Torah Times Messianic Ministry

The Justice of the Almighty

In Romans 3:21, 6:14–15, and 10:4, phrases like "righteousness apart from the Law," "you are not under the Law," and "Christ is the end of the Law" are Pauline "got ya" phrases. We see this all the time when journalists put up headlines that suggest one thing, but then you quickly see they mean another thing when you read their articles, and realize you put the wrong interpretation on the headline. The author invites the audience to misinterpret what is said, and then turns the tables. It works because ambiguity in language is exploitable. It does not work unless the language is ambiguous, and it does not work at all if the reader does not realize the language is ambiguous at the end of the matter, because then the reader will come away feeling deceived, or worse, believing the author actually meant what he perceived him to be saying. Got ya language works well to get attention and is well justified if the writer employing it is doing it to a good end. It succeeds in making the point memorable and emphasizing what the writer really wants to say. A got you phrase draws the reader in to investigate further. Seemingly heretical statements draw the curiosity of the reader or listener, who feels there has to be some explanation for why an orthodox pharisee would say such things. Got ya language also tests the loyalty of the audience and their trust in the author. Those who know the author well will not fall for it and will wait for the explanation. Those who do not will rush to judgment revealing themselves.

There are those who tell gotcha jokes. I'm a Scott, so I'll not tell any jokes to illustrate this point.

The Pauline gotcha technique requires the audience to understand Greek very well, and this was the case with the original audience. But then time, distance, and opposition to Paul's actual teaching happened. An entirely new world view of understanding Paul's words was created by Satan in order to deceive people and to misdirect Christians. This world view now causes Christians to miss the point entirely and to believe the opposite of the truth. When you see the other side of this, you will be amazed at how definitions and understandings can be turned around in such a backwards way. A large part of the original audience accommodated themselves and became comfortable with the lawless interpretations of the Gnostics. Later on, the correct side of the ambigious interpretation was hidden from the view of the laity, leaving them only with the wrong interpretation to consider. The fault is in both the heretical leadership and the laity, which is not seeking the Most High, and this is the norm everywhere you go. This explains why the original message was corrupted. The theological world view of Christianity blinds them. It has to be unlearned. Sadly, most are too old or too inflexible in their thinking to unlearn it.

But when Paul first stated it, his audience was able to see through to his real meaning, and the gotcha rhetoric served a good purpose. In Romans 3:21, it appears to be saying that righteousness is apart from the Torah. But we need to hang on a while, because the first readers, who were very familiar with Messianic prophecies, knew something about the Righteousness of the Almighty that Christians, who generally only read the NT and hear sermons on Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, which are filtered through a grid of reformation theology, don't know. They also knew a great deal about the word NOMOS that modern translations do not reveal and that Christian readers no longer know. As a result, the institutional Church's conception of legal righteousness, said to declare the guilty in the right, is in reality a strange fire that has been substituted for the actual teaching of Scripture. After I finish here, you, the reader or listener, will understand what went wrong and what the truth is.

In the Good News of Messiah I have translated Romans 3:21, "But now, apart from what is customary, the justice of the Almĭghty has been getting revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets." The marginal notes state the other possible meanings of NOMOS (or Torah) and DIKAIOUSUNE (or Righteousness). The reasons for the notes is that the ambiguity is not completely reproducible in English, unless you understand that Torah is what is customary for Jews. But so are other things related to Torah. That's the ambiguity.

So in Greek, "what is customary" (NOMOS) could be understood to be the Torah, and it could be interpreted to mean that justice or righteousness is now revealed to be different from Torah, that is another law, a new law. That is how the modern ear is trained to interpret it, but Greek NOMOS is ambiguous and so is what the next phrase refers to. So let's unpack it.

The above translation is what the sense would appear to be to a first-century reader of Koine Greek. The Greek here would understand the text to be saying that justice from God is outside what his society considers normal justice or ordinary. But he would also see Paul referring to the Torah in the context. So by seeing this, he has properly set himself up for the gothcha. The justice of God is apart from which his society considers customary, but how is it apart from what Jewish society considers customary for justice, since that is the Torah?

If anyone needs convincing that nomos means what is customary, all he has to do is look up the word in a scholarly dictionary, not Strong's Concordance, not Vines, and not Mounce. I mean, look it up in BDAG and LSJ. One will find there "that which is in habitual practice or use," "custom," and the "norm." This original definition of nomos is deleted from almost every lay dictionary. This suppression of the meaning is the result of institutional Christianity conspiring against the Torah, against the instruction of the Most High.

For good measure, one can go over to google books (https://books.google.com/). Type in the search: NOMOS "what is customary". Then work your way through all the entries of scholars discussing ancient Greek literature, and you will know that they consider NOMOS to mean "what is customary." And if you consult modern sociology, you will find that they consider NOMOS to mean societal norms. So the ancient sense, indeed, is used in modern contexts! Nothing becomes more corrupt than a people who once knew the truth but then rejected it. This is why scholars of pagan literature can still speak the truth, which Christian theologians must censor. I will explain further that by conspiring against the Torah, the Church has also destroyed the Good News, which they call the "gospel." And as such, the Church has become the harlot of Babylon, the destroyer of worlds.

The next edition of the Good News of Messiah is coming with some extraordinary notes. I have already pointed out in the existing notes that NOMOS may mean both what is customary and Torah, and that DIKAIOUSUNE may mean both justice and righteousness. However, these dual definitions are too important to be buried in the notes. And further, both sides of these dual definitions are almost equally important to understanding the matter. That is, the other definition in the margin is not, so to speak, a secondary one, which, by the way, is also a possible sense. It is rather part of the definition that the Greek reader would understand by one term. But the listener or reader must be patient, because it is not easy to relearn what English thinking has programmed us to split apart. In Greek, custom and law are meanings of the same word. In Greek, righteousness and justice are meanings of the same word.

"Law" in the eyes of the Greeks was not at first perceived as an absolute and eternal written code but as a relative and changeable matter best described as the established custom or the accepted norm as defined by a social consensus. George Eldon Ladd explained it as custom hardening into Law. In modern times, social scientists have also explained nomos in the same way. The nomos represents the perceived norms of modern society. It is just what is customarily accepted without regard to divine authority. So the nomos of one culture may vary from the nomos of another culture. What was customary among Jews was the Torah, but what is customary may refer to any number of other things that have become societal norms, including norms that would be regarded as illegal according to biblical Law.

In Paul, Greek meets Hebrew, and Hebrew meets Greek. There was really no way to express NOMOS in Hebrew, and therefore, the word NOMOS was borrowed into Hebrew as NOMOS. Nomos was also used to translate the Hebrew word Torah. But it would be a mistake to think that Nomos was limited to the Hebrew sense of Torah when Paul uses it. For the Greeks, you could say that they understood the NOMOS of Moses as a codified or written expression of divine custom or the divine norm when they understood the absolute moral nature of divine revelation in the Torah. I know this may be difficult to wrap your head around. It was especially a problem for a Jew without a Hellenistic upbringing or at least a solid bilingual grasp of Greek. But for both Paul and his main audience, the non-Jewish Greek-speaking world, this was not a problem. It is just one of those things that Paul does. He was hard enough to understand in Greek due to the intellectualism with which Paul writes.

So when the Greek thought about "what is customary" in relation to the Torah, he did not just think about the written code but all the other things that were customary in relation to it in his understanding of what Paul was trying to say. For this reason, the premier Greek Lexicon, Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich, now known as BDAG in its 3rd edition, explains NOMOS under the definition for NOMOS: "The primary meaning relates to that which is conceived as standard or generally recognized rules of civilized conduct, especially as sanctioned by tradition. The synonym εθος denotes that which is habitual or customary, especially in reference to personal behavior. In addition to rules that take hold through tradition, the state or other legislating body may enact ordinances that are recognized by all concerned and, in turn, become legal tradition. A special semantic problem for modern readers encountering the term νομος is the general tendency to confine the usage of the term "law" to codified statues. Such limitation has led to much fruitless debate in the history of New Testament interpretation."

And then this dictionary proceeds to state the definition of nomos: "1 a prodecure or practice that has taken hold; a custom, rule, principle, norm. There you have it, from the highest authority in scholarship, from what we may regard as being well immersed in the traditional Christian way of thinking. Apparrently, their linguistic intuition for understanding Greek has not been entirely squashed by traditional anti-nomian theology.

Even though this confession is in a theological dictionary produced by institutional Church scholars, there is still a great degree of suppression of the truth. This is why I urge you to do the above-mentioned search in Google Books.

Paul by no means denied absolute truth, but he was able to use the language of NOMOS to get his ideas across. You will find the relevant definition best explained in BDAG, but it is also in Thayer's Lexicon and that Massive Liddell, Scott, and Jones lexicon, as well as many other scholarly works. Where you will not find it is in the dictionary for laymen, called Strong's Dictionary, or similar lay dictionaries.

At the practical level, when I deploy the proper Greek definition of NOMOS, there is a great deal of denial. For example, when I stated that Romans 10:4 says, "The Anointed is the end of what is customary for justice," all Ron Solberg, a notorious anti-Torah crusader, would say was, "Hey T[orah]T[imes]! So in Romans 10:4, Paul says Jesus is the end/goal (τέλος) of the νόμος, which in Greek only means "law." When Paul wants to talk about a norm or standard, he uses τύπος (Rom. 6:17), or μέτρον (Rom. 12:3; Eph. 4:7). " This is, of course, exactly the mistake that BDAG warns against. And the claim that Paul uses these other words when he wants to talk about a norm can be logically as well as authoritatively dismissed as an ignorant statement.

For 2000 years, the institutional Church, after an infusion of Gnostic exegesis, has been redefining the terms of Scripture to reflect an alien worldview. For example, when the Valentian Gnostics read John 1:1, they came out with a completely different interpretation than what the plain sense would suggest. They would believe that "In the beginning was the word" meant that the beginning itself was the word and, as such, began when the beginning took place. That's not something an ordinary reader would glean from the text. Likewise, terms that are taken as equivalent to the original language in English translations have been redefined over time and through theological corruption to have meanings other than what was considered ordinary when the terms were first used. This is the stuff of cults. I am not saying the Church has fallen for every gnostic reinterpretation, but it too became corrupt and has inherited the same propensities.

To fix this problem, a corrected translation cannot just be correct from a point of view from 2000 years ago. It has to be correct to communicate the correction in terms of the subsequent history of corruption. That is, if I, as a translator, do not seek to rule out common interpretations based on corruption of a term, then I am not communicating. It does not just do to retain the word law or insert the word TORAH for Nomos. Because in that case, I would just be reinforcing the corrupt interpretations. It is better to use a translation that breaks the false interpretation and also communicates the truth.

So for Romans 3:21, I will begin by giving an interpretation that regards "what is customary" as strictly the written Torah. There is a simple, more trivial sense and a deeper, more profound sense, for which "what is customary" is more subtle and nuanced. But the simple sense of Romans 3:21 does represent a powerful and potent apologetic against common anti-Torah interpretations. If we take NOMOS as the written Torah, I will show that the gotcha depends on how you take the next words, "The Righteousnes of God."

So for this interpretation, we can read "what is customary" as "Torah" according to the marginal note. And the explanation regards the "justice of the Almighty." This phrase may equally be translated "the righteousness of the Almighty," and it corresponds to the prophecy about the Messiah, that he will be called "YHWH our Righteousness," "YHWH Tsidkeynu," which occurs in several places, Jeremiah 23:5 among them. For this, we only need to recognize that the "Righteousness of God" is Messiah Yeshua in his manfiest or revealed form, apart from a mere written description of him.

So Israel was accustomed to the written Torah, but Messiah himself stands apart from and independent from the written Torah as the manifest righteousness of the Most High. This point might seem a bit trival in light of the fact that Messiah does appear in the Torah as the Messenger of YHWH, and that in the Messenger of YHWH, the righteousness and justice of the Most High are manifest. But to those who came face-to-face with the Messiah, he was the manifest righteousness of God, beyond a mere description of it in the Torah and beyond a mere description of his appearances in the Torah. Indeed, we may say that Messiah himself is the righteousness of the Most High apart from anything that his emissaries have written, which is also only a description apart from face-to-face reality. To put it in plain Church terms, apart from the "New Testament," quote unquote, "YHWH our righteousness" has been manifested, YHWH Tsidkeynu. Personal reality is never the same as a description. It stands apart, like the word day is different from experiencing day.

So the Righteousness of the Almighty refers to the person called Messiah, who is YHWH Tzidkeynu, YHWH our Justice, or YHWH our Righteousness. Apart from the written Torah, he is personally manifest to those who have encountered him for real and not just through the words of others in the Law and Prophets, or even the words of the Apostles. The YHWH Tzidkeynu paradigm here demolishes the whole panoply of interpretations, making the description of righteousness in the Torah oppositional to its real expression in the person of Messiah. Blow the trumpet in Zion. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead. The only contrast here is that of a description of reality vs. the reality.

Now, let us move on to Paul's more profound points, which require us to unpack NOMOS in more ways than just the overall written Torah. And to do this we have to rely on similar statements in other contexts, which sadly have also been mistranslated. But you will have to trust me for a while, until you have listened or read enough to hear the whole matter. We also have to ask ourselves what other norms are related to Paul's topic that he may have in mind. And in particular, we have to ask what norms he has in mind that are specially related to the main points of the Good News of our deliverance from sin.

I should say that the first of these points is a direct teaching of the Good News, and it is this. The norm for justice is condemnation of the sinner. This is what is customary and what will be customary in the day of judgment. The sinner will die forever. Overall we find that sinners grow in their sin and corruption. We find that most never come to a knowledge of the truth so they can repent. And we find that most confronted with the truth fail to follow it. Many are called, but few are chosen. So condemnation becomes what is customary, and judgment the norm.

But punitive justice is not the only justice. The Righteousness of God may also decide it is just and righteous to forgive sin. YHWH our Righteousness may decide that his justice calls for forgiveness when a person repents of their sins. He will then bear our sin and carry it away. He will bury it in the grave and not remember it against us any more. And then truly "apart from what is customary, the justice of the Almighty has been getting revealed." It has been getting revealed to every person who repents from their sin, and who receives forgiveness of the same.

Isn't that amazing? The Good News is taught in a passage that institutional Christianity perceives to be anti-Torah. They perceive it to be so, because their tradition teaches a legalistic justice, contrary to the Torah, and not found in the Torah. But Messiah is the manifest person of the righteousness described in the Torah. This manifest righteousness still corresponds to its description in the Torah. The difference is between the commandment written in the Law, and the commandment written in the heart and obeyed by the person. This is to say, when we repent, the written word spoken in the heart must find a home in the heart as we actually embrace it and faithfully obey it. Then we too will have the righteousness of the Almighty, the righteousness of Messiah.

To repeat the first point. The justice of the Almighty, which is the judgment of Messiah, is apart from customary justice, because he grants us a pardon. He gives us forgiveness of our sins. His judgment, his decision, is to forgive our sins if we repent from our sins. But for the majority who do not listen, their fate is what is customary. Our fate is apart from what is customary. Their fate is the norm. Our fate is apart from the norm. Their fate is NOMOS. Our fate is apart from NOMOS.

There are two more things that Paul means to teach us implicit in his language. One is positive and the other is negative. I will take up the negative point first. A customary means of satisfying divine justice when a sin is committed among Jews is to at least partly trust in the doctrine of merit, also called zechut. The Rabbis taught that Jews can gain merit in two ways to offset their sins, and to make the Most High propitious to them. One way was to become Jewish and to inherit the merit of Abraham or the merit of the fathers, and by this means to receive favorable treatment from God. The other was by performing meritorious deeds beyond the basic commandments of Torah. The simple ways of doing this was charity and prayers. But any good deed performed beyond the strict requirement of Torah would meet the definition of "a merit," which could then be used to offset a demerit. If this is put another way, it is a way of trusting in one's own righteousness in regard to one's own sin. This can be a natural tendency. But in Judaism it was theologically formulated and taught as a proper way to deal with sin!

The Doctrine of Merits in Judaism has its analogue in Christianity under the guise of penance and the imputation of righteousenss. In Catholic theology there was even something called the Treasury of Merit, which is a Bank for Merit. The saints would pay into this BANK the excess of merit that they gained, and then sinners who did not have the time to perform personal penance to gain merit could borrow from the excess merit deposited in the merit bank. In this way God would be favorable to them and not judge them, or God will give them less time in purgatory. If you consider it, this means of dealing with sin is a highly refined form of theological legalism.

Paul is saying that the justice of the Almighty is apart from what is customary. It is apart from this customary merit system in Judaism. And we may as well say it is also apart from the Christian analouge. After all penance and imputed righteousness, or justification, are simply clever transformations of the Jewish doctrine into Christian terms. In this respect, Christinaity and Judaism are exactly the same. They are two sides of the same coin, thought to be opposing each other, but in the mystery of their teaching, they are the same doctrine.

What is considered customary justice is the thought of paying God off for sin by some compensation. But the justice of the Almighty, represented by Messiah, is never to justify the wicked by any means. The guilty are found guilty. The unrepentant may be forgiven, but not justified, that is, declared in the right. So God is not going to accept a pay off. But he is telling us what the costs are associated with bearing our sin to deliver us. He will forgive. But bearing our sin takes a cost. This cost is likened unto a ransom. Evil demands the ransom, but divine love pays the ransom bearing the cost of evil to gain our deliverance.

So we see that the custom which is apart from the real justice of the Almighty is what we can call the anti-Good News. It is payment for sin vs. the cost of sin. The customary system calls for God to be paid off for sin by a propitiation which satisfies his wrath. But the actual justice of God provides for forgiveness of sins along with an offering to instruct us in the cost of bearing the sin. The two systems are diametrically opposed. They are opposites. In the true system God gives the ransom and evil takes it. In the false system God is represented as demanding a ransom to appease his wrath. The Scripture says the Almighty gave his only kindred Son. It was evil that killed him him, that wounded him in the heel. It was evil that demanded payment in blood. It is God that bears the cost in Spirit and in the incarnation. So then the system of Satan has been projected onto God bv both Christianity and Judaism. But Paul is telling us that the justice of the Almighty is apart from that system.

How long will the faithful be caught between the doctrine of Baal and the truth? How long will people waver between asking for the forgiveness of sins and thinking they must pay for them, or have them paid off for them. Paying for sin is the devil's alterative to repentance. So long as one can pay for sin one does not need to repent from sin. The whole Christian world has been misled by Satan in this matter as Judaism before it.

Now I am not saying that everyone who believes bad doctrine is going to perish. But I can say that everyone who believes bad doctrine and practices it sufficiently fails to repent, and failure to repent surely leads to destruction, because the Most High will not forgive the sins of whomever refuses to repent from sin.

Now I will give the positive sense of this text. The world has its customary degree of goodness. People generally live up to the norms of their societies. After all the definition of the norm for them is what most do. But we see that this norm is invariably a mixture of good and evil, or sometimes more evil than good. And when a culture is at that final state of self-destruction, as certainly the western world is, then it becomes continually evil all the time. Their nomos becomes evil. So we must plug in the definition "righteousness" to vs. 21: "Apart from what is customary, the righteousness of the Almighty is revealed." This is a righteousness way beyond the worlds norm that we may obtain from Messiah. And that is the positive sense. In fact, we can argue that if the nomos has become evil, then the righteousness of the Almighty that we are seeking is an alien righteousness to the NOMOS around us.

And indeed, society and the institutional Church, have both torn down the Torah, which is the description of Messiah's kind of righteousness. They have both created an alien righteousenss which is perverted and legalistic. But the real righteousness, described in the Torah, became reality among men when Messiah took on human flesh and walked the earth with us for a while. For most of us, who live after those days, we have to learn righteousness from the Torah and the Spirit, because his word enters into our heart that we may obey it. And by uniting his word with our hearts, we are getting begotten of the Most High.

So my friends, we cannot get the good news out of the customary interpretations of Romans 3:21, and we cannot get the whole of it out of the institutional translations. Messiah cannot be opposed to the written description of his righteousness or his justice. The good news is not that we are being justified by an alien righteousness.  Once we recognize what the words of Paul actually mean and who or what they refer to, then it is plain that he is teaching forgiveness of sins and repentance. He is teaching that we are not subject to the nomos of judgment or legalism and that Messiah's righteousness, as described in the Torah, was revealed to us so that we may also obtain it through faithfulness. The word of faithfulness is not alien or legalistic, but it is near us, in our hearts, that we may do it.

All judgment has been turned over to Messiah. And he will be the Justice of the Almighty, so now is the day to repent and receive his forgiveness, because when he comes as the Justice of the Almighty, he will deliver those who have repented and destroy those who have not.