When we understand the relationship between the law and the covenant, we can turn afresh to the question of how Christians ought to fulfill these commandments in light of the work of Christ.

For centuries, the Christian church has given careful attention to the Ten Commandments. In his commentaries, John Calvin devotes hundreds of pages to expounding them, and in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he describes and explains them as the summary of the moral law in the Old Testament (2.8.1). Regardless of whether we agree with every aspect of Calvin’s exposition, most, if not all, of the commandments are explicitly repeated in the New Testament, and as we’ll see below, the commandments themselves express the heart of God’s law in unique ways.

In order to get a better handle on the role of the Ten Commandments, we need to understand their place in the old covenant itself. While Christians do not live under the old covenant as such (we are “not under the law,” Romans 6:14–15; 1 Corinthians 9:20; Galatians 5:18), it is important for us to understand these “Ten Words” and their connection to the covenant, because they create a pattern that is repeated in the new covenant as well.

Greatest Commandments

When the Jewish leaders asked Jesus about the greatest commandment in the law, he did not reply by listing the Ten Commandments. Instead, he said,

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 22:37–40)

Jesus taught that love for God and love for neighbor are the foundation for the rest of the commandments in the Old Testament. That is to say, everything else that God asks of his people is impossible if they do not love God with everything and love their neighbors as themselves.

What, then, do these commands have to do with the Ten Commandments? Why didn’t Jesus just quote Exodus 20 back to them? To understand this, we need to consider the relationship between the covenant and commandments — in both the Old and New Testaments.

Delivered to Love

In Galatians 5:13–14, Paul exhorts the Galatians to use their freedom as an opportunity to love one another. He writes,

You were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Here he highlights the close connection between freedom and the call to love our neighbors. In the first four chapters of Galatians, this freedom is described as freedom in Christ, which is opposed to the bondage that comes from seeking to be justified before God by the law. Through Christ, we have been set free from this bondage of sin. Therefore, Galatians 5 begins, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).

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