Names of God 2. Jehovah / Yahweh

                Names of God 2. Jehovah / Yahweh

  In review, if you can spare 17 minutes of eternally well spent time, watch the following video by Louie Giglio that illustrates Elohim - the Creator

 

In Genesis 2:4, suddenly we see God revealed as Lord God. No longer is He just Elohim but He is Jehovah Elohim. We will get more and more names of God progressively revealed to us throughout the Bible and throughout eternity - God is just that big. It's as if He revealed Himself all at once, He would literally blow our minds. Watch this video of The Matrix

 

 

I like the part where they say, "he's going to pop". That's what I'm talking about.

 

So what does this new name Jehovah add to our understanding. Lets go to Exodus 3 where it is first revealed. How can it be first revealed 2000 years later? Because Moses was writing the books of the law - Genesis through Deuteronomy - throughout his lifetime as he and God met. He obviously was told about creation, since he wasn't there, and through divine guidance felt like chapter 2 needed another name for God, the one God taught him at the burning bush. I like the song "So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt" by Keith Green especially where he says "Moses seems kind of idle, he just sits around and writes the Bible"

 

 

Look at Exodus 3

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ² There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. ³ So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

⁴ When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
And Moses said, “Here I am.”
⁵ “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” ⁶ Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.
 ¹⁰ So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
¹³ Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
¹⁴ God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
                    
The Hebrew rendering of this name is YHWH. Scholars, wanting to interpret this have found it to be derived from the verb hayah which means to be or to exist thus they translate it I Am or probably more properly I Be. For 900 years it was written YHWH because scribes thought to put it in a spoken form would violate the 3rd commandment. Finally it was given vowels from the word Adonai and it was pronounced Yahweh. The English translation became Jehovah (made famous by Indiana Jones).

 

So what does this name reveal us about God? Lets look at 5 things

 

1. God is a person, not a force. Wheras Elohim is seen as the fearsome awe inspiring creator and King of the universe and owner and judge, Yahweh comes into the picture as relating to man. God having a personal relationship with man. You see the Lord God in Genesis 2 noticing Adam's loneliness, planting a garden, creating a wife, communicating, walking in the garden, etc. You could say, if Elohim is the one who creates the bread, Yahweh is the one who disperses it. What does that have to do with anything? A lot! Mankind in general knows and believes in Elohim but they have never experienced the personal relationship that He offers. In fact when Satan tempts Eve, he takes out the Jehovah part of the name and infers that the impersonal creator wants to withhold something from her and when she responds back to him, she leaves Jehovah out too.

 

2. Self-existent . He is. Or He be's. He never was or will be but always is. He is the only truly independent being in the universe. He is the ultimate cause. When people argue about the existence of God, one of the main arguments for is the argument of cause and effect. Here is what Gotquestions.org , a very reliable source for Biblical based answers, has to say about it;

 

The Law of Cause and Effect. This law of science states that every cause has its effect and every effect has its cause. This law is the basis of all science. As such, this law bears a relationship to the origin of the heavens and the earth. In fact, scientists agree that the universe has not existed forever, that it had a beginning at some point in time.

The theory of relativity, which is almost universally accepted among scientists, has certain implications for this Law of Cause and Effect. One is that the universe, defined as time, space, matter, and physical energy had a beginning, that it is not eternal. And it is through Einstein’s equations that scientists can trace the development of the universe back to its very origin, back to what is called the “singularity event” when it actually came into being. Science has proven that the universe really did have a beginning. This means that if the universe had a starting point in history, then it obviously began to exist, and it must have a cause for its existence.

Therefore, if the universe needs a cause for its coming into being, then that cause must be beyond the universe—which is time, space, matter, and physical energy. That cause must be something similar to what Christians call “God.” Even Richard Dawkins, probably the most prominent proponent for atheism in our time, admitted in a TIME magazine article that “there could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.” Yes, and that is God!

We can best summarize this cosmological evidence with the following statements:
(1) Whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore, the universe must have a cause for its existence.
(4) The attributes of the cause of the universe (being timeless, existing outside of space, and so on) are the attributes of God.
(5) Therefore, the cause of the universe must be God

 

3. Doesn't change - immutable. We can trust in Him because His mind never changes, His promises never change and His word never changes. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

 

4. Can't become irrelevant. He is always current because He is outside of changing times. He gives unchanging standards. Look at what Piers Morgan had to say about God's word;

 

 

Or Grammy award winner Macklemore with his song "Same Love" says this;

 

"The right wing conservatives think it's a decision

And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition
Playing God, aw nah here we go
America the brave still fears what we don't know
And "God loves all his children" is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago"

 

5. God isn't who you want Him to be - you can't determine what kind of God you want because He Is. We have to adjust to His character not vice versa. Tim Keller refers to this as a "Stepford god";

 

If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.

“For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won’t have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives? The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.
“Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction.
“Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.
“So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.”

 

 

So how do we go from Elohim to Jehovah Elohim? Or how do we got from religion to relationship. How do we go from head knowledge to heart knowledge? Lets go back to Exodus 3 in conclusion where the name is introduced. (many of these thoughts courtesy of Tim Keller) This account appears to be when Moses went from knowing about Elohim to knowing Him, Yahweh.

1. Realize how far you have fallen - Moses, educated, trained in the leading country in the land had become a sheepherder in Midian. Verse 1 says "Moses was tending". The verb actually means tending and tending and tending... It implies monotony. People coming to God, almost always are in a crisis. That is why so many conversions happen in prison, on death beds, and in impoverished countries on mission trips. People need to know they are in a crisis and...

2. Their old paradigm for life isn't working. They need a new paradigm - something completely different i.e. a bush that doesn't burn up. They need to realize that their old way of thinking is not answering life's questions. There is something supernatural outside them that is a better explanation...

3. There is a God of fire - He doesn't need fuel to burn, He is self sufficient. Like fire He is consuming, unyielding, beautiful yet terrifying. The real riddle is not that the tree doesn't burn up but that a whiny Moses standing in the presence of a God of fire doesn't combust. And the answer is...

4. The Angel of the Lord was in the fire. Who's that? Jesus. A theophany or Christophany. A preincarnate Jesus who stands in the gap for us so we can be in the prescence of God and says in John 8, "before Abraham was, I Am".

5. Lastly, how do you know religion went to relationship. Two ways - Go and Glo. When God appeared to Abraham, Isaiah, Moses, Paul, they were given the command "Go". For us, we get new marching orders. God says to us" you are now an ambassador for the kingdom of Heaven. Go represent Me with your uniqueness I gave you. And like Moses, whose face glowed in the presence of God, we are to shine for Christ. God now lives inside of us and people should see a difference.

 

So, for us who are saved, how do we rekindle that relationship with God? We need to go explore that fire. Verse 4 says"Moses had gone over to look" literally detoured. He needed to break free from the usual and go meet with God. We need to turn off the TV, cell phone games, internet, Netflix, and meet with God. Take a detour - the route marked Jehovah!

 

What does Jehovah / Yahweh / YHWH mean? How about the personal, eternal, revealing, God of absolute truth.

 

For your quiet time this week

1. Read Psalm 19. Notice the abrupt change in the middle from Elohim to Jehovah. How does that closeness affect David in verses 13,14?

 

2. Read Psalm 8. When he considers Elohim, what is he amazed about in verse 4?