soyeong,
1. You misunderstand what it means about the abolishment of the Torah. We are talking in its specific context for the jewish people in its fullness of including their culture not just morals. Matter of fact the whole law for the jews involves their culture.
2. Men have certain laws separate from the women on a few issues.
Circumcision was a mandatory law that is not mandatory today for a christian.
3. This argument is not new and it is about whether or not the whole law was abolished. It was because it was as one unit in a specific context for a specific time.
4. Galatians 3:19 shows this in the phrase, till the seed should come.
5.The Torah came because of sin Galatians 3:19.
6. The Torah is forever for the jews but even it is in a slightly different context between the old and the new covenants. This is where the understanding has to be between the old and new covenants. This is why the jews rejected Christ and why many jews are secular and atheists. Secular Judaism and true Messianic Judaism are two main things in the big picture.
7. For the gentiles we were never under the Torah under the Mosaic administration and its context.
8. The argument is not about the moral laws being done away with or the spiritual connotation or meaning of things right and wrong.
There was moral law before the Torah and after.
Murder was wrong when Cain killed Abel but there was not written law of judgement for it etc.
Circumcision was a law under the written law of the Torah with a judgement if not performed for it was the sign of the covenant that was mandatory. Today that is not true even for a messianic jew lot alone for a gentile for we are saved by the spiritual circumcision of Christ and that was what Paul said.
9. No one is arguing that Christ did away with his holiness, righteousness or goodness. There were those things in other ages but not in the same manner or context. The righteousness of the law of Moses was he that does them shall live in them. Today it is about the finished work of Christ and what he did and to do automatically those things because of who we are in Christ.
10. Obedience and faith have always gone hand in hand in each age but the revelation each age had was different. For example, salvation was always by grace through faith because only God's grace could save man and he demands obedience in faith in their revelation because the people under conscience and even in Jesus day didn't have the full understanding of the death, burial and resurrection the God-Man Jesus Christ. It was veiled in types and shadows and even in Jesus day Peter tried to thwart the plan of God unknowingly because he was used as a tool of Satan. Peter said he wouldn't let anyone kill Christ and Jesus said, Get behind me Satan for you don't savor the things of God. Jesus also said Eat my flesh and drink my blood and the disciples didn't understand and Jesus said, will you leave me too like the others did at that time. This was all after the message of the KOH and the KOG after 3 years of Christ ministry and after the nation of Israel's rejection of that message.
11. The law didn't justify under the law of Moses but they did have to do them all and most of it was to be blessed and not cursed for they were under that specific system and we have never been under that specific system.
12. Paul was not talking about the traditions of men alone in Colossians for he talked about the law and the holy days and the sabbath days etc. He also talked about many of those things as a type of the future and this is because the Jews will be at the head of the nations and many of these practices under the old torah will be reinstituted though in a different context and setting and meaning because we are in the church age right now. And really for the messianic jew today they can celebrate sabbath days on any day and with any gentile for we are all the same in the body of Christ.
As far as the feast they were always eternal for the jews and will be in the millennial kingdom but not to be saved by.
Everything under the old covenant was for the jew to understand salvation and was basically mandatory. Many things were misunderstand by the jews in the early church and this is why the disciples had so much trouble with the leaders and old covenant brow beaters on subjects like circumcision and many other things.
13. The jews did have a positive view of the Torah? Yes and no and only half truth. Jews were proud of their heritage and a little too proud of being the ones with the covenant over the ones with no covenant. Paul said they were enemies of the gospel concerning the church and Peter said the law of the old covenant was a yoke of bondage for them lot alone the gentiles who were never under the law to begin with.
Paul said the Torah was taken advantage of by the law of sin and death and made them live to the frailty of man in sin. That law of sin and death was taken out of the way by the law of the Spirit.
14. There is a reason for understanding the Torah under the jewish law of Moses and its whole specific context of which the gentiles and the church of the gentiles and jews in one body and what Christ did under the new covenant in his blood. If this is not properly understood one can risk misunderstanding the new covenant for the church in this age and live defeated and become what we do instead of who we are in Christ and what the power of God can do through us.
This doesn't mean that the law was not to be who the jews were for it was but they didn't have the possibility of the Spirit living in them 24-7 and many other better promises that we have today to take advantage of. This doesn't make them any less or that the old covenant was a farce or anything else for it was the best God gave at that time and what we should learn is how much God hates sin and how much he loves to be in fellowship with us and not to make the same mistakes they did and yet learn of what it means to be faithful. The overall understanding of the changing of the old covenant to the new is not just salvation but in every part of where God wants us to get to through being who we are in him etc. through his finished work at Calvary.
This can only be seen in the gradual revelation of the redemptive plan of God from Adam to Calvary and the church age and even when the millennial kingdom comes and the completion of God being all in all.
15. So the characterization of the Mosaic law being for the church in that context is wrong because the Mosaic law was the law of God under the old covenant and not the new covenant.
This is not an argument about the generalizations of spiritual and moral law. That is separate from the argument of the full context of the old Torah of the Mosaic ethic and the new Torah of Christ in his blood. They are in both covenants but in different contexts many times.
16. As far as the sabbath specifically on one day alone was true for the jews. As far as being the same day as creation it can be argued as true and I have no problem with that even though the sabbath was also a commeration of the Red Sea deliverance just like water baptism.
17. Today, the church of jews and gentiles on the same level, the sabbath can be commerated any and every day with jew and gentile alike according to the word of God. God is not interested in regulating us to death to day.
It doesn't mean that there are not certain laws that are still the same such as loving the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and soul or the moral aspect of the Sermon on the Mount such as being pure in heart, meek and peacemakers etc. At the same time the jews had to do and be those things in order to be blessed and it was a motivation and edification to repent for the KOH was at hand and they were backslidden and the church is not to be backslidden. They were trodden down under Roman rule and from 70 A.D. to 1948 as a viable nation. Even now spiritually as a whole nation they are still backslidden though there is a remnant and we are also in the church age.
The bible must be rightly divided to be correctly understood and for it to be correctly reconciled so there are no contradictions. Thank you. Jerry Kelso
1.) Jesus fulfilled the law in the same sense that Romans 15:18-19 says that Paul fulfilled the gospel, namely that he taught full obedience to it, not that he did away with it. Jesus gave a perfect example of how to obey the law and we are told to follow his example (1 Peter 2:21-22) and to walk in the same way that Jesus walked (1 John 2:3-6), or do you think that following Jesus is just for the Jews since that is part of their culture?
2.) There is nowhere in God's law where it makes it mandatory for all Gentiles everywhere to become circumcised. If God had required that, then the Jerusalem Council had no authority to countermand God and we should obey God instead of them.
3.) God's law is instructions for how to do what is holy, righteous, and good in accordance with God's character (Romans 7:12), so if the things that are holy, righteous, and good existed in a specific context for a specific time and are no longer holy, righteous, and good in the present time, then God's holiness, righteousness, and goodness have changed. Rather, God's righteousness is eternal, so the way to do what is righteous existed unchanging from the beginning and is not dependent upon any specific period of time or on any covenant.
4.) Having no more need for a tutor is not at all the same as having no more need for what a tutor taught you. Do you really think that after you have reached the point where you no longer need a tutor that you are now supposed to disregard everything they taught you? Do people move on to algebra by forgetting everything they learned about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division? When a student completes 1st grade and moves on to 2nd grade, does their new teacher tell them to forget everything they previously learned or do they built upon what they have been previously taught?
5.) Indeed, revealing our sins is one of the reasons why the Torah was given, but since we are not to do what God has revealed to be sin, then that should be a sufficient reason in itself to live according to it.
6.) One of the biggest reasons why Jews reject Jesus as their Messiah is because Christians teach that Jesus did away with the law, which means that he was a false prophet according to Deuteronomy 13. While we are under a New Covenant with superior promises and a superior meditor, it does not come with a superior God, so the way to do what is holy, righteous, and good in accordance with His character has remained the same.
7.) If Gentiles have never been under the law, then they have never needed Jesus to come and give himself to redeem them from all lawlessness in the first place.
8.) Circumcision was never required of all Gentiles everywhere and it was never required of anyone in order to become saved. According to Romans 2:26, the way for us to see whether someone has a circumcised heart is by observing their obedience to God's law, which is the same for Jews (Deuteronomy 30:6).
9.) In 1 Peter 1:14-16, it we are commanded to have a holy conduct because God is holy, which references Leviticus where God was giving instructions for how to have a holy conduct. If the way to live in accordance with God's holiness has changed from what He revealed in Leviticus, then God's holiness has changed.
10.) In Deuteronomy 10:13, God said that what He commanded was for our own good, so if someone has faith that what God said is true, then demonstrating that to be the case through obeying His commands is the way to live by faith, for the righteous shall live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4), so this has always been the same. In John 8:56, it says that Abraham saw Messiah's day and was glad, so they looked forward in faith to the promise of a redeemer just as we look backward in faith. A progressive revelation of God's plan of redemption doesn't change the way to live by faith. I'll note that Jesus called Peter adversary, which is a name for Satan, but not every time that someone is called an adversary means that they are calling them Satan.
11.) God desires to bless us, so obedience to the law by faith wasn't something that they had to do in order to earn God's blessing, but rather it made them into a people that God could bless.
12.) Indeed, in Colossians 2, Paul was talking both about the traditions of man and the commands of God, but he was encouraging them to continue obey the commands of God as they had been instructed and to not let themselves be judged by those who were teaching the traditions of man. We must obey God rather than man and we shouldn't let any man keep us from obeying God. God's holy days are important shadows that are rich with valuable teachings about Messiah and about God's plan and they are rehearsals of what we will be doing during Messiah's reign. Keeping God's holy days is part of God's instructions for how to have a holy conduct, which we are told to have as part of the New Covenant. Obedience to the Mosaic law has never been about what we need to do in order to become saved, but about what we are to do by faith because we have been saved by faith.
The word "ecclesia" is used in the Septuagint to refer to the assembly of Israel in the wilderness. So when translators of the Bible inconsistently translate the word as "church" when it refers to a meeting of Christian believers while they translate it as "assembly" everywhere else, they create the false impression that the Bible is talking about something that is brand new. If you want to talk about a church age, then it began with Israel and remains Israel today through faith in Messiah.
13.) You must have a pretty low opinion of God to think that He would save the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt only to put them back under bondage to His law and that throughout the Bible He was calling them from their freedom to sin and do what is right in their own eyes back to the bondage of doing what is holy, righteous, and good in obedience to His ways. Rather, as
Galatians 5:1 states, it is for freedom that God sets us free, and God's law is a law of liberty (
Psalms 119:45,
James 1:25), while it is sin in transgression of God's law that puts us in bondage. It can't be disobedience and obedience to the law as it was intended that both put us in bondage. However, God's law can be perverted into a system of works that are about what we need to do in order to become justified, which would be living in just as much bondage as living in disobedience to the law. Jesus criticize the Pharisees for setting aside the commands of God to follow their own traditions (Mark 7:6-8) and he compared their traditions to a heavy burden (Matthew 23:3), while his way of teaching the law was light and easy (Matthew 11:28-30, Jeremiah 6:16-19), so it is important not to mistake a criticism of man's traditions being a yoke of bondage as being criticism of the liberty of God's law.
Again, if Gentiles have never been under the law, then they have never needed Jesus to give himself to redeem them from lawlessness. The law that we are no longer is the law of sin and death, not the Mosaic law.
14.) Jesus walked in perfect obedience to the law, he preached what he practiced, and he practiced what he preached, so what he command was obedience to the law. According to 1 John 2:3-6, those who are in Messiah follow his commands and walk in the same way that he walked, so who we are in Messiah is someone who obeys God's law as he did. If you know how much God hates sin, then why do you feel free to do the things that God has revealed in His law to be sin?
15.) The New Covenant was based upon better promises, but that Bible doesn't say that it was based upon better laws.
16.) According to Isaiah 56, the Sabbath is also for gentiles who align themselves with God.
17.) God only blessed the 7th day and made it holy and the things that are holy to God should be treated as holy to us. You can worship God on any day of the week, but that should not prevent you from obey God's command to keep the Sabbath on the 7th day. We should have the attitude where we seek to worship God in the way that He has instructed us to worship Him, not in the way we want to worship Him. If husbands should treat their wives like that, how much more should we treat God like that? I mean, do you think that God would have been please if the builders of the temple thought they were free to build it in whatever way they wanted because all God really wanted was just a temple?
Everything that is listed as being against the Spirit in Galatians 5:19-23 is against the Mosaic law and everything listed as being fruits of the Spirit are in accordance with the Mosaic law, so nothing has changed. When Jesus was telling people to repent, he was telling them to repent from their disobedience to the Mosaic law, so repentance from our disobedience to the law is a central part of the gospel message. When you read the NT as though the authors were in full agreement with the view of the law that is expressed in the Psalms, then you will see that the Bible has much more continuity than you give it credit for.
