119 Ministries has produced one of its most-watched teachings around a question that sounds, on the surface, like a genuine exegetical challenge: if God's law was abolished at the cross, why does Scripture repeatedly depict its relevance in future events? The argument draws on prophecies from Zechariah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Revelation to suggest that Torah observance must be binding on believers today because it appears in descriptions of what is still to come.

This article takes that argument seriously - and then dismantles it at the foundation. The problem is not the prophecies themselves, which are magnificent and worth careful study. The problem is the hermeneutical method being applied to them - a method that has no precedent in either Testament, that the genre of prophetic literature cannot support, and that, when applied consistently, produces conclusions that 119 Ministries itself would reject. The argument does not merely fail. It fails in ways that expose the very theology it was designed to defend.

What 119 Ministries Actually Argues

The teaching cites five clusters of prophetic texts: Zechariah 14, which describes nations celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles in the Millennial Kingdom; Ezekiel 40-48, which describes a future Temple with a reinstated Levitical priesthood and sacrifices; Revelation 18:2, which distinguishes between clean and unclean animals; Isaiah 66:17, which prophesies judgment on those eating unclean food in the end times; and Isaiah 66:23, Ezekiel 46 and Isaiah 2:2-3, which describe Sabbath observance and nations streaming to Jerusalem after the Messiah's return.

The logical move is stated plainly: if these practices will be observed in the Millennial Kingdom, they must not have been abolished. And if they have not been abolished, believers should be keeping them today.

The argument has a certain surface appeal. It bypasses the Pauline epistles entirely - no wrestling with Galatians or Colossians required. It positions itself above the fray of New Testament debate by appealing to what appears to be the final word of prophecy. And for a believer who is not yet equipped to evaluate prophetic genre or hermeneutical method, it can land with considerable force.

But it rests on a foundation that cannot bear the weight placed on it.

What Prophecy Is For - and What It Has Never Been Used For

Prophetic literature in Scripture serves identifiable and consistent purposes. It reveals God's sovereign control over history - declaring the end from the beginning so that when events unfold, faith is confirmed rather than shaken. It points to Christ - his person, his suffering, his glory, his kingdom. It warns covenant communities of the consequences of unfaithfulness and calls them back to God. It encourages perseverance in suffering by anchoring hope in what God has promised. And it is confirmed as genuine by its fulfilment, which is why the New Testament repeatedly returns to the prophets to show that Christ has fulfilled what they anticipated.

What prophecy is never used for - in either Testament, by any prophet, apostle or interpreter - is to establish present covenant obligation. This is not a minor observation. It is a hermeneutical principle with no exceptions in the biblical record. No prophet ever argued: "This future event is described, therefore here is your present duty." No apostle ever constructed a present-tense command from a future-tense prophecy. The entire weight of present obligation in Scripture rests on didactic texts - direct teaching, apostolic instruction, covenant law given in the present tense to present recipients.

119 Ministries has invented a hermeneutical method that has no precedent in the biblical text it claims to honour.

The Jeremiah 31 Mirror - Their Own Logic Reversed

The most elegant refutation of 119's method is to apply it to a prophecy they would not want applied this way.

Jeremiah 31:33 prophesies the New Covenant in these terms — and as we argue in detail in our article on Jeremiah 31, the law written on hearts is not the Mosaic Torah reinstated but something categorically new: "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts." This is a future prophecy - spoken to Israelites living under the Mosaic covenant, describing something that has not yet happened. Now apply 119's logic: if a future prophetic description establishes present obligation, then an Israelite reading Jeremiah 31 should have concluded that the law being written on hearts is something to embody now - and proceeded to bind scrolls to their chests as a symbol of Torah already dwelling within them.

This is, of course, precisely as absurd as it sounds. And it is precisely as valid as what 119 Ministries is doing with Millennial prophecy. The absurdity in both cases is identical: you cannot extract present obligation from future description. The Israelites who read Jeremiah 31 understood this instinctively - which is why not one of them ever argued from that prophecy to a present-tense duty. They understood that prophetic description of a future reality is not a command addressed to those living before that reality arrives.

119's method, applied consistently, would have produced scroll-binding Israelites. The fact that it produces Torah-observing Gentiles in the twenty-first century does not make it any more hermeneutically sound.

The New Covenant Circumvention

There is a reason 119 Ministries reaches for eschatology rather than engaging the New Covenant texts directly - and the reason is that the New Covenant texts are devastating to their position.

Jeremiah 31:31-32 is explicit: the New Covenant will not be like the covenant made with Israel's ancestors at the exodus. Hebrews 8 quotes this passage at length and adds the apostolic commentary: "By calling this covenant 'new', he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and ageing will soon disappear." 2 Corinthians 3 describes the old covenant administration as one that is fading, being set aside, giving way to something of surpassing glory. These are not ambiguous texts. They say, with unmistakable directness, that the Mosaic covenant has been superseded by something explicitly described as unlike it.

Faced with these texts, 119's move is to leap over them entirely by appealing to what the Millennium will look like. The logic runs: never mind what Hebrews 8 says - look at Zechariah 14. It is a deliberate circumvention of the strongest texts against their position, using eschatology as an escape hatch from a conversation they cannot win on the New Covenant's own terms.

But here is the second reversal of their own logic: if the Millennial Kingdom features Torah-related practices, those practices will be administered under the New Covenant - the very covenant that is explicitly not like the Mosaic one. Jeremiah 31 does not say the New Covenant will eventually be replaced by a return to Moses. It says the New Covenant is the final and permanent expression of God's covenant relationship with his people. So 119 is using a description of the future to argue backwards into a covenant the future itself will not be operating under. They are pointing to the Millennium to justify returning to something the Millennium itself has left behind.

They are trying to circumvent the New Covenant by appealing to a future that will itself be governed by the New Covenant. The logic collapses in both directions.

The Ezekiel Trap - You Cannot Cherry-Pick the Millennium

The most immediately fatal problem with 119's argument is one they appear not to have noticed: their method, applied consistently to their own proof texts, requires conclusions they would never accept.

Ezekiel 40-48 - one of their primary citations - does not merely describe Sabbath observance. As our article on the supersession of the Levitical priesthood makes clear, and feast celebrations in the Millennial Temple. It describes in elaborate detail the reinstatement of the Levitical priesthood and the resumption of animal sacrifices. If Millennial prophetic description establishes present obligation, then 119 Ministries should be reinstating the Levitical priesthood and offering animal sacrifices today. Their own method demands it.

They will not do this, of course. And the reason they will not is that Hebrews is too clear: Christ is the once-for-all sacrifice, the great high priest after the order of Melchizedek, whose single offering has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. A return to animal sacrifice is not a celebration of Christ's work - it contradicts it. This is the same logic examined in our article on what the destruction of the Temple means for the HRM's claims. Even among those who take Ezekiel's Temple vision literally, most evangelical scholars resort to calling the Millennial sacrifices "memorials" rather than atoning offerings - which is itself a symbolic and non-literal reading quietly smuggled in through the back door to avoid the theological catastrophe of literal reinstatement.

119 Ministries is doing precisely the same thing with every prophetic text they cite - selectively applying their method where it supports their conclusions and quietly abandoning it where it does not. They will take the Sabbath from Ezekiel's Millennium but leave the sacrifices. They will cite the feasts while ignoring the priesthood that administered them. They will take the dietary distinctions from Isaiah 66 but not pursue the full cultic system those distinctions belonged to — a selective approach we examine further in our article on whether Christians are bound by the dietary laws. This is not exegesis. It is selective proof-texting dressed in prophetic clothing.

Why the Millennial Prophecies Are Most Likely Symbolic

There is a further layer to this argument that 119 Ministries has not reckoned with: the prophecies they cite are drawn almost entirely from apocalyptic and visionary literature - a genre whose entire communicative method is symbolic — and one we have examined in depth in our article on how to read apocalyptic literature, typological and imagistic rather than literal and legislative.

Zechariah, Ezekiel 40-48 and Revelation are not instruction manuals. They are visionary literature operating in the same register as Daniel's four beasts, John's four living creatures and the woman clothed with the sun. Nobody reads those images as zoological or astronomical descriptions. The consistent interpretive principle across both Testaments is that this genre communicates through symbol and type - conveying spiritual and theological realities through concrete imagery, not providing architectural blueprints or legislative programmes.

The internal evidence for this in Ezekiel alone is substantial. The Temple dimensions Ezekiel describes do not fit the physical geography of Jerusalem - the city would need to be relocated and the land entirely restructured to accommodate them. The river flowing from the Temple in Ezekiel 47 transforms the Dead Sea into fresh water and produces trees bearing fruit every month with leaves for healing - language virtually identical to Revelation 22's description of the New Jerusalem. These are images of eschatological restoration and wholeness, not engineering specifications.

And the New Testament has already told us how to read the Temple imagery. Christ applies it to his own body in John 2. Paul applies it to believers individually in 1 Corinthians 6 and to the Church collectively in Ephesians 2. Revelation 21 completes the interpretation: the New Jerusalem has no Temple at all, "because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple." The entire Temple vision of Ezekiel finds its fulfilment not in a future building programme but in Christ and his body — which is precisely the argument of the shadow and the substance and fulfilment theology. The New Testament has not left us to guess. It has interpreted the imagery for us - and the interpretation moves entirely away from literal reinstatement toward fulfilment in Christ.

Zechariah 14 follows the same pattern. The nations streaming to Jerusalem, the living waters flowing out from the city, the worship of the King - these images are picked up throughout the New Testament and applied to the gospel going to the nations and the Spirit being poured out. The trajectory of New Testament interpretation moves consistently away from literal geography toward global spiritual fulfilment centred on Christ.

119 Ministries is building present covenant obligation on imagery that the New Testament has already reinterpreted as pointing to Christ. Even on its own terms, their argument does not work.

What the Prophets Actually Predicted About the Law

Here is the irony that the whole argument obscures: the prophets did predict something definitive about God's law and its future. They predicted the New Covenant - and they described it in terms that are the opposite of a return to external Mosaic observance.

Jeremiah 31 predicts that the law will be written on hearts by God himself - not inscribed on stone, not encoded in a calendar of feast days, not enforced through dietary regulations, but internalized through a direct divine act that transforms the person from within. Ezekiel 36:26-27 predicts the same reality from a different angle: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you... I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees." The agent of covenant faithfulness in the New Covenant is the Spirit, not the Torah scroll. The mechanism is regeneration, not regulation.

This is what the prophets actually predicted about the law's future. Not that Gentiles in the twenty-first century would adopt a Jewish feast calendar. Not that believers would return to Leviticus 11 for their dietary choices. But that God would accomplish from within what the external law could never achieve - a people whose obedience flows from a transformed heart rather than an external code. That prediction was fulfilled at Pentecost. It is being fulfilled in every believer indwelt by the Spirit of Christ.

The prophets are not 119's allies. They are witnesses to precisely the New Covenant reality that 119's system cannot accommodate.

The Hermeneutical Principle That Settles It

The argument from prophecy to present obligation fails at every level - methodologically, textually, genre-critically and theologically. But it is worth stating the governing principle simply, because it is one that any careful reader of Scripture should be able to apply:

Prophetic literature describes. Didactic literature prescribes. Present covenant obligation is established by direct teaching addressed to present covenant recipients - not by descriptions of future events drawn from visionary and apocalyptic texts whose genre requires symbolic interpretation and whose New Testament reinterpretation has already been provided.

No one in the Old Testament ever looked at a future prophecy and derived a present command from it. No apostle ever constructed a present-tense obligation from a future-tense vision. The method 119 Ministries is employing is without precedent in the biblical text - which is a significant problem for a ministry whose tagline is "Test Everything."

When you test this argument, it does not merely fail the test. It fails while using proof texts that, read carefully, predict the very New Covenant reality it was designed to deny.

"This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." - Jeremiah 31:33