Sure, and I think that also is supported in Jesus' Great Commandment, "Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength." It is the 1st commandment, which encapsulates the first 3 of the older Decalogue, that the 2nd commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself", is dependent upon. The Love of God is the source from which the love of others flows.Catholics follow the listing and wording in the Decalogue from Deut. in which the first three pertain to God.
That said however, doctrinal quibbelings about what "graven images" means however misses the point. I'm thinking the Iconoclastic Controversy, as an example. That's quibbling over the letter of the law, as much as this entire thread in the OP is about quibbling over which exact day is the right one to worship on.
All that is another form of legalism. I take rather the intent of what Jesus meant to summarize everything in the OT in the Two Greatest Commandments, into the higher, truer and greater principle of Love. It's the "spirit of the law" and not the "letter of the law" that matters, in other words.
I said they are not equals, and that is true. I did not say they played no role in the development of the more subtle, more mature, more sophisticated understanding of the spiritual way of life that Jesus taught.Without Hebrew Scripture there would be no Christian Scripture.
It's like saying without elementary school, you would not have graduated highschool and moved on to college. That would be a true statement. But elementary school is not equal in depth and understanding and practice to college level understandings of life and reality. The perception of a 5 year old, is not equal to the perception and understanding of the 50 year old.
When I say they are not equal, that means you cannot take what Moses said as equal to what Jesus said. Jesus' understanding supersedes Moses', in the Christian view. Take for instance this,
"You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you, if anyone slaps you on the cheek, turn to him the other also."
He is quoting the OT law from Exodus 21:24; Lev. 24:20; and Deut. 19:21, and says "BUT I say unto you..." In other words, what I say is a higher, better, and truer way than what Moses taught you.
As I said, the NT and the OT, are not equals. The NT transcends the OT, including the good bits or the "weightier matters of the law", as Jesus called them, and builds upon those as basic principles, all the while discarding the old, outgrown, legalistic rule/role based righteousness of an externalized form of religious practice. Jesus was about teaching the internal realization of the spiritual heart of true religion, which is to "love God and love your neighbor as yourself".
The legalist says Moses and Jesus are equal. The message of NT Grace is that Jesus is to be listened to first, as he taught the "better way." Do you carry the raft upon your back after you have already crossed the river? Do you treat the books you used in grade school as equal source material to your college books?
"Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster."
This is not "doing away with the law", this is superseding it, integrating it, becoming it, graduating from the 'righteousness' one attempts to find through the externalized forms of law written in stone, to the law "written upon the tablets of the heart". "You have heard it said... but I say unto you..."
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