This is a Fundamental difference between Protestants and the Jews who believed in the LORD Jesus Christ in the First Century, who are the first fruits, as it were, of the holy catholic apostolic church. They loved the Law and understood it in all contexts. Then again, the Apostles, and those eligible to be Apostles, walked and lived with Jesus and his mother, the very Israel of God. The only contentious issue they faced wrt the Law was what to do with the Gentiles who received the Holy Spirit. They decided and we are bound by their decision. The reason, as I understand it, that Catholicism does not see this break between the covenants the way most Protestants do is because they have an a priori commitment to a sacerdotal priesthood, despite the discontinuation of such by God’s own act of installing Jesus Christ as our high priest, which is not accounted for under the Mosaic covenant, and so renders it obsolete for Christians, per Hebrews 7.
The Protestant view, as I see it, created a new religion in the 16th Century that continues to suffer the same sort of protestations and reformations that marked its founding. I do not believed in an orphaned church.
Funny, that's how the Eastern Orthodox view Roman Catholicism. You left them, just a bunch of schismatics. Orphaned. All manner of novelties peculiar to Rome unknown to the primitive Church.
The law of God is good, but it is a ministry of death. You only have to believe Paul to get that. He said it repeatedly. Do you dismiss his apostolic authority? The ministration of grace through the Gospel of Jesus Christ is life from the dead, life by the power of God's own Spirit. It cannot be matched by anything in the Old Covenant.
Jesus said that John the Baptist was greatest among those born of women, but the lowest person in the kingdom of Heaven is greater than John. If it wasn't for the fact that Jesus has taken us to a whole new level in the New Covenant, then how can John be below any ordinary Christian? He was the last of the Old Covenant prophets. He marks the beginning of the end of the Old Covenant era:
Mat 11:13 For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.
That which was good, but had no power to save, has been replaced by the better, through which comes eternal life:
Heb 8:13 In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.
If I had said that as a First Century Christian, that the Old Covenant is decaying, getting old, and ready to vanish away, wouldn't that be inconsistent with the idea of the law continuing on just as it always had? Of course it would. I understand you see great good in the law. All people of good will do. But there is something even better, if you believe the apostles, the Gospel of God's grace in Jesus Christ, by whom we are delivered from the curse of the law, and raised to new life in the Spirit, all by grace, and nothing by our own failed humanity.
Peace,
SR