Brianna Tittel 3/19/26 Brianna Tittel 3/19/26

The Light of Torah

Most Christians have never been told that the word Torah doesn't mean "law." It means instruction. Direction. The kind of teaching a father gives a child he loves — not to burden them, but to form them.

The words below belong to my friend Sergio DeSoto—a Jewish believer, and author and editor of SergioDesoto.com, an incredible blog dedicated to serious conversations about faith. Sergio carries a deep love for the Torah and a thoughtful, lived perspective on how it shapes his life as a follower of Yeshua. I asked him to speak directly to Christians about a question that has shaped so much of my own work: What is the Christian relationship to the Torah?

I have learned a great deal from Sergio, and I’m honored to share his words here. Read them with an open heart—and a willingness to see what you may have missed.

Most Christians have never been told that the word Torah doesn't mean "law."

It means instruction. Direction. The kind of teaching a father gives a child he loves — not to burden them, but to form them. When God gave Israel His Torah at Sinai, He wasn't handing down a penal code. He was giving a rescued people the shape of life with Him. Holiness. Justice. Worship. Covenant. The categories that hold everything else together.

But somewhere along the way, the church began treating Torah as the thing Jesus came to fix.

That is a serious mistake. And it has cost the church more than most believers realize.

What Yeshua Was Actually Confronting

Read the Gospels again — slowly, without the filter of what you were taught He was doing — and something becomes obvious. Yeshua never once rebuked obedience to God's commandments. Not once.

He rebuked hypocrisy. He confronted religious theater — leaders who loved the appearance of holiness but neglected justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He went after systems that crushed ordinary people under the weight of man-made traditions while the leaders who built those systems exempted themselves.

When He clashed with the religious establishment, He did not say, "Stop obeying the Father." He said something far more dangerous:

You have abandoned the commandment of God and are holding to human tradition (Mark 7:8, paraphrased).

Catch that. The problem was not that people were following God's instruction. The problem was that religious leaders had buried God's instruction under layers of their own authority — and then called the whole pile sacred.

Yeshua did not come to liberate people from God's word. He came to expose those who had made God's word unrecognizable.

The Uncomfortable Paradox

Here is where it gets uncomfortable for a lot of sincere believers.

What many Christians now dismiss as outdated or irrelevant — the Torah, the commandments, the covenant framework of the Hebrew Scriptures — is exactly what Yeshua upheld, lived inside, and taught from. He kept Shabbat. He observed the feasts. He taught from Moses and the Prophets. He quoted Deuteronomy to the adversary in the wilderness.

He did not treat Torah as a rough draft that needed correcting. He treated it as His Father's voice — and He walked in it perfectly.

So when the church says Torah is finished, they are not following Yeshua's example. They are contradicting it. Not out of malice, usually. Out of inheritance. Generations of teaching have framed Torah as the failed first attempt and grace as the real answer, as though God needed two tries to get it right.

But that framing does not come from Scripture. It comes from centuries of theology that slowly — and sometimes deliberately — severed Jesus from His Jewish world.

My Own Turning Point

I used to think the same way.

When I heard the word "law," my mind went straight to bondage. Old covenant. Something heavy that Jesus lifted. I had inherited an entire story where Torah was the problem and the cross was the solution to Torah. Grace meant freedom from God's instructions, and obedience sounded suspiciously like earning something you were supposed to receive for free.

Then I stopped reading the Bible as a religion book and started reading it as covenant history. Not a collection of spiritual principles organized by topic. Not a devotional resource. A record of God binding Himself to a people, speaking to them in real time, forming them through instruction, warning them through prophets, and relentlessly holding the door open for return.

That single shift changed everything. I stopped asking, "What does my tradition say this means?" and started asking, "What did this mean to the people who first received it?" And the moment I asked that question honestly, the categories I had inherited started collapsing.

Torah was not bondage. It was the marriage covenant between God and His people. The "New Covenant" in Jeremiah 31 was not a replacement — it was a promise to write the same Torah on their hearts. Paul was not arguing against obedience — he was arguing against the idea that Gentiles had to become ethnically Jewish to enter the covenant. The entire story was one story, and I had been reading it as two.

The lights didn't go off. They came on.

What Gets Lost

When Yeshua is disconnected from Torah, the church doesn't just lose a theological category. It loses the ability to understand its own Scriptures.

"Kingdom of God" loses its covenant texture — it becomes a vague spiritual destination instead of the reign of Israel's promised King. "Lamb of God" becomes a metaphor instead of the fulfillment of a sacrificial system that God Himself designed. "Repentance" gets reduced to feeling sorry instead of what the Hebrew concept actually means: return — covenantal turning back to the God you walked away from.

And "grace" — the word Christians love most — gets pitted against obedience, as though God's kindness and God's instruction are enemies. That split is completely foreign to the biblical world. Torah is grace. It was the gift of a faithful God to a people He had already rescued. He didn't give them instructions to earn His love. He gave them instructions because He loved them. Deuteronomy 6 is not a contract. It is a father telling His children how to stay close.

Even the New Testament becomes harder to read honestly. Paul gets cast as anti-Torah — the apostle who finally set people free from all those rules. But Paul kept the feasts. Paul took a Nazirite vow in Acts 21. Paul told Timothy that all Scripture — which at that point meant the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible — is God-breathed and useful for instruction. He was not dismantling Torah. He was arguing that Gentiles enter the covenant through Messiah, not through ethnic conversion. That is a radically different claim than "Torah is over."

When you strip all of that away, you don't get a cleaner gospel. You get a Christ who floats above His own story — still beloved, still quoted, but severed from the world that gave His words their meaning.

A Word About What This Feels Like

I need to say this plainly, because it rarely gets said in Christian spaces.

Torah was not a burden inflicted on Israel. It was a gift entrusted to them. When Christians speak of it as bondage, as failure, as something expired — it lands hard on those of us for whom this is not abstract theology. It is our story. Our covenant. The revelation God entrusted to our fathers.

It can feel like the church wants the Jewish Messiah but not the Jewish story that gave Him context. It can sound — even when no one intends it — like contempt dressed in theological language.

I am not saying this to guilt anyone. I am saying it because if the body of Messiah is going to mature, it has to reckon with this. You cannot claim to honor the root while dismissing what the root produced. Romans 11 is not a footnote. It is a warning: do not be arrogant toward the branches. The Gentile church was grafted into Israel's olive tree — not planted in its own garden.

Read Again — But Read Honestly

I am not asking anyone to become Jewish. I am not asking anyone to abandon their church or torch their theology overnight.

I am asking something simpler and harder: read again.

Read the Bible as one story — not two Testaments in tension, but one covenant unfolding. Read Torah not as the thing Jesus replaced, but as the foundation He built on. Read the apostles not as founders of a new religion, but as Jewish witnesses to the fulfillment of promises that were Jewish from the beginning. Stop assuming Torah is the villain. Stop calling legalism what God called instruction. Let the text challenge the system you inherited, and see whether the roots have something to say that your tradition trained you not to hear.

Because if the Torah was good enough for Yeshua to live by, to teach from, and to die fulfilling — then maybe the question is not why some of us take it seriously. Maybe the question is why so many were taught not to.

The Torah was never the darkness. In many ways, it is the lamp most Christians were taught not to look at.

When you read Scripture as covenant history instead of inherited religion, the lights do not go off.

They come on.

Selah.

When you hear the word "Torah," what is your first instinct — and who taught you to react that way? If Yeshua lived inside Torah and never spoke against it, what does it mean that His church treats it as obsolete? What would change in your faith if you stopped reading the Bible as two books and started reading it as one?

Shalom v'shalvah. Your brother in the Way,

Sergio

I’m grateful for voices like Sergio’s in this conversation. If his words have resonated with you as deeply as they have with me, you explore more of his work and support what he’s building here: www.sergiodesoto.com.

Brianna Tittel 1/22/26 Brianna Tittel 1/22/26

Letter to the Gentile Church

Dear friends,

I write to you as a Jewish follower of Jesus, our Jewish Messiah, and as a teaching pastor who has spent years inside the modern American church. I love the Church. I have given my life to her. And because I love her, I need to speak plainly.

The words below belong to my friend Matt Davis, a Jewish believer and the co-founder of The Jewish Road. Matt has dedicated many years to helping others better understand Israel, the Jewish people, and the Jewish roots of our shared faith—work that has positioned him as a trusted and leading voice on these questions. I asked him to write a letter to the Christian church, sharing what was on his heart in this moment. It is a privilege to publish his letter here, and I invite you to read it prayerfully and with an open heart.

Dear friends,

We are living in biblical times again. Not as metaphor. Not as hype. In the same sense the prophets, apostles, and early believers lived with the awareness that God was actively moving history toward His promises. The pages of Scripture are no longer distant. They are pressing in.

Here is what I see.

The Church loves the Israel of the Bible. We teach the stories. We preach the promises. We quote the prophets. We sing the psalms.

But when it comes to the Israel of today—the Jewish people who are still here, still scattered, still returning, and still contested—things get uncomfortable. The storyline that once felt clear now feels debated. Redefined. Complicated. Safer to keep at arm’s length.

Somewhere along the way, the solid line between Scripture and history became dashed. Then dotted. Then faint. And for many, it has all but disappeared. But God has not broken the line.

From the inside, covenant is not an idea. It is not a theological category. It is identity. It is memory carried in the body. It is promise passed down through generations that have known exile, survival, hatred, and hope all at once. When the Bible speaks about Israel, it is not speaking about a concept. It is speaking about a people God refuses to forget.

This is why Paul’s words in Romans 9 are not academic to me. His anguish is familiar. “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.” That tension, love for his people, faith in Messiah, grief over blindness, hope for restoration, never goes away. It lives in me, too.

And I will tell you something that may be hard to hear.

It is painful to watch others define or redefine Israel while standing at a distance from the people themselves.

It is painful when Jewish identity is flattened into symbols, headlines, or arguments.

It is painful when the people of the Book are discussed endlessly but rarely listened to.

And yet, I remain hopeful. Because I also see Gentile believers who genuinely want to understand. Who sense that something matters here, even if they cannot yet articulate it. Who feel the weight of Scripture and refuse to dismiss what God has said, simply because it no longer fits neatly into modern categories.

So how do you love Israel rightly, from afar?

You start by refusing shortcuts.
You let Scripture speak before social media does.
You resist the urge to rush to conclusions without first sitting with the story.
You remember that God’s faithfulness to Israel is not a side issue. It is evidence that He keeps His word.

And you make room for Jewish believers like me, who walk between worlds.

I live in that tension every day. I know the language of the Church. I know her systems, her strengths, and her blind spots. I also know what it is to carry Jewish identity in a Western world that does not quite know what to do with it. I stand in Messiah, yet I remain Jewish. Those things are not opposed. They never were.

What gives me hope is this: the same Messiah who tore down the dividing wall is still doing that work. Not by erasing difference, but by redeeming it. Unity does not require sameness. It requires truth, humility, and faithfulness.

As the end draws nearer, clarity will matter more than comfort. The Church will need to remember her roots, not out of nostalgia, but out of obedience. The God who keeps covenant with Israel is the same God who grafted the nations in. If He can forget Israel, He can forget anyone.

But He will not. He never has.

My prayer is not that you would take a side, but that you would take God at His word. That you would hold fast to the storyline even when it feels costly. That you would love both the Jewish people and the Gentile Church enough to seek truth instead of ease.

The line is still there. God is still writing the story. And we are living in the middle of it.

With respect, urgency, and hope,

Matt

If Matt’s words resonated with you as they have with me, you can continue listening and learning through the The Jewish Road’s blog or latest podcast episode, and learn more about supporting their important work here.