Freed from keeping the Ten Commandments as a basis for our acceptance (justification) before God? - Yes.
Do you remember Paul's words to Peter?
"When I saw that they were not following the truth of the Good News, I said to Peter in front of all the others, "Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you trying to make these Gentiles obey the Jewish laws you abandoned?
You and I are Jews by birth, not `sinners' like the Gentiles. And yet we Jewish Christians know that we become right with God, not by doing what the law commands, but by faith in Jesus Christ.
So we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be accepted by God because of our faith in Christ--and not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be saved by obeying the law.
But what if we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then find out that we are still sinners? Has Christ led us into sin? Of course not! Rather, I make myself guilty if I rebuild the old system I already tore down.
For when I tried to keep the law, I realized I could never earn God's approval. So I died to the law so that I might live for God."
***Or do we get to pick and choose which "laws" are still pertinent and which ones are unnecessary?***
Are you saying you believe that we are still under the law?
Matthew 5:17
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Indeed!...
"For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." - Rom 8
*** By that definition, would that then render the Bible as a "tradition of men?"***
The Bible is the Word of God. Peter even refered to Paul's writings a "Scripture"
"There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures." - 2 Pet 3:16
And Paul refered to the Gospels as "scripture".
***And yet, its funny how many "Bible-believing" Christians will claim that unless you believe in the Bible, God will not accept you.***
If a person knows of, and refuses to accept the Bible and it's message then they will not be accepted by God.
Do you not believe this?