But there is a third dimension in our text: “this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.” We Messianic Jews are keenly aware that we have not only encountered the reality of God, and not only latched on to him and joined ourselves to some transgenerational community of Yeshua believers with which we are aligned. We have also come into a new relationship with our father’s God—the God of our ancestors.
This means that as Messianic Jews, we have not only joined the fold of others who believe in Yeshua as Messiah: we have also reconnected to the Jewish community and heritage. Not everyone understands. While some may criticize us for our faith in Yeshua, there are some others who don’t understand the depth of our call to Jewish life and community.
In Koholeth, Ecclesiastes 4:12, we read this: A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Each strand of the cord is meant to support the other, and together these strands make a cord of spiritual life that is strong, useful for God’s purposes. Perhaps all concerned will beneit from remembering this three-stranded cord of Messianic Jewish spirituality: personal encounter with God, communal encounter with others who share that experience, and a deepened connection with the people of Israel and their God.
We in MJTI work together to nurture a movement and where God is personally encountered, forming congregations that honor our kinship with all Yeshua believers, and which strengthen our connection with our Jewish heritage. May our threefold cord never break!
Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses. . .
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: . . .This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
Many of us came to faith in the Living God through personal crisis, a time when God had our full attention and we experienced some sort of divine intervention, when we said “This is my God and I will praise him—I recognize this chain of circumstances, this realization or intervention in crisis, as the work of God.”
In this conclusion to the Passover story— our people Israel have also come through a crisis and experienced the dramatic intervention of God. Now they too claim him as their own. But this is but one of three aspects of spiritual experience illustrated by our passage.
In the words “they feared the Lord and believed in his servant Moses” we see that peak experiences, those crises or times of apparent divine intervention, link us not only to God but to others whose experience shapes or resembles our own. Thus, the people not only encountered God in a new way, they also encountered Moses in a new way. We might term this second dimension of spirituality the communal dimension.
Stuart Dauerman
Stuart Dauermann, Ph.D. is Senior Scholar at Messianic Jewish Theological Institute and the Rabbi of Ahavat Zion Synagogue in Beverly Hills, California. Congregations.