Romans 30: Slaves of Messiah & the Issue of Law

[Rebbe]

PAUL'S LETTER TO THE ROMAN CHRISTIANS (30)
Analytical Commentary on Romans

SLAVES OF MESSIAH & THE ISSUE OF LAW

Copyright © BRI 2017 All Rights Reserved Worldwide by Les Aron Gosling,
Messianic Lecturer (BRI/IMCF)

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"No one can sum up all God is able to accomplish through one solitary life, wholly yielded, adjusted, and obedient to Him" -- Dwight L. Moody

"Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to him?" -- Henry Varley, a British revivalist who had befriended D.L.M., in Dublin in 1873. Apparently it was the Scottish theologian and Reformer John Knox (the founder of Presbyterianism), who originated the saying. 

"I can fill a church speaking on Revelation and empty it speaking on Romans" -- J. Vernon McGee

"The Bible. Know it in your head. Stow it in your heart. Show it in your life. Sow it in the world" -- J. Vernon McGee

THE TEXT
"Surely you know, brothers -- for I am speaking to those who have an experiential knowledge of Torah -- that the Torah has authority over a person only so long as he lives? For example, a married woman is permanently bound by Torah to her husband while he is alive; but if the husband dies, she is released from the part of the Torah that deals with husbands. Therefore, while the husband is alive, she will be called an adulteress if she marries another man; but if the husband dies, she is free from that part of the Torah; so that if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. Thus, my brothers, you have been made dead with regard to the Torah through the intermediate agency of Messiah's body, so that you may belong to someone else, namely, the One who has been raised from the dead, in order for us to bear fruit for God. For when we were living in the sphere of our old nature, the passions connected with sins worked through the Torah in our various parts, with the result that we bore fruit for death. But now we have been discharged from this aspect of the Torah, because we have died to that which had us in its clutches, so that we are serving habitually as a slave in the new way -- a sphere that is new in quality -- provided by the Spirit and not in the sphere outworn as to its usefulness, in a sphere of that which was written down. Therefore, what are we to say? That the Torah is sinful? Heaven forbid! Rather, the function of the Torah was that without it, I would not have come into an experiential knowledge of what sin was. For example, I would not have become conscious of what greed is if the Torah had not kept on saying, "You shalt not covet" -- Ex 20.14 (17); Deut 5.18 (21) -- "But the sinful nature, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, worked in me all kinds of evil desires -- for apart from Torah, sin is dead. I was once alive outside the framework of Torah. But when the commandment really encountered me, the sinful nature sprang to life, and I died. The commandment that was intended to bring me life was found to be bringing me death! For the sinful nature, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me; and through the commandment, the sinful nature killed me. So the Torah is holy; that is, the commandment is holy, just and good.

"Then did something good become for me the source of death? Heaven forbid! Rather, it was the sinful nature working death in me through something good, so that sin might be clearly exposed as sin, so that the sinful nature through the commandment might come to be experienced as sinful beyond measure. For we know that the Torah is of the Spirit; but as for me, I am bound to the old nature, sold to sin as a slave. I don't understand my own behavior -- I don't do what I want to do; instead, I do the very thing I hate! Now if I am doing what I don't want to do, I am agreeing that the Torah is good. But now it is no longer "the real me" doing it, but the sinful nature housed inside me. For I know that there is nothing good housed inside me -- that is, inside my old nature. I can want what is good, but I can't do it! For I don't do the good I want; instead, the evil that I don't want is what I do! But if I am doing what "the real me" doesn't want, it is no longer "the real me" doing it but the sin housed inside me. So I find it to be the rule, a kind of perverse "torah," that although I want to do what is good, evil is right there with me! For in my inner self I completely agree with God's Torah; but in my various parts, I see a different "torah," one that battles with the Torah in my mind and makes me a prisoner of sin's "torah," which is operating in my various parts. What a miserable creature I am! Who will rescue me from this body bound for death? Thanks be to God [, he will]! -- through Yeshua the Messiah, our Lord!

"To sum up: with my mind, I am a slave of God's Torah; but with my old nature, I am a slave of sin's "Torah" (Romans 7 Based on Stern's Jewish NT and superimposing thoughts from Greek scholar Kenneth Wuest).

KNOW, RECKON, YIELD -- WHERE THE TRIO LEADS
That the apostle Paul experienced a major ongoing conflict psychologically is stark evidence that he was not "dead to sin" any more than we today are "dead to sin." The "fall" of our human prototype Originals in the Garden of Eden swept them and their genetic descendants into the orbit of a new realm of dualism from which they -- and we -- are unable to escape. This world of opposites has us in its clutches: it's a kingdom of yin and yang, black and white, randomness and order, material and spirit, heat and cold, reality and psychosis, life and death, good and evil, light and darkness, the self and the not-self, the knower and the known, health and disease, the organism and its environment, the solid and the space, the useful and the useless, love and hate, multiplicity and unity, freedom and determinism.

Dualism is a conceptualisation that transmits decay and death. Our thought processes, subject to the inherited and inherently limited language of dualism, alienate us from an authentic sense of the ONENESS of God's BEING.

People everywhere it seems exist as shattered replicas of what could have been and what they could have been. They spend their time pining in a spirit of negativity on unattained goals and desires. Their speech is filled with the two most deplorably sad words in the English language: "If only..." Very few excel in themselves to succeed in inculcating a new thought process alive with the positivity of "Next Time!", instead of wallowing in their cabaret of misery.

And why?

Because we are not whole. We divide the ONENESS of SpaceTime in which we all "live and move and have our being," into artificial categories of past, present and future. We articulate our ONE MIND into three separate and distinct levels of thought: conscious, subconscious and unconscious. We have all known folk who are still "normal," others who are neurotic building castles in the air, and then we have the psychotic who not only builds castles in the air but who attempt to live in them. Our view of mental illness is, of course, decidedly false. Its a lie, but a necessary one that we have purposely adopted so that we -- in our already divided and largely self-deceived thought patterns -- will not go entirely mad. Our grasp of reality is weak, our direction quite vague, and our impact on the society in which we find ourselves located uncertain (and that may be in relation to our nation, or family, or friends and acquaintances, or in our chosen or imposed business field). We are largely disorganised individuals, our inner organisation entirely lacking in purpose to function and operate in the ONENESS of harmonious unity within ourselves. Our bodies are largely unhealthy because our attitudes, preoccupations and soul fetishes are unhealthy. Our thinking has brought us into this disrepair!

I believe this is what lay behind Rav Shaul's motive in penning his infamous chapter, Romans 7. Paul is the evidence that Menninger's Man Against Himself has brilliant psychiatric status and Thomas Szasz still possesses enormous substance -- The Myth of Mental Illness (1961); The Manufacture of Madness (1970); Coercion as Cure (2007); Psychiatry: The Science of Lies (2008).

Our Lord Yeshua advises that we who have depleted souls and aching dispositions to "Come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while" (Mk 6.31). A "deserted place" is a region largely ignored, where travelers and passersby are nowhere to be located, and where peace and a sense of oneness is readily available. There exists such a Place where in meditation you can feel at one with all that surrounds you -- the blue skies above, the gentle breeze of caressing wind, lofty trees swaying in the slow rhythm of life, and the quiet sound of a leaf falling slowly to the earth. Its a Place where the excitement and the humdrum and the hatred and the intrigue and the noise and the animosity and the competition and the violence and daily struggle of the world does not exist. This Place is deep within our hearts. "The Kingdom of God," said Yeshua, "is within you" (Lk 17.21).

In all this Yeshua calls to us, "Come unto me, all you that are weary and are heavily burdened and I will give you rest" (Mt 11.28-30). "Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one" (Jn 17.11). "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one -- I in them and you in me -- so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (Jn 17.20-23).

In our immediate past lecture we have surveyed the three key words of Paul that dominate what we now denominate as Romans 6 in his Letter to the Roman Christians. To reiterate: those three key words are (1) KNOW, (2) RECKON and (3) YIELD. Paul's strategy is to let those specific thoughts of knowledge, consideration and surrender lead into a perception and acceptance of service. In fact, if one examines closely this section of Romans 6 we are confronted by the term servant (really, SLAVE) a total of eight occasions. (Eight of course, in biblical numerology, is the number of CHRIST.) Notice these eight occasions of reference to slavery:

"Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?" (Romans 6.16).

"But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness" (Romans 6.17,18).

"I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness" (Romans 6.19,20).

"So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end result is eternal life" (Romans 6.22).

In this context Paul states that as Christians, who now have Yeshua the Messiah as their Master, Boss, King, Lord -- we cannot any longer say to sin "You are our Master!" Yeshua, who grants to each of us everlasting life, is our Master! This is because we have been (as Paul himself wrote) freed from sin. We are freed from sin because we died with Yeshua on that bloodied tree of Golgoleth way back 2000 years ago. We died with Yeshua, but we are not "dead to sin" because there exists within us two imperative drives (apart from the Death Instinct and the Erotic Instinct) and those two powerful drives are the yetzer hara (the evil inclination) and the yetzer hatov (the good inclination). And the Lord Yeshua, along with Paul, James, and John are all in agreement that the yetzer hara far outweighs and virtually eclipses the yetzer hatov. John says plainly, "If we claim that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" (1 Jn 1.8). The latter phrase can better be translated from the Greek as "we are not living in the truth." In fact, all of us who name the Name of Christ are walking in resurrection life -- newness of life for we have risen with Messiah from the dead.

Yet the Rebbetzin and I have known people who have so deceived themselves proclaiming that they themselves are "really good people" when we have watched in agony as these same characters trampled over the emotions of others, verbally abused brethren in front of other Christians, literally fought and brawled on the street outside their religious establishment (over doctrine) and in full view of pagans and heathen passing by. Yes, they were brutally fighting each other and the fists were flying!

I know we all are guilty of making mistakes, but there are mistakes and then there are massive transgressions which are compounded with self-righteous and super-righteous attitudes, assertions and claims of "perfection" and "victory living" when they obviously hate God and His laws, rules, regulations, and advice.

I might just add that one so-called pastor called his wife in our hearing "a fat pig." This same fellow stated to our face: "I've always been a good person." Yeah, right! He ended up, after removing himself from any relationship with us, being caught out by his wife having sex with a young student he knew. But this is an aside. An interesting pertinent aside, but still an aside.

SLAVES OF MESSIAH
Now I have utilised the term slave rather than servant, because this is a first century document, written by a Jew who lived under Roman occupation and in an arena of downright oppression. A doulos was a bondservant, or slave. And Paul calls Christians slaves of the Lord Yeshua the emperor of the world. He even calls himself by this ascription, and so also do other writers of the NT documents. But he does so because (as he himself has written), "I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh" (Romans 6.19). Or, as some scholars have translated this text: "I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations."

Be this as it may, are we really slaves of Christ? In no way (by modern interpretations of the word). Christianity is really freedom. Paul wrote:

"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there (in that place) is freedom" (2 Cor 3.17). "We have been called to (inherit) liberty" (Gal 5.13).

Yeshua declared, "I am come that they (my disciples) may have life and have life more abundantly" (Jn 10.10).

I think Paul has written "I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh" to mean that there are some Christians who are just plain dumb.

God alone possesses and experiences authentic FREEDOM and true LIBERTY. And we are training now through experiencing trials and troubles to work our way through them to develop character within. Only our character will SEE the Kingdom of God. Our flesh will burn up -- we will not inherit that Kingdom in, or through, or by our flesh. Our Spirit only will enter God's Realm. While we will be saved -- and ARE saved -- by Grace, we have to WORK to develop the CHARACTER to properly and appropriately inherit God's promises. That's the difference, and it is a difference that is not widely acknowledged in the churches of this world. Believe me, when the final Antichrist arises there will be a sharp division between the sheep and the goats.

Understand! First God saves us and then He introduces us to the One who saved us (1 Tim 2.3,4). Its decidedly not the other way around. God does not let us find, locate, appreciate and then choose Him. He seeks us out. He elects us to glory. He has chosen us to glory. He shares His glory with us. "Not of works lest any man should boast." [For a better grasp of this revelation refer to my lecture series Fundamentals and in particular FUNDAMENTALS: Issues of Faith, Trials & Prayer (1).] Alva McClain writes, "When you are the servant of righteousness, you have nothing to do with sin" (Romans, op.cit., 148).

Further, Romans 6.22 "goes further and insists, 'You have your fruit.' You have something else also, namely, 'the end.' It is wonderful that you can have the end before you get there. The old way was explained this way: 'if you are good, holy, and do not fall, someday, when you come to the end, God will give you eternal life.' But Paul says if you die with Christ, if you reckon it to be so, you not only have the 'fruit unto holiness,' but you have the end right now.

"Paul has shown us how to deal with sin in our lives. We are first to know that we died with Christ. Second, we are to reckon that thing to be so, never surrendering for a moment. Third, we are to yield our members. Then we are to remember that no man can serve two masters.

"These great facts will grip the heart of a true believer and lead him in the paths of righteousness. But there may be among the professed people of God some that are not born of God. There are always some people who have never really bowed the knee to Jesus Christ; people who profess to be His but who have never obeyed Him, and thus have never been born of God.

"While all these truths may work in the lives of those who are truly saved, there may be some who are merely professed Christians who say, "Oh, we are saved, and it does not matter what we do." So Paul closes with a very solemn warning. "For the wages of sin is death" (6:23). Let no man take the grace of God and turn it into license. Let no man go on in sin (and, by the way, the true Christian cannot continue in sin.) Therefore, should some man who is professing to be a Christian continue in sin, let him remember that "the wages of sin is death" and there has been no reduction in those wages!

"But for such a man there is hope. "But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (6:23). There are two servitudes. If you serve sin, you will be paid wages.  You will get just exactly what is coming to you. If you serve God, He cannot pay you any wages. You do not deserve any. But He does have a gift, that of everlasting life" (ibid, 148).

THE ISSUE OF LAW
We cannot avoid, as authentic believers in Messiah Yeshua, the issue of servanthood, or being a slave of the heavenly Emperor. There is no way we can convince ourselves that sin is not the breaking of the laws of God, the Ten Commandments (1 Jn 3.4) or that sin has nothing to do with an absence of faith (Rom 14.21-23; Heb 11.6).

For any reader of the epistles of Paul, it is at once apparent that Paul talks about "law" occasionally in a negative light. But he should always be taken in context. For, there are a few "laws" Paul discusses. He talks of the law of God, and he also uses "law" to refer to our human nature, the "law of sin and death," and the statutes and ordinances and judgments of Moses. He occasionally utilises the term, "under the law." This latter phrase in Second Temple terminology refers essentially to THE DEATH PENALTY incurred by the law for (as the rabbinic authorities understood) once a sinner transgresses that holy commandment he came under the condemnation of the law and was to be executed for capital crimes. It can equally mean that Paul refuses the law as a means of justification -- being considered and acknowledged as "right" -- before God.

I must insist right at the outset of this present lecture that if Paul was AGAINST the Torah he would have said so plainly. But he did not. If he was against God's Torah, it would be recorded by Luke in his account of the Acts but nothing of the kind is conveyed, despite the protests of intellectual dwarfs in self-appointed ministries who joyously intone that we are "freed from the law," and thus "sin no longer is an issue with God."

BUT as we study Paul's other epistles the great Rabbi and scholar comes to the conclusion -- from documents that circulated in the Temple precincts and synagogues of first century Judaea at that time and which were espoused as prophetically significant by rabbinic scholars --  that God's Spirit exposed the Rav to the teaching of the New Covenant and to the new Messianic Torah which was anticipated by those same rabbinic scholars as coming into an effect with the advent of the Messiah which Paul grasped to be none other than Yeshua the proclaimed "Nazarene King of the Jews."

Indeed, John R.W. Stott, the famous past Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, and a Cambridge tie, ordained in 1945 and appointed in 1959 an Honorary Chaplain to the present Queen, has written in defense of Paul in his use of certain expressions:

"Why... does Paul say that Christians are 'not under law'? It is true that he uses this expression several times, but never as a suspended negative. He always supplies (or at least implies) a contrast... you can never understand the meaning of a negative unless you know with what it is being contrasted... Paul never expressed his negatives in isolation... 'not under law' never meant that the category of law has been abolished for him, but rather that he does not look to the law for... his justification... 'God has done what the law WEAKENED BY THE FLESH could not do.' [Rom 8.3] It will be seen from this that the weakness of the law is not in itself but in us... God has done for us and in us what the law could not have accomplished. And He has done it by the sending of both His Son and His Spirit. He justifies us through the death of His Son and sanctifies us through the indwelling of His Spirit. That is, GOD'S WAY OF ACCEPTANCE is not our striving to obey the law but the finished work of Christ... Understand [Paul's] negative from its positive counterparts... our justification depends not on law but on Grace... but this repudiation of law... as the ground for our justification... does not dispense with it as the standard of our conduct. The contrary is the case... God justifies us 'in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us'... Thus the observance of the law... is the result of [our justification]. Samuel Bolton [1645]... summed up Paul's teaching about the law and the Gospel in this epigram: 'The law sends us to the Gospel, that we may be justified, and the Gospel sends us to the law again to enquire what is our duty being justified'" (J.R.W. Stott, Christ the Controversialist, 1970, 152-154 emphasis mine).

Luke was Paul's disciple and an educated man (he was a doctor) so he would not have been ignorant of Paul's view of the Torah. He lived with him for years and accompanied Paul on his many evangelistic journeys all around the Mediterranean. Instead of antinomianism, we find that Paul...

(1) taught the GENTILES from the Torah (which -- as Gentiles -- they did not naturally know),

(2) gave illustrations from the prophets (which as Gentiles they did not naturally know),

(3) and instructed them out of the Writings (which as Gentiles they did not naturally know).

The Torah, the Prophets (N'viim), and the Writings (K'tuvim) of course is what constitutes Tanack. The first letter each of Torah, N'viim, and K'tuvim -- TNK -- the acronym gives us Tanack.Of course, this PRESUPPOSES that they -- the Gentiles -- must have had access via Paul, or local synagogues, to Jewish Scriptures or they would have had no idea of what Paul was talking about... and the Torah must have been (at least in Paul's mind) vitally important for the Gentiles, for him to have spent so much time educating them into biblical patterns of intellectual apprehension and comprehension.

I only find Paul sourcing, on extremely infrequent occasions, pagan literature as the basis of reaching and teaching Gentiles. Indeed, the very texts that mention his usage of pagan sources do so as militant authorities brought in by the sharp witted rabbi like so many armed troops to buttress up a biblical case being articulated eloquently by the "apostle to the nations."

So, he must have also instructed them to have access to the local synagogue where these texts were obviously available. After all, so did his somewhat contentious colleague James (Acts 15.21). Either that, or he brought tons of scrolls with him for personal distribution among them, which seems highly unlikely to have been the case. What we find recorded by Luke in his Acts of the Ruach HaKodesh are instructions to the Gentiles, by Paul, to gather to hear him speak about the things of God on the seventh day Sabbath (Acts 13.14ff,27,42,44). This is nothing more than an admission by Luke of the existence of Sabbath-observing Gentile assemblies! Remember, if the Gentiles in the early church were being taught to keep the Sabbath holy, they HAD TO HAVE BEEN OBSERVING the Torah too -- and taught by Paul to do so! And, again I ask, why even mention these things out of the Hebrew Scriptures if they weren't relevant to them? 

We must ask in this current lecture in this series, and as I have enquired on many occasions in public lectures and in written material prior to this, What did Paul have to say himself about the value of the Torah?

As an observant Jew, what was Paul's attitude to the Torah? Please look these texts up and mark them in your own Bible, so you never ever forget them. This way you can memorise them and use them against pastor, preacher, or rabbi who mocks the apostle Paul -- in whose footsteps I decidedly walk.

Romans 7.12 "The Torah is holy. That is, the commandment is holy, righteous and good."

Romans 7.14 "The Torah is spiritual."

Romans 7.16 "The Torah is good."

Romans 7.22 "I delight in God's Torah."

Romans 7.25 "I myself in my mind am a slave to God's Torah."

Romans 2.12,13 "It is not those who hear the Torah who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the Torah who will be declared righteous."

Romans 3.31 "Does it follow that we abolish Torah by our trusting? Heaven forbid! On the contrary we confirm [uphold, establish] Torah."

Romans 7.7 "What shall we say then? Is the Torah sin? Absolutely not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the Torah."

Romans 10.5 "Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the Torah. 'The man who does these things will live by them.'"

What Torah is Paul discussing in Romans? He answers in Romans 13.

Romans 13.8-10 "He who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the Torah. The commandments 'Do not commit adultery,' 'Do not murder,' 'Do not steal,' 'Do not covet,' and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' Love does no harm to its neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the Torah."

Why were the Ten Commandments given? There are a number of reasons because God always is multiconceptual when it comes to His always deliberate intentions in all things. But essentially, the Torah was given to HABITUATE human behaviour in line with God's expectations of character. As it is written:

"The Torah of God is perfect, RESTORING the whole person" (Ps 19.7) or "restoring the person to wholeness."

The purpose of the Torah was to teach human beings to LOVE one another. That is, to LOVE one another according to God's expectations of (His rules of conduct for) humankind. But when Yeshua came to dwell among us he brought with him the FULL Torah that was expected by the rabbinic religious leaders of the first century to accompany the Messiah at his Advent. The Second Temple rabbinic authorities were expecting a NEW Torah, an EXPANDED Torah -- one which dwelt upon the spiritual aspects of human potential and anticipated duty toward self and others -- a Torah that went way beyond the physical aspects of the Sinai Torah of Moses.

"The Torah which a man learns in this world" -- the Mosaic or Sinai Torah --  "is vanity, in comparison of the Torah of the Messiah" (Midrash Kohelet 83.1).

The rabbis of the Second Temple period admitted that the Messiah dwelt in the MIND of God prior to the creation of this universe (Pesahim 54a; Nedarim 39b) and as such the Messianic Torah was the true Torah that lay behind or preshadowed the Sinai Torah of Moses.  Not only is this the case but Jewish sources reveal that the King Messiah, when he came to earth, would take upon himself the sins of others and by his righteousness humankind would be saved -- that is by Messiah's merits alone! This is a teaching currently denied by modern day Talmudic rabbis. But scholar Edward Cook on the Aramaic Targum to Psalm 72.17 shares:

"Composed by Solomon, uttered in prophecy. O God, give your JUST rulings to the King Messiah, and your RIGHTEOUSNESS to the son of King David; May his name be invoked for ever; and before the sun came to be his name was determined; so ALL THE PEOPLES WILL BE BLESSED BY HIS MERIT, and they shall speak well of him" (Edward M. Cook, The Psalms Targum: An English Translation, 2001 emphasis mine).

Now, under the "New Covenant," God's holy Spirit enables believers in the Mashiach to keep the authentic Torah as it was intended. Does this sound like Paul is antinomian? (Recall that "antinomian" is a theological term which is taken from the Greek language. Anti = against, nomos = law; Therefore antinomian = against law.)

In other words, lawless Christianity is a contradiction in terms. Indeed, how can anyone come to any other conclusion when they consider that the Messianic Torah consists of 1050 rules, commandments, expectations of God? The sheer number of regulatory expectations of God toward human beings under the New Covenant far outnumbers the 613 commandments of Sinai!

The bottom line in any antinomian ministry is that these people see themselves as 'free from the law' but they expect everyone else to 'obey' certain commandments so as not to interfere in that which they determine is their freedom of expression.

They want restrictions on everybody else but not on themselves.

That's the bottom line and I care not who it is that will argue with me over it. Its the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, despite clever arguments about the "indwelling Spirit of God" living in them as expressions of "God's love." I repeat -- lawless Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

Moreover, modern church teachings are ridiculously inconsistent. While they promulgate the belief that the law of God has been abrogated, they feel it in their interest to reincorporate, revive, and re-establish certain Sinai commandments and statutes and ordinances of the Mosaic Administration of the Antiquated Covenant for observance in fellowship and as a sectarian standard of appropriate behaviour. Its nothing more than a form of control of clergy over the laity. So all the commandments found in Moses are eliminated now, except for laws and perceived laws against sexual immorality, homosexuality, prohibitions relative to intercourse during menstruation, tithing, and commonsense cleanliness principles. But everything else is "done away."

After all, didn't Yeshua come to give us entirely new laws about loving one another?

Again, Stott find himself jumping to the defense of the Messiah Himself:

"To say that sanctification is a natural consequence of regeneration, is not to say that it is an automatic consequence. The really regenerate Christian can still behave badly and thoughtlessly, sin grievously, fail in personal relationships, and get into marriage problems. This is evident in the New Testament and in the lives of our fellow-Christians, yes, and we know it in our own lives also. Hence the detailed moral instructions we are given in the Epistles [based on Moses]... But were these not Christian people, regenerate people, to whom the apostles addressed these admonitions? Yes, they were! But the apostles did not take the holiness of the regenerate for granted; they worked for it by detailed instruction, by exhortation, example and prayer... It is widely supposed [in Christian circles and all denominations] that Jesus [inaugurated] a new law, and that in doing so He was contradicting and repudiating the old. Nothing could be further from the truth... that He should do this is antecedently so improbable as to be impossible. Not only would this run counter to His lifelong attitude of reverent assent to [Torah] but He had just asserted that He had not 'come to abolish the law and the prophets... but to fulfill them'... He then solemnly added that 'till heaven and earth pass away not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished'... and warned His hearers that anybody who 'relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.'... it is absurd to argue that Jesus was disagreeing with the law.. Jesus was contradicting... [in his conflicts with the religious authorities]... not what 'is written' but what 'was said,'... the [oral] interpretations [by the Pharisees]... the Pharisees... were attempting to reduce the challenge of the divine law in order to suit their convenience, either by restricting what it commanded or by extending what it permitted... while... the Pharisees were tampering with the law to make it less exacting [or more, as the case may be] the disciple must accept its full force and all its implications... "The [new church teaching] goes further [than the Pharisees] and insists that the category of 'law' has been altogether abolished for the Christian. He is not 'under law' they say, in any sense. Only one law has not been abrogated, namely the comprehensive law of love... It is essential to be fair [to those teaching this idea]. They are not... encouraging moral license... [However] what the biblical Christian would wish to affirm is that... love and law are not incompatible, still less mutually exclusive. FOR LOVE NEEDS LAW TO GUIDE IT. It is rather naive to claim that love has no need of any direction outside itself because it has a built-in moral compass enabling it to 'home' intuitively upon the deepest need of the other... Love is not infallible. Indeed, it is sometimes blind. So God has given us commandments to chart the pathways of love... Love is not the finish of the law in the sense that it dispenses with it; love is the fulfillment of the law in the sense that it obeys it. What the New Testament says about law and love is not 'if you love you can break the law' but 'if you love you will keep it'" (ibid.,145,148,150-152 emphasis mine).

It is the opinion of this lecturer that there is absolutely NO WAY that Christians can divorce the Lord Yeshua from the Torah, no matter how hard some may try, because the Mashiach Himself makes it startlingly plain that He came not to abolish the Torah but to personally fulfill it. That was His aim, that was His purpose, that was His objective. He observed Torah so perfectly that he filled it to the full -- which is what fulfill actually means.

He EARNED salvation so that we could be saved by GRACE. Again, the Aramaic Targum on Psalm 72.17 states it clearly enough: "O God, give your JUST rulings to the King Messiah, and your RIGHTEOUSNESS to the son of King David-- May his name be invoked for ever; and before the sun came to be his name was determined; so ALL THE PEOPLES WILL BE BLESSED BY HIS MERIT, and they shall speak well of him."

Yeshua certainly achieved his objective. He fulfilled it. He added, that "the heavens and the earth would first be dissolved before one little dot or dash from the Torah be taken away." 

Isaiah prophesied that when the Messiah arrived, one of His expectations would be: "Bind up the testimony; seal the Torah among my disciples" (Isa 8.16).

Rather than abolish the Torah, Messiah magnified it and made it honourable as predicted by the prophet Isaiah. "He will magnify the Torah and make it honourable" (Isa 42.21 cf Mt 5 & 6). Instead of doing away with Torah, Our Lord laid emphasis on the importance of grasping what attitude and spirit lurked behind any act of sinful behaviour. If anything, Messiah placed a vastly different emphasis upon the Torah than previously grasped by the rabbis of his day and age. In so doing Christ magnified the TRUTH that lay behind the Sinai Torah itself -- this was an ancient Torah that superseded Moses as admitted and confessed by the rabbis of the Second Temple period and which is to be found in their own writings. The Messianic Torah is far more binding on people than was the physical, material Mosaic Covenant and Torah. The Messianic Torah speaks to the spirit in man and reaches much further inwardly than physical laws that speak of acts of man. This is why John wrote: "Torah was given by Moses, but Grace and Truth came by Yeshua the Messiah" (Jn 1.17).

And so, unable from the Gospels to reduce Messiah's sovereignty regarding the issue of Torah, and despite an unhealthy and lengthy process of disparaging the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) as being somehow inferior and thus suitable only for the "lower classes" -- but especially unfit for those of higher spiritual attainment (and thus their wholehearted embrace and acceptance of John's Gospel plus the epistles of the "Protestant" apostle to the Gentiles) -- the rebels and haters of God turned to Paul, who has been interpreted by Gentiles as doing away with the Torah, to seal their case with an affirmative cry, "Free as last! Free at least! Thank God Almighty I'm free at last!" as they boldly jump into the bog of aionian stench, not realising that God "justifies those who are Torah observant" (Rom 2.13).

For those who lack cognisance to understand that Paul's letters are instructions to Gentiles on how to best utilise Torah to their advantage in alignment with the Archetypal Heavenly Man, Rav Shaul made a startling statement regarding righteousness which involved a major issue concerning the original creative purpose of God (Rom 8.4).

According to the apostle to the Gentiles, man's purpose was to fulfill God's righteousness as revealed in the Torah.

Surprisingly, here the word "righteousness" is the Greek dikaioma. This is not the usual word for "righteousness" dikaiosune used by Paul. In other places it is translated "ordinances" (Lk 1.6; Heb 9.1).

Here the apostle is referring to the righteous demands of the Torah, obedience to the just requirements of God's "ORDINANCES" in which he "delighted" (Rom 7.22) and of which he also approved (Rom 7.12), although some authorities and scholars in the Christian church proclaim arrogantly that the ordinances of God have been abolished.

Consider the commandment, "You shall not steal" (Ex 20.15; Deut 5.19). What happens when we do? Well, obviously, a number of things -- especially if we're caught! But, above all, God expects us to repent. That's a primary fundamental: repentance.

Now most churches will just teach that if we sincerely repent we are forgiven by God the Father, because Messiah Yeshua died for our sins. And yes, that's quite true.

But the Messianic Scriptures include an illustration of something performed by Zacchaeus who was guilty of extortion in the form of unjust taxation (Lk 19.2-9). In this account, there is a typical Jewish play-on-words for "salvation" (Hebrew = yeshua), in the person of Yeshua, coming to his house after his declaration of an intention to make full restitution!

His repentance involved restoring that which was stolen.

Indeed, restitution is clearly in view in the Sermon on the Mount. "Therefore if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift. Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on The Way, or he may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. Absolutely! I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny" (Mt 5.23-26).

Now we can argue and say, "Well, wait a minute! That's what Matthew and Luke record, but they were writing to the saints of the circumcision -- to the Jews! Does Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles (nations) have anything to say about the ordinances of the Torah in relation to restitution?"

Yes, he most certainly does. "...do not give the Devil a foothold. He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need" (Eph 4.28).

Paul shows the Gentile Ephesians (really, the Colossians) in no uncertain terms how the principle of restitution was to be extended. He who had been a thief must first of all cease from stealing. That's number one. Number two: He must also labour with his hands that he might restore what he had wrongfully taken away.

Why? To "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" -- the Golden Rule -- which if applied would reverse karmic debt (which the Bible does teach) in the body of our flesh (our human body).

If Paul did not teach a Messianic Torah, did not believe in the Messianic Torah, rejected the Messianic Torah and was dead-set against any obedience to God -- as church-influenced Rabbis claim concerning Paul along with particular spokesmen of popular Christian ministries who emphasise out of all proportion what they call "Grace" -- why is he here teaching the statutes, ordinances and judgments TO THE GENTILES? (and remember, these statutes, ordinances and judgments are based upon the simple Ten Commandments, obviously!!!).

Those who would decry a Christian necessity to observe a proper regulated lifestyle have never properly read Paul's writings. Those who decry the 613 commandments of the Sinai Torah, and entirely for the wrong reasons, fail somehow to grasp that Paul contributed prolifically to the 1050 laws, statutes, ordinances, commandments, regulations, decrees, recommendations and good old plain sound advice contained in the pages of the Brit Chadashah (the New Covenant) -- indeed, most of the legal aspects of morality found in the Christian Scriptures were even written by Paul himself!

In concluding this present lecture, and before the next lecture concentrating on Romans 7, I would like to affirm my acceptance of J. Vernon McGee's assessment of law and Grace.
                                                                                                                                   
He writes: "Law demands -- grace gives. Law says "do" -- grace says "believe." Law exacts -- grace bestows. Law says "work" -- grace says "rest." Law threatens, pronouncing a curse -- grace entreats, pronouncing a blessing. Law says "Do, and thou shalt live" -- grace says, "Live, and thou shalt do." Law condemns the best man -- grace saves the worst man" (J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible Commentary, Vols.1-5: Genesis Through Revelation, 1981,1982,1983,1988).

Love and law are certainly not incompatible, still less mutually exclusive. But law can kill, and only GRACE saves.

THIS CONCLUDES LECTURE 30

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