Are Christians required to keep the Old Testament law?

Few questions matter more for understanding the gospel than whether Christians must keep the Old Testament law. Get this wrong in one direction, and you risk legalism, believing your standing with God depends on your performance. Get it wrong in the other direction, and you risk lawlessness, treating grace as permission to ignore God's moral standards altogether. Scripture threads carefully between both errors, and the New Testament addresses this question directly and repeatedly.

The short answer is that Christians are not required to keep the Mosaic law as the means of being made right with God, because Christ has already fulfilled it on their behalf. But that answer needs unpacking, because it easily gets misunderstood in both directions.

The law given through Moses served Israel as its covenant charter, revealing God's holiness, structuring its worship, and governing its national life. Paul describes the law as a guardian, or tutor, meant to watch over God's people until the promised offspring, Christ, would come (Galatians 3:24-25). The law was never given as a pathway by which sinners could earn salvation; rather, it exposed sin and revealed humanity's desperate need for a Savior (Romans 3:20; Romans 7:7).

Understanding this purpose reframes the question. The law was always meant to point beyond itself. Once its intended goal arrived, the law's role as guardian reached its designed conclusion (Galatians 3:25).

It helps to remember that even in the Old Testament, Israel was never saved by keeping the law perfectly. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness, centuries before the law was given at Sinai (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3). The law came alongside a covenant relationship already established by grace, refining and instructing a people God had already redeemed from Egypt, not offering a separate ladder into His favor.

Jesus stated His mission plainly, He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). He kept the law perfectly on behalf of His people and bore its curse for their violations, so that believers might receive His righteousness rather than earn their own (2 Corinthians 5:21). Paul summarizes this reality starkly, Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4).

This means Christians are not under the law as a covenant of works, obligated to earn favor with God through obedience. You are not under law but under grace, Paul tells Roman believers (Romans 6:14), a truth so central to the gospel that misunderstanding it risks distorting the entire message of salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

Freedom from the law as a means of salvation does not mean freedom to disregard God's moral will. Paul writes that Christ has set believers free for freedom, warning them not to use that freedom as an opportunity for the flesh but to serve one another in love (Galatians 5:1, 13). The moral character the law revealed, God's holiness, love, justice, and truth, has not changed, because God Himself has not changed.

In fact, Paul explains that love fulfills the law's real intent, since commands against adultery, murder, theft, and covetousness are summed up in the command to love your neighbor as yourself (Romans 13:8-10). Christians keep this moral standard not as a ladder to climb toward acceptance, but as the grateful fruit of already being accepted in Christ.

This is why Christians can confidently say both that the law no longer condemns them and that lawlessness is never acceptable. Paul anticipates the objection directly, asking whether believers should sin more so that grace may increase, and answers with the strongest possible refusal, By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Romans 6:1-2). Grace does not lower the moral bar; it changes the motive and the power behind pursuing it.

So are Christians required to keep the Old Testament law? Not as a system for earning righteousness or maintaining salvation, that requirement has been fulfilled and set aside in Christ. But believers are called to reflect the same holy character the law revealed, now empowered by the Spirit and motivated by love rather than fear of condemnation (Romans 8:1-4).

This is genuinely good news. You are no longer trying to climb toward God through imperfect obedience; you stand already accepted through Christ's perfect obedience, and from that secure place, you are free to love and obey Him, not to be saved, but because you already are.