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A Twitter Exchange about “Torah-Keepers”

I saw this post on Twitter this morning from someone I will call GRD and felt obliged to respond. I thought the content was worth preserving here in the likely case that something will eventually happen to make it disappear from Twitter.

This is an image of the tweet to which I was responding…

Of course, I disagree with the original tweet about the Sabbath and with the person complaining about Torah-Keepers. Your eternal salvation is not contingent on the Sabbath and most Torah-Keepers do not engage in scare tactics to make you believe you need to keep the commandments “or else”. Most of us are simply trying to live the way God wants us to and some of us are trying to tell other people what God says about how to live.

Some people are all fire and brimstone and trying to scare people straight. Some people are obnoxious and legalistic and all kinds of other negative adjectives, but that’s true of every religion and denomination, not just Torah-Keepers.

So, here’s how the rest of this exchange went:

Me: If you’re open to an honest conversation between brothers with an aim to understanding instead of accusations, I’d love to talk about this topic.

GRD: That depends on: 1. Do you agree with [the OP’s] statement, “There is no salvation without the 7th day Sabbath!”? 2. Can you show me my accusations?

Me: 1. No 2. That was a proposal for a conversation, not an accusation in itself.

GRD: Start a thread. Tag me. Restrict comments to just you and me. Let’s see if it flies.

Me: I believe that Torah defines sin and is God’s standard of behavior for all people, so I’m one of those “Torah-Keepers” who believe in keeping the Sabbath.

I don’t believe that anyone can earn eternal salvation by keeping the Sabbath or any other commandment.

I don’t believe that Jesus or Paul taught people not to keep Torah (aka the Law of Moses). Their words–especially those of Paul–have been twisted and misunderstood to say what they never intended.

[Some confusion about Twitter notifications not working.]

GRD: In your original tweet, you said, ‘I believe that Torah defines sin and is God’s standard of behavior for all people, so I’m one of those “Torah-Keepers” who believe in keeping the Sabbath.’

So, do you believe that the Gentiles in Romans 2:12-16, who do not have the law, but do by nature the things contained in the law, showing the work of the law written in their hearts, keep the 7th-day Sabbath?

Me: No. Paul was talking about those aspects of the law that can be discerned by observing nature and following conscience. The concept of a sabbath could be derived from natural law, but God’s Sabbath could only be revealed by Him. The same is true of almost all of God’s Law. Let me give 2 examples.

1) The need for some kind of mediator between God and Man can be reasoned out from natural law, but the identity and nature of that Mediator can only be revealed supernaturally.
2) Open homosexuals (whom Paul had just condemned as sinners) often show that they are still able to discern some right from wrong when they defend their sin by appealing to monogamy and “committed relationships”. In that respect, they “do by nature things contained in the law, showing the work of the law written in their hearts”, but they are still disobedient in other respects.

GRD: I just discovered your reply and did not get notified of it. Maybe we should follow each other & send DMs when we reply? Missing notifications gets frustrating.

What’s your take on the scripture below, since Torah observers say the New Covenant is really a REnewed Covenant?

Me: Yeah, maybe following will kick the system. Some Torah-keepers say it is a “renewed” covenant, but I don’t think Scripture supports that. Jeremiah 31, 2 Corinthians 3, and Hebrews all say “new”, not “renewed”.

As Peter warned, Paul can be very difficult to understand. Without a thorough understanding of the Torah, he is impossible.

God’s Law had to be written down because the people couldn’t keep it through the spirit alone. Torah itself says that it is blessing if you keep it and a curse if you don’t. Of course, nobody is able to keep every commandment perfectly, so it becomes a ministration of death by it’s undeniable witness of sin. Most of it is very clear in meaning.

However, by faith, by God’s grace, and by Jesus’ death and resurrection, we are spared the eternal consequences of disobedience. The Law proves we are unworthy of eternal life and condemns us to death. God’s Grace forgives our sin, sets aside that condemnation, and promises eternal life. That doesn’t nullify the Law’s ability to define sin. It just takes away the Law’s power to condemn (ministry of condemnation).

As God reforms us in his image and writes his Law on our hearts, the written Law becomes less and less useful. I think the YLT is helpful here.

9 …for if the ministration of the condemnation is glory, much more doth the ministration of the righteousness abound in glory; 10 for also even that which hath been glorious, hath not been glorious—in this respect, because of the superior glory; 11 for if that which is being made useless is through glory, much more that which is remaining is in glory.

10-11 shows that the glory of the written Law that condemns has only diminished in comparison to the greater glory of the spiritual Law. As Jeremiah 31 says, the Law isn’t done away with; it’s only transferred from stone–which can ultimately only condemn because our hearts are unable to receive it–to hearts, where it can become part of who we are, not imposed from without, but natural and instinctive as reborn children of God.

[More confusion about Twitter notifications.]

At this point, GRD decided it wasn’t worth continuing since Twitter wasn’t notifying us when the other person replied. I wish we could have continued this conversation, as it seemed like we might have been able to reach some kind of understanding. In any case, I hope he was persuaded that manyTorah-Keepers are not legalist, salvation-by-works Judaizers.

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The Gospel, the Garden, and the Golden Calf

Thematic connections between the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the Golden Calf at Mount Sinai, and the Gospel.

My wife, Paula, is reading through Exodus, and last week she noticed several parallels between the stories of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) and the Golden Calf (Exodus 32). As we talked about them, those parallels deepened and it soon became apparent that both stories had Yeshua stamped all over them. I’m sure that some of those parallels will seem obvious–temptation, disobedience, passing the buck–but others are more subtle and significant.

Helping God in His Absence?

In the Garden, Eve was tempted by the serpent in the apparent absence of God and then she tempted Adam. At Sinai, the people began to doubt when it seemed like Moses wasn’t coming back. They likely felt confused and vulnerable, perhaps even abandoned. Genesis doesn’t seem to indicate the same about Eve, but her response was similar. In both cases, the people decided not to wait for God and to take matters into their own hands. They both tried to bridge a perceived gap that God had not authorized them to bridge.

In the Garden, the serpent told Eve that she could make herself like God. If mankind was created in God’s image, telling Eve that she would be like God, knowing Good from Evil, could have been intended to make her think that this is really what God wanted for them from the beginning. They could more fully accomplish their role on earth by being more like God himself.

At Sinai, he told the people that they could make themselves an inanimate mediator to represent YHWH in the camp. Since God had provided a mediator in the person of Moses and they had been unable to receive God’s Law directly from the source, they probably thought it was reasonable to make a replacement.

They weren’t trying to replace God himself; they were just trying to help him to help them.

The Surrender of Authority

People in the Bible often wore rings as symbols of authority. A ring in the ear or nose indicated submission, while a ring on the finger indicated the bearing of authority. Recall the pierced ear of the bond servant in Exodus 21:2-6 and the signet rings of Judah and Joseph in Genesis 38:18 and Genesis 41:42.

When the people demanded that Aaron make them a replacement for Moses, he told them to take the gold rings from the ears of their wives and children to make an idol, rings that symbolized their families’ submission to their authority. I believe that Aaron told them to bring these specific items and not their signets, arm bands, and other gold objects later given for the furnishings of the Tabernacle, in order to say, “You want me to disrupt your relationship with God, so I will disrupt your relationship with your families.”

Likewise, in the Garden, humanity probably would not have been expelled if Adam had not surrendered his authority over Eve to the serpent by not protecting her and instead joining her in eating of the forbidden fruit. In both stories, the people rebelled and their spiritual coverings aided and joined them.

Mankind might not have needed a savior and Israel might not have needed an earthly High Priest and priestly caste if they had not surrendered their authority to a false god.

Hiding from God

When God came to visit Adam and Eve in the Garden, they tried to hide themselves because of their shame. When he confronted them, Adam tried to blame Eve, and Eve tried to blame the serpent.

When Moses returned from Mount Sinai, the people couldn’t hide. God told him, “I have seen this people,” (Exodus 32:9) and Moses could hear the sound of their partying from all the way up the mountain. However, Aaron did try to shift the blame. First he blamed the people. “You know how these people are determined to do evil,” he told Moses in verse 22. Then he blamed the fire and gold in verse 24: “I threw it into the fire and out came this calf!”

Of course, nobody can really hide from God, and nobody can escape the consequences of their actions. It seems at first that Aaron got away without punishment for his role in the golden calf incident, but that’s not really true.

Cascading Consequences

God told Adam, “In the day that you eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17) and he told Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book…In the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them” (Exodus 32:33-34). These statements continue to puzzle theologians today because these threats don’t appear to have been literally carried out. Adam lived more than 900 years and Aaron lived almost 40 years after their respective sins.

God did punish the people at the time of their sin. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden by an angel bearing a flaming sword and the Israelites at the center of the calf worship were killed by sword-bearing Levites. God condemned Adam and Eve to a life of struggle and eventual death and he sent a plague among the Israelites, but neither of these really fulfill the letter of his promise.

There are several concepts that aren’t immediately apparent in the plain text and will have to wait for another article. I’m going to focus on one of those ideas for now: A dramatic change in role is analogous to death and resurrection.

As the first man, all of humanity is blessed and cursed through Adam. He wasn’t only expelled from the garden and condemned to die himself, but every person since is also condemned to die because of what he did. On the day that Adam ate the fruit, his role in the world changed from God’s governor to a mediator of death to all humanity.

When Aaron took the authority of all the men of Israel in order to create a thing that could never act as a true mediator, he condemned himself to occupying that role. This was a mixed curse, of course. It’s a great blessing to serve God by leading his people in worship, but Aaron also died to his prior role as Moses’ prophet, giving up any chance of an ordinary life, and was metaphorically resurrected as a mediator for the whole nation.

An Insufficient Mediator

Unfortunately, neither Adam nor Aaron were capable of finally undoing the damage they had done. They had both created their roles by sinning, by becoming imperfect, and that which is imperfect can never make itself perfect again. Adam and Aaron both presided over what Paul called a “ministry of death”. They could never do anything more than guide their people until inevitable death.

Ultimate restoration required a different kind of mediator, one without sin, who had never caused the people to stumble nor participated in their rebellion. The stories of the sin in the Garden and the sin of the Golden Calf are purposely told in such a way to highlight these parallels in order to illustrate mankind’s need for a perfect mediator and redeemer in the person of Yeshua.

He filled the role of God and Moses by coming down from Heaven to observe and confront the sin of mankind.

He filled the role of Eve and the Hebrews by living as an ordinary human subject to trials, temptations, joys, and sorrows.

He filled the role of Adam and Aaron by taking authority over mankind and the responsibility of their sins onto his shoulders through the cross. Like them, he died to one life and resurrected to another, but the great and essential difference is that his death was undeserved and his resurrection complete. Adam and Aaron deserved their punishments, while Yeshua did not, and so he will remain forever a perfect High Priest and Kinsman Redeemer.

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What Did Jesus Mean by “Fulfill”?

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Matthew 5:17-18 ESV

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
Matthew 5:17-18 ESV

Torah-keepers point to these verses as a primary text proving the ongoing validity of the Law of Moses (aka Torah), while anti-Torah Christians point to them as proof the Law has passed away, been nailed to the cross, superseded…you get the idea. Whatever word they choose to use, it amounts to the same as “abolish”.

In light of the numerous biblical passages claiming that the Law will never pass away, it seems the burden of proof must lie on those who claim that Yeshua here said the opposite. This is the typical argument: Yeshua said the Law would pass away when the Law was fulfilled, and he fulfilled the law on the cross, therefore the Law has passed away. The obvious counter is that Yeshua did not say “when the Law was fulfilled.” He said “nothing will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (or “fulfilled” in some translations).
What did he mean by “all”?

I see four possible meanings: all of the Law, all of the Prophets, the passing away of all of heaven and earth, and the completion of Yeshua’s mission on earth.

  1. All of the Law. What does it mean for all of the Law to be accomplished? Whatever it means, Yeshua’s death and resurrection could not have done it because decades after the resurrection, in Romans 13:8, Paul wrote that believers loving one another continue to fulfill the Law. Some will say that he was referring to a greater, unwritten Law of God that is superior to the Torah (aka Law of Moses), but in the very next verse, Paul wrote that he was specifically talking about the Torah or at the very least, the Ten Commandments which is at its core. All of the New Testament epistles are full of instruction based on the commandments of Torah. Why would the Apostles continue to instruct first century believers on how to observe and fulfill those commandments if Yeshua had nullified them by fulfilling them?
  2. All of the Prophets. It’s trivial to show that some prophecies in the Old Testament have not yet been fulfilled. For example, in Deuteronomy 30 Moses prophesied that Israel will repent from their rebellion against God and be fully restored to the land of Israel where God will circumcise their hearts and the hearts of their children so that they would keep all of the commandments given by Moses. There have been two partial returns of Israel to the land, once in the time of Nehemiah and Ezra, and once in the twentieth century. In neither case was there any significant repentance. In the former case, God returned the people to exile. Today, the state of Israel hosts some of the world’s largest celebrations of rebellion against God. There are numerous prophecies of Israel’s eventual repentance and restoration to the land, and none of them have been fulfilled.*
  3. The End of Heaven and Earth. As I write this article, I am flying through the air at more than 30,000 feet above the surface of the earth. Outside the windows of this A330, I see sun, sky, clouds, mountains, and many miles of West Texas desert. I know that when I am home tonight, I will be able to look up in the sky and see the moon and thousands of stars. I hope you’ll trust me when I say that the heavens and the earth have not yet passed away. In fact, Revelation 20:11 says that they won’t pass away until the Great White Throne Judgment immediately prior to the final resurrection. If Yeshua meant that the Law would pass away with the heavens and the earth, then it nothing in the Law will pass until God is ready to judge every person who has ever lived.
  4. Yeshua’s Mission on Earth. This is probably what most Christians believe Yeshua meant when he said “until all is accomplished”. When he said “It is finished” on the cross, that was the end of the Law. However, as I pointed out above, Paul said that believers continue to fulfill the Law of Moses after Yeshua’s death by obeying the command in Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. James also repeated this command, even stating that it was from Scripture at a time when the only Scriptures available were the Old Testament, so it is very unlikely that he was referring to the Gospels. Many scholars believe that James’ letter was the first of all the New Testament writings.

As you can see, none of the possible interpretations of “till all be accomplished” in Matthew 5:18 stand up when the whole of Scripture is considered. According to Paul, the Law wasn’t abolished at the cross. All Old Testament prophecy has not been fulfilled. The heavens and the earth are still here.

In Matthew 5:17, Yeshua said that he had come to fulfill the Law, and I think we have to believe that he did that or else he failed in his mission. In the very next verse, he said that not one jot or tittle will pass from the Law until all is accomplished, which can only mean that fulfilling the Law does not annul it or cause anything to pass from it. If both Paul and James taught that believers fulfill the Law by obeying it, why should we assume that Yeshua meant something different when he said he came to fulfill it?

One of the fundamental principles of Bible study is to let the Bible define its own terms. Of course, tradition and historical context can also be important, but ultimately, every biblical concept must be understood by how that concept is used and explained in the Bible itself.

What does the Bible say it means to “fulfill the Law”?

The Greek word translated “fulfill” in v17 is πληρόω (pleroo). It is often used to describe the fulfillment of a prophecy. The Torah is full of prophecies about the Messiah (Joseph’s entire life story is prophetic, for example), and Yeshua certainly fulfilled it in that way.

However, it is also frequently used to describe keeping the requirements of a commandment as when Yeshua, Paul, James, and John said that if we keep the commandments, we are loving one another, and if we are loving one another, then we will also be keeping (fulfilling) the commandments because the commandments are instruction in how to love. (See John 14:15, 14:21, Romans 8:4, 13:8-9, 2 Corinthians 10:6, Galatians 5:14, James 2:8, 1 John 5:2-2, and 2 John 1:6.)

Pleroo/filled-full is also used to describe something being filled up or made complete. Yeshua was filled with wisdom in Luke 2:40, valleys are filled in Luke 3:5, joy is made full in John 15:11, and Ananias’ heart is filled by Satan in Acts 5:3.

In no case does pleroo ever mean to nullify, cancel, or make anything “of no effect”. When applied to God’s commandments as given through Moses, it can only mean one of three things: 1) Fulfill their prophetic meaning, 2) Obey them, or 3) Fill or restore them with their intended meaning. Based on Yeshua’s own words throughout the Gospels and the Apostles teachings, “I have come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets” in Matthew 5:17 probably means all three, but it definitely cannot mean that Yeshua came to abolish, nullify, make obsolete…and any other synonym that people might use to get around Yeshua’s plain words in verse 18.

Our task from here is to reexamine the erroneous interpretations of verses that talk about “blotting out the handwriting of ordinances” and “that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away”. See here for more thoughts on this and related topics: Objections to Keeping Torah.

* Since the Deuteronomy 30 prophecy also clearly states that the result of Israel’s circumcised hearts at some point in the future is obedience to Torah, God must still be pleased by his people obeying Moses’ instructions.

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No One Can Serve Two Masters?

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Matthew 6:24 ESV

In Genesis 24, Abraham ordered his servant, Eliezer, to swear by YHWH that he would find a wife for Isaac from among Abraham’s people in Haran.

And Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had, “Put your hand under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell, but will go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac.”
Genesis 24:2-4 ESV

When Eliezer met Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s nephew Bethuel, he thanked God for guiding him.

The man bowed his head and worshiped the LORD and said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the LORD has led me in the way to the house of my master’s kinsmen.”
Genesis 24:26-27 ESV

Eliezer followed the orders of his master, Abraham, and of his God, YHWH.

However, in Matthew 6:24, Yeshua said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” At first, it sounds as if Yeshua was saying that nobody should ever have any master except God himself, but clearly that’s not what he meant.

The word for “master” in this verse is kurios, which means the same as the English word “master”. It can refer to a teacher, employer, slave owner, nobleman…pretty much anyone who has authority over something. In Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, and other places, Paul tells slaves to obey their human masters (kurios). In 1 Peter 3:6, Peter holds Sarah up as an example for women because she obeyed her husband and called him lord (kurios). Since God established the authority of judges, husbands, and others, clearly Yeshua didn’t mean “No one can serve two masters” in a strictly literal sense.

This is another of many times that Yeshua employed hyperbole as a teaching tool. The immediate context of his statement was the pursuit of material wealth. Just a few seconds earlier, in verse 19, he said “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth”, and he didn’t mean anyone to take this in a hyperliteral sense either, because it’s not a sin to acquire wealth. Once again, Abraham is a case in point.

The key to understanding what Yeshua meant is in the verses between:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Matthew 6:21-23 ESV

Do you see the world as land to be exploited for every grain of wheat and every lump of coal you can extract? Or do you see it as the property of a higher master entrusted to your care for its health and prosperity?

Eliezer served Abraham by seeking out the best possible wife for Isaac, ultimately serving God by being faithful to his charge. A disciple serves God by serving his master. A wife serves God by serving her husband and caring for her children.

There is no conflict at all between serving God and seeking the wellbeing of one’s family, employers, neighbors, and country, because the wellbeing of all people is tied to their conformity to God’s will. On the other hand, if any authority commands us to disobey God’s clear instructions, then we are obligated to obey God rather than man.

But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men.”
Acts 5:29 ESV

It’s one thing to submit to taxation that we know will be used for wicked purposes; it’s another thing entirely to obey orders to carry out that wickedness with our own hands. It’s one thing for a wife to submit to a criminal husband; it’s another to be an active participant in a criminal enterprise. Where exactly you draw that line in your own circumstances is between you and God.

YHWH is the Creator of everything and everyone and remains the ultimate authority over all people and relationships. So long as we do everything for his ultimate glory and purposes, we serve him by serving others in whatever role he has placed us. If we elevate our own desires–or those of anyone else!–above God’s, we also elevate ourselves above God, rejecting him as Master.

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Matthew 7:21-23 ESV

For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
Deuteronomy 4:24 ESV

Related video…

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Man and Woman in the Image of God

Man and woman together were created in the image of God.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27 ESV

Scripture never explains why God created mankind, but there are some clues we can discern from the Creation narrative.

  • We were created in his image, so our purpose requires being like him in some important ways.
  • Our first command was to “be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth and subdue it”, so our purpose requires a large enough number of us to fill the earth and be its master. (See Be Fruitful and Multiply.)
  • Adam’s first task was to inventory all the animals so that he would know he was unique and needed a helper of his own kind.
  • Eve’s first task was to assist Adam in his role as the keeper of God’s garden.

Humanity’s mission as God’s stewards over the earth requires us to act as his agents in the world, to be god-like to the plants and animals, much as Moses was to be like a god to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1). To fill that role adequately, a man needs a wife, and through that relationship, together they act in another of God’s capacities: they create more people.

God created Adam first, and he was the only man to have been created directly in God’s image through divine action rather than through procreation. Even Yeshua, who is God in the flesh, had a body built cell-by-cell within the body of a woman. All others, including Eve, are created in God’s image by being created in Adam’s image.

Moses’ was deliberate and precise in his wording of Genesis 1:27. Consider this very literal translation:

God created the man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The man in this verse is literally “the man”, ha adam in Hebrew, not “mankind”. While Scripture sometimes refers to mankind collectively as adam, only the first man is ever called Adam as an individual. Throughout Genesis 1 and 2, when Moses referred to the individual characters, he calls the man adam and the woman ishah. (The woman isn’t called “Eve” until the end of chapter 3.)

The Hebrew words used for male and female in v27 are also illustrative. Zakar, the Hebrew for male, comes from a root that means “remembered” or “memorial”, and what is an image but an imprinted memory of something else? Nekevah, the Hebrew for female, is derived from nekev, which means “to pierce”. It might be derived from the wearing of rings, especially in the context of betrothal, or it might be a sexual reference, as crude as that seems to our Western sensibilities. It’s a more functionally oriented word and describes more of who the woman is rather than who she resembles.

Adam was created from dust and the breath of God, while Eve was created from Adam. In 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 Paul pointed out that all mankind as a whole bears the image of God, but men more specifically are that image: “…he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”

Despite all this, the very first task God put to Adam was to learn how incomplete he was without Ishah.

God is neither male nor female, but he has something of both the masculine and the feminine within him; else how could Eve have been created from Adam, who was created in the image of God? When the first part of the substance of Eve was extracted from Adam, both feminine and masculine traits, which he had inherited from God, were passed on to Eve, but in a very different balance. Both men and women have masculine and feminine attributes, and in this they both bear God’s image, but each in different ways and degrees

For example, Adam is the law-giver and protector (inadequate as he might have been in both of those roles) and Eve is the mother and helper. But they are only able to be fully God’s agents in Creation when they are together, not as man and man or woman and woman, but Adam and Eve. They are complements, not Lego blocks that can be swapped out for each other at will.

By God’s original design, a man is unable to be a woman and a woman is unable to be a man. They can fill in for each other in a crippled, temporary sort of way, but one will never be complete without the other. If either disregards their role for any length of time, like any well-designed machine, malfunctions will begin to accumulate in every system: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. A person can compensate for that damage for a time through drugs, entertainment and distractions, but that won’t stop the degeneration. It only hides it, enabling a cascade of failures until the whole person is drowning in utter misery.

Hollywood, the legacy media, the National Education Association, and Washington, D.C. are all intent on convincing the world that the only loving thing to do is to encourage injured people to go on destroying their lives. I can’t help but believe they know the damage they are causing and that they actually hate all those they claim to love.

For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Romans 13:9 ESV

True love isn’t making people feel good about this moment at the expense of the rest of their lives. It’s teaching them to keep God’s commandments, including those that concern sexuality and “gender roles”. If you love your neighbor, you must support the Biblical example of marriage as male and female joined together and oppose the world’s twisted counterfeit.

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What Is Marriage?

Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24

Some topics are more personal than others and tend to trigger more emotional reactions. Food and holidays, for example. Or “is that dress white and gold or blue and black” and, of course, marriage and sexual relations.

Although the Bible has a lot to say about marriage, it never explicitly answers the question, “What is marriage?” Probably for the same reason it doesn’t give a precise definition for travel, war, and sacrifice. Everyone in the Bible’s original audience already knew what marriage was, so why waste expensive paper and ink explaining it.

Our world, on the other hand, has become so full of confusion that we need to spell out even the most basic ideas. So, let me begin at the beginning…

Adam gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but the man could not find a helper fit for him. So YHWH God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that YHWH God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman (ishah), because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis 2:20-24

This passage gives us the three most important elements of the definition of marriage.

  1. Marriage exists to help a man fulfill his assigned role in Creation.
  2. Marriage is meant to be a lifelong union of a man and woman.
  3. Marriage was instituted by God from the very beginning.

Marriage Exists to Help Man Fulfill His Mission

Although Genesis 1:28 records that the first collective mission of mankind was to be a caretaker over the earth and all life on it, Adam’s first individual assignment was to evaluate all of the other creatures to see if one of them might serve as a special helper for him. Of course, God knew that none of them would, but he had Adam go through this process so that the man would also know. When Adam was satisfied that none of the animals would meet his requirements, God created a woman, whom Adam named Eve.

Adam and most other creatures were created from the ground, but Eve was created directly from Adam. God didn’t create Eve from Adam’s head or foot, but from his side, showing that she wasn’t supposed to rule over him nor be his slave, but was supposed to be a peer. The woman was to be more like the man than any other creature in heaven or earth, a counterpart who would rule over and care for the earth together with him.

Eve wasn’t created to be exactly like Adam, though, or else God would have created another man and made them hermaphrodites or capable of parthenogenesis. Woman shares in the collective purpose of mankind as God’s stewards on earth, but each woman does so primarily by assisting her husband in his individual mission.

For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
1 Corinthians 11:8-9 ESV

I know that doesn’t sit well with many people, but it is the plain teaching of Scripture. Eve was created specifically to be a helper for Adam, and Paul asserts that this principle applies within all marriages.

While the original task of humanity was to be a caretaker of God’s creation, the Fall necessitated a change in mission parameters. Our task now is to expand the Kingdom of God through procreation, evangelism, establishing justice, and generally doing good works according to God’s standards of justice and good. How each individual and family participates in this mission varies in as many ways as there are individuals and families, but you can know this with absolute certainty: A woman’s divinely appointed mission will never be at odds with her husband’s.

All kinds of things can prevent us from fulfilling marriage’s full purpose: illness and other circumstances that might be out of our control, the husband isn’t fulfilling his calling, or the wife isn’t fulfilling hers. However, our circumstances and failings can’t change the reason God created marriage.

Marriage Is a Lifelong Union

Genesis 2:24 says that the relationship of Adam and Eve is to be a pattern for all marriages, that a new marriage is inaugurated when a man leaves his father and mother to become one flesh with his wife.

“One flesh” implies that they are united in a way that would be painful and unnatural to separate and Yeshua confirmed this understanding when he said “They are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (See Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9.)

“Leaves his father and mother” doesn’t necessarily mean that he physically leaves their dwelling place. The Scriptural example is for extended families normally to live close together, frequently on the same land, and obedience to God’s instructions for the use of the land in Israel requires this. What this statement actually means is that the man steps outside of the nuclear family unit into which he was born and creates a new family still under the broad umbrella of his father’s clan and tribe.

This also doesn’t mean that marriage cannot be ended. God hates both divorce and death, but both happen, whether for good or bad, and both end a marriage. I’ll write more about this another time, but the Torah, Prophets, Yeshua, and Apostles all discuss when it is and is not appropriate to end a marriage. Divorce should be avoided because it breaks something that God didn’t want to be broken, but it is still possible.

Marriage Was Instituted by God

From the very beginning, God intended mankind to be male and female and to be joined in a union that he uses as a metaphor of his relationship with Israel.

Like the Sabbath, marriage was created for mankind’s benefit. Both parties, as well as their children, benefit from the arrangement, especially if it is conducted according to all of God’s instructions. However, also like the Sabbath, God created marriage because it suited his purposes. Every good master provides his servants with the tools necessary to accomplish his assigned tasks. The servant benefits because his job is made easier and more enjoyable. The master benefits because the servant is able to do a better job with greater economy.

Also like the Sabbath, marriage is not a man-made custom and man doesn’t get to define it. People today insist that they can make marriage whatever they want it to be: a man and another man, a woman and herself, and every other perversion one can imagine. Yet, Yeshua said that marriage is “what God has joined together”, so there can be no real question on this score. God makes the rules, not us.

Marriage was the very first government and was created by God to serve as the core of ministry, labor, justice, and civilization. It is a model of God and of our relationship to God and, as God is one (Hebrew echad), man and woman are to be one in spirit and flesh. Marriage benefits us and was created to help us in the work for which we were created, but ultimately both we and marriage belong to God and we have a responsibility to him to protect and honor it.

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Becoming Antifragile in Faith

Becoming resilient and antifragile in faith

In recent months I’ve had several conversations and noticed numerous posts on social media in which someone expressed discouragement about the state of the Torah movement and a general sense of being disconnected from other believers. I’ve felt it too.

Geographical isolation. Ideological conflict. Conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts. Scandals in leadership. Apathy in the ranks. Congregations rise up, split, and fade away. Many are sick or have lost loved ones. Some are drifting back into celebrating the pagan days and seasons they had once left behind.

Worldwide, it seems that we are under spiritual attack as a community. I want you to know that it’s not just you. It’s everyone. Most especially, it’s each one of us separately.

Remember that “Satan is like a prowling lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Lions don’t attack the herd; they attack the weak and alone. So, while we are united as a single Body, there’s not a lot he can do to us spiritually. Instead, he beats us down with distractions, physical assaults, financial troubles, and interpersonal drama. He tries to separate us from the herd to make us vulnerable.

There’s a concept that Nassim Taleb calls “antifragility”. If you haven’t read his book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, I recommend it. The basic idea is that some things become stronger when subjected to stress and chaos. Silver and gold are purified by fire. Muscles are built by progressively greater strain. Genetic weakness is culled from packs and herds by droughts and harsh winters, making the whole group stronger.

This was part of God’s purpose in the ten tests of Abraham. By threatening his family with abandonment, war, kidnapping, etc., God was molding Abram into Abraham, the “Great Father” into “Father of a Great Multitude”. It was also part of the point of the tests of Job, but note that Job was tested by Satan, not by God directly. Satan is just another tool of God’s plan, after all. He wanted Job to fail, but God knew that Job would prevail and become stronger than ever if he persevered and maintained his faith in God.

That’s what’s happening to us right now.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
James 1:2-4

I believe most of us are convinced that there are greater trials coming for all believers in Yeshua. The world hates us and that hatred is becoming more open all the time. (Would the Grammys have featured a worship service to Satan thirty years ago?) Nearly every time we get together, the question of “how do we prepare for persecution” comes up. Well, here is the first and most important thing we can do: Count our current trials as joy and persevere in our faith and unity. In other words…

Become antifragile in faith and community.

When Satan pushes us down, we need to reach up to God and out to each other. When we’re sick or hurting or unemployed or stressed out, pray, ask for prayer, and ask for assistance. Make it a habit to resist Satan by closing ranks against him, not melting away. When the lion tries to drive one of us from the herd, we circle around that one.

We are no longer strictly individuals. We are the body of Messiah. When whoever hosts your local home fellowship is temporarily overwhelmed, is your living room free, even if its just for a single week? If a family in your community is sick, do you or someone else have a vehicle and a couple of free hours to make shopping runs, cook meals, etc.? When one person is hurt, your community probably has numerous shoulders to lean on, yours included.

If you’re not sure what needs to happen, don’t be afraid to ask. If asking the person who needs help isn’t an option for whatever reason, ask someone else. Don’t assume that nothing is wrong nor that there is nothing you can do. I frequently rely on my wife and a few others to help me understand what people need.

I have a few recommendations to help you and your community become more antifragile. Please understand that I am primarily addressing home fellowships, partly because that’s how our local community works. However, there’s a bigger reason: I am convinced that the standard church model is a dead end.

First, take ownership.

We are supposed to be the body of Christ, but most churches can never be more than a paraplegic because 10% of the body does all the work, while the other 90% is mostly just “present”. Your congregation might not be that bad–I’m sure many aren’t–but if 100% of your people aren’t taking an active role in the community, then there’s still work to be done.

The body of Christ is not an entertainment venue to which we can arrive at the scheduled time, watch the show, and go home, expecting someone else to make everything happen and clean up the mess afterwards. The body of Christ is you and the person next to you. It is a collection of relationships between active, functional members.

If we want things to happen, we each need to be prepared to make them happen. That doesn’t mean that any one person has to do everything. Rather, it means that nobody should have to do everything.

If nobody is available to host fellowship and you have a clean, peaceful home with sufficient space, then consider making it available. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It just needs to be safe and sufficient for the purpose. If you want to enjoy the meal at fellowship, then bring something to share. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy, just something appropriate.

Do your gatherings need paper plates, utensils, napkins, etc.? Chairs and tables? If you are able to provide any of those things, do it. Same for music, teaching, prayer, etc. Is there a worship song you’d like to teach everyone? Is something weighing on your heart? If you aren’t willing to make some things happen, don’t expect anyone else to either.

If your community has leadership, whether recognized or de facto, make sure that they know that your resources are available and that you want to help. If it either doesn’t have leadership or the leaders aren’t leading, you might need to make that offer to the community at large. You don’t need anyone’s permission to host a Bible study or holiday event at your home. Just be careful that you aren’t causing more of a problem than you’re trying to solve. Which brings me to my next recommendation…

Second, cultivate relationships.

We’re mostly facing “First World” problems right now, but that will change eventually. If we want to be able to survive real persecution, we’re going to need relationships and community, not a pastoral leadership team who manages everything from a central office. Those relationships start in more tranquil times, like right now. It will be too late if we wait until we’re shut out of the grocery stores and hospitals. If you haven’t heard from someone in a while, reach out. Invite each other over to share a meal and play some games. Go to the park and throw a frisbee around. Share your hobbies.

We are under assault and we are scattered, sometimes with hundreds of miles between, but the proper response is not to wait for someone else to act and let entropy have its way in the meantime. Whatever your biggest problem is right now, someone you know might have a way to help, and vice versa. At the very least, we can commiserate together instead of drifting apart.

As a body, we need to be looking for ways to respond to the attacks of Satan by becoming stronger in each other, because we will never be stronger by ourselves. We need each other. We need to cultivate love and commitment for each other before those things are put to the fire.

Above all, remember who we serve and why, and that each individual organ’s primary calling is to be part of the body of Messiah. (Some things are part of a body, while other things just pass through. Be the former, not the latter.) All we do is for the Kingdom of God, not the fiefdom of me. Kingdoms are necessarily communal, and we can’t survive this current season, let alone any future persecutions, if we are not disciplined and intentional about maintaining that community.

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The Chiasm Course

Common Sense Bible Study and The Chiasm Course

Have you ever been reading the Bible and think to yourself, “Hey! Didn’t I just read that a couple of verses up?”, again and again in the same passage, like a literary déjà vu? God’s Word doesn’t waste words, so you can be sure that there’s a reason for that repetition.

Do any of these questions sound familiar?

  • Why does this passage say the same thing that last passage just said?
  • Why does it feel like this same series of events just happened to someone else in the story?
  • Why is this weird statement in the middle of a completely different topic?
  • Why is one story sandwiched in the middle of another one?
  • Why does this story seem to end up in the same place it began?
  • Why does this one phrase keep repeating in a passage?

If you’ve asked yourself some of these questions while reading your Bible, there’s a good chance that you were in the middle of a chiasm!

What’s a Chiasm?

A chiasm is a literary device used to highlight connections between different events or ideas or to highlight a central point in a story. Many ancient cultures used chiasms in their literature, but they are especially prevalent in the Hebrew Bible.

Since we know that everything in the Bible is there for us to learn something, we can also know that these structures aren’t there just by accident. Chiasms are like special gems hidden in a diamond mine, just waiting to be revealed, and I want to help you find and understand them!

The Chiasm Course represents hundreds of hours of study and preparation! You might think that something like this would cost at least two or three hundred dollars, but I’m not trying to get rich from this. The Chiasm Course is just one of the benefits you get as a member of Common Sense Bible Study for only $9.99/month or $99.99/year (a 17% discount)!

There are literary patterns embedded in the text throughout the Bible, and with a little patience and careful reading, you can find them and add new dimensions to passages that used to seem flat!

You don’t need a degree in ancient languages or any other college or seminary degree for that matter. This 5-part course will teach you how to find and connect related statements within a Bible passage to reveal new facets of meaning and make your Bible study more meaningful, more fascinating, and even more fun!

The Chiasm Course is just one of the many benefits of being part of the Common Sense Bible Study community, including…

  • A Sabbath to YHWH, a course answering the What, Why, Who, and When questions of the weekly Sabbath.
  • Future courses on how to read and understand the Bible. Who wrote it? Why? And who decided that this book stays and that one goes?
  • Weekly live, interactive Bible studies with a focus on practical application. The Bible gives us rules for living, so why don’t we live by them?
  • Moderated group conversations on all kinds of Bible topics. Everyone’s coming from a different place and has different questions. We’ll try to answer them together.
  • Quests and challenges to find biblical answers and practical advice for fellow believers facing real difficulties.

Paid members of Common Sense Bible Study get access to all features and courses!

Frequently Asked Questions about The Chiasm Course

  • What is a chiasm? A chiasm is a literary structure used by ancient writers in many cultures in order to emphasize a central point and make connections between different parts of the text. You’ll learn more details about what they are and how they’re used in the Bible in the course.
  • Do I need to know Hebrew or Greek to take this course? Not at all! Most chiasms have more to do with the ideas expressed in the text than how a word looks or sounds.
  • Can I get college credit for this course? Unfortunately, no. Even though this course can be a little technical at times, it is not accredited for any college or seminary credit.
  • Do I need to have a degree from a Bible college to understand this course? Nope. I have tried hard to make this material accessible to anyone with a good vocabulary and a basic knowledge of the Bible.
  • Aren’t chiasms just imaginary or accidental patterns in the text? Not everything that looks like a chiasm really is one, so we have to be careful not to add meaning that the authors didn’t intend, but chiasms are real and recognized by scholars of ancient literature from all over the world.
  • Are chiasms secret codes hidden in the Bible? Not really. Chiasms are hidden only in the sense that most people don’t know that they’re supposed to be looking for them.
  • Is this course available in any languages besides English? Not yet! If you know someone who would be interested in helping translate it, please let me know.
  • What other literary structures are used in the Bible? The Bible is a collection of smaller books that use narrative, poetry, pun, parallelism, anaphora, and more. It would probably take a full college course (or more!) to cover them all.
  • Does this work with any version of the Bible? Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Literal translations work best because they are closer to the Hebrew text. Very informal or paraphrase-type translations like The Living Bible or The Message do a good job of making the Bible accessible to new readers, but they make it harder to see patterns that were in the original texts. I recommend using a literal translation like the English Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, or the New King James Version.

Can’t I just get the same information for free on YouTube? Most of those videos are only introductions to the idea of chiasms or are of a single short lecture. You could probably get all of the same information from those free videos, but you’ll have to wade through ten times more material, and almost none of it will be focused on teaching you how to find and understand chiasms in the Bible. The Chiasm Course will get you there faster and with fewer irrelevant detours.

If you’re still not sure about paying for The Chiasm Course and the other courses at Common Sense Bible Study or you just can’t afford it right now, you can still join the community and participate in the forums, weekly online Bible studies, and special events for free!

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The Law of God vs the Law of Moses

The Law of God vs the Law of Moses. A study on how the Torah applies to Christians.

There’s a growing dispensationalist belief among Christians that the Law of Moses is distinctly different from the Law of God and even that the Law of Moses is in some ways incompatible with the Law of God. I call this idea metanomianism, since I haven’t found another term for it.

The Law of Moses, in the metanomian view, is the rules that were given by God to the Israelites in Sinai through Moses. The Law of God is deeper principles that aren’t necessarily written down anywhere, but are reflected in aspects of the Law of Moses, as well as the teachings and lives of other Biblical figures, such as Abraham and David.

Accordingly–again, in the metanomian view–the Law of God finds its most explicit treatment in the Sermon on the Mount and the epistles of Paul. Even so, it’s really impossible to express the Law of God in words with any real precision, because it’s too big and too deep to be neatly defined and boxed up by the human mind.

At first glance, that doesn’t seem too far off. The Law of Moses really doesn’t define every possible wrong and right. It was written to encourage people to take what is written and apply it to situations that aren’t directly addressed. That’s even more true today. They didn’t have computers and cars in the Bronze Age, so there are things that we have to think about today that never would have crossed Moses’ mind. Likewise, they had to worry about things that very few people today will ever encounter.

The instructions that God gave to the ancient Israelites in the wilderness were tailored to that time and place. If the Exodus and the wilderness wandering happened today, Moses might have given some instruction on traffic control and digital rights management. Our job is to extrapolate modern application from God’s ancient instructions.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what metanomian teachers mean when they say that God’s Law is different than the Mosaic Law. The devil is in the details, as they say.

Notice that the first paragraph at the top of the article includes the phrases “distinctly different” and “aspects of the Law of Moses”. That’s because metanomians believe that only parts of the Law of Moses are derived from the eternal and immutable Law of God and the rest consists of temporary measures added just to keep Israel separate from other nations or as object lessons about human frailty and substitutionary atonement. Some requirements of the Mosaic Law might actually be contrary to the Law of God and only given as corrective measures for temporary problems, like stealing from someone in order to teach them that stealing is wrong.

According to metanomian doctrine none of the Law of Moses applies to a Gentile Christian. Not the dietary laws, not the sacrifices, not the sexual morals, and not even the Ten Commandments. None of it applies. We are under a different law now, sometimes called the Law of Christ, Law of the Spirit, or Law of Life.

There are some variations on metanomianism, as there are with all doctrines.

Some metanomians will say that the Mosaic Law still applies to Jews, while others insist it doesn’t apply to anyone anymore. Some people will insist that the Ten Commandments apply (except for the Sabbath, for whatever reason). Others will say the “moral” laws apply while the “ceremonial” laws don’t. Dividing the law into moral, ceremonial, and civil is an invention of men, though, and if a person is rigorously consistent in their doctrine, he will have to throw it all out or none of it.

This allows a metanomian theologian to say that New Testament passages encouraging believers to keep God’s Law aren’t talking about the Law of Moses, but the Law of Christ or the Law of the Spirit or whatever other term they choose to substitute. When John writes that “sin is transgression of the law”, he’s not talking about the Law of Moses, but God’s Law, which was never fully written down.

Metanomianism says that any resemblance between this law and that of Moses is due to their common source in God, not to their actually being the same law. We are not to commit murder because James said not to, not because God told Moses “Thou shalt not murder”. We are not to be sexually immoral because Paul said so, not Moses.

Read the following verses from a metanomian perspective and you can see how a Christian might completely reject the Law of Moses and still believe that he’s keeping God’s Law:

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
John 15:10 ESV

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.
1 John 5:3 ESV

Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea.
Revelation 12:17 ESV

But there are three very big problems with this idea.

The first problem is that the Bible itself equates the Law of Moses with the Law of God.

Not only the Bible, but Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period, and writers of the early Church all consistently refer to the Law of Moses as the Law of God or the Law of the Lord. This makes it very unlikely that the Apostles had anything other than the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) in mind when they wrote of the Law of God.

Let me give you some examples from all three categories:

The Old Testament

  • Joshua 24:6 describes how Joshua completed the book of Deuteronomy, calling it “the book of the Law of God”.
  • 1 Chronicles 16:40 references the sacrificial laws of Leviticus contained in “the Law of YHWH”.
  • 2 Chronicles 17:9 mentions the “book of the Law of YHWH”, from which a team of Levites taught the people of Judah. There is no question that this refers to the Law of Moses.
  • 2 Chronicles 31:4 refers to tithes and portions of offerings due to the Levites as specified in “the Law of YHWH”. Those instructions are in Leviticus and Numbers, the Law of Moses.
  • Nehemiah 8-9 describes how the Levites read from the books of “the Law of God” and “the Law of YHWH” in a clear reference to the written Law of Moses.

The Deuterocanon and Apocrypha

  • 1 Maccabees 2:26 says that Mattathias was zealous for the “Law of God” when he objected to the Syrians defiling the altar, forcing Jews to eat pork, and forbidding circumcision.
  • The Testament of Levi 9 says that Isaac taught to Levi the “Law of the Lord”, including the entire sacrificial system. In 13:2-3, Levi encourages teaching children to read the “Law of God” because knowing the “Law of the Lord” brings honor. You can’t read an unwritten law.
  • Tobit 1:3 says that the feasts of ascent detailed in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers are in “the Law of the Lord for Israel”.

The Early Church

  • In his Homilies on the Gospel and First Epistle of John, St. Augustine repeatedly calls the written commandments the “Law of God”.
  • In Against Heresies, Irenaeus paraphrased Yeshua from Matthew 15:6 to say “Why do you make void the Law of God by reason of your tradition?” The specific commandment in the original statement is “Honor your Father and your Mother” from Exodus 20:12. Irenaeus repeatedly equates the Mosaic Law to the Law of God or the Law of the Lord.

Of course, many of the church fathers completely rejected the Law of Moses and said that God had replaced it with a new law–Marcion is the most infamous of them–but this shows that they still recognized the Mosaic Law as God’s Law and not something separate. Others might have believed this same idea that the Law of Moses wasn’t really the Law of God, but Augustine’s writings show that this wasn’t the predominant view even centuries later.

The second problem is that metanomianism logically excludes all of the teachings of Yeshua from the New Law.

Of course, most proponents of metanomianism haven’t thought it through that far, but I’d like you to consider that Yeshua preached only to Jews who were “under the Old Covenant”, explicitly excluding non-Israelites from his teachings. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:24)

Any moral instruction he gave to the Jews before the Cross is only strictly applicable under the administration of the Law of Moses. All forms of dispensationalism teach that Yeshua was under a different Covenant and a different Law. The only moral instruction in the Bible that directly applies to a Christian today, according to metanomianism, is that given by the Apostles after Acts 1. Any moral instruction before that point only applies in so much as it reflects a greater principle within the unwritten Law of God.

The third major problem with metanomianism is that it makes sin undefinable.

In Romans 7:7, Paul says that he wouldn’t have known what sin was if the Law of Moses didn’t tell him. Once he knew the Law, he became responsible for obeying it and failing (committing sin) incurred condemnation. In 1 Corinthians 15:56 he repeats the essence of this argument when he says that “the power of sin is the law”, seemingly reiterating the Law of Moses as the authority which defines sin. Throughout his letters, he based teaching after teaching on specific statutes and ordinances from the Torah.

James, in chapter 2 of his letter, quotes Leviticus 19:18 as the “royal law” and says that if we violate Deuteronomy 16:19, we “are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.”

In his first letter, John writes that “Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is [by definition] lawlessness.” (1 John 3:4) If the law that sinners are breaking is not the written commandments of Torah, how are we to know if we are sinning or not? Certainly the Holy Spirit convicts each of us of wrongdoing and urges us to repent, but that is part of an individual relationship, not an objective standard by which we can advise each other as the Apostles instructed.

Some of the moral teachings of Yeshua and the Apostles were based on the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis or on the prophets, but the majority were explicitly derived from the instructions of Moses. If Peter and James and John and Paul–who said “imitate me as I imitate Christ”–based their moral instruction on the Law of Moses, which was called “the Law of God” in the only Scriptures they knew, on what basis can a person today presume to say that he knows better and that the Law of Moses is not the Law of God and has nothing to do with today’s Christian?

Logically and Scripturally Untenable

These three problems make the whole doctrine of metanomianism logically and scripturally untenable. The only “Law of God” that the Tanakh (what we now call the Old Testament) appears to know is the law given through Moses. Some will point out that Genesis says that Abraham kept God’s Law, and they are correct. However, Genesis 26:5 actually says that Abraham kept God’s “charge, commandments, statutes, and laws”, which implies detailed instructions, not a vague set of principles. Second Temple Jewish literature, such as The Testament of Levi, which was also popular among Christians, shows that the Jews of the Apostles’ day believed those “commandments, statutes, and laws” were exactly the same as those given to Moses at Sinai.

The Apostles didn’t have the New Testament. They only had the Tanakh and other Jewish writings of the day. Moral teaching given by the Apostles was derived from the Law of Moses. Paul said “imitate me as I imitate Christ”, yet Christ (aka Jesus or Yeshua) obeyed every particular of the Law of Moses and spent his entire ministry teaching others how to do the same.

What sense does it make for Yeshua and his Apostles to base their teachings on a Law that has been thrown out in favor of a better one? Of course, it will be argued by some metanomians that they were only using passages from the Law of Moses to illustrate moral concepts that transcend Moses, but why didn’t they ever say that? Why wouldn’t such an important idea ever be explicitly spelled out by anyone?

The closest that anything in the Bible comes to saying that the Law of Moses is not the Law of God is Hebrews 7-8, which only speaks of how different priesthoods operate under different sets of rules for different purposes, but that is in perfect alignment with Moses, and explicitly states in 8:13 that the Old Covenant had not yet passed away at the time the letter was written. (See Priests, Laws, and Covenants in Hebrews 7-8 for a more detailed treatment.)

A consistent application of this division will inevitably lead to something very much like Marcionism. You will eventually have to throw out the 90% of the New Testament that consists of commentary on the Mosaic Law. Just look at Andy Stanley and his comments in recent years about “unhitching” our faith from the Old Testament and how open and unrepentant homosexuals who still go to church have more faith than other Christians who are have not rejected God’s instructions on sex.

True Christians Keep the Law of Moses No Matter What They Believe About it

Fortunately, a Christian who legitimately fears God and wants to be a disciple of Yeshua will still end up keeping almost the entirety of the Law of Moses anyway, despite holding to the false doctrine of metanomianism, because the Holy Spirit will lead him there. Some sins are more deeply embedded in our psyches and spirits than others, but every Christian will be convicted to repent of the most egregious sins against God and neighbor. Whether they choose to follow that conviction or not will determine whether they stand with Joshua who said “Choose this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve YHWH”, or with Andy Stanley who is rushing down the road of throwing out the entire Bible.

As I noted above, I agree that the Law of Moses is not exactly the same thing as the Law of God, but only in the sense that traffic laws are not the same as whole body of laws and regulations of your city, state, and nation. The entire Law of Moses is the Law of God and nothing in it is contrary to anything in the Apostolic teachings. Every single commandment given at Sinai and in the Wilderness is instruction in how to love God and man, and is therefore 100% compatible and consistent with the Law of God.

John said that we can be sure we are loving each other if we are keeping the commandments of God, and Paul said that every commandment of Moses can be summed up in a single phrase: “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Yeshua said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” If you believe that Yeshua and the Father are one, as he said, then Yeshua’s commandments are the Father’s commandments that were given to Moses.

An honest and consistent reading of the entire Bible–instead of cherry-picked verses taken out of context–allows no other conclusion: The Law of Moses is the Law of God.

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No Way Out of Armageddon

Can we build a spaceship to escape the end of the world?

I don’t mean the Battle of Armageddon as described in the Bible, but the popular conception of the End of the World™ brought about by super volcano, alien invasion, or asteroid impact. If I say “extinction level event”, whatever comes to your mind is what I’m talking about. Whatever it is, you can’t escape it.

Hollywood (and all their spinoff) have made movie after television series after movie about saving the world from imminent disaster.

  • Deep Impact
  • Armageddon
  • The Walking Dead
  • The Day After
  • The Day After Tomorrow
  • Stargate: SG-1
  • et cetera, et cetera

Almost inevitably, the heroes save the day through hard work and ingenuity. The sun is about to go nova? Sure, let me call Uncle Dr. Scientist, and we’ll whip up a spaceship that can bore into the sun and detonate an A-bomb at just the right place. That’ll fix her right up.

All of these stories have enormous plot holes that anyone can see through if he thinks about it for a few seconds. Most of the scenarios are improbable to impossible and the solutions are usually worse.

Yet, somehow we still seem to think that when that stray planetoid is about to smash into the earth, some brilliant scientist will come up with a solution that will save the best of us just in the nick of time. It’ll be tough out there in the cold black between the stars, but humanity will survive.

Unlikely.

Enter Elon Musk.

I’m a big fan of space exploration and even extra-terrestrial colonization. I love the idea of terraforming Mars and building permanent human colonies on a world that once was barren and desolate. I’m an even bigger fan of removing space programs and technological research from the domain of government.

Elon Musk and Space-X have done more to bring humanity closer to the stars in ten years than all the governments of the world have done since Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926. Recently, he has also been wresting Twitter from a fascist, government-corporate propaganda system and developing a technology called Neuralink to allow a direct connection between a person’s brain and a computer.

These are all outstanding achievements and have the potential for doing mind-blowingly good things for people…and, of course, for doing mind-blowingly horrific things for all of humanity if abused.

But, why?

Musk has a lifelong love of technology and liberty, but he has another motive.

At a 2013 conference, he said, “Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and we’re increasingly doing ourselves in. The goal is to improve rocket technology and space technology until we can send people to Mars and establish life on Mars.”

And, regarding Neuralink, “My prime motivation for Neuralink was the question: ‘What do we do if there is a superintelligence that is much smarter than human beings? How do we, as a species, mitigate the risk or, in a benign scenario, go along for the ride?'”

I think disaster preparedness is important. We should all try to imagine the worst things that can happen and what we would do, then make reasonable preparations and mostly move on with life. The more people you have within your sphere of responsibility, the bigger and scarier those imaginings can get, and the grander the preparations need to be.

But you can’t avoid the extinction of the human race.

First, it’s pointless. God has already told us that the human race will still be around when he destroys the earth and the entire universe, so trying to save the human race from extinction is like trying to save Tokyo from Godzilla when we know that Godzilla doesn’t exist.

Second, when it’s time for the human race to go extinct, God will be the one to make it happen, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. He spoke the sun and moon into existence, and he can speak it right back out again.

You can’t escape to Mars and you can’t outthink God.

We tried that once before and it didn’t go as planned. The people in Shinar thought that if they built a massive tower as a focus for a humanist religion, they could keep all people united in both purpose and location. Yet here we are, scattered across seven continents, speaking 7000 languages.

Any serious attempt to avoid God’s judgment–whatever the instrument of that judgment might be–will end the same way, in accomplishing the exact opposite.

There is no technology, no strategy, and no alliance that can succeed against God.

Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, from there I will bring you down, declares YHWH.
Obadiah 1:4

Edom thought they could thwart God’s plans for Jacob’s inheritance by forming alliances against Israel, by aiding Judah’s enemies, and killing those who escaped the Babylonian invasion in 587 BC. But it all backfired.

All your allies have driven you to your border; those at peace with you have deceived you; they have prevailed against you; those who eat your bread have set a trap beneath you— you have no understanding.
Obadiah 1:7

Edom was a weak and despised kingdom that continued to be traded back and forth between superpowers until the Maccabees conquered them around 163 BC and they were eventually completely absorbed into Judah and the surrounding nations.

Where is Edom today? Memory. Where is the Tower of Babel today? Dust.

Where will Elon Musk and the Human Race be 10,000 years from now? Exactly where God intends them to be and nowhere else.

“You’re our only hope, Maschiach ben David!”

Ultimately, there’s only one way to escape destruction at the end of the universe: put your trust and fear in the Creator. That means you must believe what he said, including that the human race will never go extinct and that he has standards of behavior for those who want to survive the end of everything else.

You already know where to find those standards. He showed us, he told us, and then he showed us again. It’s all written down.

See A Very Brief Commentary on Obadiah at Soil from Stone.