I Went After Yeshua

My plan was simple, and I thought it was airtight. The Old Testament God cannot be seen. "You cannot see My face, for man shall not see Me and live" (Exodus 33:20). "No one has ever seen God" (John 1:18). "Whom no one has ever seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16). "Heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You" (1 Kings 8:27).

So here was my hammer: if God cannot be seen, cannot be contained, cannot be handled — then a man who was seen and touched and held inside a body cannot be that God. Yeshua walked, ate, bled, was buried. Therefore, I reasoned, Yeshua is not YHWH. Case closed.

Except the Old Testament would not let me close it.

The figure I could not get rid of

Because the same Scriptures that say God cannot be seen are full of people seeing Him — and not in safe little visions from a distance. Face to face, and living to tell it.

Hagar, alone in the wilderness, meets "the Angel of YHWH" — and then names Him: "You are a God of seeing... Truly here I have seen Him who looks after me" (Genesis 16:7–13). The narrator agrees: it was YHWH. At the bush, "the Angel of YHWH appeared to him in a flame of fire," and two verses later it is "God called to him out of the bush... I am the God of your father" (Exodus 3:2–6) — the Angel speaking as God, in the first person, while Moses hides his face. Jacob wrestles a man until dawn and names the place Peniel: "I have seen God face to face, and yet my life was delivered" (Genesis 32:30). Manoah sees the same Angel and panics: "We shall surely die, for we have seen God" (Judges 13:22).

This figure — the Malakh YHWH, the Angel of YHWH — speaks as YHWH, is called YHWH by the narrator, receives the reverence owed to God, swears by Himself, forgives. And yet He is also sent by YHWH — distinguishable from the One who sends. He is YHWH, and He is not the whole of YHWH. He is YHWH in a form a man could stand in front of and live.

I had come to dismantle a divine Yeshua. Instead I kept tripping over a divine figure who had been walking through the Old Testament the whole time — seen, met, named YHWH — and who could not be the uncontainable Source, because the Source cannot be seen. So who was He?

The word the Hebrew had been using all along

Then I saw that the Hebrew had been telling me, in a whole vocabulary I'd read past for years. The Old Testament has its own set of words for the one God making Himself reachable without ceasing to be the uncontainable One:

• the Kavod — the glory-weight that fills the tabernacle and sits enthroned (Exodus 40:34; Ezekiel 1:26–28): the visible presence of YHWH;
• the Shem — the Name that "dwells" in the Temple while YHWH remains in heaven (Deuteronomy 12:5; 1 Kings 8:29): a real, operating presence in a place;
• the Panim — the Face, the Presence that goes with Israel (Exodus 33:14), the face Moses speaks to yet cannot fully see and live;
• the Malakh YHWH — the Messenger who is YHWH, in visible form;
• and the Memra — the Word of YHWH.

Five words, one reality: the uncontainable God reaching into the world He made, in a form His creatures can survive. Not a second God. The one God's own self-expression — the Manifestation. Not a rung on a ladder, not a lesser copy: the same one God, in the mode that can be met.

The synagogue's own word for Him

And the last of those five is the one that finally broke my case, because it was not mine and it was not new. When the synagogues read the Torah aloud in Aramaic — the Targums — they ran into exactly my problem: the text kept saying YHWH walked, appeared, spoke face to face, and that felt like too much for the transcendent God. Their fix, again and again, was one phrase. Where the Hebrew said YHWH acted in the world, the Aramaic — most fully in the Palestinian Targum (Neofiti) — said the Memra of YHWH, the Word of YHWH:

"The Memra of YHWH said, 'Let there be light.'" (Targum Neofiti, Genesis 1:3) "They heard the voice of the Memra of YHWH walking in the garden." (Targum Neofiti, Genesis 3:8) "Abraham believed in the Memra of YHWH." (Targum Neofiti, Genesis 15:6)

Now — by the rule of this book, the Targums are a witness, not the proof. They don't establish the doctrine; the Tanakh's own seen-YHWH does that. But the witness told me something I could not un-learn: centuries before Yeshua, the people who guarded the Shema most jealously already had a word for the one God's reachable self-expression — the Word who creates, walks, covenants, and appears. The category was sitting there, named, waiting.

John sat Yeshua down in that exact seat

And then John did the thing I never saw coming. To open his Gospel he did not reach for a Greek philosopher. He reached for the word every synagogue Jew had heard their whole life:

"In the beginning was the Word — and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made through Him... And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen His kavod." (John 1:1–3, 14)

Read it with the Aramaic underneath, the way many of his first hearers would have heard it: In the beginning was the Memra, and the Memra was with God, and the Memra was God. The Memra who said "let there be light," who walked in the garden, who appeared at the bush — that Memra became flesh. "Tabernacled" is eskēnōsen — the verb for the tabernacle the Kavod once filled. The glory-weight that once filled the tent now sits in a human face: "we have seen His kavod."

I had set out to prove Yeshua was not the God of the Old Testament. Instead I found that the God of the Old Testament had always come in a form that could be seen — and John says that form, at the last, was Yeshua. I could not take his deity down. The Old Testament kept handing it back to me.

But I was not done fighting. Being the seen form of YHWH is one thing; being fully God — not a lesser emanation, not a junior figure, not a man merely on loan — is another wall entirely, and there were verses I was certain would bring him down. So I went at those next.