Who Are You?

Yet I have been the Lord your God since the land of Egypt; and you were not to know any god except Me, for there is no savior besides Me.  Hosea 13:4  NASB

Any god except Me – Martin Buber comments on passages like this one in Hosea: “Only by acknowledging YHVH as One, Whom they are willing to follow in doing and hearing, do they really become His people and YHVH Israel’s God.”[1]  We agree, of course.  Ah, at least we intellectually agree.  We don’t have any other god except the God who rescued Israel out of Egypt.  Or so we claim.  But Buber isn’t interested in our theology.  He’s interested in our practice!  We are part of the people of YHVH if we follow Him.  This is much more than acknowledging a connection to the exodus.  This is a dedicated willingness to embrace the instructions for practical living that He gave to those He calls His people.  In the short version, this is Torah obedience.

Buber points out that God reminds the people over and over that He was their rescuer.  He reminds them that His actions in Egypt confirmed His sovereignty.  In fact, the reason they are to follow Him is because without His intervention they simply would not exist.  They would have been absorbed into Egypt.  It is God’s choice that makes them Israel and that choice has consequences.  Remember!

For the most part, Christianity ignores this implication.  Christian doctrine substitutes the idea of Jesus as divine for the clear message of God to Israel.  What I mean is that Christianity treats God’s claim on Israel as historical development, not permanent requirement.  A Christian claims inclusion in the household of God on the basis of Jesus’ saving work on the cross, not on the basis of dedicated practice of Torah.  This theological development was inevitable once the Church separated itself from its Jewish context.  What this means is that Torah is no longer the requirement of inclusion.  Now the requirement is simply salvation, in whatever cognitive form that might be.  It is paradoxical that Yeshua observed the Torah but his Christian followers don’t.  One must wonder how that could have happened.

Buber’s claim, however, doesn’t just cut across Christian doctrinal lines.  It is just as sharp a distinction among ethnic Jews.  If the prophets really do proclaim the word of the One God YHVH, then it is difficult to imagine that simply having ethnic ties to Jewish heritage will be sufficient.  Hosea’s declaration specifically targets lack of obedience, not lack of heritage.  Those who belong are those who follow.  No reading of Paul can replace the prophets.  As Buber suggests, the name Israel “probably is not ‘God strives,’ but ‘God rules’ . . . Our path in the history of faith is not a path from one kind of deity to another, but in fact a path from the ‘God Who hides himself’ (Is. 45, 15) to the One that reveals Himself.”[2]  That revelation is the central message of the exodus and the disclosure at Sinai.  To alter its importance is to find another god.  Perhaps we need to reconsider the place of Torah in our lives today.

Topical Index:  faith, practice, Torah, Martin Buber, Hosea 13:4

[1] Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (Collier Books, 1949), p. 26.

[2] Ibid., p. 44.