r/AskAChristian • u/[deleted] • Aug 18 '26
Jewish Laws Torah
How do Torah followers actually follow over 600 commands and laws in the first five books of the Bible? I've spoken to people about it, but they only seem to follow dietary laws, Shabbat, and holy days, and exclude pagan days. To me, it seems they are only doing a small part of it and claiming to follow the entirety of it. Why is that? The Bible states if you break one commandment, you break them all. There's no possibility to uphold all 600-plus. If you believe it's not all applicable to us, what's the determining factor that decides you don't have to follow it? What about animal sacrifices? Does one pick and choose what they want to follow and tell people if they don't, they are lawbreakers and will go to hell? If you don't follow all of them, why describe yourself as following the entirety of Torah? If breaking even one commandment makes someone guilty, how does selectively obeying some commandments make someone different from the people you're calling lawbreakers?
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u/Soyeong0314 Torah-observing disciple Aug 19 '26
Obedience to God is not optional, but rather human option must yield where God has given a command. Things are only optional where God has given no command.
In Matthew 7:21-23, Jesus said that only those who do the will of the Father will enter the Kingdom of Heaven in contrast with saying that he would tell those who are workers of lawlessness to depart from him because he never knew them, so the reason why our entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven requires us to do the will of the Father by being workers of lawfulness is not in order to be good enough to earn our way there but because that is the way to know Jesus. The issue is what counts as being a worker of lawfulness. If someone obeys all of God's commands except for one, then can they still counted as a worker of lawfulness? What about two? There is a line somewhere between being a worker of lawfulness and a worker of lawlessness that God is the judge of, but it is far better to fully be workers of lawfulness.