The Jews. The Law.
Two lazy phrases that poison Christian thinking—and why serious readers have to stop tolerating them.
There are two phrases that instantly reveal whether someone is doing serious biblical thinking or just playing with inherited slogans:
“The Jews.”
“The law.”
They sound religious. They sound confident. They sound like you know what you’re talking about.
But most of the time, they function like duct tape over a cracked argument. They let a speaker blur categories, dodge context, and smuggle conclusions into the conversation without earning them. And when a public voice builds an entire posture on those two phrases, the problem isn’t merely tone.
It’s cognition.
It’s low-resolution thinking dressed up as certainty.
Let’s talk like adults, with Scripture open.
“The Jews” is usually not a people-group—it’s a rhetorical weapon
When someone says “the Jews,” the first question should be: Which Jews?
Because the New Testament itself refuses to treat “Jews” as a single moral monolith.
You have Jewish disciples who follow Yeshua. Jewish crowds who are undecided. Jewish leaders who oppose Him. Pharisees who warn Him. Priests who later become obedient to the faith. Paul—unmistakably Jewish—called as an emissary to the nations. Entire synagogues splitting as some believe and others resist.
In other words, Scripture shows a covenant people with internal division—faithful remnants, compromised leaders, sincere seekers, hardened rebels, and everything in between.
So when a modern speaker says “the Jews” as a blanket label, what are they actually doing?
They’re taking a complex covenant people and reducing them into a cartoon villain—or a prophetic mascot—depending on what their audience needs that day.
That reduction is not just unfair.
It’s anti-biblical.
It leads to predictable sins.
Collective moral guilt without precision
Scripture can indict leaders. Scripture can indict a generation. Scripture can even indict a city.
But Scripture also distinguishes. It leaves room for remnant, repentance, righteous exceptions, and individual accountability.
Blanket “the Jews” talk usually strips that distinction because it’s convenient.
Political blame that morphs into ethnic suspicion
Once you train people to hear “the Jews” as one unified bloc, it becomes effortless to drift into conspiratorial thinking—about governments, finance, media, wars, and “who’s really behind things.”
That’s not a biblical covenant frame. That’s scapegoat training.
And yes—people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens (and on a smaller scale J.D. Hall) often trade in this same category-blur. I’m not claiming they’re identical, or that everything they say is false. I’m saying the habit is the same: broad labels that smuggle in a conclusion, then ride the emotional charge of the label as if it were evidence.
That’s rhetoric.
Not truth.
“The law” is an equivocation machine—and it wrecks doctrine
“The law” is one of the most abused phrases in Christian vocabulary. It gets tossed around as if it refers to one simple thing.
It doesn’t.
Depending on context, “law” can refer to Torah as covenant instruction. The Mosaic covenant administration as a historical framework. Civil/judicial case law for Israel as a nation. Priestly and temple regulations connected to sacrificial service. “Law” as a principle, like “the law of sin” in Romans 7. Conscience and moral knowledge in Romans 2. Human nature operating under sin’s gravity in Romans 7–8.
So when a man says, “the law is abolished,” or “the law only condemns,” or “the law is bondage,” you have to ask:
Which law? Which function? Which covenant context? Which audience? Which chapter?
If he can’t answer that clearly, he’s not teaching.
He’s gesturing.
And once audiences accept “law = bad” as a reflex, they stop reading Scripture like covenant literature and start reading it like a debate script.
“Fulfilled” doesn’t mean “canceled”—and this is where the misquote lives
This is the hinge point, because Matthew 5:17 gets abused constantly:
Yeshua says He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill.
The lazy read goes like this:
fulfilled = finished = therefore irrelevant.
That’s not exegesis. That’s English wordplay imposed on a Jewish Rabbi speaking covenant language.
So what does “fulfilled” mean there?
Fulfilled means “brought to full expression,” not “thrown away”
In the biblical sense, fulfill often means to fill something up with its intended meaning, to bring it to its appointed fullness, to embody it, and to properly establish what it was aiming at.
If you “fulfill” a prophecy, you don’t invalidate the prophecy—you prove it was true.
If you “fulfill” a command’s intent, you don’t erase the command—you obey it at the deepest level.
Yeshua doesn’t treat Torah like a dead document. In Matthew 5, He immediately goes deeper into it—into anger, lust, oath-taking, retaliation, enemy-love. That’s not cancellation. That’s intensification and purification.
Fulfilled means “rightly interpreted and lived,” against tradition and hypocrisy
A major theme in the Gospels is that religious leaders kept rules while breaking Torah’s weightier matters—justice, mercy, faithfulness, love of God, love of neighbor.
Yeshua “fulfills” Torah by showing what it actually meant all along—not as a ladder to earn salvation, but as covenant faithfulness flowing from a real heart.
Fulfilled means “brought to completion in Messiah,” not “made obsolete as instruction”
Yes: Messiah fulfills the sacrificial shadows by being the substance.
Yes: Messiah fulfills the priesthood trajectory.
Yes: Messiah fulfills the prophetic arc.
But here’s the bait-and-switch: people take “Messiah fulfilled the shadows” and then apply that to everything—including moral instruction, covenant identity, and obedience. That is logically sloppy.
The right frame is simple:
Messiah fulfills the shadows (sacrifice/atonement) by becoming the reality they pointed to.
Messiah fulfills the covenant story by accomplishing what Israel failed to do, as the faithful Son.
Messiah fulfills Torah’s goal by forming a people who obey from the heart through the Spirit.
That’s why the New Covenant promise isn’t “I’ll delete my Torah.”
It’s “I’ll write it on your heart.” (Jeremiah 31:31–33)
So if someone uses Matthew 5:17 to claim “Jesus fulfilled the law so we don’t have to care about it,” they’re not reading like a disciple.
They’re reading like a lawyer trying to find an exit clause.
The real issue is low-resolution thinking masquerading as spirituality
Let me say it clean.
When a teacher repeatedly uses “the Jews” and “the law” as sweeping, undefined, catch-all phrases, what you’re seeing is not deep theology.
It’s low-resolution cognition.
Not “low education.” Not “low vocabulary.” Not “low confidence.”
Low resolution.
It’s the inability—or refusal—to hold multiple biblical categories at once:
People vs leaders
covenant instruction vs judicial penalties
temple service vs moral obedience
justification vs sanctification
identity markers vs faithfulness
Israel as a nation vs Israel as a remnant vs Israel as individuals
That kind of thinking is closer to propaganda than exegesis.
And it produces predictable fruit: fear, contempt, arrogance, and a Christianity that can quote Paul while quietly despising the world Paul came from.
A sober warning for the “Bible guys” and the political commentators
There are men who talk like they own the Bible—or like they own the moral interpretation of world events. They speak with swagger. They correct everyone. They weaponize “discernment.” They brand themselves as guardians of truth.
But they don’t seem to understand the most basic reality:
the Bible is covenant literature.
It is not a modern political commentary feed.
It is not a slogan factory.
It is not a debate club.
If your “analysis” leans on blanket nouns—“the Jews,” “the law,” “they,” “them,” “those people”—you aren’t illuminating anything.
You’re fogging the room on purpose, then calling it insight.
And Scripture warns you about this type of man:
confident, harsh, certain
eager to teach
careless with the text
producing division rather than repentance
If your “truth” requires imprecision, blanket accusations, and simplistic binaries, then you’re not defending the faith.
You’re selling a posture.
What mature Messianic reading actually demands
A beyond-reproach approach doesn’t need sarcasm or ethnic scapegoats.
It needs clarity.
It sounds like this:
God’s Torah is His instruction, not a curse.
The Mosaic covenant is a real historical administration, not an eternal vehicle for justification.
The temple system was a shadow and a tutor, not a meaningless relic.
The Messiah is the goal and fulfillment of Torah—meaning He embodies it, clarifies it, and brings it to its intended fullness—not that He cancels God’s instruction.
Israel is a real covenant people with internal division, not a single villain or a single hero.
And Gentile believers are grafted in, not hired to replace the tree. (Romans 11)
That framework doesn’t flatter modern tribalism.
But it matches the text.
And it forces the sloppy speaker into the one thing he often avoids:
define your terms.
Because once you define your terms, you can’t hide behind “the Jews” or “the law” anymore.
You actually have to do the hard work of thinking.
And that’s the dividing line right now—not between “conservative” and “liberal,” not between “Calvinist” and “Arminian,” not between “Pro-Torah” and “anti-Torah.”
The dividing line is between people who read Scripture with covenant-level precision, and people who use Scripture as a prop for pre-loaded conclusions.
One path produces humility.
The other produces heat.
Choose your teachers accordingly.
May the shalom of our Abba guard you —
shalom v’shalvah.
Your brother in The Way,
Sergio.
© Sergio DeSoto /sergiodesoto.com. All rights reserved.
This is original, protected work. Pastors and teachers: please do not lift or republish this content as your own. If you share or preach from it, simply credit the source and author. Integrity begins in the pulpit.Apple Podcast–style episode description
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Fulfilled means “brought to completion in Messiah,” not “made obsolete as instruction”
There's a lot to unpack here, but that line really jumped out. That's an important distinction many of us miss. Instruction isn't obsolete because it CAN'T become obsolete. Not in a fallen world. Pride might have a different point of view, but we see where that got us.