Gentiles and Torah

I've been pondering the Messianic Jewish/Bilateral Ecclesiology (MJ/BE) position on the portions of Torah to which Gentile believers in Yeshua are believed to be obligated. Over the past month or so, I've been publicly airing my issues and concerns about Gentiles (well, me anyway) as related to a Hebraic worship of the Messiah. I understand that most non-Jews who have come to faith in Jesus express their worship in the various denominations of the Christian church, but there is a population of us who seem called out to a different expression; one based on a position not entirely filtered through the lens of 20 centuries of post-Biblical Gentile theology and tradition, which often includes supersessionism.

While I now believe it is impossible, or at least extremely unlikely, that we can ever re-create the first century church in the modern era, we can re-evaluate our understanding of the Bible and attempt to glean more of the intent of the original authors relative to their context as Jews with a Jewish worldview of God, faith, and how Gentiles fit into it all as a result of Yeshua's command to make us all disciples (Matthew 28:19-20).

To the best of my understanding, the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC) view of an authentic Jewish worship of Messiah Yeshua is largely based on Orthodox Jewish worship and theology. Without performing a detailed examination of how they see their foundation, I will assume that, except for having faith in Yeshua as the Jewish Messiah, all the congregations affiliated with the UMJC understand the Torah, Oral Law, and all other aspects of Jewish life in Messiah as identical to the Orthodox perspective. Remember, this is an assumption, since I cannot know how every UMJC congregation is organized. I'm also going to assume that UMJC affiliated synagogues agree with and are modeled on the propositions outlined in Mark Kinzer's book Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People.

With those assumptions in place, let's take a look at what I've been told is the length, depth, and breadth of the Torah to which all believing Gentiles are obligated. You'll find it in Acts 15:23-29:

With them they sent the following letter: The apostles and elders, your brothers, To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia: Greetings. We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul - men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.

According to MJ/BE, that's it. That's the entire portion of written Torah Gentiles must obey. Seems kind of incomplete, doesn't it? Actually, there's more. From the MJ/BE perspective, at least from what I've been told within the various comments in the Messianic blogosphere, Gentiles are obligated to a larger Torah, but it's the one written on our hearts.

All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) -Romans 2:12-15

This is sort of like saying "let your conscience be your guide". I don't know if Paul intended to apply that comment to just Gentiles who have come to faith in Yeshua or to all Gentiles everywhere (pagans, atheists, and so on), but a quick review of human history seems to show that people aren't beings of great conscience or morality. True, you could argue that the historical view simply indicates there is sin in the world, but whatever God has written on our hearts doesn't seem to be amazingly evident.

It also matters, as I just said, if Paul is applying that "writing on the heart" to just Gentile Yeshua-believers or to all humanity. If the latter, then the only thing that functionally changes for a Gentile when he becomes a believer is what is written in the Acts 15 letter and everyone, Yeshua-believer or not, will be ultimately judged by the writing on our hearts. If the former, then, in addition to the Torah presented in the Acts 15 letter, when we Gentiles receive the Holy Spirit, God's Torah is, at that moment, written on our hearts and we gain a new understanding of our lives in Him and become a "new person".

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! -2 Corinthians 5:17

MJ/BE says that Gentile believers don't need to be obligated to the written Torah because, as Paul says in Romans 2, Gentiles are obligated to and will be judged by the Torah that is written on our hearts. We don't need the physical, written, Torah or the Oral Law, or any of the other Jewish understandings of the will of God given to the Children of Israel at Sinai or developed over the subsequent thousands of years by the Jewish sages. Those understandings, according to MJ/BE, represent the unique obligations the Jewish people have to the Torah and to God and that Jews who do not fulfill their obligations are subject to consequences that Gentiles will never have to face.

The big, fat, furry question sitting in the middle of the room with us is, if the majority of the Torah that Gentiles are obligated to is written on our hearts, just exactly what is written there?

Let's get back to some of the assumptions I previously made about MJ/BE relative to Orthodox Judaism. In Judaism (the non-Messianic kind), Gentiles do not have to become Jews through conversion in order to worship God or to merit a place in the world to come (a Christian would say "go to heaven"). According to Jewish tradition, Noah, from whom all humanity issues forth, was given seven laws by God. These are the laws that all of humanity is obligated to obey. You've probably heard of them before but I'll list them here again:

1. not to commit idolatry
2. not to commit blasphemy
3. not to commit murder
4. not to have forbidden sexual relations
5. not to commit theft
6. not to eat flesh cut from a living animal
7. to establish courts of justice to punish violators of the other six laws

Found at mechon-mamre.org.

The following quote from the same site renders a particular detail that you may not have gotten before, even if you have been aware of the Noahide Laws:

These commandments may seem fairly simple and straightforward, and most of them are recognized by most of the world as sound moral principles. But according to the Torah only those Gentiles who observe these laws because God commanded them in His Torah will enjoy life in the World to Come (emphasis mine): If they observe them just because they seem reasonable or because they think that God commanded them in some way other than in the Torah, they might as well not obey them so far as a part in the World to Come is concerned.

If we assume that the MJ/BE viewpoint of Judaism and of Gentiles must be consistent with larger Judaism (and Dr. Kinzer makes this point abundantly clear in his aforementioned book), then MJ/BE must believe that A. the Noahide Laws apply to all Gentiles, whether they have faith in Yeshua or not, and B. that Gentile compliance to the requirements of the Noahide Law must be based on a reading of and an understanding of those laws as presented in the Torah! Wow!

From an Orthodox point of view, that means Gentiles are responsible for reading and studying those portions of the Torah that directly apply to them. The whole "written on our hearts" part isn't sufficient from an Orthodox point of view and I am not sure an Orthodox Jewish sage would even think of Gentile compliance to the Noahide laws in those terms. If you "blend" the Orthodox principles with the MJ/BE understanding, you could reasonably believe that the Noahide Laws are both written on our hearts (since they are practiced in one way or another in most human societies) and written in the Torah for human benefit.

Let's apply that back to the Acts 15 letter. If, as traditional Judaism believes, Gentiles must learn, understand, and accept those portions of the Torah that apply to them in order to operationalize those laws in our lives, then it seems we can reasonably expand that principle to the portions of Torah outlined in the Acts 15 letter. Let's take a simple example. Murder.

Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man. -Genesis 9:6

According to traditional Jewish understanding, this is the commandment given to all mankind to not murder, as opposed to the commandment not to murder listed in Exodus 20 which is specifically aimed at the Jewish nation. Seems simple enough. Genesis 9 tells all mankind not to murder and Exodus 20 gives the commandment specifically to the Children of Israel. Now let's consider something not quite as obvious.

The Talmud contains many references to righteous gentiles whose behaviour is held up as a model for all people. The example of Dama ben Netina is known to all Jewish children (Kidushin 31a): ‘They asked R. Eliezer how far one should go in honoring parents. He said to them: Go and see how one idol worshipper in Ashdod honored his father, and Dama ben Netina was his name. The sages wished to purchase gems from him for the Ephod [for a tremendous profit] … but the key [to the box containing the gems] was under his father’s pillow [while his father was sleeping] and he did not trouble his father [by waking him even though he gave up a tremendous profit].’ Dama was rewarded for his virtue the next year when a red heifer [required for the Temple service] was born in his flock. When he sold it to the sages he told them that he knew that they would pay any price he asked for it, but he asked only for the amount he had not earned the previous year when he refrained from waking his father.

Wait a minute. I didn't see anything in the Seven Noahide Laws or the Jerusalem letter about honoring parents, yet this portion of the Talmud (I collected a list of all the references to Gentiles in the Talmud on my congregation's blog some time ago) seems to indicate quite strongly that even an idol worshipper in Ashdod could be held up as an example of how far to go in honoring one's parents. But where do we get that from?

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. -Exodus 20:12

True, this is one of the commandments Moses brought down from Sinai to the Children of Israel and it specifically mentions "living long in the land that Hashem is giving you" (the Children of Israel). On the one hand, you can say the commandment must only apply to the Children of Israel since, as far as I know, Gentiles aren't inheritors of one square inch of the physical Land of Israel. On the other hand, if the Talmud considers it a righteous deed by a Gentile, even an idol worshipper, to honor his or her parents, and Gentiles are allowed, and in fact required, to study those parts of the Torah that apply to them, how much of a stretch do I have to make to be able to study Exodus 20:12 as it applies to me? No, I don't mean the "Land" part, but the "honoring my parents" part. Sure, it's written on my heart. I'll agree to that much, but as Paul said:

What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet." -Romans 7:7

While we may have an inate sense of right and wrong based on a spiritual process we commonly call a "conscience", reading the specifics of that conscience within us is a little like trying to read the pages of a book that's at the bottom of a swimming pool when you're treading water six feet above. How many people who were atheists became convicted of their sins, not only through the process of accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior and receiving the Holy Spirit, but specifically by reading the portions of the Bible that talk about adultry, coveting, and theft? If you ask human beings to try and determine what the will of God is for our lives almost completely from a spiritual or internal sense, are we always going to get it right? Maybe Spider-Man has a sense that tells him when danger is near, but mere mortals often confuse spiritual communication with their various emotional states. Consider these words:

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. -1 John 4:1-3

As soon as it was night, the brothers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. Many of the Jews believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. -Acts 17:10-12

According to John, you test the spirits by what they have to say about the Messiah. If the spirits acknowledge that Messiah Yeshua came from God in the flesh, that spirit is from God. However, the Bereans (apparently including "prominent Greek women and many Greek men") tested Paul by checking everything he said against the scriptures to make sure he was "preaching" consistently with the Word of God. Can we not verify the Torah written on our hearts by checking it out in the scriptures?

I was going to put all of my research into one blog post and present it here, but I've been told that I can get really long-winded and wordy and it's tough for people to find the time to read the blogging equivalent of War and Peace. I do have significant material to present in relation to Gentiles being allowed and required to study the parts of Torah that apply to us, even in the Messianic age, and we still haven't settled on exactly what parts of Torah apply to Gentiles. We've seen what the Jerusalem Council had to say on the matter and we've seen how traditional Judaism applies the Noahide Laws as a requirement for Gentiles. We have further seen that, in the Talmud, honoring one's parents is considered righteous for Gentiles as well as for Jews.

I believe there's much more to learn and understand about Gentiles, the Torah, and the Messiah which I'll address in my next blog post.

Blessings.