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תּוֹרָה (Torah): Instruction, Not Mere Law · Reformed Thinking

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Reformed thinking welcome back we are here for another deep
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dive and today we have a topic that I think is going to catch a
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lot of people off guard it's. One of those words everyone
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thinks they know. Exactly.
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We're taking a single heavyweight theological term,
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one that carries a massive amount of baggage in the modern
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mind, and we are going to try and strip away some of those
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translation layers. Our goal is to figure out what
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this word actually communicated to the ancient Israelites.
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You know, before trees of history piled on top of it.
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It's a word that sits at the very base of biblical faith, yet
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it's, I think, often the most misunderstood.
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The word is Torah. Torah, and I know what you're
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thinking. I know what I used to think.
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You hear Torah and your mind immediately goes to law, rules,
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regulations, do's and don'ts. Maybe you picture a police
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officer standing there with a ticket book.
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That is the standard reaction, and honestly, it is a
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significant oversimplification. An oversimplification.
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A huge one. If you only hear law when you
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read Torah, you are missing the heart of the concept.
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You're missing the the relational aspect of.
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It So we're going to fix that today.
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We're going to look at the road map of this word.
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We'll start with the gritty etymological roots, like where
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does the word actually come from?
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Yeah, the building blocks. Then we'll trace how it was used
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in the home, then in the temple by the priests, then how the
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prophets expanded the concept, and finally how it became the
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written Canon we know today. It's a movement from a verb, an
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action, to a noun, to a fixed reality.
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OK, let's unpack this. Let's start at the very bottom,
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the root word. My notes here say the root verb
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is error. That is correct.
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So the Hebrew noun Torah is derived from the verbal root
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year, specifically in what's called the hissful form.
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OK, now there's actually a bit of a scholarly scuffle regarding
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where this root comes from. A.
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Scholarly scuffle. I like that.
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Polite one, but a debate nonetheless.
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There's a minority view, famously held by a scholar named
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Wellhausen. He wanted to connect year to the
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idea of casting lots. Casting lots, so like throwing
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dice or stones to get a decision.
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Exactly divination. So God's will is a roll of the
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dice. Well, the idea was that year A
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meant to throw or to shoot. So the original Torah was the
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result of a cast lot, a decision revealed through chance, or, you
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know, divinely guided chance. But I take it that's not the
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view we're going with today. No, it's largely been rejected.
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The majority view, supported by heavyweights like Gesenius and
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Usborne, looks at the context of how the word is actually used,
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and they argue it connects to a physical gesture, specifically
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extending the hand or pointing the finger.
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OK. I want you, the listener, to
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visualize this. This isn't a judge banging A
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gavel. It's not a cop writing a ticket.
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This is a guide. Correct.
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Imagine a teacher or a guide standing at a fork in the road.
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They stretch out their hand and point a finger toward the
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correct path. That is the root image of Torah.
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So it's about pointing out the route that changes the emotional
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tone of the word entirely. Law feels restrictive.
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It feels like a fence. Pointing the way feels helpful.
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It feels necessary. It does, and we have support for
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this from cognate languages. In Akkadian, for instance,
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there's a word tertu. Tertu.
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It means directive or instruction.
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Now it can refer to omens or signs, but the core meaning is
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receiving direction on how to proceed.
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So the primary definition we're working with isn't rule, but
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instruction or direction. Yes, the translation law, which
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comes from the Greek word nomos in the Septuagint.
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That came much later. And while Torah certainly
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contains laws, the Hebrew idea is so much broader.
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It is guidance. So when we say God gives Torah,
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we're not just saying he's legislating from a distance,
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we're saying he's pointing out the way to walk.
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He is the guy who extends his hand to show the path of life.
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That's a great starting point. Now I want to move to something
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that really surprised me in the research.
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When I think of Torah, I, like most people think of Moses,
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Mount Sinai, the 10 commandments.
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With big public stuff, right? But the sources show that Torah
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appears frequently in a completely different context,
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the Book of Proverbs. It does, and this is what we
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call the wisdom context. If you look at Proverbs, Torah
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is used in a very secular, or perhaps we should say a very
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domestic sense. Domestic is the right word.
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We're not in the temple here, we're in the living room or the
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kitchen. Exactly.
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Proverbs 4.1 says here, O sons, a father's instruction and be
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attentive that you may gain insight.
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That word for instruction is Torah.
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So a dad telling his kids how to behave, how to manage their
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money, how to stay out of trouble.
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He's giving them Torah, yes. And it gets even more
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interesting. Proverbs 1.8 and Proverbs 6.20
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explicitly mentioned the Torah of your mother.
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The Torah of your mother? That's fascinating.
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We usually associate the law with a patriarchal priesthood or
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a figure like Moses, but here the mother is a source of Torah.
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It shows that Torah in its root sense is relational instruction.
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It's the advice and guidance passed down from parent to
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child. It's not legal code in the state
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sense, it's life teaching. And the sources mentioned this
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type of Torah is associated with light and life.
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Proverbs 6.23 says for the commandment is a lamp and the
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teaching the Torah is a light. There it is again.
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Just like the etymology of pointing the way here, the Torah
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illuminates the path so you don't stumble in the dark.
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And it's oral, right? This isn't a mother handing her
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child a scroll and saying read chapter 3.
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Correct. In the Wisdom context, Torah is
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oral instruction. It's the voice of the teacher,
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the hakam, the wise one, or the voice of the parent.
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It represents human authority and wisdom passed down
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generationally. So before it was capitalized the
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Torah referring to the Bible, it was lowercase Torah.
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Just good advice on how to live well.
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It's instruction for life, and that human element is a crucial
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building block. God eventually uses this
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language to describe his relationship with Israel, but
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the concept is rooted in that intimate face to face guidance.
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I love that it makes it feel much less sterile.
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But we do have to talk about the institutional side of things.
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The outline moves us from the home to the Temple.
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Section 3 is the Priestly Torah. Right.
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This is where the usage starts to shift toward what we might
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recognize as religious law. In the Old Testament, the priest
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had a very specific job description.
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I thought their job was mostly like, you know, sacrificing
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animal. That was the ritual part,
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certainly, but their intellectual duty was to handle
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Torah, Deuteronomy 33.10 Zero says of the Levites.
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They teach Jacob your rules and Israel your Torah.
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So the priest was a teacher and instructor.
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He was the custodian of distinct knowledge.
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You see it in Jeremiah 18.18. The people say for the Torah
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shall not perish from the priest.
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It was their trademark. So if you wanted to know what
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God wanted in a specific situation, you didn't go to a
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library, you went to a priest. Exactly, the sources mentioned
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Hagai 2.1 where it says ask the priests for a ruling and the
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Hebrew there is ask the priests for a Torah.
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In this context, Torah is not a whole book, it's a specific
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ruling on a specific issue. What kind of issues are we
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talking about here? Everyday stuff.
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Usually it was about distinctions.
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The priests job at its core was distinguished between the holy
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and the common, the clean and the unclean.
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So things like can I eat this or I have this weird skin rash?
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Am I allowed to go into the temple?
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Those are the specific examples Leviticus uses.
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We see these little phrases all over the place.
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The Torah of the burnt offering, or the Torah of leprosy, or the
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really strange Torah of the jealousy ordeal.
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So these were individual packets of instruction, like little
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instruction manuals for specific situations.
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Yes, individual Toro. That's the plural.
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Over time, these individual rulings, they aggregated, they
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sort of clumped together to form a body of professional knowledge
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often called dot. It sounds a lot like case law.
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You build up enough specific rulings and eventually you have
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a whole system. That's a very fair comparison,
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but the sources highlight a crisis here because the priests
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were the gatekeepers of this instruction.
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When they failed, the whole system collapsed.
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I see Zephaniah 3.4 in the notes.
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Her priests do violence to the Torah.
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That's a strong phrase. How do you do violence to
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instruction? By twisting it for your own
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gain, or as Ezekiel says, by failing to teach the difference
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between the clean and the unclean.
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If the person pointing the finger, the guide is pointing in
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the wrong direction or just refuses to point at all.
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And the people are lost. They're lost.
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That links back to the pointing metaphor perfectly.
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A corrupt priest is a broken compass.
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Exactly, and that failure of the priesthood really paves the way
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for the prophets to step in and widen the definition of Torah
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even further. Which brings us to Section 4,
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the prophetic expansion. This is where I feel like the
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word gets much, much bigger. It really does.
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The prophets, you're thinking Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah.
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They start using Torah to mean something much larger than just
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how to perform a sacrifice. Or is this meat clean?
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So how does it change? What do they do with it?
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It becomes for them the entire disclosure of Yahweh's will.
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It stops being just about ritual details and starts being about
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the moral and spiritual direction of the entire nation.
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There's that famous passage in Isaiah chapter 1.
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Isaiah. 1.10 It's a powerhouse, he says.
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Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom.
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Give ear to the teaching the Torah of our God, you people of
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Gomorrah. And then he goes on to just
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blast them for their empty sacrifices, right?
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He says God is sick of them. Yes, and that's the beautiful
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irony. He uses the word Torah, which
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the priest used for ritual rules, to introduce a prophetic
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Oracle that actually critiques empty rituals.
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So he's redefining it in real time.
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He is. He's saying the true Torah of
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God is not just about the blood of bulls.
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It's about justice and righteousness and caring for the
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orphan and the widow. So Torah is becoming synonymous
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with the word of the Lord. Correct.
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The two terms Torah and Dabar, which means word.
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They're often used in parallel and prophetic literature.
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It shows that this instruction is direct revelation from God's
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heart, and it covers all of life.
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There's a really heavy verse in Hosea that I think resonates
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with a lot of people today. Hosea 4.6.
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My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
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Because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you, since
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you have forgotten the Torah of your God.
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It's terrifying. It is.
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It implies that forgetting the Torah, forgetting the direction
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God has given, leads to actual destruction.
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It's not just breaking a rule and getting a penalty.
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It's losing your survival guide. It's losing your connection to
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reality. If you reject the instruction of
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the Creator, you are trying to live against the grain of the
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universe He made. It can't work.
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Now we have to talk about Jeremiah 31.
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As Reformed thinkers, this is a massive text for us, the New
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Covenant. It is the pivot point of
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redemptive history. Jeremiah is looking at a people
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who have the Torah on stone tablets or in scrolls, but they
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keep disobeying it. The external guidance isn't
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working. The external pointing finger was
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not enough to change their hearts.
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The problem was internal. So what's the promise?
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What's the fix? Jeremiah 31.33 I will put my
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law, my Tor within them, and I will write it on their hearts.
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I love that he doesn't say I'll give them a new easier law, or
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I'll just get rid of the law altogether, no.
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The content of the Torah, God's righteous direction, that
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remains the same. What changes is the location.
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The location. It moves from external stone
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tablets to internal reality. It moves from a finger pointing
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out there to an impulse guiding you from in here.
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That is the work of the Holy Spirit.
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It is. It is the internalization of
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God's will. The guide is no longer just
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shouting for the mountaintop, he is resident within the believer.
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And the prophets also saw this going global, right?
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It wasn't just for Israel. Oh, absolutely.
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Isaiah 2 and Micah 4 both have this incredible vision that
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Torah shall go forth from Zion. It envisions the nations of the
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world coming to Jerusalem not as conquerors, but as students.
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They come to get this arbitration, this divine
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direction, so they can beat their swords into plowshares.
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So Torah becomes the standard for global peace, the ultimate
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instruction manual for humanity. That's the vision.
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That is a huge vision. So we've gone from a mother
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teaching her son to a priest checking for leprosy, to a
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prophet declaring the cosmic will of God.
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But we still need to talk about how it became a book.
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Right, Section 5. Deuteronomic Unity.
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This is where the Torah becomes the Bible, essentially, or at
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least the beginning of it. The outline says that
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Deuteronomy changes the game. Deuteronomy is central.
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It's a game changer. In Deuteronomy, the word Torah
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is usually singular, and it refers to the entire covenant
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code that Moses is preaching. It's not just scattered rulings
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anymore. And this is where we start
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seeing phrases like this Torah or the Book of the Torah.
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C For her Torah, this is the moment of what some scholars
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call totalization. Totalization.
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It's no longer just oral tradition or ad hoc priestly
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decisions. It is a fixed written body of
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God's will that must be obeyed, read and copied.
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Speaking of copying, there's that incredible rule for the
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king. Deuteronomy 17.18 The king is
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required to write for himself a copy of this Torah in a book.
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That's fascinating. The king isn't above the law, he
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has to literally sit down and hand copy it himself.
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It was to keep him humble, the text says.
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He had to do it so his heart would not be lifted up above his
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brothers. Even the highest human authority
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must submit to the direction of Yahweh.
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And he had to read it all the days of his life.
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Right, it was meant to shape him constantly.
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This shift to a written book leads to some really dramatic
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moments in Israel's history. I'm thinking of Josiah. 02 Kings
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22. It's an amazing story.
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The temple has fallen into disrepair.
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They're doing renovations and the high priest Hilkaya finds
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the Book of Law in the House of the Lord.
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It had been lost. I mean, Can you imagine that the
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written direction of God was just gathering dust in a closet
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somewhere? And when it's read to King
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Josiah, he tears his clothes. He realizes how far off the
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path, how far off the Torah, the nation has drifted for
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generations. So the written text became the
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catalyst for a massive national reform.
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It did. It acted as an objective
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standard that judged the king of the people.
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Then later you get to Ezra and Nehemiah and it seems like the
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book is the absolute center of everything.
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By the time of Ezra after the exile, the community is
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rebuilding itself around this text.
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Ezra is described as a scribe of the law of the God of Heaven.
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And then you have that beautiful scene in Nehemiah chapter 8.
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The people gather at the Watergate and Ezra brings out
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the Sephirot Moshe, the book of the Law of Moses.
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And he reads it from early morning until midday for hours.
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And the people stood up out of respect.
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It also mentions that the Levites went among the people
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and help them understand the reading.
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They gave the sense so that the people understood.
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Which sounds a lot like the birth of expository preaching in
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a way. It is reading the text and
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explaining the instruction. And by this point, when they say
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Torah, what are they referring to?
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At this point, it's pretty clear it refers to the Pentateuch, the
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first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy.
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The Canon is solidifying. So we have the book.
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It's written down, it's authoritative, but does that
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make it dry? Does it just become a list of
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rules again, just in a book this time?
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That is the danger, isn't it? But that brings us to the
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Psalms. And the answer the Psalms gives
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is a resounding no. Section 6.
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The Psalms delight and piety. This is the emotional response
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to the Torah. Right.
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If you read Psalm One, or Psalm 19 or that giant Psalm 119, you
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do not find people groaning under a heavy burden.
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You find delight. You find joy.
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Psalm 19 is one of my favorites. The law of the Lord is perfect.
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Reviving the soul. That doesn't sound like a
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burden. Or, more to be desired, are they
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than gold, sweeter also than honey and drippings of the
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honeycomb? Honey, that is not how most
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people describe a rule book. Because they're not seeing it as
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a rule book, they're seeing it as the wisdom of God, the
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blessed man of Psalm One. His delight is in the Torah of
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the Lord, and on it he meditates day and night.
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Why? Why would he do that?
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Because he wants to be like a tree planted by streams of
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water. He knows that's where life is.
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So it goes right back to that wisdom context we started with.
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It's the instruction for life. That's right, the Psalmist knows
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that without this Torah, he is stumbling in the dark.
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That is why Psalm 119 says so famously.
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Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
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Wow, we are right back to the etymology, the pointing finger,
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the light showing the way. It all connects.
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The pious Israelite loved the core because it was the visible
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evidence of God's grace. God did not leave them guessing
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in the dark. He showed them how to live.
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That's a really critical theological point, especially
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for us as reformed thinkers. We often draw a sharp line
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between law and grace, but here the giving of the law is an act
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of grace. Absolutely.
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The fact that God speaks, that He directs is an act of love.
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He could have left us in silence.
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That would be the opposite of grace.
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OK, before we wrap up, there's one odd little nugget in the
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sources. Section 7 calls it the Torah of
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Man. Yes, 10 and Samuel 741 time.
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This isn't David's prayer after God promises him an eternal
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dynasty. The Hebrew is really tricky.
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David asks. Is this the Torah of mankind?
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What does that even mean? The law of mankind.
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It's very difficult to translate.
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Some think it means it's just the customary way you treat
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humans. Others suggest it means is this
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the Charter for Humanity or is this the lot of a man embarked
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on a high career? Or maybe connecting to what
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we've said, is this the instruction for humanity, A
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pattern for how to live? It's possible it implies that
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God's dealing with David is a pattern or a direction for how
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he interacts with people. It just shows that the word
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Torah has a real flexibility to it.
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It's about the manner or custom or pattern of things.
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OK. So let's try to synthesize all
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of this. We've covered a lot of ground
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from a verb to a book. We have.
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We've seen the word evolve, or maybe expand is the better.
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Word. It starts with the root year,
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that visual of the finger pointing the way.
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Then it's the mother and father at the breakfast table giving
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wisdom for how to live a good life.
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Then it's the priest in the temple making these crucial
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distinctions between clean and unclean, holy and common.
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Then the prophet steps up, declaring the total moral will
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of Yahweh and promising it will one day be written on the heart.
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Then the scribe in the post exilic period holding the
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written book of the covenant as the center of the community.
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And finally, the believer, the individual and the Psalms,
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delighting in that book as their life, in their light.
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But through all these phases, is there a consistent thread, a
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core idea that holds it all together?
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I think the consistency is that it's always to our Yahweh.
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It is the gracious destruction of God to His people, whether
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it's oral or written, domestic or priestly.
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It is God saying this is the way, walk in it.
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And for us today as Christians, we still need that direction.
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We still need that pointing finger.
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We do, and as Christians we believe that the Word became
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flesh. Jesus is the ultimate disclosure
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of God's will. He is, in a very real sense, the
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living Torah. That is where it gets really
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interesting, but we are running close to our time.
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I want to leave you, the listener, with the final
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provocative thought from the outline.
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It comes from the Book of Lamentations chapter 2, verse 9.
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This is a book written after the total destruction of Jerusalem.
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The temple is gone. The city is burned to the
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ground. A.
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Lowest point. The absolute lowest.
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And the verse says her King and Princess are among the nations.
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The law, the Torah, is no more. The Torah is no more.
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Just think about the implication of that for the writer of
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Lamentations. The loss of Torah is equated
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with total desolation. It is the silence of God.
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Without that pointing. We are just lost in the dark.
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It's a terrifying thought and it should make us appreciate the
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fact that we have the book, we have the instruction, we have
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the guidance. We are not left to guess.
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No, the light is shining. Thank you for joining us on this
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deep dive into the vocabulary of faith.
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It really changes how you read the Bible when you realize law
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means guidance. It changes everything.
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Performed thinking.