The title of the message this
morning is The Lord God Jehovah. And we're gonna be looking at
Exodus chapter six. And let's read the first three
verses of this chapter. It says, then the Lord said unto
Moses, now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh. For with
a strong hand shall he let them go, let the people of Israel
go, the Hebrew children. And with a strong hand shall
he drive them out of his land. And God spake unto Moses and
said unto him, I am the Lord. Now you'll notice the word Lord,
the title Lord there is in capital letters. And in our English Bible,
whenever you see that Lord in caps, that's what we have come
to pronounce in our English language, the name Jehovah. And that's
a, A rough transliteration of the Yahweh in the scripture without
the vowel points or what some pronounce Yehovah or Yehovah. But that's the name we've come
to pronounce that way. And then verse three says, and
God says, I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by
the name of God. Now that's the name of God. You
know, God has many names now, because one name cannot describe
the vastness and the immenseness of God. And this is the name
El Shaddai, God Almighty, God the all-powerful. And he says,
I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the
name of God Almighty. But by my name Jehovah was I
not known to them. Now think about that. Now God
had revealed himself to Moses as the great I am, back in chapter
three. And we know that's really, when
you see the word, the words translated I am, or I am that I am, you
don't think of that as a name, but you have to understand that
a name in the Bible is not just a label. It's not like just calling
somebody Steve or Bill or Debbie or whatever, just a label. It's
an expression and a description of the character, the nature
of God, and I am that I am, the self-existent, immutable, eternal,
infinite God. That's what, no beginning, no
end. And of course, that bolsters
the fact that he always keeps his promises. I am the Lord God,
I cannot, I do not change, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed.
That's what we're talking about. And so he revealed himself as
the great Amen. Then he also revealed himself
to Moses in chapter three as the God of the covenant. And
that's where we come to the name of Jehovah. And I won't go through
all the grammar and language of all that. That's just where
we've come to in our Bible, and that's okay. You know, somebody
said one time, nobody really knows how to pronounce God's
name, and that's okay. But we know the God of the Bible
because he reveals himself to us through Christ. That's how
we know him. This is life eternal, that they
might know thee, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom thou
hast sent. That's how we know God. He said,
my people shall know me from the least of them to the greatest
of them. They shall all know me. And that
was the problem with Israel during their time under the old covenant.
They forgot. Many times they forgot who God
was. And the prophets, I would say,
the people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. But under the new covenant, by
the power of the Spirit through Christ, we all know him from
the least to the greatest. Whosoever shall call upon the
name of the Lord shall be saved. We know his name, he reveals
himself to us. And so God had revealed himself
as the great I Am and as the God of the covenant who made
promises to Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob. And those promises,
you remember, that began with Abraham, the Abrahamic covenant.
It contained promises that applied to Abraham's physical seed, the
physical nation of Israel. the descendants that came from
Abraham through Isaac and Jacob, the national Israelites, who
at this time were in bondage in Egypt. And even that was prophesied
in Genesis. They were in bondage in Egypt
under a wicked tyrant called Pharaoh. That was the king of
Egypt. Probably the most powerful kingdom
in the world at that time. But God's going, he said, he's
going to defeat Pharaoh. And he's going to free his people
from this bondage. And that was a promise that God
had made. The great I Am, the God of the
covenant, Jehovah, had made that promise and he was going to keep
it. And he was going to gather this nation together out of Egypt,
this redemption by power. As he brought them out of Egypt,
remember, crossed the Red Sea, he's going to gather them as
a nation, make a covenant with them through Moses, and he's
going to give them a land and bring them to that land, a land
flowing with milk and honey. And that was the physical promises
that God made to Abraham. And another physical promise
is that God promised to keep them together as a nation, really
through Jacob's son, Judah. Remember he said the scepter
will not depart from Judah until Shiloh come. So that's really
how he was gonna keep them together. You remember later on, 10 of
the tribes were obliterated by the Assyrian Empire and scattered.
And so you had Judah and Benjamin, but God still kept them together
through Judah because that was the tribe through whom Christ
would come. The Lord our righteousness, the Lord of salvation. He was
gonna gather them together. He was gonna keep them together
through Judah until the time that the Messiah will come and
perform his great work of redemption on the cross. But now God's covenant
with Abraham also contains spiritual promises that pertain only to
God's elect, chosen in Christ before the foundation of the
world, both Jew and Gentile. the remnant according to the
election of grace. And God chose his people, gave
them to Christ, and promised to save them eternally, spiritually,
and these are sinners saved by grace. If you're a sinner saved
by grace, based on the righteousness of Christ imputed and received
by God-given faith, you're a citizen of a spiritual nation. And there's
many names for that spiritual name. There's the church, there's
the redeemed, there's Zion. Zion is another name for that.
That's what we are, we're Zion. Hebrews 12. And so we're spiritual
Israel, we're the spiritual seed of Abraham, we're sinners saved
by grace, and we're justified before God. Our sins are forgiven. We stand before God righteous
in Christ and cannot be condemned. No one can lay sin to our charge
before God so as to condemn us. There's no condemnation in Christ.
So we're redeemed by the Lord and we're known by our new birth,
which results in faith in Christ, repentance of dead works, and
perseverance in the faith by the grace of God. That's who
the elect are, all by the grace of God. That's spiritual Israel.
And so that's what, when we see that, the promises, we got to
connect that. Well, in verse three, there's a strange statement
made though. He said, I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and
unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah
was I not known to them. Now, what does that mean? Well,
first of all, and obviously God tells Moses that he appeared
as El Shaddai, God Almighty, and he did, which means God all-powerful. But then he says he had not appeared
to them as Jehovah, which is God's covenant name and identifies
him as the God who saves sinners by grace, based on the righteousness
of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's really what the crux
of that name is. Now in our King James Version,
this name is indicated, as I said, by the capitals, L-O-R-D. And
the statement that God has not appeared to the fathers, to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, by that name may seem strange, because if
you go back to Genesis now, and you read several passages in
Genesis, and I didn't mark a lot of them here, because there's
so many, that God did make himself known to Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob as the Lord God Jehovah. In fact, you remember, for example,
when Abraham took Isaac up on the mount, to sacrifice him,
and God stopped him and brought him down, and Abraham called
the name of that place Jehovah-Jireh. That's Genesis 22, 14. Now, how
did Abraham know that name to call it that if God had not revealed
himself as Jehovah? Jehovah-Jireh, which means that
God is present, or God provides, rather. And the idea behind this
statement in verse three is a comparative of how God revealed himself to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as compared to how he's revealing
himself to Moses and the children of Israel here, his name in the
promises that he made, how he does it, but God revealed his
name to Abraham, but only in the promises of something to
come, but not in the actual fulfillment of that promise as he does here
to Moses. And that's what he's saying here.
This is how God reveals himself. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,
they knew the name, but they knew the name only in promise,
not in fulfillment. Moses is going to know this name
in fulfillment, because he's going to see it happen. And so
there's a difference between promise and fulfillment in the
way that revelation is understood. That's what it's saying. The
patriarchs were individuals who received the promises, but without
the fulfillment. and the fulfillment could only
come after the Israelites became a nation. that were brought out
of Egypt. So now in Egypt, they were ready
to become the promised nation. So it's a matter of how God reveals
himself in Providence. They knew the name by promise,
but they hadn't seen the fulfillment. It's kind of like what in the
book of Hebrews chapter 11, where it talks about how the prophets
desired to see the day, they had the promise of Christ coming,
but we have the actual fulfillment. But they knew Christ. You know,
Christ himself said, Abraham saw my day and rejoiced, but
now Abraham didn't actually see him come in time while Abraham
was here on earth. So I hope that makes sense to
you. But that's what I believe he's talking about there. Well,
this name was spoken by Jacob on his deathbed, connected with
another word, which is translated in the Bible as salvation. And
that word salvation in the old language is Yeshua. Yeshua. Jacob said this in Genesis 49,
18. He says, I have waited for thy salvation, Yeshua, O Lord,
Jehovah. So we see the name Yeshua. connected
with Jehovah, and this connection was made by Moses later on in
Exodus 14, 13. This is where they were standing
on the shore of the Red Sea, and Pharaoh was coming to get
them, and the people began to complain, and Moses said in verse
13, stand still and see the salvation, Yeshua, of the Lord, Jehovah. So we see the connection here
between Yeshua And then later on, there's another derivative
of Yeshua, which is translated Joshua. And the name Joshua,
which means the same as Yeshua, Jehovah saves, Jehovah is salvation. And in the English language,
we translate Yeshua as Joshua. But when translated in the New
Testament, the New Testament Greek, it became translated into
our English name, Jesus. Matthew 121, his name shall be
called Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins. And
what does the name Jesus mean? It means Jehovah is salvation. Jehovah saves. And so what we
see is all this is connected to the Lord Jesus Christ. And
we can be assured that God will perform what he's promised because
it's all conditioned on Christ. All the promises of God in him,
our yea, in him, amen, 2 Corinthians 1 20. Jesus Christ, the Lord
Jesus Christ is the surety of God's covenant. And so all things
are sure and certain because of him who would come in the
Old Testament as they look forward to, who would come in time and
do his great work. And therefore, In these verses,
God having reminded Moses of his great and glorious name,
Jehovah, the Almighty God, he assures Moses that everything
he'd promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob would be fulfilled,
and be fulfilled in spite of the unbelief and disobedience
of the Hebrew children. Now with that in mind, read the
rest of these verses in the lesson. In verse four, he says, and I
have also established my covenant with them, now that was the covenant
through Abraham, to give them the land of Canaan, the land
of their pilgrimage wherein they were strangers. You understand
the giving of the land was not part of the covenant on Sinai. That was the fulfillment of it.
It was established 400 years before in Abraham. And God promised
that to Abraham. And so it wasn't conditioned
on the Hebrews. It wasn't conditioned on the
people. There were conditions, conditional, temporal, physical
blessings. put upon the Hebrew nation, and
it mainly had to do with their prosperity and their continuing
in that land. And of course they failed, but
God, according to his promise with Abraham, they kept that
land until the Messiah come in some form or another. But he
said, my covenant, Verse five, he says, and I have also heard
the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians
keep in bondage, and I've remembered my covenant. I always, when I
read passages like that, I think of us and our sins and then our
depravity. And God has promised to save
all of his children, but that was before the foundation of
the world. And it wasn't conditioned on us. But God has heard our
groanings, our longings, which he's given us by the Spirit to
reach out, to seek him, the Lord. And it's all of grace, it's all
his covenant of grace. Verse six, he says, wherefore
say unto the children of Israel, I am the Lord, that's Jehovah,
I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egyptians. He
didn't say I'm gonna help you to bring yourselves out. He said,
I'm gonna bring you out. That's the way God saves sinners,
isn't it? He lifts the beggar off the dung heap. He didn't
say beggar, jump 10 feet high or five feet high and I'll come
down and get the rest. No, that's not the way God saves
us. It's totally by grace. He said,
and I will rid you out of their bondage and I will redeem you. Now this was a redemption by
power. I will redeem you with a stretched
out arm. That's the power of God, see?
A stretched out arm. In other words, however far it
takes God to reach down to get his people, that's how far he's
coming. You see, and there's no sinner whom God promised to
save spiritually and eternally in Christ who's beyond his reach. I'll stretch my arm out. And
with great judgments. It's not gonna be an easy thing.
There are judgments to be given. Of course, you know about the
10 plagues of Egypt, leading up to the final plague, which
was the death of the firstborn without the blood. And we're
gonna be talking about that in the Passover. When I see the
blood, I'll pass over you. Verse seven, and I will take
you to me for a people. He's not asking you to receive
him as your personal savior. Is he? No, I'm going to take
you. And somebody said, well, what
if we don't want to come? Well, we're talking about God
who gives us the desire to come to him. That's part of the covenant
of grace. Did you know that? We'll see
that in some of the passages I'm going to preach on today.
I'm going to give you a new heart, he said. And he made the Hebrew
children willing to come for a while, but it didn't last very
long, did it? But spiritually speaking, to
his spiritual nation, he gives us a new heart. And he makes
us willing in the day of this power to come to him. He said,
I will be to you a God, and you shall know that I am the Lord
your God, Jehovah who saves, which bringeth you out from under
the burdens of the Egyptians, He said, I will bring you into
the land concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham,
to Isaac, and to Jacob. So he's reaching back to that
covenant that was made with Abraham before these folks were ever
born. I will give it to you for inheritance. You're not gonna
have to earn it. I can't remember which prophet
said this. I think it might've been Isaiah,
maybe Jeremiah, I can't remember. But you know, he reminds them
that when God brought them into the land, that He gave them lands
that they didn't cultivate. He gave them houses they didn't
build. I mean, it was all a gift. And that's the way it is with
our salvation. All the blessings and all the
benefits of salvation, they're based upon God's promise through
the merits of Christ, His blood and His righteousness. It's not
things that we build and earn and deserve and work for. It's
a total gift of God. And he says, I am the Lord. That's salvation by grace. Verse
nine, it says, now all this is in spite of the rebellion and
the unbelief of the Hebrew children. He says, and Moses spake so unto
the children of Israel. Moses went down there and told
them all this, but they hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of
spirit and for cruel bondage. They just didn't believe it.
Well, that's just like us in our nature, isn't it? Our natural
state. Years before, I came to a knowledge, God revealed himself
to me that I just wouldn't hearken, wouldn't listen. Most of that
time, what I was hearkening to and listening to was a false
gospel. But when I began to hear the true gospel, I didn't hearken
and listen until God gave me ears to hear. and eyes to see. So you see that? Now that's the
situation. Well, as I said, this whole thing
is connected spiritually and eternally with our complete eternal
spiritual salvation by the Lord Jesus Christ. And so I put a
list here in the back of your lesson here. Consider some of
the compound names with Jehovah that can only be applied to the
Lord Jesus Christ. Look at these names, now there's
more than this. But I just gave you like a short list of those
names. Jehovah-Jireh, that's what Abraham
called the name of the place where he built an altar after
God spared Isaac and brought a lamb, a ram, to be slain. And it means the Lord will provide.
You remember he said the Lord will provide himself a lamb?
That's Christ, that's a picture of Christ. All that God requires,
now think about this. All that God requires for my
salvation and all that I need for my salvation, God freely
and fully provides for me in the person and work of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Because in him dwelleth all the
fullness of the Godhead body. and I'm completing Him. He's
my wisdom, He's my righteousness, He's my sanctification, He's
my redemption. All of it. He that spared not
His own Son, how shall He not with Him freely give us all things? Everything we need. What do we
need? I need forgiveness of my sins.
Not just part of my sins, all of my sins. God freely gives
it through the blood of Christ. I need a righteousness that I
cannot produce or contribute to. God freely gives it in the
person of Christ. It's his righteousness imputed
to me. That's Jehovah Jireh. And then the next one, Jehovah
Nisi, the Lord our banner in Exodus 17. All true believers
live and walk under the banner of Christ. Why are we here together
and not scattered out among false religions? Because our banner
is Christ. We want to be where Christ is
exalted. We want to be where the gospel
is preached. Because he's our banner. And
the banner of Christ who identifies and unifies us in him by his
spirit and his truth. That's what keeps us together.
That's what holds us together. We may have a lot of differences.
We may have a lot of likes and dislikes that don't jive. We
may not even like each other in a lot of ways. But that doesn't
matter because our banner is Christ. Our banner is not ourselves
or our preferences. It's not our race, our social
likes and dislikes. It's not even that the fact,
well, it is. Here's what it is. We are all
sinners saved by grace. We can't look at one person and
say, well, now, because you're a great sinner, you don't have
any right to be here. No, you have every right to be
here. This is a hospital for sinners
who are seeking salvation by grace through the blood and the
righteousness of Christ. That's what holds us together.
He's our banner. Then let's look at the next one,
Jehovah Rapha, the Lord our healer. He saves us, he heals us, he's
the great physician. He heals us from all sin and
death by his death as our surety, substitute and redeemer. He gives
us life and health spiritually and preserves us under glory.
The whole need not a physician. The sick need a physician. And
that's what we are, we're the sin sick. Sick unto death until
the great physician steps in and heals us. Next is Jehovah
Shalom, the Lord our peace. Christ is the prince of peace
who made peace between God and sinners by the blood of his cross.
That's reconciliation. God has been reconciled to his
people through the blood of Christ. And then at some point in time,
he brings them under the preaching of the gospel and brings them
to be reconciled to him. Because by nature, we're enemies
in our minds by wicked works. So what does he do? By his spirit,
he gives us life and brings us to be reconciled to him. And
then the next one is Jehovah Sidkanu. Now you may have seen
that spelled differently, if you want to transliterate it,
but that's what it is. Jehovah Sidkanu, the Lord, our
righteousness. Jeremiah spoke of that two times,
talking about the name of the Lord. His name, he shall be called
by his name, the Lord our righteousness. And then in Jeremiah 33, the
church be called by that name because the church is his bride
married to him. And of course, Romans 1, 16 and
17, the gospel is the revelation of the righteousness of God.
Christ crucified, risen from the dead, is the righteousness
of his people. It's the merit of his obedience
unto death that God has imputed to us and which we in time receive
by God-given faith. It's the ground of our salvation,
right? It's the source of our spiritual
life. And then the next one, Jehovah
Sabaoth, that means the Lord of hosts. One old writer said
it means the Lord of an invincible army that cannot be defeated. His will cannot go unfulfilled. If God, listen, if God is not
willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,
you can bet, well, you don't need to bet, you can believe
this, that all, whoever that's talking about in 2 Peter 3 and
9, they're going to be brought to repentance and they will not
perish. And who's he talking about there?
He's talking about his elect, his sheep. You see, that's the
God of salvation. He said, I will do all my pleasure. I'll bring it to pass. And none
can stay his hand or say unto him, what doest thou? He cannot
be defeated. No weapon formed against you,
he said in Isaiah, can defeat you. Because as Christ told his
disciples, I've overcome the world. He's overcome the world,
the flesh, and the devil. He's our victory. And then next,
Jehovah Shammah, the Lord is present. Christ himself is the
dwelling place of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The Word
was made flesh and tabernacled among us. What's the tabernacle? God said, that's where I will
meet with you, in Christ. Sinners draw nigh to God and
are accepted with God only in Christ. You wanna see God? You wanna commune with God? You
want to be accepted with God? Look to Christ. Is that right? His glorious person, His finished
work. And then lastly, Jehovah-Rohi
or Ro-hi, however you choose to pronounce it, the Lord is
my shepherd. I shall not want. Maketh me to
lie down in green pastures, restoreth my soul. Christ is the good shepherd. What did the good shepherd do?
He gave his life for the sheep. He had to, our sins were imputed
to him, and he had to die. Christ is the great shepherd.
What does the great shepherd do? He gathers his sheep, he
guards his sheep, protects them, and he leads his sheep. That's
what he does. And Christ is the chief shepherd. What does the chief shepherd
do? He keeps and brings his sheep to their final destination, which
is glory in heaven. That's Jehovah. Jehovah Jesus. Jehovah salvation. Okay.