The question behind the question
Many of us grew up hearing that the Torah was Israel’s law and that the church lives under something else. So when a believer from the nations begins keeping the Sabbath or the feasts, the first response is usually, “That was for the Jews.” It is a fair question, and it deserves an answer from Scripture rather than from habit.
One thing should be clear before we look. No one in this fellowship keeps God’s commandments in order to be saved. Salvation is by grace through faith, a gift and not a wage (Ephesians 2:8-10). The question here is not how we are saved but how the saved are meant to live, and whether God ever gave the nations a different answer than he gave Israel.
One law for the native-born and the stranger
The Torah answers the question about itself. Whenever it describes who is bound by it, it names two groups side by side: the native-born Israelite and the stranger who has joined himself to Israel.
“For the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who lives as a foreigner, a statute forever throughout your generations. As you are, so the foreigner shall be before the LORD. One law and one ordinance shall be for you and for the stranger who lives as a foreigner with you.’”
Numbers 15:15-16
“You shall have one kind of law for the foreigner as well as the native-born; for I am the LORD your God.’”
Leviticus 24:22
Notice the reason given: “for I am the LORD your God.” One God, one standard. The same rule governs Passover (Pesach). The stranger who wants to keep it does so under the same statute and “shall be as one who is born in the land” (Exodus 12:48-49; Numbers 9:14). The foreigner was never handed a shorter list. He was welcomed under the same one.
The whole assembly heard it
When Moses commanded that the Torah be read aloud to the whole nation every seventh year, he listed who had to be present.
“Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones, and the foreigners who are within your gates, that they may hear, learn, fear the LORD your God, and observe to do all the words of this law,”
Deuteronomy 31:12
The foreigners within the gates were to hear, learn, fear, and “observe to do all the words of this law.” Not a selection of the words. When the covenant was renewed on the plains of Moab, the foreigners in the camp, “from the one who cuts your wood to the one who draws your water,” stood with everyone else to enter it, and the LORD said he was making the covenant also with those who were not present that day (Deuteronomy 29:10-15). We take him to mean people like us.
Isaiah and the foreigner who keeps the Sabbath
Isaiah looked ahead to a day when people from the nations would attach themselves to the LORD, and he anticipated exactly our question. He tells the foreigner not to say, “the LORD will surely separate me from his people” (Isaiah 56:3). Then he describes what marks the foreigner who belongs.
“Also the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD to serve him, and to love the LORD’s name, to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath from profaning it, and holds fast my covenant, I will bring these to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
Isaiah 56:6-7
He serves the LORD, loves his name, keeps the Sabbath, and holds fast the covenant. Isaiah does not describe a second track for the nations. He describes them doing what Israel was told to do, and being brought to the same house of prayer.
No distinction in the Messiah
The apostles say the same thing from the other side of the cross.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to promise.”
Galatians 3:28-29
“For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich to all who call on him. For, “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Romans 10:12-13
If there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, there cannot be one standard of holiness for the Jew and a lighter one for the Greek. Believers from the nations are “Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to promise.” Heirs of the same promise inherit the same household, and the household has one way of life.
Teach the nations everything I commanded
Jesus himself set the curriculum for the nations. His parting instruction to the apostles was not to hand the Gentiles a simplified faith.
“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
Matthew 28:19-20
What did Jesus command? He kept the Torah without sin, taught it, and said that whoever does and teaches even its least commandments will be called great in the kingdom (Matthew 5:17-19). “All things that I commanded you” includes that. The nations are discipled into the same teaching the twelve received, not a lighter edition of it.
Once strangers, now fellow citizens
Paul told the believers in Ephesus, most of them from the nations, what their situation had been and what it now is.
“Therefore remember that once you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called “uncircumcision” by that which is called “circumcision” (in the flesh, made by hands), that you were at that time separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off are made near in the blood of Christ.”
Ephesians 2:11-13
“So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God,”
Ephesians 2:19
Some read the middle of this passage, “having abolished in his flesh the hostility, the law of commandments contained in ordinances” (Ephesians 2:15), as the end of the Torah for Gentiles. Read the sentence through. What was abolished is the hostility, the “middle wall of separation” that kept the nations out (Ephesians 2:14-16). Paul cannot mean God’s commandments themselves, because he says plainly elsewhere that faith establishes the law rather than nullifying it (Romans 3:31).
We were strangers to Israel’s covenants; now we are fellow citizens of Israel’s commonwealth. Citizens live under the commonwealth’s law, and we count that a privilege rather than a burden (1 John 5:3). For more on how believers from the nations are joined to Israel, see Question 9.
What about Acts 15? The council was asked whether Gentiles must be circumcised in order to be saved (Acts 15:1, 5), and it answered no. The four “necessary things” (Acts 15:28-29) were a starting point for new believers, not the whole of their walk, and James notes in the same breath that Moses was being read every Sabbath in every city where they would gather (Acts 15:21). Salvation was settled by grace; learning followed week by week.