Torah for Soulwrights
This treatise was written in response to several discussions that occurred within the Soulwrights Group on Facebook. Eventually, a list of questions was put forth for the good-natured sake of clarifying my position on the importance of the Hebrew Roots movement as a dynamic and necessary theological endeavor in the lifeblood of God’s people. Below, the questions are included as they were originally posted in honest inquiry. What follows thereafter is my response.
What is Israel? What is the Church?
How does one enter the Church?
Which promise of Abraham applies to the Church in Galatians 3:29?
When we talk about "Israel," are we talking about the modern Middle Eastern nation-state or something else?
What is the significance of sacrifices in the Third Temple?
What, if anything, needs to change about classical Christian liturgy (which is verifiable in writings as early as 2nd generation Christian Justin Martyr) as a result of the Hebrew Roots Movement?
1a. The Tiers of Israel
“Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”
*Ephesians 2:12
This one moniker has served as several distinct identifiers. Israel was a people-group unto itself centuries before they had any land to call their own. We are told in the Scriptures that they inhabited Egypt for 430 years, much of that in captivity and oppression. It’s a familiar story. At Mt. Sinai they are established as a nation. In the conquest of Canaan, they become a state. Of course, in modern history, we have the re-establishment of the state of Israel after its having been a nation in exile for millennia. God bless… that is so much history to condense into a single paragraph with no detours, descriptions or deliberations. It almost seems unjust to be so cursory. Alas.
Now, the reality of Remnant Israel is something else entirely. Even then, that description is sometimes two-fold, sometimes two distinct things. Several times we see the remnant referred to as mere survivors, at other times the remnant is the faithful kept by God in reserve. Then we have those occasions when both the faithful and the survivors are the same people – the faithful survivors.
This longstanding preservation of Remnant Israel is most poignant to our purposes here. However, I think that each of the above delineations is present at various points throughout Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Nevertheless, the main thing that should be emphasized presently is that, while we see Paul brokenhearted and distraught over the fate of ALL his brethren, he is abundantly clear that ethnicity is no guarantee of salvation, and, windfall that it has been for the rest of us, neither is it an exclusion.
Which brings us to the real humdinger: Israel has never been a pure bloodline. No matter the context or usage of that term, the designation of “Israel” has never applied to an enclave that was its own genetically isolated people-group, even though it was always meant to be culturally peculiar. Abram (loosely conscripted into proto-Israel status for a moment) brought 120 other people with him out of Ur. It’s unlikely he had that many enthusiastic cousins. When the Hebrews were, at long last, urged out of Egypt, we see that a “mixed multitude” left with them. This moment is the one that I find to be most astounding. It means that at the base of Mt. Sinai, when the intensity really gets amped up for the covenant-keeping people of God, right there at the inception of the Nation of Israel, it was already a motley crew of diverse cultures and ethnicities. And all of them became beholden to Torah together. Then of course we have the celebrated stories about the non-Jews that were married into the very ancestry of the Messiah.
We have so much more that warrants careful attention within the ontology of Israel, but that will have to wait. Because we absolutely must underscore the telos of Israel, its ultimate purpose and end, established at its onset and still fixed within the scheme of God’s plans for the world. That fate is to be the seat of the Messiah’s reign and rule in His Second Coming, then forever after as long as the world remains. The Commonwealth of Israel has always been His intended means of establishing peace throughout all generations in every nation and tribe, for all time in all places, in every culture and ethnicity. His designs have never changed. They remain the same, as He Himself does, yesterday, today and forever. The Remnant will be restored, the Nation invigorated, the State exalted, and we will all rejoice when He takes His seat thereupon.
1b. The Tears of the Church
“Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in His kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off. And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree. Lest you be wise in your own sight…”
*Romans 11:22-25a
The Church is a theological contrivance imposed upon the texts through biased translation determined by fallible dogma. Stated differently: “the Church” is a sanctimonious concept that we have inherited over the centuries that is not expressed within the Scriptures themselves. Stated differently: the church is an invention of the traditions of men.
I have no doubt that many who read this already have me painted as a heretic having a good ol’ fashioned sacred cow burning, maybe even desecrating altars. In truth, I suspect the perception is worse than that. To besmirch the church is to assault Christ Himself because His Bride has been sullied, or so the accusation will go. However, if it is in fact true that the concepts that we have built around the ideology of church were superimposed upon our translations, whatever the intention, then it is the adherence to this doctrine that does the violence, not the questioning of it.
Please, whoever might take this to heart, challenge anything and everything I have to say with your own study on the matter. Begin with a cross-reference word study of “church” in your Bible. Then do another one with the Greek ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) and see the additional passages that provides. We must ask. Why do the translators define ekklesia as “church” in all but a few passages?
In Acts 19 we see it rendered as “assembly” twice, when it’s effectively a mob. More poignant is that in Acts 7, during Stephen’s speech, we see it translated as “congregation.” I’m reading from the ESV. Your translation may have a different nuance, but it very likely isn’t “church” in those instances, even though it is given that flavor everywhere else in the Apostolic Scriptures.
Of course, translation is tricky work. Sometimes a single word has several different possible connotations and the translators have to make a judgment call. Culture, idiom, context, a host of factors is contained in the cipher of a codex. Here, however, the inherent political nature of the term, of the civilian assembly that has been called out for civic duty, would actually suffice rather well in every single instance of the term, including the occasions in which the Septuagint refers to Israeli assemblies as various kinds of ekklesia.
To be very clear, absolutely none of the ideas that we have come to associate with the traditions of “church” are in any way contained in the Greek term ekklesia. But when we come into the text already peering through our “church” monocle, the one that we have been wearing our entire lives, and find the word waiting for us there on the page… well, the idea that was imprinted on us is reinforced without question. And that creates a multifarious problem that we never see – because we can’t see it through that lens. It’s basic confirmation bias at work. One idea is etched onto the glass of that lens that - by design - filters out the latent image beneath it. We must try on other spectacles to see what else we might find there waiting for us. Again, I invite the reader to look into this themselves.
We have been trained to read the Bible with the operative assumption that the Church was begun in Acts 2, at the advent of Pentecost, but that is simply not the case. Consider how differently Stephen’s speech would read in Acts 7 if we insert “church” in the place of “congregation.” Is that scandalous? To consider “the Church” already present at Mt. Sinai? Well, yes, but not for the reason you might think.
The real problem is that Adonai had already established His covenant-keeping people in the Commonwealth of Israel that day at the base of Mt. Sinai. The real travesty is that in no wise did either Yeshua or the Apostles ever institute a new ecclesiology in their shared ministries. They never established a Church over and against Israel. For all the ups and downs ever since that day at the holy mountain of fire, the ultimate trajectory has always remained fixed. Namely, God set aside Israel for the purposes of Messiah, and the future purposes of Messiah still require Israel. I use the word “require” only because of the many prophecies and promises that He has uttered, not because He is bound to us in any way beyond His own words. He has bound Himself to the Commonwealth.
Enter the doctrine of Replacement Theology, Fulfillment Theology, Supersessionism (side note: these synonymous terms offend different people and I still don’t know what counts for good manners in their application, so they’re included as aggregate in my ignorance). This theology is untenable and impossible for two very simple reasons. There has never been anything to replace and there has never been anything else to replace it with. God has not abandoned his plans concerning the Commonwealth of Israel (incidentally, neither has He abandoned the people-group, nation, or state variations, either). Neither did Jesus begin a new institution. The Church is something that we created. The imagined conflict between the two entities is of our own making.
Cross-reference the Septuagint application of ekklesia throughout the Hebrew Bible. You’ll find all manner of different kinds of called-out assemblies. They’re not always good. The holiness of the congregation or the nefariousness of the gathering is determined by the context, not by the word itself. In any event, the supersessionists must contend with the copious use of this ekklesia designation throughout the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible.
I’ll leave the reader to their own devices as regards the etymology of the word “church,” as well as how it came into use in our current translations. Be advised: it gets weird down the thicket of that path. Presently, I don’t find any fruit in those weeds worth mentioning here.
In short, God only ever set apart the One Olive Tree. He did not plant one tree, then reject and uproot it, so as to go on to plant another tree. There have never been two trees in this regard. We Gentiles were grafted into the first, the one and only olive tree, having been cut away from a wild olive tree. Yes, some of the branches of the Jewish people were cut away… eventually. However, to revisit Romans 11, He is still eager to graft them back in – into that same original tree. We forget this to our peril and thereby ignore all of the warnings that Paul gives us from Romans 9 – 11, potentially to our doom.
Also, keep in mind that we don’t see the dawn of *widespread* Gentile inclusion in the covenants until Acts chapter ten; this means that all of the many thousands of converts that we see coming into the Way previously were all Jews. Furthermore, the inclusion of Gentiles in the promises of God has always been His plan, stated very clearly in the Torah, manifest even since the life of Abraham. Admittedly, Israel did not do a good job of developing its Missions Outreach Department. This is one of the reasons Messiah came, to get Israel to do its job finally. Well, they failed at that to many extents, and they have paid a dear price many times over. Nevertheless, we must remember that it has now become our job to live in such a way as to make them jealous – and we would do so well to save the world!
Please, read the entirety of Romans 11 again. Literally, it is the restoration of Israel, in all its forms, that will bring the long-awaited healing of the nations. By no means does Israel eclipse the Messiah. Yeshua is the Firstborn of all Creation and the One Who is Victorious. He is God in the flesh. Nothing can diminish Him – or His plans. If His conspiracy prominently features Israel, then we shouldn’t argue with Him about that (or each other, for that matter).
The last thing to help us reconsider our ideology of church is the translation inconsistency of sunagoge (συναγωγή). As far as I can find (referencing my Strong’s Concordance), there are 70 different verses with synagogue mentioned, and all of them with the Greek word sunagoge transliterated as synagogue – except for one. The Letter of James, chapter 2 verse 2, is that lone outlier passage. The whole letter reads like we would expect out of any of the epistles. We see a church authority exhorting and challenging the various churches that will receive his letter, or so it seems from behind the monocle. Curiously, we breeze right past the “twelve tribes” bit at the top of the letter. Then, in ch2 v2, we see James refer to their “assembly” and go on to describe a tragic scene, especially for a church. Only, it’s not a church. It’s a synagogue. Yet, this is the only instance, out of 70 separate applications of transliteration, that sunagoge (or a related word) is rendered as “assembly” rather than synagogue.
Why is that? It isn’t for me to ascribe motive to the translators. I find it impossible to prove deviant intentions and unproductive to levy that accusation. The result, however, is manifest confusion of the text. These were Jews worshipping Jesus within their synagogues. For whatever reason, the translators don’t afford us the perspective to see it that way. Even if we assume good intentions, this inconsistency prohibits us from seeing Jewish synagogues as part of “church life” as we have come to expect it. Whereas the other instances usually portray Jewish reactions to the Messiah or the Apostles in a negative light, and the synagogue transliteration stands out strong in each case. Why is that?
I find the textual evidence both clear and compelling that the ideas which the Master and His emissaries were disseminating did not convey the ecclesiology that we have developed over the centuries since. Squaring ourselves with the Church Fathers and subsequent Church History is a different matter. Orienting ourselves to proper worship in the era in which we find ourselves is a different matter. Reckoning with the Text, with all of the resources that we have available, is its own issue and the most important. Reading the Bible that Yeshua and the Apostles read, familiarizing ourselves with the ideas that they were interacting with, establishing the context of their audiences — these overlapping, syncretistic studies must be the first order of business. Any other order of operations results in a retcon rewrite that is not upheld by their own writings as they themselves wrote them and spoke them.
2. Entrance into the Kingdom of the Heavens
“And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the Name of the LORD shall be saved.”
*Joel 2:32a, Romans 10:13
At this point, it should be clear that I inhabit a different paradigm than that of standard, conventional, traditional Christianity. Accordingly, I no longer regard entering the Church as the goal. Some may see this as semantics, to emphasize the preeminence of the Commonwealth of Israel over and against the supersessionism of the Church. What’s the big deal? So, what? We say “church” instead of “Israel.” Can’t they be effectively synonymous in parlance? Well… No… because the semantics are His very own, not ours to determine at our convenience.
Our meddling has wrought the results that we inhabit. “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” Or, as Dallas Willard applies a common business adage, “Your system is perfectly designed to achieve the results you are getting.” Dissension has been the rule ever since the Church Fathers sundered themselves from the Hebraic roots of their newfound faith in Messiah. The following historical survey will be as hurried as the aforementioned run through Israel’s development, but I am afraid that I have exceeded the intended/expected scope already.
From the very beginning, the bishops were squabbling about who had the lion’s share of authority. After all this time and textual criticism, the divide between Catholicism and Orthodoxy remains the same, in that primacy of authority and doctrinal minutiae continue to draw the lines. The volleys of historical truth have not changed much even as their tones have mostly softened toward one another. While the dialogue has become kinder, the fault-finding and proposed course corrections remain about as unintelligible as the bitter feuding between Tolkien’s Elves and Dwarves. Who fired first? Who fired worst? And on and on it goes.
What I assert is that the scaffolding of the Church was structurally compromised from the start. That scaffolding was constructed from stout and sturdy materials, to be sure, but they were not *as* sound as the stuff that He left us with, the stuff that the Apostles used to build their ekklesias, their “called out” Kingdom assemblies, placed within the larger infrastructure of the Commonwealth of Israel, the Kingdom in its fullness, meant to find increasing fullness over time. The gravity of history steadily weighing down upon the load bearing capacity of that structure, the Church, would manifest the design flaws of its Architects.
This became pronounced in the Great Schism and then especially so during the Protestant Reformation. Luther and his ilk did in fact recapture *some* of the forgotten truths, but they still did not return to the primary source of those truths. In turn, some of the truth would remain distorted, like a radio station with static in the background and interruptions in the signal. We were in fact hearing things once again that we had not heard for a long time, but we were not yet hearing the whole of the Song, we had not yet dialed all the way back in. We have been fighting over the controls of the transistor ever since. Any grand theological system that has been concocted since then has been an effort to reconcile the supposed tensions of the Scriptures, which were misunderstandings and category errors that the Church had created in its self-determined reinvention of His prototype.
Every successive denominational fracturing and splintering is a result of the first Big Cracks in the original build. Again, those cracks took time to manifest, but once they did, the reconstruction efforts have been incapable of restoring a thing that was never meant to be built as it was in the first place. Consider the Tower of Pisa. It is a beautiful design, but it was never properly grounded. Even in Shakespeare’s day, there was something not quite right about the look of it. The cognitive dissonance experienced at sight of the monolith was already at work, even though it had not become exaggerated yet. Now, everyone is in on the joke. The upkeep that the edifice requires to keep it standing is exorbitant, as should be expected with the endeavor to retroactively correct wrongs that can never be righted.
No builder ever achieves structural integrity without first solidifying things at ground level. There are only two options: either the structure must be abandoned to the fates, left to topple by its own devices, or it must be painstakingly shored up from below upon a foundation that cannot be shaken, rooted beneath the aeons and imperturbable to the wheels of time. Underpinning is onerous, but it’s worthwhile if that which stands is worth salvaging.
Many a Church Historian will scald me for this. Nevertheless, let it be said that what happened with Constantine was an aberration of the schematics that Yeshua left for us in our commission to expand His domicile. Yes, the church became legalized and Christians became safe. But that came at a great cost, namely, that the church and the state were now in bed with each other, and it was the state that took up most of that sleeping arrangement. Look into the legal edicts yourself, if you please. Private houses of worship were criminalized; Christians were *permitted* to worship only in those structures endorsed by the emperor. The very same phenomenon is ongoing in China right now. Tell me: why do we decry this occurrence in China yet applaud it in Constantine?
To an extent, it makes sense that the church would find itself embroiled in the workings of the state (whatever state that might be throughout the epochs). Because, going back to Israel, Adonai has always meant to restore remnant Israel and thereby establish the kind of governance that the world was meant for – His own Kingship in the God-Emperor Himself, Yeshua the Messiah! The holistic synergy of earthly governance and spiritual worship has been the plan from the beginning. However, the church and state hybrid that we see now is not the creature that He made for that purpose. Instead, we have a golem masquerading as the real thing. The likeness is eerily similar, at times indiscernible, but the church is not His firstborn, not His chosen, not the fullness of His Body.
“How does one enter the Church?” In answer to that question, it depends on what manifestation of the church one inhabits, which includes the complex array of time, place and culture. The membership requirements of inclusivity in her walls have never been consistent. Get baptized this way, not that way. Take the Eucharist this way, not that way. Think upon these things, not those things. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. Some are looser, some are tighter. But the plain fact remains that one has to adhere to a language game of that particular collective’s group-speak, or they will eventually find themselves at the pale of the fire. Whether liberal or conservative, whatever extreme or compromise, you must hold to the doctrinal tenets that they espouse in contradistinction to all the others or else you will find yourself back in the hallway of that great house, looking once again for the “right” room to dwell in. Let us be clear: a big room is not in itself a good room; its grandeur is no proof of its solidity, safety or security.
The problem has never been that the neighboring rooms stopped conversing with each other in the common areas of the house. The problem has been and remains that we were never meant to dwell within that house in the first place, at least not as it has been erected. Many people have found shelter and protection therein, and thank God for that. Many more will continue to do so for a long, long time. Nevertheless, the Church is not God’s permanent dwelling place. That remains the Commonwealth of Israel. Perhaps we will see the Church find itself therein.
To be sure, the Church has accomplished many wonderful things, a great many of them blessed by His Namesake. By no means, do I want to convey that it is inherently evil all the way through. I will even affirm, most readily, that it was in fact built upon the foundation of Messiah, in that its construction has been in contact with Him. However, it was not established upon His foundation squarely, not even diagonally. It was constructed catawampus, with half of its house hanging over the edge of the foundation, as if it could cantilever itself out into the world without maintaining its establishment upon the Hebraic substructure that was lovingly and indefatigably formed over the course of centuries of Adonai’s own work in His chosen people, those He meant to be a light unto the world, those whom He has yet to abandon, those whom He still intends to restore for the sake of the entire world. The Commonwealth of Israel is still His Estate. We do not have the authority to forward His mail to another address, no matter how many streets we have presumed to expand into by our own authority.
3. The Father of Many Nations
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
*Leviticus 19:33-34
“And if a stranger sojourns among you and would keep the Passover to the LORD, according to the statute of the Passover and according to its rule, so shall he do. You shall have one statute, both for the sojourner and for the native.”
*Numbers 9:14
“Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
*Romans 10:1-4
“Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”
*Galatians 3:23-29
The promise made to Abraham has been available to the Gentiles ever since that Patriarch received it himself. We have already reckoned with the multi-ethnicity of Israel in all its forms since inception. Now, in the very Torah, we see the heart of Adonai revealed in His desire to see the Gentiles worshipping alongside of the Jews – without first being required to become Jewish.
Pause. Did you think that Paul innovated this expression of the Gospel, that unto us, the Gentiles? Did you think that Simon Peter’s vision in Acts 17 was the first revelation of Gentile inclusivity within the fold of the covenant-keeping people of God? Is Jonah’s story a novelty in Scripture, or is it revelatory of God’s purposes from the beginning all the way through to the end? For that matter, were you raised to believe that the Great Commission was the first mention of this objective?
For the many blessings that they have been bestowed to share with the world, the Gift of the Jews is most assuredly that of the Messiah. He is available to all who call upon His Name. Salvation is easy. It’s sanctification that’s hard.
The Church, as a manmade institution, has no promises made to it particularly. Before that statement would have me consigning anyone to hellfire (or anyone consigning me!), please, do not read that I think everyone in the Church is devoid of His presence. Much of the Church was built upon His foundation, but not all of it was. And it goes without saying how much of Christendom just barely has a point of contact with that Foundation presently.
He has revealed Himself in many wonderful ways to countless saints within the walls of churches for centuries. Their stories are beautiful and quickening. They truly encountered Him. His delight is to meet us where we are in order to draw us further into His Presence. He has never required us to understand everything before we are permitted to do as much as we know. So, it should come as no surprise that He would continue to be merciful, compassionate, longsuffering and gracious with all who truly call upon His name, whatever era or territory that they have been assigned to inhabit. God bless… don’t we see Him behave this very way in the Gospel Accounts, even throughout the torments of the Passion?!
Many of His people reside in the Church, and He resides in the hearts of all who know and love Him, but the Church, the institution as we have preserved it, it is not His residence as we have propounded it to be. Nevertheless, He continues to woo and beckon all mankind into the life of fulfilled obedience alongside of Him. Make no mistake, that Day will come, no matter how many obstructions and impediments we may continue to jury-rig along the way. He will have His way with us, one way or the other. “What the wicked dread will come upon them, and the desire of the righteous will be granted.”
We see in Galatians that the Torah was given in order to reveal the Messiah, that He would be the ultimate purpose, the end goal of all its writings. The guardian that it describes, the pedagogue (παιδαγωγός) was an individual who stewarded the child of aristocrats all the way until their coming of age into legal adulthood. The Torah has achieved this for us - it has stewarded us along to the Messiah. So, that’s the end of the matter, right? Not exactly. What do we find when we engage with Yeshua on His terms, talking and living as He did? We see Him jealously guarding over the Torah with His whole life. Then we see the Apostles doing the same in their lives. Furthermore, we see them planting Kingdom Outposts, Embassies of Heaven, that they were instructing to do the same.
Believe me, I know how much those statements go against the grain of our training. For so long we have been primed to approach the texts with the assumption that the Law is obsolete and that only the goodness of the Gospel remains. Thereby we miss a great deal.
As a result, we have drawn arbitrary lines between the moral aspects of Torah and what we then categorize as the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of the Torah. The divisions have become increasingly more arbitrary between various kinds of morality and denominational distinctives. The reason? We departed from the vast wholeness of the Truth that was the basis of the Apostolic Gospel.
4. Modern-day Israel and the Ancient Future
“’In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by My Name,’ declares the LORD who does this. ‘Behold, the days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them,’ says the LORD your God.”
* Amos 9:11-15
What I have said up to this point should already disclose much of my mind regarding the current affairs of the nation-state of Israel. It is both incomprehensibly impossible as well as unconscionably tragic what has occurred in this, the beginning of its restoration. In the history of the world, there have been no fewer than 50 attempted genocides on the Jewish people, and many of them looked like they would accomplish that end. Now, let’s just stop and examine the incalculable math of how inexplicable that is by any human reckoning. Genocides are usually quite swift, thorough, and final. Many of the world’s tribes have been wiped off the face of the earth forever.
Israel? They have endured and remained. They have been reserved as though for a purpose. Do we not see something that requires a meta-narrative? Does the poetry of history not demand that we concede the fact that mere chance does not allow for that many compounding, coalescing convergences? Any one of the atrocities and Israel’s subsequent endurance would have us hard-pressed to explain it away.
What’s more, Hebrew itself was resurrected from a dead, scholastic language to a living tongue once again. Within a single generation, we have the emergence of at least 3 distinct phenomena that have *never before* occurred in the history of the world: myriad survivals of genocide; the reconstitution of an extinct nation-state; the reinstallation of a dead language into the lingua franca of a people-group that had altogether ceased speaking it. For context, the Hebrew that is spoken today in Israel is more closely related to the Hebrew of the Bible than our English is to Shakespeare, and one man pulled off the feat single-handedly. His name is Eliezer ben Yehuda. Read his story and prepare to be amazed.
Let us not forget to acknowledge the breath of fresh air that is blowing through modern theology as it relearns how to engage the Apostolic Scriptures. Due exclusively to the archaeology that has been ongoing in the land of Israel ever since the Jews were permitted to dwell there once more, we have in our possession a wealth of information that contextualizes so much of the culture, events and ideas during the lives of Yeshua and the apostles. Because we have these primary source documents, we can not only corroborate the inarguable authenticity of the Scriptures as we have received them, we may also better understand the minds of the writers!
For centuries, scholars and theologians thought that “the works of the law” was a phrase coined by Paul, as they could not find its presence anywhere else in the Greek literature of the day. However, its Hebrew corollary is all over the place in the contemporary rabbinic and extra-canonical documents that we continue to discover. We can now see the very idea that Paul was interacting with, the very thing that he was calling to account. And it is decidedly not what church tradition has trained us to think. This is only one example. We have crisper, clearer views of the intertestamental period preceding Yeshua as well as the backdrop of the day that He and the Apostles inhabited. We would do well to reorient our understanding to their day rather than to operate on the indefensible assumption that what we have received through tradition has been undiluted.
As for the fate of modern-day Israel… I don’t know. My heart’s hope is that they will be like unto those dry bones in the valley, finding their covenantal identity in Adonai rejuvenated in their fealty to our shared Messiah. My mind must, at a rational level, reckon with the irrational sequence of events. All that is to say: it looks to me as if Aslan is on the move, and I would very much like to help prepare for His Coming.
I am willing to concede the possibility that the current nation-state of Israel is not the same nation-state of Israel that we will see restored to its fullness. That’s difficult to play out on emotional as well as imaginative levels, but it’s possible. God can do what He wants, as difficult as that might be to accept. Besides, “His faithfulness endures to a thousand generations,” and that’s a pretty long time no matter what multiple you use.
At the bottom of it, Israel’s calling and purpose in the world remain in effect, not in the least revoked, and quintessentially necessary. I have not yet interacted with anyone using the following language, so I hope that I do not overstep my bounds. When it happens that each distinct element of Israel is at last found fulfilled all at once, which means every category of people-group, nation, state, remnant, and commonwealth, then and only then will we have the very thing that He has commissioned at every point that He has spoken on the matter. This we might helpfully refer to as Restored Israel, Realized Israel, or Renewed Israel (I’m still trying on the language for size). In that Day, we will have the Eternal Kingdom of Zion.
5. Why the Whole World Awaits the Third Temple
“My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in My rules and be careful to obey My statutes. They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children’s children shall dwell there forever, and David My Servant shall be their Prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set My sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD Who sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.”
*Ezekiel 37:24-28
If we do not understand the nature of sacrifices presented during the First or Second Temple periods, then we are even less likely to understand the nature of sacrifices during the future Third Temple. A Hebraic reorientation of our imaginations is essential to even begin to interact with the rites and rituals we see exhibited in the Torah. Until we read the texts as we are meant to read them, which is to say, as the writers wrote them, we are hopeless to grasp the whole truth of the matter.
It’s true that part of the significance of temple sacrifices was for the propitiation of sin. But that was not their only purpose. Most of the sacrifices offered were then consumed by the people gathered there. These were feast days. Yes, the sacrifice is presented to God first, then it is doled out to the community. How many of us have imagined that these altars amounted to nothing more than ceremonial pyres for an archaic worship and a rather dubious animal husbandry?
Remember: salvation is one thing, sanctification is another. They are most certainly connected, inextricably linked, and they are shepherded along by the same Savior. That being the case, we should look to the means that he gave us in the Torah, the same means that He Himself participated in, that His Apostles espoused and taught as well.
Tell me, if this is not the case, what in the world do we see happening in the 21st chapter of Acts? If the Torah had been done away with due to the substitutionary work of Jesus as the Lamb of God, then why are the Jerusalem elders concerned with the rumors that Paul does not uphold the Torah any longer? Why do we hear them excitedly report, “how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed – they are all zealous for the law,” if the Torah is opposed to the now-extant Gospel? If the Torah is obsolete, then why does Paul comply with James’s ruling to pay for the Naziritic vows of the four men? What exactly was he doing when he “purified” himself? Hadn’t he already been purified by Yeshua? What purification did he require and submit to? Are we to take all of this as mere grandstanding? Was Paul, the same that confronted Peter over conduct, too shy to stand up to James concerning a central theme of the Gospel?
The Book of Hebrews is rather dense with seismic shifts that are right around the corner for the people of God. The writer, likely a 2nd generation believer, is engaging the immanent destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. He knows full well what a disruption that will be in the liturgy of those worshipping Adonai through Yeshua in their zeal for Torah. The temple, priesthood and sacrifices will vanish in an instant, leaving massive chasms in the daily and yearly rhythms of believers. Thus, he tends those vacancies by showing how He has already filled them with a greater temple, a greater priesthood and a greater sacrifice. Observe that the sublimation of temple, priesthood and sacrifice does not in any way abrogate the Torah. The drastic improvement in the covenants is in the Mediator, not in the nullification of Torah.
Correspondingly, Torah observant Jews since the destruction of the 2nd Temple have guarded the whole of Torah with the exceptions of the mitzvot having to do with… the temple… the priesthood… the sacrifices. And this is exactly the practical consequence for which the author of Hebrews was preparing the covenant-keeping communities. He also wanted them to know that their faith was by no means deficient. They had an Eternal High Priest who had once-and-for-all presented Himself as the Ultimate Sacrifice in the True Tabernacle of which Moses’s was but a copy. Please observe how that does not delete the rest of His instructions for how to be human. By no means. We still need that teaching.
As a rule, God is not a god of mere symbolism. Everything He makes has a purpose; everything He does has meaning. So it will be with the Third Temple, too. We have to reorient ourselves to the entirety of the story told throughout the Scriptures. This means that we are not permitted to unpack our luggage in the passages that we find convenient to our case while ignoring those others that are troublesome to our position. By what canonical authority did we ever receive the exegetical precedent to allegorize all of the outstanding promises to Israel as somehow fulfilled symbolically in the Church?
6. Christian Liturgy and Hebrew Roots
“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body, that is, the ekklesia, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
*Colossians 1:24-29
“Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness,’ and again, ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.’ So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future – all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”
*1 Corinthians 2:18-23
“If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”
*James 2:8-13
This part is especially hard, because I love the Church. I have no memory of learning about God as a concept during my childhood. At a basic level, He was simply always there. His Deity was as fixed in my formative bedrock and imaginative backdrop as were my parents. I had the too-good fortune of being born into a culture of people that loved Him and earnestly sought after Him. We prayed at the table like people who expected Him to both answer and be present. I have tender, precious memories of feeling His presence and hearing His voice at an early age. Many good, true and beautiful things, too many to count, such indelible wonders to guard until my dying day, were given into my keeping at the moment that I was born. From the instant I was conceived I was already in the womb of His people. All of this happened within the bastion of the Church. There has never been a time in which I was not stewarded along in love.
Allow me to say most emphatically, as though I could bleed the words clean out of me, that what I want is to see the Church fully restored into His keeping. I do not hold to the burn-the-pagan-church-to-the-ground school of thought. Do I believe that *some* pagan elements were mixed into the fabric of the Church early on? Yes. But we have the record of the one true God bearing with the idolatry of Israel many times over. I genuinely hold to the conviction that Greater Christendom worships the one true God.
My primary contention is that, from pretty early in the process, we began determining obedience on our terms, not His. It was never for us to replace His Sabbath with the next day that we thought better. It was not our job to pioneer a new holy calendar. It was not our prerogative to presume that the discoveries of science had somehow explained away the wisdom preserved in His diets and rhythms. It was not our commission to establish a Magisterium, as though He had not already breathed out into the world and into our souls the tenets that would sustain us.
Once we began blazing our own trail in the world, having forfeited substantial elements of the Apostolic Gospel - the teachings of the Master – then we had detached ourselves from congruity with the Source. This is why we have so many haphazard theological systems. As grand as they are, as many forests and generations of scholastic lives as they have cost, they are only interacting with pieces of the whole. In essence, we consigned ourselves to biblical illiteracy when we refused to learn from those who had been taught to keep His Word rightly. In this way, we Gentile Christians did indeed become arrogant against the other branches, in spite of Paul’s adamant admonishment that we resist that compulsion. If we continue in this manner, we will remain nose-deaf to the Truth forever. The “difficult words of Jesus” are amazingly simple once we see the Hebraic substance of His idioms and references, and especially so when we settle into His heart for Torah. The same goes for the New Testament writers.
Much happened between the inspiration of the Apostolic Scriptures and the Apologetics of Justin Martyr, nonetheleast of which was the Abomination of Desolations. The Fall of Jerusalem could have eradicated everything, from a secular perspective. While the Faith endured, I’m afraid it was somewhat sundered regardless. What the Apostles had built in their Kingdom Embassies was scattered in the winds.
Essentially, Jews ran one way with the Torah and Christians ran the other way with Yeshua. This is not what Paul wanted, not in the least. What we have seen as a result in the millennia since is exactly the only thing that could happen once we separate one from the other.
Jews have been discrediting the partial fulfillment of Messianic prophecies, holding out for another messiah, because they know that they cannot have a messiah who abolishes the Torah. And they are right to hold to that conviction. As pernicious as this may seem, that is largely the fault of the Church. We erroneously veiled over the proofs of Yeshua upholding Torah, thereby demonstrating the fully expressed humanity in its keeping. The Jesus that we have presented to them is not the entire picture. They are right about the wrongness of the portrait.
Meanwhile, Christians have been hard at work writing a thousand other rulebooks in place of the one Torah. In virtually every denomination, we have become guilty of the very same things that we decry as the faults of the Pharisees: burdensome governance, incessant contentiousness, and sacred status symbols over the spirit of the truth. The one-to-one ratios of failed imitation would be laughable if they weren’t so tragic.
Consider Polycarp. He is the last surviving 2nd generation Christian, that we know of, who was apprenticed by an Apostle. He poured himself out in the effort to keep the Hellenized Christians from abandoning the rhythms of spirituality that they had quite obviously received from the teachings of the apostles. He kept the Sabbath, he kept the Eucharist in the context of the Passover, he decidedly did not want the Gentile Christians to separate themselves from the Messianic Jews. Obviously, his efforts failed. Even so, we must highlight that he was respected by his contemporaries; he was not branded as a heretic in any way. No one contended with the authenticity of his claims to transmit the teachings that he received at the tutelage of John the Revelator.
Conversely, the very first heresy of the Church was Marcionism. Marcion was eventually denounced once he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, overtly trying to reverse the words of Jesus. We should be gobsmacked to realize that the inverse passage that Marcion tampered with has actually become the operating theology for all of Christendom today – that Jesus came not to fulfill the law but to destroy it. While he was excommunicated for this and several other Scriptural revisions, his insidious beliefs became a tumor in the Church and the cancer remains.
As grim as that is, there is also hope, in that a tumor is a defense mechanism. The body recognizes that something is wrong and tries to isolate it from the rest of the systems. It’s a wonder that the facts of history have made it so far, preserved in both tradition as well as the ground where He walked.
All of that is to say that much of our traditional liturgies do not in fact draw their inspiration from apostolic succession – on that the records are abundantly clear. However, whenever we are instructed to submit to the consensus of the Church Fathers, that impulse only goes back to the point in which the Church had already become thoroughly Hellenized and subsumed by the Empire. While it’s true that Justin Martyr’s writings are very early, before Constantine and the Councils, they also reveal the pulling apart that I have described. Older, more faithful and historically rooted liturgy was extant beforehand, but in this manner the new school of believers wanted to conscript Jesus into traditions and pastimes of their making. However noble their intentions may have been, they were not rooted in anything having to do with the traditions that they inherited, which is demonstrable in the Scriptures that we have received, even after all this time. As John Flavel said, “Antiquity is no passport for errors.”
Concerning modern-day worship, I don’t think there’s a simple solution. I still think it’s true that Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Protestants, Latter-Day Saints – all who call upon the name of the Lord – can inhabit the places where they find themselves. Liturgical changes would take time. In truth, I don’t know exactly how that would play out in each tradition, but we must admit that it would be significant. The baseline recognition that Yeshua and His Emissaries were zealous for the Torah and that their Kingdom work was rooted in its truth is fundamental to any discussion of radical restoration. Once we stop looking at the Old Testament as if it were tired out then much would shift, but I cannot yet discern the shape of that shoreline after its erosion.
What Catholics find in their catholicity is fully found in the Commonwealth of Israel. What the Orthodox find in their maintenance of tradition is better stewarded in the keeping of the Torah. What the Lutherans recaptured in salvation by faith has been the story since the beginning, and the Torah is simply a part of the grace of that relationship, not a means to salvation. What Presbyterians seek in the ruling of elders was long established amongst the Hebrews (Paul did not materialize the categories of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd-teacher; neither was eldership his idea). And on it goes. Each party has recaptured a piece of the whole without having the sense to reconcile it all together. The reality is that they cannot do so without reconciling Yeshua to the Torah.
Consider this. Perhaps you have heard that Jesus fulfilled the seven feasts prescribed in the 23rd chapter of Leviticus. This is true. Tell me, though, why do we take that as license to ignore these feasts beyond a nifty Bible study? If He is really to be found in these ceremonies – then why aren’t we keeping them? It seems to me as though this would help us practice holiness, with our bodies, throughout the entire year. Indeed, this was their purpose.
His fulfillment of these things does not mean that they do not matter to us anymore. Rather, His fulfillment is what allows us to participate in them all the more fully than was possible before His Incarnation. This is why He came! To show us how to be human. If Yeshua kept the Torah, who are we to think that we can get along well enough without it?
7. Torah for Soulwrights
When I first set out with a vision for a community of Soulwrights, I thought that we had much more in common than we had in dispute. In truth, I still see it that way. My heart remains to see people being faithful wherever they are. Culturally, this would mean learning to argue less and practicing the open-handed arts of reasoning together more.
Even in their present rejection of our Messiah, the rabbis of today admit that it was Christianity that made the God of Israel famous. They also give us credit with destroying idolatry throughout the world. Also noteworthy is our normalization of monogamy. Marriage is on the ropes these days, but we certainly moved the needle very far from where it was. Let’s not forget Gregory the Great and the innovation of Western music. I always enjoy that factoid. Death Metal musicians play out their hatred of our God within scales that were given to them by the Church. Literally, they could not write the music that they do without us. It’s sardonic.
The Church was built upon part of the foundation, but not the whole of it. That is what needs correcting. What exactly happens once each distinctive denomination and culture begins acquiescing to the cohesiveness of the entirety of the Scriptures as expressed in the Torah observance of the New Testament figures, well, that will be a sight to see. Because if I am right about any of this, that’s the trajectory. It may take a long time, but that’s the end.
The Hebrew Roots movement is, well, to be honest, it’s rather Wild West out there. Nothing like centralized authority, governance or creedal positions exist. Celebrity personalities are strong influencers, but there is not perfect consensus as of yet.
However, what we do see happening is the joining back together of Jew and Gentile, in the Messiah, becoming that “one man” of which Paul spoke all those ages ago. The process is messy. Divergence of opinions abounds. But hey, it’s been a little while since Christians and Jews have gotten along together in any fashion. That it’s happening at all is a wonder. That it’s happening through both the Messiah and the Torah is a miracle. I think it’s permitted to be imperfect for a time.
Now, my position has been made known. I’m still learning. Many blanks remain to be filled in and even more questions to be answered. I suspect that will never end.
To the men and women that compelled me into this space, you have my thanks, truly. I have been something of a hobbyist with all of the Hebraic backgrounds stuff for approximately 15 years. Your questions and well-meaning dissent forced me to reckon with some issues that I had been putting off for too long. Once I engaged it vigorously, because of your presence, many things crystallized. I’m sure the result is not what you would want, but I am full of joy now. My mind is being sharpened even as my heart softens. It’s a wonderful place to inhabit. Even though this is not what you intended, you have played your part in stewarding me into clarity, conviction, boldness, and hope. I love it.
I’m still a Christian. The difference is that I’m no longer “in the hallway.” Now I know where I reside. Really, if I’m right, we all reside there. We just haven’t admitted it together yet.
“The Kingdom of the Heavens is like a treasure hidden in a field…”