A Little Torah Awareness Goes a Long Way

The benefits of learning Hebraic understanding outweigh the effort it takes to get to that place in your walk with God. And I’m ecstatic more Christians are learning this!

Yahweh is a Hebrew God, working through a Hebrew people, a civilization that was countercultural in many ways to the pagan nations around them.

 Hebrews built their culture on being distinct and set-apart. On the Torah.

The word holy in Hebrew is kadosh, meaning set apart.

It doesn’t mean a random spiritual quality a saint possesses. It means someone who follows the Torah commands. And it means distinct in purpose, function, and identity.

If you lived in Japan, for example, chopsticks would be set apart for eating. But you wouldn’t use them to clean your floor.

This distinction means we are called according to God’s purposes, and we have a role He wants us to play.

We are not to mix the ways of the world with the distinct ways of Yahweh. He is our LORD, our gracious King of Kings—so the king’s rules are what we go by.

Keeping the Torah as your moral standard is one way to set yourself apart from the rest of the world, and even from most of Christianity.

The sad truth is many Christians don’t understand the Hebraic roots of where their faith came from, and that Jesus was a Torah teacher with a certain yoke of interpretation of those commandments.

When He gave the Sermon on the Mount, He said, “You have heard it said.” This was His way of correcting erroneous Torah interpretations.

I maintain we can’t keep the Torah in fullness often in my posts, but that doesn’t mean we discard it. While we can’t have a Torah-style justice system, we can avoid unclean foods and keep ourselves unspotted from the philosophies of this world.

Is that legalistic? No, it’s simply legal.

When you understand Hebraic patterns and ways of thinking, books open up to you like never before. The Book of Revelation is probably the most Hebraic book in the New Testament apart from Matthew and Hebrews.

The supernatural plagues unleashed upon the world resemble Torah penalties (which, thankfully, we are covered for under the blood of Christ as Christians).

The Two Witnesses are from the Torah idea that every matter must be established by two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15).

The Scriptures also often use hyperbole to define terms or scope. For example, when Nebuchadnezzar was told by Daniel that every language and nation feared him, that didn’t mean literally everyone. Australians did not fear him.

The same goes for the future Antichrist. He is given enormous authority but does not control every nation based on Daniel 11’s events.

Jesus isn’t a Messiah who doesn’t follow His own rules. That would make Him an illegitimate Savior.

There is nothing in the New Testament that contradicts the covenant set before in Moses. While the New Covenant in Christ overlaps and, in some ways, supersedes that covenant, the laws are now in our hearts—keeping the commands inward instead of only outward.

Jesus rules using the Torah as His guide in the Millennium (Isaiah 2:3). So if most Christians are correct that the Torah is done away with, why does Jesus use it as a guide, and even make all nations celebrate Tabernacles (Zechariah 14)?

Just like with the letters of Paul, care needs to be taken here in this area of biblical study.

I am not against the Torah for morality, and some of my posts might be difficult to get a read on when I explain the blessings of the New Covenant.

But I am a Torah-centric Christian because Jesus is the author of those commandments. There is much nuance to this topic, and we need to be careful not to be led away with the error of lawless (Torahless) people, as Peter warns in 2 Peter 3 when referring to Paul’s letters and his high-caliber interpretations and teachings.

Keep the commandments that apply to you. If you are a woman, don’t sleep with your husband while the monthly curse is going on. A man cannot keep this, as he is a man.

If you are a farmer, keep the farming laws in the spirit of the laws of the land of Israel. But I, as a non-farmer, cannot keep that law.

See what I mean?

The commandments apply to your specific situation; not every commandment for your life will even apply to others.

A moneylender should forgive debts every seven years—and a soldier should serve with humility and honor and not let women fight in their stead (not saying that women can’t be in the military).

Everyone can keep the command not to eat unclean foods, and everyone can love their neighbor.

Christians often accuse us, who are Torah-aware, of cherry-picking the commands. No, we understand not every command applies to everyone.

A priest of Israel could only marry a virgin, for example, but anyone else could marry whomever their soul desired.

If you understand Hebrew cultural customs—you’ll get the context of these ancient, Near Eastern mannerisms and rules for society.

Keeping the Torah keeps us set apart from the rest of the world.

It is the key to answered prayers (Proverbs 28:9).

Don’t discount the Hebraic because of the lawless behavior of everyone else in faith.

But also have the loving grace of Christ for those who don’t fully understand this yet.

There are normal Christians who eat ham sandwiches who keep the Law better than me in some ways as someone who is Torah-aware.

Let me leave you with this little nugget.

The Old Testament ends with this admonition right before Matthew.

“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel” (Malachi 4:4 [ESV]).

It seems God foresaw the divorce from the Torah of upcoming Christian generations and wanted to remind everyone to keep those things in mind when they flipped the page to Matthew.

Shalom.