The Gospel in Real Life

This is the last of three posts that I’m writing about conversations I recently had with two orthodox Jews. One thing that stood out to me most in my time with them was the response I got when I implored them to wrestle with who Jesus is. They remained very gracious and kind when I mentioned the name of Jesus and my belief that Jesus is God and that God became a man in the person of Jesus in order to die a substitutionary death on the cross to pay for the sin of all who believe. As we continued to talk about the gospel, they resonded by telling me that they viewed Jesus as a good example of keeping the Law. Who can disagree with that? Of course he was (is). He kept the Law perfectly as the true spotless lamb of God. On that point we agreed. But when I took them beyond the concept of seeing Jesus as simply a good man who did a good job of keeping the Law, we agreed to disagree. To my surprise, it was then that they pointed me to Matthew 5:17-18:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

To my Jewish friends, Jesus’ words, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” simply meant that he came to keep the Law and little or nothing more. I agree that he kept the Law perfectly, but that is not all that is in view in this passage. In Colossians 2:13-14, Paul gives us more information:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

Ephesians 2:14-16 is parallel in many ways with our Colossians text. The context is the bringing together of Jew and Gentile into one new man, the Church:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Something happened between Matthew 5 and Colossians chapter 2/Ephesians 2 that resulted in the Law of Moses losing its fatal grip. It was Read more…

This is the second of what will be three posts about a couple of pretty intense conversations with two Orthodox Jews that I had the privilege of being a part of. By intense, I don’t mean argumentative or mean-spirited, but I mean intense in a good way. It stretched me in theological areas that I’ve never been stretched before. Instead of just reading about how Jews under the Law of Moses seemed to think, I was verbally engaged with two of them in live, unscripted conversation. This wasn’t something I had read, say in the Book of Acts, where Paul is engaging a group in a Jewish synagogue on the Sabbath. That’s safe because every time I go back to read it, it ends the same way. No, this was unscripted and quite frankly, I wondered more than once whether I would be up for such a task. I felt more than once, like I was getting in over my head. But looking back, that caused me to trust the Lord even more for opportunities to share the gospel with my two Jewish friends. God grants repentance and eternal life not on the basis of a polished presentation, but according to his sovereign will. But I digress. Let’s begin by looking at Romans 8:3-4:

For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

I mentioned in part one of this series that much of our conversation was centered around the Mosaic Law’s unrelenting demand for perfect obedience. I found that in the process of presenting my views to my Jewish friends that I am quite spoiled by being able to use my New Testament to support my views of the Law of Moses. Rightly so. It also struck me in a very vivid way how strange it seems to talk about issues surrounding the Law of Moses in the present tense. I’m still not used to that! Most of my conversations or things that I have written about the Law have been in relation to how an Old Covenant Jew at the time of the New Testament would make application to certain things Jesus said or that one of the Apostles had written. I’ve never dealt directly with a Jew who considers himself under the Law today. At least not until now!

The New Testament completes what was begun in the Old and transitions us from picture to fulfillment. But since my Jewish companions do not recognize the New Testament as authoritative Scripture, we stayed within the pages of Genesis to Malachi. I took my Jewish friends to 4 passages from the Hebrew Scriptures (that’s the Old Testament to you and I) that illustrate Read more…

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of sitting down with a couple of Orthodox Jews (one living in Israel and the other lives near me in the Phoenix area) and talk about the Law of Moses and the Covenant given at Sinai. This was quite a thrill for me because I’ve never done it before. The first conversation was with just one of them and the second one was with both. Both occasions were interesting and I came away from both conversations with a better grasp of how an Orthodox Jew interprets Moses. I have to admit that I learned some things along the way.

I was also reminded that the Old Covenant isn’t old unless one has embraced the New Covenant in its place. So I found myself using terms like “the Hebrew Scriptures”, “the Law delivered to Moses”, and the “Covenant given at Sinai” to describe my views of the Old Covenant Scriptures. I know I slipped up and said “Old Covenant” on at least two occasions, but my Jewish companions were very gracious and overlooked my flaws.

One of my first questions was how does an Orthodox Jew (by that I mean a Jew who attempts today to hold faithfully to the Law of Moses as it was delivered on Mount Sinai) cover his or her tracks when the Law of Moses commands something that cannot possibly be done today? When Moses commands an atoning sacrifice in the Old Covenant Scriptures, how is that command Read more…