What Old Testament messianic prophecies tell us that the Messiah would set aside large parts of the Law and the Prophets?

It does not exist. On the contrary, actual messianic prophecy says the Messias would lead everyone to full torah observance. He would also be a great military leader, unite all Jews in Israel, rebuild the Temple, and usher into an era of peace lasting for a thousand years.
Jesus fulfilled none of these prophecies, and the concept of a “second coming” is an entirely Christian invention, just like the concept of hell or the heresy they call the “Trinity”.
http://www.jewfaq.org/mashiach.htm

I would say that the pastors, like your question, are ill informed.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the law of the Old Testament “doesn’t apply”, which is why it bothers me when people write off lines in Leviticus that order people to kill homosexuals as simply “not applying” anymore.

@DominicX
It is simple rationalisation because they can not reconcile the immorality of the biblical god with their own morality which is based on secular enlighenment values.

Certainly seems that way.

Marcion of Sinope thought that the contrast between how God is depicted in the Old vs. the New Testaments was so great that there were in fact two Gods. You can guess what contemporary Christians thought of him…

Hmmm, I think it is a bit of a misconstrual to say that adultery and disrespect, premarital sex and “disrespect of the Sabbath” (where is THAT required?) are not only allowed but encouraged. People’s behavior is not the same as religious proscription.

And what does the Torah have to do at all with Mary Baker Eddy or Rev. Moon?

But many of those Old Testament laws were for the Jewish people, not the Gentiles. The Gospel is for all, Jew and Gentile alike.

Your question is kinda mixed up, but the short answers is that writings were not designed to teach a man about god…God is always the knowing that flow from within to without…..not knowledge from without going in.

So in ignorance men read so as to know, but they create a problem for themselves and are stuck in a double minded predicament…where by the writings they seek justification before men, which causes them to reject the knowledge of God within.

@ragingloli Thanks. I can’t find any other way to look at it.

@filmfann I guess “ill informed” is all the rage these days. Of course i could be “ill informed” about that too. :-)

@DominicX I’ve tried to discuss this with otherwise reasonable people who were Christians, and they just go into a loop of:

Christian, “It’s true because the Bible says its true.”

Me, “But the Bible does not say that.”

Christian, “That’s because we are under a new dispensation now, so you can’t look at the Bible for it.”

And so the loop goes.

@zenvelo It would be a misconstrual.to say that. That’s why I didn’t say it. I tried to be careful about defining which of the sins that formerly required stoning were still frowned upon (children disrespecting their parents, adultery, homosexuality) and which were altogether ignored. Read the OP again, carefully.

The Sabbath is a weekly day of rest, observed from sundown on Friday until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night. Going to church on Sunday is not keeping the Sabbath. Orthodox Jews are so strict about doing no work on the Sabbath that they avoid taking elevators, lest the floor button cause a spark which ignites the building and inadvertently cooks some meat therein. Sorry, but Christians simply do not observe the Sabbath as ordered by the Law and the Prophets.

In this statement, “But many of those Old Testament laws were for the Jewish people, not the Gentiles. The Gospel is for all, Jew and Gentile alike.” you are lapsing into the same loop I described above. The original question, if we can get back to that, is “Where is it written that the Law and the Prophets are now obsolete?”.

@kess That’s an interesting theology. Are you suggesting that God gave man the Ten Commandments, the Law and the Prophets, the Torah and the New Testament to deliberately trip him up so he could then condemn them to eternal suffering in the lake of fire for having wrongly tried to obey what they were told was his word?

@ETpro
”That’s an interesting theology. Are you suggesting that God gave man the Ten Commandments, the Law and the Prophets, the Torah and the New Testament to deliberately trip him up so he could then condemn them to eternal suffering in the lake of fire for having wrongly tried to obey what they were told was his word?”
Would not be the first time. He did that already in the Garden of Eden.
First he created humans without the knowledge that it is wrong to disobey god or that it is wrong to eat from the tree, whose fruit they would have to eat in order to know that it was wrong to eat from it. And then he put the snake there to make the humans eat the fruit.
Devious.

@ragingloli Quite true. This discussion has spilled over into the Atheists & Agnostics group on GoodReads.com. Interesting comment and blog link David Rosman just added there.

Christianity is like the worst kind of fanfiction. The kind that completely ignores canon-material.

@ragingloli David had it right when he wrote that the religion should be called Constantinianity, because it basically follows not the teaching of Jesus but the ideas that Roman emperor Constantine used to consolidate his hold on the throne and the world, and to persecute the Jews as well as all other religions that refused to embrace his teachings.

If I were to write you a letter telling you thatangoes are found in trees and they are very sweet succulent and good for hunger…..

What is the proof of these things?
Is it in the letter I wrote?
Was I wrong to write?
Did I misrepresent the mangoes?

So of you never climb the tree and eat the mangoes, all you have is my letter which can never do justice to the actual experience.

So those who regard the book to condemn or justify the God it referenced, are merely referencing the reference instead of finding the proof where it lies.
Why?

@kess The book is what was given us to tell us how to approach God. And yet it is filled with contradictions and things that are cflat wrong. Not something I would expect from an omniscient and omnipotent being.

And as certain as you are that you have climbed the right tree and eaten the one true fruit, there have been over 3,000 creator Gods imagined by man and for each, people climbed that defined tree, at that defined fruit, and convinced themselves just as firmly as you have that they had tasted the one true fruit. They cannot all be right. More likely, they are all wrong.

Etpro knowing God was and is never dependant on the book.

Learn that if you believe in the book it wont get you anywhere just as if doubting the book still wont get you anywhere….
When you have tasted and seen then the book will be seen in proper perspective.

What difference would it make to you if I were to answer you Yea or Nay?
You wont be able to relate to neither of the two….
A man must first see before he can doubt…otherwise he acts foolishly to doubt that which he has not seen.

yes, believe it first, because then one will be dishonest enough to twist everything to conform to one’s preconceived beliefs, instead of the correct method to adjust beliefs to available facts.

“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change” – Dalai Lama

Curiously, the abrahamic religions seem to do the exact opposite. If science proves some belief of Christianity wrong, then science made a mistake.

@kess He who professes to believe everything explains nothing. I see this. Further discussion with you is pointless.

@kess One more try. Here is my view expressed more eloquently by Richard Feynman. You seem to be coming at understanding the world from a diametrically opposed viewpoint. If that’s so, then we have no common frame of reference within which we can understand one another’s communications.

Now you have presented something that is not focus on the book. I have no interest in perpetuating the age old two faced arguments, that come a dime a dozen on internet discussion boards.These belong to those who stumbles at the book.

You are abosolutely correct about us coming from different perspectives.
You have chosen to take the position of the doubter, but it presents these problems,
It thrives on the things external, thus never really coming to know itself.
It is constantly dissatisfied, always seeking more…you need no other reason to doubt more than the doubt itself.
Doubt perpetuates and constantly reconfirms and strengthens the belief that one is Ignorant, because for one to doubt must first believe that he does not know.

Remember all writings first exist within the man as knowledge. But in this age men search the external hoping to gain knowledge…forsaking the very source of it.

I believe everything because everything has some truth in it..yet they all have to potential to decieve.
But when you have clearly Identified truth you would find it all the time everytime.

But it is so simplistic in its nature that the doubters.easily doubts it.

You are arguing with an Agnostic trying to convince him he should doubt? You certainly are a contentious fellow.

I am quite frankly flabberglasted as your take on my efforts to discuss and to.conclude as you did. For evidently you are in no need of help to be doubtful, and based on such.knowledge I responded.

@kess Perhaps it has to do with your talking in riddles. Even the statement above is difficult for me to decipher. Is this deliberate, or is English a second language?

English is my first language, and I do not try to talk in riddles ( so a to confuse) but to explain through simple familiar examples.

But even with that, I am fully aware not many are able to understand, not because the understancing the logic is beyond the person, its just it first requires a certain conditioned (way of thinking) mind.

So even if my sentence are wholly disjointed, they would still recognise the complete thought for they have already seen it within their ownselves.

If you talk in a roundabout way it can give people the illusion that there’s something of substance beneath the noise.

Eh? There isn’t one, I don’t think. Jesus said, “I have not come to destroy the Law, but to complete it.” The point of the Gospels is that Jesus was the only sacrifice big enough to nail all of the sins at once.
See, sin can only be cleared by the sacrifice of something that had committed no sin hence the animal sacrifices. In financial terms, sin is debt and righteousness is credit, and forgiveness is a matter of transferring your “credit” to cover your “debt”. Animals aren’t worth as much as people, though they are naturally incapable of sin. People would be worth enough on a one-to-one basis, except that they’re all sinful, a sinless man would not need a sacrifice, and anyway human sacrifice is a sin. XD So then you have Jesus Who is God, Who out-values absolutely everything put together and is without sin. And we double-bypass the restriction on human sacrifice by a) not sacrificing a human and b) making it a very bloody execution instead.
Then we have the stinger: “the wages of sin is death,” right? Sin = death. So when you apply death to Someone Who has no sin, you get no death.
…Now that I think about it, I’m going to have to revise my theory on the relationship between God and Time, to account for the three-day waiting period between death and resurrection.

@DominicX “Doesn’t apply anymore” is a sort of shortcut. The Law does apply, particularly the sentiment. Jesus summed the whole thing up in two lines: love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Much easier to keep track of, IMO.

@Nullo I am asking for someone not just to tell me the spin their preacher man told them, but to show me in scripture where the law is recinded. I don’t see that in Jesus’ own teachings in Mathew 5:17 – 20.