Shalom everyone! This is my first post regarding the Good News. Before we dig into these 5 books in scripture I wanted to take this first post to lay out some groundwork for the rest of this section of my blog. There are a few different things that we need to clear up and make sure we understand BEFORE we read anything found in the Gospels. First, we have to determine if Yeshua is sent by God or if he is false teacher. Second we have to test everything that he says against the Word to see if what he is teaching is true. And lastly, we need to determine what these findings mean in context with the rest of scripture.
False Messiah?
The first test we have is to test Yeshua, and determine if he is actually the Messiah. This would be really convenient if we had a whole section of scripture dedicated to this topic..... Oh! Wait, we do! :) Please turn to Deuteronomy 13. Let's read the first few verses and see if they line up with the conventional representation of our Messiah.
1 “Whatever I command you, you must take care to do—you are not to add to it or take away from it.
2 “Suppose a prophet or a dreamer of dreams rises up among you and gives you a sign or wonder,
3 and the sign or wonder he spoke to you comes true, while saying, ‘Let’s follow other gods’—that you have not known, and—‘Let’s serve them!’
4 You must not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams—for YHVH your God is testing you, to find out whether you love YHVH your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
So assuming that Yeshua is the Messiah means that He and all of His teachings must line up on a few fronts. First he cannot add to or take away from the Torah (Law). Secondly, must not teach you to follow other god's except the One God. If he is teaching one or the other God says that he has sent them to test you. This raises a few flags for me personally. In today's day and age it is taught that He did away with the Law and came to start a new religion. This flies in the face of these few verses that we just read. If Yeshua had taught against the Torah he would have been killed and they would have been right to do it! Because of this passage in Deuteronomy. Please continue reading chapter 13.
5 YHVH your God you will follow and Him you will fear. His mitzvot you will keep, to His voice you will listen, Him you will serve and to Him you will cling.
6 That prophet or dreamer of dreams must be put to death! For he has spoken falsehood against YHVH your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, to entice you from the way YHVH your God commanded you to walk. So you will purge the evil from your midst.
Wow, this cannot really be any clearer! If Anything that Yeshua taught would have contradicted Torah he would have justly been executed. Plain and simple. I encourage you to read the whole chapter! Also, if Yeshua claimed to be God, He cannot contradict Himself. This covers the basis of content for His teachings. Let's go on to the next issue to clear up. The teachings themselves.
Sabbath Breaker!
Most teach that Yeshua broke the Law of God to show them that it was going to be done away with at the cross. They may butter it up a little bit, but that's the essence of the thought that the Law was done away with. As we learned above that cannot be the case or He is immediately disqualified from being the Messiah. So what was Yeshua teaching against? What about the Sabbath violations? What about all of the New commands that He gave? The secret is He never once broke Torah (by sinning) and He NEVER taught anyone else to break Torah. Everything that He taught was against the False "religion" of his day. Not against the Torah. Let's look at Matthew 15 for an example of this.
1 Then some Pharisees and Torah scholars came to Yeshua from Jerusalem. They said,
2 “Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not do the ritual hand washing when they eat bread.”
3 And answering, He said to them, “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?
4 For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother must be put to death.’
5 But you say, ‘Whoever tells his father or mother, “Whatever you might have gained from me is a gift to God,”
6 he need not honor his father.’ On account of your tradition, you made void the word of God.
Here is a good example of Yeshua attacking the man-made law that had been established. The pharisees thought that they should build in safeguards so that they wouldn't accidentally break the Torah. I call them Torah fences for lack of an easier term. They built these extra limitations on top of the regular commands to keep them from breaking the actual commands. A good intention, but it got to the point where they were holding the tradition of the elders above the actual commands of God. This is what Yeshua is teaching against here. The Pharisees and Torah scholars had set up an elaborate ritual of hand washing before eating as do not defile their food with "unclean" hands. However, in the Torah it never says that not washing your hands will make your food unclean. Torah only tells you what food IS. Anything that is not food according to Torah is unclean. Let's read a few verses down from where we are in chapter 15
17 “Don’t you grasp that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and then is ejected into the sewer?
18 But the things that proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart, and those things make the man unholy.
19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander.
20 These are the things that make the man unholy; but to eat with unwashed hands does not make the man unholy.”
It starts out sounding like He is going to contradict Torah. But then he finishes up with stating that eating with unwashed hands does not make a man unholy. Never once saying "You can now eat buzzard, praise God!" If a first century Jewish Rabbi is talking about food to an all Jewish audience he is NOT talking about unclean animals! He is talking about food as described in Leviticus 11. If He is talking about anything else OR trying to get people to break the Torah of God then he is a false messiah. This is simply one small example of the truth that is in Yeshua's teachings.
Context Matters!
So, since we have on the very surface begun to show that Yeshua was the Messiah who lived and taught Torah, what does this mean in respects to the rest of the brit chadasha (new testament)?
Well, the most basic explanation is that we have a LOT to go over and uncover the truth in context. I hope that you will join me in further study of the Good News!
Thanks everyone for reading, I hope that you learned something new and were blessed. Shalom!