Yes, they are binding forever.
Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations. Deuteronomy 7:9 Therefore thou shalt love the LORD thy God, and keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments, alway. Deuteronomy 11:1 These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe ... all the days that ye live upon the earth. Deuteronomy 12:1 Be ye mindful always of his covenant; the word which he commanded to a thousand generations ... an everlasting covenant. 1 Chronicles 16:15 Thou art near, O LORD; and all thy commandments are truth. Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that thou hast founded them for ever. Psalm 119:151-2 Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever. Psalm 119:160
Cited passages
Know therefore that Yahweh your God himself is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and loving kindness with them who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations,
Therefore you shall love Yahweh your God, and keep his instructions, his statutes, his ordinances, and his commandments, always.
These are the statutes and the ordinances which you shall observe to do in the land which Yahweh, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess all the days that you live on the earth.
Remember his covenant forever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations,
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The question stacks the Old Testament's permanence language—Deuteronomy 7:9 ("to a thousand generations"), 11:1 ("alway"), 12:1 ("all the days that ye live"), 1 Chronicles 16:15, and Psalm 119:151-152, 160 ("founded them for ever")—against two New Testament moves: Jesus collapsing the Law into two commandments (Matt 22:37-40) and declaring "the law and the prophets were until John" (Luke 16:16). Either the Mosaic Law is permanently binding or it has been superseded.
The standard apologetic harmonization, articulated by Walter Kaiser in Toward Old Testament Ethics, runs along Reformed and dispensationalist lines. The Law divides into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories; only the moral law binds Christians, while civil and ceremonial law were provisional and fulfilled in Christ. Matthew 22:37-40 does not abolish but summarizes—Jesus identifies the two greatest commands on which "hang all the law and the prophets," so the Law's substance is upheld, not voided. Luke 16:16 marks a salvation-historical transition point: the era of the Law and Prophets gives way to the kingdom proclamation, while the moral content endures. This is a sophisticated harmonization with a long pedigree, and on the two-commandment point it is plainly correct: Matthew 22:40's verb *krematai* ("hang/depend") presents the two loves as the hermeneutical hinge of the whole Torah, not its replacement, exactly as Matthew 5:17 has Jesus come "not to destroy, but to fulfil."
The difficulty is twofold. First, the moral/civil/ceremonial trichotomy is a later Christian theological construction—Aquinas formalized it in the Summa (I-II q.99)—not a category the Pentateuch or the post-exilic texts endorsing it operate with. It conveniently retains the Sabbath as moral "principle" while discarding dietary law as "ceremony," but Deuteronomy 11:1 lumps "his charge, his statutes, his judgments, and his commandments" together with no internal sorting mechanism for which subset is permanent. Sanders' Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People and Dunn's New Perspective work both dismantled the assumption that Second Temple Jews ranked Torah obligations this way; for them the covenant was a single indivisible whole.
Second, the New Testament does not speak with one voice on the Law's continuing force. Luke 16:16 reads as dispensational displacement—"the law and the prophets were until John; since then the gospel of the kingdom is preached"—and Fitzmyer's Anchor Bible Luke takes it as articulating Luke's two-stage salvation history in which the Law's primary function yields to kingdom proclamation. Matthew, by contrast, has Jesus insist that "not one jot or tittle" shall pass from the Law until heaven and earth pass (Matt 5:18), a position in real tension with Luke 16:16. Luz's Hermeneia Matthew and Bovon's Hermeneia Luke both register the divergent stances on the Law within the canon itself. Paul sharpens the displacement further: in Galatians 3:23-25 the Law was a "schoolmaster" (*paidagōgos*) holding Israel in custody "until Christ," after which "we are no longer under a schoolmaster"—and Räisänen's Paul and the Law shows how unstable and contested Paul's own statements about the Law's status are.
The two-commandment summary is thus genuinely reconcilable with the "forever" texts. But Luke 16:16 and the Pauline pedagogue argument read as explicit dispensational shifts, and harmonizing them with the Old Testament's repeated permanence language requires importing the tripartite-law framework that the original writers would not have recognized.
Where the critical reading lands: the summary axis harmonizes cleanly; the supersession axis is a partial harmonization resting on a later, externally supplied theological category.
Sources for this reading