The Messiah and the Torah
Jesus faced many mockers and critics in his day. Many of his opponents claimed this rabbi from Nazareth was teaching God’s people to abandon his Torah, but he was quick to correct this misinformation.
This essay is adapted from the third message in The Meaning of Messiah, a series exploring Jesus through the eyes of the Hebrew Scriptures.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets.”
Jesus faced many mockers and critics in his day. Many of his opponents claimed this rabbi from Nazareth was teaching God’s people to abandon his Torah, but he was quick to correct this misinformation.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Torah until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:17–19).
Right in the middle of the most famous sermon the world has even known, Jesus affirms the ongoing authority of the Torah in God’s redemptive plan.
He does not speak like someone embarrassed by Torah or treat it as irrelevant to his mission. He insists upon its ongoing authority and warns that whoever relaxes even its least commandments will be called least in the kingdom.
Our Master believed that the kingdom of God was within reach in his generation, which he why he preached a message of repentance: “Repent, for the kingdom is at hand!” If God’s kingdom was arriving, then Jesus believed God’s standards mattered. As Messiah and King, Jesus understood that when the kingdom comes, the king comes. And our task today is to understand how he intends to rule.
Israel’s kings were never free to invent their own moral order. The king was to know God’s instruction, study it, live beneath it, and uphold it. If Jesus is the Messiah, and the Messiah is a king, then we must ask what kind of government rests upon his shoulders? What relationship does his kingship have with God’s Torah? And why does any of that still matter for us today?
A King Formed by Torah
For many Christians, the Torah is often viewed as the part of the Bible Jesus came to free us from. But Jesus does not say that in Matthew 5. To understand what kind of Messiah he believed himself to be, we need to ask what kind of king the Scriptures presented him with.
The Torah answers that question long before Israel ever places a king upon a throne.
In Deuteronomy 17, as Israel prepares to enter the land, God gives his people a blueprint for their future king. He must be chosen by God and come from among his brothers. Unlike the kings of the surrounding nations, he must not build his security through military power, political alliances, personal excess, or accumulated wealth. Everything about his reign must remain beneath the authority of God.
The king’s security, power, and reputation must come through covenant faithfulness to Yahweh—not through the ways of the nations.
Then God gives such a remarkable requirement:
“And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this Torah, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left” (Deuteronomy 17:18–20).
The king must write his own personal copy of the Torah!
He cannot let the priests summarize it for him, keep a pretty ceremonial copy on a shelf, or memorize a few of his favorite passages. He must write it by his own hand, submit his manuscript to the priests for scrutiny, and then read it every single day for the rest of his life.
Torah is not merely a set of rules the king enforces upon everyone else. Torah is the wisdom that forms the king himself. It shapes his mind, his heart, his loyalties, his humility, and his obedience. If Jesus believed he was the Messiah, then he did not merely need David’s royal blood or Abraham’s Jewish blood. He needed to become this kind of king: a Deuteronomy 17 king who knows God’s instruction, lives it, and can teach it because he has spent his life mastering it.
The Messiah is a Jewish king. And a Jewish king must be a Torah scholar.
What Does the Messiah Do With Torah?
Torah can refer broadly to the first five books of Scripture, sometimes called the Pentateuch. But the word Torah means instruction or teaching. It reveals God’s wisdom for human life and flourishing in God’s good world, so it makes sense that the Messiah does not spend his life studying that wisdom for his own sake. The prophets give him a two-part mission:
He must teach God’s Torah to the nations.
He must renew Israel so that God’s covenant people can finally uphold it.
Isaiah 2 describes the first part of this mission. In the last days, the mountain of Yahweh’s house will be established, and the nations will stream to Jerusalem. They will say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3).
This is not just a slow trickle; this is a steady stream of people from the nations coming to Jerusalem to learn the ways of Israel’s God. They make a long journey, learn this wisdom, but they don’t remain there. Returning back home, they bring the good news of the Torah back to their regions—the Torah going forth from Zion—and teaching the world how to live beneath God’s rule. The result is righteous judgment between nations: settled disputes, economic harmony, ecological stewardship and abundance, and eventually the end of war.
This is the world beneath the wise government of God’s king. The kingdom is centered in Israel, but its blessing reaches the entire world. Torah was entrusted to Israel so that Israel might model for humanity the wisdom and ways of its Creator.
But Isaiah’s vision is only half the story. Before Torah can go forth from Zion to the nations, Israel herself must be renewed to walk in God’s ways and fulfill her calling.
The New Covenant Is Not Torah’s Funeral
When many Christians hear the phrase new covenant, it is easy to almost automatically assume a dichotomy: the old covenant was bad; the new covenant is good. The old was law; the new is grace. The old must disappear so the new can take its place.
This rhetoric is so deeply embedded within parts of Christianity that it’s hard to even recognize it. But we must understand that this reasoning is not consistent with how the prophets or apostles describe the new covenant.
The new covenant is not God scrapping Torah. It is God renewing his people—the Jewish people—so that they can live faithfully within his instruction.
The Torah is good; the human heart is what’s stubborn. So God does not promise, “I‘ll get rid of my Torah.” Of course he cannot get rid of the Torah! It’s his wisdom, his standard. It’s upon the wisdom of Torah he founded the world. So God says “I’ll send my Messiah to transform the hearts of my people.”
Hebrews 8 quotes Jeremiah’s new-covenant promise at length:
““For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. For he finds fault with them when he says,
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah…. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people”
In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” (Hebrews 8:8, 10; quoting Jeremiah 31:31–33).
That final line is an easy to trip over, because at first glance, it makes it sound as though God is done with the Torah; that the Torah is the thing that’s obsolete and passing away. But a slow, careful reading provides a different meaning, one consistent with what Jesus himself taught.
Whom does God find fault with in the first covenant? Verse 8 says he finds fault “with them”—the people, not the Torah, not even the covenant. The people are the faulty party.
With whom does he make the new covenant? The house of Israel and the house of Judah. The new covenant is not with me personally, nor Christians or the church. I am grateful that I am invited to particate in the blessings of that covenant through faith in it’s mediator, but the new covenant is not first or primarily with me.
What does God promise to place within the house of Israel and Judah? His Torah.
And what is becoming obsolete? The first covenant.
This is important. The first covenant is not the Torah. The first covenant is Israel’s agreement to keep the Torah.
The problem was not that God’s Torah was defective or impossible to attain, but that his people did not keep their end of the deal. They did not continue in the covenant.
So the new covenant does not abolish God’s Torah. It recreates God’s people: new hearts, with Torah written within, and the Spirit empowering covenant faithfulness from the inside out.
The new covenant is not Torah’s end, but Israel’s renewed capacity for faithfulness to God.
For the Sake of His Name
By this point, we may be thinking to ourselves, “Ok, that’s all great but why does any of this matter?”
Why must Israel walk faithfully in Torah?
Why must the nations learn it?
Why must the Messiah teach it?
Jesus has already died, risen, and defeated death in his own body. He’s done it! So why does biblical faith still require any of this?
There is one very big reason: if Israel does not walk faithfully in Torah, God cannot dwell in her midst as he promised. If God is not dwelling in Israel, his name is profaned among the nations.
In the world today, this is a present reality. God is not dwelling in his temple in Jerusalem. Israel is not hosting his presence on the land as the prophets envision. And the nations look at Israel and reason: There is no God in Israel. The promises he made to this people are imagined, they’re stories, legands. There is no Messiah. The God of Israel will not do what he said—or he at least meant something different by them. There is no Yahweh God.
This is what today’s world has concluded about the God we worship. The Torah is God’s wisdom for humanity, but ultimately it’s about something greater: God’s reputation. His name.
Through Ezekiel, God tells Israel:
“It is not for your sake that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name…. And the nations will know that I am the LORD … when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (Ezekiel 36:22–23).
Here’s how God is going to vindicate himself:
“My dwelling place shall be with them…. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore” (Ezekiel 37:27–28).
God has attached his name to this people and land, and his reputation to their restoration. Israel’s renewed ability to walk in the fullness and wisdom of God’s Torah demonstrates to the world that the God of Israel keeps his word—and that he is the Most High God.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray for precisely this:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9–10).
Jesus knew the writings of Ezekiel. He knew God’s name can only be hallowed among the nations when he restores Israel to covenant faithfulness, dwells among his people, and brings the earth beneath his righteous standards.
So let’s follow the logic:
If Israel is not renewed, God cannot dwell among his people as he promised.
If God does not dwell among them, Israel cannot fulfill her calling as a light to the nations.
If Israel cannot be a light to the nations, the nations will never learn the wisdom and ways of Israel’s God.
And if the nations never learn God’s ways, evil just keeps going.
The world cannot heal itself. But Yahweh does not fail. He has not forgotten his people or abandoned his Torah.
God has installed his Messiah to bring Israel and the nations into alignment with God’s wisdom.
The cross and resurrection are not alternatives to that mission. They are the decisive victory guaranteeing that the Messiah will complete it.
This is why Torah still matters. That is why the Messiah being a Torah scholar still matters. He has not yet completed all that the Torah and the Prophets teach. Jesus did not come to throw out Moses and replace Torah with grace, but to be the king who brings Israel and the world into alignment with the wisdom of God.
The Messiah Steps Into His Role
When Jesus ascends the mountain in Matthew 5, gathers the Jewish people and begins to teach Torah, he is not offering spiritual tips or making the Torah a matter of the heart.
He is beginning the work the Scriptures assigned to Israel’s Messiah.
He speaks with the authority of a king, teaching God’s people how to walk in God’s ways. He exposes shallow and selective obedience and presses the wisdom of Torah to it’s farthest extent.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not murder,’” Jesus tells the crowd. Then he calls out the anger and contempt from which murder begins.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’” Then he expands beyond outward restraint and exposes what faithfulness and holiness means in some of the most important relationships we can have in this life.
He speaks about oaths, retaliation, and love of enemies, pushing the Torah’s wisdom to is limits: integrity, mercy, and true righteousness.
Jesus does not waive Torah. He intensifies it, clarifies it, and administers it as the king who understands its goal.
Then, at the end of Matthew, Jesus stands on another mountain. Having received all authority in heaven and upon earth, he sends his disciples to the nations:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20).
The king of Israel, enthroned over heaven and earth, sends his disciples to instruct the nations in the ways of God. Doesn’t that sound like Isaiah 2?
The Messiah has not yet finished this work. The vision of the Torah and the Prophets is much larger than anything we have yet seen. The nations have not streamed to Zion. War has not ceased. Israel and Judah have not been fully renewed. God’s dwelling has not been restored in Jerusalem, and the earth has not come beneath the Messiah’s wise instruction.
Our king has begun the work, and he will finish it when he reigns in fullness.
You Have Heard It Said
In our day, we, too, have heard it said…
that he Torah does not matter anymore,
that God is finished with all that Old Testament stuff,
that Jesus abolished the law,
that Hebrews says it is all obsolete anyway.
But Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets.” Our question is not, What do I believe about Torah? but whether I have submitted myself to learning its wisdom? Have I allowed the Scriptures that formed Jesus to teach me who he is, how he intends to govern the world, and how he intends to reign over my life now?
Psalm 1 describes the righteous man this way:
“His delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2).
Those words are portrait of Israel’s Messiah. If we love Jesus, then we need to love the things he loves. And Jesus loves God’s Torah. He meditates upon it. He lives it. He teaches it. And the government we hope will one day rest on his capable shoulders and heal the world is grounded in the wisdom revealed there.
Open the Scriptures that formed your king. Read them slowly—day by day, year by year. You have heard it said that Torah is over, but Jesus says otherwise. Are willing to sit at the feet of our King and learn?
“Teach me, O LORD, the way of your statutes;
and I will keep it to the end” (Psalm 119:33).
The Meaning of Messiah
If we are going to follow him faithfully, then our understanding of Jesus must be shaped by who he says he is, not merely by who we say he is.
The following essay is adapted from a message I shared at Friends Community Church, the first in The Meaning of Messiah.
When I was growing up, my poor mom was almost never introduced by her own name. She was "Brianna's mom," or "Ray's wife," or somebody's whatever-she-happened-to-be. To this day, people will still introduce her that way: "This is Brianna's mom." It's actually kind of funny. People know who she is primarily by her relationship to someone else.
As people, we do this all the time. When we introduce others, we instinctively describe them by their relationship to us. "This is my husband, Mike." "This is my mom, Carolyn." "This is my friend..." We define people through the categories that make the most sense to us, but those categories are rarely how people introduce themselves. My mom doesn't walk up to strangers and lead with, "Hi, I'm Brianna's mom." Eventually that relationship may come up, but it isn't the foundation of her identity. It is the foundation of how I know her, but not the foundation of how she knows herself.
I think we often do this very same thing with Jesus.
When we talk about him, we tend to begin introducing him to others in the ways that have meant the most to us personally. We call him Savior, Friend, Teacher, or Rescuer. Every one of those titles is true. They are beautiful, biblical descriptions of who Jesus is.
But are those the categories Jesus would have chosen to introduce himself?
When Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" he wasn't asking strangers. The question was directed at the people who had spent the most time with him, probing whether they truly understood his identity. It is a question that still confronts every one of us today.
If Jesus were introducing himself to us, what title would he place first? How did he understand his own mission? Who is Jesus?
I have a friend who wrestles searches for answers to this question constantly. Over the years, he has heard liturgy that now feels empty to him. He has listened to passionate sermons. He's encountered cultural ideas about Jesus—billboards, commercials, along with familiar phrases like, "Jesus loves you," "Jesus died for you," and "Make Jesus Lord of your life." The problem is that every person seems to describe Jesus a little differently. Each one gives him a slightly different version, and it has left him with the impression that Jesus is simply whoever someone says he is—whoever someone wants him to be.
Our personal testimonies matter. They’re important. They are evidence of God’s faithfulness in our lives. To the addict, Jesus is the one who breaks chains. To the lonely, he is a faithful friend. To the brokenhearted, he is a healer. To the desperate, he is a rescuer. Those stories are real, and they deserve to be told.
But alone, they are not enough.
If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully, there comes a point where we must mature beyond simply talking about what Jesus has done for us and begin asking who Jesus understood himself to be. Our witness may begin with our story, but it must ultimately grow into Jesus' story about himself.
Otherwise, we are left to worship a Jesus of our own making.
If we are going to follow him faithfully, then our understanding of Jesus must be shaped by who he says he is, not merely by who we say he is.
The Question—Who did Jesus believe himself to be?
In John 4, Jesus has a remarkable conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. As they speak about worship, she tells him, "I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will teach us all things." Jesus responds with an astonishing declaration: "I who speak to you am he."
Jesus openly identifies himself as the Messiah she’s waiting for. But that answer only leads to another question: What exactly is a Messiah?
When the woman says the Messiah will "teach us all things," what are those "all things" she has in mind?
She had a very defined expectation of the Messiah, but do we?
Is there a way to outline the role, the mission, and the responsibilities of the one God promised to send?
Jesus certainly thought so. He learned about the Messiah from the Scriptures. They shaped his understanding of who he was, why he came, and what God was doing in the world.
That is why, when Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and read from Isaiah,
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor..." (Luke 4:18–19)
he knew exactly what he was claiming about himself.
The real question is whether we do.
Who were the captives Isaiah was talking about? What is "the year of the Lord's favor" and when does it arrive? What office was Jesus claiming to occupy when he declared that he was the anointed one?
Those are the types of questions that will guide this series.
Over the next several weeks, my goal is to help us learn to see Jesus the way Jesus saw himself. We are going to understand the Messiah through the very Scriptures that shaped his own understanding of his mission. More than that, we're going to ask what it actually means to confess that Jesus is the Messiah.
To do that, we're going to begin where Jesus himself directed his followers after the resurrection: Luke 24.
The Scriptures—Jesus Learned About His Mission
After his resurrection, Jesus encountered two discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus. They knew the events of the crucifixion. They knew the reports of the empty tomb. They were hoping this man who had been killed at Passover was the one who would “redeem Israel.”
Jesus' response is striking.
He does not begin by appealing to their personal experience, telling them about the death he suffered. He does not perform a miracle. Instead, Luke tells us that, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27).
To appreciate what Jesus is doing, it helps to understand the structure of the Bible he was reading.
The Hebrew Scriptures—what Jewish people often call the Tanakh—are traditionally divided into three sections:
the Torah (the books of Moses),
the Prophets,
and the Writings.
The Torah includes Genesis through Deuteronomy. The Prophets include not only Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, but also Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. The final section, the Writings, includes books like Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.
Sometimes Jesus refers to these three sections as "Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms," using Psalms—the largest book in the Writings—as a shorthand for the entire final section. “Moses” works the same way—it means the Torah. In other words, Jesus points these discouraged disciples to the whole Hebrew Bible.
Why? Because that is where the Messiah is defined.
A few verses earlier, Jesus asks, "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" (Luke 24:26).
Notice the language carefully. Jesus doesn't begin by saying, "I had to suffer," speaking in the first person. He says, "The Messiah had to suffer." Jesus is thinking of his own death and resurrection not as something that happened to him personally, but in terms of an office—a role, a vocation, a mission.
An illustration can help. The President of the United States is an office. Today, Donald Trump occupies that office. Before him, others occupied it. Long after him, others will as well. The office itself exists independently of the individual. It carries defined responsibilities, authority, expectations, and duties because the Constitution of the United States establishes what a president is supposed to do as well as the credientials one must have to occupy the office.
The same is true of the Messiah. Jesus is a person. Messiah is an office.
Long before Jesus was born, the Hebrew Scriptures had already described that office. They define what qualifies someone to be the Messiah, what the Messiah is expected to accomplish, why the Messiah suffers, what he inherits, how he reigns, the length of his term, and what God's purposes for him are.
Jesus understood himself as stepping into an existing role. He did not invent the office; he inherited it. That is why he continually returned to the Scriptures. His point was not simply, "Look what happened to me." His point was, "Surely you know—this is what the Messiah must do!"
Once the disciples began to see that pattern in the Scriptures, the identity of Jesus became unmistakable. That is why I think we need to begin here as well. Before we ask what Jesus means to us, or even what he has done for us, we should first ask a more fundamental question: What did Jesus think it meant to be the Messiah?
Because if Jesus understood himself through the office of Messiah, then we need to understand that office too.
What is a Messiah?
The word Messiah comes from the Hebrew word Mashiach. The word Christ comes from the Greek Christos. They are not two different titles. Christos is simply the Greek translation of the Hebrew Mashiach.
Messiah. Christ. Same title. Different languages.
The Hebrew word Mashiach means "anointed one." More literally, it refers to someone who has been anointed with oil.
Throughout the Scriptures, anointing was the act of setting a person or object apart for God's purposes. It marked something as belonging to God and being commissioned for a holy task. People were anointed. Sacred objects were anointed. Even altars and stones could be anointed. Anointing was God's way of publicly designating something for his service.
One of the most surprising discoveries for many Christians is that the Bible doesn't contain only one messiah. It contains many.
Aaron was an anointed priest. David was an anointed king. Solomon was an anointed king. Even Cyrus, the Persian ruler, is called God's anointed in Isaiah 45.
The Scriptures are filled with mashiachs—anointed ones. Priests, kings, prophets, judges, leaders, and deliverers all carry this designation in one way or another. When Jesus spoke about "the Messiah," he wasn't introducing a brand-new concept. He was stepping into a category the Scriptures had been developing for centuries. And this is where things become fascinating.
Each of these anointed figures reveals something about the work of the coming ultimate Messiah. Aaron teaches us about priesthood. David teaches us about kingship. Moses reveals what it means to lead God's people and mediate between God and Israel. The prophets demonstrate what it looks like to speak God's word faithfully. Each one contributes another brushstroke to an unfinished portrait. Together, they create the expectation of an anointed one who would accomplish everything God's earlier servants could accomplish only in part.
When Jesus read the Scriptures, these were the portraits he encountered. These were the categories that shaped his understanding of his own mission. The title "Messiah" was never a label that Jesus was free to define however he wished. Long before he was born, the Scriptures had already begun filling that title with concrete meaning.
That is why the opening verse of Matthew's Gospel is so significant.
The Messiah is Jewish
"The book of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham."
Most of us are eager to skip over the long list of unfamiliar names and get to the "important" parts. Matthew has other ideas. He is introducing us to Jesus's messianic credentials. The first thing Matthew wants us to understand is that the office of Messiah is thoroughly Jewish.
In order to be the Messiah, one must be Jewish.
Christianity did not invent Christ. Jesus did not invent Messiah. Jesus is the Messiah, Christians are disciples of the Messiah, but the Messiah belongs to Israel's story before he belongs to Christianity. To be Messiah, you must belong to the covenant family and story that produced Messiah.
You must belong to Abraham's family. You must stand within Israel's covenant. You must inherit the promises God made to his people.
“Christ” (or Messiah) is not a generic title for a heroic or savior-like figure. It is a covenantal office rooted in the history of Israel.
That is why Matthew begins where he does. He first calls Jesus "the son of Abraham” because in Genesis 12, God chose Abraham and established a covenant with him. Through Abraham's family, God promised blessing, a covenant relationship, and ultimately blessing for all the nations of the earth. From that moment forward, God's redemptive plan for the world would unfold through Abraham's family.
That has never changed.
Jesus is the heir of those promises. Without Abraham, there is no Messiah.
Matthew then identifies Jesus as "the son of David." In 2 Samuel 7, God promised David an everlasting throne, an enduring kingdom, and a descendant who would reign forever. "Son of David" became one of the great messianic titles in Israel because it pointed to God's promise that the coming king would arise from David's royal line. We'll spend much more time exploring that promise in the next message.
But for now, notice what Matthew has done. With a single verse, he places Jesus at the intersection of two great covenant promises.
Abraham points us to the family through whom blessing would come to the nations.
David points us to the King whose kingdom would never end.
Matthew wants us to see that Jesus stands at the convergence of both.
No Abraham, no Messiah.
No David, no Messiah.
No Israel, no Messiah.
No Judaism, no Messiah.
The Mission
When Jesus enters the synagogue in Luke 4, he is handed the scroll of Isaiah, and reads the appointed Haftarah portion for that shabbat. Today we know that as Isaiah 61. I encourage you to go read it in full.
When he finishes reading, he makes an astonishing claim:
"Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
With those words, Jesus publicly announces that he is the one who will bring Isaiah's vision to fullness.
Isaiah 61 is, in many ways, a summary of the Messiah's mission. It describes the work God's Anointed One will accomplish. By reading that passage and declaring its promises underway, Jesus was telling everyone in the synagogue exactly who he believed himself to be.
Most of us, however, were not introduced to Jesus through Isaiah 61. We know the Jesus who forgave us, comforted us, rescued us, who carried us through grief, loss, or uncertainty. Every one of those experiences is real, and every one of them is precious.
But a mature disciple will ask if are they the whole picture?
When Jesus introduced himself, he didn't begin with other people's experiences. He opened Isaiah 61.
Is Isaiah 61 the Jesus you follow?
Do we recognize him as the one who proclaims liberty to captives? The one who comforts those who mourn in Zion? The one who restores ancient ruins and rebuilds ruined cities? The one who causes righteousness to spring up before the nations? The priestly King clothed in righteousness? The one who proclaims both the year of the Lord's favor and the day of God's justice?
Every one of us carries a picture of Jesus. The question is where that picture came from. Was it shaped by the Hebrew Scriptures? By Jesus's own understanding of his mission? Or has it been assembled primarily from our experiences, our traditions, or the fragments of Jesus we've collected along the way?
That is the question I hope this series will, over time, help us answer.
If Jesus learned who he was from the Scriptures, then perhaps we should understand who he is from those same Scriptures too.
Take a few moments to pause and spend some time with two passages: Isaiah 61 and Psalm 110. As you read them, ask yourself a simple question: What did these passages teach Jesus about the meaning of his calling as the Messiah?
The goal of discipleship is to become students of our Teacher. If we call ourselves followers of Jesus, then we are following the Jewish Messiah described by the Hebrew Scriptures. We are disciples of a rabbi from Nazareth.
And if, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we want to see the risen Jesus in all his glory and become like him, we must learn to sit at the feet of our Master. We must be covered in the dust of our rabbi.
Jesus's question still stands before us: "Who do you say that I am?"
If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully, we must understand the Messiah he claimed to be.
Why I Wrote a Book About Leviticus (Of All Things)
If you had asked me a few years ago—hypothetically—what book of the Bible I would one day write about, Leviticus would not have made the list. Not even close.
If you had asked me a few years ago—hypothetically—what book of the Bible I would one day write about, Leviticus would not have made the list.
Not even close.
Leviticus is the book most of us skim or skip entirely. It’s where Bible reading plans go to die somewhere around mid-February. It’s strange, repetitive, and heavy with details that don’t seem to connect to modern faith.
Yet there it sits at the very center of the Torah, the center of Israel’s Scriptures, and the center of the story that defines Jesus.
So why write a book about it?
The short answer is this: I came to see that Leviticus is essential to the gospel, and I couldn’t not share what I had learned.
Jesus said he came to fulfill the Torah—and Leviticus is at the heart of it.
In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
It’s a familiar verse. One we tend to read and nod along with, and then move past.
But I began to wonder: do we actually take Jesus at his word?
Because if he did not come to abolish the Torah, then we have to wrestle with what it means that he came to fulfill it. And that question becomes especially pressing when we arrive at Leviticus—the book that sits at the center of the Torah’s main tension: how can a holy God dwell among unholy people?
Leviticus is not a side note. It is the core of the good news. It’s where we learn what it means for a holy God to draw near to unholy people—what that looks like and what it costs to make it possible.
And when you start paying attention, you begin to notice something: Jesus lives and speaks as if Leviticus still matters.
He operates within categories of clean and unclean.
He spends a huge amount of time in and around the temple.
He is deeply moved by the fate of Jerusalem—the place of God’s dwelling.
And he seems to believe that its story is not over.
That realization alone was enough to stop me in my tracks.
“Fulfilled” does not mean “replaced”—and that changes how we read everything.
Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited an assumption: that once Jesus came, Leviticus—and much of the Torah—was effectively finished.
Not abolished, exactly. But completed (past tense) in a way that no longer holds real weight. As though Jesus arrived, died, rose again, and poof—the Torah was fulfilled and done. But the more I sat with Jesus’ words, the less that assumption held up.
He goes on to say that those who set aside even the least of these commandments—and teach others to do the same—will be called least in the kingdom. To me, that didn’t sound like a system that’s been rendered irrelevant.
And it raised uncomfortable questions:
If Leviticus is“fulfilled” by him basically doing away with it, why insist he didn’t come to abolish it?
If the Torah is complete and already behind us, why warn against setting its commands aside?
That tension forced me to ask deeper questions: what if I’ve been reading all of this wrong?
That shift changed everything.
Instead of reading Leviticus as a dry relic—something that once mattered but no longer does—I began to read it for what it was actually saying. I tried to see it as Jesus did: a framework that points forward. One that finds its depth and future in the work of Messiah, but is not discarded by him. I asked,
What if the categories still matter?
What if the vision still matters?
What if the priesthood, the sacrifices, the rhythms of worship all still matter?
And what if its story is still unfolding?
Suddenly, Leviticus became impossible to ignore. I began to realize that a book that was central to the life and mission of my Savior was not central to me.
That needed to change.
I had questions no one seemed to be answering.
Once those first two realizations settled in, they opened up a flood of questions.
If Leviticus still matters, how does it matter?
If it hasn’t been replaced, how should we read it now?
What do we do with sacrifice, priesthood, ritual, the Day of Atonement?
How did Jesus understand these things? And how did his first followers hold these things alongside faith in him?
And what about the New Testament? The temple?
Paul, Galatians, Hebrews? The new covenant? “You’re free from the Law!” I went looking for answers.
I read books, articles, and journals. I listened to sermons and podcasts. I took classes. I searched for voices asking these same questions. And I found…very little.
There were excellent scholars writing about Leviticus in its ancient context. There were thoughtful theologians explaining how Jesus relates to the law. But usually, the conversation seemed to stop too soon. Leviticus was either reduced to metaphor, absorbed into church tradition, or ultimately dismissed as something Jesus came to transcend.
None of them could answer the question I was asking: what does it mean to take Jesus at his word—that he didn’t come to abolish the Torah—and take Leviticus seriously at the same time?
I couldn’t shake the sense that Jesus didn’t read Leviticus the way I did. He didn’t stand over it, deciding how he’d render it all obsolete. He stepped into it. He let it shape his mission. His identity. His understanding of what he came to do—and what God is still doing.
For him.
For the Jewish people.
And for the world.
And that left me with a decision. I could set those questions aside, or I could follow them wherever they led.
So I wrote the book I couldn’t find.
I didn’t start with a plan to write a book.
I started with a growing, gnawing sense that I had missed something.
So I began tracing the threads, from Leviticus into the Prophets, the Gospels, and the letters. From the tent at Sinai to the heavenly tabernacle still destined, one day, to descend to the land.
I stopped trying to read Leviticus backwards—starting with conclusions about Jesus and forcing the text to fit them—and instead tried to read it the way Jesus knew it: as a living part of the story he was stepping into.
What I found was not a disconnected system of ancient rituals that Jesus replaced with himself at the cross. I found a vision of a people and a tent that are at the very center of everything God still intends to do.
And I found that without Leviticus, I completely misunderstood almost everything about Jesus and his mission.
Why this book—and why now?
I wrote this book because I think we’ve lost something.
Not just a book of the Bible, but a critical piece of the story that most of us don’t even know.
We’ve learned to read the New Testament without its foundation.
To talk about Jesus without the categories he lived within.
To celebrate fulfillment without understanding what is being fulfilled.
And in doing so, we’ve emptied the gospel of Leviticus—and our future hope of its promises.
The Forgotten Gospel is my attempt to recover that missing piece.
Not by discovering something new, but by returning to something old.
As old as Sinai.
As old as covenant.
As old as the gospel itself.
An Invitation to Reimagine Leviticus
If Leviticus has ever felt distant to you, you’re not alone. If you’ve wondered why it’s there, or what it has to do with Jesus, you’re asking the right questions.
And if you’ve assumed it no longer matters, because no one has ever shown you why it would—I understand.
But what if that assumption is wrong?
What if the book we forgot is the one that helps us see the gospel more clearly? What if, instead of leaving Leviticus behind, we’re meant to grow into it? What if we need to reimagine Leviticus?
That’s the question that started this journey, and it’s the one that led me to write The Forgotten Gospel.
Some stories deserve to be remembered. Leviticus is one of them.
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.