My Torah Testimony

By Ben McCay

 

After completing three years of Bible school, I considered myself to be fairly solid theologically and I thought I had a good grasp on the doctrines of covenant and atonement.  When I returned home, a good friend started preaching the "Law of Moses" to me, telling me that it is still valid for today and we should still keep it.  We got in endless debates as I was convinced the Law ended and was replaced by the New Testament.  I had a long list of Scriptures that seemingly supported my claim, but one passage always troubled me - Matt. 5:17-20.  Not a single Christian theologian could effectively explain this verse and most of them avoided it altogether; and I tried to avoid it.  I knew that if this passage was true, then it would have been a major hole in my theology.  So I began to be convinced that this passage was a fluke, a mistake - maybe the copyists made a mistake, or somehow it accidentally found its way into Matthew.  I was certain that Jesus did not say this because it completely destroyed the foundation of everything I've been taught and believed to be true concerning covenants.

 

Well, after marrying the daughter of a Messianic pastor and going to Shabbat services for 1 ½ years, I still believed Torah was abolished.  But then I read a radical book by Lew White, called "Fossilized Customs," which began to tear at my theology.  Lew discusses numerous pagan customs that have become "fossilized" in our culture (mainly through the Roman Catholic Church) and he brought up a number of arguments and Scriptures I had never considered, concerning the following of pagan practices.  The most prominent thing I got out of the book with was the belief that the 4th commandment is still valid and has never changed.

 

A few months later my wife and I took an 8-month scouting trip through 12 Latin American countries while looking for signs of an uncontacted tribe to whom we could devote our lives and share the Gospel.  After arriving in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia, we immediately started hearing rumors about a savage tribe that lives deep in the jungle.  We met a local Assemblies of God missionary who invited us to stay with him.  When we told him we were Messianics who believed in Torah, he became agitated and started telling us the very same Scriptures that I once used as arguments against Torah.  After a month of friction, he kindly asked us to leave and so we moved to another missionary complex in the town.  At this point I didn't know why I believed in Torah - it just seemed right.  However, I still didn't follow much of Torah, for we ate catfish thinking it to be okay (by the way, catfish tastes like garbage - no wonder God forbade His people to eat the garbage cleaners of the planet).

 

After the move to the other side of town, I decided I had to know why I believed what I believed.  I read the entire Torah and studied Paul intently.  The first serious question I asked myself was concerning the Feasts:  Are they still valid for today?  If the Feasts were important then I would expect to find them in the Apostolic Scriptures, but I had never remembered reading much about them in the New Testament writings.  Well, after a thorough search, I found multiple references to every single Festival in the NT writings.  This shocked me!  Why hadn't I seen this before?  I hadn't seen it because I had never celebrated the Feasts, and knew nothing about them.  And likewise, the recipients of the NT writings would not have understood the references to the Festivals unless they themselves were keeping them.

 

The next bit of revelation dealt with looking at Paul through the lens of Torah, rather than the other way around.  We see what we're programmed to see.  So if we can step out of our box for just a second and try to view Scripture in light of differing theology, it might look very different.  In fact the very same Scriptures that the "Torahless" use to support their theology, the "pro-Torah" also use to support their claim.  Peter referred to this concept when he said that the "Torahless" twist Paul's writings.  When putting on the lens (or paradigm) of Torah, Paul looks very different and makes a little more sense.

 

Christians are really at a disadvantage when trying to interpret and understand the Apostolic Scriptures and Early Church thought because today we look at the Tanakh through the lens of the modern interpretation of Paul.  But the Early Church and Paul himself looked at Yahshua and the “New Covenant” through the lens of the Law and the Prophets.  Yahshua, His disciples, Paul, and all of the 1st generation Christianity viewed Moses and the prophets as "the Word of God," but most 21st century theologians seem reluctant to put them on such a high level.

 

In his book, The Letter Writer, Tim Hegg describes Paul like this:

 

We have seen that Paul considered the Bible to be divinely inspired and the authoritative body of truth by which God is known and in which righteousness for living is described.  Paul’s Bible consisted of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.  He did not have any other writings that he considered to be Scripture, nor did he consider his epistles to be an addition to the Hebrew canon.  Paul’s view of Scripture precludes any possibility that he taught the abolition of Torah.  Since he considered the Torah as divinely inspired Scripture, he received it as God’s authoritative revelation for faith and life, and so taught it to those he discipled and instructed.  To say otherwise is to misread Paul and to accuse him of errant theology.  Finally, the Torah stood as the benchmark for all subsequent Scripture.  Since it was the first canon, all subsequent writing that sought to be received as Scripture had to conform to the Torah’s exemplar.  Anything given that went contrary to what God had already revealed simply could not be received as inspired.  Therefore, neither Yeshua nor Paul could have come teaching the abolition of the Torah.  If they had taught such a thing, it would have been incumbent upon God’s people to reject them as false teachers.  This, then, is a core issue:  can we read Paul as consistently upholding Torah as the eternal, inspired word of God?  Surely we must, or else we will be forced to admit that he was a false teacher.  These are our only options.

 

We don't believe Paul had anything negative to say about the commandments themselves.  Rather Paul's negativity dealt with the result of not obeying the commandments.  The commandment itself does not bring death - only disobedience to the commandment brings death.  Obedience brings life.  That is why Yahshua came:  so that we might have the power to obey the commandments and live.  For example the traffic law saying that we must stop at a red light does not in itself bring death and destruction to the drivers.  This commandment was added for our protection and if we obey it, we will live.  However, disobedience to this law leads to death by a car accident.  This is the same logic Paul is following.

 

According to 1 Jn. 3:4, sin is disobedience to God's Torah.  Paul’s main point is that the Law only had the power to define sin - it did not have the power to change our inner beings.  Whereas belief in Messiah changes my inner self, by causing me to have both the will and the power to obey Torah. 

 

My next major realization dealt with the Jeremiah 31 passage that I had quoted so often, concerning the New Covenant.  When I had originally thought this passage was anti-Torah, I actually realized it is supportive of Torah.  "I will write the Torah on their hearts."  I used to think that since God's Law is written on my heart under the “New Covenant,” then there is no need to follow the written Law.  What I hadn't considered was that it is actually the written Law of Moses that is written on my heart and the fact this it is on my heart does not mean that it has changed in any way.  Yahshua confirms this in Mt. 5:17f.  And Paul confirms this when He says we are to live by the Spirit – the Holy Spirit will never violate His own Law.

 

While we love and practice the Torah, we do not preach obedience to the law after the manner of modern or ancient Judaism.  We, at our congregation, are not Jewish, nor do we attempt to follow the religion of Judaism because we believe that Judaism through its strict adherence to the oral law has strayed from the Torah.  We are not to add to nor take away from God's righteous decrees.  Judaism adds to them, and Christianity takes away from them.  We, in our Shabbat congregation are simply trying to do what the Bible says: "Whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

 

"Torah" actually means "teaching," and therefore should not carry with it the negative connotations that our English word "law" carries with it.  In NT writings it seems the two most common nuances are the written law and the written plus oral law together.  To the first century Jew, the written law and the oral law were inseparable  (see Acts 10:28 where Peter equates oral law with Torah).  This was how Yahshua was revolutionary:  while He often followed the oral law, He strongly opposed the oral law when it conflicted with the written law.  In Matt. 15:3, Yahshua challenged the Pharisees, “Why do you break the Torah for the sake of your tradition?”  And today, He is challenging Christianity with the exact same question.

 

There are essentially two viewpoints concerning Torah.  The anti-Semitic view (following Martin Luther's theology) says that God gave the Torah to the Jews to burden them because He hated them, but He loves us and so we don't have to follow the same set of laws.  This view lumps the Torah into moral, ceremonial, dietary, and civil laws, but these separations cannot be validated by Scripture.  “Torah” is singular and not plural – there is One set of laws, and not 4 or 5 sets of laws.  The anti-Semitic viewpoint completely falls apart after reading such passages as Deut. 4:5-8, "What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way YHWH is near us ... and what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws." 

 

Whereas, the Semitic, or "Jewish" view sees the Torah as a revelation of God Himself.  Torah reveals the attributes of God Himself and every aspect of Torah points to Yahshua.  And as Daniel Lancaster points out in his book, Restoration, to edit or change Torah in any way is to edit or change God.  So when Christianity changed the Sabbath, and outlawed the Jewish festivals, dietary observances and other laws, this religion has actually attempted to edit God Himself.   One thing that shocked me recently was the realization that God equated the eating of "unclean" meats with homosexuality.  He used the same word "abomination" (Is. 66:17, Deut 14:3, Lev 18:22) to describe both of these sins.  But today we preach the opposite in our Sunday churches - we have attempted to edit God.

 

The main difference between what “modern” Christianity believes and what we believe deals with the definition of “the righteous requirements of the Law.”  Righteousness and love are the core teachings of most religions:  Mormonism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Christianity, etc.  In fact, one of my friends has converted from Christianity to the New Age religion of Eckankar, and now he preaches “love” and “righteousness” more than most Christians I know.  But the definition of “righteousness” according to Torah is slightly different.  While the core teaching of righteousness (essentially the Ten Commandments) is found in most religions, many of these world religions declare much of Torah’s “righteous” decrees to be unrighteous, such as the Sabbath, the Festivals, the dietary laws, etc.  In fact in the fourth century, Christianity outlawed these righteous observances calling them “Jewish.”  The righteousness of Torah follows all 613 commandments.  (Obviously, many of these commandments are irrelevant without a Temple in Jerusalem).

 

WWJD?  We know what Yahshua did (He followed Torah perfectly), but the real question is:  If He came today, would He do the same?  According to Heb. 13:8, 1 Sam. 15:29, Mal. 3:6, and Num. 23:19, He would do exactly the same … so why do we do differently?

 

The Mosaic and New Covenant do not represent two “opposing” covenants, as taught by replacement theology.  Rather all the covenants in Scripture reveal the one Covenant that God is making with man.  The righteous requirements of the Mosaic Covenant (all 613 commandments) are the same righteous requirements under the “New Covenant” - Yahshua discussed this in Mt 5:17-20.  In fact Yahshua even commanded His followers to keep the "least of these commandments." The least of the commandments are those that incur no great penalty for breaking - such as the wearing of tzitzit, the not wearing of mixed fabrics, not tattooing oneself, etc. 

 

This new insight into Torah has tied together the entire Scripture in my thinking and has helped me to more fully understand the nature of God in light of both the Apostolic and Hebrew Scriptures.