The Living Torah

Stepping stone 1

 

… before mountains were sunk,—
before the hills came into being,
I was brought forth in labor…

When He laid the foundations of the earth
, I was at His side as His beloved child
, and I was His delight day by day—
, playing before His face at all times,
, playing upon the face of His earth—
, and my joy lay
with the sons of Adam/humanity!
(excerpts from Proverbs 8)

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation.

He is before all things
and all things exist through Him…
(excerpts from Colossians 1)

“Bereishit”—In the beginning was the Word…
John 1:1

 

It was Mattitjahoe—better known by his Latinized name, Matthew—who incorporated the above and other texts from Jewish tradition into a spectacular opening to his “Gospel.”
If you translate his words back into Hebrew, he begins with exactly the same words with which Genesis 5:1 begins the list of firstborns: “This is the book of the origin of …”
But he then thinks backward, back in time! … book of the genesis of Yeshua Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham.
There appears to be a special purpose behind this, because when he then lists 42 generations of “firstborns,” starting with Abraham, that list does not end with Jesus but with Joseph. And Joseph is the young man who is told in a dream that he must adopt Jesus. He does not beget Him.
So all those generations in Israel ultimately do not beget the Messiah, but nevertheless belong to His “becoming”; they turn out, as it were, to be the creation of a kind of “house in time” into which the Messiah can be received. But the actual begetting of the Messiah does not lie within the potential of Israel.

In short: Matthew places the entire genesis of the people of Israel in the service of the coming of the Messiah. This is a reversal of history dating back to Abraham. So it is not Israel that gives birth to the Messiah, but the coming of the Messiah that gives birth to Israel! Seen in this light, Abraham is the first sign of his coming.

Step 2

As Matthew does, you can only write and reason in this way if you view the Messiah as a figure who, from eternity, exerts his influence in time. Then all those centuries of covenantal history since Abraham fall within his sphere of influence.
The words and events throughout the Tanakh are therefore not separate from Him; on the contrary, His voice resounds throughout the entire Torah. He is the true Firstborn, God’s bridgehead in the world.
He, Jesus, is one with the Tanakh—“Moses and the Prophets”—and yet He is more than that. He interprets the Torah like no other, for He is, in essence, its author.
It is no coincidence, then, that Matthew quotes Jesus as saying: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah and the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them”—that is, to reveal the full meaning of the Torah and the Prophets (Matt. 5:17). He lives the Torah; He is the living Torah.

The earthly Torah (the entire Bible, in principle) thus turns out to be the reflection and manifestation of the pre-existent Torah, the Word that already existed before the world was created. The passages we quoted above from Proverbs, Colossians, and the Gospel of John bear witness to this, as do so many other passages. The Torah/the Messiah was and is the beloved at God’s right hand.
This casts the Torah scrolls in a different light altogether. In essence, therefore, the voice of the living Torah—who was, is, and will be at God’s right hand—resounds within them. He is present in those Torah scrolls; they are His testimony!
This testimony still accompanies Israel today. Everything we shared in the previous four episodes is and remains true—more than ever before, even if you believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
And so it is extremely remarkable and deeply troubling that, over the centuries, Christians have believed they could prove their faith in Jesus by burning Torah scrolls and vilifying and persecuting the people of Israel. That is an attack on the signs of Jesus’ own presence. He is always present in the Torah.
Any Christian who does not realize how closely Jesus aligns with the Tanakh—that is, with what the church calls the Old Testament—must ask themselves what kind of Jesus they actually believe in.

Step 3

The Letter to the Hebrews is specifically devoted to “the Covenant” and states unequivocally that, through his coming and his life, Jesus became the guarantor of the covenant that God made with Abraham and his descendants.
A guarantor stands as surety for all the debts a debtor owes. Israel has accumulated those debts over the centuries; the Tanakh is honest about that. But their Guarantor was already on His way to redeem the covenant people from all debt and to establish the covenant anew in the world, more powerful than ever before.
This is exactly how Matthew 1 explains the name “Yeshua”: “You shall call His name Yehoshua , for He will save His people (meaning Israel, as is clear from the word in the original text) from their sins!”
And this is exactly how Jesus’ mother Miriam expresses herself, singing about her child in whom she sees God’s faithfulness fulfilled: “He has come to the aid of His servant Israel; He has remembered His mercy—as He spoke to our fathers—toward Abraham and his descendants forever!” (Luke 1:54–55). Ultimately, then, it is not the glory of Israel that shines upon the Messiah, but rather the glory of the Messiah that shines upon Israel and, from there, seeks to illuminate the whole world.

Step 4

No other covenant has ever replaced God’s covenant with Abraham.
That covenant with Abraham has, however, always been renewed and expanded. Since Acts 10, it has also—unlike ever before—extended beyond the boundaries of the people of Israel. Non-Jews, referred to in the Bible as “Gentiles,” are allowed to share in this covenant for Jesus’ sake. Paul calls such people “fellow citizens” of the people of Israel; “partakers” in all of God’s Word and all His promises. And this is how such fellow citizens experience it. They join in singing Israel’s psalms and see themselves as “incorporated into Israel.” And so, at many baptisms in the church, the hymn “He confirms His covenant with Abraham, His friend, from generation to generation” (Psalm 105) is joyfully sung, even among non-Jews.

All the more reason, then, for you as a non-Jew to delve into all those stories in the Tanakh that were so fundamental to Jesus—indeed, with which He is one and the same, and which He represents.
What does the Torah have to say to Israel and all nations?
What does the living Torah have to say to the whole world through these stories?
How do we come to understand ourselves as biblical nations?
He, the Messiah, who is the Firstborn of all creation, who is God’s bridgehead on earth, the one in whom God holds all nations... what do we hear and understand about Him in all 66 books that make up the Bible?