I am appalled. I've had many serious problems with the institutional church. I've been part of many denominations over the five decades I've walked with the Lord: Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Foursquare, Assembly of God, and several evangelical, spirit-filled non-denominational institutions—plus Baptist, and a few more. But what you are describing as a norm in so-called christian churches has never been part of my life in the Kingdom. I would consider people who taught things like this were non-believers. We took our daughter out of a church which taught that God does not speak to His people any more. We told her that the pastor lied.
I was pleased that in my family, all males were circumcised as babies. It was just the normal thing to do, not a religious thing. After I met the Lord at thirty years old, Acts 15:21 was always covered. Paul was always a Pharisee. The Torah was always taught as Truth, and the way to live. It was taught to me as the baseline.
We were taught that kosher was not required. But, there's not much of it in the Torah anyway. As I've matured in the Lord my wife and I increasingly found that unclean food was just not palatable to us. I assume that this is because when the Torah was written on my heart, and the Ruach HaKodesh moved inside to enable me to walk out the ways of God that the Father changed me from the inside so that those things are taken care of. We always taught Yeshua's words that it is not what goes into a man that defiles Him. It is what comes out of him that does that.
I was taught that the Torah was the law. But when I read it, it just seemed to be wise. That was true of the Big Ten also. I was appalled at the sinful nature of so many of the characters in the Tanakh. I struggled to see that Jacob was any better than Esau. But I was aware that Israel was the only believing nation in the world. It was an uphill struggle to get out of the ways of the world. Plus, I was very aware that they did not have the Holy Spirit living within them. I felt sorry for their plight.
I am aware that most of the mainline churches are inhabited by large numbers of political progressives who are functionally atheists, just like the majority of the Jews. But I have never attended a church where the Torah was dumped into the trash heap.
And now I am living at a time where it is fairly easy to show that true believers are probably around 2-3 percent of the professing Christians. Believing Jews are just as rare. My focus is on teaching people about knowing the Lord intimately and learning how to live lives which are pleasing to our Messiah. Legalistic religion is one of the main impediments. Holiness is the goal. Thank God, the Holy One lives inside us to enable that pursuit.
In the article you restock by Jeremy Prince, you uphold that the four branches to inherit all have carried something with them making them bothers. The Christians and Rabbinic Jews being the only people groups survivors. And, so long as we forgive debt, help the helpless, long for Jubilee, keep the Sabbath, and the Schmiz...? I'm not familiar with, we continue to be heirs or branches of the true vine.
In this article, you assert that we are to honor and keep the Torah in order to remain in the house 🏠 and ask if we feel this reading and obeying is paramount in our lives, otherwise what are we obeying?
I'm assuming that keeping the Torah is the same thing as the list in Jeremy Prince's article. And, of course, the list in Acts 15.
However, I have believed that in following Christ and the stories of scripture, I was actually obeying my master in mercy and justice.
It was just a daily attunement to prayer and fellowship with Him and doing what He might specifically direct that day.
Forgiving debtors may be a little different than forgiving debts. Either way, in my tradition, other than reciting the Lord's prayer, I do not recall at this time a teaching or other message on this subject. So I found this element lacking in my practice. Yet, perhaps not. Perhaps it is exactly what I ended up doing when my youngest sister went behind the backs of the rest of us heirs to get my mother to quitclaim her house to her and thereby stole the inheritance from us. My mother's position even in her deep regret was that my sister had stolen the house only from her not from the other siblings. The reality was that my mother wound up living with me in hospice and I had to learn to forgive her everyday because what is honor without a tender heart of forgiveness, even if the debt was a perceived debt only. 💔 Anyway, to answer your question, yes. I am willing and wanting to obey the scriptures and interested to learn more about what is to be followed and obeyed. However, yes, these things have seemed counter cultural in my world, and I feel unsafe and uncertain as to where they are leading. Therefore, honesty makes me admit that most of my learning has taken place in my head and has trickled down into my heart.
So far, the story of my church gospel has greatly been transformed, but transformed into what? I feel it is a bit of a gooey mess. Heaven and hell and the trinity have been changed. James has been confirmed in my heart and I am relearning lesson after lesson and attempting to hold the new truth in my heart and mind. History has become alive and that has true impact on my interpretation and eagerness to receive more. Still, it all continues to rest in the God man, Son of God, Savior, Rescuer. I still hold to some legal interpretations alongside the purification and rent veil. This is my best answer to your question today.
Thank you for the trust it took to write your comment.
The story of your sister and your mother's house. You forgave her when the theft was structural, when it cost you and your siblings not one inheritance but two, and you kept your mother in hospice with a tender heart. That IS Torah in action. That is what the Yovel and the Shmitah (the seventh-year release) point at. You did not need someone to teach you to do it. The God-man-Son-of-God-Savior-Rescuer you named at the close of your note was already writing His Torah on your heart, exactly the way Jeremiah 31 promised.
Let me clarify one thing that I hope will settle a lot of this for you.
Torah-keeping in the Hebraic-first frame is not the Christian caricature of it, which is legalism, adding-to-grace, works-righteousness. Torah-keeping is the God who wrote the Torah on your heart producing in you what the Torah always described: mercy, forgiveness, remembering the poor, sabbath rest, honoring the stranger. You have been keeping it. You just were not calling it that.
The Shmitah is the seventh-year release. Every seventh year, debts get cancelled, slaves go free, the land rests. The Yovel is the fiftieth year, the Jubilee, when even ancestral land returns. Both are covenant reset built into Israel's calendar. You did what the Yovel does. You are learning the name for what you did.
On the "gooey mess" of your theology in transition, sister, that is what the middle looks like. What you are landing on is older and steadier than what you were standing on before. Let the middle be messy. The mess is not the destruction of your faith. It is the return of your faith to what it was always about.
Hold the God-man-Son-of-God-Savior-Rescuer part. That is the center. My reading and yours are on the same ground there. Yeshua is HaShem's own Word made flesh, the divine God who came down in human form to keep the covenant from both sides because no human party ever could. You do not have to lose the God-man to let go of the Greek scaffolding that got built around Him.
You are not lost. You are landing.
Walk in shalom, sister. I am glad you are at this table.
Acts 15 reveals bargaining over the conflicts between following Torah and accepting Gentiles to join The Way.
Peter makes a strong argument why following Torah should be abandoned: "...why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?"
James turns to the practical matter at hand and proposes a compromise to assuage the Gentile's complaints about circumcision while still including laws pertaining to food restrictions and sexual morality to mollify the Pharisees, Apostles and Elders assembled in Jerusalem.
There are similarities here to arguments being made today about churches compromising their teachings in order to maintain and build their congregations.
Neo Conscious, there's real tension in that room, no argument there. One correction worth making on the yoke, though.
Look at what triggered it. Acts 15:5 names the demand directly: "the party of the Pharisees" insisting Gentiles be circumcised and keep the law of Moses in full. Peter's response in verse 10 is aimed at that demand, comprehensive law-keeping imposed as a salvation requirement, not at Torah itself as God's revealed instruction.
That same "burden... hard to bear" language shows up again in Yeshua's (Jesus's) own mouth, Matthew 23:4, describing what the Pharisees themselves piled onto people, in the very same passage where he affirms their seat of Moses' authority (23:2-3). Same complaint both times: the added weight of comprehensive legal demand, not Torah's content.
Peter's actual argument in verse 11 is about the basis of salvation, grace, not Torah's validity going forward. And the Council's ruling in verses 20-21 keeps four moral requirements and expects Gentiles to keep learning Torah every Sabbath in the synagogues. That's not abandonment. That's an entry threshold with an open door.
The English "yoke" flattens a very specific first-century argument into a general anti-Law one. Worth another look at Acts 15 with that lens.
Go your way, I won't argue and only pray the Lord clears your vision. It is far better to believe and listen to the "living Lord" than to perform laws and rituals. Abraham believed God, and it counted as righteous.
No one pleased God by following laws; their faith knows the righteous! If legal obedience worked, the Lord would not have come, and he would not have needed to give his true followers the indwelling Holy Spirit.
31 (32) It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers on the day I took them by their hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt; because they, for their part, violated my covenant, even though I, for my part, was a husband to them,” says Adonai. 32 (33) “For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Isra’el after those days,” says Adonai: “I will put my Torah within them and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they will be my people. 33 (34) No longer will any of them teach his fellow community member or his brother, ‘Know Adonai’; for all will know me, from the least of them to the greatest; because I will forgive their wickednesses and remember their sins no more.”
B, "chains" is your word. It isn't anywhere close to what the Bible teaches.
Psalm 119:45: "I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought your precepts." The Hebrew behind "freedom" means wide, spacious, room to move. Verse 32: "I run in the path of your commandments, for you enlarge my heart." Chains don't let a man run.
You're reading through Roman legal glasses. Law as penalty, law as prosecution. But the word Torah means instruction, a father pointing the way. And the Spirit you appeal to? Ezekiel 36:27 says the Spirit is given so you can walk in His statutes. The Spirit doesn't free you from the Father's instruction. He finally makes you able to live it.
Count how many times David says freedom, delight, and life in Psalm 119 about the thing you just called slavery. Then ask who handed you those glasses.
I am appalled. I've had many serious problems with the institutional church. I've been part of many denominations over the five decades I've walked with the Lord: Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Foursquare, Assembly of God, and several evangelical, spirit-filled non-denominational institutions—plus Baptist, and a few more. But what you are describing as a norm in so-called christian churches has never been part of my life in the Kingdom. I would consider people who taught things like this were non-believers. We took our daughter out of a church which taught that God does not speak to His people any more. We told her that the pastor lied.
I was pleased that in my family, all males were circumcised as babies. It was just the normal thing to do, not a religious thing. After I met the Lord at thirty years old, Acts 15:21 was always covered. Paul was always a Pharisee. The Torah was always taught as Truth, and the way to live. It was taught to me as the baseline.
We were taught that kosher was not required. But, there's not much of it in the Torah anyway. As I've matured in the Lord my wife and I increasingly found that unclean food was just not palatable to us. I assume that this is because when the Torah was written on my heart, and the Ruach HaKodesh moved inside to enable me to walk out the ways of God that the Father changed me from the inside so that those things are taken care of. We always taught Yeshua's words that it is not what goes into a man that defiles Him. It is what comes out of him that does that.
I was taught that the Torah was the law. But when I read it, it just seemed to be wise. That was true of the Big Ten also. I was appalled at the sinful nature of so many of the characters in the Tanakh. I struggled to see that Jacob was any better than Esau. But I was aware that Israel was the only believing nation in the world. It was an uphill struggle to get out of the ways of the world. Plus, I was very aware that they did not have the Holy Spirit living within them. I felt sorry for their plight.
I am aware that most of the mainline churches are inhabited by large numbers of political progressives who are functionally atheists, just like the majority of the Jews. But I have never attended a church where the Torah was dumped into the trash heap.
And now I am living at a time where it is fairly easy to show that true believers are probably around 2-3 percent of the professing Christians. Believing Jews are just as rare. My focus is on teaching people about knowing the Lord intimately and learning how to live lives which are pleasing to our Messiah. Legalistic religion is one of the main impediments. Holiness is the goal. Thank God, the Holy One lives inside us to enable that pursuit.
Amen! ( It's what happens when we leave the Matrix, David. )
In the article you restock by Jeremy Prince, you uphold that the four branches to inherit all have carried something with them making them bothers. The Christians and Rabbinic Jews being the only people groups survivors. And, so long as we forgive debt, help the helpless, long for Jubilee, keep the Sabbath, and the Schmiz...? I'm not familiar with, we continue to be heirs or branches of the true vine.
In this article, you assert that we are to honor and keep the Torah in order to remain in the house 🏠 and ask if we feel this reading and obeying is paramount in our lives, otherwise what are we obeying?
I'm assuming that keeping the Torah is the same thing as the list in Jeremy Prince's article. And, of course, the list in Acts 15.
However, I have believed that in following Christ and the stories of scripture, I was actually obeying my master in mercy and justice.
It was just a daily attunement to prayer and fellowship with Him and doing what He might specifically direct that day.
Forgiving debtors may be a little different than forgiving debts. Either way, in my tradition, other than reciting the Lord's prayer, I do not recall at this time a teaching or other message on this subject. So I found this element lacking in my practice. Yet, perhaps not. Perhaps it is exactly what I ended up doing when my youngest sister went behind the backs of the rest of us heirs to get my mother to quitclaim her house to her and thereby stole the inheritance from us. My mother's position even in her deep regret was that my sister had stolen the house only from her not from the other siblings. The reality was that my mother wound up living with me in hospice and I had to learn to forgive her everyday because what is honor without a tender heart of forgiveness, even if the debt was a perceived debt only. 💔 Anyway, to answer your question, yes. I am willing and wanting to obey the scriptures and interested to learn more about what is to be followed and obeyed. However, yes, these things have seemed counter cultural in my world, and I feel unsafe and uncertain as to where they are leading. Therefore, honesty makes me admit that most of my learning has taken place in my head and has trickled down into my heart.
So far, the story of my church gospel has greatly been transformed, but transformed into what? I feel it is a bit of a gooey mess. Heaven and hell and the trinity have been changed. James has been confirmed in my heart and I am relearning lesson after lesson and attempting to hold the new truth in my heart and mind. History has become alive and that has true impact on my interpretation and eagerness to receive more. Still, it all continues to rest in the God man, Son of God, Savior, Rescuer. I still hold to some legal interpretations alongside the purification and rent veil. This is my best answer to your question today.
Sister Laura,
Thank you for the trust it took to write your comment.
The story of your sister and your mother's house. You forgave her when the theft was structural, when it cost you and your siblings not one inheritance but two, and you kept your mother in hospice with a tender heart. That IS Torah in action. That is what the Yovel and the Shmitah (the seventh-year release) point at. You did not need someone to teach you to do it. The God-man-Son-of-God-Savior-Rescuer you named at the close of your note was already writing His Torah on your heart, exactly the way Jeremiah 31 promised.
Let me clarify one thing that I hope will settle a lot of this for you.
Torah-keeping in the Hebraic-first frame is not the Christian caricature of it, which is legalism, adding-to-grace, works-righteousness. Torah-keeping is the God who wrote the Torah on your heart producing in you what the Torah always described: mercy, forgiveness, remembering the poor, sabbath rest, honoring the stranger. You have been keeping it. You just were not calling it that.
The Shmitah is the seventh-year release. Every seventh year, debts get cancelled, slaves go free, the land rests. The Yovel is the fiftieth year, the Jubilee, when even ancestral land returns. Both are covenant reset built into Israel's calendar. You did what the Yovel does. You are learning the name for what you did.
On the "gooey mess" of your theology in transition, sister, that is what the middle looks like. What you are landing on is older and steadier than what you were standing on before. Let the middle be messy. The mess is not the destruction of your faith. It is the return of your faith to what it was always about.
Hold the God-man-Son-of-God-Savior-Rescuer part. That is the center. My reading and yours are on the same ground there. Yeshua is HaShem's own Word made flesh, the divine God who came down in human form to keep the covenant from both sides because no human party ever could. You do not have to lose the God-man to let go of the Greek scaffolding that got built around Him.
You are not lost. You are landing.
Walk in shalom, sister. I am glad you are at this table.
Brought tears to my eyes. Thank you.
Prov 25:11 A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold and pictures of silver.
thank you
Acts 15 reveals bargaining over the conflicts between following Torah and accepting Gentiles to join The Way.
Peter makes a strong argument why following Torah should be abandoned: "...why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?"
James turns to the practical matter at hand and proposes a compromise to assuage the Gentile's complaints about circumcision while still including laws pertaining to food restrictions and sexual morality to mollify the Pharisees, Apostles and Elders assembled in Jerusalem.
There are similarities here to arguments being made today about churches compromising their teachings in order to maintain and build their congregations.
Neo Conscious, there's real tension in that room, no argument there. One correction worth making on the yoke, though.
Look at what triggered it. Acts 15:5 names the demand directly: "the party of the Pharisees" insisting Gentiles be circumcised and keep the law of Moses in full. Peter's response in verse 10 is aimed at that demand, comprehensive law-keeping imposed as a salvation requirement, not at Torah itself as God's revealed instruction.
That same "burden... hard to bear" language shows up again in Yeshua's (Jesus's) own mouth, Matthew 23:4, describing what the Pharisees themselves piled onto people, in the very same passage where he affirms their seat of Moses' authority (23:2-3). Same complaint both times: the added weight of comprehensive legal demand, not Torah's content.
Peter's actual argument in verse 11 is about the basis of salvation, grace, not Torah's validity going forward. And the Council's ruling in verses 20-21 keeps four moral requirements and expects Gentiles to keep learning Torah every Sabbath in the synagogues. That's not abandonment. That's an entry threshold with an open door.
The English "yoke" flattens a very specific first-century argument into a general anti-Law one. Worth another look at Acts 15 with that lens.
Points well taken, Sergio. You're correct on that.
Go your way, I won't argue and only pray the Lord clears your vision. It is far better to believe and listen to the "living Lord" than to perform laws and rituals. Abraham believed God, and it counted as righteous.
No one pleased God by following laws; their faith knows the righteous! If legal obedience worked, the Lord would not have come, and he would not have needed to give his true followers the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 (32) It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers on the day I took them by their hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt; because they, for their part, violated my covenant, even though I, for my part, was a husband to them,” says Adonai. 32 (33) “For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Isra’el after those days,” says Adonai: “I will put my Torah within them and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they will be my people. 33 (34) No longer will any of them teach his fellow community member or his brother, ‘Know Adonai’; for all will know me, from the least of them to the greatest; because I will forgive their wickednesses and remember their sins no more.”
34 (35) This is what Adonai says,
who gives the sun as light for the day,
who ordained the laws for the moon and stars
to provide light for the night,
who stirs up the sea until its waves roar —
Adonai-Tzva’ot is his name:
Sad, Jesus came to give freedom and life in the Spirit, but like a prosecutor, you want to enslave the free back to the chains of the law.
B, "chains" is your word. It isn't anywhere close to what the Bible teaches.
Psalm 119:45: "I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought your precepts." The Hebrew behind "freedom" means wide, spacious, room to move. Verse 32: "I run in the path of your commandments, for you enlarge my heart." Chains don't let a man run.
You're reading through Roman legal glasses. Law as penalty, law as prosecution. But the word Torah means instruction, a father pointing the way. And the Spirit you appeal to? Ezekiel 36:27 says the Spirit is given so you can walk in His statutes. The Spirit doesn't free you from the Father's instruction. He finally makes you able to live it.
Count how many times David says freedom, delight, and life in Psalm 119 about the thing you just called slavery. Then ask who handed you those glasses.
Shalom