Alien Righteousness

“Though I wrote for him ten thousand precepts of My law, they are regarded as a strange thing.” Hosea 8:12  NASB

Strange thing – Have you tried to explain your commitment to Torah to your friends and neighbors?  Do they ask why you don’t eat shrimp, why you don’t go to church on Sunday and why you bless the food after you eat?  Did you have a hard time explaining why you don’t celebrate Christmas as the birth of Jesus?  Just wait until Easter!  Living according to God’s instructions is indeed a mo-zar (strange thing).  Actually, the NASB does capture the Hebrew of this verse.  In Hebrew, it’s even stranger.

The verse literally says, “I will write for him the great things of my Torah.”  This could be hyperbole (as the NASB suggests) but it could also easily be understood as a reference to the fundamentals of Torah living, the same fundamentals that Yeshua recalls in answer to the scribe’s question.  Even those summaries of Torah are strange.  After all, who really loves God with all the heart, mind and resources of life?  And who would ever love a neighbor at cost to himself?  Strange?  Absolutely!  It’s so counter-intuitive that it is completely ignored in most human living.

The Hebrew word translated “strange thing” is actually kemo-zar.  It is literally “as a stranger,” but even that is an idiomatic usage for an underlying meaning, “to turn aside.”  In other words, the Hebrew idea of a stranger is one who goes astray from the path.  A stranger is someone who does not follow YHWH.  With that definition, there are a lot of strangers in this world.  Now we can see why the voice of YHWH in Hosea is so startling and paradoxical.  The very people who should have been careful followers of God’s instructions are strangers because they do not regard His instructions for what they are – markers on the path.  Dearman points out that the function of instruction is to provide what is needed to “respond adequately to YHWH’s leading in the time of crisis.”[1] Israel makes itself a stranger and in so doing begins to consider God’s instructions as strange.

Life God’s way is distinctively different.  From the world’s perspective, it is as strange as it could be.  It is alien righteousness, not in the way that Luther used the term to describe grace but in the obvious differences in behavior that accompany following the Lord.  Israel in the time of Hosea looked just like all those who did not follow the path.  Israel was the stranger, but because Israel was blind to its own condition, it looked upon God’s ways as alien.  I wonder if we don’t fall into the same spiritual blindness.  I wonder if all the frenzy about being relevant isn’t just another symptom of considering God’s uniqueness strange.  It leads to a personal assessment question:  How much of your walk with God is remarkably different?  How strange are you?

Topical Index:  strange thing, mo-zar, instruction, Torah, Hosea 8:12