How Important Is Your Halacha?

Halacha - Ha - la - kah is a Hebrew word which literally means "behavior" or "The way you live."  For the orthodox Jew, this is totally wrapped up in the teaching of the Talmud which uses the Torah as its basis, but includes the rabbinic teachings and established traditions.  A Jew's halacha includes the keeping of the 613 laws found in the Torah, but will be expounded upon by the interpretations and additions made by the rabbis.  For example, the Torah teaches in Ex. 23:19 not to boil a kid (goat) in its mother's milk. This is a sanctity of life matter and about respect for the mother, but the rabbis added their interpretation of this to mean don't mix meat and dairy products.  In modern times, this was elaborated upon to prohibit the cooking of meat and dairy in the same oven.  So, an orthodox Jewish home must have two ovens - one for meat and one for dairy because the very steam from cooking meat may collect on the walls of an oven and possibly contaminate a cake with eggs if cooked in the same oven. 

If we want to live pleasing lives for our Heavenly Father, we know that because we are all sinners and have broken all of God's commandments, we are lost and need the Messiah's indwelling of His Holy Spirit to give us the ability to have a halacha that pleases God and makes us acceptable to Him.

Jesus, Yeshua, came to give us all a halacha that will bless us in this life, but also bring glory to our Heavenly Father which is our main purpose in life!

But we are all on our own separate spiritual journeys, travelling at differing speeds, receiving inspired revelations from God and His Word with different perspectives and insights and unique applications to our circumstances in life.  This is why the Body of Christ in the world today may be joined together by the same Savior, but yet also be greatly divided by our halacha--our understanding of how we are to live and walk the Way of the Master.

Paul addressed this in his letter to the church in Rome.  The Jews and Gentiles who were finding themselves in unity through the common forgiveness of sins by Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah, were also finding themselves being divided by different understandings of what a New-Born Believer's halacha should be!  Paul's bottom line to the Church was, "Don't let your various opinions and camp divisions over halacha take priority over your unity!"  Wow, that's what we need to hear today!

Isn't it interesting that the Church today deals with the exact same problem that the Church in Rome was experiencing--the need for unity in the midst of differing halacha?  It is just sad that so many Believers will go to their graves thinking they will be rewarded (gain glory for themselves) for having maintained a strict halacha which isolated them from the larger context of The Body only to find out at the Judgment that the Father would have been more pleased if unity had been the goal which would have brought more glory to the Father!