Read Matthew 5:17, 18; Psalm 111:7, 8; Ecclesiastes 12:13, 14; 1 John 5:3; and Proverbs 28:9. What do these Bible passages teach regarding the Christian’s relationship to the law?

 Seventh-day Adventists follow in the footsteps of the Protestant Reformers who upheld the sanctity of God’s law. Note this powerful affirmation of John Wesley: “The ritual or ceremonial law delivered by Moses to the children of Israel, containing all the injunctions and ordinances which related to the old sacrifices and service of the temple, our Lord indeed did come to destroy, to dissolve and utterly abolish. . . . But the moral law, contained in the Ten Commandments, and enforced by the prophets, he did not take away. It was not the design of his coming to revoke any part of this. This is a law which never can be broken, which ‘stands fast as the faithful witness in heaven.’ . . . Every part of this law must remain in force, upon all mankind, and in all ages; as not depending either on time or place, or any other circumstances liable to change, but on the nature of God and the nature of man, and their unchangeable relation to each other.”—“Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount,” Discourse V, John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology (Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1991), pp. 208, 209.

 Compare Exodus 34:5-7 with Romans 7:11, 12; Psalm 19:7-11; Psalm 89:14; and Psalm 119:142, 172. What do these verses tell us about the relationship between God’s law and God’s character?

 Since the law of God is a transcript of His character, the foundation of His throne, and the moral basis for humanity, Satan hates it. “None could fail to see that if the earthly sanctuary was a figure or pattern of the heavenly, the law deposited in the ark on earth was an exact transcript of the law in the ark in heaven; and that an acceptance of the truth concerning the heavenly sanctuary involved an acknowledgment of the claims of God’s law and the obligation of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. Here was the secret of the bitter and determined opposition to the harmonious exposition of the Scriptures that revealed the ministration of Christ in the heavenly sanctuary.”—Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy,p. 435.