Cassian's Recap: UNDERSTANDING TORAH LIVING + Dr. James Sedlacek

Hello, hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking, Cassian's Recap. This is going to be about 20 minutes of me overviewing the episode that came out on Tuesday. If you haven't heard it yet, it's about Torah living.

How do we live Biblically accurate lives that are according to the Torah and how the Bible tells us how to live? I think that as Christians, I was raised in a church that allows me to celebrate Easter, Christmas, go to church on Sunday, and that's about it.

The traditions of my faith are honestly quite simple, and when I read the Torah and the Old Testament, there were much more festivals, there were much more traditions, there were offerings and sacrifices, there were rules.

And as I entered into this journey, I had the question of, are there things that I'm missing here? If I'm here to obey the Word of God, I feel like I'm not obeying a lot. But, it's also the Torah. It's also only applicable to the Jewish faith?

Question mark? I don't know the answer to this, which is why I sat down with Dr. James Sedlicek, and I made him walk through all of these traditions and essentially outline it for me. So today, I'm going to tell you, how do we live Biblically accurate lives?

What the Torah Is and Why It Matters for Christians

That's the question of the day. My name's Cassian Blino. Let's go into my recap. Okay, so the Torah. First off, we start there. What is it? Well, it's usually translated into the word law, and that's how people perceive it, that anything within the first five books of the Bible is the law.

If we look at that translation more accurately, it's actually instructions. If we look at the Old Testament, the Torah should really just be a bunch of case studies for how to develop faith and theological thought.

And then also, what are the good ideas that can come from the bad choices of people? There are a bunch of people in the Old Testament that we wouldn't say reacted kindly or reacted well, like Sarah laughing at the word of God promising her a child.

But what can we learn from that theologically? So if we look at the Torah, not meaning law, but instructions, kind of like an IKEA assembly set of instructions to build my desk, that's going to guide us in faith to actually obey God in practical applications.

So another thing that we need to recognize within the Old Testament is the comparison of reasoning, of cleanness, cleanness in the Torah to the necessary protocols. So if we look at Torah as more of like an instruction guide, not the laws, I think that opens up the freedom that we have as Christians when we try to ask ourselves, well, what should I be following?

It's not black and white. Again, this is a instruction manual. It's not a to a T law that we need to follow, and that's going to help guide us. For example, cleanliness. They talk a lot about cleanliness in the Old Testament.

I'm pretty deep in Leviticus right now, and it's always talking about, you know, isolating yourselves. And if there's any sort of skin issue or if you're around a dead body or a lot of particulars on blood, which we'll get into in a little bit.

This is very important because, well, they're following cleanliness laws. Cleanliness laws in the Torah are a very big deal. And the way that we can put a modern lens on that is kind of like, what are the necessary protocols that are used in health care?

You know, what are the things that we use today to reduce contamination? This is why they also followed it. They wanted to exile lepers. They didn't want contamination through blood. They didn't want any diseases through dead bodies.

This is very similar to the same level of, you know, the same level of isolation that we followed during COVID. In Jewish culture, there is the issue of, you know, blood contamination, leprosy, any sort of disease, but also the contamination of sin and evil.

Very thematic. Very important. And so to keep the contamination out of an early Israelite society is very important. And if anybody is posing a risk of contamination, they are removed until it's safe to reintroduce them or fully exclude them and kind of take them out.

From Adam to Moses: The Torah in Its Historical Timeline

So let's zoom out. We're kind of getting into something too quickly. In 2025, we often read everybody in the Bible was already within the faith. That's not how it works. The Bible is the history of all humans.

So they can't already be in a faith that hasn't been established yet. Adam and Eve were just the first humans. And this is where we get into a timeline. So bear with me. You have Adam and Eve and you have the pre-Noah societies.

Remember, that's where the Nephilim were created, the sons of renown. And then things were so bad that God's like, wipe them out. And that's where you get the judgment and the flood. So after the flood, it's just Noah and his family.

So it's just eight people.

After that, they reproduce and then we find ourselves at the Tower of Babel.

Okay.

Again, these people are not Jews yet. The Jewish religion is not clear. People have been sent out from the Tower of Babel. There are different populations speaking different languages. Not Jews. They're just early nations.

And then within still the first couple books of the Bible, we get to Abraham. And Abraham, remember, is the person who's going to father many nations, i .e. the Jews. And he goes into lands, you know, God calls him out of Ur and calls him to lands that he does not know.

Him and Sarah move out and eventually give birth to Isaac and then Jacob. And Jacob is renamed Israel, who is considered the first Israelite. Going back to the timeline, Jacob slash Israel moves his family to Egypt and his son Joseph is separated from his brothers and is adopted by the Pharaoh.

Remember, they sold him for his beautiful coat, his ability to interpret dreams. So then Joseph's brothers, they are the 12 tribes. And those are the 12 tribes that live in harmony outside of Egypt until the Israelite population gets so big that by the time there's a new Pharaoh, he enslaves them and he doesn't care so much for Jacob's family that the previous Pharaoh was much more keen to.

Eventually we find ourselves with Moses, who was a part of the Society of Israelites. So much so that there is an infanticide that allows his mother to put him in a basket or an ark, or an ark if you know the other episodes, that he's then adopted by the Pharaohs.

By then he is adopted by Pharaoh and lives and grows up within that society. If you know the story of Moses, you know that he is the one that leaves the Israelites out of Egypt during the exodus out of slavery and into the promised land.

Moses is where we find ourselves writing the Torah with these Jewish themes that begin to emerge. But he writes of the beginning of humans when Jewish culture did not exist yet for them. So it's very strange for us to look at the Torah, a Jewish based book, about a time when there was no Jewish faith.

It was about the original humans. So having that timeline broken down by Dr. Sedlicek was very incredibly helpful because.

You don't think about it.

You get, I mean, personally, I get very lost up in the names and the timelines and the stories. So it's good to summarize that lineage really quickly. Moving forward, the key aspects of the instructions of the Torah are helpful for those nations.

Those early nations that separated after the Towel of Babel, okay? And those nations that emerged afterwards. So how are we going to direct people that has more universal laws towards laws that are specific for a group of people when we're considering everybody that came out of the first humans?

The Torah is going to address all of humanity until you get to the Jewish nations. So the question that we're posing within this discussion is, which parts are for everyone and which parts are just for the Jews?

And so the main takeaway here is that if there are some things in the Torah that are just simply specific to just the Jews, like a yarmulke or the synagogue, you know, that type of thing, why would you do those things if you're not a Jew?

Dr. Sedlicek implores you, do not pretend. Be authentic. Be true to the culture that you are. But it is important to learn the decorum. So if you can participate, participate with respect. Do not be offensive, even if you don't know it.

But you're not forced to be a part of it, which I think kind of goes without saying. But through our faith, we want to respect other faiths and say, oh, that's not my religion. I'm not going to participate.

Well, you can with respect. You don't have to completely abandon your faith, but you can simply participate and know the ways so you can be respectful. So one option here is to know all of the Torah laws, be a participant within the Jewish faith.

The other option is to put off the Old Testament entirely, which myself included, is how most Christians are led. Only focus on the New Testament, Matthew to Revelation. And this is just simply due to the lack of educational guidance provided within seminary.

And we've discussed this in other episodes with Dr. Sedlicek. And it's very illuminating, at least for me, to know how the educational system for our pastors is set up. So I just want to go into what it looks like for a second.

The educational system for pastors within seminary is you either study Old Testament, New Testament, theology, practical ministries, or counseling. You just study one of those. And if you're a pastor and you want to do well leading a church, you're typically going to follow the practical ministries.

And that can even be split up into like older ministry and youth ministry. And why would they do that? Why would they? Well, they're leading a church and it helps them. It prepares them to lead a church.

However, if you're going to spend all of your time learning this to become the best pastor ever, you just simply don't have time to study other things like learning the Old Testament. So you're unable to answer questions about the Old Testament.

And that's just simply how the curriculum sets up. The reason that I interviewed Dr. Sedlicek is because he is one of the, literally you can count it on one hand, one of the few people that have gone through seminary and studied both Old Testament and New Testament.

He is a pastor, but he learned both the ancient languages. He can speak and he can read, sorry, you don't speak it. He can read ancient Greek, ancient Hebrew. He can read the texts and he is a specialist in Jewish studies and the biblical founding of the basis of our beliefs.

Noahide Laws and Respecting Jewish Customs

So bringing us back to the next topic is as a Gentile, if I shouldn't use all of the Torah, I should just respect it and respect its customs. But I also shouldn't avoid it altogether simply because my pastor isn't well-equipped to guide me in it through my church.

What do I follow? This question has plagued me for so long. And so through the guidance of Dr. Sedlicek, he said, a good place to start is from the advice of the rabbis, the Noahide laws given to everybody.

These are the laws that all humans during the time of Noah were given. So this is again going to apply to all humans because it predates the Jews. So this is no idol worship, no murder, no blasphemy, no sexual immorality, no eating meat from a living animal.

And by that it means like blood is still in it, which is really to respect life, to not eat things that still have life in that. And blood is a representation of life. Do not idolize blood. We see that in a lot of pagan rituals of like drinking the blood of animals.

And also like hygiene, you know, most of the meat that we eat today, because I got kind.

Of panicked.

I was like, wait, I love steak. Sometimes it looks a little bloody. He clarified that it's really hygienic to remove all the blood of an animal, which like.

I don't hunt.

I don't know these types of things, but now that you say that, it makes sense. And so that's what allows us to eat that meat, like having a juicy steak. That's not necessarily saying there's blood in it, which is just my own ignorance.

So that was good to clarify. Moving back to the Noahide laws, no theft and to have governance and justice trials and representation, which is crazy that to have an orderly government with justice was a part of the Noahide laws.

Like that makes you think like most of the things our government is following today is actually based in spirituality and like the Torah. How crazy is that? So the thing here that is very thematic throughout all those Noahide laws is to not mix the holy with the unholy and respecting the biblical decorum that God demands.

We don't get to just show up.

Okay.

We don't just get to say like, Hey God, take me like, I know that I'm supposed to worship you, but the way I like to worship is like through nature and going on hikes. Full transparency. I used to be like that.

Um, I vividly remember being in college and being like, I don't want to go to church today, so I'll just worship God through his nature and I'll go on a hike today and I'm going to worship God by just like enjoying his creation.

While I think we should always be grateful of his creation, God wants us to show up to in so many words, postulate before him in ways that worship him, that come in community and we don't get to say like, well, this is what works for me.

So God can bend his will, you know, like that's just not how it works. God is very specific in the Bible and how he wants us to show up. And this is part of the Noahide laws of like, this is now you need to show up.

Excuse me.

So when we look at the Israelites in the desert who just came out of Exodus, okay. God taught them how to worship him. And this took time.

Okay.

When you read Exodus, they're talking about, okay, this is how you build the tabernacle. This is how you make offerings. This is how you make sacrifices. This is exactly what you need to wear. This is when you wear it.

When you make a sacrifice in an offering, this is what you offer to God. This is what you don't absolutely don't include any of this. These are the animals that are able to be off.

He's specific.

He's very specific. And when you read the book, it seems like it's all at once that people just need to, they need to get it right away. And if they don't, they're out. But this is, this took time. This took so much time, especially with some of the festivals he asked for them to participate in like the harvest of the first fruits.

That's going to take a whole harvest. You've got to have a whole harvest before you can offer anything. So God is meeting people where they're at to prepare them for where he's bringing them. How good is that?

Okay.

So kind of like the festival of the first fruits, like you don't know how to operate within these rules, this new covenant with God as a Jew, until it actually happens kind of like a harvest. Like how do you give the first fruits until you have the harvest itself?

So this is God getting us slash the Israelites ready for the journey. It can't happen all at once. Sanctification takes time and it should. We're not going to get it right the first time. We will not.

Show me one person that's gotten it right the first time. Jesus, you're welcome. No, there is no other, there is no one other than Jesus. We will not get it right. The sanctification process is a beautiful blessing and grace from God that allows for us to grow in covenants with him over time.

And if he were to expect us to get it right the first time, none of us would make it. So all of that to say, should we read the old Testament as a Gentile? You know, again, me with the black and white questions.

Yes, we should because it adds value and, and it makes sense of what is going to occur in the new Testament. It's kind of like when you know all the background of the movie that when you watch the movie, you're like, well, that's because the director did this and that was actually filmed during this.

How much better is that movie when you know the background of it? This is what the old Testament, you know, in a, in that horrible example, the old Testament is going to bring life to these mentions within the new Testament.

When we see Jesus mentioned things and celebrate certain holidays, Oh, because in the old Testament, Oh, you might be confused. Don't be, I'm about to explain it to you. So let's get into the festivals.

Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Pentecost in the Life of Jesus

This is what cracked open the new Testament.

Okay.

I'm sure that we could do a parallel old Testament to new Testament on verses, but when we hone in on the festivals, boy, oh boy, does the new Testament come alive, alive in a way that I could have never put together.

It's so much to hold in all at once to keep track of the amazingness of the new Testament. And then remember what happened thousands of years ago in the old Testament. It was just such a blessing to have these side by side.

So it really wove together the history and the meaning of God's word. It clarified things that I missed entirely. So what I wasn't expecting was the truth of Passover, Pesach is, um, you know, Dr. Sedlicek said, and how that's going to unlock the meanings in the new Testament Passover, which is the event where the Holy spirit passes over the homes during Moses's time and Pharaoh during the plagues home without the, the sacrifice lamb's blood over the doorway.

The first, the firstborn son within that home was taken. And so Jesus was celebrating that festival during the last few days of his life. He was going to enter into the trials of his crucifixion because he was in town for the Passover.

Isn't that insane that Jesus was celebrating Moses's holiday, like the holiday that Moses lived through. So in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is praying to God for a solution that doesn't seem humanly possible.

He said, you know, take this cup if it's your will, basically. But Jesus is essentially praying for a solution that doesn't seem humanly possible as far as like saving these people, saving him. I don't think anybody saw the resurrection coming cause that simply had never happened.

Before.

So how would he even think that that'd be like a possibility to pray for the Jesus is praying for the solution, take this cup. And this is very similar to the way it didn't seem possible how Moses was going to be saved in a basket showing up on Pharaoh's front door, let alone how did they survive the plagues?

Let alone how did they part a freaking sea? In both situations, God is providing in ways that no human can. There was no coincidence that Jesus is celebrating Passover right before he is crucified and resurrected.

I'm just going to like pause there so it can marinate. As I go into the next holiday, the next holiday is going to be of the unleavened bread, the Chag Mahazot.

Okay.

A holiday about haste. You're making bread without waiting for it to rise since they're in a hurry when they were first fleeing out of Egypt. You don't have time to wait for the yeast to rise when you need to rush to make sure you're part of that group of people that are part of the mass exodus so you can be a part of that splitting of the Red Sea.

You can't wait for bread to rise. I make bread. It takes literally 24 hours. It is the best bread in the world. I claim it, but if you're in a rush running out of slavery, you don't have time. So this unleavened bread, the Chag Mahazot, and this is when Jesus is breaking bread at the Passover feast.

What does he tell Judas to do? To make haste with the things he has to go do. Go do what you need to do. If you were a Jew, you'd pick up on these things. When you read that verse of Jesus celebrating the Feast of Unleavened Bread, talking to Jews about making haste, it would have clicked for you.

As a Gentile, I totally missed it. I totally missed it. So how amazing is this? How grateful am I to have Dr. Zedlicek? The next feast is Shavuot. This is the Festival of Weeks or Pentecost. This is to commemorate the giving of the Ark of the Covenant slash Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai.

50 days after Passover, it celebrates divine revelation and the covenant between God and.

Israel.

So after Jesus's resurrection, again, look at the parallels between what happened in the Old Testament and now what Jesus is experiencing in the Gospels. So after Jesus's resurrection, the disciples are fasting.

They're praying for the Holy Spirit, for this divine revelation. So after Jesus dies, which just so happens to be around the time of the Passover, the disciples are praying, they're fasting, they want that divine revelation.

They're praying for the Holy Spirit. Jesus basically came back and was like, I'll be back. But they're like, in like five minutes or like, we'll see you tomorrow. Like they don't know what this means.

They just know he's just died and then they saw him again and he said he's going to be.

Back.

So they are fasting and praying.

Okay.

And this is during the Festival of Weeks. So they're praying for divine revelation, which is going to fall on them at the end of Shavuot. They are already at the end of Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks.

It's also during the time that Jesus just died. This is the day after the wheat harvest. So these disciples who didn't know what was going to happen were already up all night praying and studying for Shavuot and then Pentecost fell on them on the last day.

So again, this is like a double holiday. So the disciples are celebrating Shavuot. This is the celebration of God speaking to Moses with the Torah on Mount Sinai on the last day, which just so happens to be around that time Jesus just died, rose from the dead.

And said he'd be back.

They're praying and fasting. The Holy Spirit falls on the disciples and starts speaking through them to everyone else. And that's Pentecost.

Is this insane?

This is insane.

I'm over here like, what's about to happen on Easter? What is about to happen on Easter for us? Okay, now the holidays are a lot more meaningful because something's going to happen. These are clearly being stacked.

I mean, who's to say?

You know, who's to say?

I'm not God. I'm just picking up on patterns.

Okay.

Communion, Seder, and the Marriage Vow of Christ

And this is kind of the whammy. I'm like honestly scared to talk about this next part because it makes me so emotional. So every time Christians partake in communion at church, they are celebrating one piece of a meal that Jesus was celebrating with his disciples in the Last Supper.

Jesus stood up during this time of the Last Supper and he's basically partaking in a Seder.

Service.

And this is within Passover. It's a long meal. We don't know that this is the Last Supper.

Okay.

We don't know this until after it happens because obviously they think that they're just celebrating. They're just celebrating the Seder service. They're celebrating a holiday. They always have the Passover.

It's thousands of years. And so just like a little bit of background about the Seder service, I didn't know this, but it's a long meal and it has about four movements throughout the course of the meal.

You eat certain food at certain times. You say certain words. It's kind of like a whole procession. And it's around the third course when Jesus stood up and he would have said that part about the wine and the wafer.

It's a good thing that I'm crying.

This is a really beautiful thing of our faith that I just feel really blessed to know. But around the third movement, he stands up and he says, you know, take my body broken.

For you and to drink the wine.

And we look back at this and we're like, cool. That was crazy. That's a crazy thing to say. But it actually was crazy for the disciples too because that's not what you're supposed to say during the Seder service.

You're supposed to say something else. And when Jesus says, like, take my body broken for you, that's like a wedding vow. That's like well known for Jewish marriages. And I think I get really emotional about it because like, this is Jesus knowing what's about to happen on the cross.

His disciples have no idea. Obviously they couldn't, but they even mentioned it after. Like I think John says, like, we didn't know at the time, but looking back, this is what.

He was doing.

It's like, Jesus is giving his body for us. Like this is a marriage vow, like Christ in the church, like this is where our faith is.

In action.

And it just, it seems so personal. And he uses them in the middle of this because, gosh, I have notes because I knew I wasn't in the notes. He uses these marriage vows in the middle of the Seder service because this is the way he's inaugurating with his disciples a new pact or a treating or a covenant as we call.

It.

And it's one of those pledges between spouses during a wedding. And what Jesus does in the middle of that Seder service is evoke the words of a marriage.

Vow.

And he was doing something different. He was alluding to a future that he knew was coming. And his followers had no idea that he would use those words and why he was using them until after he was gone.

And like, isn't that just so beautiful that like, like, I don't, I don't know, I want to say something dumb. Like, I'm gonna use it in my marriage vows, but like, for God to like for Jesus to marry himself to us like that, as like a single woman who's not married, that's like very emotional for me to be a part of that.

So my poor guest, I start breaking down in the middle of this work of this podcast, he's like, and the next thing, this wonderful man that had to endure this, God bless him, what a beautiful part of our faith.

Tabernacles, Hanukkah, and the Roots of Christian Practice

Moving forward, Sukkot is the Feast of Tabernacles, which is where they build a tent and they stay there for a few days. It's celebrating the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites who are wandering around the desert, they knew where they were going, but they couldn't enter.

But they knew that they had to ensure their children's safety, not theirs. So they're celebrating three main things, the water from the rock, the manna from heaven, and the Ten Commandments, all of which happened with Moses while they were in the desert.

Jesus said, I am Sukkot, I am the bread of life, I am the living water, and he is here to fulfill the law. So these people that were wandering around the desert for 40 years, they knew that they weren't going to enter in the promised land, but they knew that their children would.

So it was more of a sacrifice for their children and what was needed in order to get their people into the promised land. And then, again, like we skim over Hanukkah within this, since it's not really in the Torah, but I had no idea what Torah is, like, I'll be the first one to admit, it's not like anybody teaches me about Torah when I celebrate Christmas.

But just so anybody else who didn't know is that it's about rededicating the temple after someone desecrated it. Who desecrated the temple? Well, in 164 BCE, a Greek general killed all the priests of the temple and brought in a statue of Zeus.

And they said, hey, you're going to worship this instead of God. So Hanukkah is about the fasting and the praying for the oil to come from Egypt so that they could light all the candles and rededicate the temple back to God.

And I was like, the Greeks and the Egyptians, like, I'm not a historian major, but what.

Do you mean?

This is happening at the same time?

This Egyptian and Greek overlap was happening at the same time, you know, they, the reason that we have nine candles is because it took nine nights to get all of the oil to rededicate to the temple. So in the Gospel of John, it mentions how Jesus was at the festival of lights 200 years after this incident.

How wild is this? That like this happens between, you know, the Greeks come in, they, they ruin the temple. And then so they start praying and fasting, they call on Egypt, Egypt provides the oil, they're able to re-celebrate this.

Now we have this holiday now called the festival of lights or Hanukkah. And 200 years later, Jesus is like celebrating. And we see that in the Gospel of John. So again, like when we celebrate these things in modern times, they were celebrated at the same time as Jesus.

If you're a Christ follower, do what Christ did, celebrate these holidays. You don't need to abandon your faith. You don't need to disrespect theirs, but honestly acknowledge them because it is a part of our.

Faith.

This is what it means to be a Christian, to live biblically accurate is to acknowledge the roots that we came from. I, um, I wasn't expecting to talk about festivals to get so emotional, but I do feel like the more we have these conversations, the deeper the roots of our faith grow.

So thank you for listening to my recap. I feel clear in my biblical firm, in like my biblical foundation of my faith as a Christian and the Judah and the Jewish influence over it. Um, I also feel very clear on what I can and can't do.

And even if I were to participate in Jewish customs, by no means am I blaspheming as that would be my worst case scenario, but I can still do so respectfully while still honoring my own faith and respecting someone else's.

And to be honest, I think I was anxious to have this because I felt like I was doing something wrong if I didn't. So having this conversation was both clarifying and very freeing. And while this was just a, I don't know, like 25 minute conversation between us, I do recommend you listen to the full conversation with Dr. Sedlicek.

It's about an hour and a half, but he's much smarter than I, and to hear it from his mouth is going to be much clearer to your ears. So if you haven't checked it out, go ahead and check it out. And uh, by all means, thank you so much for listening to this.

Uh, God bless you.