Should a Christian Observe the Torah?

Veröffentlicht am 16. Juni 2025 um 09:57

As we will learn, the Torah has never been done away on the cross. It is a common false church doctrine that Jesus would have abandoned the Torah or would have brought it to an end. Rather, he was more the purpose that the Torah has tried to attain. We won't elaborate for now on mistranslations or common false doctrines of Christianity, but we should ask if a Christian should observe the Torah or not.

 

In recent years it has become a kind of trend, that we hear allover terms like 'Torah observant Christian'. People on YouTube try to convince people that the New Testament would encourage or even oblige Christians to keep the entire Torah, or at least as much as is possible for them nowadays, contrary to the common church doctrine that the Torah would have been done away on the cross. Today, more and more Christians find their way back to their Hebrew roots. So it is no wonder that sometimes more Christians come to Kabbalah than Jews. Students often ask, then, do I have to observe the laws of the Old Testament? Do I have to keep kosher? Do I have to celebrate Shabbat and the festivals? Because Jewish Kabbalah, of course, is intimately connected with the observance of Torah and Mitzvot, questions arise like, can I even fulfill this in a non-Jewish household?

 

The apostles were all Torah-obedient Jews, but they decided to give the gentile Christians only the very basic laws, like not stealing, killing, practicing adultery, worshiping idols, etc. Something that sounds very similar to today's Noahide commandments of Judaism. The key message of the New Testament is that a gentile Christian from now on can attain the same spiritual heights as a Jew without the need of conversion and circumcision. Every believer would have a chance to serve in the celestial temple of God as a priest. Like man and woman would become one flesh, Jews and gentiles would become one spiritual body or community in Christ. There's just another responsibility in how to keep up one's own traditions. The apostle James admonished Paul in Acts chapter 21 that he should not teach Jews not to keep the Torah and not to practice circumcision. On the contrary, every Jewish follower of Christ would have to keep up the law of Moses. This contradicts the common church doctrine, but it's what the New Testament states. 

 

The apostle Paul, as an apostle for the gentiles, made it clear that gentiles should not live under the yoke of the law, but on the other hand, he doesn't represent keeping the law as a sin, like the Christian church commonly would do. He gives the gentile followers more of a free choice if they want to keep the Shabbat and festivals or not. We must imagine that it might have been no easy task for him to unite Jews and gentiles together in a community without breaking the Jewish traditions and, on the other hand, not imposing a too heavy burden on the gentiles. We must imagine that it might not be a very attractive motivation for people to be missionized if someone was waiting behind their backs with a knife to circumcise them. The message is, if we could achieve righteousness only through the law, the messiah would have died for nothing. Neither is it a sin to keep up the rituals of the Torah, nor is it an obligation for gentile believers to fulfill them.

 

My personal recommendation is to make that dependent upon circumcision. If one wants to live a Torah-obedient life, he should enter the covenant of circumcision and oblige himself to live according to the 613 Mitzvot. If not, he should follow the advice of the apostle Paul to live the Torah more in an inward way, as he interpreted the words of the Tanakh: "The Torah is inscribed in our hearts" (Romans 2:15).

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