I’m interested in Messianic Judism/law keeping.
Few questions:
Does Jesus save you through His death alone? As seen in Romans
Do you believe the Trinity?
Is there any laws from the OT that you do not keep, such as eating unclean foods, mixed fabrics, etc...
If our obedience to the Torah were for God's good, then it would have been about trying to earn our salvation through our best efforts, however, it was given for our own good (Deuteronomy 6:24, 10:12-13), so our obedience is instead about putting our faith in God to guide us in how to rightly live. Every example of someone living by faith is also an example of someone living in obedience to God's will, such as with the examples of faith listed in Hebrews 11, whereas disobedience to the Torah is referred to as breaking faith, such as in Numbers 5:6. In Revelation 14:12, those who kept the commandments of God are the same as those who kept faith in Jesus. In Habakkuk 2:4, the righteous shall live by faith, and in Isaiah 51:7, the righteous are those on whose heart is the Torah. In 2 Timothy 3:8, those who oppose Moses also oppose the truth, being of corrupted minds and disqualified in regard to the faith. In Romans 3:31, our faith upholds the Torah. In James 2:17-18, he said that faith without works is dead and that he would show his faith by his works, so doing good works in obedience to the Torah is what faith looks like. God is trustworthy, so His Torah is also trustworthy (Psalms 19:7, Nehemiah 9:13), and a Torah that isn't trustworthy can't come from a God who is trustworthy, so to put our faith in the Torah is to put our faith in the One who gave it, while to say that the Torah is not of faith is to deny the faithfulness of the One who gave it. Only those who have faith in God to guide us in how to rightly live will obey His Torah and will be justified by the same faith, which is why Paul said in Romans 2:13 that only doers of the Torah will be justified, but did not say that we earn our justification by obeying the Torah. God can be trusted to set us up for success, not for failure.
In Romans 1:5, we have received grace in order to bring about the obedience of faith, in Psalms 119:29, David wanted God to be gracious to him by teaching him to obey His Torah, and in Titus 2:11-14, our salvation is described as being trained by grace to do what is godly, righteous, and good, and to renounce doing what is ungodly, which is what the Torah was given to instruct how to do, so God graciously teaching us to do good works in obedience to His Torah is itself part of the content of His free gift of salvation, and participating in that training does nothing to earn it, but rather that is what it looks like to receive it. Our salvation is from sin and sin is the transgression of the Torah (1 John 3:4), so being trained by grace to live in obedience to God’s Torah through faith is what Jesus saving us from living in transgression of the Torah looks like. Furthermore, in Titus 2:14, Jesus gave himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own possession who are zealous for doing good works, so if we believe in what Jesus accomplished on the cross, then we will become zealous for doing good works in obedience to the Torah (Acts 21:20).
I believe in the divinity of Jesus. God alone is our Savior (Isaiah 43:11), so either Jesus is God or He is not our Savior. When light hits an someone, they adsorb certain spectrums of light so that we do not actually see them, but the spectrums of light that have bounced off of them, yet we still recognize what we see as being them. This is analogous to the relationship that the Son has with the Father, where the Son is the light that we see when we look at the Father such that the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15). The Son is the radiance of God's glory and exact expression of God's nature (Hebrews 1:3) and what that looked like was sinless obedience to the Torah, so the Torah is God's instructions for how to express His nature, and Jesus is the personification of the Torah, which is why the Torah testifies about him (John 5:39-40). Being a child of God is about being a chip off the old block, where we act as a light and a blessing to the nations through testifying about who He is by putting His nature on display. Everything that Jesus did testified about who the Father is by putting His nature on display, which is why He is the Son of God, and why he could say that whoever has seen him as seen the Father (John 14:9). We can also be children of God when we partake in the divine nature in obedience to the Torah, while in 1 John 3:10, those who do not practice righteousness in obedience to the Torah are not children of God because they are not testifying to the nations about God's nature.
Even when the Torah was first give to Moses, there wasn't a single person who was required to obey every single law, and not even Jesus obeyed the laws in regard to giving birth or to having a period. Some laws were only for the King, the High Priest, priests, judges, men, women, children, widows, those who are married, those with servants, those with animals, those with crops, those with tzaraat, those living in the land, and those who are strangers living among them, while others were given to everyone. So determining how the Torah applies to us today is a matter of careful study, prayer, and the leading of the Spirit. David said repeatedly throughout the Psalms that he loved the Torah and delighted in obeying it, so if we consider the Psalms to be Scripture and to therefore express a correct view of the Torah, then we will share it, as Paul did (Romans 7:22). So if we have faith in God to guide us in how to rightly live and believe that His Torah is for our own good, then we will have the attitude of looking for reasons for why we can have the delight of getting to follow the Torah rather than the attitude of looking for excuses to avoid following God's guidance.
