God Has A Personal Name And It Is Yahweh

How well do you think you know God?  Do you think it is possible for anyone to know His name?  Is His name God?  It might shock you to know that according to the Scripture we can know His name, and that there is much for us to learn from this disclosure.

2 God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself known to them. 4 I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners.     Exodus 6:2–4 (ESV)

God is telling Moses that He has revealed something about Himself to Moses which He had not revealed to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. Think about that!  Would it not be incredible to know God so well that He would tell you things about Himself which He had told no one else.  We all have friends in whom we confide, but we only confide our secrets to close personal friends.

Moses was so close to God that God would tell him what he did not tell His other friends.  Abraham was His friend but God did not disclose to Abraham what He was telling Moses.

and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. James 2:23 (NASB)

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew two of the three names.  In the passage above the word translated God in Hebrew (the original O.T. language) is “Elohim.”  The word translated Almighty in Hebrew is “Adonai.”  The word translated Lord in Hebrew is “Yahweh.”  This is the personal name of God.  The word is the “to be” verb in Hebrew.  It literally means “He is.”  In other words God’s name means, I Am or I exist.  This name “Yahweh” is the name of God which the Hebrew people knew as the ineffable name of God.

They took the commandment not to take Yahweh’s name in vain so seriously that they refused to speak His name at all.  Their rationale was that if one never uttered His name then they could never take His name in vain.

You do not have to be able to read Hebrew to find God’s name in the O.T.  Look in your O.T. and find the word “Lord.”  Look closely and you will most likely discover that the word is written LORD.  When the “ord” are written in small capital letters “ORD” then the word which is being translated into English is “Yahweh” the personal name of God which the Hebrew people considered to be to sacred to speak.

Do you consider God’s name sacred?  How do you show your respect for His name?  Taking God’s name in vain can be done through our speech, but there are other ways in which His name may be taken in vain that do not involve speech.

Perhaps the greatest way we take His name in vain is when we profess to know Him but live a lifestyle which is at odds with His word and does not honor or acknowledge Him. I want to so live that I know, honor and obey!