What Name?
Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?” Exodus 3:13 NASB
Name – According to the Book of Revelation, you and I have names that we do not know (Revelation 2:17). These are names known only to God, intimately personal names that reveal who we truly are. One day they will be ours.
There is a counterpart to this exquisite disclosure. God also has a personal name. Moses asks to know it when he feels the need to justify his declaration before the people. The translated text in the next verse is tragically unfortunate because it substitutes “The LORD” for the personal name, YHVH. English readers will conclude that God’s name is “the LORD.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But this is only a theologically motivated blunder. We can correct this. However, the correction will not provide us with the deeper insight about the name. There is a sense in which God’s personal name is also a private matter between you and Him. There is a name of God that you and God know, and only you and God know.
“Unless we can find the right name for God, we have no free, real, joyful, open access to Him. As long as we have to call God by general terms like ‘The Almighty,’ ‘The Lord God,’ as long as we have to put ‘the’ before the word to make it anonymous, to make it a generic term, we cannot use it as a personal name.”[1] Bloom suggests that when we finally enter into relationship with YHVH, it is not the name YHVH that will characterize our intimacy with Him. It is our unique, personal connected name, much like the name we have for our own fathers. My father’s name was Arnold. I never called him by that name. Nor did I call him “Father.” He was closer than either of those.
YHVH introduces us to His name, the name that identifies who He is within the people. But there is another name; a deeper name, a name that cannot be shared. You know it, don’t you?
Topical Index: name, shem, Exodus 3:13
[1] Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray, p. 103.
So. what is a name?
depends on your cultural paradigm, doesn’t it?
I am aware that in many traditional tribal cultures, as well as the East, names were what you DIDN’T tell unless and until you knew each other very well. Titles are what people use in these societies. Titles describe your function, or, position of usefulness in society. Names were extremely private affairs. You could be married before you knew a person’s name. Native Americans in many tribes had a lot of rules – most of them about guarding privacy – about names, too. I use the past tense because it seems the world now runs more on the Western insistence that names are what people know first (or even only) about others. Really backwards, if you are asking about those paradigms, actually.
Surely how we interpret information/evidences, the grid we sift things through informs our conclusions. What’s the connection between philosophy and theology and our interpretive grid that connects the two? Is that a personal choice or act of faith? Is God self defining or do we decide who god is? Words and idea’s can be very limiting when we are considering humm a subsative diety ? I love G. K. Chesterton who said “The point of an open mind, like a mouth is to close it agin on something solid”! He also said ” We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers” !
I am.. wondering , if we are , humm, considering being or doing or calling things; are we discussing nouns or verbs or a person or a diety or both? I am … confused? Who is this god you discuss?
~ Who has gone up to heaven and come down? Whose hands have gathered up the wind? Who has wrapped up the waters in a cloak? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His Name, and what is the Name of His [only begotten] Son? Surely you know!! ~
What name? Unless we forget there is a take on being LORD(lowercase caps can’t find it) continuing to be Lord must mean Lord over something………. There are areas in my life where I’m constantly battling realizing that I must continue to allow him to the LORD over.,… Someone once said if he’s not Lord Over All he’s not Lord at all
BALL-PERZIM. 2 Sam.5:18-20. Isisah 28,21. Lord of the Breakthrough
Sorry did not catch this. Ba-Al or BA AL. Perzim Lord of the Breakthrough
In 1975 my oldest sister gave me a Bible- it was the Jesus Movement and I just”woke”up. In the front of the Bible she wrote:
If He is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all.
It stuck with me my whole life.
Thanks for reminding me
No words for how powerful that concept is.
Often, the “names” we translate with THE in front (such as The Almighty) were VERY personal names to those who first spoke them. For Avraham to say “El-Shaddai” was a powerful moment in his experience of knowing YHVH. I wonder if we all were so bold to call God what we actually KNOW him to be, how many of us would call him “The god I’ve never met” or “the god my parents told me about”.
What god do you worship? “Elohim of the Pulpit”.
During a deep dark time of my life, a time that later led me to the truth of who He is, to the truth that is taught here ,
He taught me his name.
Thank you for revealing this to me in this word for today. I always realized it was a precious and personal revealing but now it is even more so.
To call Him my Ishi. Oh what a glorious name.