While I really appreciate you taking all that time to respond, I really wish you hadn’t, now. This is a sad day, for sure. After listening to you for – man! it’ll have been 20 years this year (got my first Trumans Water album in ’92)! – and looking up to you for the majority of my life, I’m going to have to re-evaluate absolutely everything I learned from you because of what you’ve written here: “Israel according to the flesh has no special position before Father anymore, only the Israel of God – established in Christ alone.”

All that writing, explaining and reasoning, when that’s all you needed to say to let me know exactly where you stand. I’ve always known you to have a ton of understanding about so many things, Glen. Honestly, I never saw it coming. Paul would have had you removed from the congregation for such a statement. It completely flies in the face of his epistle to the Romans! How can you read about his “desire to be cut off from G-d for Israel’s sake” or “not boasting against the branches, etc.” and think that way?

While it certainly helps me understand your previous comments, I’m shocked that the musician behind Soul-Junk’s “1960″, which is, in my opinion, the absolute greatest celebration of the Law of G-d, would be a supersessionist. Even with you growing up Presbyterian, I would have never imagined that you’d subscribe to replacement theology. Your favorite book is Isaiah for cryin’ out loud! Speaking of which, you never mentioned your thoughts on Isaiah 56:1-8… though, at this point, I’m not sure I want to hear them.

With all due respect, you sound as though you’re completely unaware of all the unconditional and eternal promises G-d has made to Israel – and I know you’re not! You sound as though you’ve sat under some really inaccurate teaching for quite some time – which devastates me, personally, because I’ve sat under you and respected you for so, so long – again, most of my life. If you think you’re Israel, you’ve got a pretty rough future ahead of you, brother. Contrary to your views, G-d is in no way finished with “Israel according to the flesh” – in fact, the entire remainder of man’s history is dedicated to His interactions with His Chosen People, Israel. Of course, Christians that attempt to take on the countless promises G-d has given to Israel for eternity, have a convenient way of ignoring all the judgments they have coming. Interesting, that.

Never mind the scriptural errors, have you ever stopped for a moment to consider what this perspective you espouse sounds like to a Jewish person? Y’know, the people that our Savior said “Salvation is of”? When someone who believes as you speaks, it sounds like, “All the things that G-d gave to you and your ancestors were just to lead to the Church. Now that Jesus has come, all those promises that G-d promised you unconditionally and for eternity mean absolutely nothing. Jesus took care of all that – would you like to ask Him into your heart now?” That’s quite an approach and that’s precisely what they hear when you say such things. Not to suggest that it’s about tickling people’s ears – but it is about being scripturally sound when representing Messiah to the unbelieving world.

Further, after reading all you wrote, it seems that you’ve completely missed my (concisely stated) point – which was that we are absolutely NOT saved by keeping the Law, but once we are saved, we are commanded to live sinless lives. How is that accomplished, Glen? Not watching Rated R movies? Do you make a disciple by asking a sinner to recite a poem that doesn’t even appear in scripture? What does it mean to truly believe? Does faith necessitate action? How do you understand the book of James? Or do you consider James a legalist?

Most of your argument rests on numerous examples of Paul and others instructing believers that they will not be saved by keeping the Law – and, as I said, I agree emphatically. Likewise, you, no doubt, understand that this was the understanding that developed over thousands of years – keeping the Torah equals righteousness. Indeed, Yeshua came and changed all that, though it wasn’t the way you think. He didn’t say, “Forget the Law! I’m here now, guys!” He kept the Law perfectly to establish the standard of righteousness for us. Then, He died to put an end to the death sentence that was on us for not keeping the Law perfectly (as He did, and we couldn’t). He did NOT die to put an end to the Law itself (biggest misunderstanding in the Church) – and commanded you not even to think such an erroneous thing (Matthew 5:17-19). Once we believe, G-d seals us with His Spirit and enables us to live holy lives through His Messiah. Notice how the offender in Matthew 5:19 is still admitted to Heaven – he’s just the lowest there. This is not about salvation, Glen. – it’s about living a righteous life, through Yeshua, in order to please G-d – as He has commanded you. There are myriad verses that mandate this. It’s truly a shame that you don’t seem to understand this concept. And to return to my original comment, all the way back when this discussion started, this is what’s missing from the Church today – a monumental amount of understanding. No one knows what they’re supposed to do – or how. They have mountains of seminars, books, and all manner of charlatans out there telling them all kinds of things, none of it scriptural – that they just keep tweeting back and forth ad nauseum. Didn’t Yeshua tell us that deception would reign in the end times? Have you noticed any deception in Christianity today? Who do you, personally, think Yeshua was talking about in Matthew 7:21-23?

There are so, so many things in your response that I’d like to address, but who has the time? I can’t blame you for taking so long to get back to me. I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree for now, but I have to close by saying that it’s interesting to note that Yeshua, the Messiah of Israel, the incarnation of the Eternal One, had very different ideas than you do concerning the keeping of the Law. I mean, it really can’t get any more graphic than what He said (very plainly) in Matthew 5:17-19 (which you haven’t yet addressed), but here’s another interesting one:

Then Yeshua spoke to the multitudes and to His disciples saying, “The Scribes and Pharisees sit in the seat of Moshe. You are to obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.” ~ Matthew 23:1-3

As usual, this was a teaching against hypocrisy – NOT the Law – not even the Oral Law! That’s incredible, isn’t it?! Notice that Yeshua instructed both the multitudes and His disciples to obey everything the Pharisees told them. And while, again, I don’t maintain that keeping Torah will earn anyone eternal life, it’s interesting that Yeshua seems to say it would in Luke 10:25-28. And this wasn’t even the first time He did so. He wasn’t lying, was He?

Perhaps we just lack the understanding to receive His teaching, but I tend to think He was speaking the truth, and meant what He said. I think He intended for us to live righteous lives through Him. He came to fulfill the Law – which is pleroo, to activate, to make real and actual (which is exactly what He did) – not nullify or render meaningless (as so many teach in error). Regardless, it’s His reply to the question that I wanted to highlight. When asked how to have eternal life, He replied with a simple, but poignant question, “What is written in the Torah? How do you read it?” This is your Messiah asking this, Glen. How would you answer? What do you think the response of the thousands upon thousands of believers that followed Yeshua for centuries before the compiling of the “New Testament” that, as you claim “spells out loud & clear that there has been a fundamental change in the Law”, would have been to that question?

I think you’d be absolutely astonished to hear their answer.

let’s go over the 8 points i was hoping fairly summarized your contention. i see focusing on points 2-4 & 6 as most profitable in finding reconciliation on this question. your responses to 1 & 5 are rhetorical & basically in agreement; while 7-8 basically restate points in earlier comments, and both hang thoroughly on the “linchpin” response i outlined in my last comment above. either the scriptures you listed prove conclusively & systematically that Torah-observance transfers from the Old to the New Covenant, or…they don’t. if they do, then all the “if you love me, keep my commandments” scriptures you are quoting apply to gentiles now observing the specifics of Moses’ Law. otherwise, they refer specifically to the Law of Christ, which i will spell out. i will address your emphasis on imitating Christ’s obedience, as it is central.

so, for these summary points (citing your responses) –
2. “Yes, we should obey the Torah, excluding, as you said, the laws for the high priest, but also the laws exclusively for those in the Land (unless you’re in the Land), as well as the laws regarding the Temple, since there isn’t one standing currently, but including the laws on diet & the Sabbath. Why wouldn’t we?”
3. “Yes, one of the many reasons most modern churches don’t obey Torah is because early gentile believers pushed Judaism out of the Gospel, as you said, but more accurately, they extracted their own faith from the pre-existing and G-d-ordained one.”
4. “Yes, we can’t be law-less, or Messiah will say He never knew us. Yeshua has made that very clear. How do you understand matthew 7:21-23?”
6. “Yes, even after salvation, we have a flesh nature (yetzer hara) that causes us to want to defy God’s instruction – not highlighting our need for Torah, highlighting our need for Yeshua – for salvation. Torah is Law. Must we highlight our need for thermodynamics? There is nothing that “highlights” our need for Torah. G-d has given us His instruction. Yeshua kept it perfectly and we are His disciples, yes?”

i see point 4 as pivotal. i understand matthew 7.21-23 completely in view of 1 corinthians 9.19-21, matthew 5.17-20, romans 3.31, & romans 13.9-10. we hold to the Law of Christ – the law of faith that accomplishes a superior rightousness, a righteousness that fulfills & consummates the Torah & the prophets. i explain below how your contention that Law of Christ absorbs & includes the commands of the Torah is assumed and interpolated rather than specifically mandated in either the Old Covenant or the New – and i also explain how it is specifically fulfilled (which you are incorrectly calling “negated”).

as for point 2, there is no consistency in what the Torah model would be to pass on to all gentiles. you really can’t construct a model by connecting matthew 23.2 to Christ’s obedience, because the scribes and pharisees clearly commanded and modeled things that Jesus did not follow (eg. stoning people, talmudic washings, casting messianic believers out of the synagogue, etc.). you run into real problems constructing a model from a supposedly absolute observe-the-Torah-just-as-Christ-did statement because we all admit the conditions do not presently exist to allow that rigorously and literally (eg. no temple); and what’s more, Christ did and taught things that from the letter of the law would very much appear to interrupt the continuity of the Torah spelled out in deuteronomy 17.1-13 and underscored by contrast in hebrews 10.28. compare this to deuteronomy 4.2 & 12.32; the Torah itself does not allow adaptations (like you suggest is demonstrated in john 8.1-11), only fulfillment (matthew 5.17). Jesus was born under the Law, & he himself was the complete transition from Old Covenant to New.

what’s more, you have serious difficulties constructing a model by connecting Christ’s specific Torah observance to his apostles, because after Christ’s ascension, the disciples spoke and referred to each other as those “not under the law,” and as living “in the manner of gentiles and not as the jews.” the apostles’ understanding of all believers following them as they followed Christ is fundamentally different from yours. again, there is a consistent model available for you in the Law of Christ – the reconciliation is found in the scripturally specified fulfillment of the Mosaic Law rather than a superimposed inclusion of its particulars the New Covenant. (keep reading, i will show how it is superimposed).

on point 6, you have two responses (evil inclination, highlighting need for salvation). i can show you how these two reponses basically take care of each other, in that the New Testament clearly teaches that Law brings the knowledge of sin – then salvation instantaneously & totally removes the evil inclination referred to in genesis 6.5 & 8.21. you mention Torah-observance as crucial in reference to your previous claim that we have “an indwelling flesh nature that wars against the standards of God, that causes us to rebel – not only in our hearts, but deep in our minds.” this flesh nature has been removed by the circumcision of Christ. the influence of fleshly thinking is to be completely external to the believer in the New Covenant (1 john 2.15-16; colossians 2.11; romans 8.12; romans 13.14); we are to give no place to it, and we have no obligation to it. notice that the Law of Moses could not accomplish this. the seemingly impersonal “thermodynamics” of Torah you refer to served to highlight the need for deliverance rather than bring it to pass (romans 7.14-25; galatians 3.19-24; 2 corinthians 3.6-11; 1 timothy 1.9-10; acts 15.10; john 7.19; galatians 6.13; acts 7.51-53; romans 3.19-20). it is significant that the teachings of traditional judaism can not find a way to release man (even redeemed man) from an evil inclination. Messianic Jews, on the other hand, have every right to.

the last of the points to address is 3. i see how the assertion you make might seem historically intuitive; but is not scriptural. the New Testament was written over the course of roughly 65 years, and does not contain a single mention or account of Gentiles making any attempt at extracting their own “faith” out of a God-ordained one, or of them pushing judaism out of the gospel. the exact opposite is documented numerous times (acts 15.5; philippians 3.2-7; acts 13.39-46,50; acts 14.2,4,19; acts 17.5-6,13; acts 18.5-6,12-14,28; acts 19.13-15; acts 20.19; acts 28.25-29; acts 6.11-14; 1 thessalonians 2.14-16; romans 11.28; galatians 2.11-14; galatians 4.9-11,17,21,29-30; galatians 5.4,7-12); as well as (galatians 6.12; galatians 1.6-9; 1 timothy 1.4-7; titus 3.9-11; 2 corinthians 11.3-4,12-13,22; colossians 2.16-17,20-22; hebrews 13.9-10).

at the heart of understanding this central question is one key assumption – we must agree on a basis for whether these commands in question (diet, sabbath, feast observances, etc.) are transferred between the Old and New Covenants. you indicate they are implicitly transferred, that nothing explicitly discontinues them, and that they are by nature immutable. the reason i rounded up every scripture mentioned in all of your above comments in defense of this assumption is to demonstrate simply that the New Testament itself does not provide a definitive or consistent proof in favor of transfering them wholesale into the New Covenant. so the argument that they do transfer must be made essentially from silence; i.e. nothing says they don’t transfer, so they must.

what the New Testament does explicitly say is that there has been a change of the Law. it says that for the New Covenant to take effect, the first had to become obsolete. it says he takes away the first that he may establish the second. it says he has wiped out the handwriting of ordinances against us, that he has abolished in His flesh the enmity (between God & man, and between jew & gentile), that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances. it says we are delivered from the Law in order to serve in the newness of the Spirit, not the oldness of the letter. it says Christ did not come according to the law of a fleshly commandment. it says the fleshly ordinances of the law were imposed only until the time of reformation. it says that now that faith has come, we are no longer under the Mosaic Law as our tutor. it charges us directly to not desire to be back under the law or its beggarly elements.

how were the gentiles to accept the New Covenant? we have specific New Testament direction that these terms of the Old Covenant do not transfer: gentiles did not have to be circumsized, did not need to participate in Judaism’s foods and drinks, various washings, and fleshly ordinances; no one was to judge the gentiles in terms of festival or sabbath observance, gentiles could eat anything that is sold in the meat market without asking questions for conscience’ sake, that they could in good conscience eat anything set before them as dinner-guests of unbelievers, that food does not commend us to God, that their hearts should be established with grace rather than with food-observance, that they were not under the yoke of the law of Moses, & they were not to be compelled to live as the Jews. not only were they told clearly they didn’t need to observe Torah’s fleshly ordinances, they were warned that if they submitted themselves to them, they would be fallen from grace & responsible for the whole Mosaic Law. these are all direct scriptures, and they are explicit directions.

in contrast to the lifting of the requirements of the Law of Moses, we have countless New Testament passages full of explicit New Covenant instructions on how the gentiles are to live in Christ, spelling out what we are specifically resposible for and what is required of us. ephesians 4.17-32 is a powerfully typical example of this – with a call to gentile believers to not live as the rest of the gentiles, and then the application of specific instructions commending behaviors consistent with the law of Christ and forbidding all others. the New Testament is chock full of specific commandments, and it consistently references them from the Old Testament. not once is there a single mention of these particular Torah-specific commandments in question. even more, we have this stunning observation from the jerusalem council in acts 15:11 – “but we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we (the jews) shall be saved in the same manner as they (the gentiles).” the law of Moses was fulfilled rather than negated in Christ, and God has definitely not cast away his people; but traditional judaism has clearly been cast out and rejected by Father (luke 3.8-9; luke 13.6-9; matthew 21.18-19,43; john 1.11; 1 peter 2.7-9; john 15.2,6; 2 corinthians 3.9-15; romans 11.7-10,15,22,25; luke 2.34; matthew 23.37-38; luke 13.33-35; jeremiah 2.21; ezekiel 31.11-12; ezekiel 15.6-7; isaiah 6.13; isaiah 11.1). the gentiles were not grafted into Israel, they were grafted into Christ.

now Christ is the vine of psalm 80.8-17 & john 15.1-8. all of galatians 4 spells out that our connection to Israel is through Christ to the Promise to the fathers (“the root” of romans 11.16-18), not through the Law of Moses. Israel according to the flesh has no special position before Father anymore, only the Israel of God – established in Christ alone. ephesians 2.11-16 explains how the gentiles were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and all the specific outward displays of Torah-observance in the Old Covenant made that clear. now that division has been completely eradicated, with all its outward signifiers. Father sees no difference between jew & gentile – he sees us completely united in Christ. our joining to the Lord is not described by Torah’s provisions (exodus 12.48; numbers 9.14; numbers 15.14; isaiah 56.1-8); it is described by the Christ’s radical abolition of all division in his creation of one new man. for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation.
and as many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, even to the Israel of God. this is who the New Covenant of jeremiah 31.31-34 is made with (as explained by paul in hebrews 8.7-13 & applied in hebrews 10.14-16), since israel according to the flesh clearly broke the first covenant and is currently disregarded because of it. thank God for romans 11.29-32!

now…i’d like to circle back and answer each of your remaining questions. but let me take a breath first. people love endlessly revising history, but our 2012+beyond vision for the physical nation of israel and all people who identify themselves as jews or of jewish descent is really about them embracing their Messiah NOW. they will be saved the same way we have been. zechariah 12.10 talks about mourning for the one they had pierced, and zechariah 13.1-2 talks about a fountain being opened to them for cleansing. Jesus was pierced for my personal iniquity/lawlessness, and wounded for my personal transgression; and his blood flowed out as a fountain for my cleansing – so why should john 1.11 still stand true to such a large extent for Israel according to the flesh today? is romans 11.12,15,23-24 all locked up in some future dispensation, or can we petition God together & see a powerful winning over of large numbers the Yeshua’s own physical flesh & blood now? as i look at his example & his strategy, i am drawn towards something very much like luke 10.17-21 being on display >>