How We Can Obey The God of Israel - (part one)
Any and all Christian theology that has understood Paul to be teaching that the death and resurrection of Israel's Messiah resulted in an end having come to the Torah as God's instructions for the life and conduct of Israel have misread him. The grace of God is not an instruction for Israel on how to live life corporately, communally or personally, as is the Torah. The only fundamental question Paul discusses is the question about how we can obey God. Secondarily, he discusses a question about how gentiles can obey God in distinction from how Israel and Jews can obey God. Once this is clear, a great deal of confused Christian theology is put into perspective.
The death and resurrection of Israel's Messiah of his nation reveals once and for all that it is not possible for Israel to obey the Torah as it was commanded to, as a nation, perfectly and completely, without doing so with God's Spirit. Did Israel then, from the time of Moses not possess God's Spirit? She did, though not in the measure at all times that she needed to be truly obedient, which one must be in order to actually fulfill the commandments.
It is possible to do many things that God commands without doing so as an act of obedience to God. It is possible to do so as an obedience to one's own will, as an act only of one's own deliberation and decision and not as an act of obedience to the commandment as given by God. For example, one could obstain from murder simply because one chose to and then not obstain from murder if one chose to commit murder. Not committing murder because of following one's own decision is a different thing from not committing murder because of obeying the commandment of God not to commit murder.
It is not vain or useless to do those things that are also commanded in the Torah to Israel because one choses and answers only to one's own self. The problem with this is that if one does this, eventually they will begin to fail and will slowly become more and more corrupt. Not only this, the attitude itself is always a violation of the relationship with one's Creator. It is essentially an attitude of idolatry, of sin.
Israel was not only given the Torah. With the Torah Israel was given the promise of God to bring about the blessing of life. In this promise of God Israel was given God's Spirit. To say that the Spirit of God was given to Israel through the form of a promise is to say that the Spirit of God was not yet given to Israel in full measure. It was because of this that the Torah, as Paul put it, was weak through the flesh, through human nature, and was not able yet to provide the power to Israel to enable Israel to coporately perfectly and completely obey God in every commandment, (rather than leaning to her own undertanding in some ways).
This then is the Good News, that the blessing of God for Avraham and his offspring, Israel, is now being given in full measure and no longer just by promise.
