The God Who Is…
Week 3: Real Conversation With a Real Person
One of the most significant things we need to understand as we sit down to study about God is this: God wants us to know Him. Once we have grasped this truth as fully as we’re able, our study of theology takes on a greater sense of purpose and of urgency. God wants us to know who He is. I don’t know about you, but the more I study God, the more that truth blows my mind. Our understanding of God, our thoughts about God, and even the words we use to try to make sense of God are limited to the boundaries He set up around humanity. But those boundaries are seemingly endless because, what I’ve learned first-hand, is that the more I learn about Him, the more there is to learn.
This week in your homework, you’re going to take a stab at understanding what it means to have a relationship with God, so we’ll talk a lot about prayer because prayer is the way our relationship with God manifests itself in the most obvious way. We started our study a couple of weeks ago in Exodus 34, so let’s start there today.
[Read Exodus 34:1-8] Flip back for a moment to the end of chapter 33 and [Read Exodus 33:18-19a]. Moses had asked God to do something specific for him because he wanted to know God more intimately. But God’s response doesn’t seem to follow that request well. [What was God’s answer to Moses requesting, “show me Your glory?”]
God tells Moses, who has asked to see His glory, that he will: 1) Cause His goodness to pass before him, and 2) say His name as He passes by. It seems like a strange response, but it makes a lot more sense once we take it apart a bit.
First, God tells Moses that He will cause His goodness to pass before him. Go back to Exodus 34:6. [What is the very first thing God tells Moses about Himself after He says His name (which we’ll get back to shortly)?] God begins by describing Himself as “compassionate”. The Hebrew word (rakhuwm) translated “compassionate” can also be translated “merciful” and is only ever used in the Bible when talking about God. In English, the word “compassionate” means, “feeling or showing sympathy and concern for others”. When we look at the word merciful, we see that “mercy” is “compassion or forgiveness toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm”.
So the very first thing God tells Moses about Himself is that He is sympathetic toward those created in His image, and that He will extend forgiveness toward them, rather than harm. What we learn here is that God understands that we’re going to fall short of His standards of perfection, but that will never change how He feels about us, or how He responds to us.
Putting these verses together, then, we see first that God’s goodness is expressed in compassion and mercy toward us.
We’re going to get into this very deeply next week, so just hold onto all of that for now, and let’s step back a line and look at the second thing God tells Moses He will do for him: “I will proclaim the name ‘the Lord’ before you”. [What, based on Exodus 33:19 and 34:6, is God’s name?] This actually ends up being a bit of a trick question. Our English Bibles translate the original Hebrew word that God speaks as “the Lord”. There are a number of problems with this translation that can easily not only lead us to incorrect conclusions about what God is saying here, but can also cause us to miss such a beautiful, important aspect of who God is!
First, the way to word is translated into English isn’t even an accurate treatment of the original Hebrew word. Anyone who did the homework on Day 4 of Week 1 already knows what I’m about to say. But for those who didn’t, and those who need the reminder, hang on – we’re about to embark on a bumpy etymological ride
The Hebrew word used where God says His name is this one:
יְהֹוָה
The corresponding English letters are: YHVH (remember, Hebrew is read right to left). [What’s missing from this word?] The Hebrew language doesn’t have vowels the way English does. However, the position of the dots and lines (or jots and tittles, if you’ve ever wondered what that phrase meant) serve as indications of which vowels would be used in a word if there were actual vowels.
When the Bible was being translated from Hebrew to German in the 16th century, one translator noticed that the vowel markings from another word used for God, Adonai, were often found written below the word YHVH, so he simply inserted them where he thought they might go, and started writing YHVH as YAHOVAH. Where did the word Adonai come from? Now we’re getting to the root of our problem…
Ancient Jews, particularly our friends the Pharisees, put a lot of fences around God’s laws. One of God’s laws is “do not take the name of God in vain”, so to avoid breaking this law, early Jews simply stopped saying God’s name all together, and instead referred to Him as “Adonai”. The problem is this: Adonai is not a name. It’s a title. Adonai means “lord”. Look in your Bible for a moment. [What does Exodus 34:6 say?] Exodus 34:6 says, “The Lord passed in front of him and proclaimed: The Lord – the Lord…”
It’s a bit maddening really. The moment in which God reveals His name to Moses is recorded for us in the pages of History, but it’s recorded incorrectly. God’s name is not a title! But that translation has seeped into our own language and our own prayers, right? How often do we begin a prayer with “Dear Lord”, and how often do you hear people scatter “Lord” throughout their prayers?
To help this make sense, and to really hone in on the problem, think about it this way: Suppose you had a life-long friend. You grew up together, you slept over at each other’s houses, you sat together in class, at football games, and went to the prom with your dates together. You’ve shared every possible moment with each other. It’s a great friendship. Except for one small problem. Your friend has never called you by name. Instead, he or she always refers to you as “The Friend”. “Hey, The Friend, do you want to come over for dinner?” “This is my friend, The Friend.” That would be a little weird, don’t you think? But unknowingly, we do that to God all the time, and all because some German guy in the 16th Century thought he knew how to insert German vowels into Hebrew words.
So if God’s name isn’t “the Lord”, like your Bible says it is, what is it? Back to the original Hebrew we go! The oldest Hebrew manuscripts that have been found are the Dead Sea Scrolls, located in the 1970s and consisting of at least fragments of every book of the Hebrew Scriptures except the book of Esther. This then, includes Exodus, and the word used wherever we see the words “the Lord” is YHVH, which we pronounce as “Yahweh”.
This is all super technical, and probably way more than you actually wanted to know, so let’s finally get to the point. God has a name, and it is not “the Lord”. God’s name is Yahweh.
That’s all well and good, I’m sure you’re thinking, but what does Yahweh actually mean? To get that answer, we need to go back to the very first time God tells Moses who He is. [Read Exodus 3:13-14] When Moses asks God His name when they meet for the first time, rather than give him His name, God instead, simply describes Himself. What He says is “I will be what I will be”. [Read Genesis 1:2 and 1:3.] The same word we see God use in Exodus 6 is used to describe what Moses calls “the earth” before God created a single thing, and to express the state of being of light once God created it.
Like the nothingness that existed before Creation, and like the light that came flying out of God’s mouth when He spoke it into being, God had no beginning and God has no end. Our human brains will never actually be able to sit comfortably with this idea, so don’t try to now. Just focus on this: Yahweh means “the existing One”. God’s name is unique in that it never has and never will describe anyone or anything else.
Let’s look back at Exodus 3:14 for just a moment as we wrap this up to shed just a little more light on God’s name. In Exodus 3:14, Moses asks God “what is Your name”, but it’s the words he uses to ask the question that shed the most light on God’s answer. In Hebrew, there were two different ways to ask the question “what’s your name” and each was looking for distinctly different information about the person. The first way is what we think of when we ask someone this question: “What are you called?” or, as I read recently, “what sounds should I make when I want to get your attention?”.
But that’s not what Moses asked. Moses wasn’t looking for information on what to call God to get His attention. Moses was looking for much more. The question Moses asks God was this one: “What makes You You?”. So when God tells Moses His names is “Yahweh”, the Existing One, Moses understands that he is speaking with the one, true, eternal, all knowing, all powerful God of the Universe, and that whatever this God tells him is trustworthy, and it’s safe to obey Him.
Moses takes this information with him to confront Pharaoh and free the people of Israel from 400 years of slavery. Moses takes this information to the edge of the Red Sea, and smacks it with his walking stick so that those same people can escape Pharaoh’s pursuing army. Moses takes this information to the edge of a wilderness on the other side of which is a land the Existent One has promised to give these people as their forever home.
Where will you take this information? Where will you take your knowledge of the Existent One, the One who knows the beginning and the end of your story, and every moment in between? The One who is compassionate and merciful toward you in your weaknesses and failures. The One who is always with you, especially when you can’t see Him?
How does knowing God’s name change the way we relate to Him? That’s exactly what we’ll be exploring in our homework this week. But if you’re not planning to do it, know this: Knowing God personally radically changes how we relate to Him. And that starts with just knowing His name, because God’s name tells us everything we need to know about Him for our todays.