What Jesus said before the cross
Many of us were taught that the law was for Israel before the cross, and that believers now live under grace instead. That view leans on real verses, and we take it seriously. But Jesus told us what he came to do, and abolishing the law is the very thing he ruled out.
“Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill. For most certainly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accomplished. Therefore, whoever shall break one of these least commandments and teach others to do so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but whoever shall do and teach them shall be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Matthew 5:17-19
Jesus gives a timeline. Not one pen stroke passes from the law until heaven and earth pass away, and John saw that happen at the end of the age (Revelation 21:1). The cross stands inside that timeline, not at its end.
What he said after the resurrection
If the cross had ended the law, we would expect the risen Messiah to say so. Instead he sent his disciples out with a teaching assignment.
“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
Matthew 28:19-20
The phrase “all things that I commanded you” includes Matthew 5:19. The nations were to be taught to do, and to teach, even the least of the commandments. We are those nations. Nothing in the commission hints that the standard shifted between the Sermon on the Mount and the empty tomb.
What the apostles said
The apostles wrote after the cross. Here is how Paul, the one most often quoted against the law, answered our question.
“Do we then nullify the law through faith? May it never be! No, we establish the law.”
Romans 3:31
He calls the law “holy, and the commandment holy, righteous, and good” (Romans 7:12). When someone drew the conclusion that grace made sin harmless, he refused it: “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be!” (Romans 6:15). And to a mostly non-Jewish church in Corinth he wrote this.
“Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but what matters is keeping God’s commandments.”
1 Corinthians 7:19
John, writing decades after the cross, still defined sin as lawlessness (1 John 3:4). If the law had been abolished at Calvary, there would be no lawlessness left to define, and the apostles would have had nothing to warn against. Paul’s harder sayings are real, and we take them up in Question 14, but they must be read beside these plain ones.
What the cross did end
The cross changed something enormous. It did not change what God calls sin. It dealt with sin’s penalty, and with the endless cycle of sacrifices that could never remove it.
“For the law, having a shadow of the good to come, not the very image of the things, can never with the same sacrifices year by year, which they offer continually, make perfect those who draw near. Or else wouldn’t they have ceased to be offered, because the worshipers, having been once cleansed, would have had no more consciousness of sins? But in those sacrifices there is a yearly reminder of sins. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.”
Hebrews 10:1-4
Animal blood could remind people of sin but never take it away. Messiah’s one offering did what those sacrifices only pointed to (Hebrews 9:11-12; 10:10, 14). So what exactly was nailed to the cross? Paul tells us.
“You were dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh. He made you alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, wiping out the handwriting in ordinances which was against us. He has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross.”
Colossians 2:13-14
The Greek word behind “handwriting in ordinances” is cheirographon, a handwritten certificate of debt. It was “against us” because we owed it. Jesus wiped out the record of our debt, not the standard that revealed it. The law was never against us in itself; our breaking of it was. This is also what Paul means when he says Messiah redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). The curse was the penalty for disobedience, not the commandments themselves.
“For what the law couldn’t do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us who don’t walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.”
Romans 8:3-4
Read that last clause again. The purpose of the Son’s death was that the law’s requirement would be fulfilled in us by the Spirit. A crucifixion that abolished the law would have defeated its own purpose. Hebrews agrees: right after describing the once-for-all sacrifice, it quotes God’s promise to write his laws on our hearts, and concludes that where sins are forgiven no further offering for sin is needed (Hebrews 10:16-18). Forgiveness ends the offering. It does not end the law.
Fulfill is not another word for abolish
Jesus said he came to fulfill the law, and some hear that as complete it and retire it. But Scripture uses the word for doing what is written, not for ending it. Jesus was baptized “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). Paul says that “he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), and no one thinks a loving neighbor has thereby cancelled the commandments. Paul tells us to bear one another’s burdens “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).
The same goes for Romans 10:4. Some translations say Christ is the end of the law, but the Greek word is telos, the goal or aim that something moves toward. The WEB captures the sense.
“For Christ is the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
Romans 10:4
Messiah is what the law was aiming at, and his righteousness is credited to everyone who believes. Set the verse beside Romans 3:31, in the same letter, and end in the sense of termination is ruled out. Faith does not nullify the law. It establishes it.
Ephesians 2:14-16 says that in his flesh Messiah abolished “the hostility” and broke down the wall between Israel and the nations. In context (Ephesians 2:11-19) it is about who belongs: strangers to the covenants became fellow citizens. What died on the cross there was the enmity, not the covenant they were joining. See Question 5 and Question 9.
Not under law, but under grace
So what does Paul mean by “not under law”? In Romans 6 the phrase answers the question of whether sin will still have dominion over us (Romans 6:14). To be under the law is to stand before it as a guilty person, owing its penalty. Grace moves us out from under that condemnation. It does not move us out from under God’s instruction, which is why Paul’s very next sentence forbids treating grace as a license to sin (Romans 6:15).
No one is justified by the works of the law (Galatians 2:16; Romans 3:20). We agree completely. Justification is by faith in the Messiah who died for us. But being forgiven for breaking a law is not the same as the law being repealed. A pardoned man does not walk out of the courtroom free to steal. He walks out grateful, and keeps the law he once broke.
That is where the cross leaves us: forgiven, alive, and with God’s law written on our hearts by his Spirit. The penalty is paid. The standard stands.