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There is a popular view among Christians, to some extent justified in the words and teachings of Christ himself concerning the Pharisees, that one is somehow more sensitive to the spiritual aspects of Christian teaching if one de-emphasises those practices in the Bible which possess an outward manifestation. The truth is, however, that it takes a great deal of faith to keep God's laws, particularly in the modern world where one invites ridicule by engaging in these practices. These laws are important. If we know God's will for us and do not keep to his ways it is a serious sin. Moreover, it is a real test of our priorities in life that we sacrifice a seventh of our time to God, a tenth of our income, and forsake unclean foods. All of these things create difficulties in today's world and force us to stand up and be counted as God's people. Accordingly we should view such conduct in its proper light as an act of deep faithfulness in God, and not simply dismiss it out of hand as evidence of a belief in "salvation by works" by deluded heretics.

Many people who scorn the idea of people living by the Old Testament commandments claim to accept the literal truth of the scriptures, and the belief in the coming of the kingdom of God. How then do they understand the words of Isaiah when he describes the coming of the LORD in the latter days. This is a time still to come, yet we read that among the wicked to be punished and destroyed by God will be people who eat pork and other unclean food:

Later in the same chapter appear the following words:

How can people argue so strongly against the acceptance of God's law, yet fail to see that the very same laws continue right into the millennium? The law was once valid, and will be again. How can traditional Christians assert that now in the intervening period, in some mysterious way, the law has been suspended, and even abolished?

The plain fact is that few students of the Bible, in their religious experience have ever contemplated the idea of obeying God's Old Testament law. To the overwhelming majority, it is a bizarre and unfamiliar teaching - a legacy of the estrangement which developed between Christians and Jews as Christianity became more influenced by gentile pagan ideas. That these teachings could have some basis in truth seems such an outlandish assertion that it is not given a moment's serious thought. Adherence to this way of thinking is not, and never was, a part of their religious background. Their experience of conversion was genuine, so the argument goes, nothing positive was ever said about the law of Moses, therefore this view of Christianity must be wrong! We all see the original vision of Christianity we had at conversion as representing the pristine truth. Any "truth" which comes afterwards is viewed with suspicion, the assumption being that anything new and strange and "not part of the original message as I received it" must be wrong. It is a shame that this attitude should prevail over the dictates of God's law as recorded in the Bible.

Why has it taken so long for these truths to be proclaimed? It is not so difficult to understand when we consider the fact that the Bible was largely a closed book to humanity for fifteen centuries, kept out of the hands of the common people by a priestly elite. Most people in times past could not read or write, and even if they could it was necessary to be able to understand Latin in order to read the Bible. Having overcome these obstacles in the quest for Bible truth, the individual finally encountered the iron discipline of the established church which brooked no challenge to its teachings.

It is only in recent centuries, since the Reformation period, that the Bible has become available to ordinary people, and the old errors and deviations slowly given way to a knowledge of the truth. Even the early Protestants were influenced by much of the old theology and religious practices. An illustration of this is the fact that the first Protestants, despite overthrowing Romish images and religious practices, nevertheless readily accepted an expressly Catholic interpretation of the Sabbath Day. Officially, according to the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, the true sabbath is declared to be Saturday. However the "holy, mother, Roman church" claims for itself the power to change the day of worship for Christians to Sunday. (Note: Dan.7:25! "[He] shall think to change the times and the law"). Modern day Protestants keep Sunday as their "Christian Sabbath" expressly on the orders of the Pope! There was no other justification for continuance of this practice!

There is no longer any excuse for traditionalists to resist the plain message of the Bible concerning the keeping of God's law.

There are those who will take issue with the actual wisdom of the Old Testament law. They will strongly assert that many of these laws belong to an ancient and barbaric past that we have outgrown as civilisation has developed. The more benign version of this argument is that the law relates to an essentially rural society. As such how, it might be argued, is this relevant to the lifestyle of twentieth century man? The truth is that man was really always intended to live a basically agrarian existence, close to nature. Man after all was originally placed in a garden surrounded by animals. The dream of every hassled city-dweller is to escape to the peace and quiet of the countryside. This is precisely the kind of life we all seek deep-down, and that God desires us to have! Prophecies of the world to come are replete with images of rural life, every man sitting beneath his fig tree, and tending the soil. This will be a world where great cities will be the exception (if they exist at all!); where most people will live in small rural communities. The whole nature of human life will take on a different character. For example, noisy, smelly, polluting automobiles may not even exist in this new world. A man's work will be on his own plot of ground surrounded by his wider extended family. There will be no need for him to travel the vast distances necessitated by modern urbanised existence. Since man will be self-sufficient on little farmlets, there will be no need for the complex monetary systems we have today. The whole economic system will be revolutionised. Moreover, progress will not be measured by the criteria of a materialistic culture which is at odds with the environment. Technological advancement will be governed by considerations based on man's renewed spiritual nature, and not just a mad rush to be the biggest and the best at all costs, as in today's world. Man's system of values will be gentler and more "humane" (i.e. Godly). Tomorrow's success story among the nations maybe more a sleepy South Sea island's backwater than corporate Japan! It is in this setting that so much Bible law will again take on its real significance in human life.

A more incisive argument is that the Old Testament law is bloodthirsty and violent, and does not befit modern ideas of justice. According to this view it is totally indefensible to condone Bible laws relating to the punishment of criminals. It is one thing to accept the execution of murderers as the Bible demands. But quite another to accept such a drastic punishment for offences like adultery, and the striking of a father by his son! But in this attitude modern critics are making a few questionable assumptions. We don't execute adulterers these days, but who is to say that this is really such an enlightened way of looking at things? Our society allows even the most brutal sadistic murderers to live after they are caught and convicted, sometimes only to be released and repeat their crime! We keep prisoners penned up in overcrowded, and hellish prisons. We do all this in the name of a twisted form of "enlightenment". The Bible teaches immediate and measured retaliation exactly in accordance with the nature of the crime committed. In fact, today's criminals should suffer both capital and corporal punishment - just as the Bible dictates, and not be kept confined indefinitely with little hope of reform. There should be extensive schemes of criminal compensation. People who commit robbery and property offences should be made to reimburse their victims with interest (Lev.6:4-5), through forced labour if necessary! Consider how leniently we deal with those who sexually abuse children. When compared with modern human concepts of criminology the idea of executing adulterers does not seem so silly. What we need to do is to get some of our ideas straightened out according to God's ways.

People who argue that Christ did away with capital punishment in his teachings should contemplate his words in Mat.25:41:

Consider also the picture of Christ in Rev.19:15:

In the parable of the pounds, Christ portrays himself as a returning king who exacts retribution on his enemies by putting them to death (Luke 19:25).

The popular image of a pacifist Christ forever humbly tolerating the iniquity of mankind does not stand up very well against these passages!

But surely, it will be argued, Christ dispensed with capital punishment in the incident concerning the adulterous woman recorded in the gospel of John. But in this instance the crowd who wished to have the woman stoned in accordance with the Law of Moses were clearly not principally concerned with the application of divine law. (There were, in any event, a number of aspects of this case which were not completely consistent with the law as laid down in the Torah, e.g. the absence of the male offender, even though the woman had been "caught in the act"; and the possibility that the mob lacked duly constituted authority according to the law.) The accusers were primarily concerned to catch Jesus in a dilemma over his claims to be able to exercise divine forgiveness personally, and the opportunity afforded to have Jesus further "incriminate" himself on this issue. The important thing to remember is that they themselves were not in reality concerned with applying the Mosaic Law, but in discrediting Jesus. As such, his response was perfectly appropriate to the situation, when he declared "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." He was addressing the real issue, the hard heartedness and hypocrisy of the accusers, not the demands of the Mosaic Law. This episode, then, provides no justification for generalisations regarding the attitude of Jesus to capital punishment. Neither can it be used as evidence that on one occasion at least, Jesus in fact dispensed with the Mosaic Law by obstructing its performance. Similarly, the teaching concerning "an eye for an eye" in Mat.5:38 does not refer to the statement in the Torah, but to a popular interpretation of this biblical text as understood by sinful men, i.e. as an excuse for personal retribution.

One of Satan's most successful deceptions these days is that there is no basis for the principle of deterrence. It is argued by people with liberal philosophical leanings that deterrence does not influence the crime rate. They ridicule the idea that capital punishment discourages murder. As a matter of fact the principle of deterrence has virtually never been instituted in any modern society. How do I justify this statement? Because deterrence does not rely solely upon the existence of capital punishment as a provision in the statute books. It has to be actually seen to be put into practice on every occasion before it can have a deterrent effect. This was never the case in the United States in the first half of this century, where only a relative handful of convicted murderers were ever actually executed. Utilising every kind of false data, and misuse of statistics, opponents of capital punishment have helped spread the delusion that the biblical principle of punishment which fits the crime doesn't work. The fact is, it has actually never been tried in the modern era!

The bible demands execution for adulterers and homosexuals. These are sins of enormous magnitude! We excuse these activities and work to abolish capital punishment for hardened criminals. At the same time we think nothing of teminating the lives of innocent unborn children because it may be inconvenient for us to have children. These are social attitudes we can really be proud of! It is man's concepts of right and wrong which are truly warped, not those of the Bible! Seen in this light, the supporter of Old Testament law has no need to feel defensive in arguing biblical principles of justice and right living.

It should nevertheless be emphasised that the Old Testament law of capital punishment concerned the regulation of society by civil authorities. Christ taught his followers to not resist evil-doers (Mat.5:39), and this indicates that as individuals we should practice non-violence in our personal lives.

Criticism is also levelled at the ceremonial law of the Old Testament by modern Christians on the basis that it has ceased to have relevance. In previous chapters I have argued that formality can have the effect of stifling genuine religious experience. It is true that in the hands of unspiritual men religious truths can be seriously corrupted by an over-emphasis on form and ritual. However the converse of this view is that there is a place for ritual and formalism in human life. In fact there is a God-given instinct in man to practice religion in a ritualistic fashion - so long as it does not subvert, and actually come to replace genuine spirituality. Man's need of ritual is met in the Bible, just as every other aspect of his existence is dealt with in Bible law.

It is truly ironic that Christianity has set aside the festivals and ceremonies of the Old Testament on the basis that they belong to an outmoded and obsolete religious system, and yet merely replaces these rituals with a host of new ones which are not even sanctioned in scripture.

One of the major areas of Old Testament law in the Jewish religion is the cycle of holy days laid down in the Torah. These holy days have been rejected by traditional Christianity because they were part of the Old Testament law abolished by Paul. They are called "Jewish", and regarded as a strange and exotic custom which had relevance under the Old Covenant, but ceased to have a place in the "new" religion of Christ. This is curious given that Jesus himself observed this system of holy days. even more to the point, contrary to commonly accepted belief, these days are directly applicable to Christianity.

It is not as if Christianity has dropped the ceremonies of the Old Testament and forsaken the whole idea of ritual. It has simply replaced the genuine holy days of the Bible with festivals which owe their origins to paganism. This is the foundation for modern celebrations such as Easter and Christmas. The crass consumerism and profitmaking involved in these celebrations carried out in the name of Christ are a complete insult to everything he taught. Meanwhile, the holy days which the founder of Christianity himself observed, remain a complete mystery to most professing Christians! Even in principle, the religious festivals of the Old Testament should be far preferable to Christianity than the pagan celebrations it has adopted.

What I am suggesting is that Christians as a matter of religious law should be observing the Old Testament festivals in a Christian context, with regard for the specifically New Testament meanings to be attached to them, as well as a consciousness of their meaning in the national history of the people Israel. However, there is an even more basic aspect of this issue. As a matter of practical reality there is absolutely no reason why the Old Testament holy days should not have been adopted automatically in the development of Christian theology. In what follows I seek to show that most, if not all, of the so-called "Jewish" festivals are in some way directly relevant to Christians quite apart from the dictates of religious law.

The Old Testament sets out five religious festivals. I am inclined to think that, as with every other part of God's law, they have an eternal validity, and as such probably were in existence in some form or other before being given to the people of Israel. This is implied in Gen.1:14 (NEB) ‘Let there be lights in the vault of heaven ... to serve as signs both for festivals and for seasons’. I would expect that the Passover existed as some kind of religious festival even before the events of the Exodus. According to this scenario, the flight from Egypt merely served to give a new relevance to an already established feast to the Hebrew God. Subsequent events have invested these festivals with a new significance, as indeed happened in the case of Christ.

There is evidence in the Bible to justify Christian observance of at least five out of the seven holy days that were enjoined upon Israel as annual sabbaths of the Hebrew calendar, in addition to the seventh day Saturday sabbath. This alone suggests that the whole system of Old Testament holy days is applicable in Christianity.

These festivals and holy days are as follows:

PASSOVER

This feast celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, around the fifteenth century B.C. Jews are required to commemorate the Exodus by eating unleavened bread for seven days as a reminder that the people left the land of their captivity in great haste, and did not have time to bake bread fully. The first and seventh days are holy days on which no work is to be done. This seven day period follows observance of a special passover meal in memory of the night when God's angel slew the first-born of the Egyptians, but "passed over" the Israelites. Central to this feast as set out in the Old Testament, was the sacrifice of a spotless lamb.

The Christian application of this festival highlights the deliverance of the individual from the "Egypt" of sin; the journey through the wilderness of trials and tribulations in the service of God; and finally, entry to the promised land of eternal life in the kingdom of God. The Christian passover lamb is of course Christ himself, whose death has provided deliverance and life.

Should Christians observe this feast? Christ himself observed it, and Paul (in 1 Cor.5:8) writes to his followers:

What really settles the issue however is that at the last supper Christ stated that he would observe the passover in the kingdom of God (Mk.14:25), which has not yet come! Are we to assume that if it was good to observe the passover in Old Testament times, and in the time of Christ, that it will also be good in the kingdom of God, but for some reason is unnecessary, and even wrong now, in the intervening time? The answer from traditional Christian theology is a resounding YES!

It is clear from the statement of Christ in Mark that the passover possesses a meaning in the thinking of Christ which gives it a valid place in Christianity in the present time. Obviously Christians today should be observing the passover as a memorial of Christ's crucifixion, quite apart from its Old Testament significance. Christians bother to observe Easter (which invokes the name of the pagan goddess Astarte or Ashtoreth!) which is computed albeit erroneously, on the basis of the events of the passover week at the time of the crucifixion. Why not observe the passover festival in full at this time, just as did Christ and his followers? Since it will be observed once again in the Messianic kingdom, and by the Messiah himself, what possible counterarguments exist for dispensing with it in modern Christianity?

PENTECOST

A one day sabbath observed fifty days after the passover. In the Old Testament this feast commemorated the first ingathering of the harvest season (the first-fruits), and the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai. In the New Testament context we are reminded of the called out and chosen ones of the present age, who are the first-fruits of Christ's salvation. The New Testament Christians received the spirit of God (the baptism of the spirit) on this day. Traditional Christianity asserts that this represented the beginning of the Christian church. Of all the Old Testament festivals this is the most obvious candidate for elevation to the status of a Christian holy day/festival. How is it that Christianity can observe a pagan inspired celebration such as Christmas, and yet overlook this holy day? There are no possible excuses here. Failure to observe Pentecost represents positive proof that Christianity has gone terribly astray doctrinally!

THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES

Known by Jews as Succoth (meaning "booths"). This is a reference to the temporary dwellings the Israelites lived in after the flight from Egypt. It is an eight day festival. The first and eight days are holy day/sabbaths on which no work should be performed. This feast reminds us of the wanderings of the Israelites through the wilderness of Sinai, just as Christians wander through the vicissitudes of life on the way to the kingdom.

This festival is mentioned in the book of Zechariah as a mandatory celebration for the nations in the Messianic kingdom. Are we to understand that a festival which was solemnly commanded in the Old Testament, and which will be observed in the world to come under threat of dire punishment for those who do not keep it, somehow loses its validity in the intervening period - in the name of "Christian freedom" or some other ill-defined concept? It is painfully clear that the Feast of Tabernacles has not been dispensed with.

The foregoing argument amounts to a clear-cut justification for Christian observance of the Old Testament holy days. The festivals I have dealt with make up the majority of the biblically ordained feasts days. The remaining festivals are TRUMPETS (Rosh Ha Shana - the Hebrew New Year), a holy day/sabbath which inaugurates the civil year of the Hebrew calendar; and the DAY OF ATONEMENT (Yom Kippur), a special fast day symbolising man's recognition of his sins, and the need for reconciliation with God. Each of these feast days can be understood in a New Testament setting, and if the festivals as set out above continue to be relevant to Christians, there is every reason to think that these are also.

The holy days are everlasting, and they remind us of God's role in human affairs expressed in the cycle of the seasons and the rhythms of human existence. Like every other aspect of God's law, they serve a purpose in instructing us in the ways of righteousness. There is absolutely no reason why they should ever have been abolished. The Bible states that the commandments are not burdensome (1 Jn.5:3), and are to our benefit. It is only through a twisted interpretation of the scriptures that men have been deluded into thinking God's law has been done away with. The Jewish people have received a special blessing from God by being entrusted with his commandments.

Those who argue against law-keeping, and hold the Old Testament law in contempt, as Christian theology does in effect, must puzzle over what they read in Deut.6:4-9:

This is called by the Jews Shema Israel and is one of the foundational Bible texts of the Jewish religion. All religious Jews would be quite familiar with this passage of scripture. Can Christians say the same thing? In these words we see the profound importance of keeping God's laws. Their importance is such that we are to teach our children diligently to obey them; to think and talk about them continually. They have supreme relevance to our lives. They are of eternal validity. What sense can Christians, who see God's law as dispensed with, possibly see in these words? This quotation destroys the whole basis of so-called "Pauline" theology as effectively as any other passage of scripture! The Jews are privileged to have been given this law to live by.

Jesus taught that we should make God central to our lives, and submit totally to his will. This is what faith really amounts to. We do this by making him the number one consideration in all of our actions. The Bible teaches that our first step in accepting God is to repent (which means to turn away from evil) and begin to keep God's commandments. If we continue following our own ways, and not those of God, we are putting ourselves first and God second.

The true message of Christianity to the Jews is: accept Jesus Christ, and return to the Torah! Gentiles should take note and follow their example.

CONTINUE

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