Hebrew Roots Dialogues

An explanation to a Torah observant friend

This is written in three parts.  Follow the links at the bottom of each page to come to the next section.

(In response to the HRM assertion that Jesus came to demonstrate how to live Torah.  They believe He also made the perfect sacrifice, but this is nearly always the second response, therefore the chief purpose they see in His incarnation was to reinforce the Torah as given as Sinai.)

As far as the mission of Yehoshua, (John 3:16 – while worn out to most people, is a clear statement in Yehoshua’s own words of why He came.).  I personally believe if you take the NT as a whole, it emphasizes the purpose of Messiah as bringing reconciliation between man and God through the sacrifice, and not so much that He came to demonstrate Torah as presented at Mt. Sinai, as an example for everyone else.  This is where I would urge you to read the NT from beginning to end, if you want to really understand what I am going to present as our perspective.

The NT is full of references to the superior nature of Messiah in mission and message.  No way could I begin to even find them all, but these are some major ones.

Heb 1:1  Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,

Heb 1:2  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

Mat 17:4  And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

Mat 17:5  He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

Mat 17:6  When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified.

Mat 17:7  But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.”

Mat 17:8  And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.

Also, as the Torah says, and Peter quoted in Acts,

Act 3:22  Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’

First question this raises for me is, if He didn’t say anything new (which I have heard often), why did God insist that we listen to Him?  Evidently somewhere He is going to teach something we need to know – either new information, or maybe previous information in a deeper way than before, or both.  Either way,  God is very clear who we are to hear.

While we were still fully in the HRM I realized at the very least, the words and actions of Yehoshua should be given equal reverence and diligent study as the Hebrew scriptures – line by line – chapter by chapter, but we always just picked out the parts we wanted to use.  We tried a few times in our group to start a study of the NT the same way we delved into Torah, but no one really wanted to.  I began to read through it again on my own after several years of just bits and pieces.

I knew that most people in the HRM had no respect for NT writings because of the Greek. They considered it adulterated and inferior. To my mind, if the Sovereign God of the universe had wished the witness of His most important revelation to man (His Son) to be given in Hebrew, we would have it in Hebrew.  What is harder, incarnating God into human flesh or protecting the witness of such an event?  I don’t want to say God let us down by allowing the original Hebrew or Aramaic to be lost.  Instead, the reality is that witness has gone out in almost every language (people are still working on that as we speak..) just as it was intended to do, and Yehoshua has been the light to the gentiles everywhere it has gone – regardless of anyone’s knowledge of original languages.  If knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek is needed to find the Yehoshua that has the Words of Life (as John puts it) then He is indeed a very difficult God to find.

Even though I claimed with my mouth that I believed Yehoshua was God, my actions (focus of life and method of interpreting scripture) indicated that I had placed Torah in the place of God, not God Himself.  Yehoshua became a very small part of my thought, conversation, or theology.  He was a small clause at the bottom that was necessary in order to have eternal life, but other than that, my life was filled with seeking after the Law, not a Person which I now see truly are not, one in the same thing.  In regard to this command in Torah to listen to Messiah, even if I was to be Torah observant, I had not been obedient.  Setting out to do this was just the beginning.

This is when I began to see the “fruit” issue.  The fruit of abiding in Him was never presented in terms of outward observances, but in matters of the heart – love, compassion, humility, etc. etc…  These are taught in Torah, yes I agree.  But we had spent all our time obeying God in outward things and totally ignoring the direct, clear commands of Messiah in these areas.  Not only were we ignoring them, we found them to be an increasing impossibility.  I was harder, colder, and less compassionate for all my time trying to “draw near” to God – I was resembling Him less and less.  I didn’t see “abiding in Torah” transforming anyone else either.  Fruit does not lie.  If you are in the vine, you will have fruit.  Yehoshua makes this clear over and over.  If the fruit isn’t there, something has to be wrong!  This was a very sobering realization for me.  He even said to discern false teachers by their fruit.  How can illiterate people who have to rely on other people for their doctrine (which was a great deal of the ancient world) figure out who is from God and who is not?  Fruit!  Judging by this criteria – I was not attached to the vine!

If the one and only thing I could transmit to anyone in the HRM was the need to give Yehoshua the rightful place that is His, and everything else I said was lost into the void, I would be satisfied.  This was the point where I felt the deepest grief and repentance.  I know because of the “Torah is Yehoshua and Yehoshua is Torah” mindset most think that by studying Torah, they ARE doing just that.   I found I could not support this from scripture, nor from the resulting unfruitful results.

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This page has the following sub pages.

• Hebrew Roots Dialogues – Part 2