This is more than permission to relax a few regulations. It is a change in how humanity lives with God—from an external covenantal administration to His indwelling presence.

Jesus named both the purpose and the endpoint

“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

— Matthew 5:17–18, NASB, as quoted in Dismantling Religion, Chapter 8

Jesus did not dismiss the Law as worthless. Fulfillment honors its purpose. But neither did He describe its administration as endless. The word “until” matters as much as the insistence that not the smallest stroke passes prematurely.

A reading that keeps the guardian forever has to reckon with the horizon Jesus attached to it. Has that heaven-and-earth order passed, or are we still living under its covenantal arrangements?

Revelation names the corresponding transition

Revelation 21:1 announces the passing of the first heaven and earth and the absence of the sea. That follows the millennium, the Gog and Magog conflict, the surrender of the dead, and the abolition of Death and Hades.

The sea is the old Sheol reality, not the planet’s oceans. Its disappearance marks the end of the waiting arrangement. But the earthly side of the transition is equally important. The world did not merely acquire a new theological label.

Between 1100 and 1300 AD, compound volcanism, seismic upheaval, megadrought, famine, and plague formed a planetary-scale catastrophe. Major sulfur injections arrived before the climate recovered from earlier shocks. Nearly two dozen city-leveling earthquakes and hundreds of moderate to severe shocks repeatedly destroyed communities and altered landscapes. Damaged irrigation, failed rivers, dimmed skies, cold, drought, and flood compounded agricultural collapse. The cascade helped push the world into the Little Ice Age.

That is the scale of the physical signature accompanying the covenantal milestone. The earth’s transformation does not mean matter was deleted. The old world ceased to exist in its former condition, through an upheaval that changed climates, landscapes, and the structures of life.

The disasters did not independently make a new law. Their significance lies in their place in the prophetic sequence: heaven’s old death-shadowed arrangement ended, and earth bore the marks of the same turning of the age.

Why Paul already spoke of freedom

Paul says believers are not under Law but under grace, that Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness, and that the Law was a guardian until Christ. Those statements do not contradict Jesus’ “until.” They show the new relationship opening while the older administration was giving way.

The remaining distinction concerns Israel. Romans 11 describes a partial hardening with its own endpoint. Gentiles entered immediate access after Christ’s return, while the old covenant economy continued for the Jewish faithful through the millennium: Abraham’s Bosom and the covenantal registers of life and death remained part of that lingering framework.

The second resurrection ends the remaining waiting realm. The heaven-and-earth transition of 1100–1300 completes the horizon Jesus named. Christ’s first-century appearing, the 96–1096 reign, the second resurrection, and the following cataclysm are connected stages, not rival dates for one undifferentiated event.

There is an important distinction within that framework. Jewish followers of Jesus received the Spirit at Pentecost. Appendix 2 explores whether Israel’s later inclusion involved a distinct fullness of outpouring after Gog; it does not pretend the exact history of that outpouring is beyond question. The conclusion here does not require erasing Pentecost. It concerns the completed administration and the removal of the remaining covenantal barrier.

The Spirit is not an inadequate replacement

Religion often answers freedom from Law with fear: without an external code, how will anyone know right from wrong? But that objection treats the Holy Spirit as insufficient for the very work Jesus sent Him to do.

The alternative to the Mosaic tutor is not indifference to harm. It is inward guidance, conviction, and relationship. Holiness flows from within; righteousness is written on hearts rather than restored as an obligation on stone.

A completed covenant cannot be honored by repeatedly rebuilding its authority over people who now live in the greater relationship toward which it moved. The Law was not defeated by contempt. It reached its appointed end in the divine plan.

Jesus set the horizon. Revelation identifies its passing. The world’s upheaval bears its physical signature. The burden is not waiting to be lifted: the “until” has been fulfilled.

Discussion

• How does keeping both fulfillment and “until” change the way we read Matthew 5 alongside Paul?
• Why does the distinction between the first-century opening and the medieval completion matter?
• Where does reliance on an external religious code prevent trust in the Spirit’s present guidance?