Remember the word / given to your servant
which you have made / the basis of my hope
This has been my comfort / in my suffering
that your sayings / can give me life.
Godless men / have cruelly derided me
I have not deviated / from your Torah
I remember / your rulings of old
Yhwh / and I take comfort
I am seized / with passionate fury / in reaction to the wicked
who abandon / your Torah
Your laws have been / the theme of my songs
in my place / of lodging
At night time / I remember
your name / Yhwh
and I comply / with your Torah
This has been / my practice
that I have obeyed / your charges
In the Torah, Yhwh brought himself close to his people. It is not merely instruction, as we see here. She contains within herself the promises of Yhwh that, in times of suffering, will be spoken back to Yhwh so that he will remember and act. In a way, it makes the One one, causing him to be unified through this act of remembrance and action. The people become Yhwh-speaking-to-himself; in Torah, they are the carriers of the promise and, in Torah, they also become the Promise. This is why the Torah can become the object of devotion in a way that other parts of Scripture speak of Yhwh—it can ‘give life’ and it can ‘be loved’. It is like the Temple—both God (Psalm 48) and not God. Torah is two-and-one, the gift-and-the-giver, the source-and-the-summit. This is how Torah re-Adamizes the people, making them again into the unity of priest and king that Adam lost. This must be grasped—Torah, in re-making the people into Adam, makes them into Yhwh’s children. In Torah, they live their life into Life. Torah, in this way, is the mother of Yhwh’s people, giving birth to them. In Torah, the people are the the glory of God.
Torah is, then, a rung on the ladder down which Yhwh travels toward the incarnation, when the Torah will become flesh. Christ is the incarnation of Torah, of the Logos. He IS this two-and-one, the gift-and-the-giver, the source-and-the-summit. He is the new Adam that is also the one Adam was modeled after. He is, too, the ‘remembrance’. For people-in-Torah, they can implore Yhwh to remember because they are in Torah, which contains his promises. They, in a very real sense, participate within the promise and are the promise. In Christ, this is completed absolutely—he IS the remembering. The people participated in it; they drank from it; they incorporated it into their minds. But they were not, in the end, absolutely identified with it. Christ is. He does not simply represent, nor does he simply participate within, the promises of Torah. He is Torah, and, as such, he is the remembrance-of-Promise. This is the profoundest of things. In Genesis, Adam’s creation is the only thing that is not followed by “and it was so.” This project of God is not completed by his word alone. It is only in Christ that it is completed, that “it is finished”. When the closeness of Torah to his people is now made absolute. When it becomes flesh. Christ is Adam, the true human being, because he is Torah incarnate. As Pilate (unwittingly) says, “Behold the human being” (Jn. 19.5). He is the one who came last but was before all. Adam was made in his image; Christ was not made in Adam’s image.
In Christ the ‘Face of Torah’, the face of ‘the people of God’, and God’s own face, are now a single face. All is revealed together; or, we might say, all become in Jesus. And so, the children of Yhwh that Torah made his people, is now completed in baptism, when God’s people become children in Christ. Just as Torah gave birth to Israel, so now is that momentum completed in Christ—when, IN him, we are baptized—and, as such, now baptized INTO his divine life. This was something Torah, in and of itself, could not accomplish. Torah begins the process; it ‘guides the people’, like a tutor guiding children. It begins putting within them Yhwh’s life. But it is completed in Christ—when that Life is now, finally, imparted to man, and creation is complete(d).
