A friend wrote to me this morning with a question. She asked “The confusion is about Believing Gentiles, are they under the Law? Paul, in 1Cor 9:20, says we are not. Missler says we are not. They say the commands found in the Torah do not apply to us.”
One of my little axioms is: All questions are good questions. All answers may not be good,because we are all still in a learning process.
This is how I answered her.
Our Wednesday morning ladies’ Bible Study just finished an 18 week course called “Repaving the Roman Road”. I will give you a summary of the study, but sometime we need to get together to talk about it further.
Basically, one God for all people, and God does not change.
A better translation for “the law” is “instruction” or “teaching”. That is what the word “Torah” means in Hebrew.
Yeshua said emphatically, “He who has my commandments and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.” Remember “commandments” is better translated as teachings.
The problem about misunderstanding Paul is complex–it starts with understanding that he did not “convert”. He was a practicing Jew, a Pharisee, right up to the minute he was killed. The last chapters of Acts tell of his defense of himself in five, or six, if you count the last one in Rome, trials that he went through where he told everyone that he was a faithful Jew, a Hebrew among Hebrews.
Paul’s letters are misinterpreted because people do not understand the style of rhetoric he used. He used what is called an interlocutor (see the definition below). The style is also called “text in content”. Lots of the statements that Paul makes are not his voice speaking. He is writing as if he were someone in his audience who is questioning what he is saying. The easiest example to show it is when he says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Romans 7:24-25. He is speaking as the interlocutor. We don’t see it because the Greek, and the Hebrew, do not use punctuation marks. In English we would put those statements in quotation marks so that the reader would know that someone else is speaking.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to the “Church”. Even though the teachers of the past taught, and were taught, incompletely what Jesus taught, they did take the message of salvation through Jesus to the whole world. Now there is an awakening happening as people are studying Jesus in his Jewish context and realizing that there is so much more than just holding up your hand, asking Jesus into your heart and thinking that is all there is to it.
Nobody gets saved by keeping the commandments–neither Jews or those who are called Christians. We are all saved by grace, praise HaShem! Our response to so great a salvation is to follow our Rabbi’s (Jesus) example. He said his burden is not difficult. We can do this. He did not come to abolish to law, but to show us how to live it as he kept (fulfilled) it.
interlocutor
/ĭn″tər-lŏk′yə-tər/
noun
- (Scotland, law) A decree of a court.
- A person who takes part in dialogue or conversation.
- A man in the middle of the line in a minstrel show who questions the end men and acts as leader.