Theological Necessity (1)
Salvation belongs to the Lord; May Your blessing [h]be upon Your people! Selah Psalm 3:8 NASB
To the LORD – It goes without saying that the Psalms consistently ascribe salvation to YHVH. So do the prophets. No one would argue this point. Therefore, we are pressed to ask, “If the Tanakh views YHVH as the source of salvation, why does Christianity claim that it is Jesus who saves?” The answer, of course, is that Jesus is God. In other words, the Christian claim that salvation is found in Jesus depends on a Trinitarian idea of God. And that means that all those verses in the Tanakh, like this one, must be read not as the Hebrew audience would have understood them but rather as the Christian Church understands them.
Just pause for a moment and contemplate the enormity of this change. This verse in Hebrew reads:
לַֽיהֹוָ֥ה הַיְשׁוּעָ֑ה עַל־עַמְּךָ֖ בִרְכָתֶ֣ךָ סֶּֽלָה
You will recognize immediately that לַֽיהֹוָ֥ה is in the first place in the sentence, granting it the emphasis of the statement. The English Bible renders the verse as if “salvation” were the most important word, but this is not true in the Hebrew text. YHVH is the point of the verse. Furthermore, the verb “belongs” is a gloss, that is, it is not in the original. As you can see, the name YHVH is prefixed by the preposition lĕ (“to”) and followed immediately by the noun yĕšûʿâ with a definite article. In other words, Hebrew assumes the identity of YHVH and the salvation of His people. There is nointermediary. To be YHVH is to be the saving action for Israel. This equivalence is translated by Chabad as:
“It is incumbent upon the Lord to save, and it is incumbent upon Your people to bless You forever.”
It isn’t possible to think of YHVH without thinking of His salvific acts. He is identical to/with them. If there is any ontological foundation in YHVH in the Tanakh, it is not a godhead with three persons in one Being. It is rather the unity “God-acts” as both person and performance, utterly homogenized and incapable of divorce. God is not separate from what He does. He is what He does! And this is how the biblical text portrays Him. It might be that His essential being is other than these acts, but that sort of speculation is utterly useless, precisely because it is sheer speculation. God presents Himself only as “the God who acts” and this is all we know of Him. The claim on natural theology, that God can be understood from a contemplation of the cosmos, leads only to positing His existence. It tells us next to nothing of who He is. Philosophy and some forms of theology on both the Jewish and Christian sides portend to speak of the “essence” of God, but there is no biblical evidence to support these claims. Mystics and Kabbalists can’t go to the text itself for validation. They must find other sources. This is the real problem with speaking about the essence of God. We just don’t know.
But we do know this. God saves. It is His character to do so, and He reveals this to us in His word. When the Hebrew text equates salvation and God, it deliberately makes the point that God is the rescuing God. That should be enough.
Topical Index: salvation, yĕšûʿâ, essence, Psalm 3:8
לַֽיהֹוָ֥ה הַיְשׁוּעָ֑ה — beautiful poetry!
Emet… and amen.
The real problem with speaking about the essence of God is that the source of such revealing can only come by YHVH himself as the saving action of Israel… (and indeed, of all mankind)… and that mediated by His own choice of means.
Specifically, “Although God spoke long ago in many parts and in many ways to the fathers by the prophets, in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world, who is the radiance of his glory and the representation of his essence, sustaining all things by the word of power. When he had made purification for sins through him, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become by so much better than the angels, by as much as he has inherited a more excellent name than theirs.” (Hebrews 1:1-4)
The apostle, John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, tells us this regarding the nature or essence of God: God is spirit (cf. John 4:24); God is light (cf. John 1:5); and God is love (cf. 1 John 4:7-8). Moreover, what God is determines what we ought to be. “As He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). A person who claims he knows God and is in union with Him must be personally affected by this relationship… because the God who acts is the God who saves… precisely because he is the God who loves.