Olive Hemmings,
I’d like to respond to your thoughtful essay.
In Gal 3:8 Paul describes the giving the covenant promise to Abraham of a blessed Seed.
In verse 9, he describes the adding of the law until the Promised Seed is sent.
In verse 25, he reported that the Promised Seed had arrived.
In verse 24, he declared that "the Law was our schoolmaster (custodian) until [the Seed replaced it with Himself].
Then we have “no more need for the schoolmaster”.
In 2 Cor 3:7, he calls the Torah-- written on stone and in ink–a “ministration of death”, superseded by greater glory of the Spirit.
What about Matthew 5:17?
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfill….”
Ellen White did not seem to know that in the Jewish vocabulary the Law was the Pentateuch, never the 10 Commandments (I’m pretty sure) so she championed this passage as proof that the Decalogue was for all time and all people. (She always removed the part of the 10 C that appears to deny this.) Then the entire Law was for all time and all people–alI 613 commandments. (Splitting the Law into two pieces was a post-New Testament action).
I have concluded that Jesus meant, “Don’t think of my mission as destroying the the Law, but as replacing the Law with the Spirit.”
As Paul said later, while the law was in force it felt like a prison warden or or a slave driver. That which was letters carved on stone, or written with ink was now written on the heart (without letters).–Paul never spoke of “the spirit of the law”. It was always the Spirit OR the Law. And by Law he always meant the Torah.
He was livid when he chastised the Galatians for obeying the Torah’s requirement to be circumcised. And the Jerusalem Christians were unhappy with him preaching to Diaspora Jews that the Torah had completed it’s mission.
When speaking of Hagar and Ishmael as analogs of the Law, he implore his hearers to: Cast out the bondwoman and her son: (Gal 4:30)
Paul even succeed in convincing James to declare that he had never supported Gentile involvement with the Torah:
*Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us have troubled you with words, **subverting your souls, saying, Ye must…keep the law: to whom we gave no such commandment: (Acts 15:24
I admit that these passages are very seldom heard in Adventist sermons, perhaps because of the secret policies we’ve heard about.