Monday, May 7, 2012

May 7th 2012

Did Jesus keep the Oral Law?

Read Mark 3:1-6 and journal your thoughts

First we need to talk about what the Oral Law was. If the Law or Torah was God’s Law, then the Oral Law was simply a set of interpretations of how to keep God’s Law, and over time the Oral Law turned into traditions. Normally, Christianity tends to look back at all these things and talk about how they’re not important anymore. The problem with this is that they seem to be very important to Jesus.

Notice in how Jesus asks this question about whether it’s keeping God’s Law if someone heals on the Sabbath? In their time there was this debate about how much someone could heal on the Sabbath without it being considered “work”. The general conclusion was you could heal to save a life, other than that you could heal as long as you didn’t have to touch the other person. If you had to touch them, then it could be considered to be work.

Jesus never touches the man. He heals him with his words. Have you ever wondered why sometimes Jesus heals with a touch and other times with just his words? Every time Jesus heals with his words it falls on the Sabbath (with one debatable exception I dare you to find it). Jesus is keeping the Oral Law.

This raises the question; if it was important to Jesus then should it be important to us?

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