Spirit and Torah Together

This claim is spoken with real feeling, often by people who love the Spirit-filled life and want others to share it:

“The New Testament is about how to be born again and live as a person of the Spirit. If you send a person of the Spirit back to the Torah that was given to people of the flesh, the image of Messiah grows faint.”

The first sentence is true. The New Testament is full of new birth and life in the Spirit, and we would not take one word of that away. The second sentence claims that the Torah belongs to the flesh. That is the part to be checked, and Paul answers it in a single line.

The Torah Is Spiritual

Romans 7:14 For we know that the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) is spiritual, but I am sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh)ly, sold under sin.

The word for spiritual is pneumatikos πνευματικός pnyoo-mat-ik-os', of the Spirit, and Paul sets it directly against its opposite: “but I am sarx(flesh)ly.” In this sentence the fleshly one is not the Torah but the man.

The claim says the Torah was given to people of the flesh. Paul says the Torah is spiritual and the trouble lies in the flesh. These are not two ways of saying the same thing; they are opposites.

Two verses earlier Paul had already written, “So then, the nomos(law) is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12). Holy, righteous, good, and spiritual are his words for it, and nowhere in his letters does Paul call the Torah fleshly.

The Score and the Hands

Think of a piece of music written by a master. A beginner sits down to play it with stiff, clumsy fingers, and every bar comes out wrong. No one would blame the music, which is beautiful. The trouble is in the hands.

Now suppose a great teacher takes those hands and trains them slowly. Months later the same student plays the same score, and it sounds the way it was meant to sound. The teacher did not replace the music with something easier. He changed the player.

That is the picture Paul gives in Romans 8. First he names where the resistance comes from:

Romans 8:7 Because the phronema φρόνημα fron'-ay-mah(mindset) of the sarx(flesh) is hostility toward God, for it does not submit to the nomos(law) of God — indeed it cannot —

It is not the Spirit that refuses to submit to the Torah, but the flesh. The mindset that pushes away the law of God is the fleshly mindset.

Fulfilled in Those Who Walk by the Spirit

A few verses earlier Paul tells us what the Spirit does with the Torah:

Romans 8:4 so that the dikaioma δικαίωμα dik-ah'-yo-mah(ordinance) of the nomos(law) might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the sarx(flesh) but according to the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit).

A dikaioma (δικαίωμα) is a righteous requirement actually carried out, an ordinance done. And Paul says where it is fulfilled: “in us who do not walk according to the sarx(flesh) but according to the pneuma(spirit).”

The person of the Spirit, then, is not someone who has left the Torah behind. That person is the one in whom the Torah is at last carried out. The hands have been trained, and the music is being played.

That turns the claim around. A person of the Spirit does not go back to the Torah, as though returning to something beneath him. The one who walks in the Torah is the person of the Spirit, and the one who cannot submit to it is the person of the flesh.

The Image of His Son

The claim ends with the image of Messiah, and that is right to care about, because it is God’s own goal for us:

Romans 8:29 Because those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He might be the firstborn among many brothers.

“To be conformed to the image of His Son” is where everything is heading. God is shaping His people into the likeness of the Son.

What, then, does the Son look like? He told us Himself on the night before the cross: “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love); just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His agape(love)” (John 15:10). The Son kept His Father’s commandments, and that is part of His image. Conformed to that image, we resemble the One who kept the commandments and who calls us to keep His in the same way.

Keeping the commandments, therefore, does not make the image of Messiah grow faint. It is one of the lines of His face. The faint portrait is the one that leaves out His obedience to the Father.

Where the Line Really Falls

The claim draws a line with the Spirit on one side and the Torah on the other. Paul draws a different line. On one side stands the flesh, which is hostile to God and cannot submit to His law. On the other stands the Spirit, who fulfills the righteous requirement of the law in those who walk by Him. The Torah is not across the line from the Spirit. It stands with Him, because it is spiritual.

The life of the Spirit is everything the claim says it is: new birth, new life, and a living relationship with God. What it is not is a life in which the commandments have been left behind as fleshly things.

The next claim brings its own picture, a student admitted to university without an exam, and it is worth asking what that student does on his first day of class.