Although many Christians think of God’s Law (Torah, see #5) in negative terms, the fact is that if Jesus simply discarded the Torah, He could not be the Messiah. This would be like someone claiming to be Jesus in His second coming and yet announcing a new way of salvation in which faith in Jesus was no longer necessary and in which the cross was now powerless in its effect. Perish the thought! In the same way, it would be unthinkable for a God-fearing Jew in the first century to imagine that the Messiah would come and abolish God’s holy Torah. As New Testament scholar John Nolland observes, “In Jewish terms any attempt to annul (Gk. kataluein) the Law could have been viewed only with horror. . . . The Law defined the identity of the Jewish people.”[228]
In the Sermon on the Mount, the first full-length teaching of the Lord recorded by Matthew, Jesus Himself emphasized that His purpose was not to abolish the Torah:
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. I tell you the truth, 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.
Matthew 5:17–18; verses 19–20 are important as well[229]
“But,” you ask, “didn’t Jesus have lots of conflicts with the religious leaders over the Torah? And didn’t He make lots of changes to the Law?”
I’ll answer this by summarizing what Jesus did and taught in the gospels, adding some reflections based on the epistles as well. I recognize, of course, that many volumes have been written on this subject, but I’ll try to highlight the main points.
(1) Yeshua fulfilled the Torah and the Prophets. Notice carefully that in Matthew 5:17–18 Yeshua did not say, “I have not come to abolish the Law” but rather, “I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” (emphasis added), meaning the entire Tanakh. Notice also that He did not say, “I have not come to abolish them but to reinforce them.” Rather, He said, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (emphasis added). What does this mean? It means that the Hebrew Scriptures find their ultimate expression in Him.
As I wrote in volume 4 of my series on Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus:
To begin with, the Torah laws dealing with sacrifice, atonement, ritual cleansing, priesthood, tabernacle/temple reach their goal in the Messiah, the ultimate and final sacrifice for sins—in keeping with the Rabbinic principle that “the death of the righteous atones” (see vol. 2, 3.15)—the great High Priest, and the living embodiment of the Shekhinah—that is, the manifest presence of God on earth (see vol. 2, 3.1–2). The Torah was pointing to him! That’s why, when the Temple was destroyed and the sacrifices ceased and the priests could no longer fulfill many of the functions, the followers of Yeshua were not set back at all. He had already fulfilled this aspect of Torah and replaced the shadow with the substance (for this imagery, see Hebrews 8–10). . . .
We also recognize that Yeshua is the fulfillment of the biblical calendar, as explained in volume 1, 2.1, with Passover pointing to his death as the Lamb of God, paving the way for a greater exodus, Firstfruits pointing to his resurrection, Shavuot (Pentecost) corresponding to the outpouring of the Spirit, and then, still in the future, Trumpets (in Jewish tradition, Rosh HaShanah) pointing to his return, Yom Kippur to national atonement for Israel, and Sukkot (Tabernacles) to the final ingathering of the nations. Even the calendar ultimately points to Messiah, and all this is part of his fulfilling the Torah and Prophets.[230]
In addition to this, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives His own authoritative interpretation of Torah laws, taking the moral commands to a deeper level, thereby providing a template for the interpretation of other, similar Torah laws. (For a good example of this, see Matthew 19:16–26.) This, too, is part of His “fulfilling” the Torah.
(2) Yeshua Himself transcended the Torah. In His personal life, Jesus never violated anything written in the Torah. When He was accused of violating the Sabbath, the real conflict was with the wrong application of the Torah and with man-made traditions, not with an actual Torah command. On numerous occasions, He rejected the religious traditions that distorted the meaning and purpose of God’s laws (see Mark 7). Having said this, it is also important to understand that He transcended the written Torah as the Son of God. No one else could have said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working” (see John 5:17; this was said to the religious leaders after He healed a man on the Sabbath).
In keeping with His transcendent nature, He also explained that the divorce command was not given as an ideal but rather as a concession (see Matthew 19:8: “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning”). In another act of transcendence, when a woman caught in adultery was brought to Jesus to be stoned, Jesus exposed the hypocrisy of her accusers rather than saying she should be stoned (see John 8:1–11), despite the Torah law that adulterers be stoned (see Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22–24).
(3) Yeshua pointed to the true intent of the Torah. When manmade traditions got in the way of the true purpose of the Sabbath, Jesus went out of His way to heal and work miracles on that very day, reminding the people that it was to be a day of liberation and rest (see Matthew 11:28–30, reading these verses as the introduction to the Sabbath accounts that follow in Matthew 12:1–14). In fact, the reason given for the Sabbath in Deuteronomy 5:12–15 is so that the Israelites will remember that God delivered them from Egypt and called them to Himself. So, when we come to Jesus, we find rest for our souls.
This, too, brought Him into conflict with some of the religious leaders, whom He accused of putting all kinds of extra burdens on God’s people (see Matthew 23:1–4). It is important to remember, however, that His argument with them was over man-made traditions, not the Torah itself.
(4) Yeshua gave us a new understanding of the purity laws. Although some scholars, especially Messianic Jews, question whether Jesus actually abolished the dietary laws (see #50), it is clear that He brought a deeper understanding of defilement, explaining that “nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean’ ” (Mark 7:15). What we eat goes into our stomachs and is then processed out of our bodies, and therefore it does not affect our spiritual being and cannot make us truly “unclean” (see Mark 7:19). On the other hand, “from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean’ ” (Mark 7:21–23; this entire account is paralleled in Matthew 15). Paul also spoke to this issue as well in several of his letters (see #50).
Because the Torah placed such a strong emphasis on ritual purity alongside moral purity, it was very easy for the Jewish people to think that eating forbidden food or eating food with unwashed hands (see Matthew 15:19) produced the same kind of defilement as did moral impurity. Jesus made it clear that real defilement was spiritual, not ritual, and the real issue was the condition of the heart.
(5) Yeshua opened up the door for the Gentiles to receive God’s full blessings without becoming Jews. It is significant that both Matthew 15 and Mark 7 place the same two accounts back-to-back: Jesus’ dispute with some religious leaders about eating food with unwashed hands and the Lord’s journey to Tyre and Sidon, where He heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter. What is so important about this? To quote again from volume 4 of my series:
When Peter received a thrice-repeated vision in Acts 10 which ordered him to kill and eat all kinds of unclean animals, God was not telling him to change his dietary habits. Rather, it was a visionary lesson that Peter should no longer call the Gentiles unclean; instead, they would now be accepted as spiritual equals through the Messiah. In the same way here, Yeshua’s teaching about “clean” and “unclean,” about spiritual defilement coming from the inside and not the outside, about no food, in and of itself, being truly “unclean” (even if it carries that legal status), is now put into spiritual practice, as the Lord takes a long journey into a Gentile region and then reaches out in mercy to a needy “Canaanite.” Was there nowhere else where Jesus could get alone for a little while?
The object lesson is indisputable: Jesus was pointing to the fact that the Gentiles were no longer to be considered “unclean” if they put their trust in him. As articulated some years later by Paul, “As the Scripture says, ‘Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’ For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ ” (Romans 10:11–13, quoting Joel 2:32). So then, in terms of salvation, Jesus the Messiah broke down the walls of separation so that, in this respect, “there is no difference between Jew and Gentile.” This was revolutionary! (In fact, it still is revolutionary, an object of misunderstanding and spiritual stumbling for many Jews.)[231]
Several times in the gospels Jesus contrasted the great faith of Gentile believers with the unbelief of His own people, stating, “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:11–12).
The door has been opened wide to the Gentiles through the coming of the Messiah, and they can have right standing with God without having to become Jews.
(6) Yeshua changed our relationship to the Torah. Through the establishing of a new and better covenant, we stand in a new and better relationship with God (this is a theme throughout Hebrews, where the word better appears repeatedly). There is no more death penalty for nonobservance of the Sabbath (and a host of other sins) and no more condemnation of the Law (see Romans 8:1–2; see also #47). Through our identification with Jesus in His death and resurrection, we die to sin and rise in new life (see Romans 6:1–11), now being led by the indwelling Spirit to crucify the flesh and walk in newness of life (see Romans 8:3–4). We have been supernaturally empowered, and God’s laws are now written on our hearts (see Jeremiah 31:31–34; Ezekiel 36:26–29; cf. Psalm 40:8).
In the words of the old poem,
To run and work, the law commands
Yet gives us neither feet nor hands.
But better news the gospel brings;
It bids us fly and gives us wings.
To be sure, there are grave consequences for willfully rejecting God’s grace, more severe even than the consequences of rejecting the Law of Moses (see Hebrews 2:1–4; 10:26–31; 12:25–29), but for those who love the Lord and want to serve Him, they have nothing to fear (see John 10:27–29), being confident that He who began the good work in them will bring it to completion (see Philippians 1:6), an assurance beyond that of the righteous living under the Sinai covenant.
These, then, are just some of the key elements of how Jesus fulfilled the Law and Prophets, bringing the entire Tanakh to its full expression and inaugurating the Messianic kingdom, bringing about profound changes in our relationship to the Torah. We do well to follow that new and better way, one in which Jesus gives us rest (see Matthew 11:28–30).
As for the question of whether Jewish and Gentile believers are required to obey the Law, see #’s 48 through #51.