Israel ben Betzalel

Our perspective to the Torah, and Torah observance, should always be to inquire “how much can I love God, and others today?” The entire Torah and Prophets “hang” from “love God” and “love people!” This means that not a single commandment is outside of the category of love! Thus if we desire to love, if we wish to love as Messiah himself loved, then love demands and requires that our behavior conform to the Torah that Messiah himself lived, and now desires to live through us. There isn’t a minimum to love. Love is the maximum. Do you see it now? Do you agree that only doing the maximum, one can love - and to fail in any measure of the maximum, is to in fact… NOT love? It is to fall short of the mark. And that, friends, is the definition of sin. Sin therefore is failing to love according to God’s standard of love: the Torah. It as simple as that.

If the entire Torah is about how to love God and love people as God desires, then why wouldn’t a believer in Messiah desire to conform their behavior accordingly? If Yeshua is the standard of love by which the rest of the unbelieving world is judged, then how much more should one who is saved from the condemnation coming to the world, should imitate the Messiah who is Himself the Living Torah made flesh living in them!

For love to be fulfilled, requires obedience to the Standard of Love: Yeshua, the Messiah, the Living Torah made flesh, who never sinned once, and loved God and others in full accordance with the Torah.

To say one isn’t “required” to keep kosher, is to say one isn’t “required” to imitate the Messiah! And to say one isn’t “required” to imitate the Messiah, is to say that one isn’t “required” to love God and love others. That’s the ultimate conclusion of this line of thinking, and I hope now you see that it for what it is. The conclusion is inescapable. The conclusion nullifies the commandment to “love the Lord your God,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

And this is why there is so much confusion on the matter. Imitating the Messiah is not seen in this way of how he loved God and others as defined by the Torah, but that is in fact the very definition of the Messiah! If we have Messiah living in us and through us, we will conform to what He does through us. Yeshua is still Torah observant. He lives in us, and by his standard of love (because NO commandment is outside the category of loving God or people) if we submit to His lordship, we WILL choose to love God he does, as defined in total, by the Torah. This includes the weightier commandments of justice, faithfulness, and mercy; as well as keeping the Sabbath, keeping kosher, wearing tzitzit, and helping a neighbor’s overburdened donkey, and all the other commandments in the Torah.

Quit thinking that as a “Gentile” you do not have the right nor the responsibility as a believer to love God and others as God defined through His Son, Yeshua. The whole world will be condemned for failing The Standard. Believers are fully enabled to meet it because of the One who lives in them. You can, and should love God and others as Messiah himself modeled for you. Shalom.

And if you are a believer in Messiah, you are not a “gentile” in the sight of God and men, but rather now you have been removed from the world, the nations, gentiles, into the People of God, His Children, Israel. You are from the nations, but now no longer of them. By all definitions, you are Jewish according to faith, action, and identity. But that is another thread.