Christ our Messiah didn’t come to abolish Torah, the Mosaic Law, He came to fulfill it. (Mt 5:17) Fulfill comes from the Greek play-ro’-o, meaning to fill up, make replete, cram; it’s used in many places in scripture to indicate a fulfillment of prophecy by bringing to pass what was predicted. (e.g. Mt 1:22, 2:15, 17, 23, 4:14, etc.) Christ certainly fulfilled hundreds of biblical prophecies as God used Him to accomplish what they foretold.
Another way in which Christ fulfilled the Law and the prophets was by His perfect obedience to Torah, and to all the godly precepts and principles the prophets have derived from Torah. (Mt 3:15) It was necessary for Christ to live like this, to be perfectly sinless, in order to suffer for our sins: He had to be innocent and pure in every possible way in order to be a proper substitute for the ungodly (Ro 5:6), to bring us to God. (1Pe 3:18)
Yet many understand from this that since Christ has kept God’s law for us, we don’t have to keep it; He has obeyed Torah for us, on our behalf, so we are free break it. But since God defines sin itself as the violation of Torah (1Jn 3:4), this is equivalent to claiming that since Christ died to save us from our sins that we are now free to sin. Or, in other words, since He is our Great Physician, we are now free to be sick, or since Christ is our Resurrection and our Life, we are now free to remain dead. It’s a contradiction on such a basic level that only the reprobate mind can tolerate it. (Ro 1:28) Nothing could be farther from the truth. (2Ti 2:19)
Clearly, Christ did not come to save us in our sin, delivering us from sin’s lawful penalty so we could go on living in disobedience without consequence. No. Christ came to set us free from the power and dominion of sin (Ro 6:14), to work godliness and holiness within us as a manner of life. (He 12:14) We are elect unto obedience (1Pe 1:2), created in Christ unto good works, which God has preordained that we should walk in them. (Ep 2:10)
We might think this settles the matter, yet most Christians still ignore Torah and use this idea the Christ fulfilled the law as justification, claiming much of Torah was temporary in nature, applicable only to Jews to distinguish them as God’s chosen people until Christ came, or pointing us to what Christ would accomplish in His ministry. The assertion is that though Christ did not actually abolish any of Torah, in completing His ministry He fulfilled or completed certain laws such that they are no longer useful or binding; they have served their purpose and are therefore now obsolete.
Since the mid-second century, post-Apostolic Christianity has been cleverly partitioning Torah into moral, civil and ceremonial laws, and claiming the civil and ceremonial laws are fulfilled. So, while the moral law is still valid (clearly, we’re not free to murder, lie, cheat and steal, etc.), Sabbath, dietary law, God’s feasts and the like are no longer binding. This avoids obvious absurdity and may seem reasonable on the surface, but no justification is ever provided for the partition itself; it is taken for granted.
However, any attempt to partition Torah like this plainly violates the immediate context, in which Christ states (as clearly as it can be stated) that every detail of Torah will remain relevant in God’s kingdom until every single prophecy has been fulfilled, until Heaven and Earth pass away (Mt 5:18), affirming that anyone breaking any of the least of Torah’s commands will be considered least in God’s kingdom, and that whoever does and teaches all of Torah will be considered great in His kingdom. (Mt 5:19) It is difficult to imagine how Christ might have been more explicit or stated this more clearly.
Even so, mainstream Christianity persists in discarding the bulk of Torah as God’s perfect standard of righteousness (Ps 119:172), taking numerous Pauline passages out of context and leveraging them to corrupt the very definition of sin. Yet Peter warns that Paul says many things which are hard to understand, and those who take him out of context in an unlearned and ignorant manner, as they do the rest of scripture, do so to their own eternal destruction. (2Pe 3:16) This should be sobering to any earnest soul.
So, how do we reconcile Paul and Christ? In my experience, we won’t get much help from organized religion, but this should be expected. Yet if we are prayerful, persistent and careful, taking each passage in context, we find Paul loved Torah (Ro 7:22), validated Torah as the definition of sin (Ro 7:7), saw no inconsistency between faith in Christ and keeping Torah (Ro 3:21), and never encouraged anyone to break it. (Ro 6:1-2) There’s no inconsistency between Paul and Christ: Torah is the law of God’s eternal kingdom, and if we love Him we should be obeying all of it that we can. (1Jn 5:3)