08 - What Is the Law?

There is an enormous amount of confusion, not to say misinformation, in much that is said and written about ‘the law’.1 Let me explain.
Most evangelicals think of ‘the law’ as a moral system encapsulated in the ten commandments.2 This is a bad, bad mistake, and the source of much misunderstanding and trouble. True, ‘the ten commandments’ is a biblical phrase, but its use in Scripture is very rare, and the law is never defined in this way, never! The phrase ‘ten commandments’ occurs only three times in the entire Bible (Ex. 34:28; Deut. 4:13; 10:4), never once in the New Testament. Of course, the ‘tablets of stone’, and ‘the ministry... written and engraved on stones’ are mentioned in the New Testament (2 Cor. 3:3,7), but whether these are references exclusively to the ten commandments or to the entire Sinai covenant is debatable.