Setting the Record Straight about the Spirit of the Law

One of the most important things we can learn how to do in our religious lives is to question our own learned rhetoric and paradigms. And so today I want to say a few words about keeping the Law according to the spirit and not the letter. I have tackled this previously in my blog Setting the Record Straight about Christianity where I came against the idea touted by some of those in the Hebrew Roots Movement and among some Messianic Jews that if you don’t keep all of the commandments you are unsaved. Consider this the sequel.

So what is it to “keeping the Law according to the spirit and not the letter” and where does it come from?

This is grossly misunderstood in many circles so, I am just going to briefly summarize the problem we have out there. When a Christian decides to keep more of the commandments than your mainstream Christian, they might be called a “legalist,” or “not believing in the finished work of Christ on the Cross.” But how do we get to that point where somehow keeping commandments becomes sinful?

Let’s first look at what it means to keep the Law according to the spirit and not the letter. First, where do we even get that phrase? Since it is repeated so often, we need to know. Here is the source of the confusion:

Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (I Cor 3:5-6, ESV)

What does this mean, that the letter kills and the Spirit gives life? And I want you to notice something–Paul does not say that we are to keep the Spirit of the Law and not the letter. Even though this is the mantra we repeat and believe, it is not actually in the Bible. Let’s look at the other “spirit/letter” verse from Paul:

But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God. (Ro 2:29, ESV)

This verse is also not, in context, telling people to obey the “spirit of the law” and not the letter. Instead, it is pointing out a man whose parents kept the commandment to circumcise (which was considered to be one of the cultural markers of Judaism) yet who lives in violation of the commandments, has what amounts to a sham circumcision because that person is not living as a true Jew, for whom God’s commandments and His Word are precious. And what does Paul say about the concept of breaking the Commandments of God so that good may come?

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Ro 6:2, ESV)

Obviously sin still exists and we can still commit it. So where does the mantra really come from?

But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (Ro 7:6, ESV)

That’s a lot closer to our mantra, right? So now we need to look at the next verse for context:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” (Ro 7:7, ESV)

The Laws of God are not sin–they instead show us what sin is. And so for those people who have been trained in this saying and never really thought about it, I have an honest question (because I used to say it too so I am in no way condemning anyone): You know that you keep a lot of commandments. In fact, you almost certainly keep the majority of those that can be kept in this day and age without a Temple and a functioning Priesthood (the regulations of which make up a whopping 58% of the laws). You love those laws that you keep. You promote them to others. You know they are good and protect us from one another. Our Savior was asked which law is the most important and He quoted from the Shema of Deut 6:4-9, and Lev 19:18:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt 22:36-40, ESV)

So, what was going on then, and what is going on now? Jesus/Yeshua has clearly said that the Law and the Prophets depend first, on loving God and second, on loving our neighbors as ourselves. In stating this, He was re-emphasizing what the Law was given to us for–the laws were given to us in order to be the bare minimum to protect us from one another’s beast natures. But He says nothing here about that Law being evil, nor does Paul, nor does anyone. The law must be used, however, for the purpose of loving God and neighbor, and not as a system of earning brownie points, or else it can become not only a trap but a deadly one. But what this doesn’t mean is that breaking the law is, in and of itself, somehow a sign of faith and keeping it somehow an act of faithlessness. Remember that faith, in the Greek, is the word pistis, which comes down to meaning trust. It would be silly for us to say we trust God and try to prove it by breaking all the commandments that (according to our beloved Messiah, to the great sage Hillel, and many others) teach us how to love God and love and protect others from our evil instincts.

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully (I Tim 1:8, ESV)

We can’t, for example, love others and keep the spirit of the law by breaking the incest commandments, right? Or by committing murder, theft, or adultery. When we lie, slander, and gossip, it isn’t because we trust God but because we ignore His love and disregard His justice by refusing to be reflections of His mercy. We show that we have no fear of or respect for Him when we casually break His commandments. And we must not have disdain for His commandments because they are the bare minimum requirements, as we learned in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus not only preached the Law but raised the bar exponentially. Not only are we commanded to keep the commandments on the outside but also on the inside. Does that mean we will do it perfectly? Of course not! And this is where faith/trust comes in. We have to trust Him to fill in our honest gaps and to not condemn us over our weaknesses as we grow in His love and righteousness.

So, no, the spirit of the law doesn’t mean disregarding the law because that wouldn’t be in the spirit of it at all! We would have to ignore all of our Messiah’s teachings! How is that trust? Jeremiah prophesied about the days of the Messiah:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer 31:31-33, ESV)

Loving God and neighbor by keeping His commandments was promised to be internalized within us, and that is our trust in the “finished work of the Cross”–that we would be granted that transformation, and that we would live in the reality of the New Creation that Paul wrote of:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor 5:17, ESV)

Jesus ushered in a new reality at the Cross, a second and greater Exodus out of sin and death. Not a death that nullified the definition and existence of sin but a death that conquered the stranglehold of sin and death over all those who would believe. Those who have truly tasted salvation know what I am talking about–slowly but surely, as we grow in Him and learn to love, those sins that were once so naturally a part of our lives fall away and become unthinkable–but they never become unsinful! We increasingly just don’t want to commit them anymore. But this is a gift. One that we once languished without–a gift that the entire world was suffering for lack of in the early first century.

But I come back to the original question–“what is the spirit of the law?”

Those who are unaware of the historical realities of the first century often do not know that it was a time of gratuitous hatred among the deeply factionalized Jewish people. Different groups (we could call them denominations and not be entirely wrong) had some rulings in those times that have been denounced by later generations. Just as, among Christians, we look back in disapproval of a great many former policies perpetrated by the Church and by Christians in the name of God–pogroms, inquisitions, the burning at the stake of those considered to be heretics, the condoning of slavery, etc..

But, the Jews have a concept–“Pikuah Nefesh” and we would rightly call it “the spirit of the law.” Yeshua made reference to it when He spoke of the “weightier matters” in Matthew 23:23. These are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Mercy is the attribute which guides Pikuah Nefesh–which literally means “saving lives.”

Pikuah Nefesh dictates, in a situation where two commandments are at odds with one another, which you keep and which you break. And whenever anyone comes to me unhappy that a friend who keeps fewer commandments has called them unsaved or not trusting in the finished work of Yeshua at the Cross, or a legalist, I ask them a few questions:

(1) If you were held hostage by a terrorist and they had a gun to the head of a child and told you they would shoot if you didn’t eat a plate full of pork, would you eat it? (Note: no one has ever said no to this question because everyone realizes how heartless and selfish it would be to end a child’s life, one of the weightiest matters, over food restrictions, a much less important matter)

(2) If someone was drowning on the Sabbath, would you move heaven and earth to save them no matter how much work was involved? (no one says no to this either, but at least some of the Qumran Covenanters who penned the sectarian documents found among the Dead Sea Scroll would have allowed them to drown)

(3) If refugees flooded into your town on the Sabbath and there was no food in the house to feed them, would you go shopping so that they could have rest on the Sabbath even though it would mean work for you? Would you kindle a flame? (I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is a former orthodox Jew and is now a believer in Yeshua and he agreed that he would definitely do this as well)

A legalist would refuse to serve others in all of these situations, believing that the keeping of the letter is the most important. But in doing so they would not be observing the spirit of the law, Pikuah Nefesh. We were never meant to be robots, using one law to get us out of the obligation to serve another and telling God that we were just doing what He said. A great many legal arguments in the Talmud center around this very concept. We must first and foremost serve life and mercy–and this is why the letter can kill if we misuse it.

But this nonsense about saved/unsaved over the number of commandments kept has really got to go. On both sides.

Only 42% of the Laws of the Torah can currently be observed, as 58% revolve around the Temple. On that 42%, 67% is kept and cherished by the overwhelming majority of mainstream Christians. Messianics/Hebrew Roots believers, at most, observe only 11% more. That leaves a lot of laws that we don’t observe. So, the whole idea of “Torah Observant” is really just as much of a myth as more mainstream Christians claiming that they believe the Law has been done away with. Both of these are mantras that people think they believe but actually do not–and certainly do not live by. It comes down to a lot of unwitting posturing on the different “sides” as each side tries to be right by saying things that aren’t actually all that true once we really stop and think about it. So how about we all ditch the illogical rhetoric that none of us truly live by and get to work, together, for the good of the Kingdom and for the sake of those who are still perishing. We all love God’s commandments–the majority of believers just have different opinions on which of the non-moral ones are still important to God. Let’s try to keep it in mind that none of us can claim to entirely know His mind, nor are our individual interpretations of Scripture faultless. We are very much in need of the very grace we should be extending to others.