Torah

In the second chapter of Love Secrets, John Mark compares the law to a cold, unfeeling mirror, saying that it has “no heart of love”. Having been discipled in a Calvinist tradition, this viewpoint isn’t alien to me. If you don’t know, (some) Calvinists adhere to TULIP, which stands for

• Total depravity
• Unconditional election
• Limited atonement
• Irresistible grace
• Perseverance of the saints

Because there are five assertions, this is also called Five Point Calvinism.

In this faith tradition, it’s common to present the Old Testament commandments/covenant and first century Judaism in a very negative light. The old covenant leads to death and the new covenant leads to life. The old covenant is, essentially, a curse. The old covenant is described as pure legalism, while the new covenant is almost the opposite, focusing only on what God has done, almost to the point of obliterating human agency. If we are at all involved in what God is doing, it is passively.

As a baby christian, I was all for this. It definitely challenged my naive understanding that Christianity was about rules, about doing things to get into heaven. It places emphasis on God, and, importantly, his love for us. Christianity is not about who can ascend above, but rather about who has descended below. And I still love Calvinist teachers. Tim Keller is my absolute jam. I’m not trying to dismiss Calvinism. But every faith tradition has weak points and if you disagree with that you are definitely not reformed, because reformed theology recognizes the reformation.

As I grew in my faith, I began to realize that nobody had ever bothered to teach me the Old Testament. Literally zero instruction. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? The Old Testament comprises the majority of the Bible. But nobody ever sat me down and went — “hey, why don’t I describe to you what the biblical story is?”. That is what it is. A story. Not a systematic theology. If God wanted us to take away Grudem from our daily devotion, don’t you think that’s what he would have given us? Instead God relates to us the way that people who want relationships do. He gives his story. And how can you understand a story if you only know the last 20% of it? It’s nearly impossible, right?

Two years after I was saved, I spent a year in Japan as a university exchange student. Sounds like a blast, right? Well… kind of. I was drowning, completely cut off from christian community. I was also more than ever consumed by my addiction to pornography. “There is now no condemnation” I knew of course. I wasn’t afraid that God was going to punish me because I was in sin. But somehow I was still completely miserable, I guess because sin is horrible. I didn’t want the absence of punishment from sin. I wanted the absence of sin. I also wanted God. So I started listening to as many sermons as possible. I would just sit in my bed and listen to sermons for hours. It wasn’t an exercise in self righteousness, it was an exercise in desperation, grasping for the liberty that I thought I should be experiencing. It was during this season that I started reading the Bible. Like actually, from start to finish. I slowly read the Bible over the course of the next two years, with a final push to finish by Easter of 2018.

The Law Conundrum

In reading the Old Testament something began to bother me. Why so much focus on laws? I thought these laws were supposed to be a speed bump, a distraction, maybe a pit stop, on our merry way to God’s grace. But rather they seemed to be the focal point of the Old Testament. Leviticus is long, inconveniently hard to ignore, and placed at the center part of the Torah. In Jewish literature what is at the center is the most important.

Even worse, when Moses gives his final message he says “You shall be careful therefore to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left” (Deuteronomy 28:14). This bothered me a lot. Wasn’t the point of the law merely to show us our wickedness? Why is the narrative presenting it as something good? Is Moses a secret agent, sowing the seeds of justification by works? What about God, who tells Moses to say this? Did God just plant a huge ticking time bomb in Israel? Is God literally sabotaging his own plan? What kind of God would do this?

All of these doubts were rooted in the idea that the old covenant was against grace, against God, for works, for human pride. The idea was that the old covenant was a moral tower of babel attempting to make morally perfect humans. This was the problem, and what I managed to slowly unravel over four years of learning the scriptures.

In truth, the Bible doesn’t seem to present the giving of the law of Moses as anything less than a complete act of grace, a gift from God.

The Heartbeat of God

Let your steadfast love come to me, O Lord,
your salvation according to your promise;
then shall I have an answer for him who taunts me,
for I trust in your word.
And take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth,
for my hope is in your rules.
I will keep your law continually,
forever and ever,
and I shall walk in a wide place,
for I have sought your precepts.
I will also speak of your testimonies before kings
and shall not be put to shame,
for I find my delight in your commandments,
which I love.
I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love,
and I will meditate on your statutes.

Psalm 119:41–48

Does this sound like someone who is caught in the legalistic trap, the “leaven of the law” as John Mark would say? It sounds to me like the Psalmist has found the love of God and the grace of God in his commandments. That the commandments themselves give life, love, and hope. How?

The first hint lies here: what the word “law” actually means in Hebrew. The Hebrew scriptures are made up of three parts: the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim. This translates to: the law, the prophets, and the writings. Yup, Torah means “law”. Wherever someone is talking about the law (and the prophets) in the New Testament, it’s ambiguous if they are talking about the legal code of God, or if they are talking about the scriptures. Immediately, this makes it more difficult to adopt a simplistic viewpoint of the law. The law and the prophets were a narrative, and it was a narrative that pointed to the future hope of God and of a savior. For the Jews, the law was not just a rigid set of rules: it in fact was the very story that showed them God’s mercy and deliverance. It was the heartbeat of God.

From the ancient perspective, gods were capricious. When something bad happened, people thought their god was punishing them, but they didn’t know why. They would just do random things to try to please their god. But Yahweh is different, because he makes it clear to us what is pleasing to him and what is not. He loves justice and mercy, and he hates the things that disrupt that.

The giving of the law is the method by which God made himself known. Or we might say, the giving of God’s word. The ten commandments are literally the “ten words” in Hebrew (from which we get the term decalogue). God’s word makes him known and gives life. This is also why Jesus is described as the word of God, because he does the same thing. God also speaks ten times in creation, or gives ten words. Understood in this way, the giving of the ten commandments was less a legal contract and more life giving wisdom to bless the Israelites and make them prosperous.

Moreover, the Mosaic law is never presented as a requirement for salvation. The Israelites are already saved. Remember when God parted the Red Sea? God saved them without requiring their agreement to obey the law. Salvation is a free gift. But the laws teach the Israelites how to live in light of their salvation. In many of the instructions given in Leviticus, God reminds them that they were once an enslaved people and that he liberated them, when we might expect God to threaten them with punishment. Obedience is responsive, not anticipatory.

The Law and the New Testament Narrative

In the gospel of Luke, John the Baptist is busy at work preparing Israel for the arrival of Jesus. But the people ask what they should do to avoid judgment, John doesn’t say “Nothing! Just wait for the messiah and he will fix everything! He’s just around the corner! Your own righteousness is pointless!”. Rather, John tells people to live lives bearing the fruit in repentance, and in accordance with Torah commands.

Then we get to Jesus.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly 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.

Matthew 5:17–19

In saying he will fulfill the Law and the Prophets, he’s not saying only that he is morally perfect, but also that he is the hope that is the focal point of the scriptures. He’s also saying that the law remains to fulfill a purpose until the story is complete and the new heaven and new earth is unveiled, and until then, his followers should practice and teach the law! Is Jesus preaching the law here? Would John Mark consider what Jesus is doing here to be “multiplying sins”?

And now to the apostles. When Paul visits James in Acts, James informs Paul that there are Jews in Jerusalem who believe that the gospel that Paul is preaching instructs people to cease observing the law, and then instructs Paul to ritually cleanse himself to prove that he is still Torah observant! If Paul, who wrote Romans, Galatians, and 2 Corinthians, believes that following the law leads to death, how could he choose to continue to obey the law?

Righteousness

By now, you’re probably thinking about the verses in the epistles that talk about the new covenant superseding the old covenant, and how they fit into all of this. Doesn’t that contradict the idea that the law is not purely good, and that following the law is good?

Consider that in 1 Corinthians Paul states “To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law.” This challenges the dichotomy forcing us to choose between law and gospel.

The problem, which I’ve illustrated, is the idea that the old covenant is living with the law while the new covenant is living with grace. John Mark demonstrates this perspective when he says that living under the law leads only to condemnation.

Paul chooses his terminology carefully when he talks about the law, contrasting justifying faith with justifying works of the law. He emphasizes that righteousness cannot come from works of the law. How do we make sense of this?

Righteousness cannot exist in a vacuum. Righteousness can only exist in relationship. So, righteousness in the Bible is focused on right relationship between God and with fellow man. And while God is interested in good moral behavior, what he really cares about is being able to live with his people.

The works of the law, I think, refer to the practices done by the Israelites according to the Levitical purity system under the old covenant, which allowed God’s presence to dwell with his people. This was accomplished by mediating his spirit within a particular space set apart (holy) for him: the tabernacle, and later, the temple. After the people’s trespass at Mount Sinai, Moses became unable to enter the tent of meeting. By receiving the Levitical commands, Moses becomes able to enter the tent. So the Levitical commands make a way for at least one person to dwell, for a time, directly in God’s presence. Is this law? Yes. Is this grace? Yes.

But God’s ultimate intent is not to reside in a tiny space where only the high priest can enter once a year. His presence desires to break out beyond these confines. However, due to his holiness, his presence is deadly. When the king Uzziah enters the temple to burn incense without permission, God’s spirit breaks out against him and ultimately kills him (2 Chronicles 26). This system is also not invulnerable because it relies on human obedience, or works of the law. When Israel’s disobedience persists for generation after generation, the system breaks and Israel is scattered into exile.

In the same year that Uzziah dies, Isaiah has a vision where he enters the heavenly temple (Isaiah 6). Isaiah freaks out. However, Isaiah isn’t in the earthly temple, which is but a reflection. He is in the real temple in heaven. If God’s holiness broke out against Uzziah on the earthly temple, what more would happen to Isaiah? But instead of letting him be obliterated, God gives Isaiah a holy coal that takes away his impurity, allowing him to remain in his presence. In this encounter, a more perfect system for dealing with sin is presented.

With Jesus’ sacrifice, the veil within the temple is torn (Matthew 27). Access to God was then accomplished for all people, without need for the priest to mediate God’s presence. Next, the presence of God itself arrived on the day of Pentecost, in a way that it never did when the second temple was erected. God’s spirit, rather than filling the temple, rests on the very people in the assembly. With Jesus’ sacrifice, a new way to live with God’s presence is achieved. This new system is way better! It makes sense that the apostles are upset when anyone wants to revert to the old system. It’s as if someone who is married wants to move out of their house and go back to living as if they were just dating their spouse. Is this new covenant grace? Yes. But is this law? Yes.

Close to heart

Rather than a covenant that does away with law, the new covenant actually draws the law closer.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Jeremiah 31:33

Now, the law is written on our hearts rather than on tablets of stone! John Mark actually references this verse (or its quotation in Hebrews), but replaces the word law with desire. This isn’t ok, and it’s hard for me to see this as not intellectually dishonest. There exists absolutely no translation that renders nomos as something other than the word law. After all, this is the same exact word that Paul uses to talk about the law of sin and death (Romans 8).

Moses instructs the Israelites to teach God’s commandments to their children, to write them on their foreheads, hands, gates, and doorposts, so that they would never forget them (Deuteronomy 6). But they did forget. They forgot so hard that the written copy of the Torah was literally lost for about 400 years until Josiah discovered it in the temple (2 Kings 22).

The problem with the old covenant, then, was not that people were too obsessed with the law and were constantly self flagellating in trying to follow it. Rather, the narrative presented in the Bible was that it was too easy to forget it.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Ezekiel 36:26–27

One of the primary rituals observed under the mosaic law was the practice of circumcision. When Paul speaks on circumcision, he says that even if you are circumcised (in the flesh), you become uncircumcised when you stop following the law. The outward act isn’t enough to change you because your inner heart is still heard. He then says “But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter” (Romans 2:29).

This means: what the Spirit does is not remove the law, but replace a shallow obedience to the law with a true obedience of the law.

Grace and Peace

The law’s aim was not only to create right-relationship between God and man, but also between fellow men.

As soon as the Israelites are saved through the waters, they begin to quarrel with God. They accuse him of failing to provide water and food for him. This is the focus of Exodus 16 and 17. But when we get to Exodus 18, we find out the people have been quarreling with each other as well.

In this chapter, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro visits Moses and celebrates how God has delivered the Israelites. But Jethro also notices that Moses spends all of his time acting as a judge for his people whenever they have a dispute, and asks why he needs to overburdening himself.

And Moses said to his father-in-law, “Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.”

Exodus 18:15–16

The giving of the law is precisely what allows the Israelites to live in peace with one another! Rules exist precisely because people have this tendency to be in conflict with one another. When two people agree on rules, it allows them to mediate when disagreement arises. The law creates unity for the Israelites.

The Spirit has the same function, coming upon the Church so that it can create unity within it. Paul speaks of the “unity of the spirit in the bond of peace” in Ephesians. But this unity that the Spirit provides is profound on another level. When the Spirit arrives on Pentecost, the people speak in other languages, which creates a picture of reversing the scattering of Babel.

The other image that the pouring of the Spirit should evoke is the creation of Adam. Before the giving of God’s spirit, man is just a mass of wet dirt. And when God’s spirit departs man, man decomposes and scatters to dust. The spirit turns a collection of amorphous, disconnected particles into a cohesive whole. And this is what happens to the Church as well. Note how the Church is described in the epistles as a body!

So, both the law and the Spirit are intended for the purpose of unifying the Jews.

New blood, new family

Oh wait, did I say Jews? Sorry, I forgot that Gentiles are included now too. It turns out the apostles actually noticed that too, and it is of supreme importance to them. This is almost always what they are concerned about in their wider discussion of the law.

Let’s rewind to Acts 21. Why do the zealous Jews accuse Paul of betraying the law? Because he has been preaching the gospel to the filthy Gentiles!

The old covenant system excluded Gentiles, or as Paul writes, they were “alienated from the life of God” (Ephesians 4). Even if a Gentile were to convert, baptism was first required and their religious participation was limited. The purity requirements of the covenant required that Jews live distinctly from their neighbors, to prevent them from slipping into idolatry and living out of sync with their God’s heartbeat. Yet, fulfilling the covenant would bring them prosperity and declare to the nations who God was, with hope of expanding God’s reconciliation from just Israel to the nations. But Israel’s repeated disobedience destroyed any hope of this.

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Ephesians 3:6

To Paul, the gospel involves nothing less than the inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s plan of salvation. This development is the central concern of the book of Acts in the council of Jerusalem. By including Gentiles, the messianic Jews were faced with a difficult question: do we require them to be Torah observant, especially with respect to circumcision? Peter’s observation is that the Gentiles, by being filled with the spirit, demonstrate that they are already living in the new covenant. This means that it is unnecessary to practice the old covenant to mediate the presence of God, as that would be “placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear” (Acts 15:10). Yet at the conclusion of the council, they charge the Gentiles to “abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood” (Acts 15:2). If the apostles believed in a new covenant of grace that should abolish any semblance of moral ordinance, isn’t it strange that they would command the Gentiles to follow moral ordinances?

In the epistle to the Galatians and to the Romans, when Paul is writing about the law, it is extremely important to be aware of this dynamic between Gentiles and Jews. When the Galatians are preaching the false gospel, that is, that to be included in the new covenant one needs to become circumcised, it is in danger of excluding the Gentiles and therefore introducing division into the church. This is why Paul admonished Peter for not eating with Gentiles, and why his conclusion to his entire discussion of the law being a guardian is that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). It’s clear that Paul’s concern is not primarily with how christians are living with guilty consciences, or self-righteousness, but that Christ’s work of ethnic reconciliation is being undone in the church.

Good and Bad

John Mark also compares the law to the tree of knowing good and evil, saying that to eat from it causes death. This argument is built on the premise that because the law informs us what is good and what is bad, it is analogous to the tree of knowing good and evil.

Nothing could be more of the complete opposite of what the biblical story is teaching us. Having a knowledge of what is good and what is bad is not the problem. The problem is attempting to establish such knowledge without God.

If defining good and bad is problematic by itself, then why does God repeatedly declare what is good and evil in the first page of the Bible? The day is good, the night is bad. Things that lead to human flourishing are all good. Humanity is good good (the word good is literally used twice). Man alone is not good. God is seems to be very interested in defining what is good and what is evil. And he also gives man a law: listen to me, don’t define good and evil by yourself. I should note here that the giving of a law prior to the fall should indicate that giving of the law cannot be considered as only an accommodation for sin.

The response to the fall isn’t that God erases our conception of good and evil, and our understanding of sin, so that we are blind to it. It is that God gives us understanding of all those things. So the giving of the law is only good in the sense that it reveals God’s moral will.

I digress here that what we view as God’s law is not restricted to God’s written legal codes as presented in the first five books of the Bible. That is, it’s not a list of rules. The Torah is better translated to “instruction”, and it represents how God teaches us how to live. God tells Isaac, “Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws” (Genesis 26:5). But Abraham did this without having been given the explicit Mosaic law. Rather, he was able to obey due to his faith. This should indicate to us that true obedience of the law is more than following rules like a robot.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22–23

In a broader view, the work of God is to give us wisdom (which, the discernment between good and bad). But wisdom from God is based on him (as proverbs says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge). The purpose of wisdom is so that we can be co-heirs with Christ and participate with him in his continuing work of redemption in the body. It’s not to produce our own justification. “For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building” (1 Corinthians 3:9).

Judgment

When the Israelites were commanded to build the altar, they were instructed to use only uncut stones (Exodus 20). The work of God was not meant to be defiled by human “refinements”. Even in the old covenant God rejected self-justification.

And I will declare my judgments against them, for all their evil in forsaking me. They have made offerings to other gods and worshipped the works of their own hands.

Jeremiah 1:16

The problem of the Pharisees was not that they had actually made themselves righteous through their obedience to the law. The problem was that they had fooled themselves into thinking that they were obedient when they were not. As Jesus said, their cups were still dirty on the inside. Yet because the Pharisees had created the appearance of righteousness, they thought they were actually upholding the law. And, ironically, by using the law as a way to elevate themselves, they were actually breaking the law and using the law as a way of promoting injustice.

Self-justification is ultimately self-deception. Truly following the law ought to cultivate a spirit of humility, not of pride. Because the law, with its sacrifices, reminds us that we’re unable to be holy on our own terms. When a family sacrifices a lamb for passover, it’s supposed to remind us of the intense price of sin, and the iniquity that we bear and are unable to take away without an atoning sacrifice. Killing an innocent lamb, one that grew up in your house, is not meant to be pleasant. It’s not meant to make you feel like you’re the good guy. That you’re morally superior.

The law also demands that we treat others with charity and mercy. During the sabbath year, Israelites were supposed to leave their fields unharvested, not only because they were supposed to stop working, but also so the poor and foreigners could pick and eat from their crops. It was a way to provide for those who had no land. When Jesus’ followers are accused of breaking the sabbath, they are living the very way they were supposed to during the sabbath. Jesus then challenges not the law, but the way the Pharisees used the law for the opposite of its intent. Jesus says “If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent” (Matthew 12:7). He states not that the law is irrelevant, but that his disciples are in fact innocent, under the law!

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Psalm 51:17

Conclusion

I want to support John Mark’s story, and I want to support his intention. I found the first chapter of Love Secrets to be heart wrenching actually, and it also made me want to understand what is wrong with the church that Jesus’ message of hope, reconciliation, and grace is hijacked.

It’s true that the gospel announces to us that salvation is not contingent on our performance. It’s also true that so many, even inside the church, fail to get this. How do we solve this? One way is to preach a message that emphasizes the new covenant in such a way that the old covenant is depicted as cruel and evil, laying a trap for those who grow in their faith to a point where they start to read the Old Testament. I have already talked about the problems with doing this. What’s the alternative, though?

Maybe the best way is just to present the entire story of God, start to finish, and see that the entire thing is grace. Maybe the best way is to actually believe that the scriptures can make us wise for salvation. And for us to get out of the way of what God is doing. Not to subtract or add to it.

I’m still working it all out on my end. I don’t think my understanding of new and old covenants is airtight. I just think that viewing the law as a gift makes God look less like a two faced maniac. I think it makes his grace and mercy radiate.

Your word is a lamp for my feet,
a light on my path.
I have taken an oath and confirmed it,
that I will follow your righteous laws.
I have suffered much;
preserve my life, Lord, according to your word.
Accept, Lord, the willing praise of my mouth,
and teach me your laws.
Though I constantly take my life in my hands,
I will not forget your law.
The wicked have set a snare for me,
but I have not strayed from your precepts.
Your statutes are my heritage forever;
they are the joy of my heart.
My heart is set on keeping your decrees
to the very end.

Psalm 119:105–112

I love the law of the lord. I shall meditate on it day and night. It sustains me, and I shall never wither.