Pip: There is a site called The Way of the Rabbi, which is either a very old GPS app or a very serious invitation to reconsider everything you thought you knew about obedience.
Mara: It is definitely the second one. cj has been writing about what it looks like to take the whole of Scripture seriously — Torah, faith, obedience, and what loving God actually requires in practice. Let’s start with that question directly.
Loving God in Truth: Faith, Obedience, and the Whole Word
Pip: The central tension here is a familiar one — is God’s instruction a burden we’ve been released from, or a delight we’ve been invited into? The post takes a clear position, and it’s not the one you’ll hear in most Sunday sermons.
Mara: The setup is Psalm 1:2, and the argument turns on a translation point: “But his delight is in the instruction of YHWH, and on His Torah he meditates day and night.” Torah and instruction are treated as interchangeable — not as legal code, but as the principles we are meant to aspire toward.
Pip: So the upshot is that if you spend your energy arguing the instructions are impossible or done away with, you never get to the place where they become a delight. The posture forecloses the experience.
Mara: Right, and the post names a specific argument it’s pushing back against — the claim that because Yahoshua fulfilled the law, we don’t have to. It calls this a real argument made by serious students of the Word, but says it uses Paul to supersede the rest of Scripture rather than read him within it.
Pip: Which is a pointed critique. The post also makes a striking move connecting lawlessness to the spirit of antichrist — not lawless in a civil sense, but in the sense of rejecting God’s Torah entirely.
Mara: The Ecclesiastes quotation lands the conclusion plainly: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” That is the post’s floor, and everything else builds toward it.
Pip: And faith itself gets redefined. The Hebrew word Emunah is described not as intellectual assent but as “a steadiness, as in a steady walk of obedience” — which reframes the whole salvation-by-faith-alone conversation.
Mara: Matthew 5:19 carries the weight of the practical call: whoever does the commandments and teaches them will be called great in the Kingdom. The burden the Pharisees imposed, the post clarifies, was man’s tradition layered over Torah — not Torah itself.
Pip: So loving God and loving neighbor aren’t two separate tracks — they’re both grounded in the same instruction. That connection between love and obedience is where this lands.
Mara: And what it means for how we read the whole of Scripture — not as history, but as living instruction — is exactly the kind of question worth sitting with longer than one episode.
Pip: Delight in the instruction, or argue your way out of it — the post suggests only one of those paths actually changes you.
Mara: That’s the thread worth pulling. More from The Way of the Rabbi next time.
Read the whole post here: Loving God in Truth: Faith, Obedience, and the Whole Word
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