Posted on 01/31/2005 5:25:06 PM PST by Diago
Without a clean heart, sacrifice is empty gesture. Without sacrifice, Torah is empty words.
I beg to differ on the 2nd half of that.
Psalm 19:7 The Torah of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul.
And the fulfillment of Torah is Christ Jesus, our eternal sacrifice. It is a person who converts the soul -- the speaker, not the words; the actor, not the act.
Didn't need fulfilled. Was perfect already.
The Person always was, is, and always will be Perfect.
Torah not a person.
Here's your blueprint:
And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Yes and no. Abraham too was saved by his faith, not by his sacrifices (Gen. 15, Rom. 4). So were all those who sacrificed under the Mosaic covenant.
It is in this sense that the sacrifice of Christ Jesus is the fulfillment of Torah. He is the Passover sacrifice. He is the purification. The various Christian feasts and rites are important only as they related to the centrality of our sacrifice, who is Christ Jesus.
Insofar as you mean fulfillment in the sense of "making full, or complete," we agree. If you're thinking of "fulfillement" as a termination, no.
Actually, the reason that I harp on this is because all of the Torah points to the Messiah--and as a rule, we Christians are cheating ourselves by not learning and teaching our children just how that is. How can you fully explain that Christ is our Passover Lamb to someone who has never celebrated Passover, for example? Does calling Christ the firstfruits of the dead mean as much to someone who has never celebrated the Feast of Firstfruits?
I am advocating returning to the Torah not out of legalism or because I think those who do are somehow more saved than those who don't--I don't--but because by not keeping and/or teaching it, we are cheating ourselves out of so many blessings and so many teaching opportunities.
I'm not out to win an argument here. I'm just making a suggestion that you can choose to follow up on in your own studies of the Bible or not.
God bless.
Torah is perfect because the Lawgiver is perfect. It is the Lawgiver that saves, not the Law.
Somebody say the Torah saves?
Of course it did. Tell me, do you keep Easter or Passover?
And Jesus was referring to the oral Mishnah--which later became the Talmud--when he condemned a man-made tradition, claiming it was being substituted for God's revelation.
Agreed.
In fact, the Church uses the Torah in its liturgies. But it interprets it in the light of the New Testament understanding.
Unfortunately, it often interprets it wrongly in light of what it presumes about the New Testament understanding. For example, one assumption is that with the crucifixion, all animal sacrifices were done away with. Yet we know from the book of Acts (chapter 26, I believe, though I may have to correct that when I get off from work) that thousands of Jewish Christians kept the Torah, and that Paul joined some of them in taking a Nazrite oath. Per that rite's requirements, he and they went up to the Temple to make an animal sacrifice when the time of purification had come to an end (and that was when Paul was arrested).
Now I'm not suggesting that we go out and sacrifice animals in our churchyards, so don't take me wrong there. What I am suggesting is that we need to re-evaluate some of our interpretations of the Bible in which we've been prone to Hellenize/Latinize/Westernize them.
The Sacrifice that is at the heart of Torah saves, because that Sacrifice and the Lawgiver are one.
So say the supercessionists.
So said Christ Jesus.
I believe that was James who said that.
"Before Abraham was, I AM."
2And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;
3Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
4Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.
The point being that Jesus never asked his followers to serve any god other than the giver of Torah, from which this passage comes.
Yup. Jesus worshipped the same God the Jews do.
When a man is worshipped as God then those verses pertain.
It isn't man as God who is worshipped. It's God as man.
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