Answering the Attacks on God’s Law
COMMON ATTACK: Misusing the Jerusalem Council to Dismiss the Torah
Objection
“Acts 15 shows that the Apostles met and explicitly stated that requiring Gentiles to keep the Law of Moses was a yoke that neither they nor their ancestors could bear. Gentiles are saved by grace, not by the law.”
Scriptural Defense
The account in Acts 15 is frequently misused to dismiss God’s law, but a closer look reveals that the “yoke” Peter spoke of was not the Torah itself—it was the Pharisaical demand that a person must undergo ritual circumcision to *earn* salvation.
The core debate is stated in Acts 15:1: “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” The issue was **justification by ritual works**, trying to use external rites to buy entry into the covenant. That legalistic burden is the yoke “which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear” (Acts 15:10).
God’s commandments are never described as an unbearable yoke. Scripture tells us the exact opposite. The Psalmist wrote, “And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts” (Psalm 119:45), and John confirmed, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous” (1 John 5:3).
If the council had actually abolished the law for Gentiles, they wouldn’t have immediately ordered them to abstain from idols, blood, strangled meats, and fornication (Acts 15:20)—prohibitions pulled directly from Leviticus 17 and 18. The Apostles gave these baseline rules to distance converts from paganism, expecting them to learn the rest over time: “For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath day” (Acts 15:21).
Salvation is entirely by grace through faith, but that faith doesn’t grant license to violate God’s standards. As Paul writes, “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law” (Romans 3:31).
If the Apostles intended to completely sever Gentiles from the law, why did their very first decree require those Gentiles to obey specific commandments from Leviticus?
COMMON ATTACK: Claiming the Law Only Brings Condemnation
Objection
“If you walk after the law of Moses all you will know is condemnation because you cannot keep it perfectly. If you offend in just one point you are guilty of the whole law.”
Scriptural Defense
To argue that we should abandon the law because we cannot keep it perfectly is to completely misunderstand the relationship between faith, grace, and obedience.
When James wrote that “whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10), he was not telling believers to throw out the law. In the very next verse, he commands: “So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty” (James 2:12). James is warning against selective obedience—hypocrisy—not telling us that attempting to obey God is futile.
The idea that the law only brings condemnation to a believer is a direct denial of the New Covenant. God promised, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). If the law itself is nothing but condemnation, why would God write it onto the hearts of His redeemed people by the Holy Spirit?
The law cannot justify us; only the blood of Christ can clean our slate. But once we are cleansed, Christ does not give us a license to return to sin, which is defined as “the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). We walk in the law not to be saved, but because we *are* saved. As Paul forcefully asked, “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid” (Romans 6:1-2).
If a believer breaks a single point of the law and is guilty of all, does that mean the solution is to break *all* of them by ignoring the law entirely, or does it mean we rely on Christ’s grace to cover our failures while striving to walk in His ways?
COMMON ATTACK: Blind Accusations of Deception
Objection
“That’s a lie, you’re a liar, shame on you for lying.”
Scriptural Defense
When someone lacks a scriptural argument, they resort to insults. Calling the defense of God’s word a lie without providing a single line of Scripture doesn’t expose my error—it exposes your emptiness.
You shout “shame,” but the Bible tells us exactly who will actually face shame: “Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy commandments” (Psalm 119:6). Conversely, it is those who reject His instructions who face reproach: “Whoso keepeth the law is a wise son: but he that is a companion of riotous men shameth his father” (Proverbs 28:7).
If you believe the Word of God is a lie, show the readers exactly where Christ or the Prophets ever authorized His followers to trample on the commandments. If you cannot produce the Scripture, then your accusation is nothing but empty noise. As Isaiah 8:20 declares: “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”
Since you are so quick to call the truth a lie, can you provide even one single verse from Genesis to Revelation where God says that breaking His law is what makes a person righteous?
COMMON ATTACK: Inventing an Artificial War Between Grace and Obedience
Objection
“There is no longer any grace for those who live under the law. We are all disobedient sinners who need forgiveness, not the commandments.”
Scriptural Defense
To suggest that walking in God’s law removes a person from grace is to turn the entire Bible upside down. Scripture reveals that grace is not a license to remain a “disobedient sinner”—grace is the very power that delivers us from disobedience.
When the Apostle Paul asked the ultimate question on this matter, “Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace?” his immediate, definitive answer was, “God forbid” (Romans 6:15). How does the Bible define sin? “Sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). Therefore, Paul is literally saying: “God forbid that we break the law because we are under grace.”
We are indeed all sinners who need forgiveness, but true forgiveness leads to repentance, which means turning *away* from lawlessness. Christ did not die on the cross just to leave us wallowing in the very mud that required His death. He died to redeem a people who would actually walk in holiness. Titus 2:14 states that He “gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity [lawlessness], and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.”
Grace does not oppose the law; grace guards our past law-breaking and gives us the Holy Spirit to fulfill the law. As the New Covenant specifies, God puts His law “into their mind, and write[s] them in their hearts” (Hebrews 8:10). If you claim to be under grace while willfully continuing in disobedience, you are trampling the very purpose of the New Covenant.
If grace is meant to leave us as “disobedient sinners,” why did Christ tell the woman caught in adultery to “go, and sin no more” (John 8:11)—which means, stop breaking the law?
COMMON ATTACK: Arbitrarily Slicing the Law into “Moral” vs. “Identity” Labels
Objection
“We see the morality of the law being preached in the New Covenant, but what we don’t see are old identity laws carried over, like circumcision, food laws, feasts, and Sabbaths. Those are distinct from the moral warnings against lust, hatred, pride, and sexual impurity.”
Scriptural Defense
You claim we do not see the feasts, Sabbaths, or dietary laws carried over into the New Covenant, but the New Testament scriptures completely contradict this.
The Apostle Paul explicitly commanded Gentile converts in Corinth to keep the feast: “Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven… but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:8). Regarding the Sabbath, the New Testament confirms that “there remaineth therefore a rest [Sabbatismos, a Sabbath-keeping] to the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9), and Paul’s own custom was to reason in the synagogues every Sabbath day (Acts 18:4).
As for the dietary laws, Paul writes in 1 Timothy 4:4-5 that every creature is good “if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” Ask yourself: which animals are “sanctified” (set apart as clean) by the Word of God? Only those listed in Leviticus 11.
You mentioned the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, but look at how Paul closes that very list: “they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:21). This is standard Torah judgment. Paul isn’t inventing a new law; he is applying the Holiness Code. The visual instructions regarding mixtures and boundaries are pulled from the exact same chapters that contain the moral high ground, such as Leviticus 19. Christ did not give us authority to slice a single chapter of God’s Word in half, keeping the portions we choose while tossing the rest.
To answer this directly: a believer must keep the *entire* Torah as walked out through faith in Christ. We do not use the law to earn salvation—that was the error of the Pharisaical circumcision party in Acts 15. But once saved by grace, the Torah is our manual for righteousness. Christ Himself settled this forever: “Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).
If the Apostles intended to discard the laws regarding the feasts and Sabbaths, why did Paul explicitly command the Gentile Corinthians to *“keep the feast”* and consistently use the Sabbath for holy assembly?
COMMON ATTACK: Demoting Physical Obedience to a Purely Spiritual “Analogy”
Objection
“The physical commandments were just shadow analogies pointing to Christ. In the New Covenant, we transition to a spiritual keeping. The physical identities are gone; we are separated by the Spirit now. You can have a day of rest on any day of the week, because without Christ, a physical day is meaningless.”
Scriptural Defense
To claim that Christ’s fulfillment of the law turns physical obedience into a mere “analogy” is the definition of antinomianism—the false doctrine that grace nullifies the need to obey.
When Paul wrote that the feasts and Sabbaths are “a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:17), he did not say they were abolished. A shadow is cast by a real, solid object. You cannot have the shadow without the body that casts it. The text says they *are* a shadow of things to come—meaning they still point to future prophetic realities. Paul never said, “Stop keeping them because they are shadows”; he said don’t let outsiders judge you *for* keeping them.
You claim the Sabbath can be kept on “any day of the week,” but God never blessed “any day.” He specifically sanctified the *seventh* day at Creation (Genesis 2:3), long before a physical nation of Israel existed. Man has no authority to alter what the Creator set apart as holy. To change God’s appointed times is not spirituality; it is presumption.
Furthermore, the New Covenant is not a replacement that throws away the old law; it is the mechanism by which the law is finally obeyed. Hebrews 8:10 says, “I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts.” God is writing the *same* Torah onto our hearts by His Spirit, not a different, stripped-down version. The Spirit does not lead a believer to break the very commandments the Spirit wrote.
If walking in the physical commandments of God is labeled an error, then the accusation falls upon Christ Himself, who warned: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17).
If the Holy Spirit’s job is to write God’s law directly onto our hearts under the New Covenant, why would that same Spirit lead a believer to ignore, alter, or stop keeping those very commandments?