Tag Archives: Paul

Under the Law Vs. Under the Law Toward Messiah

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1 Corinthians 9:20–22, Under the law. David Stern in his commentary asserts that this term means “under a legalistic perversion of the Torah”; i.e., that Torah here doesn’t mean Torah, but rather a skewed view of Torah as proffered by the Judaizers (i.e., those of the sect of the Pharisees or those who were under their influence who asserted that one needed to be circumcised and to keep the law of Moses in order to be saved, see Acts 15:1, 5).

Under a legalistic or skewed view of the Torah.

Under a legalistic or skewed view of the Torah.

In this passage, those who are “under the law” aren’t the Jews, since Paul already mentions them at the beginning of verse 20, but Gentiles who are living under a false notion that one can be saved by keeping the Torah.

Paul then goes on to describe the next group of Gentiles — “those who are without the Torah” (verse 21).

The third group of Gentiles to which Paul makes reference is “to the weak” (verse 22), who are those who are new to the faith and tend toward a more punctilious or legalistic obedience to the Torah.

In summary, Paul is saying that he’s sensitive to the spiritual paradigm of those to whom he is preaching the gospel, has learned to relate to all people from all backgrounds and, as such, has become all things to all men in an effort to save some.

Paul, at the same time, asserts that he is not “unTorahed” himself, but rather is “under or in subjection to the true Torah (as opposed to a legalistic perversion of the Torah) through his relationship with Yeshua (verse 21). This statement of Paul lines up perfectly with other statements he makes with regard to his pro-Torah beliefs and lifestyle (e.g., Rom 3:31; 7:12,14; Acts 21:24; 4:14; 25:8; 28:17; 1 Cor 7:19).

 

 

Was Paul’s Favorite Meal Barbecued Bat Snouts?

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If the biblical dietary laws have been abolished in the New Covenant as many in the church claim, then let’s all serve ourselves up a huge helping of our favorite dish of gourmet treif (unclean meats). How about some fricassee of roadkill skunk, rack of baboon brains, with chocolate covered maggots in creme brûlée for desert? Okay, you get the point. What did Paul really mean when he said that “nothing is unclean of itself”?

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Romans 14:14, Nothing is unclean in itself. In this verse, is the Apostle Paul declaring that there is no longer a distinction between clean and unclean foods, therefore making void the biblical dietary laws? Let’s analyze the contextual and linguistic aspects of this passage to see what Paul is really saying here.

The word unclean (koinos) in this verse can also mean “common,” and in three places in the Apostolic Scriptures the two words “common” and “unclean” are used side by side; q.v. Acts 10: 14, 28 and 11:8, which says, “But I said, Not so, Master: for nothing common [koinos] or unclean [akathartos] has at any time entered into my mouth. “From this example, we see that unclean in Romans 14 can also mean “common” as we find in Acts 11. The word for unclean in Acts 11:8 is an entirely different word; therefore, akathartos is a reference to unclean meat, as proscribed by the Torah. Koinos, on the other hand, cannot mean unclean meat in Romans 14, or else Acts 11:8 would be a superfluous and unexplainably redundant in using two words that mean exactly the same thing. The word koinos is used elsewhere in the Apostolic Scriptures not to mean “unclean,” as in “unclean meat,” but “unclean” as in unwashed hands (Matt. 7:2), or “common,” as in something that is shared commonly among people (Acts 2:44; 4:32; Tit 1:4; Jude 3). Of the seven places this word is used in the Apostolic Scriptures it never means unclean meat.

In David Stern’s Jewish New Testament Commentary, on Romans 14 he states that Paul is not abrogating the biblical dietary laws. On verse 14, Stern states that Paul is referring to ritual purity, not whether something is unclean (nonkosher) meat or not. What is ritual purity? It is a reference to either how something was slaughtered, and whether it was bled properly, or whether the meat had previously been sacrificed to idols before being sold in the public meat markets—a common practice in that day in pagan cities.

Furthermore, Paul could not have been advocating eating swine, and other unclean meats, without making himself into a total hypocrite and liar, since in several places in the Book of Acts he strongly states (toward the end of his life) that he was a Torah-observant Jew and walked orderly and kept the Torah (Acts 21:20), and that he had not broken any of the Torah laws (Acts 25:16), which would have included the dietary laws contained in the Torah.

Let’s also keep an important point in mind when speaking of YHVH’s biblical dietary commands: When some­one gets born again their digestive system does not change. Eating unclean or biblically unkosher meat is, from a purely medical standpoint, deleterious to one’s health regardless of whether one is a believer in Yeshua or not.

 

Are You Free to Break the Law If You’re Dead to It?

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Romans 7:4, You have been made dead with regard to the Torah. David Stern in his commentary (The Jewish New Testament Commentary, p. 375) explains that it is not the Torah that has been made dead (or abrogated), nor is a believer made dead in the sense of no longer responding to its truth. Rather, he has been made dead not to all of the Torah, but to three aspects of it: (1) its capacity to stir sin in him (vv. 5–14), (2) its capacity to produce irremediable guilt feelings (vv. 15–24), and (3) its penalties, punishment and curses (8:1–4).

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To fully understand Paul’s writings, one must have a complete understanding of the Torah and all of its aspects. Most individuals coming from the Christian theological perspective have a very limited and narrow understanding of the Torah (or as they term it, the law). For example, they fail to understand that how we react to the Torah—obediently versus disobediently—will determine how Torah “reacts” to us.

For example, YHVH has embedded into the Torah a cause-and-effect spiritual mechanism: obey and be blessed, disobey and suffer the consequences, i.e., the curses. Other laws in the universe with which we are familiar have the same cause-effect rewards-punishment systems built into them.

How about the law of gravity? Try jumping off a tall building! Paul in verse 13 asks whether we are implying that the (good) Torah, like gravity, is bad? His reply is that it’s not. Gravity, like Torah is good. It is when someone defies gravity and jumps off a tall building that gravity takes on a negative connotation. Is this because gravity is inherently evil? No. The law of gravity is for our benefit, since it keeps man from spinning (or floating) uncontrollably off of this earth into outer space.

So what causes men to jump off of tall buildings? Gravity or the evil inclination inside of their character? The answer is obvious. The same idea applies to the Torah. Paul says in verse 13 that it was sin working death in him through something good (i.e., theTorah), so that sin might be clearly exposed as sin.

So the Torah is very beneficial at exposing the sin in our lives, bringing it out into the open so that it can be dealt with (through confession, repentance, and faith in the blood atonement of Yeshua), so that we might be redeemed, justified, sanctified and finally reconciled to YHVH. Even the Torah’s “negative” side has a very beneficial outcome for those who are willing to follow YHVH’s path of reconciliation and righteousness.

Many Christians resist the Torah not because it’s inherently evil, but because of their own evil inclination, which resists and rejects anything that casts himself in a negative light and forces him to deal with the resident sin in his life.

Romans 8:7 explains the root of this problem in man: “The carnal mind is enmity against Elohim, for it is not subject to the Torah-law of Elohim, nor indeed can be.”

At the beginning, Adam and Eve were not subject to Elohim’s Torah-instructions and quickly rebelled against his clear commands, and humans have been following in this path of pride and rebellion ever since.

 

Are You Under the Law? I Hope Not!

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Romans 3:19,  Under [the] Torah-law … all the world guilty before Elohim. Paul uses the term “under [the] law” (also found in 6:14) twelve times in his writings. In this case he is referring to those who are under the penalty for violating the Torah (the penalty of which is death, Rom 6:23; 1 John 3:4). This we know, for he speaks of guilt in the latter half of this verse: “and all the world may become guilty [subject to the judgment of Elohim] before Elohim.” 

The bottom line of what Paul is saying here is that all humans (both Jews and Gentiles) are guilty before Elohim. This is the point he is driving at, as we stated above.

Paul is breaking up the fallow ground of men’s hearts, showing them their sinfulness (unrighteousness), that they have violated the holy and righteous standards of Elohim’s law (the Torah) and in this condition need a Redeemer (a message Paul preaches more strongly later in the book of Romans).

It is Paul’s mission to bring the two opposing sides (Jew and Gentile) together, to show them their common state of sinfulness and their common need for Yeshua, the Redeemer, and their common need to dwell together in Torah-community as the body of believers in Yeshua. This is indeed the tall order to which Paul dedicated his life’s efforts and that he terms “the ministry of reconciliation” to which he has been called (2 Cor. 5:18).

 

New Video: Let Us Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread—1 Cor 5:8

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In 1 Corinthians 5:8, the Apostle Paul tells us to keep (or celebrate) the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which occurs right after the Passover. Though many in the church feel that Paul liberated Christians from the law of Moses (the Torah) including the Sabbath and the biblical feasts, here Paul is telling us to celebrate it.

In this video, learn what the the significance and relevance of this biblical holiday is to you. It is the story of your life—past, present and future! A complimentary study guide is available at http://www.hoshanarabbah.org/pdfs/unlbread.pdf.

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The Abrahamic Covenant Revisited

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Genesis 12:1, Elohim’s covenant with Abraham. In the recent past on this blog, I inserted several teachings on the Abrahamic Covenant and how this covenant serves as the model for the process by which we as New Covenant believers are redeemed. If you didn’t have a chance to read them, or would like to refresh your understanding, I invite you to read them now.

To access these posts, either use the search and find box at the top of this page by typing in “Abrahamic Covenant,” or click on the phrase “Abrahamic Covenant” in the tag cloud on the right side of this page. Either way, all my past posts on this subject will pop up.

Understanding the Abrahamic Covenant is beneficial to your spiritual understanding in several ways.

  • It shows the character and nature of Elohim and how he relates to men legally.
  • It shows how the salvation of the redeemed believer is rooted in the Torah and, specifically, the Abrahamic Covenant. It’s not an invention of the Apostle Paul or the New Testament Christians.
  • We see the consistency  of the Word of Elohim from beginning to end, and the immutable nature of Elohim.
  • It will help you to understand the background of what Paul is saying in the Epistle to the Romans—especially in chapter 4.

Happy reading!

 

The Torah—The Elephant in the Room of the NT

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The Torah in the Testimony of Yeshua (New Testament)

Though the primary theme of the Testimony of Yeshua (the name John gives to the New Testament in the Book of Revelation—e.g. Rev 1:2; 6:9; 12:17; 20:4) is the testimony of Yeshua the Messiah, the Torah is, nevertheless, the elephant in the room.

Though not mentioned outrightly as often as one would think in the Testimony of Yeshua, the Torah is implied, assumed, or referred to in on countless occasions using coded Hebraisms. Why, one might ask, is this the case with the apostolic writers? The answer is simple: They were writing to Jews as well as to non-Jewish people who either already operated within a Torah-centric religious paradigm or were being brought into it. The obvious didn’t have to be mentioned over and over again, for Torah was not a strange or foreign thing to the first century believers as it is to most in the church today. The Torah was their way of life and frame of reference for all that they thought and did!

The word law as used in the Testimony of Yeshua is the first aspect of this “elephant” we need to examine. It is the Greek word nomos which in the Septuagint (the third century B.C. Greek translation of the Tanakh [Old Testament Scriptures]) is used in place of the Hebrew word Torah. Therefore, we know that the Jewish scholars who translated the Tanakh into the Greek language considered the words Nomos and Torah to be equivalent. Also, contextually, in the Testimony of Yeshua, we can see that the word law means Torah. To the Messianic Jews who wrote the entire Testimony of Yeshua, when the Greek word nomos is used this is not a reference to Roman, Greek or Babylonian law, but to the biblical Hebrew law or the Torah, or Torah-law of Moses.

Let us not forget that the Bible was written, for the most part, if not totally, in the Hebrew (or Aramaic) language by Hebrew people who spoke Hebrew, lived in a Hebrew culture, practiced the Hebrew religion and worshipped and served YHVH Elohim, the God of the Hebrews. What defined the Israelites’ spiritual relationship to their God – YHVH Elohim? It was the Torah, which by definition and to the Hebrew mindset of the first-century referred specifically to the instructions in righteousness of Elohim as delivered through his servant and prophet Moses to his people, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Israel), known as Israelites. As noted above, the Torah is recorded in what is commonly called the Books of the Law, the Books of Moses, the Pentateuch or the Chumash, or what we would call the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These books contain YHVH’s instructions in righteousness, which were delivered letter-for-letter and word-for-word from the very mouth of Elohim to Moses and the Hebrew children of Israel and forms the foundation for the entire Bible: both sections which Christians commonly call the Tanakh and the Testimony of Yeshua.

For the people of Israel in Yeshua’s day, including the apostles who, under the inspiration of the Ruach HaKodesh (the Spirit of Elohim), the Torah of Elohim, given through Elohim’s servant Moses, formed the central teaching document that regulated and governed every aspect of life, culture, family relationship, marriage, society, religion and relationship with surrounding nations. Therefore, law for them was Torah. Nothing more nor less.

Keep in mind that the concept of Torah, to the Hebrew mind, did not have the pejorative connotation that the term law has to the traditional Christian mindset which tends to read a legalistic bias into the word law when reading the Testimony of Yeshua.

Although Yeshua, the Living Torah, and not the Law of Moses or the Written Torah, is the main theme of the Testimony of Yeshua, it can’t be denied that the Written Torah is woven throughout the fabric of the Testimony of Yeshua. In fact, it would be negligent of me to pass over the pro-Torah themes and statements found throughout the apostolic writings.

Examples of References to the Torah in the Testimony of Yeshua

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