POSTED 12 AUGUST, 2010

One Law for All

by J.K. McKee
editor@tnnonline.net

Today’s broad Messianic movement has many admirable qualities for which it should feel most spiritually gratified.[1] The Messianic movement has been used mightily by the Lord to see many Jewish people come to saving faith in Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus), and it has also helped many evangelical Christians appreciate their Hebraic Roots and the Torah. The Messianic movement definitely stands against the common, yet errant thought in much of modern Christian theology, that the Law of Moses was exclusively for the era prior to the Messiah, and has now been nullified with His arrival.

While it is safe to say that most of the broad Messianic community believes that God’s Torah is valid instruction in a general sense, there are varied degrees of praxis and halachah to be certain. It is not difficult to find Messianic congregations which are quite close to following an Orthodox Jewish level of Torah keeping, others which shun a great deal of Jewish tradition, and then others which stand somewhere in the middle. If there is anything that all congregations or fellowships have in common, it is that there is a panoply of different interpretations and applications of commandments. The order of the Shabbat service could be very different from one assembly to another, the way kosher is kept is probably not going to be the same, and the way people dress and groom themselves will certainly not be uniform.

Because of the uniqueness of Messianic congregations, which are often mixed assemblies of Jewish and non-Jewish Believers, a significant discussion and debate is ongoing about the relevance of Moses’ Teaching to the broad Body of Messiah. While it is only natural to expect Messianic Jews to keep the seventh-day Sabbath or remember the Passover, being a definite part of their ethnic heritage, are these practices—and many others—things that non-Jewish Believers in the Messianic community should also be expected to follow? There has certainly been much talk about what is intended by the Torah’s usage of terms like “one law” or “one statute” for not only the native Israelite, but also for some kind of outsider who has joined into the assembly of Israel, appearing in passages such as: Exodus 12:48-49; Leviticus 24:22; Numbers 9:14; 15:15-16, 29-30. What does all of this mean?

Sadly, when these verses get mentioned among different Messianic teachers or leaders, rather than some reasonable discussion and constructive dialogue occurring, a great deal of accusations and misstatements are instead more likely to be made. The amount of negative emotions present, from all the various sides regarding the different One Law verses, has been quite disproportionate to the actual amount of careful dissection of these verses. There has been much written about the One Law subject matter, but most of it has unfortunately been in the form of refutations and counter responses to other teachers, with some territorialism quite easily detected.[2]

While it is difficult at times not to get engulfed in the politics of our broad Messianic faith community, we must strive as best as can to remain above them.[3] We have to act like mature Believers whose loyalty is to the Scriptures and the legitimate mission of God, and not a particular sub-movement or clique. It is most surprising to me that given the significance or importance that some have given to these different One Law passages, that there has been very little engagement with the actual verses themselves. There has been an avoidance to attempt to understand these verses for what they originally meant to Israel in the context of the Ancient Near East, their implications to the generation of the Apostles, and then how they affect us living today. Furthermore, there has not been a great deal of evaluation incorporating a reasonable range of current Biblical scholarship, including not only Jewish opinions, but also those of evangelical Christian and critical/liberal interpreters.

It is my intention in this investigation to provide an analysis for you of the different One Law verses, engaged with the Biblical text, the opinions of a spectrum of respected commentators, and how their role helps us to understand the trajectory of Jewish and non-Jewish Believers making up a “one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:15, NRSV/CJB) in Messiah Yeshua. Our job as Bible readers and interpreters is to always go to the text, so we can see the actual data, and filter out any of the distracting noise—as noise has a tendency to just get us upset and offended at each other. In order for us to have a good handle on what “one law” really means, we need to make sure that we have done our homework, and that we are no longer satisfied with a sub-standard level of examination.

J.K. McKee (B.A., University of Oklahoma; M.A., Asbury Theological Seminary) is the editor of TNN Online (www.tnnonline.net) and is a Messianic apologist. He is a 2009 recipient of the Zondervan Biblical Languages Award for Greek. He is author of numerous books, dealing with a wide range of topics that are important for today’s Messianic Believers. He has also written many articles on theological issues, and is presently focusing his attention on Messianic commentaries of various books of the Bible.

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