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The Legalism of Torah
By John Gavazzoni
I have long been aware of the fact that Torah has the sense of instruction, but its legal characteristic is found in the fact that it was binding upon the nation, and that, involving severe penalties for non-compliance. Paul understood that and chose a Greek word for law to convey that inherent legality. Torah was not, so to speak, a merely benign compendium of helpful instructions for living. It had the force of law, i.e., the factor of demanded obedience.
Few exegetes take seriously enough Paul's evaluation of its negative effects upon the human psyche. Of particular note, his statement that, "the law is the power of sin," gives us a very particular entrance into his thought. Also, in his understanding, "the law was not meant for a righteous man..." It was, to his thinking, a dispensation of death, meant to "make sin exceedingly sinful." It effectively reinforced, and brought to the surface sin in the flesh.
Yes, Jesus did say that He did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it, and that He did. Every aspect of the Torah, down to its most minute detail, was a shadow of things to come, with Jesus Christ being the substance. As a life-principle, it is contradistinctive to "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," for it is an externally imposed standard of living, and thus it is alien to true humanness. We are to live from the inside out by Christ, who is our life
Torah was an interjected accommodation/concession to man's already existential condition of having had his conscience infected by eating of the knowledge of good and evil. God begins with people where they're at in order to bring them to where they need to be, so we must keep in mind that He was dealing with a people (Israel) that, even in the process of their deliverance, still suffered from a slave mentality. They required, at that stage, an imposition of structured living. Their identity as a people had been shattered by their enslavement in Egypt. The Torah gave them that structured identity.
In contrast to the nations around them, that which bound them together as a nation, at least as a shadow of reality, came directly from God Himself. Getting back to Paul, at the heart of his theology is how he references God's dealings with Abraham as archetypical of what is normative to God's relationship with man... no imposition of moral/ethical instruction, just the promise of blessing.
I am very convinced that a living relationship with God, a relationship of communing intimacy requires knowing God as our Father. Torah, along with the prophets, dimly points to that relationship, but only in Christ does it come into full light. From Romans, "for when they knew God, they worshipped Him not as God, but became vain in their imagination..." They worshipped Him not, because God can only be truly worshipped as our Father. Without that, the human conscience veers off religiously down a path of vain imagination.
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