Why Believe?
For Your righteousness, God, reaches to the heavens, You who have done great things; God, who is like You? Psalm 71:19 NASB
Who is like You? – Pagan religions don’t need human history. Astrological signs, natural phenomenon, legends, numbers, the cosmic order—they’re enough. Human history is an anecdote to the divine plot. So, when the poet writes, “Who is like You?,” let’s not get confused. In our post-Christian world we imagine that this is more or less a rhetorical question. The answer is obvious. Since there is only one God, there is no other being like Him. But, of course, that wasn’t the case when the psalmist wrote. There were plenty of competitors for the title “god.” The difference wasn’t the claim of divinity. It was the history! Lose the history; lose the God of history.
You will notice that the poet offers two qualifiers to his rhetorical question. The first is about righteousness; the second about great things. Let’s examine these two claims and see why they are essential and why they are essentially different from all the competing gods.
Righteousness is the Hebrew word ṣĕdāqâ. You know this word. It’s the fundamental claim that refers to the ethical and moral standard based on the will of God. But it’s not a “rule of law” word. It’s not the impersonal, rationally developed system of the philosophers, an intrinsic, immutable, eternal reflection of the laws of nature so familiar to us from our Greco-Roman heritage. No sir! ṣĕdāqâ is God’s personal will revealed to human beings. Perhaps that’s why it seems idiosyncratic at times. Christine Hayes described the contrast like this:
“In much Greek thought, divine law is divine ‘because it expresses the profound structures of a permanent natural order’ (Brague 2007, 18).”[1]
“By contrast, according to biblical tradition, the law is divine not by virtue of an inherent quality but ‘because it emanates from a god who is master of history’ (Brague 2007, 18).”[2]
From our Western perspective, even within the Christian tradition, natural law based on the ordered cosmos is universal and rationally compelling. Biblical law is viewed as quite the opposite: “Specifically, divine law is represented as particular rather than universal, arbitrary rather than rational, evolving rather than static, coercive rather than instructive, and as addressed to obedient servants.”[3] From our perspective, all those Mosaic codes are temporary and expendable. What matters is what is true everywhere every time.
But this isn’t what the poet (or any other biblical writer) thinks. God’s ṣĕdāqâ reaches to the heavens because He is the author of both the law and the heavens. God’s ṣĕdāqâ is the touchstone of all human interaction because God is the Creator of humanity and its sovereign. Everything God does under ṣĕdāqâ implies personal, human involvement. The ethical systems of pagan deities may be anchored in the ordered (or disordered) universe, but that means human beings are not essential to the process. God’s ṣĕdāqâ says just the opposite.
What about “great things”? The Hebrew expression is odd. It’s not a noun. It’s a plural adjective. gādôlot (from gādôl—“great”) is like saying “greats,” which, of course, we don’t say in English so that translators add “things.” But the Hebrew suggests something else. It is doing greats that sets God apart from the pagan gods. It’s gādôlot, that is, the superlative character of the God who acts. This is hard to express in English. We think of God doing things that are great, like opening the waters of the Jordan. But the poet isn’t concentrating on the things done. He is focusing on the Being doing them. gādôlot describes God. It is not the object of the verb “to do.” As if we could write, “God great doings.”
Why is this important? Because the great doing God acts on behalf of human beings. We are not extraneous to His purposes, like some divine after thought. His great doings are for us. As Heschel so fondly reminded us, “God is in search of Man.”
Now you know why no one is like Him, right?
Topical Index: ṣĕdāqâ, righteousness, gādôlot, great doings, Psalm 71:19
[1] Christine Hayes, What’s Divine About Divine Law?: Early Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 2.
[2] Ibid., p. 2.
[3] Ibid., p. 16.
