Exploring God’s Name of Yahweh
Exploring God’s Name of Yahweh.
“O the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God! What a deep wealth of wisdom and knowledge He has! How incomprehensible are His decisions, how unsearchable His judgments! How undiscoverable are His paths, how mysterious His ways, beyond finding out! Who has understood the mind of Yahweh? Who knows how the LORD thinks, or what His thoughts are? Can anyone discern the LORD’s intentions, His motivations? Who knows enough to give Him advice? Is there anyone qualified to be His counselor? Who has given Him so much that He needs to pay it back? Who could ever have a claim against Him? For everything was created by Him, everything lives through Him, and everything exists for Him; So to Him must be given the glory forever! Amen!” (Romans 11:33-36, also Isaiah 40:12-14).
WANTED: Adventurers who want to explore creation’s Final Frontier, the greatest Wonder of the World; must be extremely curious about the nature of God’s Being; motivated to know more about God than you know presently; inspired by the thrill of discovery; need to be challenged and changed in the process of exploration; have the courage to step into a safe unknown; able to invest considerable mental energy to pursue life inside God with a mustard seed of trust in Him; be comfortable with the certainty of endless exploring; have the patience to pursue the quest one step at a time for as long as it takes; must explore with the vision of C. S. Lewis in his Narnia tales, “Further Up and Further In!”
Contemporary Frontiers. What are the most compelling frontiers in our world that we could explore… Outer space with its 100 billion galaxies, each of them having 100 billion stars? Inner space where protons and electrons and all the subatomic particles seeming to be dancing in joy? The ocean floors across the earth, 80% of which are unexplored? Or perhaps land areas such as remote mountain ranges, untraveled deserts, impenetrable jungles and rainforests, the frozen tundra of the Arctic, isolated islands in the middle of nowhere, or virgin caverns and caves that are largely hidden from humanity? These are all worthy frontiers, but there is a final frontier that tops them all… God. And whatever might be discovered about the Person of God, it’s only the tip of the eternal iceberg.
Exploring God’s Name of Yahweh.
“So Moses said to God, ‘Indeed, when I go to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I tell them?’ Then God said to Moses, “I AM the Existing One.’ God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: ‘The Existing One sent me to you.’ Moreover, God said to Moses again, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: ‘The Lord God of your fathers – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob – sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and my memorial to all generations.’” (Exodus 3: 13-15, the Septuagint version).
The Personal Name of God. When God 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.
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. So now we can try to read Yahweh as, “I AM He who is,” “I AM the One who exists,” or “I AM the Existing One.” 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!
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.”
To Be. 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!”
“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).
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.
When Jesus started speaking about being “I AM,” the listeners would have understood that He is referring to divinity, to “the Great I AM.” They would have been flabbergasted to realize that by saying “I AM,” Jesus was in fact claiming to be on the same footing as the great Yahweh, the divine kin to the Great I AM.
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. As one scholar put it, “The whole content of biblical history is a commentary on the meaning of this Name.”
Sam Oladotun – You Are Yahweh (Worship Medley)
Yahweh and Jesus. Jesus is the incarnation of Yahweh. Jesus Christ the Messiah is Yahweh with flesh on. In the mystery of the Trinity, Jesus in the gospels is the same Person as the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. If we want to know the character of the mysterious Yahweh, then look at His character being fleshed out in the Jesus of the gospels. Completing the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Love that unites the Father and the Son, Yahweh and Jesus, in their eternal union. “Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being.’ (Heb. 1:1-3). Somehow, in the impenetrable mystery of the Trinity, the divine Godhead, the Three-in-One, Jesus maintained His distinctive role as the Son, as did the Father. Yet still Jesus was at one with Yahweh. Jesus was and is Yahweh. Referring to one Person means we are referring to the other. God is spirit, Jesus is flesh, and yet they are so close to each other that somehow they are inside each other as One God in the Holy Spirit, while keeping their unique identities.
The LORD! The LORD! The Great I AM revelation seems to leave a lot of blanks. I AM… what, exactly? If there was any doubt as to His character and self-description when using that Name, God certainly cleared a lot of that up in His amazing self-revelation in Exodus 34: “And Yahweh descended in a cloud, and stood with Moses and pronounced the Name Yahweh. Then Yahweh passed before Moses and called out, ‘Yahweh, Yahweh, God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful love and constancy, maintaining His mercy to thousands, forgiving fault, crime and sin…” (Exodus 34:5-7, NJB).
Filling Some of the Blanks. But what does Yahweh look like in daily, practical terms? Sure enough, here comes Jesus to the rescue, filling in some of the details. He loved to explain some of the holy Name with easily understood metaphors: I AM the Bread of Life; I AM the Good Shepherd; I AM the Light of the World; I AM the Gate for the Sheep; I AM the Resurrection and the Life; I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life; I AM the True Vine. Perhaps that is one good way to unpack something as expansive and mysterious as YHWH. Another way is to flesh it out, to fill in the blanks of Yahweh by showing us the very nature of the Great I AM in daily practice. And Jesus did just that. Now we know more of what I AM means, through the Person of Christ, who is Yahweh in the flesh.
A Prayer to YHWH (Yahweh, ya’-way):
We humbly revere you, Yahweh, LORD Eternal, the Great I AM. For, You-are-who-You-are, and You–will–be–who-You will be. You are infinitely transcendent and yet intimately personal. You are the Name above all names… Who was, Who is, and Who is to come. You are great in counsel and mighty in deed. Yet in Your power, You show steadfast love to thousands of thousands. You deeply love us with an everlasting love, for You are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness and truth. You are the LORD, You will not give Your glory to another. Nothing is too hard for You, for you remain wondrous, the same yesterday, today and forever. We thank You for Your Son Jesus, who revealed to everyone Your heart, Your essence, and Your character. We bow before You, YHWH, Yahweh, and glorify Your sacred Name. Amen! Amen!