral law pre-exists the formal giving of the Decalogue and people are held accountable to it no matter what situation that are in, including the foreign nations condemned by the prophets for their evil. The moral law is binding for everyone everywhere.
The Decalogue is “‘the constitution’ upon which ‘all else is but commentary’”. I took this to mean that the other laws show how following the moral law actually works out in practice in the specific context that the Israelites were entering. There is a sense that the rest of the law only applies to the Israelites of that time and place, but we need to understand those specific laws to understand how they expound the moral law. In other words, the Decalogue is the foundation and the rest of the Torah is one specific application. They don’t apply to us, but the principles underlying them is merely more of the moral law, and those principles therefore absolutely apply to us.
We need to figure out, then, what those principles underlying them are.
The Epistle to the Hebrews gives pretty compelling reasoning why we should not be sacrificing after Christ’s crucifixion, since those sacrifices were “types and shadows” of the true sacrifice of Christ. To continue those sacrifices is to bring back the debt of sin that had been canceled in Christ. As James White often puts it, “There’s nothing to go back to.” So, we look at those laws that are looking forward to that crucifixion and we understand them and why they are important, and we do not perform them because we see their fulfillment. We call them “ceremonial” laws because they’re part of the ceremony.
And the laws specifically about preserving the Israelites’ distinctiveness are no longer relevant to us because the people of God has expanded to include Gentiles. All meats are made clean, and the application of that is actually pretty broad. The gentiles in the early church were not expected to take part of these laws. They were absolutely expected to abandon the typical evil practices like idolatry and sexual deviancy. We include these laws about distinctiveness as part of the ceremonial law.
What we call civil law is typically pretty easy to recognize and it’s easy to see why we don’t follow them in today’s context. Civil law is usually in what’s called a “casuistic” form (a word I learned from this book), meaning “If this happens, do this” or “When this happens, do this”. We don’t follow those today because, for the most part, we literally can’t. They’re the role of the government. Even in Christ’s day, these were not followed by the Jews entirely, because only Rome had the right to condemn a man to die at that point. But we absolutely can learn principles from those civil laws, like a priest quarantining sick people to prevent spread of infectious diseases. (Incidentally, that particular law was followed in Christ’s day.)
The book describes a number of other distinctions, like civil laws are to be obeyed “in the land” and ceremonial laws are according to a “pattern”. In general, it is possible to tell which laws are which, but admittedly some require more thought.
There are still some issues that I’m not clear on, though. For instance, the “laws that symbolize Israel’s distinctiveness no longer bind” makes sense, but how can we tell which are which? It seems obvious that, for example, “nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material” (Lev 19:19) is about ceremonial Israelite distinctiveness, but it also seems like it could be very easy to dismiss a law as “ceremonial distinctiveness” based on current cultural bias.
Another point that I’m still uncertain on is Sabbatarianism. I think that the position that “makes sense” most to me right now is the Sabbatarian position (i.e., continuing to hold the Sabbath as holy by separating it, focusing on worship and leisure and refraining from worldly work). The reason I think that is primarily because it is in the Ten Commandments. There’s just not really any good reason to abrogate it or change its application. But there are still problems with that position that I don’t know how to reconcile.
The first is that we have changed it. There’s no question that the Sabbath is Saturday, but we’ve changed it to Sunday. If it’s the moral law, making it eternal and unchangeable, then why are we doing it on the wrong day? I understand that that goes back to the book of Acts and I understand that it’s because Sunday is the day Christ rose, which is why we call it “The Lord’s Day”, but I still don’t understand why it was able to change.
Another one is that if it’s part of the moral law, then why was nobody outside of Israel ever held accountable for failing to keep the Sabbath by the prophets? Of all of the foreign nations judged by God in the major and minor prophets, Sabbath-breaking was never in the condemnations.
Overall, I definitely recommend this book, though it is exhausting. It helped me to get a better understanding and I felt like I was able to read chapter 19 of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith with better grasp than I had before. (Ross, being I assume Presbyterian, uses the Westminster Confession of Faith, but they’re probably identical on this topic.) I’d be willing to entertain some other resources on the subject, and one other that I know is James White’s sermon series on the Holiness Code.