This article is adapted from an answer John gave on the recent Undeceptions Question Answer XV episode.
Question:
I’m curious to hear John’s thoughts about the Hebrew Roots Movement as taught by groups such as 119 Ministries and Seed of Abraham Ministries. These groups emphasise that Christians should follow and adhere to the Torah and the Law of Moses as given to early Israel. Others dispute those teachings, saying that the Gospel and Christ’s sacrifice for our sins have made the Law obsolete. I’ve been listening to the Undeceptions Podcast for several months now, and I greatly appreciate John’s insight on Christian doctrine. I would love to hear an Undeceptions deep-dive into this topic. Thanks for all you do. Keep up the good work!
Answer:
There are loads of questions I’d want to ask people who think Christians today should be following all 619 laws of the Old Testament. For instance, do they enforce the death penalty in their communities? I mean, really? I suspect we’d have heard about it if they did.
What about all those laws concerning the temple? Those are actually impossible to obey because there is no temple. So straightaway, dozens and dozens of rituals and sacrifices and laws just can’t be done. At the very least, then, the position has to be inconsistent. Some things will apply, and some things don’t.
Interestingly, Orthodox Judaism itself had to face this problem. When the temple was destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, huge parts of the law became impossible to keep. The Pharisees came up with an answer that became the foundation of classical Judaism. Jews, they said, could maintain temple-level purity by following the oral traditions of the Pharisees, which went well beyond the written laws of Moses. But that explanation obviously isn’t going to work for Christians who want to obey the Old Testament.
The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans is a seminal (and traumatic) event in the history of the region.
Then there’s the historical side of things. Ancient Jews already recognised a distinction between full Jews, including converts to Judaism, and what they called “righteous gentiles”. These were non-Jews who practised monotheism, avoided idolatry and murder, and lived moral lives. They were considered acceptable to the God of Israel without adopting all of the laws given to Israel. So even before Christianity, Jews didn’t think their entire law applied to Gentiles.
Christianity took that idea and expanded it. It insisted that Gentiles could be acceptable to God, not by keeping Israel’s laws, but by trusting in the Messiah Jesus and following his ways.
Now, the theological bit. From the very beginning of Christianity, in our earliest texts (the letters of Paul) it’s crystal clear that Gentiles could become righteous without becoming Jews.
They didn’t need to practice Sabbath keeping, observe food laws, or be circumcised. They became righteous Gentiles through faith in the Messiah, in his life and teaching and death and resurrection.
The word Paul uses is ‘justified’, and that’s really just the verb of the term righteous. He says that these Gentiles become righteous through faith, apart from the law. Jesus Himself, on more than one occasion, declared that a Gentile (someone outside the Jewish traditions) could show greater faith in God than many within Israel.
The classic example of this is Matthew chapter 8:
“Truly, I tell you”, Jesus said, “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.”
The thing is, in that passage, he’s talking about a Roman centurion. He goes on:
“I say to you that many will come from the east and the west and will take their place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”
None of this is about Jesus or the apostles picking and choosing which parts of the Old Testament they liked and which they didn’t. From the beginning, Christians saw Jesus as the fulfilment of Jeremiah 31’s promise of a new covenant, that Jeremiah said “Will not be like the covenant Israel broke”.
Christians still believe that the whole Old Testament is God’s word, but that doesn’t mean every part of it is to be directly followed. We read the Old Testament through what I like to call the ‘Prism of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection’.
When white light passes through a prism, it refracts. It shows itself in the full spectrum of colours. The perfect image of that, of course, is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, album cover. What it is is a single white beam hitting this triangular prism and bursting out the other side in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
That is how Christians viewed the Old Testament through the prism of Christ. Like that light, the truth of the Old Testament passes through Jesus … and refracts.
Some parts are barely changed, like caring for the poor. That’s the same in the old and the new covenant. Telling the truth is also the same. Some other laws are intensified. So, in the Old Testament, ‘love your neighbour’ becomes, in the New Testament, ‘love your enemy’. And some of the laws are refracted beyond recognition, like circumcision, food laws, animal sacrifices, theocracy, and death penalties.
This isn’t a conjuring trick, so we can pick and choose what we like. It’s the way Jesus and the Apostles themselves taught us to read Scripture. It’s built into the very idea of two covenants.
Adapted by Alasdair Belling from Undeceptions episode 165 ‘Question Answer XV’. Listen here.
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