Today’s Christian’s definition of works of the law is all the work we do to please Christ as scripture tells us to do. In the deep sea scrolls, they talk of works of the law in a completely different way. Some people in those days put what they did to obey ahead of any Torah principle of God. If someone was drowning on Sunday, for instance, they would put forth no effort to save that person because the works of the law had more importance to them that the principle of kindness. No one thought of works of the law as the same as the law of the Torah, even those who believed in them ahead of the spiritual law of the Torah.
When God breathed scripture to Paul to record, God used the way the current population thought of the words Paul used. We are expected to use information available to us to find out what that was. God gave us the deep sea scrolls to open up a lot of understanding to us that was lost through the years.
It is the same with “the law of Moses”. When Paul wrote about that, it was understood those laws had nothing to do with the actual law of Moses, they had to do with the lifestyle asked of the Jews so they kept separated from the gentiles who did not believe in the Lord. When we assign the meaning of that as the ten commandments, we would have been considered out of our minds by the people of Paul’s day.
When God breathed scripture to Paul to record, God used the way the current population thought of the words Paul used. We are expected to use information available to us to find out what that was. God gave us the deep sea scrolls to open up a lot of understanding to us that was lost through the years.
It is the same with “the law of Moses”. When Paul wrote about that, it was understood those laws had nothing to do with the actual law of Moses, they had to do with the lifestyle asked of the Jews so they kept separated from the gentiles who did not believe in the Lord. When we assign the meaning of that as the ten commandments, we would have been considered out of our minds by the people of Paul’s day.