Isaiah 42:8
“I am the Lord: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.”
Name:
a word or phrase that constitutes the distinctive designation of a person or thing
Another:
different or distinct from the one first considered
1000 Verses - a project of Judaism Resources 
People who believe that God chose to make Himself incarnate, to be known in human form, don’t find it hard to harmonise this verse with their existing beliefs about God and about loyalty to Him, alone.
They would feel that when verses like this are pointed out as evidence against their faith, that is clear evidence that the nuances and actual nature of their believe are just being misunderstood.
I guess it’s important for each one of us to remember the importance and depth of a prophetic statement like this one, though. For those who worship Jesus, it’s important to keep in mind how much severity, holiness, and worth is attached with the way God said it would be Him alone; a person needs to be absolutely sure that they’re not merging something created with their feelings towards Him. A Torah observant Jew needs to test the claim even more carefully, not as a commandment that God might be giving to their heart and soul; before they listen to their heart they need to see if anything in Torah can be given to help them test a claim that a man was totally righteous, performed miracles, and ‘was’ God Himself. They need to see if the commandments give them any reason to be suspicious, and any way to accept such a thing in place of their present relationship with Him.
For all of us, remembering that God’s glory is the reason why we live and that we can’t give ourselves over to anything that distracts from Him alone is a lifelong journey. Something to be reminded of again and again, and something to draw near to in our actions and our hearts even when we don’t know anything else.
In essence (and, I think, closer to the intention of this blog post):
The importance of this concept in scripture, that God is alone in His glory before the hearts of all humanity, should give someone pause about the doctrine that Jesus (as understood by Christians) is by a mystery both distinct from and indistinct from the ‘other’ members of who God is.
(Of course God in His nature is beyond imagination and speculation. But the human understanding of Him is something that He taught to Israel in a particular way, for a reason. There was never any need and no permissibility to relate to Him in multiple ‘persons’, and the imagery of aloneness and monogamous relationship have truly strengthened that impression on the hearts of the community being addressed.)
A claim that a man was totally righteous, performed miracles, and ‘was’ God Himself? This idea was done over and over by ancient pagan belief systems in modern and ancient times and still go’s on to this very day. G-D clearly knew, that very idea would come and he warned us on how to identify it – “If there appears among you a prophet or a dream-diviner and he gives you a sign or a portent, saying, ‘Let us follow and worship another god ‘ – whom you have not experienced – even if the sign or portent that he named to you comes true, do not heed the words of that prophet or dream diviner”. (Deut. 13:2) G-D also explicitly identified himself – (Numbers 23:19) (Hosea 11:9) (1 Samuel 15:29) (Hosea 4:15) (Deut. 13:2) (Malachi 3:6) He is not a man, like me, that I can answer him, that we can go to law together. No arbiter is between us, to lay his hand on us both. (Job 9:32-33)
“No arbiter is between us, to lay his hand on us both.” That thought is really of interest.
What do you say to the fact that Jesus never claimed to be ‘another’ god or a rival to Hashem? Christians only believe that the one God chose to let His very person be born within a human, and therefore allowed that human identity to be part of His very own.
The belief in the trinity is adamant that each person is not merely ‘similar’; they are believed to be absolutely one (somehow beyond understanding). Most of the explanations people try to offer end up being labelled by others as heresies. Three doesn’t equal one, and if you’re going to say that God is both in a real sense, there’s obviously no way within natural categories of figuring that out. The preference often is to be vague and call it a mystery out of genuine respect for the fact that you can’t define God or compare Him to anything we understand, even though Christians think that all the things they say about the trinity were revealed and can/must be said.
To put it simply, do you think there’s a difference between idolators who say there is an other god, and those who think there are reasons to believe in a personal incarnation from Him?
‘Nuf said
(for some).
One need not be a “Torah Observant Jew” to understand the words. You only need to know the context, the author and audience of the verse. Don’t try to project your own modern ideas and predjudized, intellectualized worldview on the text. There are quite a few Christians who know that God and Jesus are 2 different beings. My 1st revelation of this was when I was reading a book, in Sunday School when I was about 6 years old, about the “Old Testament”. I believe it was about the walls of Jericho. No amount of intellectualizing and philosophizing (with a good dose of “scripture twisting”) or adult Christian education (including a few ministerial courses) has been able to convinced me otherwise.
Not that I had any reason or real desire to keep Jesus and God separated in my mind; quite the contrary. Many people form their religious beliefs on a few teachings and they “sign up”, commit, knowing very little about the “story”. Emotions and feelings, not reason or logic, are what drives many to form their religious beliefs and that little knowedge is all they feel they need and it usually is all they are given. In the days of old when the bible was written in a foreign language, i.e., Latin, the “simple” people need not be concerned with what the text said and where the text came from. More sophisticated tactics and tools are needed now-adays. One would have taught that when bibles were written in the “language of the people” and were so accessible, that all would know the one story and all would believe as one, both Jew & “Gentile”. But there are 10’s of thousands of different faiths. Several different, contradictory “faces of Jesus”. That should come as no surprise when one knows the history of the NT texts and one can read in the text that there are several stories of different versions of Jesus. And several versions of Jesus in early Christianity, that didn’t really get included in the canon. And several different views of God. Who Jesus is or was and what his relation to God was or is depends upon who you ask.
For those who believe Jesus and God of the OT are one, then they are saying that Jesus or Yeshua are redundant. One can play different roles, but in those roles “they” are perceived differently and they might even contradict each other. One simple test about who you really think Jesus is and who you really think God is, is do a praying and reading for 30 days. Only read the OT, or preferably a Jewish Tanach (with none of the verses quoted in the NT), every day for 30 days. Easy (but NO NT). At the same time never use the names Jesus or Yeshua or Yehoshua, etc, nor titles that you might normaly use for Jesus, like son or Christ, saviour, no messiah, no paschal lamb, etc. and not even Father. No son of man, no son of God, no holy one of God, no “in the name of___”, no lamb of God, no lion of Zion, no prince of peace, etc. Definitely no father, son, and holy ghost, no shekinah, unless the non-Christian Tanach uses those terms. If one month is too easy, try it another month. After that try a month of never saying God, HaShem, Adonai, Elohim, or any other common name of God used in a Tanach and instead say the son or the messiah or the son of man or the messenger or the one sent or the lamb, etc., when reading only the NT or only the OT. Might try saying the word one instead of the word many or vice versa. List 10 things why this test is nonsense or absurd or 10 things you discovered about why words are important and are many words are not interchangeable. Or 10 things that you learned about the nature of relationships and the perspective of each entity that is in that relationship, and especially what is the relationship that you want with God. Is it all relative or what ideas are irrelevant?
It’s true that anyone should be able to understand the fact that if Jesus couldn’t be accepted by Jews, he cannot be who Christians claim him to be. Emotions are not the realm in which God commanded these things to Israel, and since Jesus’ message was presented first to the Jews- their context is the correct one for all nations to test him by.
A lot of Jewish opinions recognise that Christians can be very sincere in trying to worship our Creator alone. These authorities try to be generous with people who don’t know better and who aren’t under the same marriage covenant as Jews are. But if anyone, from any nation, who is really seeking Israel’s God comes to realise that these questions *must* be asked… then it is very wrong to ignore what God is saying about Himself and about the nation who is speaking on His behalf. That’s between each person and God, though, because you can only follow Him to a place you truly know is from Him. It calls for a lot of carefulness, ignoring opinions other than His.
P.S. I know he has been accepted by Jews throughout history. The messianic movement around him first arose in a Jewish context.
When I said ‘cannot be accepted’, I meant by people who are really grasping the process that the Torah gave for considering all this and- beyond this conversation- seeking God.
John 14:6 – Jsus is clearly making himself an arbiter and the only way as past demi G-D’S have clammed and falling under (Job 9:32-33) Over and over G-D say’s he is no man and dose not change his mind (1 Samuel 15:29) There is no way around G-D’s very word given to the Jewish nation and passed down accurately to this very day from Mt Sinai. Understanding Torah within it context can only properly be done in Hebrew. The very number of thousands of different brands and denominations of christianity with its different belief’s and doctrines is a clear demonstration that it is not divine in itself, and is still an evolving religion unlike orthodox Judaism.
SonofDavid, I’d agree with you on that thought about John 14:6. But when I was in Christianity I could fit my understanding around it. I agree with the importance of the context: understanding what Judaism was before Jesus’ time, and how people had to respond to the claims about him.
What do you think is the difference between the denominations of Christianity and the various Orthodox Jewish groups that have grown up around various philosophies, leaders, and disagreements?
In the Tanach, God is sometimes challenged by men (Abram, Moses, Job, etc), who will ask “what will others think” about this “God of theirs?” Did God change between “Malachi and Matthew” or did people? Some Jews/Israelites were influenced by “the gods of Babylon & Assyria”, others by Hellenization, and later still others by Rome. For as much as the NT, particularly the gospels, pictures the Sadducees as hypocrites, although most were just strict literalists (those who did bow to Rome aren’t really mentioned). The Pharisees (in name) are sometimes shown as hypocrites, but their internal writings and their
history show something quite different. The “evidence” against them by the gospel writers and others are largely unsupported or absent. It is hard to imagine that those who are ultra-legalists are also supposed to be “lawbreakers”. One of the “faces” of Jesus was that he was a typical Pharisee, at times very conservative like Shammai and at other times more liberal than Hillel, maybe even radical. Some Rabbis and Jewish (and several Christian) scholars have noted this, so it is not surprising that they some might say that “whatever Jesus taught that was “old” (from the Tanach) was good and whatever he taught that was “new” (not in the Tanach) was not so good”. Several Christian scholars have presented good arguments for several other faces of Jesus. So what should one think? Is Jesus a hypocrite or is God or is that both are (since they are the same person/s) or is it a mystery that we must accept? Since when is “revelation” defined as mystery (non- or anti-revelation)? Or is Jesus a product of human writers who had different beliefs and who were from different communities or “schools of thought or faith”? A “believer” might not accept that, but a Bishop, who is generally considered as one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all times, St Augustine of Hippo did.
Leaving aside the internal problems within Christian texts, and the differing interpretations of those texts, which would be of little concern for Jews if it did not also adversely affect them as it has and still does, how do those texts reflect poorly on the God of Israel? There is a distinct difference between the name of God in one place and the “names” of God in another. Put aside the differences in history and in language. One name is new. And that new name is mentioned with the name of God and yet so separate from it that the 2 names will appear to the untrained person as the names of 2 different gods, with one god inferior or subordinate to the other god. The terminology and manner is so much more similar to the myths of other nations than it is to Israel or to the Hebrew Bible, that one wonders if the God of Israel decided to change his image in order to become more accessible to more people at the risk of alienating and becoming a false God to those Jews & God-fearers who were so faithful before? Many in Israel were “adulterous”, so should God be also?
If God says emphatically in one place that He is not a man, why should we not be confused or even greatly upset, if he now appears as a man (not for a minute or 2 before hundreds of thousands of witnesses for no good reason except maybe to just please people who have not known him)? Wasn’t the light bright enough in his human messengers? Why would God want to appear as a liar, like man whom He said He was not like, in order to slowly, over 3-400 years, finally began to make an impact in the nations and this increase often came “at the point of a sword”? Why then would God, several more hundred years later, then send another messenger with a very different message, including a different message about who Jesus was in relationship to God? Some say this time it was the “devil”, but why would God allow the ‘”devil” so much power to essentially destroy 10’s of millions? Was the light of Jesus and “the way” not good enough and another new revelation was needed? Or once again, is this a movement of people and not of God? The prophets of Israel almost 1000 years earlier spoke of a God who remains in the heart of a nation or peoples, a remnant of which would always remain faithful to the One God they knew. Didn’t those prophets know that God revised the plan? Every few years or decades recently there is a “new movement of God” (Pentecostal, “Brownsville”, “Hebraic Roots”, etc). Is God experimentally or indecisive, or are the people who think they know God and think they hear from God?
Is “incarnation” or “manifestation” the answer, the “fix”, or the “work-around” to the problem of seeing God as appearing to “surrender” to people who seem to prefer the pagan & mystery religion model of a god over God’s “model” (the original one)? No. There were fundamental problems with most previous arguments trying to harmonize NT theology with OT theology. In the second century, some Christians seen a problem with what they called Judaizing (trying to make something not originally Jewish into something more aligned with the Holy Scripture of the Jews). To them the “Chrestos” was not Jewish. But that is part of a college course is early Christian writing. Incarnation is a subset of the concept of manifestation. And manifestation is a subset of idolatry. Idolatry means more than the belief in “other gods”, if “other gods” could exist (the Tanach uses them as metaphor and they were spoken of since other people believed that these gods were “real”.) Other “gods” were seen as “no-gods” or “beings” imagined by other people who did not know the universal God that Israel “knew” and who did not truly understand that the powers in nature were not gods but creations of the One and only god. There was power in nature and some people seemed to have “super-natural” powers, but nature and humans were not God. God didn’t manifest in a burning bush, a box, a serpent, and not a human body. God was not in the earth nor in the wind nor in the fire (the 3 so called primal elements). Idolatry was what they called the belief or “mystery” that the spirit of a “god” (or of their God) could enter a created object. They rejected as idolatry that the power of a god (or God) entered into a created object, such as an asherah pole or a man. Wherever a person thought they seen a person as an angel, etc. it is always presented as a deception, an illusion, an apparent appearance, usually after the fact. But God was not in the fire. Nor the wood (person) thrown into the fire. However, someone like a Nebuchanezzar could see “one like the many non-living sons of his god” in the fire. Should he be our teacher of God?
Isaiah 42:18
Listen you deaf! Look and see you blind!
Listen
to pay attention; heed; obey
Isaiah 43:11
11. I, I am the Lord, and besides Me there is no Savior.
I. = the nominative singular pronoun, used by a speaker in referring to himself or herself.
Amen Larry.
Hello All,
Amongst the sayings of Agur in Proverbs 30 is a riddle. The riddle consists of 6 questions, the first four of which are rhectorical. The answers to these are of course God, because only He could ever accomplish these things. The fifth question is also easy since the name of God was revealed to men long before the book of Proverbs was written, the Name of God, YHVH, is often translated, Jehovah. With the typograhic coventions of modern translations, it is usually translated, Lord.
It is tthe sixth question which is the tricky one: “What is the name of His son”? You dont have to look very far to see that the Hebrew scriptures teach that God has a son. It is stated twice in Psalm 2 for example. Here you see it again. What is not revealed however is the sons Name, hence the teasing question “if you know” At this stage of progressive revelation, no one could have known his name. It is only when you read the NT, that His Name IS revealed as Jeshua/Jesus- ” and no other Name is given under Heaven whereby you can be saved” (Acts 14;12). His Name has now been revealed.
So in summary Proverbs 30 v4 teaches that Messiah would be,uniquely, the Son of God.
Ps Im still waiting for someone to answers these questions which no one has responded to as yet.
1. If Messiah is called the Son of David, when Messiah does come as the Son of David, how will you know His linaege, since all records were destroyed in AD70. And what tribe are you from?? Can Israel still trace her family line. Please help me out on this. x
2. How does Israel now attone for Her sins. I take it you still need to attone? Where does it state in the Law that you can stop observing Gods commandants. I also thought that Passover still needs to be observed. (properley that is) Well all severn feasts actually. I keep looking to see where God said you can have a rest from the LAW. Were not these feasts supposed to be kept for all generations? Please help! x
Peace to you all. x
Paul
1 -The records were not destroyed in 70 CE, there are families today who trace their lineage back to David or Aaron. In any case a prophet can come and tell us that this fellow is from the lineage of David on his father’s side as required by law
2 – We atone for our sins the same way we always did – through repentance – this article may help you – https://yourphariseefriend.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/atonement/
Concerning your next point – the law is never put aside – but the opportunity to observe every last law is not always present – we await the time when God will bring back those oportunities as per Deuteronomy 30
Your Phairsee friend
Yisroel
Paul i have a name for name tree that go’s back to David, there only 9 grandmothers between me and David. And lot of Jews have this same tree as the last head of the exile came to Spain in. Yisroel handled the second part of the question.
“Pay heed to him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your peysha’im; for My Shem is in him.”
(Exodus 23:21)
While Hashemn does not give His glory another, it appears He gives His Name.