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This 2000 year-old argument, this argument of legalism versus grace reminds me of a more recent argument. Which is: remember Miller Light beer for years used the slogan “Tastes great less filling” They made a lot of money with that ad. But it was really an argument to support why you should drink beer. And you should drink it either because it tastes great, which meaning the primary reason for drinking beer is that it tastes great. And less filling was the angle of drinkers reasoning to validate their excess by saying that it has fewer calories, so they could drink more. And maybe, somehow it would eliminate beer-bellies or a lot more room for the excess; at the very least reduce their guilt. The argument was based on you can only choose one or the other, less filling or tastes great to validate a choice.

So I want to make an analogy a little bit here between beer and the commandments. Just for a little bit. Legalism is the “tastes great” and “less filling” is grace. As I said we have a battle in the body of Messiah, legalism verses grace, one over the other. If you partake in the mitzvot the commandments, we are told you are a legalist. If you drape yourself in grace as defined by doing what you want to do, pronouncing that the law is obsolete, you are know as “graceists” I made that word up.

From the perspective of the Hebrew testament and the B’rit ha-Chadashah (Renewed Covenant) these positions are really a strong man argument. A strong man argument is a statement a person makes if they want to more easily attack an opposing position.

Romans 1:15 says that “Through Him we have received grace and we were given the work of being an emissary on His behalf promoting trust, grounded obedience among all the Gentiles.”

Legalism and grace exist, I believe, in a perfect state of godly order and tension. In God’s world we live with a lot that to us appears paradoxes. But it is really godly tension. It doesn’t always have to be black and white with God. There’s a tension there where legalism and grace fall in. Both are ok. The one is not in contradiction to the other they live in a godly tension.

Clearly we have received grace through Messiah Yeshua. But in the context of this scripture this grace allows us to be a good testimony to the Gentiles or in our case to those that do not yet believe, and directly related to being a good testimony with good fruit promoting trust, grounded obedience. Obedience to what or who? To Messiah Yeshua of course, and to the Word which is God.

“All Adonai’s paths are grace and truth to those who keep His covenant and instructions.” “For your grace is there before my eyes, and I live my life by your truth”

(Psalm 25:10, Psalm 26:3) Adonai’s truth is His Word and His Word is Yeshua. When we search out the scriptures, a clear picture takes shape, and that is that grace and obedience, legalism go hand in hand they are not to be argued as separate. So the argument we need to choose between grace and legalism is not an argument of HaShem. But quite possibly it could be the work of the adversary, trying to split us to pit God’s people against one another.

The argument legalism versus grace, “tastes great” versus “less filling” as I said is a strong man argument trying to convince us that the two are not compatible, not meant to dwell in unity. The truth is that, they are compatible, they are inseparable, they go together.

Legalism without God’s grace leads to spiritual death. What that says is that if we just have grace, we have no context for that grace. It wouldn’t have any meaning. It has to have structure, and we die without structure. Legalism is a system of thought whereby our spiritual state is judged on the basis of how well we abide by a set of rules and regulations. This was the approach of the Pharisees.

They filtered the Hebrew Scriptures through a legalistic grid. Their obsessesion with God’s commandments was such that they tended to miss the heart of what God was actually saying through His Word. They viewed all of life as dependant on observing all the commandments. For them it was necessary to determine what constituted valid observance, leading them to create a vast and complex system of interpretation. Theses interpretations of the Pharisee’s were the foundation for today’s Rabbinical Judaism.

As Jews and Gentiles today we owe a great deal to the brilliant Jewish scholars. Without them we would have great difficulty expressing ourselves as Jews and as Gentiles with a Ruth calling, growing in the ways that God desires of us.

What I mean by a Ruth calling is a live change focused on the Kingdom of God. Remember Ruth who married Boaz that followed Naomi. She said, “Your people shall be my people.” Her sister went back to her native people, but she chose Israel, she chose the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to follow. And that she would follow in those traditions of Naomi, who was an Israelite.

So a Ruth calling is somebody that may not be born Jewish but God has called into a life with the Jewish people, many times in the context of a Messianic Jewish congregation. Where they learn about how to live a life in God, in the context of how Israel has learned to walk. And that can mean different things to different people, but as a general statement it’s a calling on our lives, to change. Because we change, somebody that ‘s not Jewish, make a life change a least in the Messianic context, and that it’s voluntarily, they are choosing a lifestyle, it’s something that wasn’t theirs. And let me tell you that’s a great sacrifice.

You know if you are actually live a Jewish lifestyle you’re taking a great deal upon yourself. Because Paul encouraged and said you don’t have to do that, Paul says you don’t have to convert. God made you a Gentile that’s good. If He made you Jewish you’re good. They’re both good, and yet they’re both immaterial. Our salvations isn’t based on whether we’re Jewish or Gentile. But in the context of how we live our lives and how we choose to glorify God, and we make choices, in the context of reality, those are sacrifices that we make. That we are going to lay down something that we grew up with maybe and we’re going to pick up something that is alien to us, new, and challenging.

If you are not led by the Spirit to follow God in the context of a Messianic Jewish congregation, why would you do it in the first place anyway? To most people, if you went to any body that’s not Jewish in the world and your asking “Gee would you like to convert to Judaism, and be a Jew”, they’re not going to go, yeah that’s the first thing on my list. On one side you’re considered legalistic with a great burden of obligation, and on the other side of the practical there’s a great deal of persecution.

Anybody that thinks that anti-Semitism isn’t alive and well in the world, isn’t reading the paper at all. It’s alive and thriving.

Yeshua in Matthew 23:1-7, (I’m just addressing some of it), He shared with the Torah teachers and the P’rushim, he said, they sit in the seat of Moses, so whatever they tell you, take care to do it. But don’t do what they do, because they talk, but don’t act. They tie heavy loads on to people’s shoulders, but won’t lift a finger to help carry them. You know the Pharisees indeed had wisdom, but they also created great burdens that they did not place on themselves. They also did not partake of their own insight.

Lots of times in the Body of Messiah, when we read scripture, Pharisee is projected as a bad word. Pharisee is not a bad word. We’re just like them; we’re not getting it all right either. Yeshua didn’t come against all Pharisees; he came against some of the leaders. If Yeshua was anything, He was probably a Pharisee. That’s probably who he is closely aligned to in his thought, in his theology at the time. He’s telling to them, listen to them, just don’t do what they’re doing, but listen to them, they have wisdom.

Legalism is not simply about following rules. And remember HaShem has given us many commandments, 613 by the Jewish count from the Hebrew testament. That He expects us to immerse ourselves in. Uhh-oh, we got a Rabbi that’s gonna tell us that we got to do all the laws... no, you don’t. But the Mitzvot are spiritual standards, they are Adonai’s rules. Keeping the Lords commandments cannot be equated with man made legalism.

While we might discuss which of his rules are applicable today, the context of the commandments is Love, and if we love Him, we will obey. Right? If we love Him we will obey Him. And I can give you at least 100 scriptures that related in context to that. The question always is, when we say we will obey him, everybody forgets what the obey weighs. It seems many people think of grace as freedom from rules, as if the grace of the New Covenant has to do with our free ticket of acceptance in the Messiah. Many in the body of Messiah think this way and give the impression of that if we believe in Yeshua, God accepts us no matter how we live. I call this cheap grace. Not only is this way of thinking confronted by the B’rit ha-Chadashah writers, the New Testament writers, but they clearly understood that true spirituality is not based on observance, but rather upon trusting in God and His salvation through the Messiah.

The Torah came into the picture so that the offenses would proliferate. But where sin proliferated, grace proliferated even more. “All this happened so that just as sin ruled by means of death, so also grace might rule through causing people to be considered righteous. So that they might have eternal life through Yeshua, the Messiah, Our Lord.” Romans 5:20-21. Again it’s that godly tension, that paradox, that legalism and grace that they work together, it’s a healthy relationship.

Grace allows us, to operate in Torah without paying the penalty of death, because we don’t live up to it. Grace doesn’t eliminate Torah, and I equate that to legalism, legalist, legalism, Torah is law (and instruction) and it’s commandments, legalistic and good. We get tied up sometimes in the words, that’s why I’m using these words intentionally. Somehow being a legalist is a bad thing in our culture, especially in the Body of Messiah. “You follow the commandments, so you’re a legalist.”

Let me tell you something, if you believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and we believe Yeshua is Messiah, then He is the invisible God incarnate, if we believe that, then we are legalists. And it’s not a bad word. Let me tell you I’ve been to enough church services where I have heard how they use it. “Legalist”

This approach to spiritually be in keeping with the Hebrew Scriptures, what I was quoting from Romans. Right relationship with God has always been on the basis of faith, not observance. The New Covenant writers confronted the flawed spirituality of the Pharisees not the legitimate faith of centuries of godly people. They weren’t attacking 2,500 years of Jewish history. Well… Israel wasn’t that obedient, but when they were. Yeshua’s not attacking that.

The book of Galatians 5:4 has a warning for all of us: “You who are trying to be declared righteous by God through legalism, have severed yourselves from the Messiah. You have fallen away from God’s grace.”

And this warning stands today. I don’t want you to think that doing the law, doesn’t bring us salvation, ok, it’s not that. So in the context that we want to obey God, we know it’s by His grace that we do it. That’s the whole connection with Yeshua.

In Exodus 21:1 “These are the rules you are to present to them.” They deal with slaves and how masters are to treat them. Respect them; it sets boundaries for purchase and forgiving freedom. Because after seven years a slave went free, unless that slave chose to stay with the master because he had a wife or children or whatever, he loved the master. Actually specifically says love in here.

It becomes clear reading the commandments that love and respect are foundational, not just for the slave to the master, but the master to the slave. So now we are getting a little bit more specific on what the reading is about. Because the readings have a lot to do with a lot of laws, there’s more than Ten Commandments, and there is a lot of instructions. But I can tell you that all the instruction is given on the basis of love and respect. Not only God for His children, but His children for God and the children’s respect for other children. But even slavery as we know it in scripture is not quite the same as we think of slavery today, it’s a little different, and I don’t have time to really go through that, that’s a whole message in itself. But there’s a foundation of love and respect in the commandments. And hat’s why the commandments are valid today. They give us structure, they give us base, respect to how we treat people, and how we treat animals.

The Mitzvot are full of compassion, fairness and love for humanity. But with HaShem’s understanding, and that sometimes it’s hard for us to understand how God thinks. We forget or we never were taught or never witnessed, that the Lord our God is love. And that His Word is love and it’s full of love and grace, and Yeshua is all of that.

“The earth Adonai is full of grace, teach me your laws and keeping with your grace. Revive me and I will observe your spoken instruction. Deal with your servant with accordance with your grace. And teach me your laws. In your grace, hear my voice. In keeping with your justice, revive me. See how I love your precepts. Adonai, in keeping with your grace revive me. (Psalm 119:64, 88, 124, 149 & 159 verses)

But we struggle to fully understand the commandments on God’s level. We have instructions that deal with physical harm to people. We find that in Sh’mot/Exodus 21:12 and following, there are lots of regulations on this. The Lord’s instructions are not only judicial and legalistic, but they have the love and the grace built right into them. If, if, we follow His Torah there we will find legalism and grace. When we study the scriptures of the Parsha we find numerous scenarios regarding justice, punishment and restitution, all crafted with the love of God.

His legal rules and His grace it is important to read and accept God’s insight. In fact many of our own laws in this good old United States are built on God’s commandments. Principles of justice thought the execution of His justice seems to have fallen short. Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound and bruise for bruise. This is one of the most quoted and misquoted scriptures in the entire bible.

We find it in our Parsha, Exodus 21:23-25. The irony is the correct interpretation is found in the very next verses. We always hear that quoted you know how hard God is, and I have a right to kill somebody if they kill me, but it’s not the correct interpretation of scripture. The correct interpretation is right in the next verses. It says and you can read them, I’m not going to read them for you. And the interpretation they are loaded with. Guess what… legalism, grace, mercy, compassion and love.

It goes on to tell, that if someone takes out your eye, you don’t give them your eye, if you read the scripture, it says you make it right. You pay for it. You make restitution. You make it right as best you can, as humanly possible. But if you knock somebody’s tooth out, you don’t go out over there with the pliers and rip out one of theirs. But many times, it’s taught that way. That we have a cruel God, we have the God of the Hebrew testament is really cruel and nasty. Well when we misquote Him He is, or when we distort the verses.

Justice is not just for man, but it is for beast as well. Treat God’s creation with respect. HaShem does not command destruction for destruction. Though that is the letter of the law, because we when read a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, a arm for and arm, life for a life, that’s the epitome of legalistic, that’s what it’s gonna cost you. So the scriptures are legal. That’s the “letter of the law.” But that’s not the grace of the law, not the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law is love and compassion, but it’s insights on rightness, and righteousness, fairness, repentance and restitution. Legalism and grace surviving in a godly created tension. It can be less filling and tastes grace.

The popular definition of New Covenant grace falls short of God’s instruction. Grace is God’s empowerment to live the kind of life He desires for us and to do the things that He wants us to do. When we say we are saved by grace, we are not referring to HaShem’s mercy. While including His mercy, grace is based on our being made right with God, based on what He has accomplished on our behalf, as opposed to our own spirituality. This is how grace is in contrast to legalism, and how they are inseparable partners. Grace has not obliterated the Torah. Just read Matthew 5:17 and 18.

“Don’t think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets, I have come not to abolish, but to complete. Yes, indeed I tell you that until heaven and earth pass away, not such much as a yod or a stroke will pass from the Torah.”

In the following verses 19 and 20, Yeshua makes it pretty clear that His grace, HaShem’s grace has not released the Body of believers from the legal goodness of the Torah and our continued obligation to it. “

So whoever disobeys the least of these Mitzvot and teaches others to do so will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever obeys them and so teaches will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness is far greater than that of the Torah teachers and the P’rushim, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I hope everybody gets that, because lots of people don’t get it. Torah is good. We need Torah. I have regular arguments or discussions, more politically correct, discussions with pastors and ministers that are insisting that the Torah is obsolete, still. Yet it’s very clear that it can’t be. It can’t be and there’s lots of other scripture we can talk about.

And going back just to make a comment about P’rushim, Yeshua says here unless your righteousness is better that the P’rushim ok, then the Torah teachers and the P’rushim, you’re certainly not going to enter the kingdom of God . That does not sound like someone that’s knocking down every Pharisee he ran into. Does it? He’s got issues with some of them, but they’re not the “Black Sheep”. So Yeshua came restoring grace under the law and the renewed commitment, thus the heartfelt commitment for the law for all of us. Isn’t Matthew 5:17 Yeshua is recommitting us as a body of believers to God’s Word. If He said anything less than that, He would be invalidating Himself. Because He is the Word made flesh

If we don’t walk in Torah, strive to walk in Torah, but we say we love God, that’s a contradiction… That’s a contradiction! You can’t support Torah becoming invalid in scripture. And when you look at it, it doesn’t even make any sense.

“It is through the love and kindness, the Chesed (mercy), divine love without strings of the Lord Yeshua, that we trust and are delivered.” Acts 15:11

Having received God’s grace we now can live godly lives. The same grace enables us to remain in rightful relationship with God, even though we fail to fully live up to His righteous standards. And what is God’s righteous standards? Torah! Torah is God’s righteous standards! So even though we don’t live up to it, because of God’s grace, His love for us, we can do it, we can struggle through it, because that’s what we do in the flesh, we struggle in Torah.

I want to ask, is anybody here getting the 10 right? Let alone the 613 right. Does anybody get 10 right? And that’s what God wants, to try, with all our hearts, all our soul, and with all our might.

So where did the Pharisees and the Orthodox of today head down the wrong rabbit trails? When they thought they could attain God’s standard through their lifelong obsession with an adherence to His commandments, without acknowledging Yeshua as the source of the grace that will free them from the condemnation and when being judged under the law and not receiving the grace. HaShem intended that the burden of His commandments would lead His people to salvation in Yeshua. When recognizing their own inability to live up to the standards of the strict legal document that we know as the Torah.

Instead of turning to Messiah, they created a formulated system of righteousness, based on the commandments, a hedge to protect the breaking of the Mitzvot, but it has turned into a barrier between our Jewish brothers and God. We need to be careful because our Jewish brothers for the most part, had a right heart intent when they created Talmud (Oral Law). There isn’t any body that can convince me, although I read plenty about Rabbi Akiva in his agenda to be in control of the Jewish world. And maybe he had a little bit of that, but that wasn’t the intention of the Sanhedrin and all the scholars that wrote the Talmud, the Mishna and the Gemara, but it has created a huge, huge wall.

Observing the Mitzvot is legalism, and the genuine adherence to God’s word. When we are walking out Torah, when we are doing commandments, when we are being called legalists, we are in fact walking our God’s commandments. We are being obedient. That is not a crime. In Fact that is what God desires of us, that we’ll walk it out, with His grace.

As we rely on Yeshua for our right standing with God, we are enabled by God’s grace to live godly lives in the midst of the Torah. Without Him we are doomed. “Because they have transgressed the teachings, changed the law and broken the everlasting covenant.” Isaiah saw it. It was prevalent in Isaiah’s day and its prevalent today.

HaShem has something great in mind. Moshe came and told the people everything Adonai had said including all the rulings. The people answered in one voice. “We will obey every word Adonai has spoken.” Exodus 24:3-4

Adonai said to Moshe, “I will give you the stone tablets with the Torah and the Mitzvot that I have written on them, so that you can teach them” v12.

Whether we are stealing sheep, destroying vineyards or mishandling finances, God expects us to do the right thing. Exodus 22:1-15. I put a lot in a couple of sentences.. And the right thing is His thing, and His thing is Torah. Legalism and being legalists in the context of HaShem’s instruction is good. God’s grace, Messiah Yeshua’s grace, give us the ability to honor HaShem in His word. And that is legalistic. And you better believe it is, but it’s also smothered in grace.

D’varim, which is Deuteronomy 5:10 says that HaShem will display His grace to the thousandth generation of those who love me and who obey His Mitzvot.” Our proper response should be: “Give thanks to Adonai for He is good and His grace continues forever.” I Chronicles 16:34.

Without the grace we cannot survive the shortfalls of our disobedience. Only by God’s sacrificing grace (Yeshua’s blood atonement) that derives out of that sacrifice, do we live. God wants us to love Him and our fellow man. By respecting them, the Mitzvot, the Laws, the Commandments, and we do that by not breaking the Lord’s very wise counsel and instruction when we fall short. “If they cry out, I will answer the cry, because I am compassionate, the Lord says.” Exodus 22:27.

“Can we say lets keep on sinning so that there can be more grace?” Romans 6:1. It follows “for sin will not have authority over you because you are not under legalism, but under grace. Therefore what conclusion should we reach? Let’s go on sinning because we’re not under legalism, but under grace. Romans 6:14 says: “Heaven forbid.” That’s not what it means at all. It doesn’t mean at all that we’re not supposed to be living a godly life. Having grace doesn’t mean that we have Carte Blanche to say and do whatever we want to who ever we want, whenever we want. First of all, that’s not even the teaching of Yeshua in the New Testament. And His teachings of in the B’rit Chadashah are no different than the teachings that are in the Hebrew Testament. They are consistent. Maybe amplified. Yeshua didn’t make up a whole bunch of new stuff. And he surely didn’t say, I got new stuff for you, forget the “old” stuff. The New stuff is the old stuff! And I don’t mean that irreverently Lord.

Revelation 22:11 and 12 says “Whoever is righteous, let him go on doing what is righteous. And whoever is holy, let him go on being holy. Pay attention, says Yeshua, I am coming soon and my rewards are with me to give to each person according to what he has done.”

Grace without legalism is not grace at all. What does God mean in Revelation 22? Who are the holy ones, what are the holy hosts doing? They are living Torah, they are living God, they are living the Word. Those that are being holy, those that being righteous, what are they doing? They’re following God. Let’s not forget, even if we want to blame it on the B’rit Chadashah, the New Testament, it didn’t exist when Revelation was written. What was Paul talking about? The only thing Paul knew was Torah, the old one.

Grace without legalism is not grace at all. Who cares if it’s less filling, if it doesn’t taste good. Without Torah, grace would not taste so good. It would in fact be tasteless, like chewing on tofu that has not been marinated in some savory juice. Torah gives grace, its flavor, its worth, its reason for being. For remember that Yeshua is Torah. Yeshua said: “I am coming soon. Amen.” Come Lord Yeshua, May the grace of the Lord Yeshua, be with us all… Amen

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Messianic Rabbi Mark Shulman