Road to the Redeemer

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Romans 9:20

In my previous post, I shared some of my experiences in Catholic-dominated Europe and the difficulties that arise when one accepts dogma without a legitimate divine source. At the end of that post, I made a comparison between Catholic and Jewish understandings of contemporary divine revelation, explaining that both accept continuous innovations in religious law. Today we will dive into a fascinating passage in the Talmud that serves as a basis for this humanistic approach to Jewish law.

The Hebrew Bible is full of many kinds of literary styles, but the most prominent are narrative and prophetic proclamation.[1] In narrative, God is not a bystander but rather an active influence on the outcome of the story, a phenomenon clearly seen, for example, in the patriarchs’ story in Genesis. Prophetic proclamation goes even further, with many of the prophets’ words coming directly from the mouth of the Lord. One cannot read the Hebrew Scriptures very long without being confronted by the divine character who is truly the lead role in the story. In contrast, upon turning to the Talmud it seems strikingly different than the text of the Hebrew Bible. Gone are the prophets speaking the direct words of God. Instead, the Talmud consists of many rabbis from many eras discussing matters of Jewish life, sometimes coming to a conclusion, sometimes not. Surprisingly, despite these rabbis discussing matters of Torah, direct discussion about God rarely surfaces, and unlike the Bible, God rarely intervenes. However, there are certain places in the Talmud where a “heavenly voice” breaks the silence to intervene in the rabbis’ discussions. A survey of these occurrences indicates that the Talmud’s concept of divine revelation is markedly different than the Hebrew understanding during the era of the Bible.

Rabbi Shaul was in chains, being dragged all around the land of Israel in a masquerade of justice. He was accused of being a member of The Way (הַדֶּרֶךְ), which had been equated with heresy. The irony of the situation was that the rabbi, more popularly known as the Apostle Paul, had once been the chief persecutor of The Way. Now the persecutor was on trial for having joined his victims.

After being arrested by Roman authorities in Acts 21, Paul is bounced between one Roman authority and the next, repeatedly forced to act as his own defense attorney and fight for his life. Just like with Jesus some twenty-five years before, Paul’s Jewish brothers were requesting the death penalty for his heresies. How would Paul defend himself against the charges?

Paul’s method of defense should shock us. Paul fights for his life by claiming he is a Pharisee.

Pharisees in Christian Tradition

I grew up with nothing but bad things associated with Pharisees. To be a Pharisee was to be a nitpicking, legalistic bigot whose heart’s current ran against the flow of the Gospel. Could one be a Pharisee and a Christian at the same time? Of course not! A Pharisee trusted in his own righteousness, flaunting it to be seen by men (Matthew 6). They were hypocrites, blind guides, whitewashed tombs, snakes, a brood of vipers, and gnat-strainers! Jesus’ denunciations of the scribes and the Pharisees in Matthew 23 could hardly be more stinging, and my understanding of them mirrored Jesus’ words.

However, one of the easiest errors to make in biblical interpretation is to only study a topic until we have a narrative that makes sense to us. We often assume that one passage’s discourse handles a subject exhaustively, and we see no need to read the rest of the Scriptures. Atheist detractors employ this tactic when they proclaim that Christians are hypocrites because they don’t stone adulterers like Moses prescribed in the Torah (Lev. 20:10). But was Moses the last word in God’s divine revelation to man? In the history of the Church, Christians had the same difficulties with the personhood of Christ. Was Jesus just an enlightened man, or was he an inhuman spirit-form of God? Reading certain texts exclusively seemed to tip the scales in either direction. But the correct and difficult answer is to hold the Manhood and Godhood of Christ in tension, together at the same time, each one intact and yet interacting with each other… somehow. It’s that mysterious tension that we find difficult to accept, but we must.

So too there is a tension with the Pharisees that we must learn to embrace. They were not simply the bad guys.

Below is a personal journal entry of Brian hashing out his emotions with God about his purpose in history for the Jewish people. The question of, “What happened with the Jewish people?” still looms large in Jewish evangelism, just as it did in Paul’s mind in Romans 9-11. Here is one man’s attempt to wrestle this out with the Lord, ultimately finding rest in the counsel of Scripture.

"Why, Lord?" This simple prayer draws our souls down deeper into the recesses of our finiteness and our lack of understanding. We see the evidence before us, discounting any possibility that it is anything but exhaustive, and we dream of an outcome, any outcome other than the one You have chosen. With that evidence before us, we would have chosen the opposite course. So we charge you with injustice, or non-love, ineptitude, or aloofness. The truly regenerate soul will recoil from such accusations and return to You the mystery, acknowledging by faith that our understanding, however informed, is finite and nonexhaustive.

I have been captivated by David Berger's Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue. My heart has been broken to read about the threats, the coercion, the bickering, and the distrust of Christian-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages. Not only were the Christians guilty of institutionalized Jew-hatred, but they preached a Christianity engineered specifically for Jewish distaste. As if the original Jewish Gospel message of the Apostles wasn't enough of a stumbling stone for Israel - now the church was ripping out the Jewishness from the faith and whitewashing the past. Imagine! The very message I preached at 20 churches in the Spring - the Messiah in the Passover - would have me excommunicated in another church age. I would be accused of Judaizing, of returning to obsolete shadows and done-away-with traditions. It's hard to imagine such a church founded by a Jew.

God, why did it have to be this way? Why, Lord? Why did you come to your people, only to have the majority reject you? Why did those few who followed you, the first Jewish Christians, die out so quickly? Why did they cease to have any influence on the church after the first century, and why did they cease to exist after the fourth? Oh, it makes me so mad to think of Jerome's quote about the Ebionites! Too Jewish for the Church (yet in full agreement on the Creeds), and too Christian for the synagogue! No place to go, no fellowship to be had with Rome or Antioch or Constantinople. So they just disappeared. Based on Jerome's quote, Chosen People Ministries would be condemned as a cult. “Leave your Jewishness at the foot of the Cross,” he would say. Forget the Seders and your Shabbats. Stop celebrating Easter on 14 Nisan - that was the past! We are in a new era, and the Church usurped all claims of the covenants.

That’s what John Piper said about this sermon given by David Platt at Together for the Gospel 2012. This is an incredibly moving and challenging sermon. Platt goes from the big picture perspective of God’s sovereignty and breaks it down to how his sovereignty should motivate us to share the Gospel with all nations.

Yes, all nations need the Gospel! Platt asks the question, “But what about the innocent people in Africa who haven’t heard about Jesus?” To that he gives the answer, “All the innocent people will go to heaven.” But here’s the technicality: there are no innocent people. All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. This should motivate us to go and be a part of the solution.

Platt says that for every $100 a Christian in North America makes, an average of $0.05 goes to unreached peoples. Unreached peoples are those who never, in their entire lives, hear the Gospel. They live isolated, far away from access to the Bible and to Christian evangelists. And yet we Americans are the richest people who have ever walked the Planet Earth. Why has God given us riches?

But I’m giving too much away. Watch Platt’s fantastic sermon below: