Open Heart
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- Aug 3, 2014
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What a well written post!Fair enough. Where I am going with this is somewhere a little different, and important for the endless debates among Christians. I am trying to bring a point of clarity.
Jesus says that nothing can be added to the Law. He's just repeating YHWH. I will grant and warrant that your point about going to the Levites is correct, for that is indeed what God said to do. But that did not authorize the Levites to, for example, decide that, because all meat has some trace of blood in it, that therefore the prohibition against eating blood meant that all of Israel was required to forever be vegetarian. That would be changing the Law.
Here's where this bites down, and I think this is really, really important because I see so many Christians right on these boards doing just exactly this. YHWH stated who the covenant was with, and what they got if they followed it. It was the Hebrews who came out of Sinai, who circumcised themselves and who kept the Law, all of it (to the best of their abilities anyway) - they were the human half of the covenant. The divine half was YHWH. And what did he promise them if they obeyed the Law? Eternal life with God in Heaven? No. There isn't a word of that in there. He promised them a farm in Israel, which they would keep in security and prosperity, and have many children under their vines. The law was specific, the targets of the Law were specific, and what those people were promised under the Law is specific.
During that time period, some of my ancestors were Sami, living way up above the Arctic Circle in Fennoscandia and Karelia, where the Long Night is 70 days long, and the Long Day in summer is almost 90. When God boomed out those Ten Commandments from atop Sinai as the Hebrews quailed in terror, was he giving law to my ancestors in the Lappland? Was he telling them they had to leave their homeland forever because a Sabbath falling upon the Long Night or the Long Day meant death? Was God ruling a sixth of the world uninhabitable, despite having previously commanded to fill all the land and subdue it all?
No. He was talking to Hebrews, and giving them special laws that would apply to them in Israel, the land he had prepared for them.
He was not declaring Karelia off limits to human habitation, nor requiring the abandonment of Petsamo. He wasn't talking to the Sami at all. He WOULD talk to the Sami, and everybody else in the world, and he WOULD eventually make a covenant with them, and with all people everywhere, but THAT would come through his Son, Jesus, 2000 years later. At Sinai, God was giving a law to the Hebrews, for them to live under in Israel. It was tailored for the conditions of Israel, not for the whole world. The sacrifices for sin - these were for the cleansing of the israelites in Israel. They were never a method for the Sami to cleanse themselves of their sins. We know this because God addressed the Israelites, them specifically, over and over again - even called the sacrifice invalid if it were not made by the descendants of one single man.
Consider the thrice-yearly pilgrimages to the place of the altar, required by the Law. That rule effectively ruled the Americas, East Asia and Southern Africa perpetually uninhabitable until the age of the jet plane. Nobody could make that trajectory back and forth three times a year from any of the even slightly more distant places. Nobody could have done that even from Italy or Iran, without completely surrendering all hope of settled agriculture and simply spending one's time on the road back and forth. Such a rule in little Israel made sense. It does not make sense when the circle is extended.
The truth is, the Law - the Torah - was not given to the world. It was given to the Hebrews - just them. It was not a Law FOR the entire world. The most important laws - against murder, against adultery, against lying and theft - had already been given by God to the world. Even though the Bible only specifically references, in Genesis, the giving of the law against shedding man's blood, men across four cultures - the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Canaanite Abimelek, the Abrahamites, and the Mesopotamians all, in Genesis, show knowledge of the wrongness of adultery, of lying or of theft.
God walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve in the spiritual part of the day, and he talked with them. The Bible does not report everything God ever said to men. The Old Testament is focused on God's interaction with one people: the Abrahamites who became the Hebrews, who became the Israelites, who became the Jews. It's not the history of the whole world (though it impinges on it). And it's not the history of God giving the world it's Law at Mt. Sinai. He gave a law, a detailed one, to the Hebrews at Sinai. It was that law, that covenant, that turned the Hebrew refugees into Israelites. It is the Hebrew covenant, the promises and laws of an agreement between two specific parties.
The rest of the world cannot be ADDED TO that covenant. That is not what Jesus was about. He made a brand NEW covenant, with significantly different laws, for a different purpose. The Torah was made between YHWH and a tribe, but the New Covenant is between Jesus and individuals only. The Torah contains ritual laws of cleanliness, limitations on food, and a method of animal sacrifice for the forgiveness of the sins of the Israelites. But the New Covenant has no unclean foods, and the method of being forgiven one's sins is not sacrifice, but rather, forgiving others their sins.
YHWH of the Torah commanded the Jews to place no god before him, but having begotten Jesus and sent him on his mission, the Father (YHWH?) spoke from the sky (as YHWH did at Sinai), and said "This is my beloved Son, listen to HIM." And HE never told the world "obey the Torah". He said "Follow me."
He told the Jews, under the Law, that the Law would not change until the end of the world. Note that that means that, until the end of the Law, the only promise under the Law was a secure farm in Israel. But Jesus offers eternal life under the New Covenant, which is "Eat my flesh, drink my blood (very unkosher things!), do unto others as you would have do unto you, follow me and forgive as you would be forgiven, love your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all." It's a new deal entirely, one that applies to Sami as much as Jew. It isn't an adding on to the old thing. It's new wine in new bottles, not new wine in an old bottle.
None of this is to denigrate Jews, or the Torah, at all!
But it IS to say that those Christians who strive mightily to see Jesus as releasing them from the Law of Sinai err greatly. He didn't. They weren't under it in the first place unless they're Jews.
My Sami ancestors didn't gain a Sabbath that would have driven them from their homeland, nor a prohibition against eating the blood and fat of walruses and seals that constitutes such a major part of the diet of the extreme north. What they gained is a Savior, and a new law.
It is not respecting the Torah to pretend that it applies, or ever did apply, to Gentiles. It doesn't. And it didn't.
The same God gave the Torah as begat Jesus, so there is overlap, of course, but much of the overlap is in laws that are already visible before Sinai.
I think that people need to properly respect what the Torah is, and not misappropriate it or pretend that it is something it is not. Because if the Torah is forced upon Gentile Christians, it makes them all hypocrites, and that's bad, obviously.
I agree with you thoroughly that the Torah was given to Israel and not to the nations, and that the Sinai covenant is a different covenant than the New Covenant through Christ.
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