Old Testament Torah for Christians?!

Before I even start off I want to point out that Christian people most often instantly react to this topic by saying that we who keep torah are being legalistic. And I want to first ask those people where it says in the bible that we should NOT go to great lengths to obey what our God has commanded us. On the contrary it is written in Deuteronomy 6 that we are to “love the LORD our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength.” Even Jesus quoted this scripture and said it was the greatest commandment of them all.

I will talk about Common doctrine that all Christians share and I will build off that. First, we all believe that Jesus, the Messiah, took our own sins upon Himself, even though we were not yet born when He did it, so that we could be reconciled to God. This is the bare essence of Christian belief and is what separates the Jews from the Christians today. Now you may never have even thought about it before but Yeshua (Jesus) also took the sins of the people before Him (Abraham, Moses, Adam, Noah, etc). So if He took their sins away also then why did they still make animal sacrifices? Surely then we could say that animal sacrifice was never capable of taking away the sins of the humans. [And by now I have probably crossed into new territory for a lot of you.]

If the animal sacrifices could possibly remove human sins then why would we ever need a messiah? We could have just kept doing it the same old way until the end of time! But the sacrifices could not do it (Hebrews 10). So what were they for then? To teach us that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6), but that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will not die but will have eternal life (John 3) which is the gift of God in messiah Yeshua our Lord (Romans 6). So then why do we not still do them after Yeshua has come? Because God has commanded that they must be done in a specific place only by the priests who are physical descendents of the tribe of Levi (Deuteronomy 12), and at this point in time there is no temple to the LORD on the temple mount in Jerusalem and the dedicated priesthood (the sons of Aaron) is not organized and ritually clean to act as priests.

But will it ever be reestablished? The prophets say that it will all be restored in the reign of the messiah. Jerusalem and the temple will be rebuilt, all the tribes of Israel will be gathered back in, the priesthood will be restored, and the sacrifices will also continue; but this time God will be sitting on His throne right there with us in Jerusalem. Almost every prophetic book in the bible ends with God restoring Israel and reigning over it as their King (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi). Based on these prophecies I should point out that any teaching that says Israel is no longer God’s chosen people is unbiblical. Now that we have briefly talked about that, let us move on to another subject.

The Torah in general is so much more than just a bunch of rules given to us so that we become “good people.” For one thing we are already by nature evil people, rebellious against God and the only way to really be good again is by the sacrifice of Yeshua, our Passover Lamb whose very name means Salvation. So there is no “becoming good” in God’s sight by obeying rules, it is only by His grace through faith that we can be saved as written in Ephesians 2. We are to follow these “rules” not to be saved but rather BECAUSE HE HAS ALREADY SAVED US.

In James 2 it he says,
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works and I will show you my faith by my works.” (NASB) He is making the argument that faith without any works as its fruit is worthless and not real faith at all. The do’s and do not’s are God’s way of taking away one thing from us only so that he may give us something so much better in return. It could simply be like a parent telling their child not to put their hand in the fire because it will burn them, and to eat all their food because it will nourish them. Or it is a way of God telling us to enjoy life to its fullest, and His Torah shows us the most fulfilling way to do it. On top of all that, the Torah is also a way of God revealing Himself to us. It shows us what justice and righteousness and sin are, and that God is just and righteous while we are sinful. God gave us the Torah to reveal to us His attributes and who He is. In the book of Leviticus while you are reading through the commandments you will see the phrase, “Be holy as I am holy” (Chapters 11, 19, 20, 21). God is telling us, “This is who I am, be like me!” Even Yeshua said we should “be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5). We can only know true righteousness because God told us what it is, and we could never measure up to it by our own strength. Only by seeing our own failure can we realize our desperate need for a savior: Yeshua.

Another point worth bringing up here is that many times throughout the Torah a commandment is given and with it is the phrase, “This is to be a perpetual statute throughout your generations.” This word that we have translated as perpetual is the Hebrew word עולם (olam) meaning forever or eternity – if that helps give strength to what He means by perpetual. The number of times this phrase is used is phenomenal and sometimes we see it used at the beginning and end of a command to help add emphasis to it. It is found in Exodus 12, 28, 30 and 31, Leviticus 3, 6, 10, 16, 17, 23 and 24, Numbers 18 and 19, and finally in Ezekiel 37 and 46. It is written for us in all these places yet most Christians believe that Torah is no longer relevant and Yeshua abolished it when He died. The text itself explicitly says otherwise. Paul writes in Romans that the law (Torah) is a very good thing, and it was evil that took advantage of the law and put people into bondage (That was the short paraphrased version).

Now since I brought it up I might as well talk about Paul writing that we are no longer under the law (Torah) or slaves to it. Let me use this imagery to try and help my argument: For a man to do the dishes or the laundry for his wife when she asks of him, does that make him a slave to her? Well you could say yes and no I suppose; no because he is doing it out of love for her and not just obligation, and yes because he is bound to love her though their marriage covenant. But are we not also bound to the God of Israel in a sort of marriage covenant?! Now we ourselves are free to accept or reject that covenant but we are not free to change the terms of it. That would be ridiculous, like a wife saying to her husband, “Let’s stay married but I no longer want to do anything you say. And in fact let’s live in separate houses and I’ll come visit on weekends sometimes. Oh but I still want you to provide all of my needs; just don’t expect anything from me. And I will often cheat on you with other men but don’t worry about it, everyone’s doing it these days.” Who would want to be in a relationship like that? And yet that is exactly w what we've always done with God.
But now you might say that the Torah covenant was made with Israel and the Jews only and does not apply to us Gentile believers: we have a different covenant. I just don't believe that. Isaiah 56 says that the foreigner (non-Israelite) who attaches himself the God of Israel is not to say that God has separated him from His people (Israel). And Romans 11 says that we gentiles have been grafted into the inheritance with Israel so that Israel will see their ungodliness and return to their covenant with God. Galatians 3 says that in Messiah there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; all are equally heirs according to God’s promise. Did you know that the term “old covenant” is used only one time in the whole bible (2 Corinthians 3)? You can see from this and from reading all the prophets, as mentioned earlier, that God will never replace Israel with anyone else or make any separate covenant or go back on any old promises. He is the eternal God who loves His people! Now let’s examine some more specific topics.

    The Festivals, for one thing, fall under the category of “perpetual statute etc. etc.” and for another, in Colossians 2 Paul talks about the festivals as a good thing: a “shadow” of the things to come. For example, the Passover festival is packed full of symbolism of our Messiah. To celebrate the feast in its fullness one is given a very vivid picture of our own sin and need for reconciliation. One can see how God with a strong arm reached down and pulled Israel out of their slavery in Egypt, just as in Yeshua’s death He pulled us out of our filth of sin and rescued us from death. He redeemed us by taking our sin onto Himself and dying with it then coming back to life, just as the Passover lamb was to killed in place of the firstborn sons on the very first Passover. The festival celebrated in the traditional Jewish fashion has so much meaning and symbolism of our eternal redemption. And it all points to Jesus! That is the whole purpose of the feasts; to reveal to us that God loves us so much that He came as Yeshua to be our Messiah (literally meaning “anointed one”).
Yeshua spent His human lifetime here pointing it out to us even more because we might have missed it.

In John 7 we have record of Yeshua celebrating the Sukkot festival in Jerusalem and on the eighth day (when they did the water cerimony in the Temple) He stands up among the people and says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Just as the scripture says, ‘From within him will flow rivers of living water.’” (Now he said this about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were going to receive, for the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.) (NET) For some insight on what exactly is going on here, Sukkot is sometimes called the festival of tabernacles and is where everyone stays in a temporary shelter (Sukkah) for the week to remember when Israel wandered the desert for 40 years living in tents and the presence of God physically was there in the center of their camp. And particularly during the water cerimony they pray for God open the heavens and send rain to the earth. So while the people are remembering this time Yeshua in essence says to them, “Hey! I’m right here among you again! Don’t you recognize me?! Come to me and I will give you life and living water and dwell with you and sustain you again just as before!”
   
Yeshua was always celebrating the feasts. We have record throughout all of gospel writings that He did celebrate them and He never made any indication that we should no longer celebrate them ourselves. Why would he? They point to Him and who He is and why He came, it makes more sense for us to keep the feasts, they bring Him honor. Instructions for how the festivals were to be kept are recorded in Exodus 12 and 13, Leviticus 23, Numbers 28 and 29, Deuteronomy 16, Ezra 45 and 46, Nehemiah 8, and 2 Chronicles 35. The prophets (Jeremiah 14, Ezekiel 43, Isaiah 66, Zachariah 14) also write about celebrating the feasts and making sacrifices even in end times when the temple and Jerusalem has been rebuilt and the dispersed tribes have all been gathered back together in Israel and Yeshua is reigning as the King in Jerusalem and there is peace in all the land. Now why would our God who never changes reinstate an old-time practice in end times, which He had gotten rid of in middle times? It just does not make sense, unless He had never gotten rid of them and they were actually to be forever, just as He had originally commanded that they were to be. If you study Judeo/Christian history you may be surprised to find out that it was powerful wicked men who hated Jews who decided that Christians should no longer do the festivals, and made their observance illegal under penalty of death.

Shabbat (the Sabbath day) could be put under the same category as the other festivals but it is held in highest regard to all others and has a slightly different nature so it has received its own category. Most Christians have especially disregarded the commandment of the Sabbath day because Jesus also broke the Sabbath, right? Wrong. If Yeshua had broken even the least of all the commandments then His death would have been in vain and we would not be a redeemed people!
James 2 says that, For the one who obeys the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. (NET) An imperfect sin offering is not at all acceptable to God! Every time that Yeshua was questioned for healing on Shabbat He would say something like, “Isn’t it better to do good on Shabbat than to do evil?” His point was this, if He had passed by someone who was obviously in need while He had the ability to help them, it would have been sinful for Him not to help them, Shabbat or no Shabbat. And I think that is what James 4 is talking about when it says, Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into this or that town and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life like? For you are a puff of smoke that appears for a short time and then vanishes.  You ought to say instead, “If the Lord is willing, then we will live and do this or that.”  But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.  So whoever knows what is good to do and does not do it is guilty of sin. (NET)
He could not have said, “I will heal you tomorrow when it is no longer the Sabbath”, because tomorrow is never guaranteed for any of us. For us to put off doing good is sin.

The rabbis (Yeshua and Paul included) have agreed that the whole Torah can be boiled down to two commandments: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your whole being, and love your neighbors as yourself. For Yeshua not to help as He passed by would not be loving them and He would be committing the same sin as the one Pharisee who was so zealous about remaining ceremonially clean that he let a woman drown because for him to swim over and pull her out from the water he would risk touching an unclean woman during her monthly period. Yeshua also compared it in Matthew 12 to the priests carrying out their priestly duties on Shabbat. They were doing work on Shabbat because they had to; they were the priests who made the sacrifices. Yeshua is also our high priest as written in Hebrews, and was just carrying out His priestly duties of pronouncing people clean (though He would still send them to the priest to be legally pronounced clean). I do not have all the answers for all the scenarios where Yeshua did something “unacceptable” on Shabbat, but I know that we (even as gentiles) are to maintain it as a holy day of rest. I will point you again to Isaiah 56 and 58 for my evidence. I could even argue that the sabbath commandment made it onto the list of the ten commandments. We are commanded to consecrate Shabbat as a holy day in Exodus 16, 20, 23, 31, 35 and Leviticus 19, 23, 26 and Deuteronomy 5 and Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 17 and Nehemiah 13. And the consequences of not doing it (death, immediate or not) are found in Numbers 15 and Ezekiel 20, 22, 23 and Isaiah 1 and Jeremiah 17. And now I must move on.

The laws of clean and unclean found in Leviticus 11 are next on my list of topics. These have been disregarded by most of the Christians but with more justification than the rest of the laws have been. We have Peters vision of animals in a sheet recorded in Acts 10 (but if you read the whole story you will see that the vision is actually about people, not food), Jesus “declaring all foods clean” in Mark 7 (this one is actually a terrible misinterpretation of the Greek), and Paul brings up the issue of food many times in his numerous writings to the churches. We even have the apostles gathering together as a counsel in Acts 15 and 21 for the specific purpose of discussing what laws should immediately apply to the non-Jewish believers (and which ones they can just start doing as they progress in learning).
“Therefore I conclude that we should not cause extra difficulty for those among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but that we should write them a letter telling them to abstain from things defiled by idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from blood.” Surely that is not all that the Gentiles had to do; what about do not murder or do not steal? So they finish it off by saying, “For Moses has had those who proclaim him in every town from ancient times, because he is read aloud in the synagogues every Sabbath.” (NET) Would this verse in Acts not also imply that the Christians were keeping the Sabbath and gathering in Jewish synagogues with other Jews every week?

What we see in the epistles is that the issue of what may and may not be eaten was a huge issue in the church. The subject was brought up in Corinthians, Romans, Timothy, Colossians, and Revelation. In the Torah we see these laws as making a distinction between holy and profane. God commands His people not to even eat in the same way that the pagans do. We are given this idea of being separate from the rest of this world. Not residing and working in completely separate locations (though maybe living in our own communities separated from them) but living sanctified lives from them.
When the issue is brought up in the epistles most Christians will say, “See, it says we may eat whatever we want.” But when read in context to the rest of that particular letter, you will see that he is not saying, “Eat whatever non-kosher food you want.” He is instead addressing a very specific other issue regarding food, whether it is food that has been sacrificed to idols or vegetarian pagan practices or whatever else comes up. I won't take the time here to get into every specific case.

I must also point out to you that in Isaiah 65 and 66 the prophet is talking about our time today and also the reign of the messiah in Jerusalem which has not yet happened, and he says that God is offended by and hates the deeds and thoughts of those who eat pig’s flesh, among a list of other detestable acts.
65:3 These people continually and blatantly offend me as they sacrifice in their sacred orchards and burn incense on brick altars. 65:4 They sit among the tombs and keep watch all night long. They eat pork, and broth from unclean sacrificial meat is in their pans. 65:5 They say, ‘Keep to yourself! Don’t get near me, for I am holier than you!’ These people are like smoke in my nostrils, like a fire that keeps burning all day long. 66:17 “As for those who consecrate and ritually purify themselves so they can follow their leader and worship in the sacred orchards, those who eat the flesh of pigs and other disgusting creatures, like mice – they will all be destroyed together,” says the Lord. 66:18 “I hate their deeds and thoughts!”
 So that makes it nearly impossible to say that now it is okay for us to eat whatever we want when the LORD has clearly said even in end times that He hates such things. And God is the good father; He will not give us a snake to eat when we ask for a fish, or stones when we ask for bread (Matthew 7). He will provide us with what is good so that we do not need to eat animals that eat garbage, feces, and decaying flesh (that is what pigs, shellfish, birds of prey, and most insects eat).

Lastly I will talk about the obscure laws we have been given. Many of them have to do with what seems to us in today’s world would be an unlikely scenario. They say, “If that happens, do this.” In such cases you might want to say they are irrelevant. Or is it possible that there is a perpetual idea that carries over into our world today? One example would be that we are commanded in Exodus 23 to help our enemy when we see his donkey fallen on the road. This concept could be updated to say we should stop and help people whose car has broken down on the side of the road, even if they are our enemy. But rather than focusing on rough “interpretation” I would like to look at the laws that affect our everyday lives. Attaching tzit-tzit (tassels) to your clothing or mounting a mezuzah onto your doorposts have the purpose of being a continuous physical reminder to obey the rest of the Torah; pretty self-explanatory right?

But then there is also the issue of circumcision. Circumcision is again about being set apart from the rest of the world, but more than that it has a symbolism. Performing a surgery that cuts away some of the flesh we have been born with symbolizes our covenant with God saying that even from birth we were not right with God and we have to cut away a part of ourselves in order to make it right. Our rebellion against God is so cancerous to us humans that it has been fused in as a part of us and to get rid of it requires something very painful. Just like there is no way the Hebrews could have freed themselves from their slavery in Egypt that they had been born into. The only way for them all to get out was for the LORD Himself to reach down and pull them out. But they still had to do the work of actually walking out of Egypt too; they did not just sit there to be swept away by the wind. And just as the festivals are a sign of what God has done for us so is the circumcision. It is “the sign of the covenant sealed in our flesh” (Romans 4). Each baby boy is to be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. Biblically the eighth day often represents eternity, so in eternity the flesh is cut away and only the core (or soul and spirit) remain. That person has been made into a new creation by the one who makes all things new.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, Nevertheless, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each person, so must he live. I give this sort of direction in all the churches. Was anyone called after he had been circumcised? He should not try to undo his circumcision. Was anyone called who is uncircumcised? He should not get circumcised. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Instead, keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Let each one remain in that situation in life in which he was called. Were you called as a slave? Do not worry about it. But if indeed you are able to be free, make the most of the opportunity. For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freedman. In the same way, the one who was called as a free person is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price. Do not become slaves of men. In whatever situation someone was called, brothers and sisters, let him remain in it with God.

So right here he specifically says a man who is not circumcised already should not seek to be circumcised because the act is nothing. But then he follows it up by saying that keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Is not circumcision one of God’s commandments? One interpretation says that he could be talking about ritual conversion to Judaism, which would explain why he says, “do not become slaves of men.” Identity is a huge issue between Jews and Christians in Paul’s letters (Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians are especially good examples) we often find him speaking against the Jews who say that Gentiles can have no share in God’s inheritance unless they ritually convert to being a Jew by race. But of course the truth is that we who believe are of a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one. In the heavenly kingdom all who believe in the name of Yeshua the Messiah are heirs and children of God. That is why he says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3).

In closing, I want to help you get away from picking and choosing to follow some of these laws strictly but completely ignoring the others. I believe that is a mistake that the Christian church has made since before the 4th century and it has become engrained in us as our tradition. If we follow the Torah we should follow the whole Torah as being absolute truth. Can a person really say they worship the God of Israel and yet completely disregard most of His commandments? 1 John 2 says it this way: Now by this we know that we have come to know God: if we keep his commandments. The one who says “I have come to know God” and yet does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in such a person. But whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has been perfected. By this we know that we are in him. The one who says he resides in God ought himself to walk just as Jesus walked. (NET)
   
If you want to make some compromise and accept the God of Israel without accepting His covenant with men you are deceiving yourself. So what it eventually comes down to is this: Who is your god and what do you believe about him? Do you trust Him completely? Do you think he would change his mind about some things? I have heard some people ask, “Why is your Jesus different than mine?” That is an excellent question! You should think about that for a while. What you really believe about God? I write this to you not so I can say that you need to live a Torah observant life or you might not be saved, we know that we are saved only by God’s grace and not by our own works, though James even questions if a person’s faith without works will save them. Only God may be the judge of that. 

I write this to you because I have found the Torah to be very good and right. I have seen how far so many Christians have strayed from the truth of our God and I want to help bring them back. There are many great people out there who I highly respect that are missing out on so much that our wonderful God wants to give them. And there are many teachers who are unknowingly leading people astray. James 3 says that a teacher will certainly incur a stricter judgment than the others, so I greave for those teachers who are living and teaching in ignorance. So may you also find the beauty of living life in our Messiah Yeshua according to the Torah of God’s love for humanity. Shalom.