The Torah: A Guide to the Messiah and God's Redemptive Plan
The Torah, often viewed simply as a collection of laws, serves a far deeper purpose in the biblical narrative. It acts as a guide that points to something far greater—the Messiah. The "bulls-eye" of the Torah, as described by Paul in Romans, is the Messiah, who fulfills the ultimate purpose of the law. In this lesson, we will explore how the Torah reveals the need for a righteous savior, and how it serves as a guardian for Israel until the arrival of the Messiah, through whom God's promises are realized.
What does the “bulls-eye” represent if the Torah hits the mark? What is the end-game result of the Torah? Paul defines this end game or bulls-eye as Messiah in Romans 10:4:
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Romans 10:4, ESV Bible)
In addition to the Messiah being the goal or the “aim” of the Torah, the Torah points to Israel’s need for a righteous Messiah who can have righteousness on behalf of the whole nation so that the entire nation may have favor with God. Their sin and failure to uphold their end of the covenant have always been the issue. The Torah and the covenant itself were never the problem. It was their failure to keep their part of the covenant. In Hebrews 8:6-13 we read:
But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. For he finds fault with them… when he says: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. (Hebrews 8:6-13, ESV Bible)
The author of Hebrews tells us that Israel was the problem, the fault of the first covenant. God could have said, “You broke your end of the covenant, and therefore I cut you off forever!” But that is not the God we serve. Instead, God sees that the fault lies with the people of Israel, and instead of cutting them off, He creates a New Covenant. A New Covenant that through the favor Israel gains with a righteous Messiah, their faults and sins are no more. And if their issue is failure to follow God’s law, then God will write it on their hearts and minds so they can fail no more. That is the God of Israel. Israel would have never seen their need for a savior without the Torah!
The Torah leads us to Messiah:
Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Galatians 3:23-26, ESV Bible)
When reading this passage from Galatians, it appears that Paul is saying that the Jewish people are no longer under the Torah, since faith has arrived. Is that what Paul means? If he meant that the Messiah has canceled the Torah, then Paul disqualified himself as a teacher and an apostle because his conclusion contradicts the teaching of Jesus.
Having explained why God gave the Torah, Paul hastened to clarify that the Torah does not contradict the Abrahamic promise of salvation through faith/faithfulness and the blessing of all nations in Messiah. He rhetorically asked, "Is the law contrary to the promises of God?" (Galatians 3:21). Then he answered his own question, "Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law." If it were possible that observing certain ceremonies and becoming Jewish could provide legal justification before God and eternal life, then salvation would indeed be by the Torah. It is not.
Paul said that "Scripture (that is, the Written Torah) imprisoned everything under sin." "Imprisoned" is not the best choice of words. The Greek text means "to shut in, enclose, or confine," but not necessarily to imprison, and certainly not to incarcerate. The King James Version translates it as "The scripture hath concluded all under sin." I would put it this way: "The Torah has included everyone under sin." There is none righteous, and when Paul said "everything (or everyone) under sin," he meant both Jews and Gentiles. The revelation of God's righteous standard has identified all human beings as sinners, not just Jews.
The Written Torah included both Jews and Gentiles under sin "so that the promise [given to Abraham] by the faithfulness of Yeshua the Messiah might be given to those who believe." The word "believe" here is just a participle form of the word "faith." The promise that came by the faithfulness of Yeshua is given to those who are “faith-ing." "Faithing" is not a static faith, not assent to a creed or doctrine or a one-time confession. Faithing is the active, ongoing, trusting, relational, obedient, confident exercise of faith in God's promises. To those who have such faith and live the faith of Abraham, God is pleased to deliver the promises he made to Abraham. Not by the merit of your faith, but by the merit of the faithfulness of Yeshua the Messiah.
In Galatians 3:23, Paul left the universal scope of all humanity to speak in the first person plural form about Israel's unique relationship with the Torah. He said "we" to speak specifically of the Jewish people (and converts), those under the law.” This is an unfortunate translation. Being "held captive under the law, imprisoned" sounds like a dreadful prison sentence. It seems that the Apostle Paul depicted the Torah as a cruel prison guard. It sounds like the Torah was keeping people away from faith. The English translators have depicted the Torah as something that holds people captive like prisoners and bars them from faith.
Paul drew upon a familiar illustration from the ancient Greco-Roman world of which he was a part. Well-to-do families often hired someone or assigned a household slave to serve as a warden for their children. This warden was called a paidagogos. The English word "pedagogue" (which means tutor) is derived from paidagogos, but the terms are not synonymous. The word paidagogos is actually a compound consisting of two Greek words. It could most literally be translated as "child-conductor" or "someone responsible for the conduct of a child.”
This is confusing to us because in English a pedagogue is a teacher. In Paul's words, the paidagogos is not a teacher. Instead, the paidagogos was a type of caretaker entrusted with supervising and directing a child's conduct and moral behavior. He was responsible for overseeing the child's activities, particularly as the child became a teen and young adult. He ensured that the child was safe, stayed out of trouble, attended to his responsibilities, and did not fall in with the wrong crowd.
The paidagogos taught the child social skills and manners. Moreover, the paidagogos was responsible for coordinating and overseeing the child's education by arranging tutors, lesson schedules, and courses of study. The paidagogos' job was "to conduct the boy or youth to and from school and to superintend his conduct ... he was not a 'teacher." In that regard, he served as a type of bodyguard, high school principal, and school guidance counselor all rolled into one, with the responsibility of ensuring the student's safety and good behavior on the way to school and back.
This understanding of the function of the paidagogos clears up Galatians 3:23, where Paul says, "Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed." The paidagogos was the child's guardian, not his jailer. When we understand that the paidagogos was responsible for protecting, supervising, and directing a child, then we have a better understanding of how the Greek text of Galatians 3:23 should be rendered into English. The Greek word which the English Standard Version translates as "held captive" has a different connotation. It can also be rendered as "protected," "kept safe," or "guarded." The word should be understood as speaking about how a pedagogue kept a child safe and out of trouble. Similarly, the Greek word which the ESV translates as "imprisoned" (the same word appears in 3:22) can be rendered as "kept in" or "enclosed" in a positive sense. The word should be understood as speaking about how a pedagogue kept a child inside for his school lessons. He did not allow the child to run off and follow his friends into trouble. He kept him shut up inside for the purpose of education and protection.
This is the background to Paul's pedagogue parable. The paidagogos represents Jewish status under the Torah, and Messiah is the teacher to whom the paidagogos brings the Jewish person. Based upon that information, we can retranslate the passage:
Now before faith came, we [the Jewish people] were [protected] under the law, [kept inside for] the coming faith [that] would be revealed. So then, the [Torah] was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified [i.e., exonerated by faith. (Galatians 3:23-24)
Those "under the law" were protected and kept inside by the Torah, preserved for the coming of the Messiah.
Remember, the term "under the law" refers specifically to legal Jewish halachic status, whether by birth or conversion. Paul says that the Jewish people were protected under the law, by means of national Jewish identity, for the coming faith that would be revealed that is, the Messiah. The purpose of Jewishness is the revelation of Messiah. Allow me to illustrate Paul's illustration with a parable:
To what may the Torah be compared? It can be compared to a pedagogue who escorted a child to the schoolteacher, but once the child was under the care of the schoolteacher, the pedagogue relinquished his care over the child. So, too, the Torah escorted the Jewish people to the Messiah, but once the people enter the care of the Messiah, the Torah relinquishes them to him.
This retranslation of Galatians 3:23-24 makes much better sense in the context from which Paul was writing. In Paul's metaphor, the Torah is the guardian appointed to watch over and protect the people of Israel and to arrange for their education by taking them to the teacher, the Messiah. The Torah did this by creating moral boundaries which kept Israel inside the parameters of ethical monotheism until the fullness of faith in Messiah was revealed. The revelation of Torah was the only place from which the people of Israel could draw hope for salvation, relationship with God, and the expectation of eternal life. Prior to the revelation of Messiah, it made good sense for Gentiles to join themselves to Israel by means of conversion. That was the only way to get under the protection of the paidagogos and to be preserved for Messiah.
Paul went on to explain, "But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian" (Galatians 3:25). Just as the paidagogos brought the student to the teacher, the Torah brought the Jewish people to the Messiah. But the paidagogos is not the teacher; neither is the Torah the means to earn salvation. When Paul said, "We are no longer under a guardian," he did not mean that the Torah is done away with or cancelled. He meant that we should not look to Torah or legal conversion to Judaism as a means of earning salvation. Salvation is (and always was) through the grace of God in Yeshua the Messiah for Jews and Gentiles both.
Does this mean that Jewishness no longer has any value? Is Jewishness "then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not!" (Galatians 3:21). It means that subsequent to Messiah, there is no salvation-related reason for Gentiles to undergo conversion and become Jewish, under the law. As he explained in Galatians 3:26, "For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”
The Gentile believers to whom Paul was writing had already been led to the teacher of righteousness. They were already sons through faith; they had already come to the teacher. In previous generations, prior to the revelation of Yeshua, there were valid reasons for Gentiles to become Jewish and thus under the law. Doing so brought them and their children inside, protected, and preserved by the Torah along with the rest of the Jewish people until the coming faith would be revealed. Now that it has been revealed, conversion "under the law" no longer serves that purpose. The Messiah is already revealed.
The problem with any metaphor, analogy, or parable is that the symbolism can always be pushed too far. In rabbinic literature and in the parables of Yeshua, a metaphor or parable like this ordinarily makes only a single point. After the point has been made, the parable is set aside. One does not attempt to draw further applications from a rabbinic parable. For example, one should not spend time puzzling about where the good shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep left the other ninety-nine while he sought the lost one. That's not the point of the parable.
So, too, here in Galatians 3, one might push the parable further and say, "The Jewish people are no longer under a guardian. Therefore, the Jewish people no longer need to obey the commandments of Torah.' That sounds like a logical inference, but that was not the point that Paul was trying to make. Whether or not the Jewish people have a covenantal obligation to keep the whole Torah was never a question for Paul, and it is never a question in the entire New Testament. That is not what Paul was speaking about in his paidagogos parable.
He was talking about the purpose of becoming Jewish in the first place. "Why then the Torah?" he asked. He demonstrated that, for Gentiles, coming under the law once had meaning and value because it was the only way to come under the protection of the guardian that would preserve them and their posterity within the people until the revelation of Messiah. Now that Messiah has come, that particular function of Jewishness is completed already for believers.
Again: One of the roles of the Torah (of Jewishness) was to preserve the people and bring them to Messiah. If you are already a believer in Messiah, becoming Jewish is not going to accomplish that for you. You're already there. Paul was not saying more than that. We stray from his intention when we try to read more into it. He did not mean the Torah is obsolete, that Jewish people are no longer under the Torah, nor did he mean that Gentile believers can ignore the commandments in the Torah that apply to them.
Instead, Paul was perfectly comfortable admitting that the commandments of the Torah continue to protect us, to instruct us, to guide us through life, to preserve us, and to escort us to the Messiah through whom we have eternal life.
God made promises to Abraham, saying that all nations would be blessed in his seed. The Torah was added to define and condemn sin. God gave the Torah to Israel through the hands of intermediaries, but it is still the essential revelation of the one God, for God is One. The Torah does not contradict the promises that God made to Abraham. The Written Torah includes both Jews and Gentiles in its condemnation of sin, so that the universal Abrahamic promise can be fulfilled only through the faithfulness of the Messiah. Before the revelation of Messiah, the Torah preserved both the Jewish people and the Gentiles who joined them by conversion. After a person becomes a believer, the Torah no longer performs that specific role of escorting him to Messiah.
All things within the Torah and the Tanach point to Messiah. As we can read in Luke 24:
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, (Luke 24:44-45, ESV Bible)
As we reflect on the purpose of the Torah, it becomes clear that it was never meant to be a burdensome legal code, but rather a pathway leading to the Messiah. The Torah reveals humanity's need for a savior and preserves God's people until that salvation is fully realized through Jesus at the second coming. By understanding the Torah in its intended context, we see its role in God's redemptive plan and its continued relevance as a guide, teacher, and witness to the faithfulness of God’s promises in the Messiah.