Day 300

  • Principle: Jesus Christ came and fulfilled the Law of Moses.

  • Book of Mormon Reading: 3 Nephi 15:1 - 15:24

    • Jesus Christ came to fulfill the Law of Moses.  Jeffrey R. Holland taught:

      • “Clearly the Nephite congregation understood this more readily than did the Jewish world, partly because the Nephite prophets had been so careful to teach the transitional nature of the law. Abinadi had said, ‘It is expedient that ye should keep the law of Moses as yet; but I say unto you, that the time shall come when it shall no more be expedient to keep the law of Moses.’ [Mosiah 13:27.] In that same spirit Nephi emphasized, ‘We speak concerning the law that our children may know the deadness of the law; and they, by knowing the deadness of the law, may look forward unto that life which is in Christ, and know for what end the law was given. And after the law is fulfilled in Christ, that they need not harden their hearts against him when the law ought to be done away.’ [2 Nephi 25:27; italics added.]

        “That kind of teaching—a caution against hardening one’s heart against Christ in ignorant defense of the law of Moses—could have served (and saved) so many living in the Old World then and living throughout the world now” (Christ and the New Covenant [1997], 156–57).

      • “It is crucial to understand that the law of Moses was overlaid upon, and thereby included, many basic parts of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which had existed before it. It was never intended to be something apart or separated from, and certainly not something antagonistic to, the gospel of Jesus Christ. … Its purpose was never to have been different from the higher law. Both were to bring people to Christ” (Christ and the New Covenant, 147). 

      • How has your understanding of the Law of Moses improved your understanding of the teachings of Jesus Christ?  

    • One area to distinguish is in verse 8 Jesus says “The covenant which I have made with my people is not all fulfilled”  Though Christ fulfilled the Law of Moses there are other covenants, such as the covenant with Abraham that are still in force.  These include eternal posterity, land that would become the celestial kingdom, and God’s priesthood power.  

      • Speaking of this promise, which is extended to all of Abraham’s children Orson F. Whitney taught:

        • “Another name for America, authorized by the Book of Mormon, is the Land of Joseph, referred to by the Patriarch Jacob in blessing his twelve sons (Gen. 49:22–26), and by the Prophet Moses in his farewell benediction upon the twelve tribes of Israel (Deut. 33:13–15). Jacob’s allusion to Joseph as ‘a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall, was fulfilled in the migration of Lehi and his companions from Asia to America over the Pacific Ocean. It is hardly necessary to add, that one of the main features of these western continents are those mighty mountain ranges, the Andes and the Rockies, well termed by the Hebrew Patriarch ‘the everlasting hills,’ nature’s depositories for ‘the precious things of the earth’—gold, silver, and other minerals—and for ‘the precious things of heaven’—the sacred records already discovered and others that are yet to come forth” (“The Book of Mormon: Historical and Prophetic Phases,” Improvement Era, Sept. 1927, 944–45).

  • Additional Study: