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.
Copyright © Sergio DeSoto. All rights reserved. You are welcome to share this essay freely with proper attribution. Do not reproduce, alter, or monetize without written permission.
On the Hard Parts
Small groups sometimes skip the hard parts of Scripture, but they’re where God forms us. Learn why we avoid them—and how reading the whole Bible, together, changes everything.
Our small group is about to finish the final book of the Torah: Deuteronomy. Two years, five biblical books, countless Sunday afternoons gathered around coffee and Bibles spread across the living room. The hum is familiar now—pens click, pages turns, sometimes a late arrival slips in with an apology. Someone opens in prayer, and we settle into another conversation about faith, obedience, and what it means to love God with all our heart.
It’s been good. Stretching. Holy, even. That’s what the hard parts of the Bible do.
In many years of leading groups now, I’ve noticed how rare it is to actually spend long periods of time in places like this—in the thick of laws, genealogies, and strange stories that don’t resolve neatly. Most of us like to drift into the same comfortable corners of Scripture. No one says, “Let’s skip Habakkuk.” But we do.
We skim the tricky stuff; treat the prophets like awkward relatives at a reunion—best acknowledged from a distance.
And when we do, we miss something sacred.
Why We Avoid the Hard Parts
We avoid the hard parts of Scripture for many reasons.
Emotional Avoidance—Hard passages tend to stir up things we’d rather not face. They challenge our tidy categories of “good God, good life.” Sometimes, we’re not avoiding the text—we’re avoiding the emotions it awakens (or fails to awaken). Many of us have come to the Bible expecting it to be a self-help manual and for God to play the role of our therapist. We struggle with the passages that either don’t appear to do those things or do them too well. We like God’s mercy but struggle with his judgment. So when Scripture steps outside the lines of our expectations, it’s hard to know how to respond. “This is in the Bible?” we realize, embarrassed.
Cultural Conditioning—We live in a world that prizes positivity, productivity, and relevance. Within evangelical culture especially, spiritual growth is often measured by how encouraged we feel after an encounter with the Bible—not by how challenged we are. When a passage doesn’t yield a quick “life application,” we move on. We expect Scripture to inspire us, not to unsettle us. We prefer a verse that fits into an Instagram square to a story that forces us to rethink our own worldview. The hard parts require endurance—slow reading and learning to sit in tension without resolution, sometimes for a very long time. Most of us have never been trained for that kind of spiritual stamina. And sometimes, we’re simply too exhausted. After a long week, we crave encouragement, not confrontation.
Fear of Getting It Wrong—Many believers fear they’re not equipped to interpret difficult texts. We’re embarrassed by that. The Bible can feel inaccessible. It’s easy to feel intimidated by how little we think we understand. So we don’t even try. Especially in small groups, we also fear those passages might stir up disagreement or silence. So leaders often default to the verses that make everyone nod. But those fears are actually an advantage. We can bring dumb questions, admit our disbelief, and step forward into conversations with the hearts and minds we have, not the ones we’re suppose to have. Its in those moments where the light bulbs flicker on and shine brightest.
If we’re honest, we avoid the hard parts because they’re disorienting. It’s not that they’re impossible to understand—it’s that they’re unfamiliar. We avoid them for reasons that sound reasonable enough, but when we finally engage them, we find ourselves pulled into a story that isn’t centered on us. To truly understand it, we have to give more of ourselves than we often want to. Books like Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Romans confront us with truths that stretch far beyond our culture and lifetime.
But avoidance comes with a cost.
The Cost of Avoidance
When we skip the hard parts of Scripture, we end up with a God made in our own image.
The Bible was never meant to be read in fragments—ten minutes over coffee, a verse for the day, a quote for encouragement. It wasn’t written in a vacuum or designed to fit neatly into our study guides, devotionals, or theology handbooks. Yet that’s often how we approach it. The hard parts resist those models.
And so, in avoiding them, we lose our grip on the story’s sweep. Ironically, the very truths we claim to cherish are found most clearly in the places we neglect. The key to unlocking the story of Scripture is not in the Gospels or Psalms—it’s in the unopened books, waiting to be found by those willing to linger there.
Our avoidance of these texts has bred spiritual shallowness, biblical illiteracy, and costly forgetfulness. It’s possible to attend a Bible study faithfully for years, to memorize verses and fill in workbook blanks, yet never find the thread that connects the garden to the eternal throne. Worse still, it’s possible to do all this and never realize the part God has written for you within that story.
In skipping the hard parts, I fear we’ve so often forfeited what it means to become true disciples of Jesus.
Because the hard parts are not there to confuse us. They’re there to reveal God. Every law, lament, and obscure oracle is a window into the heart of a God who refuses to abandon his plan. He invites us into his story—one that is far bigger and more demanding than the version we often settle for.
Why We Need to Wrestle Together
But when a small group dares to tackle the hard parts of Scripture together, something beautiful happens. We learn to depend on one another—and on the Spirit—in new ways. No one person has the easy answers. We grow side by side. Everyone is discipled, and everyone is discipling.
This is how the early believers learned. They didn’t gather around curated lists of “most encouraging passages for modern life.” They opened the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—the same Scriptures Jesus used to explain himself. Every community had its Torah-guide, its elders—those “able to teach,” who helped the rest discern the wisdom of the oldest books and apply it to their sphere.
Studying Scripture in community guards us from arrogance and isolation. It reminds us that no one “owns” the truth; we discover it together as a diverse people learning to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, into the image of the Messiah.
Our mission as small groups is to disciple one another in how to enter Scripture on its own terms. Our goal is fluency and growth—to ask how the Bible uses its own language, patterns, and designs to reveal truth, and how those truths challenge our assumptions. Learning to situate the Bible within its own worldview is difficult work, but it can be done.
And the simplest, least-used tool for it?
Repetition.
Reading and rereading entire books—again and again.
The Bible is meditation literature. It’s meant to be reread, pondered, and wrestled with together. Later passages illuminate the earlier ones; earlier stories give shape to what follows. The goal isn’t to revise original meaning but to listen more carefully to it—to enter into the divine conversation already unfolding, and stay there long enough to be changed by it.
A Way Back into the Hard Parts
The best way to venture into deeper waters is to start small—but start. And start near the beginning. In the first Bible study I ever led, we began with Genesis 1.
Choose a short, “hard” passage and sit with it.
Don’t rush to explain it. Read it aloud. Ask what others notice. Wait through the awkward silence; let it do its work. Push one another to find something—anything—that stands out. Ask what this passage says in its own story, to its original audience, before asking what it means for you.
Embrace confusion as an act of worship.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. The best Bible studies are the ones where someone says, “I don’t know what I’m missing here, but I want to find out.” That first Genesis study I led didn’t use a guide or workbook. We simply showed up having read a few chapters and talked about what we saw. I didn’t have all the answers (I still don’t!)—and that made everyone else feel free to learn alongside me.
Use good tools, but don’t outsource.
Commentaries and study guides are helpful. Still, read the actual Bible. Learn to use a concordance—and then teach others how to do the same. Let Scripture interpret itself. Train your eyes to look for patterns, repetitions, echoes. Ask, “Where have I heard this before?” and “What does this remind me of elsewhere in the Bible?”
Keep the bigger picture in view.
Every hard passage belongs to a larger story. It’s easy to zoom in so closely on a verse that we lose sight of the arc it lives within. Try reversing that. Ask how the larger story—the structure of the book, the covenantal thread, the themes, the author—shapes the meaning of the smaller part. What bigger picture is at stake?
Pray Psalm 1—and then live it.
Blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night. Make that your aim: not just to gain knowledge, but to marinate in the earliest books of the Bible until they reshape how you see the world. Anyone who’s studied with me knows that I’m never not studying Genesis. The stories of the Torah are the most underestimated and least utilized tools for understanding the rest of Scripture. Every syllable of the Bible echoes back to those early books. Even when you’re knee-deep in Romans, remember Genesis. Remember Exodus. Remember Leviticus. These are the words that gave every later word its meaning.
When Small Groups Become Holy Ground
When small groups read the hard parts, the atmosphere changes. The words come alive in new ways. The discussion begins to shift. It takes time; returning to the same grass and mowing over it in different ways. But in those moments, the living room turns into holy ground.
We begin to see Scripture not as a collection of stories to inspire or fix us, but as one breathtaking reality that includes us. We discover that God’s hardest words are his most loving, meant to purify our hearts and prepare us for an eternity in his presence. But if we want to know him, we must be willing to open the whole book.
When we study the hard parts, we learn to live the hard parts. We find courage for obedience, clarity in confusion, and hope that outlasts circumstance.
So gather your people. Open the Scriptures.
Turn the pages that intimidate you.
Ask the hard questions.
And when you do, expect the Spirit to show up. Because the same God who spoke from the mountain still speaks from the pages—and he has not changed.