The Word of the Law? Well At Least I am in Good Company! Shabbat 2

Recently I was met with the idiom “The Word of the Law.” But why you may be asking...well because I asked a Rabbi to help me with my Hebrew. Wonder what I would have been met with had I asked a Greek Orthodox Priest to help me with my Greek?

So what does it mean when someone says “all you have is the word of the law...” It means you don’t have Jesus (Yeshua) and you don’t have the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh). However, literally “The word of the law” means that the law is interpreted in an absolutely literal way which goes against the ideas that the lawmakers had wished to implement.

So lets think about this in a Biblical way--Jesus was a Torah Observant Jew, so was Paul--even after he became a ‘Follower” of Christ. However, in the 1st century AD “Ignatius of Antioch, the early Church authority, encountered Messianic Jews who continued to be Torah-Observant (Shomar Mitzvah). He didn’t regard their observance as positive, but rather wrote “We have seen how former adherents of the ancient customs have since attained to a new hope, so that they have give up keeping the Sabbath [on Saturday], and now order their lives by the “Lord’s Day” instead [Sunday].” (Freidman, 2001, p. 101) What is interesting is that Jews in the New Testament aren’t regarded as not being Jewish considering their belief in Jesus as Messiah, they are considered just as Jewish as non-believing Jews.

Christians seem to have fallen for Ignatius’ thought process that one can’t be Torah Observant and saved by grace at the same time. This belief simply isn’t true! I have many friends who are Jewish, Torah-Observant and believers in Messiah Jesus.

So if “Word of the Law” is all I have, if all I have is an absolutely literal interpretation of the LAW, which is GOD’S LAW, then I must be in good company, because the early church held the same beliefs.