…Paul went further. To those who imagine that “living biblically” means keeping all the rules you can possibly find in the Bible, I think he would say, “You haven’t understood the first thing about the gospel. The Good News is not, ‘Here are the rules, see how many of them you can keep.’ ” Instead, I believe he would say, “Here is Jesus. See what God has done for you through him.”
The good news is that the God who created the world has kept his promise to save the world. He has done it through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And we can be part of the story that ends in a new creation, with Christ reigning as king. The good news also is that once we have entered that story by repentance and faith, God gives us his Spirit, precisely so that “the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4).
There is plenty that we can learn from Old Testament laws that can still usefully guide our ethical and missional thinking and action. The Torah was always intended to do just that. But the heartbeat of Christian life and freedom is not keeping all the rules. Instead, it is living as people whose whole life and character are shaped by God’s Word in all its Christ-centered fullness, becoming more like the Christ we trust and follow, and bearing the fruit of God’s Spirit. That’s living biblically.