JEWISH CHRISTIANITY
IS REAL CHRISTIANITY
The Church was Jewish
before it started abandoning the Faith
INDEX
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ACTS DOES NOT TEACH ABOLITION DOCTRINE
PAUL KNEW NOTHING OF AN ABROGATION
Today,
it is only too easy for Christians to forget the Jewish roots of their
religion. The book whose teaching they
consider to be the teaching of God thanks to his divine inspiration, the Bible,
tells them that the Jewish Law or the Torah, the first five books of the Bible,
given by God to Moses is to be followed even today by all who call themselves
children of Abraham. Christians claim to
be children of Abraham.
When the Jews cried they wanted to be
accountable for killing Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, many Christians used
this as an excuse for persecuting and butchering the people their God first
made his own.
Since the very start there have been many
Christians who have loathed the Jews.
The monstrous, St John Chrysotom, used to chant that he hated them. Persecution began when the dreadful
Many popes hated the Jews too. In 1555, the wine-bibbing Pope Paul IV
published a bull called Cum Nimis Absurdum. It demanded that they be treated as slaves
and locked away in ghettos. Their books
were burnt by rabid Catholics though surprisingly they were allowed one
synagogue in every city.
In the last century, Pius IX, had no sense
of justice towards the Jews and even had Jewish babies kidnapped for the
purpose of brainwashing them into becoming ardent Roman Catholics.
There is some evidence that the Catholic
and many other cults plotted with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews during
World War Two. Pius XII did not say a
word while Hitler slaughtered the Jews.
He could have saved them by breaking his silence but he was too evil
to. It might have done little good but
it should have been tried.
Despite their antagonism towards the Jews,
the Christians follow a religion that is supposed to tell them to become
Jews. How ironic.
This book proves that Catholicism,
Orthodoxy and Protestantism have rejected Judaism out of badness and not
because what they consider to be divine revelation told them to. Early Christianity was a Jewish sect. True Christianity would still observe the
Jewish religion, with its feasts, Sabbaths, sacrifices and rites. This book proves that modern Christianity has
forsaken authentic Christianity. I hope
that it converts Christians to make another great division in the Church so
that confusion may reign and Atheism may grow.
The New Testament never says that the horrifying punishment laws of the Torah, and the other rules laid down by God through Moses have been done away. Those who dispute this must be answered. Jesus said that he didn't come to do away with these laws but to make them more severe (Matthew 5:17). He said that to sum up the law was to advocate the great commandment of loving God with all your power and ultimately, while loving your neighbour. You love your neighbour for God so that it is really God you love. This being so it follows that each part of the Law is equally important and each act must be done with the right inner disposition so merely external obedience is useless.
Yet Christians claim that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John repudiate the Law, punishment laws, ceremony laws and so on and all.
The Gospel of Matthew says that Jesus said he didn’t come to do away with the Law but to perfect it and make it better so we can consider the matter closed.
Some scholars and Christians say that Jesus was only saying that about the Jews. If you had Jewish blood in you, you had to keep the Law or Torah. Karen Armstrong claims that the apostle Paul never suggested at all that the Jews should just ignore this Jewish Law (page 62,
The Bible, The Biography, Karen Armstrong, Atlantic Books, London, 2007). She writes in her book that Paul valued Judaism and the covenant it had with God that makes Jews to be the sons of God. And she says also that the Judaizers or Jewish Christians Paul was condemning so viciously and vigorously in his letters were those who wished for Gentiles to be circumcised and therefore made Jews and accordingly be required to keep the whole Law perfectly.
Even if she is right, it follows that the Church and Christian nations should enable and encourage Jews and Jews who believe in Christ to obey the bloodier parts of the Law, including the parts where God demands that sinners such as adulterers should be cruelly put to death by stoning. She would say that non-Jewish believers in Christ being allowed to ignore the Law does not mean that the Law is to be disobeyed but only that the Law does not apply to them. Their being allowed to disobey it doesn't mean it was abolished. A law can only be abolished for you if it applies to you and has authority over you in the first place.
So anyway Jesus did
not do away with the Law at all. That much is certain.
Let
us go on.
All agree that Jesus Christ sought to restore
the spirit of the law, in other words its real meaning. They think that Jesus was of the opinion that
the Jews were taking many of its rules out of context and making them harder
than they were meant to be. See how this
works in relation say to the killing of homosexuals by stoning. Even if you can’t kill them this way you have
to wish you can and could purge them from your midst. There is no way spirit of the law talk can
get around that. The law is still
dangerous.
·
“ Luke 9:51-56 has Jesus condemning James and John for wanting fire to
come down from Heaven to consume those who rejected their preaching. Jesus snapped that they did not know what
kind of men they were and what kind of spirit or personality was in them for
the Son of Man is not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.”
Jesus simply meant that killing everybody
that did that would mean that there would be nobody left to follow him. James and John wanted God to do the murdering
while the Law says people are to do it for God so this section has nothing at
all to do with the Law. They reminded
Jesus that Elijah had murdered people by miraculously summoning fire from
Heaven. Jesus would not have condemned
this miracle. He would also believed
that this was not murder for God willed it and would have been angry at his
disciples for wanting God to kill without caring if it was God’s will or not
under the circumstances.
·
“Jesus forbade self-defence which the Law allowed when he said that
whoever will protect his life will lose it (Mark 8:35).”
There are other ways to interpret this
verse. It is very vague. It may refer to the man who protects his life
as being more valuable than God – who uses forbidden methods of preserving his
life. It does not mean that we should
get ourselves killed for he instructed his disciples to run away from
persecution and to do what is right for themselves for God’s sake (Matthew
10:23).
·
“Jesus said the edict condoning divorce (Deuteronomy 24:14) was wrong so
he did repeal some of the rules of the Law so he must have been opposed to the
cruel ones too.”
He could have disagreed with the Law on
divorce while accepting the nefarious decrees as well. We have to accept what he never explicitly
rejected to be on the safe side.
Jesus said that Genesis forbade divorce so
the divorce law was only made because God knew if it wasn’t the people would
fall away from him. Thus, he was not
changing the Old Testament law at all but only declaring that the divorce law
was only temporary. It was right under
the circumstances.
But a better suggestion is as follows. Jesus was asked by the Jews about divorce in
relation to remarriage. Jesus said that
this kind of divorce was wrong. The Law
only allowed divorce but said nothing about allowing remarriage so there is no
disagreement. Jesus said that Moses
wrote the commandment allowing divorce out of the stubbornness of the
people. He does not say that Moses was
forced to allow the evil of divorce. You
could say that somebody had to write a law forbidding murder because of the
stubbornness of the people. That
doesn’t imply that murder is only to be forbidden when the people are bad.
·
“According to our blessed Lord, the Law and the Prophets were in force
until the coming of John the Baptist for the good news is being proclaimed now
(Luke 16:16).”
Whatever sense Jesus intended in this, he
is not stating that the Law and the Prophets have lost their value and
significance for he must have approved of much in them at the very least. He said they were inspired by God so he
approved of all they taught. He probably
meant that the writings had served their purpose which according to him, was
preparing for his gospel. If he did not
then he said that they were bad news and had to be done away for the good news
which he would not have said for it was blasphemous and destroyed his own claim
to be the Saviour for he needed those writings to justify his claims.
A law is something that is forced on you. Jesus might have meant that the Law must still be kept but is no longer a law for the coercive element has been taken away. God makes keeping the Law a pleasure in which case it is a blessing and a liberty not a law.
·
“Luke 21:20-21 has Jesus telling his followers to abandon their country
and flee when they see it surrounded by armies.”
He said that they will know then that the
end is nigh. When the end is nigh what
is the point of fighting? And why would
they fight when they were not soldiers?
I get really sick of some of the arguments that biased Christians come
up with.
·
“Jesus didn’t campaign for the execution of anyone who laughed at his
gospel so the Law for the murder of apostates is abolished. Paul did not tell the Corinthians to murder
the man who committed incest though that was a capital crime under the
Law. Paul forgave the people who
committed capital crimes like homosexuality and adultery instead of asking them
to submit to execution”.
The silence of the gospels does not prove
that Jesus did not.
If Jesus refused to have those who mocked
his gospel slaughtered then it was because if he killed everybody who did that
he would bring in no converts at all for there would be nobody left to preach
to. The Torah laid down that only
initiated believers who abnegated the faith were to be destroyed. No one was given the right to kill those who
scoff at the gospel in ignorance.
The early Jesus People were subject to
enough hatred without killing people.
They had to live in peace for the greater good which was the propagation
of the gospel. When it was safe to do so
some sinners might have been urged to commit suicide in a horrible and brutal
manner to satisfy the Law.
The early Jesus People had no facility for
eradicating them.
The way the man was described by Paul as being
handed over to Satan for the destruction of his body would suggest that the man
was put on death row or that Christians were trying to kill him by their
prayers.
ACTS DOES NOT TEACH ABOLITION
DOCTRINE
If
the Law were abolished we would expect to read about it in the book of the Acts
of the Apostles. This book claims to
report the developments and adjusting of the disciples of Christ. And we don’t.
The Law said that the Lord dwelt on the Ark
of the Covenant so he could dwell in
One answer to this reasoning is that God
only promised to dwell on the Ark of the Covenant and so when the
Perhaps Paul, by saying that God does not
live in human
·
“There is no record in the Book of Acts or anywhere in the New Testament
about Christians carrying out the Mosiac Law.
It does not say they are binding therefore they are not.”
All that means is that they haven’t
said. It does not mean that they didn’t
see them as binding.
They might not have carried out the badder
laws for they may not have been able to.
They were a persecuted and detested sect.
And finally Acts does say that they adhered
to the Law.
Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was
arraigned before the outraged Jews for allegedly saying that Jesus will change
the institutions and commandments of Moses’ Law (Acts
Acts 16 has the apostle Paul putting up
with a spirit medium for days before he exorcises her. This alleged to infer that he approved of her
antics indicating the abolition of the Law which forbade witchcraft and
spiritualism. But maybe Paul had been
praying to God to take away the spirit without anything happening all
along. When God told him that prayer was
to be answered Paul turned on the Spirit and expelled it. If he was then the episode does not tell us
anything about the status of the Law in his sight.
Acts says that Jesus saved sinners with his
blood, that is, by dying on the cross.
That implies that it is wrong to sacrifice animals for sins or does it? It does not for a man who pays his fine can
pay a superfluous one for some benevolent reason.
The Christians according to Acts lived a
communistic way of life. They shared all
things together. There is a different
way presupposed in the Torah. This does
not prove the Torah is not for Christians because the Torah only commands what
is to be done in a non-communistic society and neither allows or forbids
communism. The family unite which the
Torah upheld was like a communist society.
The way was cleared for the emergence of a Church that considered itself
to be a family and behaved as one.
PAUL KNEW NOTHING OF AN
ABROGATION
Paul
is reputed to have said that Christians don’t have to observe the Law of Moses,
over and over again. He never said
anything of the kind.
·
Christians claim, “Paul said that justification could not be gained by
keeping the Law but only be faith without keeping it (Romans 3:20,28). Faith is opposition to the Law. The Law is abolished.” Yes he said that but he also said that faith
does not abrogate the Law but upholds and fulfils it (Romans 3:31). Faith must then enable you to keep the Law
but the Law has to be kept in force before faith can do that or try to.
Paul said that the Law was given to show both
Jew and Gentile why we need a saviour and that we are sinners. It cannot do that unless it stays valid
forever. Otherwise people could do evil
things and say God has changed his mind about these things being bad.
Paul stated that the only reason the Law
failed to justify was because its command about faith and trust in God was
ignored which meant it was not being kept right. He did say that anybody who kept the Law as
it should be kept would be justified and right with God (Romans
The Protestants say that Paul preached
salvation by faith without good works in the sense that you can be sinful and
still be smuggled into Heaven even though you should not be there. God pretends that you are holy though you are
not for Jesus obeyed God and earned Heaven for you and atoned your sins. If their interpretation is right it does not
confute the notion of the Law still being in force but means that Jesus has
compensated for our failures to follow it.
Some say it does for the Law prescribes punishments and this doctrine
says that you are free from the penalty of the Law. This penalty is the separation from God due to
sin not the other punishments. We know
this for even the New Testament says that God will punish his sons to keep them
right. In the Law, God never said that
he would not forgive those who were stoned to death. Perhaps they pay for their sin by their death
and that’s the matter ended. But all God
said was that he forgives all who repent.
Others say that if you are saved by faith alone then you don’t need to
obey the Law so it cannot exist anymore.
But the Bible says that if you are saved you will be inclined to
obey. What is right is always
essential. Paul says that we are saved
by faith alone because we will not obey the Law fully and it is the only way we
can be made righteous in the sight of the Law.
For him, the two were perfectly compatible for Law forces you to obey
but faith makes you keen to obey.
The Catholics say that Paul just meant that
when you turn away from your sins and are forgiven because of your faith you
are saved by faith alone but only as long as you stay pure from sin that
divides you from God. This does not
contradict the Law which taught the same thing by preaching that God
forgives.
·
Christians argue that “St Paul taught that the laws of Israel are over
for he pronounced the Jewish Law a thing of the past and that there is no Law
now (Ephesians 2:15; Galatians 2:15-21).
He proclaimed Christ to be the end of the Law (Romans 10:4). In Ephesians 2:14,15 he stated that Christ
cancelled the Law with its commandments for Christians.”
A law is something you are forced to
obey. Paul was just saying that the Law
of Moses though a law is not a law in the sense that one has to be forced to
keep it any longer. He thought that
people had to try and force themselves to keep it with little help from God so
that they would realise that they couldn’t do it and depend on his mercy and on
faith. Now that was all over and anyone
who obeys God will do it because they want to and enjoy it and have God
assisting them in this task.
His teaching does not eliminate the laws of
the Old Testament for Christians. Far
from this he said that the Law was all about love. He was saying it was love to keep the capital
laws. God cannot change these rules
without ceasing to be love. He did not
even declare the ritual laws of the Old Testament to be abrogated for instead
of that, according to the Christian interpretation – which I question - they
were fulfilled by Christ for us so that we have no need to keep them. That would be saying that they are abolished
only in the sense that they are not binding on us but strictly speaking they
are not abolished. They cannot be
abolished when Jesus has to keep them for us to make up for our failure to keep
them.
How could the Ephesians verse that supposedly
says the commandments of the Law are cancelled for Christians forbid the
commandments of the Law when Paul said that the Law was love and that
Christians must love? The Law forbade
pre-marital sex, adultery, stealing and laying and so do Christ and the
apostles. It means that the Law must be
kept but that it is no longer law.
·
Christians argue, “God asserted that the faith isn’t spread by violence
(2 Corinthians 10:4) while the Law advocates the forced conversion of heretics
in the form of ‘Convert and stay converted or die!’ He told us to be at peace with all. These things prove that the capital laws are
things of the past.”
The Law never said that forcing a person to
believe and obey was any good. It
commanded the love of God which is voluntary.
Force can be used to only indirectly effect sincere conversions and this
was the sort of compulsion the Law desired.
We successfully force our children to believe in Geography.
God rejection of violence as being good
evangelism is saying that intimidation cannot make people faithful or believe. But force can spread the faith in certain
ways and circumstances so more probably it forbids force that puts people
off. The command to be at peace with all
is not taken literally by any Christian for they aren’t at peace with certain
sinners. They forbid some forms of peace
when they hamper greater peace.
Christians would say the Law could not be annulled by this verse for the
Law never advocated conversion by force but my book Religious Warmongering
belies that.
Christians argue, “The New Testament does
away with the morality of the Law to keep the Sabbath proving that the Mosiac
morality is nonsense. Moreover, the
penalty for Sabbath-breaking was death by stoning. The Sabbath is abolished so the death penalty
got the same fate. We need a Sabbath
day. The rule that we must keep the
Sabbath is a moral law. The NT revoked
so much of the morality of the Law of Moses.
The ceremonial laws were done away too even though it was immoral to
keep these for they were signs of gratitude to God. This means that the ethical laws are
abolished.”
It is surmised that since the New Testament
commands cheerful free and uncoerced giving to the Church (1 Corinthians 16:2;
1 Corinthians 9:7) that the Old Testament law of tithing was done away. But that law applied to the Jewish priesthood
and the Church was a different set-up.
It is argued that “God says that the Law
that the Christian follows is written not on paper but in the heart. Written Law cuts one off from God but the one
in the heart gives life. (See 2
Corinthians 3:3-11). Nobody can assert
that the Law of Moses is everlasting after reading this for this means that the
written Law is no more. In verse 11,
Paul says that the Law has passed away”.
The law of the land can be written in my
conscience and in my heart though it is down on paper too. Its being in me does not mean that I have
abolished it for myself. But I have
abolished it in the sense that I like following it so it is no longer a law, a
law is what compels. I have the Holy
Spirit to tell me how to follow it and so I don’t need the written law.
·
“Paul said that vengeance was God’s job not ours (Romans 12:19). The Law commands vengeance so Paul is making
it plain that it is abrogated.”
Just before that Paul told his people to
avoid vengeance as far as possible not absolutely. He said that God set up governments to avenge
crime. Moreover, if vengeance is God’s
job we will still have to do it for him.
Even the Law restricted vengeance for you can’t have a society if all
take revenge all the time. Paul was
quoting an Old Testament Psalm when he said that vengeance was God's job and
the Psalms all upheld and were under the authority of the Law. Paul means that vengeance is God’s business
except where the Law says otherwise so by implication we are to get involved
too as avengers but only where the Law says.
He knew his readers should be smart enough to see that he did not mean
to be taken too literally.
·
“Romans 15 condemns judgment which the Law allows”.
It condemns judging those who are merely
following their conscience (v 3,4). Paul
allowed judgment in the case of a man living with his stepmother.
·
“In 1 Corinthians 9:20, Paul said that he acts towards the Jews as if he
were under the Law like them though he is not.
The Jews therefore had to obey it and he had not. The Law is cancelled.”
He just means that the Jews obey under
compulsion and he does not so in that sense he is not under the Law. This not saying that the Law is wrong or
wrong now. Also, Jesus obeyed the Law
for us so we are counted law-keepers if we become true Christians and we must
keep the Law not to gain salvation like the Jews did but in thanksgiving for
salvation. The Law is compulsory for us but
it is not compulsory in the sense that it is required for getting into Heaven.
·
“Paul declared that he acts as one without Law when he is among people
who have no law (1 Corinthians 9:21). He
was opposed to hypocrisy so he is saying that the Law of the Jews is
abolished.”
He says in this verse that he follows the
Law of Christ. To be without the Law
means that you are not forced by the Law to obey it so that it is not a real
Law for you.
·
“Paul claimed that the righteousness he got from the Law was rubbish
compared to his being saved by Jesus (Philippians 3:6,7). God must have dropped the Law when he wrote
like this.”
Since Paul said that nobody could keep much
of the Law unless they were saved by faith in Jesus (Ephesians 2:8-10) he did
not mean righteousness in the sight of God here but righteousness in the sight
of man which according to the standard of the Law was not true righteousness
for all fall short (Romans 9:31). He is
not criticising the Law. He is saying
that the Christian is able to fulfil the Law by obeying the Law and that Jesus
has obeyed the Law for you to make up for the defects so that you stand before
God as a perfect law-keeper. When a
person is saved Jesus has kept the Law for them so they are credited as
law-keepers and now they must keep the Law not to gain salvation but in
gratitude for salvation.
·
“Christians do not have to observe the Law of Moses. It is written that Jesus ‘wiped away the
handwriting of the note (bond) with its legal decrees and demands which was in
force and stood against us (hostile to us).
This [note with its regulations, decrees, and demands] He set aside and
cleared completely out of our way by nailing it to [His] cross’ (Colossians
2:14). Jesus destroyed or repealed the
laws that were against us.”
The verse is about the decrees that
condemned us.
It only says that Jesus forgave sins when
he died on the cross by dying on the cross.
Forgiving sins against the Law is not doing away with the Law. How could the Law be done away when Jesus saw
it as being so important that he had to suffer and die for every transgression
against it? When Jesus atoned for sins
against the Law by his death that should show the Law is still in force for you
can’t forgive breaking a law when the law is repealed.
·
“Paul complained that certain people were preaching that the Law was to
be followed by Christians (1 Timothy 1:6-8) proving that he believed them to be
in error.”
He said they were abusing the Law. He said that unlike them he recognised that
the Law was given for bad people not good people. If the Law were given for good people as the
heretics said then they thought that unless good people keep it they will not
be saved which is intolerable blasphemy and bigotry.
·
“God has revoked the Torah in Hebrews 8:13.”
This verse says that God has done away with
the Old Covenant and replaced it with a new one. The Covenant was that God would be the God of
the people if they were true to him.
They would not be his people so he made a New Covenant under Christ. The Law is not the Covenant. You just have to obey the Law to be in the
Covenant. However, the only thing new
about the New Covenant is that it is a repeat of the Old. The contract was the same, “Be my people and
I will be your God”. The first contract
was broken by the people for they did not obey the Law through faith and use
Jesus to keep it for them and the second is the exact same contract except that
this time we have and are aware that through trust and faith and the obedience
of Jesus in our place to make up for our sins against the Law we will be
reconciled with God. The substitutionary
obedience of Jesus means that though we should obey the Law we don’t have to
when it comes to acquiring salvation though we have to obey it to be moral for
Jesus has obeyed it for us and was valuable enough to God to ensure that God
would be satisfied with his obedience as much as that of many people.
The New Testament says that since the Jews
turned their backs on the saviour that God rejected them and applied the
promises he made to Israel to its continuation – not successor for Jesus came
to fulfil Judaism and to add to it and not to destroy it! These promises concerned ownership of the
Promised Land and loads of material and spiritual blessings. They were conditional upon obedience to the
Law. So when the Church was promised the
blessings of the Law pertaining to its status as the continuation of Israel the
people of God and warned about the dangers of disobedience and the punishments
it could bring it follows that the Law was still to be obeyed by the
Church. See Those Incredible
Christians, page 54 and Matthew 11:43.
We
have exhaustively demonstrated that the New Testament never contradicts the Law
of Moses. Does it go one step further to
actually say that the Law is still in force?
It does.
As a Jew, Jesus had to praise all the
bloodshed which God had sanctioned because in his prayer and in his preaching
he stressed that the scriptures which commanded it were void of error. On the Sabbath, he sang psalms that were
eulogies of the wickedness of he Law. If
honest he would not have appealed to any Old Testament scriptures at all to add
weight to his doctrinal statements if there was anything in them that God had
not sanctioned for what is the point of quoting something that could be an
insertion from a tampered Bible? If he
would have and did he was far from being an honest man.
Suicide rates are high among young gay men
and religion which condemns gay sexuality in accordance with the Bible will
make sure that it not only stays high but climbs higher still. The condemnation of homosexuality excites
much homophobia and drives many to despair and even suicide. It would be better to speak positively about
homosexuality and stop condemning even if it saves just one life but the Church
won’t do it showing how little concern it has for human life despite bragging
about its great respect for life as the most important thing. Catholics who rail against capital punishment
on the grounds that human life is sacred are hypocrites. Their dogma forbids them to do that for all
God cares about is what he wants and does not mind if people die over the
things he directs the Church to teach.
How anybody could expect this God to be unlike the bloodthirsty tyrant
who commanded that gays be stoned to death in the Bible is a mystery. His commanding the prohibition of
homosexuality is proof enough that he wants gays dead and for us to make sure
he gets his wish. If we respect God we
will advocate the murder of homosexuals for it would be disrespecting him and
his law to be inconsistent. The Law
claimed the right to command the destruction of Israelites whose cities broke
away from the Law to practice idolatry and in effect became new countries with
their own Law (Deuteronomy 13:12,15). So
don’t let anybody dare suggest that the Law of Moses forbids the killing of the
criminals God wants dead when it is against the law of the land. This also implies that the Law of Moses was
to be imposed on other nations that were not Israelite as well.
The New Testament allowed slavery. It could have been forbidden Christians to
have slaves but it allowed it. It is
silly to say it had to allow slavery because of the social system of the day
for not everybody was Christian.
Christians were a minority group and were despised anyway so opposing
slavery couldn’t have made things any worse.
Paul taught that every commandment of the
Law was holy, fair and good (Romans
John defined sin as the transgression of
the Law (1 John 3:4). So, since it is
wicked to break the Law it is right to follow the Law. Christians allege that Paul wrote against
Jewish Christians who sought to get Christians to obey the Law of Moses for
Jesus had cancelled the Law. They
pretend that the Law Paul asked his followers to live under was not the Law of
Moses but the Law of God about right and wrong.
Their position falls to pieces when it is realised that if they were
right Paul would not have used the simple term, “The Law,” for both Laws. He and his secretary, Tertius, wouldn’t have
been so sloppy and confusing. If he were
writing to Christians who stupidly thought they were to live like Jews then he
would have known what they would have thought he meant, when he advocated the
bending of the knee to the Law. He would
have prevented this misunderstanding.
Never does the Bible distinguish between
the moral law and the religious law.
There is only the Law.
Romans 13:8 says that loving other people
fulfils the whole Law.
1 Timothy 1:8 says that the Law is good if
it is not abused. To do what is not good
is to do what is bad so if the Law is good then it should be obeyed. To call it good means, “Obey it!”
Do these texts mean the Ten Commandments
only? No. They were the heart of the Law and all the
other commandments came forth from them like spokes. They were not the Law but a bit of it. The New Testament would make it clear it
means only these if it did mean them.
The Ten Commandments were to be interpreted in the light of the rest of
the Law. For example, “You shall not
kill”, means “Do not kill except in self-defence, when I have prescribed the
death-penalty – for kidnappers, adulterers, homosexuals, etc – or command
war”. It is stupid to say the Ten
Commandments can be plucked or followed out of the context of the Law. The first of the commandments says that God
is to be worshipped by being obeyed meaning by the Law.
It is stupid to say that you can use the
commandment that some render “You shall not kill” to forbid killing animals or
capital punishment or anything – a murderer will have been asked by his victim
not to kill him and does that mean the victim thinks that the killing will not
be a murder. Of course not! Killing can mean murder though not all
killing is murder. Yet the Christian
Church thinks it can reinterpret the commandments and that God wants them to
keep them. Its commandments may have the
same wording as God’s but they are not his commandments which even the Church
admits are still to be obeyed. When the
New Testament enjoins keeping the commandments of the Law which are supposed to
be the ten it is proof that the whole Law is still in force according to the
true Christian religion.
Acts 21 makes it clear that the prophets of
the early Church taught that the Law was still completely in power long after
modern Christianity says Jesus got rid of it.
Jesus allegedly inspired them to do so from on high according to many
places in the Bible. Paul was accused by
the apostles of telling Jewish Christians not to keep the Law. Obviously, they wanted him neither to teach
that they could obey the Law out of custom if they wanted to or that they
should cast it aside. To make the Law
optional is the same as telling some of them to disregard it. It is saying, “If you don’t want to keep the
Law then don’t do it.” The Law made life
harder so nobody wanted to keep it though they supported it. To ask people to give it up when they want
would be unfair on those who make themselves keep it. The apostles told him to prove that he was
not hostile to the keeping of the Law by undertaking a ritual purity rite – a
rite for the removal of uncleanness – and he agreed to. They asked him to prove that he did not
regard the Law as abolished or optional.
Obviously, the rite was only one of the things they asked for. It was too easy so you can be sure Paul had
to do a lot more than that.
So, it can be proved that the barbaric
edicts of the Law, such as those that what certain criminals tortured to death,
advocate an eye for an eye and the chopping off of the hands of anyone who
hurts a man in the groin are as much a part of the correctly understood
Christian religion as they are of Islam and Judaism.
The Sanhedrin would not have decided to
give the Christians some tolerance if the Church was set against the rites and
ethics of the Law (Acts
There is more evidence in the New Testament
that the Law is over Christians than for any of the distinctive doctrines of
the Church. The Church only exploits the
Bible if it does not reverence it because it would be Jewish Christian if it
did.
Christians admit that Jesus never rescinded
the moral law (page 14, Sunday or Sabbath).
WRITTEN ON THE HEART
If
the Law of Moses depends on a rational morality that cannot be done away then
it would be true to say that it is written on the heart of every person on
earth. They might refuse to see the
truth of the Law but it is still written on their hearts.
In Romans 2, Paul wrote that even those who
do not have the written Law have its principles written on their hearts. This is a response to the prophecy of
Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel which speak of God writing the Law of Moses on the
hearts of his chosen people in the future.
In their time, they were just written in books but not in hearts for
nobody was interested in sincerely keeping them.
He means they know it by thinking for God
can’t make them believe in the Law if the Law is beyond reason.
Commentators prefer to believe that Paul
means that some of the principles of the Law are engraved on their hearts and
not all. They are happy to say that all
people know stealing and adultery are wrong.
But they deny that the laws about cleanness and about the Jewish God
ordering the people to put people to death for certain crimes could be written
on the heart.
But the lines before give a different
interpretation. All the way up to this
verse the word Law means the full Jewish Law.
In verse 9, 10 he says that the Jew will be punished for not keeping all
the Law. When the same word keeps
turning up like that we can only take it to mean the same thing: the full Law.
Paul already said in Romans 1 that the pagans knew by reason or deep
down about God’s existence and that God was opposed to homosexuality and a lot
of other things many pagan codes found acceptable. He denied that the pagans just knew the
commonsense stuff in the Law and nothing more.
They knew the whole Law by the power of God. He says they knew too that homosexuals
deserved death. That says it all. The New Testament sees the Law of Moses as
eminently reasonable so it could not be done away. To abolish it would be to abolish
morality.
JAMES WANTS THE LAW OBEYED
James
the brother of Jesus who was known for his devotion to the Law according to
Josephus seems to have written the Epistle of James. Sources outside the Bible say he was a loyal
Jew. This means that the Law he commands
adherence to in the authority of Jesus Christ is the Law of Moses in its
fullness.
James, in his epistle, taught that the
person who offends against the Law in one point breaks all its rules (2). It is thought that the Law of liberty he
mentions is another Law. But if the Law
of Moses is righteousness then it is the Law of liberty, the remedy for bondage
to stupidity and error and evil. He
quoted some commandments to show that to break one commandment is to break all
and said that this is breaking the Law meaning the Law of Moses.
James declared that anybody who judges his
brother unfairly is criticising and judging the Law (
James
James 4:1-3 says that lusts and selfishness
are to blame for wars. Some see that as
forbidding wars. But even people who
believe in war believe that human badness is to blame. The side that is in the right however is not
to blame. It is only defending itself or
should be.
EDWARDS AND STOTT ON THE LAW
Did
Jesus retain the Law of God in the first five books of the Bible? Plenty of experts say yes.
John Stott says that Jesus “kept up the
custom of worship in a synagogue every Sabbath.
The complaints made about his behaviour as being unconventional for a
religious teacher – he and his disciples were willing to heal on the Sabbath,
did not fast, did not wash their hands before meals, and ate meals with
‘sinners’ – did not refer to acts which were technically illegal under the written
‘law of Moses’. It is significant that
his brother James, who became a Christian, is said to have observed that law
piously throughout his life” (Essentials, page 56). Stott says Jesus never contradicted anything
in the Old Testament.
However, liberal scholar David Edwards
disagrees with John Stott who he accused of going too far when he said that
Jesus never disputed any doctrine in the Old Testament (Essentials, page
56).
John 10:8 where Jesus says that all who came
before him to teach religion were robbers and were not listened to is taken to
be an example. But none of the prophets
were perfect. Jesus is accusing them of
being bad and liars but that is not the same as saying that God did not speak
through them.
And since the gospel respects the Old
Testament it is probable that the robbers were not the Bible-writing prophets
at all.
Edwards supposes that if Jesus reverenced
the scriptures well there would be no explanation for the division between the
Jews and him. That is nonsense for Jesus
sought to add new doctrines to the revelation of the Law. He wanted to form a cult centred on himself
as supreme revealer of God and the Jews did not think he was worthy. He told the Jews that they were fanatical about
the traditions and customs which he despised.
Edwards held that it was very improbable
that Christ had a copy of the entire Old Testament for it would have been very
difficult to carry and too expensive for him to buy (page 58). The reason for this assumption is that
Edwards desires to undermine the doctrine that Jesus respected the Law to the
letter and was worried about the exact wording of it for if he had no book he
would not have taken the text very seriously.
If you don’t worry about the exact text then you do not consider the
document wholly reliable. Jesus had
wealthy friends as the gospels admit.
Martha and Mary and Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus for
example. They could have given him the
scriptures.
Edwards feels that if Jesus had really been
a fundamentalist and not a liberal about the Law of Moses in the Bible he could
have been a Sadducee rejecting the doctrines about angels and spirits which are
not in it (page 60). But Jesus could
have had other reasons for accepting these doctrines. New doctrines do not necessarily imply that
the old ones were wrong or are being contradicted.
It does not enter Edward’s head that the
things he takes as indications that Jesus did to believe all that was written
before in the scriptures could have been errors or lies and not intended to do
that. That is the most likely thing when
the records never state clearly and frankly that Jesus disagreed with some
scriptural statements.
Edwards seems to be saying that Jesus stood
by most of the Law but had some faults with it.
Stott saw plenty of holes in Edwards’
analysis. Stott observes that Edwards’
belief that the hostility between Jesus and the Jews indicates that he opposed
their scriptures contradicts the biblical evidence that it was their traditions
he was against for he cited scripture to defend his opposition (page 86). “Even in the debate over divorce…what Jesus
criticised was not Moses but the hardness of human hearts, and the direction in
which he led his hearers was not away from the Pentateuch but back to the
creation narrative”. Again, in
‘declaring all foods clean’ (Mk 7:19), he was not saying that the Law’s dietary
regulations had never been God’s will, but that they were a temporary divine
arrangement, which was now fulfilled in the purity of heart demanded in the
Kingdom of God” (page 87).
The Bible does not say that any
ceremony of the Law was done away.
The argument that Jesus kept the
ceremonial law for us and that it is abolished is unsuccessful.
Incidentally, it is silly to argue that the
Sabbath must be celebrated on a Saturday and that God cannot switch it to
another day because it would be immoral and that if he does that then he has
called bad good! The fact that a Sabbath
is needed and should be observed does not mean that it has to be on a certain
day. That is why if Saturday is
abolished as a Sabbath it does not mean that morality has changed and is
arbitrary as long as a new day is designated in its place. To change a day would not infer that the rest
of the Law is invalidated or that morality is questionable. The Sabbath was to remember God resting after
making the world and the universe in six days.
That could be remembered on a Sunday as well. The Sabbath falls at different times in
different parts of the world and God is not strict about what day is used as
long as it is used to remember the seventh day of creation. However, there is no evidence of a switch
from Saturday to Sunday at all in the Bible.
Jesus is being thought to have changed the
laws that were never meant to be permanent.
I can accept that that might be true of the divorce law (Deuteronomy 24)
for it does not say that divorce is right but that a man should not take back
his first wife after divorcing her if she has got married and divorced again in
the meantime for she is defiled implying that divorce is only tolerated and
endured by God but there is no evidence in the Law that the divorce laws were
temporary though Jesus might have thought they were. The laws never permitted remarriage which
supports the view that Jesus never undermined or declared the divorce laws
changed at all when he forbade remarriage. Stott is wrong to think that Jesus
did away with the purity laws. If Jesus made all food clean by a miracle that
doesn’t mean the law banning the eating of unclean food is wrong or done
away. It just means it isn’t needed any
more.
Circumcision
is said in the New Testament to be the sign of making a covenant with God to
keep his Law that he gave to Moses.
When the New Testament condemns circumcision it only
condemns the physical act without the spiritual side being taken into
account. It stresses that circumcision
is worthless unless you intend to circumcise your heart and keep God’s
Law. Romans 2:25 says that circumcision
is good and right if you can keep the Law of Moses. But once you break the Law you break the
contract signified by your circumcision and it is no longer any good. Your circumcision is now uncircumcision. 1 Corinthians 7:18 is the only verse that
says one must not be circumcised but it says it in the context of a list of
things not to bother doing including marrying or fighting for your freedom if
you are a slave for the focus must be entirely on the return of the Lord Jesus.
Circumcision for the right reasons is part of New
Testament doctrine for it never explicitly did away with it.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE NOT BANNED
The
God of the Torah commands the making of sacrifices to God by priests, the Levites. These sacrifices are to be of animals and
sometimes fruits and crops. They were
offered to honour God and to obtain his pardon and to gain many other favours.
The letter to the Hebrews says the blood of sheep and goats cannot do away with sin and the sacrifices have been imposed until Jesus made his sacrifice. This does not imply abolition. The Old Testament says the sacrifices forgave sin and the New says they had no such power. The answer seems to be that the sacrifices had no power of their own but only forgive sin by looking forward to the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. That is not stopping us from offering sacrifices to look back on the sacrifice of Jesus as gratitude and not because we are impelled to offer them.
Hebrews 10 says that animal sacrifice gave
God no pleasure for it did not stop sin permanently. It does not say that it was unable to atone
in the sense that animals could not pay for sins even when the person offering
it had become perfect.
The Church says that God said he prefers obedience to sacrifice. This does not imply that sacrifice is wrong.
The Bible says the blood sacrificing
Levitical Priesthood is still in
force. God made a covenant establishing
an everlasting priesthood with Phinehas the grandson of Aaron (Numbers
25:13). The Church says he meant that
they would be priests forever not that there would be priests forever. But what would God promise them they would be
priests forever for? He was promising
that the priesthood would never be abolished.
The
Christians kept the feast of Pentecost when they with the apostles were in
Christians preach, “Paul said that Jesus
our Passover has been sacrificed so that we should keep the Feast of Unleavened
Bread (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). And Paul
uses leavened and unleavened to picture unholiness and holiness
respectively. When they are metaphors so
is the reference to the keeping of the feast.
He did not mean literal Passover, literal leaven or literal unleavened
bread. He was not telling us to
celebrate the Passover or the Feast of Unleavened Bread here. Keep the feast means act as if you are
celebrating that Jewish feast but are eating not unleavened bread but spiritual
food or grace”.
But if the leaven and unleavened bread are
symbols then Paul could still tell us to celebrate the feast and mean a literal
feast. He could want the eating of the
unleavened bread to represent renouncing leaven or evil. The principle of take the simplest meaning
tells us that the feast is literal. We
are to celebrate the feast of Unleavened Bread.
In the Book of Acts it is strongly
suggested that the apostles continued in the feasts (20:6). There, it is reported that Paul who had the
apostles’ approval of his religious actions and others sailed from Phillipi
after the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
This is such an odd detail for Acts had no interest in time structures
in mundane matters and when it was not relevant. When it is stated so apparently foolishly the
only explanation is that it is hinting that they sailed after they kept the
festival which would make sense of it all and fit into the pattern of Acts.
Galatians
Paul’s desperation to get to
The fast in Acts 27:9 is the fast of the
feast of the Atonement. We are told that
it was kept on the ship Paul was on. The
fast caused danger we are told. Paul was
not excluded in the text so it is probable that he fasted as well. He would not have been on the boat if it
meant being pressurised into abetting or doing something wrong. He did not think it was wrong to cause
trouble over keeping a fast.
Christians are still to follow the
feasts. But they have new additional
meaning for them. To the Jew, the
Passover, for example, was a memorial of the saving power of God when he killed
the firstborn of
God said in the Law of Moses that it was a
sin not to keep the feasts. God does not
invent sins so it must really have been wrong to do so. God cannot change right into wrong so the
feasts must still be for keeping. Their
moral purpose was for instilling and expressing gratitude therefore feasts are
morally required.
Jesus told the Devil that man lives by
every word from the mouth of God (Luke 4:4).
He meant the Old Testament scriptures.
He meant that everything they command should be done. The Devil would have understood him to mean
every man not just Jews for the Devil is not a Jew.
The
Law of Moses with its superstitions and cruelties is still in force according
to the Bible. Jesus could not and did
not teach that the days which we have to obey it are gone. The Law is said to be no longer obligatory
for us in the sense that we want to obey it so it is no longer like a Law and
in the sense that if we fail Jesus has obeyed the Law for us in our place so we
are still counted as obeying the Law perfectly.
The fact that we need Jesus to do some of the work for us indicates that
the Law has his sanction as being fair and correct.
The Law of Moses is not for the Hebrews
alone but for the world.
The Bible is an evil book that deserves to
have its pages torn out and used to shine windows. Any other use is criminal. Stop calling it the good book. It should be banned for it opposes social
order.
WORKS CONSULTED
Alleged
Discrepancies of the Bible, John W Haley,
Christ
and Violence, Ronald J Sider, Herald Press,
Christ’s
Literal Reign on Earth From David’s Throne at Jerusalem, John R Rice, Sword of
the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, undated
Early
Christian Writings, Editor Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin,
Essentials,
David L Edwards and John Stott, Hodder & Stoughton,
Eunuchs
for the
God A Guide to the Perplexed, Keith Ward, OneWorld, Oxford, 2003
God’s
Festivals and Holy Days, Herbert W Armstrong, Worldwide Church of God,
California, 1992
Hard
Sayings Derek Kidner InterVarsity Press,
Jesus
the Only Saviour, Tony and Patricia Higton, Monarch,
Kennedy’s
Murder, John R Rice, Sword of the Lord,
Martin
Luther, Richard Marius, Belknap Press of
Moral
Philosophy, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans, Green
and Co,
Not
Under Law, Brian Edwards, Day One Publications, Bromley, Ken, 1994
Radio
Replies Vol 2, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press,
Sabbath
Keeping, Johnie Edwards, Guardian of Truth Publications,
Secrets
of Romanism, Joseph Zacchello, Loizeaux Brothers,
Set
My Exiles Free, John Power, Logos Books, MH Gill & Son Ltd,
Storehouse
Tithing, Does the Bible Teach it? John R Rice, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee,
1954
Sunday
or Sabbath? John R Rice, Sword of the
Lord, Murfreesboro,
1943
The Bible, The Biography, Karen Armstrong, Atlantic Books, London, 2007
The
Christian and War, JB Norris, The Christadelphian,
The
Christian and War, Robert Moyer, Sword of the Lord Murfreesboro
The
Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan,
The
Enigma of Evil, John Wenham, Eagle,
The
Gospel and Strife, A. D. Norris, The Christadelphian,
The
Jesus Event, Martine Tripole SJ, Alba House,
The
The
Metaphor of God Incarnate, John Hick, SCM Press,
The
Plain Truth about Easter, Herbert W Armstrong, Worldwide
The
Sabbath, Peter Watkins, Christadelphian Bible
The
Ten Commandments, Herbert W Armstrong, Worldwide
The
Truth that Leads to Eternal Life, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of
The
World Ahead, November December 1998, Vol 6, Issue 6
Theodore
Parker’s Discourses, Theodore Parker, Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer,
Those
Incredible Christians, Hugh Schonfield,
Vicars
of Christ, Peter de Rosa, Corgi Books,
War
and Pacifism, Margaret Cooling, Scripture
War
and the Gospel, Jean Lasserre, Herald Press,
When
Critics Ask, Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, Victor Books,
Which
Day is the Christian Sabbath? Herbert W Armstrong, Worldwide
THE
WEB
The
Law of Moses: Is It Valid Today?
www.ark_of_salvation.orgJewish_law.htm
The
Law of Moses and the Law of Christ by
Is
Old Testament Law for New Testament Christians
www.souldevice.org/writings_law_gospel.html
This
Christian site accepts that the New Testament did not run the Law of Moses out
of town but accepted it. It argues that
Matthew 5 has Jesus stating that he has no intention of doing away with the Law
of Moses and what he does with it is he gives out a stricter interpretation of
it. But strangely it argues then that
Jesus did discontinue some parts of the Law.
1 Samuel 15:22,23/Isaiah 1:11-17/Jeremiah
7:21-23/Proverbs 21:3/Matthew 9:13/23:23 are said to make no sense unless the
law can be given three distinctions which are Moral, Ceremonial and Civil. Not once however in these verses does God
even hint that the Moral laws and the Civil laws and the Ceremonial laws are to
be treated as three units. What they are
is three different kinds of law in one law based on love. The first two cannot
be changed because of the link with morality but the latter can if it is only
temporary and states that clearly. You
can’t change what love is. The law
plainly commands and practices hatred so God is assuming that we need to hate
in order to love properly so that is how a law of love can encourage and foster
hatred.
Christians,
assuming that they are to have any distinctions at all, are to have just Moral
and Ceremonial law. The Christians make
the distinctions for they hold that the moral law of God is unchangeable while
the civil and ceremonial law of God is changeable. But when there is no evidence that moral and
civil are not the same they can only hope for the abolition of the Ceremonial
law. They simply have to hold that it is
right to slay homosexuals and other sinners Moses wanted dead in the name of
God.
A
case for holding that Paul believed that the law that could not save was a
legalistic interpretation of the Law and not the law itself as it actually was
is dismissed. Paul never hinted that he
meant only the interpretation of the law was dangerous for salvation not the
Law itself. Paul’s word for the Law
backs this dismissal up.
Then
the site suggests the correctness of the shocking statement of the theologian
Geisler that all God’s laws must be in accord with God’s nature but need not be
necessitated by that nature and so they can be changed. In other words, God can forbid you to pay
taxes to the temple so that the poor may be given the money and then he could
change that law. But that does not
explain how he could command the stoning of certain sinners. Any law he makes, changeable or unchangeable
is designed to bring about the best. So
if the Israelites were better rid of these sinners so were we. If the temple can do without money it can at
other times so the law would have to be reinstated. There is a sense then in which all his laws
are permanent. They are permanent but if
other permanent laws become more important than them they are just put to the
background and not done away until they can be put back to the foreground
again. Not one of the laws in the Torah
are claimed to be changeable or even look like that kind of law. They are all different from the one about
paying money to charity instead of the temple.
God in the Law said you could murder a burglar who breaks into your
house at night with impunity. Now is
that a law that isn’t necessitated by God’s nature? It does no good at all. It clearly indicates that God does not accept
the view that he has any laws that his nature does not require him to make but
which he makes anyway. It is unnecessary
and it is against the nature of a good God.
Geisler is wrong.
The
Law claims to be right. In other words,
we are meant to see that it is right even if we don’t believe in God. God told the Hebrews that other nations would
consider them to be the wisest nation on earth because of their Law
(Deuteronomy 4:6,8).
At
least Geisler would admit that stoning people to death is not necessarily
incompatible with God. He would say that
if God doesn’t allow it now, he still wants us to have the mindset that we
would do it if he asked. We want to do
it but it is because he asks us not to that we don’t. The fanaticism is still there.
Wednesday, 09 April 2008