The Old Testament YHWH vs. The New Testament Christ

Many have wondered if the identity of God in the Old Testament is the same as that of the New Testament. If that has been your dilemma, then you have joined those asking who the Old Testament God is, a question that leads us all into the alley of monotheism. In his Monotheism article, Ronald Youngblood defined the concept as “the belief that there is only one God. [However,] related terms are polytheism (belief that there are many gods), henotheism (belief in one supreme God, though not necessarily to the exclusion of belief in other lesser gods).”^[1]The author went a step further to include “monolatry [the] (worship of only one god, though not necessarily denying that other gods exist), and atheism (denying or disbelieving in the existence of any gods at all).”^[2] Some scholars believe that Israel did not arrive at monotheism overnight but went through some kind of gradual doctrinal evolution. Youngblood asserted that “Comparative religion, then, often teaches that Israel’s religion underwent a process of evolution from animism to polytheism to henotheism to [eventually] monotheism.”^[3]

The Jews in their Jewish Shema have always maintained that God is one according to Deuteronomy 6:4, which stated, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” – ESV. The oneness of God, a monotheistic mindset, is thus the primary doctrinal position of the ordinary Jew to the exclusion of any other appearance of polytheism. So this Old Testament view of God held by Judaism is that the Lord is YHWH, the God of creation. Here Scott Sunquist explained that the Bible, “the story [of God] reveals that God is the only God, the only One who creates, and that he creates all things good.”^[4] Apart from this understanding, Jewish monotheism promotes exclusivity to this YHWH God of creation. In Christopher Wright’s view, “It seems clear that from a very early stage Israel had a conviction that to be [an] Israelite required an exclusive attachment to YHWH as their God,”^[5] mainly due to the various covenants God had with their Patriarchs. Is this still the situation in the 21^st century with the advent of Christ?

The God of the Old Testament and, by extension, the Bible is a God who does not want to remain hidden. In Exodus 6:7, he told Moses to tell Israel, saying, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” – ESV. The writer of Hebrews and Paul equates Christ with the God of the Old Testament. First, considering Hebrews, Kavin Rowe established that “indeed, the first verse of chapter 1 immediately and clearly identifies the God about whom Hebrews speaks as the God of Israel, the one who ‘spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets.’”^[6] Per Rowe, the God of the New Testament “is not a new God, a divine figure other than the Jewish God, whose identity is bound together with his uniqueness, and whose demand for worship is therefore exclusive, [thus] the theos of Hebrews is in no way anything other than the Old Testament God.”^[7] In short, the God of the Old Testament is the same as that of the New Testament.

Secondly, in Hebrews chapter 1, this Old Testament God identifies himself in God the Son by choosing to speak through him. In v. 3a, the author of Hebrews stated that “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” – NIV. Furthermore, Rowe said, “to put it in contemporary language, the Son is not other than God but is in fact God expressed or externalized – embodied – in relation to the world.”^[8] The Holy Spirit, who also bears the same divine essence as the Father and the Son, is also projected in Hebrews (6:4). Rowe added that “to speak of the Holy Spirit, therefore, is also to speak of God and of the Lord Jesus.”^[9] Paul, in his writings, also conveys his trinitarian thoughts putting the Old Testament God on the same status as Christ and the Holy Spirit. In the benediction of his second epistle to the Corinthian church (13:14), he said, “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” – NIV. Rowe presented Paul’s trinitarian thoughts accurately when he suggested that it “presupposes a linguistic interconnection between God, Jesus the Lord and the Holy Spirit such that to speak of one is necessarily to invoke or imply the others.”^[10] The Old Testament God is the same as the New.

Notes

[1] Ronald Youngblood, “Monotheism,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Daniel J Treier and Walter A Elwell, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), pp. 560-561, 560.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Scott W. Sunquist, Understanding Christian Mission: Participation in Suffering and Glory (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 181.

[5] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 72.

[6] Gilles Emery, Matthew Levering, and Kavin Rowe, “The Trinity in the Letters of St Paul and Hebrews,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 41-54, 45.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Rowe, 48.

[10] Rowe, 50.