One Word Purposely Taught Backwards

Yeshua said He came to fulfill the Torah. The very next verse tells you what that word actually meant.

Fulfill.

Last night I spent a ton of time trying to explain that one word to a man who couldn’t understand what I was trying to say. Ole Mr. Beane just wanted a simple yes or a simple no. Did Jesus fulfill the law? I gave him the answer, and he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want that answer. He wanted to spring a trap on me. So I said it again, a little bit cleaner this time. He didn’t hear any of it. Somewhere in there I had to stop. And my mistake was the one sitting underneath this whole dialogue: I kept believing that if I explained it clearly enough, he would finally understand what I was trying to say. Clarity was never what stood in the way between James and me. He was not asking to learn; he was asking to prove a point.

So allow me to write it down for the ones that are curious and who do want to know the truth.

Fulfill is the entire hinge. The modern Church told you that Yeshua (Jesus) fulfilled the Torah (instruction, teaching, law), and the moment you heard fulfill, you heard finished. Okay, back up a step. We heard completed and done. What was given to us was a receipt stamped paid and filed away. If he fulfilled the law, as the reasoning goes, then you are free of it, and the Torah becomes a museum piece, something that we look at, admire, and then forget about when we walk out of the old building.

Okay, but we can’t do that. Stop. Take a moment and read the following sentence that comes out of his mouth:

Until heaven and earth pass away, not one yod (י), not one stroke of a letter, not the most minuscule part of the Torah, of the Hebrew alphabet, will pass from the Torah until all is accomplished. (Matthew 5:18)

Keep in mind here, the yod is the smallest letter that Hebrew has to offer, a mark the size of an apostrophe. The stroke, or the tittle, is the tiny hook that separates one letter from the next in Hebrew. He reaches for those two smallest items on the page and says not even these tiny little marks are exempt from God’s instruction. That is not a man retiring anything. That is a man guarding it down to the very ink it’s written in.

So, that being said, he doesn’t mean what you were told he meant. In verse 17, he also says he did not come to abolish. Okay, there’s a simple statement that most Christians ignore right there. However, in verse 18 he says that not a pen stroke falls. What do we do with that? If fulfill meant finish, he would be abolishing everything in one beat that he just swore he wouldn’t touch. Slow down, think about that for a second.

Here is what that passage actually carries. In the mouth of rabbis, to fulfill the Torah and to abolish it were a matched pair, and they never meant what English readers assume. To abolish it, l’vatel, was to interpret a commandment so poorly that people would stop keeping it. To fulfill it, l’qayem, was to interpret it so rightly that it established a foundation and it was lived out properly. The Mishnah still keeps that pair, that very pair: whoever upholds the Torah in poverty will uphold it in wealth, and whoever nullifies it in wealth will nullify it in poverty. That is in Pirkei Avot 4:9. Fulfill was never about ending the commandments; it was about getting them right.

Now put it back in his own language. What was he talking about, in what context? It was all about getting that right.

And one more thing. To fulfill meant to live out perfectly and demonstrate. So think about it: if you were given a job and the employer said, “I expect you to fulfill your obligation,” that doesn’t mean you end it; it means you do it correctly.

When he said this in his own language: “I truly did not come to nullify the Torah by teaching it falsely; I came to establish it by teaching it truly.” That makes everything fit together. This is a rabbi staking his authority on doing what’s correct, reading Moses correctly. This is not a savior canceling anything, and everything that follows it proves my point. You’ve heard it said, but I say to you, driving each command deeper into your heart, never leaving the room.

One word, two readings. One of them makes the verses contradict, and the other one makes them say the same thing.

So the man in my conversation last night was handed the losing definition and was told that that’s the gospel. And so were you, probably. The difference is not how clearly someone explains it to you. The true difference is whether or not you’re willing to read it again in the right context and try to figure out what it’s actually saying.

That is the distinction. That is what being a Berean ever was. It is what being a Berean means. And it is something that the majority of the church fails to look at deeply.

Shalom, shalom.

ps: I’ve rebranded the main site to be called the Berean table. However, I did create a personal blog site for me to share all my thoughts and not just spiritual.

https://sergiodesoto.me