Vive la Differénce (1)
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, Deuteronomy 30:19 ESV
Choose – What are you choosing when you decide to follow the Torah of YHVH? Did you think you were choosing a set of rules, a code of behavior, a way of acting in the world? Maybe, but if that’s all Torah is, then it is simply one of many different paths, all equally demanding your attention and decision. You could choose to follow the path of the early Church fathers, or the path of the Qur’an, the teachings of the Buddha, the path of the Vedas, or just go your own way and be religiously independent. As Ralph Trine suggests: “For true worship, only God and the human soul are necessary. It does not depend upon times, or seasons, or occasions. Anywhere and at any time God and man in the bush may meet. This is the great fundamental principle of the universal religion upon which all can agree.”[1]
Sorry, we all don’t agree! Not all paths lead to the same God and even if they did, not all paths are equal. In fact, the uniqueness of Torah isn’t in the path it prescribes. It is in the character of the path itself. Sacks explains:
The concept of a covenantal between God and man is revolutionary and has no parallel in any other system of thought. For the ancients, man was at the mercy of impersonal forces that had to be placated. For Christianity, he is corrupt, tainted by an original sin that only the saving grace of God can remove. For Islam, man is called to absolute submission to God’s will. In secular humanism, man is alone in a universe blind to his hopes and deaf to his prayers. Each of these is a coherent vision, and each has its adherents. But only in Judaism do we encounter the proposition that, despite their utter disparity, God and man come together as “partners in the work of creation.” I know of no other vision that confers on mankind so great a dignity and responsibility.[2]
The Hebrew paradigm is based entirely on covenant. No other path is. Yes, that’s right, not even Christianity despite its claim of the new covenant, for Christianity introduces a view of man that erases the original covenant and requires God to start over, both personally and corporately. The original promise, the original obligation, including the dignity and responsibility conferred, is set aside, abrogated, nullified. Man is not how he was created and God is not the same God who established the relationship of Genesis.
The difference between a covenant-based path and every other approach is crucial and fundamental. What must occur in the broken world is restoration, not renaissance. What God established at the beginning is still the objective. Vive la Differénce!
Topical Index: covenant, choice, Deuteronomy 30:19
[1] http://www.psitek.net/pages/PsiTekITWTI13.html#gsc.tab=0
[2] Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now, p. 82.
To be able to choose, there must be something to choose. If sin is the choice to avoid choice, or to choose the options away, then free will implies that there is only one set of choices that can agree with, or reset, reality in a positive direction. Think about it as I might, I don’t think sin is a true choice. I think sin is a compulsion created by a void where love should have been. We get pushed (or pulled – “drawn” ) into sin by a deficit of love; either because we are fractured from love, or it is being blocked somehow. When I succumb to, say, an addictive response to life, I am choosing to AVOID my true options for dealing with reality. I can only choose real things. Sin is not a real thing. Sin destroys real things.
What is the set of real things I was given free will to choose? That would be Torah, which is the basis of the covenant. There have been no improvements upon the Ten, which are an encapsulation of the rest of Torah, and which are summarized again by Yeshua who agreed with the lawyer who stated that the whole covenant encompasses love for God and man. There are no other ways to love other than the Torah. None. Only love is a true choice. Only the covenant provides this set of choices. Everything else is a choice to negate love. Everything else is an agreement with death. Everything else is the avoidance of choice.
Reality is the expression of the Creator’s love, and choice is where we agree with that reality. There are not multiple realities for each belief system. Instead, each belief system more or less agrees with the only reality (some of them a lot less!) If I want to manifest in reality, then I am going to have to learn how to love.
The covenant that the Creator established with His creation involves my active participation. Creation is present tense, and, by design, I am supposed to be showing up in it and pulling my half of the love load. Only my choice can accomplish that, but only within the covenant can I find those real things I am supposed to be choosing into that creation. I think the rest of the world consists of dead humans more or less reacting to the past and being held in suspension by grace and mercy. To choose is to live (and all those real choices can only be activated by faith, by the way), but the only life Messiah came to restore us to was the restoration (which forgiveness grants us) of the freedom to make the choices of love that are to be found only in that original covenant. Might be time to pull it out and dust it off!
Very well said, Laurita.
~ The one who believes in the Son [the Living Word, the Word made flesh] of God has the testimony in himself; the one who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given concerning His Son. And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life ~
~ Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends ~
~ If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater; for the testimony of God is this, that He has testified concerning His Son. The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself; the one who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given concerning His Son. And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.. ~
~ Blessing and honor and glory and power belong to the One sitting on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever ~
Free will our choice, life or death, the narrow road, or the broad way, choose today whom ye shall serve, it is all about what and whom we choose to serve , he does not pressure us into doing anything. He changes not we are the ones that flip flop back and forth we have to get it togetger, and let our light shine and stop hiding it under the bush.
One of the most amazing things about God is the fact that He chooses to work through His creatures, in particular His human creatures, to accomplish His purposes. It’s not a need with God, but a want of God. He has chosen to ‘partner’ with you and I, always with the knowledge that we are the ‘junior’ partner, a lesser partner, but a ‘partner’ none the less, in what He is doing in His good creation. So many of us run smack into a wall with the acceptance of an idea like that. ‘What, God wants to work through me and with me; to what end I know not, for what purpose I know not and in what time-frame I know not’? ‘Church-world’ most often ‘packages’ and presents to us, something like this. God saves us. We die. After death, we live forever, often times as a disembodied spirit, in some distant place called ‘heaven’ with God, in bliss and happiness. That’s the long and short of it. We are also given the Holy Spirit that resides within us, at the time of coming to faith. But that is where the ‘train leaves the track’ with most believers, because we place God’s Spirit in ‘cold storage’, not really aware what we have been saved for; what God intends for us to do with His Spirit. To many, the Spirit placed within us is really just a ‘bookmark’ for God to identify those He has rescued and redeemed. This state of affairs, this condition lies solely on the shoulders of those teaching and preaching and the paradigms that they espouse. With that paradigm, it really doesn’t matter what happens on this Earth, as ‘Heaven’ is our home and we are ‘just passing through.’ Somehow, I believe, God was not copied on that ‘memo’. For that ‘reality’, I find nowhere in my Bible! In Plato maybe and those greatly influenced and shaped by Plato’s thinking, but not in Holy Writ. God is not a dualist, period. We are blessed with the power of choice and God wants us to choose correctly, though He will not hamstring our choices. And when we ‘chose life’ we are choosing the only kind of life there really is. Life as He always intended, with Him, next to Him, working with Him and He working through us, to accomplish His purposes. It’s not about us, for if you think that it is, you are asking for something that is not life. You are asking for curses. And that is never what the Creator had in mind.
I disagree that Messianic Judaism (I use that phrase rather than Christianity ) does away with covenantal relationship. Jer. 31:31-34 says (paraphrase ) ‘I will make a new covenant (brit chadash) with israel, for they broke my original covenant . I will write the torah on their hearts…’ Skip , I infer that as Yeshua comes to fulfill torah rather than abolish it, the original covenant is embedded in another — torah is still perfect, just written on our hearts and ratified by the blood of Yeshua.
This is how I read the Hebraic ideas of the Greek NT. “Fulfill” is a Hebrew idiom, found in the rabbinic material, for “correctly interpret,” not “abolish” as so many Christian anti-Semitic theologies suggest.