1.2 Should we follow the Law of Moses?

Another example that seems contradictory is found by comparing Matthew 23 and various other gospel passages.

In Matthew 23:1-3 Jesus specifically tells the disciples to do everything the Pharisees tell them because they are the authority on the Law of Moses, they sit in Moses seat.

This seems different to how Jesus acted in Matthew 12v1-8 when his disciples picked and ate grain on the Sabbath, rejecting the Pharisees teaching. Matthew 12v2 says that the Pharisees told Jesus "your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath". Without worrying about whether or not the law tells them not to pick grain and eat it on the Sabbath, Jesus practice and teaching in chapter 12 appears to allow you to disregard what the Pharisees say which is different to chapter 23 where he tells them to do everything the Pharisees say.

There are also instances where Jesus heals on the Sabbath. Whether this was allowed under the Law depends on your understanding of what constitutes ‘work’, and whether Jesus healing should be regarded as work. Certainly the Pharisees regarded it as work and there is no suggestion that Jesus did not think of it as work. The first one I want to look at is in Mark 3 where he heals a man with a crippled arm, something he could have waited until the following day to do which would have sat better with the Pharisees. The interesting thing about this is that afterwards the Pharisees went out and plotted to kill Jesus, in this they were simply following what the law required them to do. The second example I have used is Jesus healing on the Sabbath recorded in Luke 13, when he heals a woman who has been crippled for 18 years. The fact that she had been crippled for so long indicates that it was not necessary to carry out the healing on the Sabbath; it could easily have been done the following day.

Jesus point in Mark 3 is that it is better to do good that evil. Based on this analysis, a large number of work activities become allowable because they are doing good, very few work activities could be considered ‘evil’ by nature.

There is still another place where Jesus suggests that the Pharisees do not teach accurately. This is in Matthew 16, where the disciples are told to guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees, indicating that they should not do everything the Pharisees preach.

It is not clear from this if the Israelites of Jesus day were to follow Jesus or the Pharisees interpretation of the law which were different.

2 comments:

  1. There's no date on this blog so I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time by commenting but.....God can't go near sin. Ever. So when we sin, we literally put up a barrier against him. When God sent His Son to be born on the earth (and I do believe there was a pre-Incarnate Jesus, unlike the Christadelphian Brethren) the major problem was how to get him in without the Enemy knowing, since man had stupidly handed his own lordship of the Earth over to the deceitful Enemy. Fortunately the lease of the earth's lordship has an expiry date which is drawing ever nearer, hence the Enemy's unease, but I digress..... There are many defects and sin in mankind's life which were never meant to be there, owing to the enemy's interference in man's affairs. Diseases like cancer would be one such example in my opinion. So God needed to get a people and isolate them to Himself and keep them completely pure so that His Son could get into the Earth and do his redemptive work. The only way for this to happen was through the implementation of the strictest possible religious laws to maintain ritual purity. God's people had to be holy, that means 'set apart'. Not part of the world. Unfortunately, the people God chose found these laws to be extremely difficult. That's why they kept falling by the wayside, stepping out of God's protection and ending up getting carried off to Babylon. The Law was extremely difficult to keep, to the point of impossible. The only way to keep it was with love. If you kept the law with pride, you ended up all smug and full of yourself like the Pharisees. Or many of the Pharisees. Once Jesus got into the earth, he taught his followers the meaning of love. His 'disgraceful' execution contained all the elements of a ritual sacrifice. Iron, wood, a blemish free sacrificial specimen. Once the perfect Sacrifice had taken place and Jesus had offered up his life, the penalty for all the sins of the world was paid. Jesus Christ went down to Sheol, announced liberty to the souls trapped there and then threw off the shackles of death, to the enemy's horror. Now, we don't have to keep the literal law. We wash ourselves in the Blood of the perfect sacrificial lamb and we walk free. We can eat what we like, wear what we like, sit beside who we like on the bus. Obviously, we shouldn't indulge in immorality or the like as that would make a mockery of Jesus Christ's sacrifice on our behalf. But the account is paid, the Law is now obsolete. We don't have to keep the laws. Obviously, if we observe the food laws and the like, we would be healthier, but ritual purity is not an issue now. We take Jesus as our Saviour and there we go, born again and not under the burdens of legalism. Religious groups and sects who try to make the Law of Moses an issue of faith are literally flogging a dead horse. The only people keeping the Law now should be orthodox Jews who haven't yet accepted Jesus.

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  2. Maria: You write:

    "God can't go near sin. Ever."

    - Where did you get that idea from? Or did you just make it up?

    What else can't God do? Perhaps he can't stop human suffering, because he does not seem concerned about it.

    Perhaps he can't reveal himself anymore, because no one has hear or seen anything from him for 2,000 years.

    Perhaps he can't exist at all outside of the imaginations of human who are scared of death?

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