The Law of Moses — Why Israel Needed It and What It Pointed To
Christ did not abolish the law — He fulfilled every detail of it
What Was the Law of Moses?
The Law of Moses is not simply the Ten Commandments. It is the entire legislative framework given to Israel at Sinai and elaborated through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — encompassing moral law, civil law, ceremonial law, purity codes, dietary restrictions, sacrificial requirements, feast observances, priestly regulations, and the structure of Israel's worship life.
Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments in the Torah. These governed every aspect of Israelite life from what you ate to how you harvested your field to what happened when you touched a dead body to what the high priest wore when he entered the holy of holies once a year. It was a comprehensive legal and liturgical system designed to govern a covenant people.
That comprehensiveness was the point. God was not merely giving rules. He was shaping a people — embedding in their daily life, their calendar, their diet, and their worship a constant pattern of symbols that all pointed in the same direction: forward, toward the Messiah who would complete what the law prefigured.
Why Did Israel Need a Schoolmaster?
Paul's word for the Law of Moses in Galatians is paidagogos — schoolmaster, or tutor. In the Greco-Roman world, a paidagogos was the slave who walked a child to school and back, guarding them, correcting them, and accompanying them until they were old enough to manage themselves. The relationship was not permanent — it was preparatory.
Galatians 3:24
“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”
The Book of Mormon is equally clear about the law's purpose. Nephi says “the law hath become dead unto us, and we are made alive in Christ because of our faith” (2 Nephi 25:25), and Mosiah 13:29–30 states that God gave the law “because of their stiffneckedness” — as a remedial measure for a people who had just demonstrated, at the foot of Sinai, that they could not sustain direct access to God without an intermediate system to govern them.
The law was not God's ideal. It was God's mercy — a structured system of symbols and ordinances designed to preserve the knowledge of the Messiah in a people who were prone to forget, prone to idolatry, and not yet ready for the higher law. It was given to hold the covenant people in position until the covenant's author arrived in person.
Every Ordinance Pointed to Christ
This is the central claim of the Book of Mormon's interpretation of the Law of Moses — and it is explicit rather than implied:
2 Nephi 11:4
“Behold, my soul delighteth in proving unto my people the truth of the coming of Christ; for, for this end hath the law of Moses been given; and all things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world, unto man, are the typifying of him.”
Every ordinance. Every feast. Every sacrifice. Every purity law. All of it was designed to encode the coming Atonement in ritual form, so that when Christ arrived and completed it, those who knew the law would recognize the fulfillment. The problem was that Israel came to treat the ritual as an end in itself — precisely the failure the prophets spent centuries rebuking.
The Sacrifices — Types of the Atonement
The sacrificial system is the most blood-soaked and most theologically concentrated part of the Law of Moses. A worshiper brought an unblemished animal. He placed his hands on it — transferring, in symbol, his sin to the animal. The animal was killed. The blood was applied to the altar. The worshiper was declared clean.
Every element of this was a type. The unblemished animal pointed to the sinless Christ. The laying on of hands pointed to the transfer of sin. The blood pointed to His blood. The declaration of cleanness pointed to justification through the Atonement. The altar pointed to the cross. None of it was accidental — it was a systematic visual theology of what the Messiah would do when He arrived.
Hebrews 9 explains this explicitly: the blood of goats and bulls could not actually take away sin — they were shadows. Only the blood of Christ could do what the sacrifices signified. The sacrifices were the picture; Christ was the reality.
The Day of Atonement
Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement — was the most solemn day in Israel's year. The high priest entered the holy of holies alone, carrying the blood of the sacrifice, to make atonement for the sins of the entire nation. He did this once a year. If anything was done incorrectly, the text implies he would die in God's presence.
Two goats were used. One was sacrificed; its blood atoned. The other — the scapegoat — had the sins of Israel symbolically laid upon it and was driven into the wilderness, carrying the sins away. Together they depicted what Christ would accomplish: atone for sin and remove it entirely.
Hebrews 9:11–12 says Christ entered not the earthly holy of holies but the heavenly one — not with the blood of animals but with His own blood — and obtained eternal redemption. He fulfilled the Day of Atonement once, permanently, with a sacrifice that did not need repeating.
The Feasts
Israel's seven annual feasts were not social celebrations. They were prophetic scripts, rehearsed year after year, encoding the timeline of salvation:
The Seven Feasts and Their Fulfillment
- Passover — Christ crucified as the Passover Lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7)
- Unleavened Bread — His sinless body in the tomb
- Firstfruits — His resurrection as the firstfruits of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20)
- Pentecost (Weeks) — The giving of the Holy Ghost fifty days after the Resurrection
- Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles — Future fulfillments: gathering, judgment, millennial reign
The first four feasts were fulfilled precisely, on the exact days, at Christ's first coming. The final three await His second. The Law of Moses was not just pointing to His arrival — it was announcing the schedule of salvation history.
“Think Not That I Am Come to Destroy the Law”
Jesus addressed the relationship between His ministry and the Law directly in the Sermon on the Mount:
Matthew 5:17
“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
The distinction between destroying and fulfilling is everything. To destroy would be to invalidate. To fulfill is to complete — to bring to its full intended meaning. When you complete a building, you do not destroy the blueprints — you accomplish what they were designed to produce. Jesus accomplished what the Law was designed to produce. Every sacrifice, every feast, every ordinance found its completion in Him.
How Christ Fulfilled It
3 Nephi 15:2–5 records Christ speaking to the Nephites after His resurrection: “Behold, I say unto you that the law is fulfilled that was given unto Moses. Behold, I am he that gave the law, and I am he that covenanted with my people Israel; therefore, the law in me is fulfilled, for I have come to fulfil the law; therefore it hath an end.”
The law was given by Christ. The law was fulfilled by Christ. The same being who enacted the schoolmaster completed the lesson the schoolmaster had been teaching. At the moment of His death — when the veil of the temple tore from top to bottom — the symbolic barrier between man and God's presence was removed. The system that managed access to God through priests and sacrifices was superseded by direct access through Christ.
From Animal Sacrifice to a Broken Heart
From the very beginning, the shedding of an animal's blood was never about the animal. When Adam offered the firstlings of his flock, an angel asked him why — and the answer he was given reaches to the root of the entire sacrificial system. The offering had a meaning that the worshiper himself could not always see.
“This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father… Wherefore, thou shalt do all that thou doest in the name of the Son, and thou shalt repent and call upon God in the name of the Son forevermore.”
Every lamb laid on every altar for thousands of years was a similitude — a rehearsal — of the one sacrifice that would actually redeem. The animal was a placeholder. When the reality came, the placeholder was no longer needed.
That is exactly what happened at Christ's coming to the Nephites. The resurrected Lord announced that the centuries of blood offerings were over — not because sacrifice itself had ended, but because the form of the sacrifice had changed forever. The altar of stone gave way to the altar of the soul.
“And ye shall offer up unto me no more the shedding of blood; yea, your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away… And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, him will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost.”
Notice what is and is not abolished. The shedding of blood is done away. The sacrifice is not. In place of a dying animal, the Lord asks for a living heart — broken open, surrendered, contrite. The external offering is replaced by an internal one.
This was never a new idea sprung on Israel at the last moment. It was the meaning hidden inside the sacrifices all along. David — a thousand years before Christ — already understood that God had never wanted the carcass for its own sake. What God sought, and would not despise, was a heart laid low.
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
The revelations of the Restoration confirm that this is now the standing law of acceptable worship. What God asks of His covenant people is no longer measured in livestock but in the offering of a humbled, repentant self.
“Thou shalt offer a sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in righteousness, even that of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”
And what, exactly, does a broken heart offer up? Not a portion, not a tithe of the flock — the whole self. Where the Mosaic worshiper surrendered an animal that stood in his place, the disciple of Christ surrenders the one thing the animal only symbolized: his own entire soul. King Benjamin's people, and Paul, name the same offering from opposite ends of the scriptural record.
“And offer your whole souls as an offering unto him, and continue in fasting and praying, and endure to the end; and as the Lord liveth ye will be saved.”
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”
The dead sacrifice of the Law of Moses becomes the living sacrifice of the gospel. The animal died once on the altar; the disciple offers himself daily, alive, in continual surrender. This is why the change is not a downgrade but a deepening. It is harder, not easier, to give a broken heart than to give a bullock — for the offering is no longer outside of you. It is you.
So the trajectory of the whole Law is complete. The altar of animals is fulfilled and emptied; its blood pointed to a blood it could never contain, and that blood has now been shed once for all. What remains is the altar that every other altar was always pointing toward — the human heart, broken open and wholly given to God. That is the sacrifice the Lord will not despise, and it is the only one He now asks.
What Was Replaced and What Was Not
Not everything in the Law of Moses was replaced. The moral law — honesty, fidelity, love of neighbor, care for the widow and orphan — was not abolished. It was deepened. The Sermon on the Mount does not cancel “thou shalt not murder” — it extends it to anger. It does not cancel “thou shalt not commit adultery” — it extends it to lust. The moral core of the law endures because it reflects the character of God.
What was replaced was the ceremonial scaffolding — the animal sacrifices, the Levitical priesthood functions, the purity codes, the dietary restrictions as covenant markers, the feast observances as obligatory law. These were types, and when the reality arrived, the types gave way.
What the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers is a higher law — the law of consecration, the covenants of the temple, the ordinances of the Melchizedek Priesthood — that fulfills the same function the Mosaic system once did: connecting covenant people to Christ through authorized ordinances. The instrument changed. The purpose is continuous.