The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi’s set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi’s interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called that rabbi’s yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi’s set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended through the scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke.
One rabbi even said his yoke was easy.7
The intent then of a rabbi having a yoke wasn’t just to interpret the words correctly; it was to live them out. In the Jewish context, action was always the goal. It still is.
Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, “You have abolished the Torah,” which meant that in the rabbi’s opinion, the student wasn’t anywhere near what God wanted. But if the student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God’s intention in the text, the rabbi would say, “You have fulfilled the Torah.”
Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: “I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it].”8 He was essentially saying, “I didn’t come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest punctuation marks.”
“I’m here to put flesh and blood on the words.”9
Most rabbis taught the yoke of a well respected rabbi who had come before them. So if you visited a synagogue and the local rabbi (Torah teacher) was going to teach, you might hear that this rabbi teaches in the name of Rabbi So-and-So. If you were familiar with the yoke of Rabbi So-and-So, then you would know what to expect from this rabbi.
Every once in a while, a rabbi would come along who was teaching a new yoke, a new way of interpreting the Torah. This was rare and extraordinary.
Imagine: A rabbi was claiming that he had a new way to understand the scriptures that was closer to what God intended than the way of the rabbis who had come before him. A new take on the scriptures.
The questions would immediately be raised: “How do we know this is truth? How do we know this rabbi isn’t crazy?” One of the protections for the rabbi in this case was that two other rabbis with authority would lay hands on the rabbi and essentially validate him. They would be saying, “We believe this rabbi has authority to make new interpretations.” That’s why Jesus’s baptism was so important. John the Baptist was a powerful teacher and prophet who was saying publicly that he wasn’t worthy to carry Jesus’s sandals.10
“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’”11
A second voice affirmed Jesus’s unique calling. The voice of God.
Amazing.
A Jewish audience reading Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism would pick up right away on Jesus’s getting the affirmation of two powerful voices.12
Which leads to an interesting scene: In the book of Luke, what is the one question the religious leaders keep hounding Jesus with?
“Where did you get your authority?”
Jesus’s response? “You tell me, where did John get his?”13
Now imagine if a rabbi who had a new perspective on the Torah was coming to town. This rabbi who was making new interpretations of the Torah was said to have authority. The Hebrew word for “authority” is shmikah. This might not even happen in your lifetime. You would hike for miles to hear him.
A rabbi who taught with shmikah would say things like, “You have heard it said . . . , but I tell you. . . .”14
What he was saying is, “You have heard people interpret that verse this way, but I tell you that this is what God really means in that verse.”
Now the rabbis had technical terms for this endless process of forbidding and permitting and making interpretations. They called it “binding and loosing.” To “bind” something was to forbid it. To “loose” something was to allow it.15
So a rabbi would bind certain practices and loose other practices. And when he gave his disciples the authority to bind and loose, it was called “giving the keys of the kingdom.”
Notice what Jesus says in the book of Matthew: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”16
What he is doing here is significant. He is giving his followers the authority to make new interpretations of the Bible. He is giving them permission to say, “Hey, we think we missed it before on that verse, and we’ve recently come to the conclusion that this is what it actually means.”
And not only is he giving them authority, but he is saying that when they do debate and discuss and pray and wrestle and then make decisions about the Bible, somehow God in heaven will be involved.
Our Turn
Jesus expects his followers to be engaged in the endless process of deciding what it means to actually live the scriptures. And right away in the life of this new movement, we see them doing it. In Acts 15, these first Christians find themselves having to make a huge decision about what it means to be a Christian.
To understand what they are facing, we have to understand that they are Jewish—Jewish believers who are circumcised and eat kosher and recite Jewish prayers and celebrate Jewish feasts.
Jewish followers of a Jewish messiah who live a Jewish life in a Jewish nation.
But all sorts of Gentiles (people who aren’t Jewish) start becoming followers of Jesus. People who don’t eat kosher, who aren’t circumcised, who don’t dress and talk and look and live like them.
So what do they do? Do they expect all of these Gentiles to start being Jewish?
And what exactly would that mean? What would that look like? (Grown men being told that if they are really serious about becoming Christians, there’s a little surgery they need to have . . .)
The first Christians know that Jesus is for everybody, but what do they do with all of these Jewish laws they follow? So they convene a council (yeshiva in Hebrew) to discuss it.
After hearing all sides of the issue, they decide to forbid (or should we say they bind?) several things.17
Here is why this is so important: They have to make decisions about what it means to be a Christian.
They actually do it. They gather together and make interpretations of the Bible regarding what it will look like for millions of people to be Christians.
I wonder if one of them stood up at any point and said, “Jesus gave us the authority to do this, didn’t he?”
Now let’s move things into our world. If we take Jesus seriously and actually see it