The Testimony of YHWH and the Testimony of the Self
Why the Difference Is Everything

If you have a personal testimony it may be because you have forgotten whose testimony actually matters. The Torah is the testimony of YHWH. It was written before you existed. It does not require your experience to be true.

 

There is a phrase that moves through Christian culture like a standard of faithfulness. My testimony. Share your testimony. What is your testimony? And what follows is almost always the same kind of story. I used to drink. I used to use drugs. I used to live a certain way. Then the gospel came into my life and now I am different. Look at the change. This is my testimony.

This document is not written to dismiss the reality of changed lives or to minimize what YHWH does in the lives of people who encounter the truth of the gospel. Changed lives are real. Freedom from destructive patterns is real. The fruit of understanding the gospel is real and it matters.

But the personal transformation story is not the testimony. And the tradition that has made it the testimony has, in doing so, displaced something far older, far more authoritative, and far more powerful from the center of the proclamation. It has displaced the testimony of YHWH himself, written before the foundation of the world, declared in the first word of the Torah before the light was called, preserved through three thousand years of silence and management, and now speaking again in full voice.

The Torah is the testimony of YHWH. Not a record of what his people experienced. His own declaration, authored by him, about his Son, written before any of us existed. That testimony does not require your experience to be true.

The Hebrew word is edut. Testimony. Witness. The legal declaration of what is true, made by the one who knows. The ark in the tabernacle was called the Aron HaEdut, the Ark of the Testimony, because it contained the tablets of the covenant. The written declaration of YHWH about himself, his character, and his purposes. The Torah sitting in the ark was YHWH’s own witness about himself. Not a collection of human experiences. Not a record of what his people had seen and felt and survived. His own declaration. Authored by him. Spoken through Moshe in the pictographic script where the first word of the covenant text declared the Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross before the first sentence was complete.

Yeshua said, the scriptures testify about me. The Greek word is martyreo, to bear witness, to give legal testimony, to make a declaration whose truth stands independent of the audience’s reception of it. The Torah is a witness. The Psalms are a witness. The Prophets are a witness. They bear testimony to the Son of God not because of what any individual has experienced but because YHWH declared it, wrote it, preserved it, and confirmed it at the cross. That testimony was true before the first human being was born. It will be true after the last personal transformation story has been forgotten.

 

The Structural Problem With Personal Testimony as the Gospel

When personal experience becomes the primary testimony, I was this, now I am that, look what happened to me, the self becomes the subject of the proclamation. And a proclamation whose subject is the self is not the gospel no matter how sincerely it is offered or how dramatically the change is real.

The structural problem is this. If the gospel’s validity is demonstrated by the change in the individual, then the gospel’s validity depends on the performance of the individual. When the individual struggles, when the freedom is not yet visible, when the old patterns return, when the change takes longer than the testimony suggested it should, the gospel appears to have failed. The testimony collapses under the weight it was never designed to carry. And the person who cannot yet produce the transformation story concludes that either the gospel is not working for them or they are not working hard enough for the gospel.

Neither conclusion is the gospel. Both conclusions flow directly from placing personal testimony at the center of the proclamation instead of the testimony of YHWH. The gospel declared in the first word of the Torah, the Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross, does not fail when an individual struggles. It does not depend on individual performance to be true. Sin was abolished at the cross. Righteousness was constituted universal. Judgment was finished. Those three declarations stand whether or not any individual’s behavior has changed since last Tuesday.

The gospel’s validity does not depend on anyone’s personal change. It was declared in the first word of the Torah before any of us were born. It was confirmed at the cross. The empty tomb is the seal. None of it requires a personal before-and-after story to be true.

The before-and-after personal testimony carries a hidden claim that is almost never stated openly but is always structurally present.

The hidden claim is this: the reason you should believe the gospel is because of what it did for me. My change is the evidence. My freedom is the proof. My story is the argument for the truth of the announcement. And if that is the structure of the proclamation, then the proclamation is only as strong as the most recent chapter of the speaker’s personal story. Which means it is extraordinarily fragile. And it means the speaker has placed themselves, their performance, their freedom, their visible transformation, between the listener and the gospel. Exactly the arrangement Yeshua dismantled when he said come down from the platform. You have one teacher.

 

What Self-Righteousness Actually Is

Self-righteousness is not only the pride of the person who has kept the law and wants credit for it. Self-righteousness is any framework in which the self is the measure, the evidence, or the subject of righteousness. And a testimony that says look how I changed, look at what the gospel produced in me, is a framework in which the self is the evidence of righteousness, even when the change is genuine and the freedom is real.

This is not a judgment on the people who share such testimonies. Most of them are sharing from genuine gratitude and genuine desire to point others toward what helped them. The problem is not the motivation. The problem is the structure. The structure places the self at the center. And a self-centered proclamation, however sincere, however dramatically the change is real, is not the same thing as proclaiming the testimony of YHWH about his Son.

Paul wrote in Galatians 6:14, far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Yeshua the Mashiach, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. The boast is not in what happened to Paul. The boast is in the cross. Not my story about the cross. The cross itself. The event declared in the first word of the Torah. The Tav that closes Bereshit, the two crossed sticks, the covenant seal, the instrument of the declaration. Paul did not say far be it from me to boast except in what the cross did for me. He said the boast is the cross. The subject is not Paul. The subject is the cross.

 

The Testimony of the Saints in Its Actual Context

Revelation 12:11 is the passage the tradition most often cites when it speaks of the testimony of the saints. It says they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony and they did not love their lives even unto death.

Read it carefully. The overcoming is by two things, the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. The blood of the Lamb is the testimony of YHWH, the declaration written in the first word of the Torah, confirmed at the cross, sealed in the resurrection. And the word of their testimony is their agreement with that declaration, their witness that what YHWH said about the Lamb is true. The confirmation of that agreement is not a personal transformation story. The confirmation of that agreement is that they did not love their lives even unto death. They held the testimony of YHWH as more true than their own survival. They were witnesses to what YHWH declared, not to what they had personally experienced.

The testimony of the saints in Revelation is not the personal before-and-after story. It is the declaration that the blood of the Lamb is what YHWH said it is, the destruction of the Son of God by his own hand on the cross, the abolition of sin, the constitution of universal righteousness, the finishing of judgment, and the saints held that declaration as the most true thing in existence, more true than their own continued lives. That is the testimony. The subject is the Lamb, not the saint.

The saints overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. Their testimony was their agreement that what YHWH said about the Lamb is true, confirmed not by their personal improvement but by their willingness to die rather than deny it. The subject was not themselves. The subject was the Lamb.

 

Silencing the Torah Is Silencing the Testimony of YHWH

This is where the personal testimony tradition and the management of the covenant text intersect at the deepest level. When the Torah’s testimony about Yeshua was silenced, through the removal of the name, the script change, the fence built around the text, the interpretive layer placed between the people and the word, what was silenced was the testimony of YHWH himself about his Son. The oldest testimony. The most authoritative testimony. The testimony that does not depend on any human experience, any personal change, any before-and-after story, any individual’s performance or failure.

And when the church replaced that silenced testimony with the personal transformation story as the primary evidence for the gospel, it completed a displacement that the tradition had begun. The Torah’s testimony, written before anything was made, declared in the first word, confirmed in every YHWH-bearing name across the covenant text, was set aside. In its place: the individual’s account of their own change. The self as the evidence. The performance as the proof.

The gospel has nothing to do with whether you used to drink or smoke or take drugs. The gospel was declared before you existed. It was confirmed before you were born. It stands whether you have changed or not, whether you are struggling or free, whether your life looks improved to the people around you or does not. The Son of God was destroyed by his own hand on the cross and sin was abolished for all flesh. That is the testimony. That is what was written before anything was made. That is what the Torah declares from its first word to its last. And it does not need your story to be true.

What it needs, what it has always needed, is the voice that will read it in full. Not smooth it over with translation filler. Not silence the name that carries the identity declaration. Not place an interpreter between the people and the word. Not substitute personal experience for the declaration that preceded all experience. But read what is written. In-beginning. The Son. The covenant. God-destruction. The hand. The cross. The first and the last standing between the creator and the creation. YHWH declaring behold the hand, behold the nail in every occurrence of the divine name across the entire covenant text.

This is the testimony. It belongs to YHWH. It was authored by YHWH. It declares the Son of YHWH. And it has been waiting, through three thousand years of silence, through the script change and the name removal and the fence and the migdal etz and the personal testimony tradition that finished what the scribal tradition began, for the generation that would read it again in full voice without flinching at the door of its own declaration.

The testimony of YHWH was written before you existed. It does not need your story to be true.
It needs your voice to declare what it says.

 

The Torah is the testimony of YHWH about his Son.

 

It was written before anything was made.

It does not depend on anyone’s personal change to be true.

It was true before you were born.

 

The personal transformation story is not the gospel.

It is at best a fruit of the gospel.

At worst it is self-righteousness with a conversion narrative attached.

 

The boast is not in what the cross did for me.

The boast is in the cross.

 

The subject is not the saint. The subject is the Lamb.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams