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Helping the World to Count to One - Page 4
God cannot be begotten, and the Son of God was begotten. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls speak of an expected time when God will beget the Son of God. They too used 2 Samuel 7:14 and Psalm 2:7 to indicate the beginning of the expected Messiah. The immortal God (1 Tim. 6:16) cannot die. The Son of God died (Rom. 5:10). God cannot be tempted (James 1:13), yet the Son of God was tempted. Not to observe these category differences is to throw away precious biblical instruction.
Hebrews 1:1-2 says that God did not speak through a Son in the Old Testament times. Verse 2 also says that God made the ages through Jesus. This could refer to the ages of the new creation which Jesus introduced or it may refer to Jesus, as Wisdom, being the reason for God’s creation of everything. Hebrews 1:5, quoting the prophecy of Psalm 2:7, speaks of the coming into existence of Jesus, the Son: “Today I have begotten you” (so also the LXX of Ps. 110:3 and many Hebrew manuscripts). The same verse in Hebrews speaks of 2 Samuel 7:14’s marvelous promise, given a thousand years before Jesus’ birth, that God “will be a father to him and he will be a son.” That promise was given to David and it referred to the Messiah who was to come. The beginning of Messiah’s existence is the moment when God becomes the Father of the Messiah. Acts 13:33 refers also to the beginning of Jesus’ existence, his raising up (not raising up again as wrongly translated in the KJV), and verse 34, by contrast, to his resurrection. The same beginning of the Son is exactly what we find in Luke 1:35 and Matthew 1:20 (“that which is begotten in her is from the holy spirit”).
Isaiah 44:24 says that God, unaccompanied, unaided, created the Genesis heavens and earth. He was entirely alone. “Who was with me?” At the time of the Genesis creation there was no Son with Him (cf. Heb. 1:1-2).
God did not speak in a Son until the New Testament. So then who said, “Let there be light”? It would be a flat contradiction of Hebrews 1:1-2 to say it was the Son. The God of the Old Testament is quite distinct from His unique Son. The latter had his genesis in Matthew 1:18 (“the genesis of Jesus was as follows”). The Bible becomes a book of incomprehensible riddles if God can have a Son before He brings him into existence! Luke 1:35 describes how the Son of God came to exist. He was begotten. To beget in the Bible and in English is a word which of all words denotes a before and after. Therefore the Son had a beginning. There was a time before he was begotten, before he was. If he already existed, these testimonies in Matthew 1 and Luke 1 are nonsense. Mary bore a human being, not God or an angel. Human mothers bear humans. Mary certainly did not just bear “human nature,” and “human nature” as Mary’s son would not be the descendant of David and thus not the Messiah. (The creeds try to frighten us away from this beginning of the Son, telling us that if we say “there was a time when the Son did not exist” we are heretics and anathematized — see the anathemas at Nicea, 325AD).
The notion that the Son of God was in fact God would make a charade out of his whole struggle in obedience to God and on our behalf as Savior and model. The whole point of a High Priest is that he must be “selected from among men” (Heb. 5:1). He is the “man Messiah Jesus” in contrast to his Father (1 Tim. 2:5). The Father in John 17:3 is “the only one who is God.” If God is the only one who is God, no one else is God except the Father, which is exactly what Paul declared when rehearsing the creed in 1 Corinthians 8: “There is no God except the one God the Father” (combining vv. 4 and 6). He added, not “splitting the Shema or expanding it” as Tom Wright and others say, that Jesus is the one Lord Messiah! All that had been well said by Luke, who agreed with Paul when he spoke of the Lord Messiah (Luke 2:11) who is “the Lord’s Messiah” (Luke 2:26).
If the Son were God, there would be two Gods. To call Jesus God and the Father God is not strict monotheism, however much the label may be applied. The Bible nowhere uses “God” to mean a triune or biune God.
In Hebrews 1:10, there is a complication due to the fact that the writer quotes Psalm 102 from the Greek version (LXX) and not the Hebrew version. The LXX (Septuagint) has a different sense entirely in Psalm 102:23-25. It introduces thoughts not found in the Hebrew text. It introduces God’s reply to the suppliant. The LXX, quoted in Hebrews 1:10, says: “He [God] answered him [the suppliant]…Tell me [God speaking to the suppliant]…Thou, lord [God addressing someone else called ‘lord’].” But the Hebrew text has “He [God] weakened me…I [the suppliant] say, ‘O my God…’”
Thus the LXX introduces a second lord who is addressed by God: “At the beginning you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands” (v. 25). The writer to the Hebrews had open before him the LXX and not the Hebrew (rather as today someone might quote the NIV instead of the KJV). The New Testament often cites the LXX Greek. F.F. Bruce in the New International Commentary on Hebrews explains:
In the Septuagint text the person to whom these words [“of old you laid the foundation of the earth”] are spoken is addressed explicitly as “Lord”; and it is God who addresses him thus. Whereas in the Hebrew text the suppliant is the speaker from the beginning to the end of the psalm, in the Greek text his prayer comes to an end with v. 22, and the next words read as follows: “He [God] answered him [the suppliant] in the way of his strength: ‘Declare to Me the shortness of My days: Bring Me not up in the midst of My days. Thy [the suppliant’s] years are throughout all generations. Thou, lord [the suppliant, viewed here as the Messiah by Hebrews], in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth.’”5 This is God’s answer to the suppliant; He bids him acknowledge the shortness of God’s set time (for the restoration of Jerusalem, as in v. 13) and not summon Him [God] to act when that set time has only half expired, while He [God] assures him [the suppliant, called lord by God] that he and his servants’ children will be preserved forever…
Bacon suggested that the Hebrew, as well as the Greek, text of this psalm formed a basis for messianic eschatology, especially its reference to the “shortness” of God’s days, i.e., of the period destined to elapse before the consummation of His purpose [the arrival of the yet future Messianic Kingdom on earth]; he found here the OT background of Matt. 24:22, Mark 13:20 and Ep. Barn. 4.3 (“as Enoch says, ‘For to this end the Master [God] has cut short the times and the days, that his Beloved [Jesus] should make haste and come to his inheritance’”)…
But to whom (a Christian reader of the Septuagint might well ask) could God speak in words like these? And whom would God himself address as “Lord,” as the maker [or founder] of earth and heaven?6
Reading the LXX the Hebrews writer sees an obvious reference to the new heavens and earth of the future Kingdom and he sees God addressing the Messianic Lord in connection with the prophecies of the rest of Psalm 102 which speak of “the generation to come” (v. 18) and of the set time for Yahweh to build up Zion and appear in His glory. The fact that the One YHVH addresses another “lord” proves that the second lord cannot be YHVH.
The important article by B.W. Bacon (alluded to by Bruce above) stresses the fact that “The word ‘lord’ is wholly absent from the Hebrew [and English] text of Psalm 102:25.” But it appears in the LXX cited by Hebrews.
[With the translation in the LXX “he answered him”] the whole passage down to the end of the psalm becomes the answer of Yahweh to the suppliant who accordingly appears to be addressed as Kurie [lord] and creator of heaven and earth...Instead of understanding the verse as a complaint of the psalmist at the shortness of his days which are cut off in the midst, LXX and the Vulgate understand the utterance to be Yahweh's answer to the psalmist’s plea that he will intervene to save Zion, because “it is time to have pity on her, yea, the set time is come” (v. 13). He is bidden acknowledge (or prescribe?) the shortness of Yahweh’s set time, and not to summon him when it is but half expired. On the other hand he [the Messianic lord] is promised that his own endurance shall be perpetual with the children of his servants.7
5 The reason for the completely different translations, between Greek and Hebrew, lies in the Hebrew vowel points. The sense can be altered if the vowel points are changed, and sometimes it is not clear which of the possible senses is the right one. Thus the Hebrew takes INNaHto mean “He [God] afflicted” (v. 23) but the LXX repoints the verb (i.e. understands the vowel points to be different from the Hebrew text we now have). The LXX uses the same Hebrew consonants but changes the vowels to read ANaH (cp. English shipping/shopping, stepping/stopping] which means “He [God] answered [him].” So then in the LXX God is answering the one praying and addressing that person as “lord.” The LXX adds the word “lord” in v. 25. Next the Hebrew has OMaR eli (“I say, ‘O my God,’ v. 24). But the LXX reads these consonants as EMoR elai (“Say to Me,” v. 23b; i.e. the person praying is commanded by God to tell God). The idea is that God is asked to cut short the days which have to elapse before the Kingdom comes (cf. Matt. 24:22). Ps. 102 is largely about the age to come and the restoration of Israel in the future Kingdom and so was entirely appropriate as a proof text for Hebrews 1 in regard to what the Son is destined to do in the future, indeed his role in the new, not the Genesis creation. This sense is reversed when it is made to support the unbiblical idea that Jesus was the Creator in Genesis! Orthodoxy is looking backwards, while Hebrews looks forward.
6F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews (New International Commentary on the New Testament), Eerdmans, 1990, p.62-63.
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