Quotes about Torah

Saul came from a family who knew what that meant. It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a "religion" called "Judaism" in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.

What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather "Sin" together into one place, so that it could then be condemned.

Only in the light of Jesus can he look back and see not only that the God-given Torah had the effect of increasing "Sin," but that this was the divine intention all along.

There are five language-sets in particular which they employed for this purpose. Briefly, they are as follows: Wisdom, Torah, Spirit, Word and Shekinah

Hebrew for "poor, humble." The "pious poor" of Judaism. After the Exile in Babylon (587 BC), a social class of Jews who returned were known as much for their commitment to the Torah* and the temple as for their economic poverty. Their situation led them to trust in God and to pray for him to establish his justice in the Land. Accordingly, this group was one in which hopes for the Messiah flourished

The hope of Israel, expressed variously in the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, was not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed.

What is Scripture? The Hebrew word is torah. Torah means teaching, learning.

This is the law that Moses set before the Israelites.

There are five incomplete phenomena (or unripe fruits). The incomplete experience of death is sleep; an incomplete form of prophecy is dream; the incomplete form of the world to come is the Sabbath; the incomplete form of the heavenly light is the orb of the sun; the incomplete form of heavenly wisdom is the Torah.

Jesus is the 'Word' of God. Jesus is the Wisdom through which the world was made. Jesus is, in some senses, the new Torah. And, in a move which has stupendous consequences, Jesus is the true Shekinah, the true presence of the one true God, the truth of which the Jerusalem Temple was simply a foretaste.9

The Torah's view is we are supposed to be preoccupied with making this world as heavenly as possible. Those who live by its moral laws and values are best able to achieve that goal.

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel's God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel's scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.