Ex-Hebrew Roots/Cult Members

[footwasher]

Umm...the contradiction was in the conjunction of the the verses with theology that says the law is not binding, so I'm not sure why you felt the need to break up my question into small parts to repeat something that I've already stated in this thread. I've argued that "not being under the law" refers to being free from power of the law to condemn us to death for breaking it, the power of our sin nature to cause us to pervert the law into legalism, and the power of our sin nature to cause us to rebel against the law, but that it does not refer to being free from the instruction of the law. If we were free from the instruction of the law, then we would be free to sin all we wanted, but Romans 6:15 says that we aren't. In other words, if sinning is still wrong for us to do, then we should still avoid doing what the law identifies as sin. The law identifies eating unclean animals as a sin, so even though we won't face sentencing for eating unclean animals, our faith upholds the law by leading us in obedience to it and away from sin. *

Why do you think God commanded Moses and the Israelites to do sacrifices when he didn't desire them?

The law is holy, righteous, and good in accordance with God's standard of holiness, righteousness, and goodness. This is a standard that we should all aspire to align our lives with, not something that we need to or can be set free from. If God could just lower His standards, then Christ would not have needed to die. The fact that we can't live up what that standard requires through our own effort does highlight our inadequacy, but that's far from the only reason God made His standard known. A role of the Spirit is to cause us to be obedient to God, so God set us free from our sin nature's mastery over us and sent His Spirit to cause to be able to live up to that standard and meet its righteous requirement, not so that we could disregard it. What we needed to be set free from was not God's holy, righteous, and good standard, but the penalty for violating it.

The promise was made by God. Israel should have waited. But like Sarah, she did not have faith in God and forced the issue. God gave a stop gap solution, to give life, but it depended on Israel remembering God's *faithfulness and building on that experience to build up her own faith. ****

There is a huge difference between submitting to God's law because that it what He has called those who have been justified by faith to do and submitting to God's law in an effort to become justified in God's eyes through our own effort. God never gave His law for His people to become justified by keeping it, so that is a perversion of the law. You should not confuse criticism of a perversion of the law with with a criticism of God's holy, righteous, and good law.

The law was given to teach faith, show that not waiting for God led to disaster, that was the harvest from the vineyard. It was derivative, but uncertain. Sin saw the opportunity and used law to reinforce human presumption that God's promise was a sanction for human intervention.

Christ is not at all at odds with the Father, so He is not at odds with the law God has commanded. Having faith in Christ should lead us to submit to the law, just as Christ did.

And the law is to have faith in God, believe He will deliver on His promise:


Galatians 4:21Tell me, you who want to be under law, do you not listen to the law? 22For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. 23But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise.

Having faith is not simply saying that you trust someone, but it is demonstrating through your actions that you do, so having faith is demonstrated by obedience to the law. As James says, faith without works is useless. The holy, righteous, and good law unsurprisingly instructs how to have a holy conduct, how to practice righteousness, and how to do good works. Christ lived in perfect accordance with the law and taught how to follow it both in word and by example, so faith in Christ is in perfect accordance with the law.

The law is to believe God will deliver on His promise.


And the law is now applied to them: believe God will deliver on His promise. Once they had no formal covenant, promise from God, no hope, now they had that hope. All they had to do was believe God and wait, not take pre emptive action.

Again, Christ lived in perfect accordance with the law and he is not at odds with the Father, so obedience to Christ is in perfect accordance with the law that God has commanded. Sanctifying us to be more like Christ in how he thought and in his obedience to God is likewise in perfect accordance with obedience to God's law.

Christ did not take pre emptive action:

John 5:30"I can do nothing on My own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.

Other verses that to do explain how to have a holy conduct do not exclude the law's instructions for it, but rather are in perfect accordance with it.

Holy conduct is put to death the deeds of the body, pre emptive action.

If our freedom in Christ means that we have freedom from the instructions of law in regard to sin, then we have the freedom to sin and to do what is evil, but this verse is saying that we should not understand our freedom in Christ to mean that. Rather, we are set free from sin to become bondslaves of God, which means obediently following His commands.

Which is: see above.

All of those acts list in Galatians 5:19-23 are found in the law. The law identifies breaking the dietary laws as a sin, so I see no good reason to exclude it from Galatians 6:1. The lists in Galatians 5:19-23 are not exhaustive.

The law is a stop gap, for unbelievers.

If you eat unclean animals because that is what you want to do in defiance of God, then that's just as much a selfish act as anything else. Jesus gave no indication that he thought some laws were unimportant, but rather in Matthew 5:17-19, he said that not the least commandment would disappear from the law and warned against those who would teach to relax them, which includes the dietary laws. He spoke about what he thought was most relevant to his Jewish audiences and apparently he didn't think they needed to be exhorted to keep the dietary laws, probably because they were already doing that.

See above.

Correct, sorry, that was a typo. This is exactly the problem with people considering God's law to be a heavy burden, when it is actually instructions for proper living.

Proper living is: see above.

I'm in agreement. There's just such huge disconnect between how the Jews view the law as a delight, such as in Psalms 119, or with them frequently giving thanks to God for giving them His Torah as instructions for life and with Christians who view the law as a heavy burden. I've become convinced that in this the Jews have the right idea and that it is absurd to think that they would have referred to God's holy, righteous, and good law as a heavy burden in Acts 15. Through the leading of the Spirit, it is a delight to keep the law and to exceed what it requires, and we are set free from keeping the law legalistically.

The law to delight in is to believe God.

God's holy, righteous, and good standard exists independently of any contract to obey it and the law is as you said, "instructions for proper living". We can't become justified by following instructions for proper living, but it was never given for that purpose, and it is nevertheless still good to live properly. Does it really make sense to you that Jesus is at odds with the Father and following God's instructions for living properly makes Christ of no value? Of course not, what was making Christ of no value to someone was not obedience to God, but rather it was seeking justification in any way other than faith in Christ. Christ died to set us free from our sin nature and sent the Holy Spirit to enable all to enable us to practice righteousness in accordance with the righteous requirement of God's law, so it is disregarding God's law that is the insult to Christ. It's amazing what Christ has done for us in that we get to not sin, but people want to ignore what the law says about what sin is.

Sin is preemptive action, the sin of Sarah.

Someone who kept the law almost perfectly and only sinned once would still have lived their life properly, they just would not be justified by doing so.

See above.

The law does point to our need for the Messiah and the prophets do help to identify him, but that does not exclude other that it was given to instruct how to live properly.

See above.

And we are apart of Israel, God's chosen people, and a holy nation by faith. A holy nation is also one that is set apart from the pagan nations, or in other words, we are to be in the world, but not of the world.

Faith is what differentiates God's people from other nations.

I am a vegan, so I would likely find that an enjoyable experience.

That was a general example.

Sarah learned it was blessed to believe in God. She bore good fruit, through God's permission to let her have her way. Israel never bore good fruit from the vineyard. But she will, when the required number of Gentiles are *gathered in.

Indeed, God making His holy, righteous, and good standard known does reveal our transgressions, but it is nevertheless something that we should aspire to through the leading of the Spirit.

The transgression is preemptive action

More and more Christians are gaining a deeper understanding of the Bible and are being blessed by coming into a fuller obedience to God. Many Jews are also coming to see the truth that Jesus is their Messiah. We've also recently helped to host a annual March of Remembrance at our State Capital. I'm not trying say we're better or worse than other churches, but we try do our part.

Living water is cleansing water, cleansing from preemptive action. Preemptive action is such a subtle sin. However the results are disastrous.

[Soyeong]

Define righteousness according to the New Covenant please.

"Righteousness" is the character that is built by doing what is right and someone who is "righteous" is someone who does what is right. God always does what is right, which is something that we all fall short of, so we can't meet God's standard of righteousness through our own efforts. So when God puts his righteous Spirit in us, which causes us to do what is right in accordance with God's instructions for how to do what is right, we are declared to now be righteous, someone who by faith and and the leading of the Holy Spirit does what is right in accordance with God's righteous standard.

The Judaizers in Acts 15 simply said "obey the law of Moses". This is what you are saying as well.

The Jews point out that Torah written in ancient Hebrew lacks vowels and punctuation, so that it can't even correctly be read or pronounced without the existence of additional oral instructions. Furthermore, many of the laws, such as the command not to work on the Sabbath, require additional instructions for how to define "work". For instance, is there a certain distance that can be traveled or a certain amount of weight that can be lifted before it counts as work? Then they would put a fence around that to protect the Torah from being transgressed. They traced the command for the oral law and the fences back to Moses and many argued that if you couldn't keep the written law without knowing the oral law, then the oral law had an equal or higher priority, so their concept of "the laws of Moses" was different from most Christians today. They would never have envisioned teaching the written law apart from teaching the oral law that instructs how to understand the written law, so what they were wanting to require Gentiles to do in Acts 15 would have included all of the oral law or the traditions of the elders. So not only did they want to required Gentiles to keep the oral law as they understood it, but they wanted them to keep all of the law in order to be saved, both of which Paul rightly rejected.

This is what is being talked about in Mark 7:1-9, where Jesus criticized the Pharisees for rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish their traditions. This is what Jesus called a heavy burden in Matthew 23:4 and what Peter called a heavy burden in Acts 15:10. They were doing the same sort of thing that Jesus was by rejecting man-made traditions and upholding the commandment of God.

Nevertheless, your position can also be characterized as the Galatian heresy -a child of Hagar. Look how Paul starts in relation to the slave-woman and the freewoman - "Tell me, you who want to be under law..." (Gal.4:21). Read the rest of chapter 4 to see which woman represents those who "want to be under the law".

I do not want to be "under the law", but I understand what is meant by that phrase differently than you do. As Paul specifies in Roman 7:6, we are dying to what holds us captive. What holds us captive is the law's power to condemn us to death for transgressing the law (Romans 7:1-4, 8:1-2), our sin nature's propensity to pervert the law into legalism and away from being about a relationship with God (Romans 7:6), and our sin nature's propensity to rebel against what the law instructs (Romans 7:6-25). However, God's holy, righteous, and good instruction for how to live in a manner that is holy, righteous, and good are not what holds us in captivity, but rather they are what we have been set free to do. We could not obey the law on our own, but only by faith and by the leading of the Spirit. If "under the law" included the holy, righteous, and good instructions of the law, then we would be free to sin all we wanted, but the Bible makes it clear in a couple places that we shouldn't misunderstand our freedom in Christ to be a freedom to transgress the law (Romans 6:15, 1 Peter 2:16).

"this may be one of those verses in which Paul uses nomos to depict the demand of God generally rather than any particular expression of that demand". In any event, believers who walk in the Spirit and produce the fruit of the Spirit are not hostile to God's law because they are already fulfilling the righteous requirement of the law. (Rom. 8:4).

If Paul is speaking more generally about all that God has commanded, then that would also include what He commanded to Moses. The law requires is obedience and the Spirit's role is to cause us to be obedient to God, so we fulfill the righteous requirement of the law by walking in the Spirit because He causes us to be obedient to it. The Spirit is not at odds with the Father, so the fruit of the Spirit are in perfect accordance with the law God commanded and can be found instructed in it.

Mosaic law obedience is not an expression of being born-again, because many Orthodox Jews faithfully obey the law and do not possess the Spirit which only comes about by faith in Christ. For example see Paul's experience of being under the law as an unregenerate Jew (Rom. 7:14-24).

The Pharisees are a false positive, so obedience to the law is not necessarily an expression of being born again, but it is nevertheless an indicator of it. A husband can do all the same things that someone does who loves their wife without actually loving his wife, but it is still a pretty good indicator that he loves his wife. Man judges by outward appearances, but God judges the heart.

Devotion to the person of Christ, walking in the Spirit, and adherence to Apostolic teaching under the New Covenant from a position of gratitude for all that Christ has done on our behalf is the proper expression of genuine faith.

Indeed, devotion to the person of Christ means becoming an imitation of him in how he thought and how he acted in obedience to God, walking in the Spirit means being guided by Him in obedience to the law, adherence to the Apostolic teaching under the New Covenant means obedience to the law, and the proper expression of gratitude is obedience to the law.

[Scrawly]

"What is the law of Christ?"

Answer: Galatians 6:2 states, “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (emphasis added). What exactly is the law of Christ, and how is it fulfilled by carrying each other’s burdens? While the law of Christ is also mentioned in 1 Corinthians 9:21, the Bible nowhere specifically defines what precisely is the law of Christ. However, most Bible teachers understand the law of Christ to be what Christ stated were the greatest commandments in Mark 12:28–31, “‘Which commandment is the most important of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’”

The law of Christ, then, is to love God with all of our being and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. In Mark 12:32–33, the scribe who asked Jesus the question responds with, “To love Him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” In this, Jesus and the scribe agreed that those two commands are the core of the entire Old Testament Law. All of the Old Testament Law can be placed in the categories of “loving God” or “loving your neighbor.”

Various New Testament scriptures state that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament Law, bringing it to completion and conclusion (Romans 10:4; Galatians 3:23–25; Ephesians 2:15). In place of the Old Testament Law, Christians are to obey the law of Christ. Rather than trying to remember the over 600 individual commandments in the Old Testament Law, Christians are simply to focus on loving God and loving others. If Christians would truly and wholeheartedly obey those two commands, we would be fulfilling everything that God requires of us.

Christ freed us from the bondage of the hundreds of commands in the Old Testament Law and instead calls on us to love. First John 4:7–8 declares, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” First John 5:3 continues, “This is love for God: to obey His commands. And His commands are not burdensome.”

Some use the fact that we are not under the Old Testament Law as an excuse to sin. The apostle Paul addresses this very issue in Romans. “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” (Romans 6:15). For the follower of Christ, the avoidance of sin is to be accomplished out of love for God and love for others. Love is to be our motivation. When we recognize the value of Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, our response is to be love, gratitude, and obedience. When we understand the sacrifice Jesus made for us and others, our response is to be to follow His example in expressing love to others. Our motivation for overcoming sin should be love, not a desire to legalistically obey a series of commandments. We are to obey the law of Christ because we love Him, not so that we can check off a list of commands that we successfully obeyed.

Source: http://www.gotquestions.org/law-of-C...#ixzz3Y3arZWbB

[Scrawly]

and He said to them, “Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, 19because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?” (Thus He declared all foods clean.) 20And He was saying, “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. 21“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, 22deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. 23“All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.” (Mk. 7:19-23).

[One Bad Pig]

Messianic Judaism is made up of Jews who recognize Jesus as their Messiah and Gentiles that recognize the innate Jewishness of Christianity and that we follow a Jewish Messiah. Good Messianic Judaism emphasizes the Jewishness of Christianity, not one's Jewishness, and it does not hesitate to identify as Christian. While it is true that there are some Messianics who look down on Gentiles and Gentiles who are made to be inferior, that is not how it should be.

Paul was arguing against the idea that people had a better or worse status based on which group they belong to. He was not denying that there were Jews, Gentiles, slaves, free, men, or women, but was saying that they all had equal when it comes to being in Christ. In other words, Paul was not denying the Jewishness of Christianity, but that that gives superior status to Jews.

In further response to this, I thought I'd look up some info on Messianic Judaism:

Source: A Brief History of (Modern) Messianic Judaism

Resisting assimilation and recognizing the need to remain distinctreclaim their Jewish identity they opted for a name change and began using the term Messianic Jew instead of Hebrew Christian. By this time there had been a shift in their theology as well, as Messianic Jews began to take more seriously their responsibility to live as Jews.

© Copyright Original Source

source

The bold bits are what concern me most. Rather than seeking to unite with the body of Christ, they are seeking to separate and remain distinct, even eschewing the label "Hebrew Christian." The unspecified change in theology concerns me as well. Now, the other sites I looked at tended to be less problematic, but they tend to deplore the disappearance of "Messianic Judaism" in the 7th century due to assimilation with other Christians. None of them mention the dodgy theology that such groups tended to have.

[Soyeong]

Way to completely misconstrue my point.

This looks mostly like one heaping evasion, given that the Old Covenant is the Torah. The Mosaic Covenant is part of the Torah, and is the sticking point, which I'm sure you realize.

The Old Covenant is not the Torah, but is part of it. Doing what is right in accordance with God's righteous standard is good to do and remains the same regardless of any contract to do that. If you enter into a contract to do what is right, but then you do not, then you are in violation of both your contract and of God's righteous standard.

And in Messianic Judaism, you're picking and choosing which parts of the Mosaic Covenant you want to follow (feasts) and which you do not (blood sacrifices, circumcision).

I am not pick and choosing. The Torah never commanded for all Gentiles to become Jews, so in Acts 15 they were upholding the Torah and rejecting a man-made requirement.

I'm not sure that Acts bears out this assertion. Once the followers of Jesus were forced out of the synagogues, they continued to meet together elsewhere. Since the apostles seemed to attract both Jews and God-fearers from the synagogues, there would already have been a mixture of Jew and Gentile, to which other Gentile converts would have been added.

I meant unbelieving Gentiles.

You realize that the apostles themselves (in Acts 15) were the ones who "sanitized" Christianity, yes? And there certainly were attempts to proselytize the Jews beyond then (Justin martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, for example), though they had to contend with Jewish slander.

I realize that thinking the apostles were sanitizing the Jewishness from Christianity in Acts 15 is a common misunderstanding, while the reality is that they were doing no such thing. I didn't deny that they attempted to proselytize the Jews, but rather I was saying that they removed the tools to do so effectively. Jews who were considering whether to believe Jesus was their Messiah were looking to see whether Gentiles to starting to obey the Torah, which they would have seen as confirmation of what Paul was telling them, but seeing Gentiles who were disregarding the Torah would have confirmed that Paul was teaching something foreign. Paul wanted the Gentile to keep the Torah in part to provoke the unbelieving Jews to jealousy.

Oh, I agree that there are rich teachings about the Messiah in the feasts of Israel, but they are shadows or types of what has been fulfilled in Him. And Pascha (Easter) = Passover, Pentecost = Feast of Weeks, and first fruits are offered when we celebrate the Transfiguration (August 6).

[One Bad Pig]

The Old Covenant is not the Torah, but is part of it. Doing what is right in accordance with God's righteous standard is good to do and remains the same regardless of any contract to do that. If you enter into a contract to do what is right, but then you do not, then you are in violation of both your contract and of God's righteous standard.

The Old Covenant was until John (Luke 16:16). God has established the New Covenant prophesied by Jeremiah; I am not under the Old.

I am not pick and choosing. The Torah never commanded for all Gentiles to become Jews, so in Acts 15 they were upholding the Torah and rejecting a man-made requirement.

Yes, you are. Are we required to keep the feasts in Acts 15?

I meant unbelieving Gentiles.

That makes no sense. In that case, then the Messianic Jews were in the same boat as the believing Gentiles, and there was no need for division between them.

I realize that thinking the apostles were sanitizing the Jewishness from Christianity in Acts 15 is a common misunderstanding, while the reality is that they were doing no such thing. I didn't deny that they attempted to proselytize the Jews, but rather I was saying that they removed the tools to do so effectively.

You misunderstand my point. The tools were "removed" in Acts 15, not later.

Jews who were considering whether to believe Jesus was their Messiah were looking to see whether Gentiles to starting to obey the Torah, which they would have seen as confirmation of what Paul was telling them, but seeing Gentiles who were disregarding the Torah would have confirmed that Paul was teaching something foreign. Paul wanted the Gentile to keep the Torah in part to provoke the unbelieving Jews to jealousy.

No, you're reading that into scripture. Paul thought that salvation of the Gentiles was sufficient to provoke the Jews to jealousy (Rom 11:11).

A shadow was not seen as a negative thing, but rather as a rehearsal done in anticipation of things to come.

Of course.

Jesus fulfilled some of the feasts by bringing full meaning to them, which makes them all the more important to keep, but Jesus has not yet fulfilled the Fall feasts.

Once the fullness has come, that which is but a shadow is no longer required (Heb 10).

The equivalent of Easter should be the Feast of Firstfruits and the focus of Passover should be on the Passover lamb and God bringing the Israelites out of Egypt. When I was younger, I thought Pentecost was a new holiday to commemorate God pouring out His Spirit because no one told me of its significance to the Jews before that. It's fine to celebrate the Transfiguration, but if you celebrate it instead of the God's Feasts, then you fall under the same criticism that Jesus had for the Pharisees:

Mark 7:9 And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!

You would condemn every non-messianic Jew as rejecting the commandment of God for not celebrating the feasts of the Old Covenant? Seriously?