Bible Verses About Law

and sent them with this letter: The apostles and the elders, your brothers, To the brothers among the Gentiles in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia: Greetings.

It has come to our attention that some went out from us without our authorization and unsettled you, troubling your minds by what they said.

So we all agreed to choose men to send to you along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul,

men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to tell you in person the same things we are writing.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond these essential requirements:

You must abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.

When they heard this, they glorified God. Then they said to Paul, “You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law.

But they are under the impression that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or observe our customs.

What then should we do? They will certainly hear that you have come.

Therefore do what we advise you. There are four men with us who have taken a vow.

Take these men, purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know that there is no truth to these rumors about you, but that you also live in obedience to the law.

As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they must abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality.”

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.

So they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts either accusing or defending them

What, then, is the advantage of being a Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?

Much in every way. First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God.

Do you not know, brothers (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives?

For instance, a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.

So then, if she is joined to another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law and is not an adulteress, even if she marries another man.

Therefore, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.

For when we lived according to the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, bearing fruit for death.

But now, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Now if the ministry of death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze at the face of Moses because of its fleeting glory,

will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious?