But how?

But did this salvation come by obeying rules? To ask the question is to miss the point. Salvation in the Old Testament meant love for Yahweh alone. One had to believe that Yahweh was the God of all gods, trusting that this Most High God had chosen covenant relationship with Israel to the detriment of all other nations. The law was how one demonstrated that love—that loyalty.—Michael Heiser, The Unseen Realm, 169 (emphasis original)

You need to know the territory!

The value of the Torah for us does not consist in requiring us to do anything. The value is to see the reputation that Yahweh has established for himself, read through the lens of the ANE context. From the Torah, we can know that the God we worship is not petty, arbitrary, co-dependent, indifferent, or (conversely) cruel, tyrannical, or monstrous. The Torah and the covenant establish these qualities (reputation) in the context of the ANE cultural environment. This is useful to know because many modern people often do not know this. Unfortunately, misreading the Torah usually gives us the opposite impressions because we do not understand the context.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 228

Selective scripture

If we apply the derived principles approach only selectively, then we are the ones deciding what does and does not have value as God’s Word. Inevitably we will choose only the passages that we can readily attach to principles that we already believe are true. In this scenario, we are using Torah not to establish a moral system but to undergird one that we have already decided is valuable and coherent. In this case Torah is used as little more than illustration.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 173

<idle musing>
And we are all only too familiar with that approach, aren't we? It's the recipe for division and strife as we argue about trivialities, siphoning the gnat and swallowing the camel...
</idle musing>

The problem of reducing Torah to a checklist

The key is to have clear sight of the goal and to be committed to doing whatever represents the current wisdom in order to achieve that goal. If we try to reduce the goal to a checklist of practices and behaviors, it is likely that we will lose sight of the larger goal. Extracting a list of principles has the potential to undermine the importance of some of the more abstract ideas.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 164

<idle musing>
Sounds similar to the accusation Jesus made to the Pharisees—and he would likely make to us. We jump through hoops sometimes, but are they right hoops? I suspect that more frequently than we would like to admit, they aren't.

By the way, merry Christmas!
<\idle musing>

About those Ten Commandments...

Others locate the moral law even more strictly in the Decalogue alone. The base assumption is fueled by the equation that morality is achieved by law and that law is intended to produce morality. Given this two-way equation, the Torah, which they identify as law, is seen as being the source of morality, and since the source of Torah is God, the Torah has moral authority. As we have been discussing, this breaks down at almost every level. If the Torah is not legislation and cannot be reduced to morality, the fact that it has divine authority does not establish a divine source for either legislation or morality since neither is the Torah’s intent.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 161

Is it really all or nothing?

Since the Torah cannot be divided into categories of ritual, moral, and social, if we read any of it as divine legislation, we must read all of it as divine legislation, with social ideals standing equally beside moral ideals. Some interpreters, of course, are inclined to read the social stipulations of the Torah as divine ideals anyway.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 136

<idle musing>
Not sure I buy that. I read a review of one of John's books a while ago where the reviewer basically said that John needed a better theological foundation from which to read. I believe this is one of those places... Not that I think that he's wrong about torah not being laws; I just think nuance would be a bit better. YMMV, of course.
</idle musing>

He's got the whole world…

In the ancient Near East curses, “the punishing deity does not pursue his people in exile. He cannot, since it is the territory of another god,”—Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 3B (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 2322.

<idle musing>
But YHWH can and does. What does that say about YHWH? He's not territorial bound—the whole world is his dominion. As the psalmist says,

Where could I go to get away
from your spirit?
     Where could I go to escape
     your presence?
If I went up to heaven,
you would be there.
     If I went down to the grave,
     you would be there too!
If I could fly on the wings of dawn,
     stopping to rest only
     on the far side of the ocean—
          even there your hand would guide me;
          even there your strong hand
     would hold me tight!
If I said, “The darkness will definitely hide me;
     the light will become night around me,”
     even then the darkness
     isn’t too dark for you!
          Nighttime would shine bright as day,
     because darkness is the same
     as light to you!

Depending on how you see God, that can be very comforting—or terrifying!
</idle musing>