In our first three chapters, we established two vital points: (1) when we are referring to God’s trustworthy revelation of himself to his people, we find complete continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. That division is a literary device. (2) When we are referring to the legality of the covenants under which God’s people live, we find complete discontinuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. This division is a redemptive historical one wherein we move from God’s promises to his fulfillment of those promises. In this chapter, we want to deal with the aspect of the subject that addresses the place of the Ten Commandments in the history of redemption. Do they belong to the era of promise or to the era of fulfillment, or do they transcend redemptive eras altogether? This question has been, and remains, controversial, especially in Reformed theological circles.

Two authors have written books that offer support for the claim that God has given one unchanging canon of morality for his people. In other words, there is complete continuity in the area of morality and ethics between the Old and New Covenants. In 1957, John Murray wrote Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics and more recently (2001), Dr. Richard Barcellos penned In Defense of the Decalogue: A Critique of New Covenant Theology. Both authors view the Ten Commandments as significant in the lives of Christians because they believe that those words are the unchanging moral law of God. The unstated and unproven major premise for this position is that there is such as thing as the unchanging moral law of God. Other Christians, however, disagree with Murray, Barcellos, and those who accept their position. We believe the Ten Commandments are still significant, but not because they constitute the so-called moral law. Rather, those words are important because God gave them to Israel as the words, or terms, of the covenant he made with them at Sinai (Ex. 34:27, 28). 

In 2008, I published a lengthy review of Barcellos’ book titled In Defense of Jesus, the New Lawgiver. In this chapter, I will offer a partial review of and response to Murray’s work. The use of bolding within a quotation always denotes my emphasis. The use of italics within a quotation is always that of the particular author being quoted.

John Murray wrote his Principles of Conduct to resolve the problem of continuity and discontinuity in the area of ethics and morality. He was especially concerned to prove that easy divorce and polygamy were just as sinful under the Old Covenant as they are under the New Covenant, despite the fact that God “allowed” them to go unpunished under the Old. In Murray’s theology (Covenant Theology), it is essential for Israel and the church to be under the same canon of ethical conduct. If there are two different canons (one for Israel and another for the church), then Covenant Theology’s concept of a uniform, immutable moral law is not tenable. Covenant Theology builds its system upon three essential tenets. These three points are indispensable and indisputable. All three require continuity.

One: God has given one unchanging Covenant of Grace that overarches all of history. All other covenants are administrations of this single, ubiquitous covenant. Therefore, there is complete continuity in a covenantal sense.

Two: God has only one redeemed people under the one covenant. Israel is the Jewish redeemed church, and the Christian church is the same redeemed church with Gentiles added to it. Therefore, there is complete continuity in a church sense.

Three: God has provided one unchanging moral code, or canon, of conduct for his one redeemed people under his one covenant. Therefore, there is complete continuity in a moral law sense.

This insistence on continuity faces a serious challenge when confronted with certain biblical texts: most significantly, with Matthew 5:17-5:48. One point of contention between Covenant Theology and New Covenant Theology is each system’s understanding of this section of Scripture. Both systems agree that when Jesus says, “But I say unto you” in the Sermon on the Mount, he is clearly contrasting his teaching with some other authority. New Covenant Theology believes that he was contrasting his new teaching with the older teaching of Moses. This understanding is unthinkable to Covenant Theologians such as John Murray and Richard Barcellos. When Covenant Theology insists that there can be no change in the Ten Commandments as given to Israel as the “words of the covenant,” they mean no change whatsoever. Any change would mean two different canons of ethical conduct, and that would destroy one of the essential building blocks of that theological system. The system demands full and unqualified continuity of God’s “one unchanging moral law.” Covenant Theology insists that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus did not give any new and higher laws; he merely gave the true interpretation of the law of Moses. The “But I say unto you” contrast is not between Moses and Christ, but between the true meaning of Moses and the distortions of him by the Pharisees.^[1]

In the first line of the book proper, Professor Murray states his purpose for writing:

One of the main purposes of the lectures and of this volume is to seek to show the basic unity and continuity of the biblical ethic…we may discover the organic unity and continuity of divine revelation…^[2]

Murray’s thesis is both simple and clear: in the area of ethics and morality, the Bible presents continuity throughout. He believes that the Bible contains one unchanging set of moral standards that God gave to Adam at creation, which remained in force after the fall, and which was given again at Mount Sinai. The identical set of standards is still in force today. That one unchanging set of moral standards is the Ten Commandments, “as promulgated at Sinai.”^[3] Those commandments furnish the biblical ethic for all people in all ages. That, in brief, is the tenet of the continuity of the moral law as promoted in Covenant Theology.

Murray introduces his position by asking two questions:

We may now turn our attention to two fundamental questions relevant to the biblical ethic. Are we justified in speaking of norms, or standards, as the canons of biblically sanctioned and approved behavior? And assuming there are norms or standards, whence are they derived?^[4]

Murray’s two questions are appropriate and salient. The first question is this: does the Bible contain a clearly defined set of moral standards? Put it another way: do we have biblical evidence of one unchanging set of moral laws to which Adam and all his descendents must conform? Or, in the terms of our discussion: is there a single, unchanging moral law of God for all people in all ages? Regardless of how we phrase it, Murray answers this first question with an emphatic “Yes!” There is one uniform set of ethical norms that continues, unchanged, from the Old Covenant to the New. These standards, or laws, define moral behavior in all ages for all people and are “biblically sanctioned and approved by God.”^[5]

Murray’s second question is this: what is the origin of this law? He answers: as those laws were given to Adam in the garden, as they are written in men’s hearts, and as they were rewritten on the tables of the covenant that God gave to Israel at Mount Sinai. In short, we derive the set of standards—the one unchanging moral law of God—from the biblical record of the Ten Commandments as communicated at Mount Sinai:

The Ten Commandments, it will surely be admitted, furnish the core of the biblical ethic. When we apply the biblico-theological method to the study of the Scripture, it will be seen that the Ten Commandments, as promulgated at Sinai,^[6] were but the concrete and practical form of enunciating principles which did not then for the first time come to have relevance but were relevant from the beginning. And it will also be seen that, as they did not begin to have relevance at Sinai, so they did not cease to have relevance when the economy of Sinai had passed away. It is biblico-theological study that demonstrates that these commandments embody principles which belong to the order which God established for man at the beginning, as also the order of redemption. In other words, we discover that they belong to the organism of divine revelation respecting God’s will for man.^[7]

For Murray and Covenant Theology, God gave the Ten Commandments, as written on the stone tables at Sinai, to Adam. Covenant Theology teaches that God gave the Ten Commandments to Adam as the terms of the so-called Covenant of Works, put in place prior to the fall. Remember, Murray is talking about the Ten Commandments “as promulgated at Sinai.” Adam received them in exactly the same form as Moses did. I heard that while at Westminster Seminary, which he helped found, Murray advocated a six-day class schedule instead of five, because the fourth commandment states, “six days shall thou labor.” To my knowledge, the seminary never instituted that schedule, but such an innovation is a logical conclusion to Murray’s position.

Murray’s view of the relevance of the Ten Commandments calls for a few comments. First, believing that the Ten Commandments have “relevance before Sinai,” and believing that they have the same relevance today as when first given at Sinai, are two different things. We have biblical evidence that nine of the Ten Commandments had relevance before and following Sinai. They became far more significant at Sinai because that was when those commandments became the summary terms of the Old Covenant.^[8] Sinai marks the first time that God gave those commandments in a codified form to Israel. They were the terms of the covenant that God made there with Israel. The Ten Commandments became the words of the covenant at Sinai. 

One commandment, Sabbath observance, had no relevance at all before Sinai, simply because God did not reveal the concept of a Sabbath until Sinai (recorded in Ex. 16). At that point, however, the Sabbath commandment gained the most significance of all the ten, because it functioned as the sign of the covenant (Ex. 31:12-18). A covenant sign represented the entire covenant; to violate the sign was to break the entire covenant. When the New Covenant fulfilled and replaced the Old Covenant, of which the Sabbath was the ceremonial sign, the entire Ten Commandments ceased to be covenant terms, and thus lost their major relevance. The Sabbath, as one of the ten, was fulfilled and done away with—it lost all of its significance as a holy day. Yet Covenant Theology retains the Sabbath commandment, viewing it as part of the unchanging moral law.

Covenant Theology, when they divide Mosaic legislation into three categories (civil, ceremonial, and moral), must put Sabbath observance into the moral category. If it is ceremonial—if God revealed it and gave it to Israel at Sinai, instead of to Adam at creation—then Covenant Theology’s system of continuity collapses. I should add that for Covenant Theology, not only has the time of observance changed (from Saturday to Sunday), but what constitutes Sabbath observance (how you behave on the Sabbath) has changed from the specifics set forth in Exodus. What is important is not so much practice or behavior, but confession of theology. Apart from going to church at 11:00 AM, there often may be little difference in the behavior of Sabbatarian Christians and their unbelieving neighbors on Sunday. They eat lunch at the same restaurants, watch the same football on television, and engage in other such like behaviors. All that matters is that you hold the theological tenet that observing the Sabbath is a moral commandment. That keeps the system intact.

Let me illustrate this claim from personal experience. First, a well-known Reformed Baptist pastor was speaking at a Bible conference on the subject, “The Moral Law of God.” A brother invited him to supper, and he accepted. The individual said, “I should tell you that I do not believe the fourth commandment is a moral commandment, so you will be eating with an antinomian as you defined that term in your last message.” The pastor smiled and said, “That’s OK, I will still have supper with you, but I appreciate you warning me.” The individual asked, “Would you eat with me if I was living with two women?” The pastor then became angry. The brother pressed his point, “It seems to me that your position is not equally concerned with breaking all the commandments.” Can you imagine what would happen if we treated the seventh commandment the way that most churches claiming to believe in Sabbath observance treat the fourth commandment?

The second illustration: I was preaching in a Presbyterian church in Georgia and went to lunch at the country club with the pastor and three elders. While we were waiting for our food, the one elder went to check if a new putter he had ordered had come in. In a few moments, he appeared on the putting green just outside our window with his new putter and a handful of golf balls. One of the elders at the table said to me, “John, I understand that you do not believe that the commandment to observe the Sabbath is part of the moral law. We believe that it is a very important part of the holy law of God. Why do you believe as you do?” I looked out the window and replied, “I refuse to discuss keeping the Sabbath with three ruling elders and a teaching elder while eating dinner with them at a country club on the holy Sabbath and watching one of their fellow elders practicing his golf.” He laughed and dropped the matter.

It seems hypocritical to me to believe and preach that Sabbath observance is a moral commandment and then not to treat it as such. The next time a Covenant Theologian wants to discuss the subject of the Sabbath, ask them to name the last time their church disciplined a Sabbath breaker. Or maybe ask exactly what a Christian must do in that congregation in order to be disciplined as a Sabbath breaker. No Puritan in their generation would have eaten out or watched a sporting event on Sunday. Sabbatarian churches today have either the most holy people in this generation (because they scrupulously observe the Sabbath) or the most inconsistent people in this generation (because they fail to match their practice to their belief).

New Covenant Theology disagrees with Covenant Theology’s position on the unchanged relevance of the Ten Commandments. We do not believe that the Ten Commandments, as given in Exodus 20, are either “all pure moral law” or that they even all carry the same connotative definition under the New Covenant as they did when given at Sinai to Israel. There is not, as Murray posits, an exact correspondence of continuity.

We believe that the Scriptures clearly demonstrate that God never meant the tables of the covenant to be anything other than that which their name clearly implies; namely, the tables of the covenant. The Ten Commandments are the summary document of the terms of a Covenant of Works made with the nation of Israel at Sinai (Ex. 34:28; Deut. 4:13).

We believe that progressive revelation applies to ethics and morality as well as to other biblical subjects. The Ten Commandments were indeed the clearest and fullest revelation of the moral character of God given up to that point in time. However, our Lord, in his person, work, and teaching, surpassed that revelation, making it clearer and fuller yet. This question of revelation is a crucial issue between Covenant Theology and New Covenant Theology. For Covenant Theology, the Decalogue, as the unchanging moral law of God, requires no subsequent revelation. They make this claim, however, with no textual evidence.

For New Covenant Theology, the Ten Commandments are significant because they are the words, or terms, of the Old Covenant. The box that the Israelites built, just to house those tables of the covenant, or Ten Commandments, clearly defines the nature of its contents. Nowhere do the authors of Scriptures call that box, “the ark of the moral law.” They label it “the ark of the covenant” simply because it housed the tables of the covenant upon which were written the words of the covenant.

In Covenant Theology’s ethical system, Moses is lord over the consciences of the New Covenant people of God in the same sense that he was lord over the consciences of the Old Covenant people of God (Israel). We believe that this ethical approach denies Paul’s teaching about New Covenant freedom from the tyranny of the law in the conscience of the believer. We believe that Covenant Theology’s ethics fails to recognize the biblical implications of the dismissal of the law as the pedagogue and the giving of the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete. 

In no sense whatever are we rejecting God’s authoritative law; however, we do reject Covenant Theology’s insistence that the Decalogue was, and is, “THE unchanging moral law.” We reject their view of continuity. We believe that the New Covenant Scriptures provide us with objective rules and principles to guide our life. We do not believe that we have detailed, new tables of stone. Everything Jesus did, taught, and exemplified is part of our rule of life today. The Scriptures give us, as New Covenant believers, a revelation of the will of our Father for our life in the life, teaching, and death of our Lord. However, it does not come as a codified list as it did under the Old Covenant. Rather, it comes as a person who is our moral exemplar. We want to be the kind of human being that Jesus was.

Before we move on, I want to make a comment about Murray’s “biblico-theological method” of interpreting Scripture. This method involves the use of what the Westminster Confession of Faith calls “good and necessary consequences deduced from Scripture.” That may, or may not, be a valid methodology. Let us assume, for the moment, that it is legitimate; we still must acknowledge that Covenant Theology grossly misuses it in establishing their view of infant baptism, the Sabbath, tithing, moral law, and other such points of doctrine.

We need to look a bit more carefully at Murray’s second question, “Whence are these (canons of moral norms) derived?” Our answer to this question differs significantly from John Murray’s answer. Murray states that they derive from the Ten Commandments “as promulgated at Sinai.” This means there can be no later change whatsoever in any of the Ten Commandments. They are all, literally, set in stone for all time. Murray means, beyond question, that the tablets of the covenant, as given at Sinai, are THE unchanging moral law of God for all time for all people. We believe such a statement totally misses the fact that the Decalogue was the document that summarized the Old Covenant of law made specifically with the nation of Israel, and as such, had the same historical beginning and historical ending as the theocracy that it brought into being and governed with a sword until Christ came. This theology, in effect, exalts Moses over Christ and the apostles.

If by the statement, “these commandments embody principles,” Murray means that the Ten Commandments contain eternal and unchanging moral law, then we agree without question, although we have yet to biblically define the term moral law. However, that is not what he means. Murray means that the Ten Commandments “as promulgated at Sinai” are, in their entirety as there written, with no exceptions, pure unchanging moral law. This we reject. We believe our Lord has given us a higher ethical standard—himself—as revealed in the New Covenant.^[9]

If, by “relevance,” Murray means that the moral principles contained in the Ten Commandments always have been, and always will be, in force as moral principles, then we say a hearty “amen.” We believe that there is biblical evidence that indicates that human beings everywhere and in all times are always to honor God as creator, and, in general, to respect the life, property, and relationships of our fellow human beings. To do so fulfills the essence of what it means to be a human being and distinguishes us from the rest of God’s creation that does not bear his image. However, if Murray means (and he does) that the Decalogue as given at Sinai has always had the same relevance and is in force in the same sense as when it was given at Sinai to Israel as the terms of a covenant, then we must again disagree. Remember, Covenant Theology denies that the Decalogue is a Covenant of Works; for them, it is God’s unchanging moral law, given by God to his redeemed people for their sanctification.

Murray is one of the most honest writers I have ever read. He does not wait for his readers to raise objections to what he has said; he raises them himself. He admits that the idea that there is one unchanging moral code for all people in all ages raises serious problems. Note carefully what he says:

It is quite obvious that this statement of the case poses several questions. And the most basic of these is the question: Is there in the sense defined, a biblical ethic? Is there one coherent and consistent ethic set forth in the Bible? Is there not diversity in the Bible and diversity of a kind that embraces antithetical elements? Are there not in the Bible canons of conduct that are contrary to one another?

To be specific: Is there not an antithesis between the canons of conduct sanctioned and approved of God in the Old Testament and those sanctioned and approved of God in the New in respect of certain central features of human behaviour?

It is a patent fact that the behaviour of the most illustrious of Old Testament believers was characterized by practices which are clearly contradictory of the elementary demands of the New Testament ethic. Monogamy is surely a principle of the Christian ethic. Old Testament saints practiced polygamy. In like manner, under the Old Testament, divorce was practiced on grounds which could not be tolerated in terms of the explicit provisions of the New Testament revelation.

And polygamy and divorce were practiced without overt disapprobation in terms of the canons of behaviour which were recognized as regulative but not sanctioned and approved by God in the Old Testament period.^[10]

That last sentence raises an important issue. One of the major problems in this discussion is terminology. Murray refers to “canons of behavior,” “the law established by God,” “canons of behavior recognized but not sanctioned by God,” “the perceptive will of God” and other such descriptions of norms. He has “canons of conduct recognized as regulative,” but some of those same “sanctioned and approved” canons of conduct are not “sanctioned” by God.

Murray recognizes and makes explicit the apparent “antithesis in the canons of conduct” between the Old and New Covenants, between Israel’s rule of life under a law covenant and the church’s rule of life under a grace covenant. But Covenant Theology cannot hold that kind of discontinuity.

Murray’s concept of sanctioned and not-sanctioned canons poses some serious problems:

(1) Murray’s Covenant Theology demands that polygamy is always a sin; otherwise we have two different canons of conduct, and we destroy continuity. Therefore, polygamy must always be a violation of the seventh commandment, regardless of who practices it and when. If this is correct, then David consciously lived in the sin of adultery for much of his adult life, and God did not overtly punish it.

(2) It is a “patent fact” [Murray’s statement and words] that Old Testament saints, true believers, men like David and Abraham, practiced polygamy.

(3) There were clear “canons of behavior which were recognized,” by both God and the people, “as regulative in the Old Testament.” However, these “recognized” canons of behavior allowed polygamy to be practiced “without overt disapprobation” by God, even though polygamy was in reality adultery, a clear breaking of the seventh commandment in the sight of God.

One problem that immediately manifests itself is that of knowledge and moral accountability. How did God’s Old Covenant people know which regulations they could break with impunity and to which ones God would hold them accountable? Does the same principle hold true for God’s New Covenant people? Are there some regulations that carry no sanction, and if so, which ones, and for how long? And if some regulations carry sanctions, and some do not, then do we not, in effect, have two codes of moral conduct?

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