“I, even I, am the LORD, and there is no savior besides Me. Isaiah 43:11 NASB No savior – Isaiah’s proclamations concerning the Servant of the Lord are favorite verses among believers. But the context makes these cherished statements much more difficult. YHWH isn’t speaking to the Church. He quite clearly states that His audience is Jacob and Israel, the two houses of His chosen people (see 43:1). He redeems them, protects them, honors them, and exchanges other nations and peoples for them. He gathers them from the four corners of the earth. Then He says, “There is no savior besides Me.” In other words, YHWH saves the houses of Judah and Israel and He is the only one who does so. There are no “Christians” in this group. There are only those who belong to Judah or Israel. Of course, replacement theology craftily reinterprets the direct object of God’s saving grace. The new Israel takes the place of the houses of Judah and Israel. That’s how we Christians get in. Christian theology also has to alter this text so that “Jesus” saves. That’s covered in Trinitarian doctrine. But it does present a problem, doesn’t it? When YHWH speaks through Isaiah, it’s pretty clear whom He has in mind. It’s very difficult to alter that text. So we do a paradigm shift and reinterpret all the texts. That way Isaiah’s references can be re-read from a perspective of the late second century CE. Isaiah really didn’t mean what he says. He really meant what we believe. When contortionist theology amends the Tanakh so that it appears to support the Christian thinking of the early Church fathers, the Jewish rabbis go crazy. We can understand why they say, “A Jew or a Gentile who claims that God sent him to add, remove or change a commandment from those that God gave through Moses . . . is a false prophet.”[1] “The Torah as a whole is an inheritance from God for the Jews alone, and a Gentile who ‘delves’ into areas of Torah that are unrelated to the Noahide Code is liable for punishment at the Hand of Heaven.”[2] Think clearly about the implications of this rabbinical view. First, Torah is Jewish. It was given by God to the Jews. It distinguishes the Jews from all other peoples on the earth. “A Jew without Torah is obsolete” (Heschel). Second, no Gentile has a right to the whole of Torah. Gentiles are commanded by God to keep (and therefore understand) only that portion of Torah that applies to all human beings, i.e., the Noahide seven commandments. Any Gentile who adopts anything more than this adds to Torah (by making the exclusively Jewish commandment also apply to Gentiles) and is therefore an idolater and blasphemer. Third, from this perspective, Christianity is essentially idolatry and blasphemy because it attempts to usurp God’s revelation to the Jews, claiming the revelation as its own, and . . . Fourth, Christianity is worse than idolatry and blasphemy because it subsequently claims that Torah has no application to either converted Jews or Gentiles (the Augustinian-Lutheran concept of “grace”). Is there any doubt why orthodox Jews must reject any Christian claim? Frankly, there is no middle ground here, no peaceful co-existence, no room for negotiation. The Crusades are alive and well in the theology books of the Christian faith. Whom does God save? In the first century, that question was debated by the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. The issue was, “How do Gentiles come into the House of Israel and the House of Judah so that they may benefit from the blessings of the Lord?” In other words, the question was, “How do Gentiles become Jews?” No one debated how Jews became Christians. That was simply unthinkable! Rabbi Weiner, twenty centuries later, claims that Gentiles cannot be Jews. Either you convert to Judaism properly or you remain an outsider. The Jerusalem Council had another solution. If God called you, you were accepted. Then you go to work on living the Jewish way of life. God saves whomever He wants. Then we all learn to live like the family He chooses. Twenty centuries later the Christians and the Jews remain at polar opposites. Neither group understands the Acts 15 solution. Whom Does God Save? by Skip Moen, D. Phil. [1] Rabbi Moshe Weiner, The Divine Code (Second Edition), 2011, p. 60. [2] Ibid., p. 84.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 19:24:14 +0000
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