Judaism – What Does This Mean?

Calling God our Father and Meaning it

Encore Post: Calling God our father is second nature to Christians. After all, Jesus invites us to do so. We teach the Lord’s Prayer to our youngest children as their first prayer. So it may come as a surprise how unique that is among the world’s religions. Most religions hold their gods at a distance. The high god of native religions makes the world and goes away, leaving it to lesser spirits and humans. For Muslims, Allah is a strict, distant god you must toe the line to please. In Judaism, while God is seen as having a warm relationship with them, even to pronounce his name is considered disrespectful. For Hindus, Buddhists and other Eastern religions, god is not a person at all. The universe is their god and they see humans as god in a real sense.

For Christians, however, God is very much a Father who loves us and is a part of our daily lives. In a previous post, we spoke about how the Father adopted us as his sons and heirs with Christ. He invites us to call him abba — daddy — and approach us the way a little child approaches her father.

When we confess God as Father, we claim that he loves us, cares for us, wants The Three Ways God Cares for Us to be with us now and forever. It is incarnational – a statement that God cares for us so much that in person of his Son, he became a flesh-and-blood man, lived with us as one of us, suffered and died for us and rose again for us. By doing so, he restored the relationship between himself and us. He is indeed our father and a model of what fatherhood is all about.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Digging into the Old Testament: Marcion

Encore Post: If we think of a pendulum, it swings one way or the other. Let’s imagine the Ebionites to one extreme. At the other extreme would be the man named Marcion.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge we do not have any of Marcion’s own writings at our disposal. However, we have the early Church Fathers and their writings against his teachings. Ireaneaus of Lyon wrote against him in his work Against Heresies.

From Ireaneaus and some of the other Apostolic Fathers we learn that Marcion held to the idea that the the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New were not the same. Marcion saw the god of the Testament as a lesser Creator god who even was possibly evil. The god of the Old Testament was the Jewish God, and not the Father of the True Christ. The Old Testament may have prophesied about a Christ, but not the true one.

For Marcion, Jesus (the true Christ) came to subvert the Creator and overthrow the law and the prophets. Marcion even went so far as to change the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew to make Jesus say, “I have not come to fulfill the law but to abolish it.” This is the exact opposite of what Jesus says He came to do.

This is a major problem. If the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New, there is no promise of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. There would not be those who are righteous by faith. For all this flows out of the Old Testament. There would be no hall of faith, there would not fathers of the faith like Abraham. Jesus, Himself points us to them in the Old Testament to emulate, to rejoice with Abraham at Jesus’ Day. There would be nothing to learn from the Old Testament, even though Paul, one of the New Testament writers who is okay for Marcion, says we ought to learn from the ancient Israelites in the wilderness.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Blog Post Series

Digging into the Old Testament

Encore Post: This is the beginning of some wandering deeper into the Old Testament. As I stated before I love the Old Testament, so much I earned my Master’s of Sacred Theology in Old Testament Exegesis.

In my reading for such a degree, I was always confronted in one way or another with the question: “What is the Old Testament? And how are Christians supposed to read it?”

Many a theologian has asked those questions. Especially since the Old Testament is the sacred text for the Jewish religion as well as Christianity. How can the same books be read and people come to a different conclusion? How ought the Old Testament be understood? The obvious answer to that question for us is to follow in the way of Jesus, and how He read and understood the Old Testament.

But we humans and our sinful nature try to do it on our own, and that leads us into trouble. We will try to highlight some of those along the way as we see and learn how the greatest exegete, Jesus, explains and interprets the Old Testament showing us that He is the fulfillment of it (John 5:37-40; John 6:44-48; John 8:48-59; Luke 24:26-27; Luke 24:44-48).

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

The Ten Commandments

Encore Post: Etched in stone, framed as a print in calligraphy, the Ten Commandments appear in many places throughout the Western world. As the foundation of the English and French legal systems, they still define the basic moral framework of our society, even though they have been under attack for the last fifty years.

Like the two great commandments, the Ten Commandments sum up all of God’s law, spelling out in a bit of detail what it means to love God and neighbor. Yet they are not quite what we would expect from commandments. First, the original Hebrew calls them the Ten Words, not commands. In fact, Judaism counts “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt..” (Exodus 20:2) as the First Word. Second, God does not number them, so Judaism, Lutherans and Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox all number them differently. Third, most of the verbs have a simple future sense to them. In short, the Commandments explain how God wants his people to live.

In the Small Catechism, Martin Luther divides the commandments into two tables. The first table is about the way God’s people should relate to God. The second table is about the way they should relate to their neighbors. He also looks not only at what each command forbids, but also what it implies we should do.

While for Christians all three uses of the law apply, the primary use that they focus on is the third use. As God’s children, we love God because he freed us from slavery to sin and want to do his will.

And There’s None Other God

Encore Post: The word “Trinity” is old — it was first used in second century AD. (100-200 AD) Yet, it is not a term used by the Bible. Christian theologians use it to sum up what the Scripture says about the nature of God. It helps to look at the passages that brought the Church to talk about God in this way.

The first truth that the Word of God reveals to us about God is that he is unique. There is only one God. On this point, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and a number of other religions agree. Here is how the Holy Spirit talks about the number of gods and the unity of God.

Judaism uses Deuteronomy 6:4 as its creed: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Jesus and Paul agree. (Mark 12:29, Romans 3:30, Galatians 3:20). Other passages emphasize that there is one God. (Ephesians 4:6 1 Timothy 2:5, James 2:19).

There are no other Gods besides the Lord. (Isaiah 45:21, 1 Corinthians 8:4) None of the so-called gods of the nations are like him. (Isaiah 46:8-9) None of the false gods can bring rain (Jeremiah 14:22) Since they are not real, they cannot help, much less save.

From these, and many other passages, the Church concluded and still believes that there is only one God. It is this God that we fear, love and trust as our own.