The Gospel in Real Life

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 the Lord’s requirement for perfect obedience to the Law. I won’t type those out here, but I will give you the references so you can double check me. They are: Exodus 19:5-6, Deuteronomy 28:1-2, Jeremiah 11:1-5, and we ended with Ezekiel 18:20. There were a lot more I wanted to go to, but just talking about these few turned into a LONG discussion and we ran out of time.

In the first 3 passages, I attempted to emphasize the condition that’s attached to Moses – perfect obedience. We talked about phrases in these passages like “if you obey fully”, “keep my covenant”, “carefully follow all his commands”, and “obey me and do everything I command you”. Not very uplifting stuff, but my point was to highlight the fact that if one is going to be under Moses’ authority, then that person must understand that Moses demands perfect obedience to “everything” God commanded. In addition, the perfect obedience demanded by the Mosaic Law is dependent on certain physical trappings such as a Temple, a group of Levitical priests, and a high priest who has to be a physical descendant to Aaron. This makes full obedience to the Law impossible today and yet full obedience is what it demands. God was very gracious in giving the Law to Moses and Israel, but the Mosaic Law is part of a conditional covenant – it’s an “if – then” kind of covenant. If the people obeyed fully, then they get the goodies.  On the down side, it is a law that will kill you if you fail to obey it perfectly because it demands perfect obedience. It is literally a “ministry that brought death” (2 Corinthians 3:5-11) because it is works based and not of faith (Galatians 3:12). No one is accepted by God by what they do. No one.

The concept of not obeying the Law of Moses perfectly brought up the issue of sin (not by accident!). Things got interesting in our discussion of sin. It was no small task to get my Jewish friends to the place where they finally agreed that breaking God’s law (in any era) is in fact sin. When I posed the question, “do you observe everything in God’s law perfectly?”, the answer was of course, “No.” But the caveat to each response they gave was “We try to be”, and “God understands our situation” (see my previous blog on this subject and their handling of Hosea 3:4-5), and “It’s ok that we can’t obey everything because God knows that we can’t.” So we would go over the passage again (or move to the next one) and re-emphasize the command for unswerving obedience to Moses. I think (and I pray) that they finally understood my point. Simply trying to obey Moses isn’t enough. Failing to perfectly follow everything in the Law of the Covenant given at Sinai means that you have fallen short of its demands. You have sinned and broken the Covenant. You are by definition a law-breaker and a sinner. Moses doesn’t leave any wiggle room for the one who does not obey perfectly. Obey and live; disobey and die! That’s the message of Moses. Not very uplifting.

This brought us to our last passage – the one I referenced above in Ezekiel 18:20 – “the soul that sins will die.” This is where our conversation turned and we started to talk about the gospel and God’s remedy for sin, apart from law or works. I am thankful for having the opportunity to explain to my Jewish companions that the God they are trusting and loving has revealed himself more fully since the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures they embrace. They are trusting in a revelation of God that is incomplete and therefore, no longer valid. We walked through how that the New Testament gives us more information about what he is like and it is God as he has fully revealed himself in the New Testament and in his son Jesus Christ that they must embrace in order to be accepted by him. And they must embrace him by faith alone, apart from trusting in works to save them. God as he is revealed in the New Testament is the God they must love in order to be saved. I’ll share more about their response to the gospel in my next blog. For now, I want to paste the passage from Romans 8:3-4 that I cited at the start of this blog:

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.

Those who seek acceptance with God by keeping the Law of Moses find themselves under its curse instead (Galatians 3:10) and law-keeping, any kind of law-keeping, actually backfires and we find ourselves cursed instead because no one will be accepted by God by working for acceptance (again, Galatians 3:10).  Seeking acceptance with God by keeping the law, does not make anyone acceptable to God (Hebrews 7:18). Acceptance with God is the work and power of the gospel. The gospel is God’s only remedy for sin. More on that next time. Stay tuned…