The Hebrew Roots Movement and Torah-keeping communities regularly deploy a specific argument when challenged about whether the Mosaic law applies to Gentile believers today. It sounds simple and it sounds decisive: the Bible itself uses "the law of God" and "the law of Moses" interchangeably. Therefore they are the same thing. Therefore the law of Moses is God's law. And God's law is eternal and binding on everyone. Therefore Gentile believers must keep Torah.

The argument has a surface plausibility that makes it feel like a conversation-stopper. It is not. The interchangeable use of the two terms is real and worth acknowledging. But the conclusion drawn from it does not follow - and when you examine what the argument actually establishes versus what it needs to establish, the entire case collapses before it reaches its destination.

What They Get Right

Several of their observations are genuine and worth acknowledging before engaging the problems.

Scripture does use "law of God" and "law of Moses" interchangeably in places. Nehemiah 8 and Ezra 7 do use both terms for the same body of instruction. Moses was indeed the human instrument through whom God communicated the Sinai covenant - the divine origin is not in question. 2 Timothy 3:16 does apply to all Scripture including the Law of Moses. And the greatest commandments - love God and love neighbour - do appear in Deuteronomy and Leviticus rather than in the Decalogue itself.

These are real observations. The argument built on them, however, does not reach the conclusion it needs to reach. And the reason it fails is fundamental rather than peripheral.

The Argument Proves the Wrong Thing

This is the centrepiece of the response and it deserves to be stated clearly. Establishing that the law of Moses originated with God and is therefore also the law of God tells us absolutely nothing about that law's covenant scope or its duration. These are two completely different questions - and the HRM conflates them as though answering the first automatically answers the second.

Consider the pattern of God's lawgiving throughout Scripture. God gave a law to Adam - do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God gave a law to Noah - do not eat blood, do not murder, be fruitful and multiply. God gave a law to Abraham - circumcise every male in your household as the sign of the covenant. All of these originated with God. All of them are in the most straightforward sense "the law of God." All of them are recorded in inspired Scripture. None of them are perpetually binding on New Covenant believers in the way Torah-keeping communities require.

Nobody argues that Christians must be circumcised on the eighth day because God commanded it to Abraham. Nobody argues that we must not eat blood because God commanded it to Noah. Nobody argues that we are forbidden from eating from specific trees because God commanded it to Adam. Why not? Because recognising that a command originated with God is not the same as establishing that the command governs all people in all ages under all covenants. Divine origin does not determine covenant scope or duration. That requires a separate argument entirely - one the HRM does not make and cannot make from the interchangeability of the two terms.

Numbers 15:15-16 - The Sojourner Is Not the Gentile Believer

Numbers 15:15-16 states: "The community is to have the same rules for you and for the foreigner residing among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the foreigner shall be the same before the Lord. The same laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the foreigner residing among you."

Torah-observant teachers use this text to argue that the Mosaic law was never limited to ethnic Israel - that God explicitly included foreigners, and therefore Gentile believers today are included in Torah obligation.

But the text is describing a specific and historically defined category of person: the ger - the foreigner who physically resided within the borders of Israel, living under the Mosaic covenant administration in the land. This person had made a choice to join the covenant community of Israel geographically, socially, and covenantally. They were subject to the same laws because they were living under the same covenant in the same land under the same governance.

A Gentile believer in Ephesus in 55 AD, united with Christ through faith, is not in this position. They are not residing within Israel's borders. They are not living under the Mosaic covenant administration. They are not subject to the governance of the Sinai covenant. They have been united with Christ and are living under the New Covenant - the covenant explicitly described as not like the Mosaic one. The sojourner of Numbers 15 and the Gentile believer of Paul's letters are in entirely different covenantal positions, and applying a text about one to the other is importing a meaning the text does not carry.

Furthermore, if Numbers 15:15-16 establishes universal Torah obligation for all who join God's people, then the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is the most inexplicable failure in apostolic history. The Spirit-guided council deliberated specifically on what Gentile believers must do - and produced four requirements. Not Torah observance. Not Sabbath. Not circumcision. If Numbers 15 had already settled this question, the council would not have needed to meet. And if it had met, it would have reached a different conclusion.

The Greatest Commandments Argument - Which Side Does It Support?

The observation that the greatest commandments - love God from Deuteronomy 6:5 and love your neighbour from Leviticus 19:18 - appear in the wider Torah rather than the Decalogue is genuinely interesting. The HRM uses it to argue that the whole Torah carries equal moral weight and cannot be divided into categories.

But examine what Jesus and Paul do with these commandments. Jesus says all the law and the prophets hang on these two. Paul says in Romans 13:8-10 that love your neighbour summarises the commandments - and the commandments he lists are the moral absolutes: do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet. He does not list Sabbath, dietary laws, or feast observance as part of what love fulfils. Galatians 5:14 says the entire law is fulfilled in loving your neighbour - and immediately proceeds to describe the fruit of the Spirit, not a Torah observance programme.

The greatest commandments argument actually demonstrates the moral law distinction rather than undermining it. The moral content of the law - love God, love neighbour, the weightier matters Jesus identifies in Matthew 23 as justice, mercy and faithfulness - is consistently upheld and deepened in the New Covenant. What is not carried forward as binding obligation is the Mosaic covenant administration: its calendar, its dietary code, its sacrificial system, its national covenant structures. The HRM's own proof text points to the moral content as what endures - and the New Testament's application of that content never includes Sabbath or dietary compliance.

The Real Question the Argument Never Asks

Here is the fundamental problem with the law of God versus law of Moses argument: even granting every observation it makes - the interchangeable terms, the divine authorship, the inclusion of sojourners, the equal weight of the whole Torah, the God-breathed status of all Scripture - none of it addresses the actual disputed question.

The disputed question is not who gave the law. Nobody disputes that God gave it. The disputed question is which covenant New Covenant believers in Christ are living under - and what God himself said about that covenant's purpose and duration.

"For when the priesthood is changed, the law must be changed also." - Hebrews 7:12

This is God's own word - spoken through the inspired author of Hebrews - declaring that the law changes when the priesthood changes. The Levitical priesthood has been superseded by Christ's eternal priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. Therefore, by the Scripture's own internal logic, the law has changed. This is not a Christian tradition. This is not a Gentile misreading. This is Scripture - the same Scripture that Torah-keeping communities claim to honour - declaring that the law itself changes as redemptive history moves forward.

And Jeremiah 31 - which Torah observant communities regularly cite as the New Covenant promise of Torah written on hearts - is equally explicit: the New Covenant will not be like the covenant made with Israel's ancestors at the exodus. Not different in peripheral ways. Explicitly and deliberately not like it. As our article on Jeremiah 31 and the law on the heart examines in detail, the law written on hearts in the New Covenant is not the Mosaic Torah reinstated internally. It is the moral character of God produced from within by the Spirit - which is something categorically new, not a renewal of what came before.

If the law of Moses is the law of God - and it is - then the New Covenant is also the law of God. And God's own law, in Hebrews 8:13, says the first covenant is obsolete. The law of God declared the law of Moses obsolete. The HRM argument that the two terms are interchangeable actually creates a problem for their position rather than solving one: if God's word includes both the Mosaic covenant and the New Covenant, then God's word contains the declaration that the Mosaic covenant has been superseded. You cannot invoke the authority of God's word to establish the Mosaic covenant's permanence while ignoring what God's word says about its end.

Romans 3:29-30 - The Universal Reach of God's Law

"Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith." - Romans 3:29-30

Paul asks exactly the question the HRM argument raises: is God's law universal? Does it reach Gentiles? His answer is yes - but the mechanism of that universal reach is not Torah observance. It is faith in Christ. The one God justifies both Jew and Gentile through faith. That is the universal reach of God's law. Not a universal Sabbath obligation. Not a universal dietary code. Faith in the one who fulfilled what the law pointed toward.

This is consistent with everything Paul argues in Galatians, Romans, and Colossians. The law of God reaches all people - in its moral content, in its witness to righteousness, in its diagnosis of sin, in its pointing toward Christ. What does not universalise is the Mosaic covenant administration - the specific national covenant given to Israel at Sinai, with its calendar, its dietary regulations, its sacrificial system, and its covenant signs. As our article on the Mosaic covenant's purpose and limits examines, the covenant was specific in its audience, its administration, and its duration - by God's own design.

The Gentile World and Fifteen Centuries of Silence

There is a final observation worth making about the claim that the law of Moses is God's universal eternal law for all people in all ages. If this is true then God gave his universal eternal law to one small nation in the ancient Near East and failed to communicate it to the vast majority of humanity for the next fifteen centuries.

Every nation outside Israel - Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, India, the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa - lived and died without access to the Sabbath commandment, the dietary laws, the feast calendar, or the covenant sign of circumcision. By the HRM's logic, God's eternal law for all people was functionally inaccessible to most people for most of history.

The New Testament's answer to this problem is not that the Mosaic Torah was always universally intended but poorly distributed. It is that God's moral character - his justice, his holiness, his love - is written on every human conscience through natural revelation, as Romans 2:14-15 establishes. And his redemptive purposes, which the Mosaic covenant served within Israel, have been universalised through Christ - not through the extension of Mosaic covenant obligation to all nations but through the proclamation of the gospel to all nations. As our article on progressive revelation argues, this is not God changing his mind. It is God's plan moving forward through its appointed stages.

What the Interchangeable Terms Actually Establish

The law of God and the law of Moses are interchangeable terms in Scripture because they refer to the same body of instruction given to Israel at Sinai. That is real. That is accurate. And it establishes exactly one thing: that Moses was the human instrument through whom God gave the Sinai covenant to Israel.

It does not establish that the Sinai covenant was intended for all people in all ages. It does not establish that the Sinai covenant's duration is eternal. It does not establish that Gentile believers in Christ are obligated to live under the Sinai covenant administration. All of those conclusions require additional arguments from different texts - and those texts, read honestly, consistently point in the opposite direction.

The law of Moses is the law of God. And the law of God, through Jeremiah, predicted a New Covenant not like the Mosaic one. The law of God, through Hebrews, declared that when the priesthood changes the law must change also. The law of God, through Paul, said that believers died to the law through the body of Christ. The law of God, through the Jerusalem Council guided by the Holy Spirit, gave Gentile believers four requirements - not Torah observance.

If you honour the law of God you must honour all of it. Including what it says about its own supersession. As our articles on why the old covenant became obsolete and understanding the covenants demonstrate, this is not a contradiction. It is the plan of God moving from shadow to substance, from promise to fulfilment, from the pointer to the one it was always pointing toward.

The law of Moses and the law of God are the same thing. Which is precisely why what God said about the law of Moses - through his own inspired word - matters so much. And what he said is that it has been fulfilled in Christ, superseded by something better, and replaced by a New Covenant explicitly not like the old one.

That is the law of God speaking. Torah-keeping communities should listen to it.

For when the priesthood is changed, the law must be changed also. - Hebrews 7:12