Clifford Denton completes his study of the relationship between law and grace.

Recap: Law and Grace Part 1

In this series we are tracing what some have called "the parting of the ways between the Church and the Synagogue". Our concern is with the identity and origin of the Christian Church, because there are serious consequences of its separation from the roots of our faith- for both Christians and Jews.

One consequence is the way in which we read our Bibles. Separation from our roots brings a conceptual break in the continuity of the Scriptures. We have paused in our historical survey in order to illustrate this important point. In the first part of this study we explored what the word law might mean, as found in the New Testament. We differentiated between the Torah (teaching of God), and its interpretation into Halakhah. We reasoned that there is a difference between interpretations that bring legal bondage to those which encourage a walk with God under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

We must not allow ourselves to be robbed of the freedom that is given for living out a biblical lifestyle under the grace and leading of the Holy Spirit. However, it is not the Torah that is at fault – it is the way Torah is interpreted."

Rebuilding relationship between Jews and Christians

Reconciliation with the Jewish community is something of great importance in our day and should be a consequence of the Christian Church being properly rooted in all aspects of life and faith. Those who value the Torah are not necessarily walking a wrong path and need not necessarily be bound up in legalism. To be free to explore afresh our common heritage should build bridges of reconciliation, since to not care for the Torah has been a symptom of not caring about our relationship with the Jews.

Dr Marvin Wilson has spent many years in the pursuit of reconciling Christians and Jews. In his book Our Father Abraham, Dr Wilson poses some strong questions about accusations of Judaising levelled at Christians, who are exploring the roots of their faith with freedom whilst remaining sure of their salvation:

To those in the modern Church concerned about the dangers of Judaising after nineteen hundred years of de-Judaising, we would pose these questions: Is it Judaising to seek to reconstruct certain aspects of the first-century Jewish context of the New Testament and early Church? Is it Judaising to investigate the life and teaching of Jesus through Jewish eyes? Is it Judaising to find personal fulfillment by adopting personal perspectives on God and one's neighbour that emerges from the teaching of the Hebrew prophets?

Is it Judaising to resonate positively to a Jewish pattern of worship, music, and celebration of special events in life? Is it Judaising to find in modern Israel – within its people and the historic land itself – that for which you deeply care, a veritable laboratory filled with spiritual and historical meaning? To each of the above questions we would answer an emphatic no!¹

On the one hand, we must beware of the warnings gleaned through the Scriptures, concerning denial of salvation through faith, in favour of ritual observance of 'the law'. We must avoid an artificial self-righteousness resulting from a wrong view of the teaching (Torah) of God.

We must avoid the legalism of ritual observance of 'the law'. However, we must also avoid going too far the other way: rejecting the beneficial teachings of Scripture and our opportunity to freely discover the Jewish heritage of Christianity"

On the other hand, we must also recognize when a bondage of a different kind is being imposed: namely, when the accusation of Judaising is incorrectly levied, restricting us from freely practising the beneficial teachings of Scripture, as discovered from the Jewish roots of Christianity. We cannot avoid facing this challenge when we seek to restore the Christian faith to its relationship with Israel and the Jews.

The Torah is good

The whole of Israel's life, before the writing of the New Testament, and the context from which the Gospel was sent, was founded upon the teaching of God. The task over all history was to accurately interpret the teaching of God into everyday life. The Hebrew word for this teaching is Torah - teaching for a right direction in life.

The Torah is God's teaching for a right direction in life. In the New Covenant, it becomes a living walk in the Spirit, received in the heart.

The word Torah does not appear in translations of the New Testament. This was not because God's teaching was done away with: it is because of the poor translation into the word law. Indeed, Jesus made that important point very clearly during His great teaching of the Sermon on the Mount:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law [Torah] or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law [Torah] until everything is accomplished.

Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law [Torah], you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:17-20)

Read carefully and with the mindset of the continuity of Scripture, we understand that the Sermon on the Mount was spoken to the disciples of Jesus in the early stages of the New Covenant. The New Covenant brought the interpretation of Torah as the walk in the Spirit, where Torah was received in the heart rather than on tablets of stone. Jesus' teaching kindled new light in the understanding and purpose of Scripture. In his great sermon Jesus was referring to the Torah, the teaching of God, which He had come to interpret correctly and not replace.

This explains why Paul can warn his readers about misapplication of the Torah of in the letter to the Galatians, and also say that the Torah is good in Romans (Romans 7:12). Our salvation does not depend on ritual obedience to the Torah of God. Those who teach the opposite have denied the sins of the flesh that need a remedy beyond what the will of fallen man can itself accomplish. Jesus came to be our sacrifice for sin in fulfillment of the sacrificial requirements of God in his Torah so that we would be free from the impossible burden of trying to earn our own salvation.

Far from Jesus changing the teaching of God, Torah includes what Jesus has done for us through his sacrifice, to atone for those of God's requirements that we cannot reach for ourselves. He has atoned for our sins - those things we do that cause us to fall short of the perfection of Torah.

Our salvation does not depend on ritual obedience to the Torah of God. But the life to which God's teaching points is still our goal- by the help of the Holy Spirit, and by faith."

Being aware of our shortcomings, however, does not mean that we should neglect the teaching of God and the right application in our lives. The life to which God's teaching points us is still our goal by the help of the Holy Spirit, and by faith in Jesus' covering of our sins. Torah, rightly interpreted, still shows us what is good, and the Sermon on the Mount shows us that God's teaching has depth of meaning that can be missed by superficial study.

We must weigh carefully our English understanding of the word law, what is meant by the New Testament word nomos (the Greek word for law), and the Hebrew understanding of Torah and halakhah. In right balance, we see that the New and Old Testaments are compatible in conveying the full range of God's teaching. All of God's teaching, rightly interpreted, is good.

So now let us turn to the meaning of grace, attempting to further achieve a balanced understanding.

Grace

By the word 'grace', we understand God's unmerited favour. God put Adam and Eve (and, as a consequence, all their descendants) outside of the Garden of Eden. He left us with the weakness of our flesh and the temptation to sin. Yet, he did not abandon us. Over the few thousand years since then he has shown us that he is outworking a plan for redeeming a community from this earth for all eternity. His plan is worked out through the principle of covenant, revealed progressively through the Patriarchs and fulfilled through Jesus the Messiah.

It is a useful exercise to go back, conceptually, to the time of Adam and look forward, as if through a telescope. From such a viewpoint, in the distance is the coming of Jesus and his sacrificial death on the Cross, his resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit to empower his disciples to preach the good news to all nations. The view encompasses the covenant principles given through Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Jeremiah. All of this was through God's unmerited favour, his grace. This grace includes the aspects of Torah given to Moses in the wilderness years.

It is a mistake to think that grace began with the writing of the New Testament. The entire plan of God is through grace, and it is one coherent plan from start to finish."

Confusion has often arisen because of a misreading of John 1:17:

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Even if we insert the word Torah for law, taking this verse in isolation, we are still left with the same possibility of thinking that what Moses was given was replaced when Jesus came to earth. Yet, John 1:17 is preceded, in the same passage, by John 1:1-3:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Jesus, the Son of God, was with the Father before Creation. All things came through him, including all of God's spoken and written word, and what Moses was shown. Moses was not the originator of God's grace: this was the higher call of God in Jesus, both pre-incarnate and incarnate. Moses, born of the flesh, was an agent of central aspects of God's Torah but he was less than Jesus. Yet it was grace that brought forth the Torah- as with all of God's goodness.

In his Gospel, John was comparing the ministry of Moses and Jesus more than comparing grace and law.² The main point that we are making here is that we must not bring a false contrast between grace and law when both are from God and linked together.

Ultimately, through all the strands of history and all the experiences of mankind in seeking to restore fellowship with the One True God, through grace God has been outworking a plan that all who can be saved will be saved. He has revealed to us what is good and made provision in Jesus for the shortcomings that the flesh cannot achieve by its own will.

Restoring balance

There have been nearly 2000 years of gradual separation of the Christian Church from its relationship with Israel and the Jews. Now we have a somewhat different task before us than was faced in the Council of Jerusalem of Acts 15. We need to look back at the root meaning of some of the terms used in the New Testament, such as grace and law, in the context of the continuous covenant plan of God from the Fall in Genesis to the Restoration envisioned in the Book of Revelation. We need to reconnect the Church into the seamless flow of covenant history through this restored balance.

The New Covenant brought a new and permanent sacrifice for sin. Trust in God through faith in Jesus' sacrifice brings forgiveness of sins that are by grace alone. Forgiveness of sins leads to desire for sanctification – a clean heart and a pleasing walk with God. The Holy Spirit interprets Torah at heart level. Study of all Scripture is to be understood in this context.

The challenge in all things is to give no place to the flesh and encourage one another on this walk, in the balance of all of God's teaching, into the life of faith through the grace of God.

We must not even seek to "work up faith" as some do in the areas of healing and deliverance, turning faith into works. Our goal is to encourage one another on a personal walk with God through prayer and study of the Bible, trusting the Holy Spirit to be our tutor on this walk together.

For Study and Prayer

This study is not a complete overview of this sensitive subject; rather, it should be a prompt for further study. Despite all we have written, the subject is yet deeper and wider, with many implications to consider. You may have realised that this topic requires something of a mindset reorientation, and this can take some time.

• Consider how recognition of the continuity of all Scripture influences the way we study key topics from the Bible.
• Can you discover other topics that begin in the early chapters of the Bible and develop right through from Genesis to Revelation?
• Do you agree that a separation of the Christian Church from its historical foundations has affected the way we study the Bible?

Next time: Jesus the Jewish Messiah

These studies are developed from the course Christianity's Relationship with Israel and the Jews, first prepared for Tishrei Bible School.

References

1 p26, Eerdmans, 1989.

2 There was also a possibility that John's use of the term 'Moses' stood symbolically for the interpretation of the teachers of Torah, of his day. This is how the teaching of Moses was passed on. It was interpreted by the teachers of the day as much as studied from the written word. Thus, 'Moses' can mean the current teaching and interpretation of the Books of Moses. Thereby there is an element of contrast between what had become the practices of Torah in Jesus' day and the grace through which he brought true emphasis to God's teaching.