The Torah in Its Own Words

Suppose you had only ever heard of a city through its courthouse. Every time its name came up, someone was being sentenced there, and so you pictured a gray place of judges and fines. Then one day you walk its streets and hear singing from the windows, children reciting their lessons, and families talking at the table. The courthouse is real, but it was never the whole city.

For many readers the Torah is that city. The word comes to us as “law,” and the picture it raises is a courthouse. Many Christians have learned to describe it with heavy words: a burden, a yoke, a curse, a shadow that has passed. The last three chapters told the story these 214 verses tell. Now it is time to hear how those verses describe the Torah in their own words.

What the Bible Calls the Torah

The verse numbers are the YLV’s, in Masoretic order; most English Bibles number three of them differently: Psalm 19:8 as 19:7, Psalm 40:9 as 40:8, and Malachi 3:22 as 4:4. Read down the right-hand column, and you will find that not one of those words was written to make anyone afraid. Here are four of them in full.

Psalm 19:8 The Torah of the LORD is perfect, restoring the soul (nephesh); the testimony (edut עֵדוּת ay-dooth') of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.

Psalm 119:97 How I love your Torah! All the day it is my meditation.

Psalm 119:165 Great peace have those who love your Torah, and there is no stumbling-block for them.

Isaiah 51:7 Hearken to me, you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my Torah; fear not the reproach of men, and at their revilings be not dismayed.

A burden crushes the soul, but the Torah is “restoring the soul (nephesh).” No one speaks of a burden the way the psalmist speaks here: “How I love your Torah!” “Great peace have those who love your Torah,” and Isaiah names God’s people by it: “the people in whose heart is my Torah.”

Where the Word Lives

This is where the word Torah appears in the YLV, book by book.

The book that uses the word most is not Leviticus, with 16 verses, or Deuteronomy, with 22, but Psalms, with 35 verses, 25 of them in Psalm 119. The Torah is something God’s people sang.

Yeshua even called the Psalms themselves nomos νόμος nom'-os, the Greek word for Torah. Quoting Psalm 82:6, He said, “Has it not been written in your nomos(law): ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34). On the night before the cross, quoting the Psalms again, He spoke of “the logos λόγος log'-os(word) that is written in their nomos(law)” (John 15:25).

Among the history books Nehemiah has the most, 21 verses. It is the book of the return, where the people gathered as one man to hear the Torah read, wept, and then rejoiced. The word runs through the whole story, from Abraham (Genesis 26:5) to the last command of the prophets (Malachi 3:22). The courthouse is real, but the city is full of music.

What This Book Has Done

We began with the verses used to say the law was abolished. Read in their places, each one said something smaller and more exact than the claim built on it. What came down in Ephesians 2 was a wall of dogmata, decrees of men. What was nailed to the cross was the record of our debt. Messiah is the telos τέλος tel'-os of the nomos, its goal. The nomos was laid down for the Torah-less. What ran “until John” was the age of pointing forward. Grace came upon grace, not in place of the Torah. And the work of God is a faith that obeys.

Then we followed the lines drawn between servants and sons and between flesh and Spirit, and each time we found the commandments on the near side, with the sons, with the Spirit, and with the saints.

After that we went to the place where Christians most often fail to believe the Bible as written: food, and the clean and the unclean. Food is what Scripture calls food. Not one of the verses quoted for “eat anything” tells a believer to eat what God said is not food. The two pairs, holy and common, unclean and clean, still stand, and the goal of them all is holiness: holy first, holy second, holy third.

In these last chapters we saw why. The Torah is the lamp God gave a redeemed people in a dark world, a blessing for those who walk by it, given so that they would live well forever. Its story runs through the few who obeyed, to the One who conquered sin and death by water, blood, and Spirit, along the order of the seven appointed times, to a holy city filled with a multitude no one can count.

None of this is the price of being saved. A sinner is made right with God by grace, through faith in the Messiah’s blood, as a gift and never by works. But the justified walk somewhere, and Scripture tells us where.

Not One Iota

The last command of the Old Testament is “Remember the Torah of Moses my servant.” In the first book of the New Testament, the Messiah Himself answers that last command:

Matthew 5:18 For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota ἰῶτα ee-o'-tah(smallest Greek letter) or one keraia κεραία ker-ah'-yah(stroke of a letter) will pass away from the nomos(law) until all things are accomplished.

The iota is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, and the keraia is the little stroke that tells one letter from another. Yeshua says that not even these will pass from the nomos “until heaven and earth pass away.”

So look up. The heavens are still there, and the ground is still under your feet. The Torah that was given as blessing and curse, in a world of light and darkness, is still the light God’s people walk by. It will remain so until the day when there is no more night, and the holy people He chose enter the holy city and live in the eternal blessedness for which the Torah was given.

The Next Book

One thing remains, and it lies at the center of the faith itself. When some asked Yeshua for a sign, He said that none would be given “except the sign of Jonah the prophet. For just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights” (Matthew 12:39-40).

Book 4, The Only Sign, opens that sign: the Passover and its Lamb, the cross, the resurrection, and the name of Yeshua. This book has followed the Torah He kept and taught. The next follows the Passover He fulfilled, read again from the text.

Until then, we close where the Bible’s book of songs begins, with a man who is blessed because he delights in the Torah:

Psalm 1:2 But his delight is in the Torah of the LORD, and in his Torah he meditates day and night.