The Book of Acts: They Didn't Leave Torah at the Cross

I want to tell you something that will either settle something in you or start a fight, depending on where you are right now.

The men who turned the world upside down for Yeshua — the ones in the Book of Acts — never stopped keeping Torah. Not one of them. Peter still went to the temple at the hour of prayer. Paul observed Shavuot. James was Torah to the bone. The first believers gathered on Shabbat. They didn't preach from a New Testament because there wasn't one yet. They opened the Tanakh and showed people Yeshua on every page.

That is where this study came from.

Our group came into this study from three different directions. Some were new to the faith entirely — still finding their footing, learning what it even means to walk with Yeshua. Some had been believers for years but were just beginning to wrestle with Torah, to feel that pull toward something older and deeper than what they had been handed. And some had already made that journey and were settled in it. Three different places. One book. And Acts handled all three without apology.

I will be honest with you about what I expected going in and what actually happened.

For the new believers, I wanted them to see faith with skin on it. Not doctrine on a page but people living it — making hard choices, standing in front of rulers, losing everything for something they were absolutely certain of. Acts is the most alive book in Scripture for someone who just came to faith and is wondering what this is supposed to look like. It did not disappoint. I watched people in our group grow through this study in ways that still bless me.

For the group wrestling with Torah — the ones who weren't convinced, who pushed back, who needed to see it for themselves — I brought them to Acts for one reason. I knew what was in there. And I knew that if Yeshua wanted to show them something, He would do it through the text. You can argue with me all day. You can't argue with Peter standing in Solomon's Porch. You can't argue with Paul in the synagogue on Shabbat, reasoning from the Scriptures. The disciples didn't preach from the book of Romans. They opened Isaiah and Psalms and Deuteronomy and they showed people Yeshua.

When that finally landed — when a few of them finally saw that the first hundred years of the faith were built entirely on the Old Covenant Scriptures — something shifted. Torah didn't look like a burden anymore. It looked like the foundation everything else was built on.

And for me personally — I learned things in this study I had missed in years of reading Acts on my own. The cultural weight of the story. The historical moment the disciples were standing in. Why certain things happened in the order they happened. Depth I had walked past a hundred times without seeing it.

That is what this series is. It is not a commentary. It is not a seminary course. It is one man sitting with a group of people who are serious about walking with Yeshua, working through the Book of Acts passage by passage, and letting it say what it actually says.

Wherever you are coming from — brand new to the faith, years in but something stirring, or already walking in Torah and hungry to go deeper — Acts has something for you. It always does.

Let's walk through it together.

— Phil Balay | Vigilant Faith