Followers of Jesus and the Torah including the 10 Commandments A careful discussion of how Adventists relate to the Torah,

including the 10 Commandments, is something upon which we can all agree should be very important. At the same time, some might consider it irrelevant, self-evident, or unnecessary because the issues have already been so long decided that there is nothing more to be said or written. A careful study of the Old and New Testaments, though, may reveal some surprising things we may not have considered before. There are a couple of foundational ideas which will help us get off on the right foot. There are two distinct laws referred to in Scripture. If you dont hold on to that concept, you will clearly miss what the Bible writers were trying to say. Those two laws are the Royal Law, or the Law of Liberty and Torah - which includes the 10 Commandments. Whenever you read the word Law, or the lawin the Bible, without clarification by the use modifiers like Royal or Liberty, it always refers to the whole Pentateuch - the first five books of the Bible written by Moses. It never, even a cursory look at the context of each instance will reveal, refers specifically to the 10 Commandments, but to the larger body of legal and historical information contained in the Pentateuch. One thing that is a given is that nowhere does the Bible teach that the Torah has been done away with, or ever will be - until it has fulfilled or achieved its purpose (Matthew 5:18). That is not the question. What is plain is that the New Testament authors put the Torah in its proper perspective in that it was preceded by what James refers to as the Royal Law or the Law of Liberty and it is that law to which God desires to lead us. Royal Law The law which governed our whole universe and any other universes which may exist was a simple one. Jesus refers to it in a number of places (ie Mark 12:28-33; Matthew 22:34-40) where he describes it as having only two commandments - You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these! James underscores this definition in James 2:8 where he says that when we fulfill (the requirements of) the Royal Law we will focus on loving our neighbor as our self. Then he goes on to describe the ways that will play out in the daily life of the follower of Jesus. For more than one thousand years the Jews had been focusing in a very elementary view of what it meant to honor God - not having any other gods more important than God and not creating anything to worship from wood or stone or metal, etc. Jesus returned people to the much more comprehensive view of relating to God - loving him with our entire mind and heart and soul and body. The Rich Young Ruler (Luke 18:18-30; Matthew 19:16-30, Mark 10:13-16) could contend, without contradiction by Jesus, that he had kept the Torah from the time he was a child, but his next response to Jesus showed that he didnt begin to comprehend, much less live by, the Royal law. Jesus challenged his Torah focused disciples not long before his death to focus on something new for

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them that was not explicitly stated in the Torah, with one exception in Leviticus 19:18, and that was to love each other and by doing so to prove to the world that they were his disciples. (John 13:34,35; 15:12-13) And, John, who apparently, finally got it, writes in 1 John 2:7-8 Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you; rather it is an old one you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment, which as already mentioned preceded the Torah (with one exception) - to love one another - is the same message you heard before. Yet it is also new. Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you also are living it. For the darkness is disappearing, and the true light is already shining. The law which anyone who wished to be a part of Gods Kingdom from the very beginning was expected to live by involved loving God with all of their heart and mind and soul and strength and their others as they did themselves. John repeats this so there will be no doubt of what he is saying in 2 John 1:5 where he says, I am writing to remind you, dear friends, that we should love one another. This is not a new commandment, but one we have had from the beginning. Also 1 John 3:10-11 where he says, So now we can tell who are children of God and who are children of the devil. Anyone who does not live righteously and does not love other believers does not belong to God. This is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Torah A person can search in vain through Genesis and Exodus for any reference to Torah, including the 10 Commandments, prior to the Exodus. God sent Moses to deliver a group of people who had been slaves in Egypt for more than 400 years. Almost all, apparently, had little or no knowledge of God and what it meant to serve him. So, he created a primer to teach them about himself, themselves, the Kingdom of God, sin, and salvation in what we know today as the sacrificial system; and he set out for them the barest outline of what it meant to live as a citizen of his Kingdom in the 10 Commandments. It quickly becomes plain that the Royal Law and not the 10 Commandments were what ruled heaven. The first commandment is really a restatement or summary statement of the Royals command to love God supremely. The same can be said of the 2nd. The 3rd makes absolutely no sense in the context of a perfect world if it is viewed, as is commonly done, as referring to cussing. What it in reality says is that we should not claim to be followers of God in vain unless we are committed to living like it - in other words we should not take his name in vain. This could be a legitimate extrapolation from the first commandment in the Royal Law. The 4th Commandment of what we call the Decalogue is also senseless in the context of heaven. The Sabbath did not exist until this world was created as a memorial of Creation. (Note Genesis 2:13) In fact, Mark 2:28 tells us that he created it as a gift

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for humanity after he had created them. For the Sabbath to exist in heaven, either one has to believe that the world and all that is on it was created billions of years ago and therefore could be memorialized, or it did not and therefore would not have been in any heavenly law. For heaven and the rest of the universe to keep the earths weekly Sabbath it would mean that earth was the universes clock and that everything in the universe was ruled by the spinning of a little world in a minor solar system in one of billions of galaxies in the universe1. No, the Sabbath was given as a gift to humanity at the Creation. Only when God brings the capital of the universe to earth (Revelation 21) will heaven celebrate Sabbath on the restored earth. (Isaiah 66:22) In a place where Jesus said that there is no marrying or giving in marriage (Matthew 22:30) the 5th and 7th Commandments would have been nonsensical in that context. The first instance of killing recorded in the Bible was Cains murder of Abel (although Revelation 12:11 may give us a hint that there was death associated with the original war between God and Satan in heaven.) So the 6 th Commandment would have referred to something heavens inhabitants were totally unfamiliar with. What purpose would the 8th Commandment have in a place where anyone had everything they ever needed or wanted? The same goes for the 10th Commandment. Does anyone think that God needed to spell out to the angels, etc., that they were always supposed to tell the truth as the 9th Commandment dictates?

Prior to Israels Egyptian captivity, loyal followers of God, no matter their nationality or location, lived by the Royal Law which was much more comprehensive and all encompassing and complete than the Torah ever could be. So, what was the purpose of Torah? It is clear that all of the 10 Commandments make perfect sense in a fallen world for anyone just beginning to learn about God. The same goes for the rest of Torah. It was nothing more than a shadow pointing to something greater (Colossians 2:17; Hebrews 10:1-6) - but shadows are never reality. It was a schoolteacher

This does not preclude the probability that God, on any other inhabited planets in the universe, gave them also a Sabbath or some other equivalent gift of his time for focused time on relationship. The idea here is that the rest of the inhabitants of the universe, and heaven, do not now celebrate our Sabbath on our time schedule. When you think of the different rates of the spin of various inhabitable planets so far discovered, and the varying length of time it takes for them to revolve around their suns (the measures of a year and a day respectively), whatever Sabbath they were given operates on a different schedule than ours - although it may very well be, and fact probably is if our world furnishes any precedent, on a seven-day rotation as ours is. -3-

designed by God to teach something about sin and God - until the reality (Jesus) appeared. (Galatians 3:23,24) What was written on stone and papyrus would then be written on the human heart (Hebrews 10:16; Jeremiah 31:33-34). What changed was not the content but the motivation and the means and the scope. Torah wasnt done away with. It was superseded by something much greater and comprehensive. For those with a slave mentality who know little or nothing about God, the 10 Commandments and the rest of Torah point out in the most basic way how we are in rebellion against God and explain in kindergarten terms the Plan of Salvation. But to make that the basis of a mature and maturing relationship with God is something akin to only reading Dick and Jane all the way through college. Almost every follower of Jesus I know of could agree with all that I have said until it comes to the Sabbath. Then, in order to protect the Sabbath they often revert back to the 10 Commandments. In doing so, they miss a very important point. Jesus, the Creator of the World gave humanity the gift of the Sabbath in a perfect world before sin ever raised its ugly head. He made it holy time! You could take the Old Testament after Genesis 2 out of the Bible and the Sabbath would still be important to followers of Jesus. Not only did he create it, he kept the Sabbath the whole time he was on earth; as far as we know from the Bible, the early church only worshiped on the Sabbath; and we will celebrate the weekly Sabbath in the earth made new. (Isaiah 66:22-23) Jesus sent us out into the world to make committed followers, disciples. That is our mandate - to connect people with Jesus and to encourage them to follow him. Some might object that connecting people with Jesus so that they follow him and encouraging them to surrender their life and will over to him is somehow not enough and that it would lead to some kind of moral licentiousness. Can anyone possible imagine that Jesus would lead anyone who follows him to do anything contrary to the 10 Commandments or that he would leave anything out or forget some important details or that he is really incapable of shepherding us in the right path? In essence that argument says that Jesus isnt enough and that we need some kind of human effort to supplement what he does in our lives. Or stated another way, we cannot really trust Jesus to always lead us to do what is right in his Fathers eyes. If fact, the comparison between the Pharisees, who punctiliously kept all of Torah and what Jesus taught about a life focused on following him reveals that it is only in focusing on Jesus that we have any hope of living the life God wants us to live. It is right at this point that many who love God and wish to please him take a deadly detour. By taking their eyes off of Jesus and focusing on the Law, they wander off into a place where they cannot do and be what they sincerely wish to be. Jesus and Paul and John and Peter all cannot understand how people can be content with so little when they could have so much! The reality is that Jesus demands far more of us than the 10 Commandments and the rest of Torah do. Not only does he want us not to kill - he calls us not to hate and remain angry; He not only calls

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on us not to adulterate our marriage, he challenges us not to lust; following him we not only do not covet and steal, we rejoice with others who have things we might wish we had. Rather than doing away with Torah, following Jesus supersedes and expands and extends it exponentially. Part of the problem is that we have settled for a very narrow definition of sin found in 1 John 3:4 Everyone who sins is breaking Gods law, for all sin is contrary to the law of God. But, there are a number of other definitions of sin which we often choose to ignore - ie knowing something is right and not doing it (James 4:17); all wrongdoing (1 John 5:17); anything, even good things, even absolute obedience to Torah, that is not of faith (Romans 14:23); anything that damages, deforms or destroys relationships (living contrary to the Royal Law). In reality there are only three basic sins or areas of sin described in the Bible. The Pride of thinking we are God or wanting to be a god in our own lives or the lives of others is the first category of sin found in the Bible. That was Lucifers sin in heaven and it was Adam and Eves sin in the Garden. The issue was not an apple or some other kind of fruit. The issue was wanting to be like God. (Genesis 3:5) This gives us a distorted view of reality, making it appear to us that we can handle everything (or many things or anything) without God. One consequence of our sinful nature is that we all, at one time or another, in one way or another want to, in a sense, to kill God, to dismiss him, impersonate him, pretend to know more than God, to seduce others into disobeying his commandments so that they can take control of them. A second basic area of sin, which affects our heart, our emotions, is self-love. This is a passionate attachment to the appetites and senses of the body which blanks out zeal for spiritual things and replaces it with lust for carnal satisfaction. When selflove takes over, the mind (in the pre-frontal cortex) abandons its executive function and relinquishes the reins of government to the excitement itself, leaving the soul with no government. The Self-love of making the gratification of our own materialistic and sensory desires more important than what God wants or what is best for others is evidenced in things like greed, lust, concern for oneself and indifference to others. The Bible makes it very clear that we are born with the predisposition to protect self and please and satisfy self at the others expense and that it is only God living in the surrendered life and will that can change that. The third is described by a word that appears in older translations of the Bible, vainglory, which literally means empty glory. (It is what is commonly called in the helping professions, people pleasing.) People-pleasing is forcibly or voluntarily obeying the instructions or demands of someone other than God. People-pleasing is anything that focuses attention to us and admiration for us. It makes us determined to say or do anything in order to impress other people to make them like or accept us. People-pleasing gives us a strong desire to impress other people rather than obeying God, so that theyll approve of us. It is revealed in our

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immediate attempts to make a good impression as soon as we are confronted with people. People-pleasers cant easily tolerate being shunned. The thought that something about us may not be acceptable to others can make us feel very insecure so we adjust our desire to theirs - wanting the praise of men more than the praise of God. (John 12:43) so we tend to do whatever we think people are calling for. (Ask a person who is captivated by people pleasing How are you today? and his/her first impulse is to say, I dont know, what do you think? Or I dont know, what have you heard?) People-pleasing puts us on stage, behaving as if we were professional actors, performing to win applause from them and doing anything we can to avoid having them walk out. So, we are constantly checking on the responses we are getting from the audience. It is a form of stage fright which has us constantly asking if we are performing well enough to win approval from the audiences we are striving to please. When we are captivated by people-pleasing, we become shut off from obeying and serving God. Instead of being shaped by Gods will, our desires become dictated by the desires of other people as we attempt to please them, impress them, attract their acceptance and praise and to avoid losing their approval by displeasing them. No one enslaved by people-pleasing is really serving God Every other type of sin described in the Bible grows out of one or all of them. By focusing just on the smaller picture of Torah we often miss the larger picture of what sin really is and where the battle really lies. It is only when we allow Jesus to lead us beyond the basic, kindergarten concepts of sin that we really begin to discover and experience the truth and victory of the life of a follower of Jesus! And, it is only as we allow God to point out those areas of our life where we attempt to be a god in our own life and the lives of others; where we live our lives focused on satisfying the cravings of our carnal nature; and where we find the opinion of anyone more important than God and confess and repent of them and allow God to empower us to grow beyond them that we will become everything God dreams for us to be.

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