I'd like to lead your thinking
today for a few minutes on a subject that's really been interesting
to me through the years. And I've been reading Exodus
lately, and it re-caught my attention. And that is the proper name of
God. And that's what I'd like to talk about today. What's in
a name? Names are important to us, and
God has a name. And he makes it very evident
to us in the Bible, and it's a very interesting study. You've
probably been in a situation in a school reunion or something
like that where you were supposed to know the name of somebody
and you'd forgotten. It's embarrassing, isn't it? And you start talking
to that person, and you If you can't use their name, it's awkward. You start saying, oh, how you
been? And it's all you. And it's kind of on the surface
and not really very deep. We need each other's names to
really have a personal relationship with each other. And a name is
important for communication, for a personal relationship,
for identification, it's what identifies us, and for uniqueness. Not that we all have unique names,
but it kind of attributes to our uniqueness. Well, God our
Father has a proper name. And I'd like to lead you in a
discussion of that today, beyond just God and beyond just the
relationship name of our Father. In fact, one of the prayers of
the Bible is, hallowed be thy name. That's an important part
of the prayer. So we know that his name is supposed to be sanctified
or hallowed. God didn't reveal his personal
name until Moses at the burning bush. Did you realize that? Let's
turn to Exodus. Chapter 6, verses 2 and 3. It's a wonderful experience that
Moses had at the burning bush. In chapter 6, verse 2, God spoke
further to Moses and said to him, Now, the burning bush example,
our experience is in chapter three. I'm gonna take you back
to that in a minute, but I just wanna set the stage in chapter
six here. He's talking to Moses again,
and he says, God spoke further to Moses and said to him, I am
the Lord. Now you notice that's all in
capitals, L-O-R-D in your Bible, and that's the name we're gonna
be talking about of God. I'll explain more in a minute.
And I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, that's
El Shaddai. But by my name, Lord, I did not
make myself known to them. I also established my covenant
with them to which to give them the land of Canaan, the land
of which they sojourned. Okay, so what we learn in this
passage is that God had not revealed his proper name to the patriarchs,
but he did at first to Moses. Now, it's important to understand
that since Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Moses went back and when he wrote
it, he did write God's proper name into those earlier chapters,
but that's, not to confuse the issue that those earlier patriarchs
did not know God's proper name. So this word Lord in your Bible
as capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, what is it? It
is the Hebrew tetragrammaton, big name, but that just tetra
means four. The tetragrammaton is the four
Hebrew letters that make up the proper name of our father. And
those letters, if you transliterate them to English, are Y-H-V-H. So remember as we talk today,
remember that. YHVH. Hebrew didn't have any
vowels when it was first written and in the Old Testament. The
vowels were added later underneath the letters by the Masoretic,
Masoretes. So really, God's proper name
is YHVH, the Tetragrammaton. And Moses wrote that back into
the Pentateuch after Genesis 1. If you look at Genesis 1,
it's all Elohim. It's nothing to have to do with
God's proper name. His proper name starts in Genesis
2.4, where it starts talking about the Lord God. Okay, with
that as the background, now let's go back to the burning bush in
Exodus 3.6. And let's see exactly how this
name is revealed to Moses and maybe a little insight into what
it means, what it's all about. Exodus 3, 6. And you know the
story. We're not going to read all the
background, but you know how God caught Moses' attention out
in the desert with the bush that was burning but not being burned
up. So he went over to that, God said to him, take off your
shoes, this is sacred ground, I'm gonna talk to you. And so
this is where we pick up in verse six. He said also, I am the God
of your father, that's Elohim, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac and the God of Jacob. Then Moses hit his face for he
was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, I have surely
seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have given
heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware
of their sufferings. All right, so now let's follow
on down to verses 13 through 15. What I wanted you to see
in verse six is that he starts off saying, I am the God of your
father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that's Elohim, the
general word for God. Now in verses 13 through 15 is
when it gets interesting. Then Moses said to God, behold,
I'm 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? Here
you start seeing the importance of a name. Moses is anticipating
that those Jews are gonna say, or those children of Israel are
gonna say, okay, you supposedly talked to God, what's his name
then? God said to Moses, I am who I am. This in Hebrew is et
yei asher et yei. This is the, okay, a little lesson
in Hebrew, not too much. Hebrew has two tenses, just two. It's very simple language, Greek
is very complicated language. Hebrew has the perfect and the
imperfect. It's either happened or it hasn't
happened. The Hebrew mind is very concrete. Something's happened or it hasn't
happened, makes sense to me. And so this is the imperfect
tense of the verb to be, so. Different people try to translate,
this is so important how you translate this, but this one
says, I am who I am. Other people say, I will be who
I will be. It's all having to do with the
verb to be. It's all centered on the verb
to be. So he is the one who is eternally being, is the essence
of what he's saying here. So Moses asked him, who do I
say you are? And the first thing God says
to him is, I am who I am. And he said, thus you shall say
to the sons of Israel, I am, that's et ye, that is just the
verb to be in the future tense, first person singular, I will
be, has sent me to you. God furthermore said to Moses,
thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, The Lord, all right,
here we go. This is the Tetragrammaton for
the first time to human experience. This is God saying to Moses,
the Lord, now that's not, that's just what we say, but it's the
Tetragrammaton, Y-H-V-H, got it? The God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has
sent me to you. This is my name forever, and
this is my memorial name to all generations. All right, let's
jump off here for a minute. There's so much written and so
much discussion about this tetragrammaton. And I accessed several Hebrew
sites, Jewish sites, to see what they had to say about the tetragrammaton.
It's so interesting. You might want to do that. But
it's all centered on the verb to be, to exist. All right, the
verb to be in the Hebrew is H, the most current version of it
is H-Y-H, haya, but the earlier version of it was H-V-H, hava,
right? The verb to be is H-V-H. In the Hebrew, when you make
something imperfect tense or in the future, in general, you
add a Y to the front of it. And so if you added a Y to the
verb to be, that would be Y-H-V-H. And so most people tie the tetragrammaton
to the verb to be very literally that way. And they get those
four letters by doing that. So he said, I am or I will be
who I will be, et ye, asher et ye, to be or to exist. And then the second time he says,
tell them Etie has sent you. I am the one who will be forever.
And by the way, the Septuagint translates that, haon, the one
being, the one being with the Greek word, aimi, for to be. And so we come up with, down
to verse 15, where he reveals to us his proper name. A little
bit about it, or a little bit more about it. YHVH, as his name,
is used 6,828 times in the Old Testament. It's pervasive through
the Old Testament. The early Jews and the present
Jews, at least the really religious ones, will not try to pronounce
it. They will not pronounce that.
And they may be going on the commandment somewhat to not take
the name of the Lord in vain of the Ten Commandments, but
turn also to Leviticus 24.10. I'll show you another interesting
passage on that. Leviticus 24 10 through 12. Now the son of an Israelite woman
whose father was an Egyptian went out among the sons of Israel
and the Israelite woman's son and a man of Israel struggled
with each other in the camp. The son of the Israelite woman
blasphemed the name and cursed. So they brought him to Moses.
Now his mother's name was Shalemeth, the daughter of Deborah of the
tribe of Dan. They put him in custody so that
the command of the Lord might be made clear to them. So this
guy got in a fight and he blasphemed the name, which had to be referring
to the Tetragrammaton, the proper name of God, and he got punished
for it, which may be going back to Exodus in the Ten Commandments.
Now, but, The Jews took this way too far in saying that they
would never pronounce the name, but that's what they did. So
when they got together and read the Old Testament, what did they
do when they came across that name, the YHVH? They would substitute
Adonai. Adonai in Hebrew just means Lord
or Master. It means Master and Lord in that
way. So whenever they would read,
they would substitute Adonai when they saw the Tetragrammaton,
because they did not want to say it out of reverence to God. Furthermore, the Masoretes came
along, and they added vowels to the Old Testament to help
with the reading so that people could better understand how to
pronounce things. And when they got to the Tetragrammaton,
They added the vowels for Adonai underneath the letters YHVH. OK? Are you with me so far? So they put the pointed vowels
for Adonai under the YHVH. And so if you try to pronounce
the YHVH, you would have something like, Yehovah. Yehovah. Y-H-V-H with those vowels
makes Yehovah. And so people started writing
it Yehovah in some translations. The Germans wrote it J-E-H-O-V-A
because in German, a J is pronounced yah. So really, you never get
to a pronunciation anywhere close of Jehovah. That's not right. It's Yehovah if you put those
vowels under those letters. But if you put simpler vowels
under those letters, you get something like Yahveh, Yahveh,
something like that. That would be a simpler pronunciation
of it and still get the YHVH in there. All right, bottom line
is we don't know how to pronounce it. But that's where you get
all of these different forms of it floating around. Yahweh,
Jehovah, and so forth. Furthermore, there's a shortened
form, just Yah. And you have that in the Old
Testament for all kinds of names. All kinds of biblical names have
Yah incorporated in them, either at the end or at the beginning.
Elijah. Okay, Jeremiah. Anytime you have the ah on the
end is for Yah, is for God's name. Hallelujah is Yah be praised. So that's the Yah of Yahweh. And the interesting one is Joshua. That's how we pronounce it in
English. And it really is Yahoshua. And Yehoshua means Yah. Yah is salvation. Yehoshua. Yah is salvation. Which, if you
look at a Septuagint, in the book of Joshua, guess what the
translation is in Greek? It's Yesus. So Yehoshua comes
to Greek as Yesus. which is Jesus's name. So we're
gonna get to that in a minute. So what could Yahweh mean? What could it mean? It was first
revealed at the burning bush, and we've already talked about
the fact that it is definitely tied to the verb to be. It implies
constant existence. The one causing to be caused
all of us to be, besides the fact that he's eternally existent.
So there's a lot to that verb, to be. And the verb haya, older
form hava, and in the imperfect, is yahava. All right, when we
get to the Septuagint, now you know that the Septuagint is the
English translation of the Old Testament in the Greek days and
in the New Testament times. Whenever those early apostles
would read the Old Testament, they were probably reading the
Septuagint. Now, no guarantee of that, because
they probably knew Hebrew also, but they definitely had the Septuagint
around. And in the Septuagint, how did
they translate the Tetragrammaton? Well, they translated it, kurios,
Lord. So they went with the same kind
of thinking as the Hebrews when they substituted the Hebrew word
Adonai, Lord, for Yahweh. The Greeks would put in kurios,
which is Lord in Greek, whenever that name came about in the scriptures. On to the New Testament. So we
have set a stage here for the early Christians and for the
Jews of the time to be very familiar with the fact that when the scriptures
were read, whenever you said Lord, you meant Yahweh. When you get to the New Testament,
kurios is definitely used in two different ways. One, it's
used for our Father's name, as I said. I'll give you an example
of that. And then it's just used for master or servant. So for
most of the New Testament, when you see it used with Jesus' name,
Lord Jesus Christ, it means master. But there is that loose and interesting
connection to Yahweh. And so, I wanted to show you,
for instance, in Matthew 4, 7, let's turn there. Imagine that
you are of the Greek language back then,
and Matthew 4, 7, and 10, this is when our Lord was being tempted,
and he's quoting scripture to Satan. Matthew 4, 7, Jesus said to him, On the other
hand, it is written, you shall not put the Lord, kurios, your
God to the test. And there's so many examples
of that. Verse 10 is another one. Then Jesus said to him,
go, Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your
God and serve him only. So whenever there is a quote
of the Old Testament, they're gonna use the word kurios to
mean the Tetragrammaton. By the way, when you see in your
Bible the common phrase, Lord God, with capital L-O-R-D, and
then God, then that is a translation of Yahweh with God. So that's obvious. All right,
let's look at something in the New Testament. Along comes the
Messiah. And let's turn to Matthew 1,
20 to 22. We're talking about God's name. And along comes the Messiah,
the second person of the Trinity. And so what are we going to call
him? Matthew 1, 20 to 22 is where
we find out. But when he had considered this,
behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying,
Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your
wife, for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy
Spirit. She will bear a son, and you
shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from
their sins. So, you shall call his name Jesus,
And all the Hebrews of that time would know that that is a translation
for Yahoshua. And he goes on to say, for he
will save his people from their sins. So Yesus has to do with
salvation. We know that. And what reason
is, it is for the Hebrew word Yahoshua. Yah is salvation. So we know, of course, that when
the Lord Jesus came as the Messiah, he was the salvation sent from
Yahweh for us. He shall save us from our sins.
Now, the full name of our Lord in the New Testament is the Lord
Jesus Christ, three names. And you well know that we've
already said Lord, kurios, means master. Yesus means salvation
from Yah. And Christ, of course, is the
translation of the Hebrew word Messiah. So the anointed one,
Christos, is the Messiah. So what you have with the Lord
Jesus Christ is that he's our master, he is our salvation from
Yah, and you have the fact that he is our Messiah. In Luke 2.11,
the angel said, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And in Philippians
2.11, you know that it says that, in the end, every knee shall
bow and say that Jesus Christ is Lord, or is master. Now, kurios, as we said, has
two definite meanings in the New Testament. It either means
master, or it can mean and be translated, direct translation,
of Yahweh. John 10 with me, would you? John 10, 29 to 39. I'm sorry,
first let's go to Matthew 8. Matthew 8. Matthew 8, two, and a leper came
to him and bowed down before him and said, Lord, if you are
willing, you can make me clean. I want to show you a few examples
where it clearly means master. Verse six, saying, Lord, my servant
is lying paralyzed at home. In other words, it means master
or sir. And then in chapter 10, 24, a
disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his kurios,
master. Then there is in Matthew 22,
a quote of Psalm 110, verse one. And this is an interesting one
because it says, the Lord said to my Lord in the Hebrew. And
that's Yahweh said to my Adonai. But this in the New Testament,
which translates that is the Kurios said to my Kurios because
they don't have the two different words. In John 13, he said, you
call me teacher and Lord and you're right for so I am. And
in Acts 10, Peter, in his preaching, said, Peace through Jesus Christ,
he is Lord of all. In those contexts, it means master
over all. In Acts 221, in quoting Joel
2, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Now that's interesting because
in the New Testament, when it translates Joel, it says everyone
who calls on the name of Kurios. But in Joel, where it happens
and where it's quoted from, it says, everyone who calls on the
name of Yahweh. But we know that the only way
we can call upon the name of Yahweh now is through Jesus Christ,
our mediator. And even though the Old Testament
saints didn't know all that, when they were calling on Yahweh,
they were really calling through the Lord Jesus. And in Romans
10, we're to confess Jesus as Lord. Look at the Song of the
Lamb in Revelation 15. Now I want to show you a few
tithes where maybe the tithe of Lord in the New Testament
is even a little closer than just meaning master. Maybe it's
a really a stronger tithe to Yahweh. We're never going to
say that our Lord Jesus Christ is the same as Yahweh. I'm not
saying that at all today. There's separation in the Godhead
between the three persons. And God the Father, Yahweh, is
not God the Son, Jesus Christ the Lord, but obviously they're
equal. And so the identification that
Jesus made with Yahweh is where I want to end up today. Just
a few more scriptures. Let's look at the Song of the
Lamb in Revelation 15, three and four. This is the scene of heaven after
it's all over. And they sang the song of Moses,
the bondservant of God, and the Song of the Lamb, same. Now this is the Song of the Lamb.
That's the Lord Jesus. Great and marvelous are your
works, O Lord God the Almighty. Righteous and true are your ways,
King of the nations. Who will not fear, O Lord, and
glorify your name? For you alone are holy, for all
the nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous
acts have been revealed. I'm frankly a little confused
there, whether they are worshiping Yahweh or the Lamb. But it doesn't
make much difference, does it? Because they're equal inequality,
and we know that. Now, finally, two more verses
that really bring this to a conclusion. John 10, 29 to 39. Now, before we read that, let
me just set the stage and kind of wrap up what I'm trying to
say. We know in the Old Testament
that God didn't reveal his proper name until the burning bush with
Moses. The way he revealed it was in
a conversation with Moses, where he started out saying, and Moses
saying, who do I say sent me? He said, I am who I am, I will
be who I will be, however you want to translate that, using
the Hebrew verb to be, ha-ya or ha-va. Then he said again,
the second time, he said, tell him et ye, the one being or the
one forever being sent you. And then he finally said Yahweh,
Y-H-V-H, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. He gave him his name. He finally gave him his name.
And that Yahweh is very much tied to the verb to be. And it's
got to be that etymology. All right. Let's look at John 10, 29 to
39. I love this passage. Jesus had
gotten into, well, okay, let's just read.
My father who has given them to me is greater than all, and
no one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand. I and
the father are one. Okay, there's his claim to deity
right there. The Jews picked up stones again
to stone him. Why were they gonna stone him?
Because he said, that's not something you would say back then, I and
the Father are one, that's blasphemy. You're claiming to be equal with
God? Yes. The Jews picked up stones again
to stone him. Jesus answered them, I showed you many good
works from the Father. For which of them are you stoning
me? Wouldn't you have loved to hear this conversation? The Jews
answered him, for a good work we do not stone you, but for
blasphemy. And because you, being a man, make yourself out to be
God." Jesus answered them, "'Has it not been written in your law,
I said, you are gods? And if you call them gods, to
whom the word of God came and the scripture cannot be broken,
do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the
world, you are blaspheming because I said I am the Son of God? If
I do not do the works of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do
them, though you do not believe me, believe the works. so that
you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am
the Father. Therefore, they were seeking
again to seize him and he eluded their grasp. They wanted to stone
him because he claimed equality with the Father. Now, the coup
de grace, look at John 8. This is the best of all of them. Have you ever had someone try
to say to you that Jesus never claimed to be God? Well, it's
just not right. In John 8, verses 56 to 59. Here he's in another discussion
with the Pharisees. And we're not gonna read all
of it, we're gonna pick up in verse 56. He says to them, your father
Abraham rejoiced to see my day. And he saw it and was glad. So
he's claiming that Abraham saw his, Jesus' day. So the Jews
said to him, you're not yet 50 years old, and have you seen
Abraham? Jesus said to them, truly, truly,
I say to you, before Abraham, now this, my translation says
was born, strike the word born. It just says before Abraham was,
I am. There we go. There's that verb
to be. all these Jews around him and
they know all the Old Testament with Yahweh and the source of
that word and the burning bush and all of that and Jesus just
knocks them on their heels by saying before Abraham was I am
I Have been here forever Therefore guess what they did I picked
up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hit himself and went out
of the temple So that's the whole story, and that's how we come
to the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is also
the eternal being, the one being, the I Am, and he identifies with
Jehovah, God our Father.