What is Torah?
[Psa 1:1-2 NKJV] 1 Blessed [is] the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful; 2 But his delight [is] in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night.
The church has fractured into countless denominations and drifts ever further from the high calling and standard defined in God’s Word. Disciples all over the world recognize these problems, but so far, no one has been able to fix them. However, the solution has always been in our Bibles. In fact, it’s right at the beginning. It’s the Torah.
The Torah—the first five books of the Bible—is almost never the main event at Bible studies or in sermon series. While everyone who was raised as a Christian is familiar with childhood stories drawn from the Genesis and Exodus narratives, God’s standard of holiness as defined by the Torah’s numerous laws and statutes is discussed rarely if at all. Some churches—even big, influential ones—actively discourage study of the Torah.
However, the Torah comes first in our Bibles for a reason. It’s foundational. Without the Torah, the rest of the Bible is impossible to understand.
The New Testament tells us that God sent Yahawashi (Jesus-Yeshua), the Messiah (Christ-Hamashayachaa), to give his life for our sins. But which god? What is sin? What’s a messiah? This precious message of redemption raises more questions than it answers.
The Torah answers these foundational questions because the Torah is the foundational text of our faith. It tells us where the universe came from. It tells us why the human condition is full of suffering. It tells us who made everything—the God of Israel—and it tells us about the way of life he designed us to live. It defines sin and righteousness. All these critical concepts are introduced in the Torah, and without the Torah, they lack definition.
The Torah also contains a perpetual covenant between God and Israel. It tells the story of the exile and redemption of the Israelites (Deuteronomy 32:1–43), a story that culminates in the redemption of the entire world (Romans 11:15). It identifies the Israelites as the eventual agent of that final redemption, clarifying the respective roles of Jew and Gentile in God’s salvation economy.
The rest of the Bible looks back on the Torah as its foundation. The authorities we look to in the New Testament—Yahawashi (Jesus-Yeshua) and the apostles—based their entire lives on the Torah. It was their Bible.
Jesus said:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law [that is, the Torah] or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17–18)
Paul wrote:
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16–17)
The New Testament hadn’t been written yet when Paul wrote 2 Timothy. He was talking about the Old Testament, and God’s “teaching” is at its clearest and most direct in the Torah.
That same Paul who wrote so prolifically on grace also wrote that “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12)—an unambiguous endorsement. Paul based his entire life on the Torah, even offering animal sacrifices at the Temple (Acts 21:20–26). He never even transgressed his Israelite customs (Acts 28:17).
The church has done a great work by bringing Yahawashi's (Jesus-Yeshua) message to “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9), but this message is built on the Torah—the Torah is its foundation. Only by building our faith on this foundation, only through planting our roots into the Israelite context of the Scriptures can we really understand what Yahawashi (Jesus-Yeshua) came to accomplish and what our role is—whether we are an Israelite or Gentile—in bringing the mission Yahawashi (Jesus-Yeshua) gave us to fruition.