Chapter IV: The Abrogation of the Ceremonial Laws, § 27.
CHAPTER IV: THE ABROGATION OF THE CEREMONIAL LAWS
The ceremonial laws have been abrogated.
§ 27. However, God did not intend for the ceremonial ordinances to stand forever, but to last only until the coming of the New Testament. In it they have been abrogated, as is clear from the following foundations:
(1) Ps. 110:4 promises “a priest according to the order of Melchizedek.” From this Heb. 7:11–12 concludes thus: “If there was fulfillment through the Levitical priesthood, then why was it still necessary to mention another priest arising according to the order of Melchizedek and not the order of Aaron? For when there is a removal of the priesthood, there is necessarily a removal of the Law as well.” If in the New Testament, whose high priest is Christ, the Levitical ceremonies should still be observed, then surely Christ would be no less a priest according to the order of Aaron than were the priests of the Old Testament. The consequence is at odds with the prophecy of the psalm. Therefore the antecedent is also false.
(2) Dan. 9:27 says the Messiah “will make a strong covenant” (that is, the new one promised in Jer. 31:33) “with many for one week, and for half a week He will cause sacrifice and offering to cease.” The most important part of Levitical worship was located in the sacrifices. But now, it predicts that these shall be abrogated through the Messiah. Therefore the same is to be understood regarding the rest of the Levitical ceremonies.
(3) Whatever is constrained within the limits of a certain time is not perpetual. But now, the Levitical ordinances are constrained within the limits of a certain time, seeing as they are most often published alongside the words: “You will observe these things in your generations (
).” Gen. 17:7: “I shall establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations.” Here Luther has written in the margin [of the German Bible]: “ ’So long as their condition endures.’ With this Moses means that their condition eventually will come to an end and another will come.”
(4) Heb. 9:10 says that the distinction of foods, the various washings, and the regulations of the flesh were imposed “until the time of correction (διoρθώσεως).” Matt. 11:13: “All the prophets and the Law prophesied until John.” Just as the prophets prophesied about Christ with words, so did the ceremonial law with types. Therefore just as the prophecies of the prophets were fulfilled through the coming of the Messiah, to whom John pointed with his finger [cf. John 1:29, 35–36], so also the types of the Law were abrogated.
(5) In Acts 15:6 the Council of Jerusalem was convened by the apostles in answer to the dispute about imposing the observance of circumcision and the rest of the Mosaic laws upon the Gentiles. By the Holy Spirit’s doing, it was determined that those laws were by no means to be imposed upon the Gentile converts. Why the eating of blood and of strangled flesh was also forbidden there has been explained above [On the Law of God (Commonplace XV), § 182].
(6) In Acts 10:11 Peter is reminded in a heavenly vision that the distinction of foods has been removed in the New Testament. When he observed this [distinction] again to please the Jewish converts, he was reproved by Paul (Gal. 2 [:11]). Gal. 4:10–11: “You observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear that I have labored among you in vain.” Gal. 5:2: “I, Paul, say to you: ’If you are circumcised, then Christ is of no advantage to you.’ ” Col. 2:16: “Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or the Sabbath.” If the distinction of foods and days and also the requirement of circumcision was removed in the New Testament, then the rest of the ceremonial laws must also be removed because they have the same nature and origin, for parts of the same genus [partes homogeneae] have the same nature and definition as does the whole.
(7) When the body comes, the shadow (or shadowy depiction of the first outlines) ceases; when the antitype is present, the type ceases. Yet the Levitical ceremonies were shadows and types of the benefits of Christ. Therefore at and through His coming they were abrogated. The minor premise is clear on the basis of clear statements of Scripture. Exod. 25:40: “See that you make them according to the pattern you were shown on the mountain.” Heb. 8:5 uses this to show that this symbolized the fact that the Old Testament priests “served a pattern and shadow of the heavenly things.” According to Col. 2:17, new moons and Sabbaths were “shadows of the things to come, but the body is of Christ.” According to Heb. 9:9, the first tabernacle was a παραβoλὴ εἰς τὸν καιρὸν τὸνἐνεστηκότα (“a parable of the present time”). Heb. 10:1: “The Law held the shadow of the good things to come but not the true form of the realities.”
(8) Finally, the clear proof of the abrogation of these ceremonies is the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. You see, because in Deut. 12:5 God Himself had designated and determined the specific place for the sacrifices and other Levitical rituals, then surely the destruction of the tabernacle and temple clearly proves the abrogation of the sacrifices and other Levitical ceremonies. Irenaeus (bk. 4, ch. 7):
As stalks and twigs are not made principally for their own sake but for the fruit that grows on them, and as, once the fruit has matured and been picked, they are left and removed if not fruit-bearing, so also Jerusalem—though she had carried upon herself the yoke of slavery that subdued man who formerly did not subject himself to God when death was reigning and, once subdued, became fit for freedom—was rightly abandoned and abolished once the fruit of freedom had come, matured, been harvested, and the produce carried off into the granary and spread into all the world.
§ 28. Therefore the Roman Church’s heap of theatrical ceremonies instituted in imitation of Levitical worship is bad mimicry [κακoίηλία], given that the worship of the New Testament should chiefly be spiritual and internal (John 4:23). There one sees the external sacrifice of the Mass, the water for purification, the different kinds of priestly vestments, the ever-burning lamps, etc. All of these were thought up in imitation of Levitical worship, as the facts show and also the Rationale divinorum officiorum. Even Polydorus Vergilius does not wholly disavow this.
More grievously do the Jews err in arguing that the use of those Levitical ceremonies is still necessary today under the New Testament. They rely especially upon those passages of Scripture which call these ceremonies of the law a permanent statute. It says of circumcision (Gen. 17:7): “I shall establish My covenant between Me and you for an eternal covenant.” It says of the Sabbath (Exod. 31:16): “They shall keep the Sabbath as a perpetual covenant.” It says of the Passover (Exod. 12:14): “You shall celebrate it as an ordinance forever.” The same is said in Exod. 40:15 of the other parts of the Levitical priesthood.
We respond. The word 
(“age” or “eternity”) does not always mean endless eternity and absolute perpetuity but expresses any very long period of time whose duration is unknown, for it comes from the root 
(“he hid”). Therefore the duration must be viewed with reference to the subject matter. Exod. 21:6 and Deut. 15:17: “He will be your servant 
(’forever’).” Here it means the period of a life span—or, rather, “He will serve until the year of jubilee,” as is explained in Midrash Ele Haddebarim (ch. 15). In 1 Sam. 1:22 it is said of Samuel: “He will dwell there forever all the days of his life,” or until the age of the Levites, which was reached at fifty years, as Rabbi Salomon explains. In Jer. 25:9, the first captivity of Israel and the overthrow of Jerusalem are called an “everlasting desolation,” though in the same chapter (v. 11) it is limited to seventy years. Eccl. 3:14: “The works of God endure forever.” That is, they have a definite span of their duration. It is used in the same way in those statements, namely, not as a reference to absolute perpetuity but to long-standing yet periodic duration. That is why He adds carefully: “I shall establish My covenant between Me and you forever in your generations.” Jerome (commentary on Galatians) thinks when this word is written with a waw cholem [
] it means absolute eternity, but when it is written without the waw [
] it means a finite and determined time. Yet the examples show that this is not always the case.
** The Jews also tell tales about a sabbatical river which flows all week rapidly enough to roll stones, but then rests on the Sabbath. We respond. This is nonsense, for where in the world was it? Although Josephus and Pliny do mention it, neither agrees with the other. Today that proof means nothing until they show us a drop from that sabbatical river. **
1 pontem Sublicium, a wooden bridge that connected Rome to the Janiculan hill on the other side of the Tiber River.
2 The town is now called Cerveteri.
3 The accepted orthography is caerimoniae, though the word’s origin is uncertain and could very well be Etruscan (where Caere was located). Cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. “caerimonia.”
4 Gerhard gives this word as plural. In the Hebrew of Genesis it is singular. The ESV translates it as “a ruler’s staff ”; KJV: “lawgiver.”
5 Read fuerint with Cotta instead of fuerunt.
6 hyacinthina; or “hyacinth-colored.”
7 That which brings about an effect. Here, the “efficient cause” is the people who offer sacrifices.
8 Or “material” or “matter.” When form and matter are combined, they produce actually existing beings. A material cause concurs toward an effect by receiving and sustaining a form. Here, the “material cause” is the stuff from which a sacrifice is made.
9 That which completes another thing or determines it or through which it operates, its “form.” A formal cause gives being to an effect by forming a material. Here the “formal cause” is what distinguishes one kind of sacrifice from others.
10 The same as an “end,” i.e., an aim, purpose, or goal. The final cause is the cause for which the doer acts or that for whose sake something happens.
11 Reading vel with Cotta instead of nunc.
12 Novalia can mean either “standing crops” or “cultivated fields.”
13 See Lectures on Genesis (1535–45/1544–54), AE 1:248 (WA 42:184).
14 Read Theodoretus with Cotta instead of Theodorus.
15 Ovid, Heroides 20.181–82 (LCL 41 [1931], 286–87).
16 The Latin word for “salt” (sal) implies wisdom and wit. See also Mark 9:50; Col. 4:6.
17 κoινωνία ἁλῶν καὶ τραπέξης. See, e.g., Chrysostom, Homily 24 on 1 Cor. 10:18 (NPNF1 12:140 n. 1).
18 In Latin a propitiatorium is a place where propitiation happens.
19 Oeconomica; or “of the household.”
20 I.e., 
.
21 Read firmitas instead of infirmitas.
22 Read Judaeos with Cotta instead of Judaeis.
23 On “humors,” see above, p. 54 n. 6.
24 Sic per arefactionem mundabimur ab omni peccati labe. The statement in this context is nonsensical. Cf. Matt. 21:19; Jer. 23:10. Sections such as this, enclosed in asterisks, are Gerhard’s marginal notes that were added to editions after his death; Gerhard himself did not have the opportunity to edit them. Perhaps read patefactionem [“revealing, uncovering”] instead of arefactionem [“drying out”]. Or perhaps Gerhard alludes to the drying out of a bodily flow or discharge that inflicted Levitical uncleanness.
25 I.e., the corrupted religion of the Samaritans. See 2 Kings 17:29–41.
26 In the Vulgate and Luther’s German Bible, the apocryphal “Letter of Jeremiah” is considered Baruch 6. In English editions of the Apocrypha, the “Letter of Jeremiah” is often considered a separate book. See The Apocrypha: The Lutheran Edition with Notes (St. Louis: Concordia, 2012), 151.
27 mollities. For a different definition of this term, see above, p. 159 (On the Law of God [Commonplace XV], § 161 [3]).