# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1861_S321
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume VII.    November 1861.    No. 11.

Report on the Law.*)

1. What actually belongs to the law now binding on everyone in the New Testament?

The reporter gives the answer to this in the following propositions:

1. The law binding on everyone, also in the New Testament, is solely the natural law originally written into the hearts of all men.

2. Hence also now the holy Ten Commandments, which God once revealed through Moses from Mount Sinai, remain binding on everyone, as do all the other laws contained in the Old Testament, insofar as they contain the natural law.

3. But not only everything else in the Old Testament, but also whatever, within the holy Ten Commandments themselves, relates solely to the Old Testament covenant people and to their particular constitution and household order — that is, whatever belongs to their special ceremonial or ecclesiastical laws, as well as to their civil or political laws — has lost its binding force on the conscience in the New Testament and has been abolished through Christ; hence we nowhere find, even in the New Testament, the Ten Commandments cited in their Old Testament form, but always in a New Testament form. Thus, for example, the apostle Paul alters the words of the fourth commandment in the Old Testament: "that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee" (Exodus 20:12), into: "that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth" (Ephesians 6:3). The outward Sabbath of a particular day with bodily rest, commanded in the third commandment of the Old Testament, is expressly declared abolished in Colossians 2:16–17: "Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ." The sole reason why the Reformed insist that the holy Ten Commandments also be included in the Christian catechism entirely in the form in which Moses received them from God and

*) Delivered at the last meeting of the Western District of the Missouri Synod, at Altenburg, Perry County, Missouri.