What’s the purpose of the religious laws of the Old Testament?

“And now, Israel, what does the LORDyour God require of you, but to fear the LORDyour God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORDyour God with all your heart and all your soul.” Deuteronomy 10.12

As careful as the Lord was to emphasize that obedience to His Law had to come from the heart, He knew that Israel did not have a heart for Him and that therefore their obedience would be, at best, perfunctory, if at all (Deut. 5.29). By the time of the Temple the people had come to believe that mere outward conformity to the institutions and means of covenant renewal was all God required. But, as God Himself made clear (Ps. 50, Is. 1), obedience must come from heart if is to be truly faithful and renewing before the Lord.

Thus God repeatedly emphasized the need to make sure His people were right with Him in their hearts and minds. God requires fear, love, gratitude, wonder, hope, and rejoicing as the kind of heart attitudes that find favor with Him. The ceremonial laws – with their drama of sacrifice, death, revitalization, and glory – were meant to kindle those attitudes and to encourage the people to nurture them at all times.

God hates the offerings of His people that do not come from grateful hearts. Mere external conformity was never the intention in the giving of the ceremonial laws. The laws were simply a means for expressing what was on the hearts of the people, as well as for assisting them in cultivating and maintaining those attitudes through the normal course of their everyday lives. It is good for us today to be reminded that God looks on the heart, and that none of our activities or efforts, entered into in His Name, will be of any benefit unless the attitude of our heart is pleasing to Him.

We must love God from the heart before we seek to love Him with our lives. Works done in Jesus’ Name, be they ever so sacrificial, but that spring from anything other than fear and love for God, may be merely self-serving and, therefore, not pleasing to God at all. God does not want thousands of bulls; He seeks our obedience, from the heart.

For a fuller study of the pattern of worship revealed in Scripture, order the book, The Highest Thing, by T. M. Moore, from our online store. These studies and brief essays will help you to see how the pattern of sound worship, which began in the Law of God, comes to complete expression in the rest of Scripture. Subscribe to Crosfigell, the devotional newsletter of The Fellowship of Ailbe.