The Gospel of Isaiah: Ch. 54:5, Seven Names for Our God

The Gospel of Isaiah: Ch. 54:5, Seven Names for Our God.

WANTED: An imaginative scribe who can write exquisite poetry. A faithful, articulate believer in Yahweh who can switch from one extreme to another at the Lord’s command… from a sublime vision of God’s glory, to a ridiculous demonstration of shameful nakedness; from confronting the people over their sinfulness, to comforting people with hopefulness; from being an outspoken messenger one minute, to a living object lesson the next; from having one foot in the immediate surroundings one minute, to one foot in the future messianic realm the next. Must be adaptable, thick-skinned, and extraordinarily brave. Person who answers, “Here I am. Send me!” will be especially considered. (from The Jerusalem Post, 740 BC).

“For your Maker is your Husband; His name is LORD-of-the-Angel-Armies. Your Kinsman-Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. He has the title Mighty-God-of-all-the-Earth!” (54:5).

Another way to say this is… “The One marrying you is the One who created you. The Great I AM who is Commander of the Heavenly Forces is His name. The One redeeming you is the Holy One of Israel, the One who is called the Super-God of all the Earth!” 

The Holy Name. In Scripture, names are significant. Names contain the personal characteristics of that person. They signify the important aspects of that person, the personality, the abilities.  “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your Name…” (Matt. 6:9). Jesus is praying here that the magnificent Name of God be kept holy in the minds of the people. May His Name be honored and sanctified, for in honoring His Name, we are honoring who He is. May the Name of the Lord be set apart into a whole different category from other names. May His Name be sacred and hallowed and kept worthy of one-of-a-kind respect and adoration. May His Name be lifted up and held high above all the rest. God’s Name is the accumulation of His greatness, His attributes, His character. Jesus is yearning in His prayer that God’s Name be adored and revered in the holiness that God deserves. God’s Name is the key to this glorification. God’s Name opens the door to His Personhood and to His divine nature. That is why it so helpful to learn the biblical Names of God. We grow in our understanding of God if we study all these somewhat obscure Hebrew words for God. The truth is that every Name of God highlights an aspect of God’s character and personality. Every Name is an attribute of the God we worship. When we get to know God’s Name, we are getting to know God on a more personal level.

(1.) Maker: Hebrew, “osayik” = the only time in the Hebrew Bible this term is used, and means the great Creator, the ultimate Doer, the mighty Accomplisher, the One who forms and fashions all things in the universe.

(2.) Husband: Hebrew, “boalayik” = the only time in the Hebrew Bible this term is used, and whose root word is a combination of marital union and covenant lordship; a relationship of faithful loyalty, love, and God’s rightful authority; this term implies a covenant promise of restoration and reunion.

Prophets in the Jewish Scriptures loved to refer to God as a husband or a bridegroom to the chosen people. They loved to speak the truth that He considered Himself married to His people. God used the metaphor of marriage, evidently, because that is the closest earthly union, the most intimate and meaningful, that provides a way of communicating the love God has for His followers.

1. “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:5);
2. “Thus says the Lord: ‘I remember you, the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved Me and followed Me through the wilderness.” (Jeremiah 2:2);
3. “Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband.” (Jeremiah 3:14);
4. “It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them.” (Jeremiah 31:32);
5. “In that day,’ declares the Lord, ‘you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master’; I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion; I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.” (Hosea 2:16, 20).

The earliest Christians also loved to think about Jesus as the Bridegroom, the fulfillment of all the Jewish Scriptures about God being the husband. They thought of the Church as His bride, and they considered the relationship between Christ and His followers to be a spousal relationship in a spiritual sense.

1. John the Baptist: “You heard me tell you before that I am not the Messiah, but certainly I am the messenger sent ahead of Him. He is the Bridegroom, and the bride belongs to Him. I am the friend of the Bridegroom who stands nearby and listens with great joy to the Bridegroom’s voice. And because of His words my joy is complete and overflows!” (John the Baptist, in John 3:29, TPT).
2. Paul: “I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to Him.” (2 Corinthains 11:2);
3. Paul: “For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up His life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to Himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault… No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. And we are members of His body…. As the Scriptures say, ‘A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife as the two are united into one.’ This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one.” (Ephesians 5:25-27, 29-32);
4. John: “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give Him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready… Then the angel said to me, ‘Write: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’ And he added, “These are the true words of God.’” (Revelation 19:7, 9);
5. John: “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, ‘Look, God’s home is now among the people! He will live with them, and they will be His people. God Himself will be with them.” (Revelation 21:2-3).

(3.) LORD: Hebrew, “Yahweh” = the most personal name of the eternal God, even though it’s not technically a word. It could mean, I AM What I AM; I will Be what I will Be; I AM the Existing One; I AM Being Itself; I AM Life; I will Be There as I will be There. As one Bible Scholar put it, “The whole content of biblical history is a commentary on the meaning of this Name.

1. Backstory. When Go created that sacred space on Mt. Horeb and presented Himself to Moses at the burning bush, Moses didn’t exactly know how to respond. Moses wanted to know God’s name for one thing, so that he would know how to properly address Him, and call out to Him, and refer to Him. God seemed reluctant to share His most personal eternal Name, so He gave Moses a name that wasn’t even a word. Was this purposely mysterious, or even evasive? Perhaps God’s Name was too “wonderful” to even understand or take in at the human level (Judges 13:18). Or, maybe God’s name here was deliberately unclear because, similar to God’s face that couldn’t be seen, His Name could not be heard by mere mortals? Who’s to say? It’s clear that the precise pronunciation and spelling have been lost through time.
2. Yahweh is the Truth. God gave to Moses His name of Yahweh, which is about as close to a personal name of God as we’re going to get. Scholars have been lining up to solve this puzzle of a name for centuries, and have been unsuccessful. It is obviously an archaic use of letters, because Yahweh is the “to be” verb in the future tense. There is no “am” in the Hebrew language, which leads many to claim that Yahweh means, “I will be what I will be.” But many others say that God was using that non-word in the poetic sense with “I AM,” because He is trying to communicate that He is outside of time, so must always speak int the present tense. In other words, God declares the bedrock truth that upholds the universe… He exists! And this is the truth that Jesus bore witness to in his incarnation. Jesus basically said to the world, I am here to tell the one indisputable fact of the universe… that God exists in the world!
3. LORD. In Scripture, every time the reader sees LORD in all caps, that signifies Yahweh. This Name is used about 6,800 times in the Hebrew Bible, and 700 times in Psalms alone. The first time we seen Yahweh in the Bible is in Genesis 2:4 = “In the day that Yahweh-Elohim made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up – for Yahweh-Elohim had not caused it to rain upon the earth…”  The shortened form of Yahweh is Yah, or Jah, which is found over 40 times in the Psalms, including “Hallelujah,” which literally means “Praise Yah.”
4. I AM Present. The non-word Yahweh is connected with the Hebrew verb “hayah,” to be, to become, to happen. Martin Buber thinks the verb could also partly mean “to be actively present.” So Buber, and many other Jewish scholars, think the Name could mean something like, “I will be there as I will be there,” or “I will be what I will be.” In other words, “I live an uncreated existence, and yet I will be ready, willing, able to be present in whatever situation you are in.” Rabbi Jonathon Sacks believes that early Christian translations omitted that future tense altogether. He says that in this Name, the LORD claims to be “the God of the future tense.” In this important future tense, Sacks believes that He is a God of surprises, that we will have to learn to trust Him, and that we will only know Him through His moral commitments and His acts, not just His abstract essence. Dr. David Stern states his view that the root idea of Yahweh is “to breathe,” in other words, “I live!”
5. “What is the Name’s mystery? First, it has no vowels. Without vowels it is impossible to pronounce a word. But YHWH also has no real consonants! Y, H and W really are blowing sounds, rushings of air through the mouth. The point is one of elusiveness or abstraction. The Name of God is so subtle it could slip away from you. YHWH is not a God you can grab hold of and be sure you’ve got it in your mental grasp.” (Rabbi Arthur Green, These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life).
6. I Exist! The seventy Greek-speaking Jewish scholars who translated the original Hebrew into Greek around 150 BC, produced an authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint. This Greek version of Scripture was determined to be divinely inspired long before Jesus, and copies were spread around the Greek-speaking world. This version of the Scripture then, was the Bible that was used during the 1st Century, and thus by Jesus and His early followers. Whenever Jesus quoted His Jewish Bible (the Old Testament) in the Gospels, He is quoting directly from the Septuagint. That was the commonly used Bible during Christ’s time, in Jewish life and worship and study. The Septuagint translated Yahweh as “I AM the Existing One,” so that would be the most familiar way of referring to Yahweh. All Bible-reading Jews would have thought of Yahweh when hearing the phrase “I AM.” In the minds of the Jews, I AM would have been completed with “the Existing One” since that was what they were most familiar with. So Jews would have been thinking of their God as the Existent One, the only Being who is self-existent and truly independent. Only Yahweh God is the Essence of Being, the Ground of Being. Put another way, they would have thought of Yahweh as, “I AM Being.” One of God’s titles that has lasted through the centuries, “the Existing One,” is drawn directly from the Greek Bible’s version of Yahweh, the sacred Name that cannot be uttered. In the Orthodox Church, “the Existing One” is addressed every day in prayers and worship.
7. YHWH, or Yahweh, so basic, so mysterious, so elusive. A personal Name, yet somehow impersonal. It is God’s self-revealed Name, alluding to His uncreated existence, His eternal Personhood, His quality of Being, His basic self-sufficiency and self-existence. It is perhaps somehow a spiritual version of an “act of being” verb. Yahweh, intimately relational, a keeper of covenants, unchangeably complete, infinite and everlasting. God is the LORD, He will not give His glory to another. Yahweh, set apart from everything else in His holiness.

(4.) LORD of Hosts. Hebrew, “Yahweh-sabaoth” = LORD of Hosts; LORD of the Angel Armies; Commander of Heaven’s Armies; Leader of Angelic Warriors; the Captain of the host of angelic forces massing together for battle at the command of the LORD. Yahweh Himself called His angelic force “sacred warriors” and “proud champions.” This name of God is the most frequently used compound name for God in the Hebrew Bible. It is used over 280 times, most of them found in the biblical Prophets, especially Jeremiah, Isaiah, and in many of the Psalms and Minor Prophets. “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh-sabaoth. His glory fills the whole earth.” (Is. 6:1). 

A Prayer for Yahweh-sabaoth (ya’-way sab-ah-owth’): We honor and salute you, Yahweh-sabaoth, LORD of Hosts. For you go forth like a great warrior, and your voice rings out at the head of your troops. Your angels of protection encamp around those who fear you, Lord, and as the mountains surround Jerusalem, so you surround your people both now and forever. You are at our side like a mighty hero, and our opponents will stumble and be vanquished. For our struggles are not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. No weapon forged against you will succeed, for you do not give victory by means of sword and spear, O LORD of the Angel Armies. You are the righteous King leading your heavenly warriors, O God of renown, and your deliverance will be forever, your salvation to all generations. We kneel before you, Yahweh-sabaoth, and gather together around your holy Name. Amen. 

(5.) Kinsman-Redeemer. Hebrew, Go’el = To buy back; to restore; to recover by purchase; to perform the obligation of the next of kin; to put something back into its original condition; to repay a debt; to advocate for a relative if wrongly accused; the blood relative who will do what is needed for the kin if that person is unable to do it for himself; the first kinsman obligated to help a relative is the brother. The term Go’el was used more generally to mean to rescue from captivity, to deliver from some type of confinement; to ransom from slavery; to bring justice to a loved one’s unjust situation. The most extensive use of Go’el in the Hebrew Bible is in Isaiah, where the divine Redeemer is highlighted at least thirteen times: The Redeemer will rescue the helpless (41:14); wreak vengeance on Babylon (43:14); remain as King of Israel (47:4); direct and teach the way to go (48:17); be their Savior (49:26 and 60:16); be their husband (54:5); show compassion (54:8); be their Father forever (63:16). Isaiah had an expansive view of how God was a Redeemer, and his heightened vision of the Lord as Israel’s Redeemer is unequaled. How did the Kinsman-Redeemer become such an important title for the Lord God?

1. Father God redeemed His children the Israelites from oppression in Egypt. As their Father, God was the closest relative to His Chosen People, He was united with them by a blood covenant, and therefore was the first in line to redeem His children, rescuing them from tyranny and slavery. “This is what Yahweh says: Israel is my firstborn son, and I told you, ‘Let my son go, so he may worship me.” (Ex. 4:22). And then the Lord followed that up with, “I am the Lord Yahweh and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them and will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.” (Ex. 6:6-7).
2. Jewish believers developed the meaning of redeemer to include Yahweh as they understood the parallels between deliverance from Egypt and God’s continual rescue mission of each of them from evil and destruction. What was once a kinsman redeemer evolved into a God-Redeemer.
3. The Father sent the Son to forgive our indebtedness to God because of our sin; to redeem mankind: to deliver us from evil; to rescue us from our captivity to our fallen nature; to remove the penalties of sin in our lives; to save us from our slavery to sin; to regain mankind’s innocence; to avenge the evil done to mankind through judgment of Satan and his demons; to wipe the slate clean and offer eternal life in God’s presence.
4. To redeem mankind, God the Son was required to be a divine Go’el and buy back the human race from sin and sin’s master. In order for this redemption to occur, Jesus purchased our spiritual freedom by offering His own blood as a worthy sacrifice. Jesus saw we were on the slave block, and He ransomed us, giving up His life in the process. We were not able to regain our own salvation from the guilt of sin, we were not able to restore our own innocence by our own efforts, so in the role of kinsman redeemer, Jesus rescued us because of His unfathomable love for us.
5. Among Jesus’ parting words before His Ascension, He declared that His God was our God, and His Father was our Father. So we have the same Father as Jesus, which makes us brothers and sisters with Him. Who was the first relative obligated to redeem a blood relative? The brother. Jesus was our Go’el, our kinsman redeemer, the brother coming to the rescue. In every way possible, Jesus Christ is the biblical fulfillment of the kinsman redeemer. Jesus is the Go’el of the world.

(6.) The Holy One. Hebrew, “Kadosh” = To be set apart; to be separated from the profane; to be distinctive in life purpose from the ordinary; to be sacred and dedicated for a special purpose; to be different in purity and character from the common. When we read “the Holy One” in Isaiah, the literal translation is “The Holy,” and the “One” is assumed. Yahweh God, the Lord of the universe, is The Holy. It’s not that God is merely in another category by Himself, it’s that God can’t be categorized. There is no comparison to God in this world, there are no parallels. The Lord is utterly distinctive, set apart in every imaginable way, and then some. Because God is Wholly Other, He is worthy to receive one-of-a-kind honor, respect, reverence, and adoration. He is completely separate from any taint of sin, any meager hint of evil, and He has perfect freedom from anything that would compromise His character. God is Truth dwelling in his sacred Spirit. He is comprised of uncreated light. God is high and lifted up, above and beyond comprehension and imagination. Yahweh God has no personal shape or form, and yet remains a Person, Someone in whose image we are all made. God is the source of whatever holiness exists in the world, so God is the only Being for whom the word holy truly applies. When Isaiah 6:3 is recited in the Jewish daily liturgy, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of power and might! Heaven and earth are full of your glory!“, it is customary for the worshippers to stand on their tiptoes and stretch upwards three times. This is a wonderful picture of our rising up to grasp at the unreachable holiness of God. (Arthur Green). In the universe, on the one hand there is The Holy, and then on the other hand there is everything else. To describe the indescribable Holy One is like a slug attempting to explain how a human brain functions.

(7.) Mighty God of the Whole World. Hebrew, “Elohim” = In the creation story of Genesis 1-2, the Creator was referred to as Elohim in Genesis 1, and as Yahweh-Elohim in chapter 2. Elohim was the generic Hebrew word for God or gods or great persons. It is used for the God of Israel throughout Scripture, but is also used for the gods of the secular culture surrounding the Hebrews. So when we read Yahweh-Elohim, it is read as LORD God. Yahweh is God’s personal name, His redemptive name, His name that implies relationship and covenant. Elohim is God’s transcendent name, God as universal God. So the two names together pack the powerful meaning of God as personal and relational, as well as universal and transcendent.

1. Elohim is often shortened to “El,’ which implies a singular God of mighty power and tremendous strength. When referring to the God of Israel, it is pointing to a universal Ruler with unsurpassed majesty. Elohim is used extensively in the Hebrew Bible, over 2,500 times. It is first used in the story of creation in Genesis, and is used 32 times in Genesis alone. A shortened form of Elohim was even groaned by Jesus on the Cross, “Eloi, Eloi, My God, my God…” (Matthew 27:46).
2. The One and Only. Elohim was often used in the context of God’s creative power in nature. Only Elohim was mighty enough to create something out of nothing. Only Elohim contains the super-abundant strength to become the Creator of the world, the majestic Sovereign of the universe. Only the one and only Elohim has the raw, unlimited energy to be the Original Initiator, the First Mover.
3. As Rabbi Green says, “Elohim is used as a collective Name. All the powers that once belonged to all the deities of the pantheon – such as love, power, wisdom, fruitfulness – now are concentrated in this single Supreme Being who contains them all.” In Elohim, all the attributes of set-apart holiness are wrapped up in the single Source of Life… Elohim. Elohim is a collective word referring to all these divine characteristics of spiritual and material reality. In our current vocabulary, the plural nature of the singular name of Elohim is a way to emphasize superior greatness and unsurpassed fullness. It would be like saying “SuperGod.” He is the Elohim above all other elohim. The God of gods. The more than super-powerful God of Israel. The Super-Existent One. The One whose fullness overflows eternally. God in the singular would not do.