This week’s briefing jumps off from the message this past Sunday. If you missed it, you can watch the video or listen to the audio here.
I want to share more about the beauty of the Torah. This was a topic I had to cut due to time constraints, but which I think can help our church better appreciate the wisdom, justice, and beauty of the Torah.
In Sunday’s sermon, I gave three keys for understanding the Torah:
Near the end of the message, I noted believers are not “bound” to the 611 laws there. Jesus fulfilled that covenant and has now instituted a New Covenant for Israel, which we Gentiles (non-Jews) have been grafted into (Romans 11). Now, for Jew and Gentile alike, our covenant is in Christ himself and we are bound to the Law of love (Romans 8) and we have peace with God (Romans 5).
If the Torah points toward Christ and has been fulfilled in Christ, then is the only purpose of the Torah to show our need for Christ? Now that we know that, can we skip reading it? "No, it also shows us the Wisdom of God".
This is the perspective that opens up the Laws for followers of Jesus. When Jesus saw the law “Do not murder,” he sought the ideal underneath it. And it is that ideal, the Wisdom of God, that revolutionized justice for humanity.
The Torah is the source of “Equality,” “Justice for all,” and “Human Rights.”
For us in the United States, we’re familiar with the opening of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The irony is that was NOT self-evident for most of human history. In the ancient world, for a peasant to claim he was “created equal” to the king would have seemed ridiculous and laughable. Obviously not everyone is equal in intelligence, wisdom, strength, beauty, wealth, or length of life.
In summary, human rights, welfare, and social equality are all Biblical concepts that came into history via the revolution of ethical monotheism. We assume those concepts are eternal and abstract, when in fact they emerged from Israel’s Torah.
My hope in writing this is that when we read the Torah moving forward, let us read it like Jesus did. We know that all has been fulfilled in Christ, but we can still search for and appreciate the deep wisdom that undergirds the laws in context. Such an exploration may not always be easy, but thankfully we have a lifetime to learn, and Christ to carry us on the way.