Lawless Christians?, part 3

[I use the phrase tanach/TNK to refer to the Old Testament.]

In my two previous posts, I have been dealing with bad teaching in the Church that tries to do away with God’s requirement for holiness in the lives of His followers. The Church has tried to do away with God’s requirements for his followers to live lives that are worthy of His calling by eliminating God’s instruction, His torah, by calling it Law and saying that we are free from the Law, that we are “under Grace” because Jesus did away with the Law.

As I demonstrated in my previous posts, we have mislabeled and mistranslated God’s words to us to fit our desires. In this post I want to deal with one more concept that we have gotten phenomenally wrong because of our misunderstanding of the context of the scriptures.

We have the mistaken belief that the writers of the Tanach and the religious leaders of Jesus’ day believed that they had to earn salvation, that by doing works of the Law, they could merit God’s kingdom. Yes, the phrase, works of the Law does occur several times in Paul’s epistles, but could it be even remotely possible that we have, somehow, misunderstood Paul and got it wrong? Again? (That again should tell you that were you and I speaking face-to-face, my tone would be dripping with snarkasm.)

Lawless Christians?, part 2

In my last post, I decided to examine the basic Christian assumption that Christian are not under the Law (Torah), that since Jesus fulfilled the righteousness of the Old Testament’s requirement by paying the penalty for sin, we are freed from the Old Testament law and now live by the grace of God.

Yup, I went there. But I had facts to back up my statements that the word Law in the New Testament is greatly misunderstood. After all, the Hebrew word that is translated “law” in the TNK (Old Testament) doesn’t mean “law”, but means “guidance, teaching”. With that basic misunderstanding cleared up, we would have to say, “How could Torah be abolished, done away with? God’s instruction and teaching is eternal.”

Lawless Christians?, part 1

How many of you believe that we Christians are not under Law, but under grace? After all, isn’t it a truism of the Church that, as people living under the New Covenant, the righteousness that the Old Testament Law required was fulfilled by Jesus, and so did away with it? The Law no longer applies to us because of the New Covenant established in Jesus’ blood, right?

As those of you who know me, the contrarian that I am, have probably surmised, I am going to disagree with this established teaching of the Church. (Quelle surprise!, right?)

Be that as it may, with the next couple of posts, I would like to share an eye-opening thought that just might help with bridging the gap that stands between the teachings of Jesus, who was a completely Torah-observant Jewish rabbi, and the teachings of his followers.

“Inherit The Land”?

Please indulge me as I engage in a mini-rant, as I am really, REALLY, cheesed off! As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am reading scads of material on the Jewish context of Christianity, and I just read something that has me…, well, angry, I guess.

I do get that there is a silent anti-Semitism inherent in today’s Christianity that is so ingrained as to be unnoticed because it is so pervasive that it has become part of our faith, unintended though it may be. What we don’t understand is that we have precious little light and, because of this, we have even less reason to make inquiry into how much we know just ain’t so!