A podcast listener named Luke writes, "Dear Pastor John, I want to first thank you for the Ask Pastor John podcast and for your obedience and love to the Lord. One thing I have always struggled to communicate is the difference between the Old Testament law and the fulfilled law after Christ.

I have many atheist friends who press me here, specifically when it comes to homosexuality. Why do we as Christians not believe practicing homosexuals should be killed for their sin, if that is exactly the prescription in our Bibles in Leviticus chapter 20, verse 13? How would you answer this objection?" This is huge and absolutely crucial, and we need an answer for it to those who ask.

It's such a common response for somebody who has a smattering of knowledge or has just read that there are these verses in the Bible like that. And it's not difficult to answer this problem. It just takes a little willingness on the part of people to listen for a few minutes as we describe the nature of the Christian Bible.

So you have to ask for a few minutes. It might be helpful to start with an analogy. I think right off the bat, this might be helpful. You might say to the person who's asking that question, "Suppose a book is written for the military and in chapter one, it deals with how soldiers should relate to each other during basic training stateside.

Chapter two deals with how soldiers should relate to each other and to their captured enemies on the battlefield. Chapter three deals with how soldiers should relate to each other and to their captors if any of them is taken captive and in prison. And the fourth chapter deals with how they should relate to each other and to the enemy if they are infiltrated behind enemy lines.

Should anyone accuse a soldier of disobedience if while he is captured as a prisoner of war, he obeys the instructions in chapter three rather than the instructions in chapter one? No, nobody would. That's the way the book intends to be used. Now that's the kind of book the Bible is.

It was written under God's inspiration over a period of 1,500 years or so through various periods where God dealt with his people in different ways. Not everything that the Bible designed for God's people—Israel under the judges or under the kings or that God designs for Christians under the apostles in the New Testament—is the same.

Putting to death adulterers, putting to death homosexuals, putting to death the sons who cursed their parents—all these penalties belonged to a particular season in the history of God's dealings with his covenant people, and those dealings have changed dramatically with the coming of God's Son, Jesus Christ, into the world.

That's the basic nature of the Bible and of redemptive history that we need to get across to our critics. Then if they're willing to take a few more minutes with us to examine the Bible, we can point them to the very places in the Bible where this becomes plain.

So maybe it would be helpful if I just gave a few of those, and this would be a guideline for how you—what text would you use if you sat down with your atheist friend who said, "No, I think you Christians are inconsistent because you're not putting homosexuals to death because it says right here in Leviticus that that's what you're supposed to do." So here's a few.

First, the first pointer of how things have changed dramatically. Matthew 5:17, Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them." So all the Old Testament finds its completion and fulfillment in Jesus, and that's a basic truth that a person needs to understand.

Everything in the Old Testament was pointing toward Jesus as the Son of God incarnate, dying, rising to save His people, and therefore in His person, in His ministry, the whole Old Testament reaches a climax and is dramatically altered. Second pointer, the Bible spells out many of the specifics of this dramatic alteration.

For example, the book of Hebrews is probably the classic place for showing how the Old Covenant has become obsolete with the coming of the New Covenant. Chapter 8, verse 13, "In speaking of a new covenant, He makes the first one obsolete, and what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." And for example, the death of Jesus is the once-for-all sacrifice for sins so that the entire Old Testament sacrificial system of offering animals comes to an end.

Hebrews 7, 27, 9, 12, "Jesus is the final Lamb of God." The whole Old Testament sacrificial system is over, doesn't apply anymore. Another example from Hebrews is that Jesus Himself offers the sacrifice of Himself, and therefore Jesus is the final priest, and you don't need any more priests. And so the entire Old Testament priesthood is removed.

It's over. We have one new, final, eternal High Priest, Jesus Christ. A third example is that Jesus saw Himself as the new temple. If you destroy this temple, I'll build it in three days. And He meant, I'll rise from the dead in three days. So when the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, the place of worship for Christians was not destroyed because we don't have a place for worship that is limited geographically.

We have Jesus. And any place Jesus is, we can worship. So all those specifics are how the Old Covenant was becoming obsolete, and dramatic changes came about, and hundreds of commands in the Old Testament don't apply to Christians anymore because this new phase of redemptive history has come. A third pointer to this dramatic alteration between Old and New Testament is that the Christian life is put on a completely new footing from law.

Romans 7, 6, "Now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of spirit, not the old way of a written code." A fourth pointer is that Jesus said about the people of Israel in Matthew 21, 43, "I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you," political, ethnic Israel, "and given to a people producing its fruits," that is, the Christian church.

And what that marks is a dramatic change from the old theocratic, ethnic orientation on one people group, namely Israel, to a new kind of people who are not a political entity, they're not an ethnic entity ruled by a political or governmental leader, but they are a people scattered like exiles away from heaven, their homeland, on the earth, mingling among all the ethnic groups of the world with a king in heaven, not on earth, so that Jesus says to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world.

If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I might not be delivered over to the Jews, but my kingdom is not of this world." And so the church doesn't function any longer, like Israel did, as a national or political, governmental agency, and therefore does not coerce its beliefs with the sword.

Fifth pointer is the way that Christians are freed from the old theocratic, ethnic orientation that needed all kinds of cultural distinctives which the Jews had to set it apart from the nations. Mark 7, 19, Jesus declared all foods clean. So the entire dietary law system of the Old Testament is wiped away because we don't need to distinguish ourselves from all the nations of the world.

We are part of the nations of the world. We eat whatever we're offered because we're on an evangelistic mission to win people from all the peoples of the world among whom we are a part. Another example would be circumcision. Circumcision was the defining trait of Israel among the nations, and in Galatians 5, 6, we're told it doesn't longer count for Christians.

It's not required for Christians anymore. And a sixth pointer to this dramatic alteration between Old and New Testament is Matthew 5, 38, and 39. You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil.

But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Or another example of change in moral expectations is where Jesus talks about divorce. In Matthew 19, 7 and 8, he says this. They ask him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and send her away if you say we shouldn't divorce?" And here's what he answers.

He said, "Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning, it was not so." In other words, even though Moses made this provision, I don't anymore. So you can see changes coming to the world with Jesus in the moral expectations upon the people of God.

Now finally, directly to the point about homosexuals being executed in the Old Testament, is the New Testament, when it is presented with an executable offense, dealt with it differently. For example, 1 Corinthians 5, the early church was confronted with a man who was having sex with his stepmother, evidently.

Might have been his mother-in-law. It was an intra-family, horrendous sexual sin that even the nations around the church thought was evil. It goes like this, "It is actually reported that there is a sexual immorality among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among the pagans, for a man has his father's wife." When Paul dealt with that, which was in the Old Testament an offense so egregious it would have been dealt with by stoning, killing, execution.

And Paul did not, of course, prescribe stoning or execution. He prescribed church discipline. And that's a clear example of how dramatic the changes have become between chapter 1 in the military book and chapter 4 in the military book. So our overall aim in dealing with our critics who don't know their Bibles is to direct them to Jesus, who is the goal of everything in the Bible, and to try to help them see that God has been moving through history in different ways at different times to bring us into a relationship with Jesus for the salvation of our souls.

Yeah, man, that's so important. I should also point out that this entire argument applies to the popular year of living biblically experiments, which are just a tangled hermeneutical and ethical mess. And nevertheless, people all the time try to pull off a living biblically for a year experiment where they make none of these old covenant and new covenant distinctions that Scripture calls for.

Thank you, Pastor John. What is the most terrible thing in the world? Is it the inability of a Christian to defend themselves with a pistol? Or is there something worse to be feared? John Piper will return tomorrow to explain. You can find our apps and our past episodes, and you can get us a question all online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye. DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 9 DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 9