Jehovah - The Covenant-Keeping God

JEHOVAH - THE COVENANT-KEEPING GOD
Though the name “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” is used in the early pages of the Bible, it is not until the book of Exodus that the meaning of the name is explained. It takes place in the context of God's revelation of Himself to Moses.

1 Now Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

2 And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. 3 So Moses said, “I must turn aside now, and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”

4 When the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush, and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then He said, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exodus 3:1-6). The scene is the Sinai Desert. Into this hot, arid region comes Moses. He is a fugitive from Egypt, having escaped from the consequences of a past murder. He has found refuge in the tents of a wealthy sheik named Jethro. Over the years, he has taken a wife from among the daughters of Jethro and he has settled down to become a simple shepherd. The years pass by until one day when Moses comes upon a strange sight. It is a bush burning on the slopes of a mountain. The strange thing is not the bush or the fact that it is burning, but that it continues to burn without burning up the bush. His curiosity aroused, Moses moves closer to investigate. As he does, God speaks to him from the midst of the bush.

God first instructs Moses to show proper reverence for the ground upon which he stands. He is to do this by removing his sandals. Forever afterward, the priests would enter the Temple of God barefoot in order to show the same reverence. Next the Lord identifies Himself to Moses:

He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exodus 3:6).

Moses had come out of Egypt. The land of Egypt was filled with gods. There was a god of the harvest and a god for the rain and a god for the sun and a god for the river and a god for the cattle. There was a god for everything in Egypt. But God identifies Himself as the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He is the God of Moses' ancestors.

Hundreds of years earlier, God had appeared to Abraham and had promised Him certain things. The entire history of the Israelite people had been laid out in a detailed prophecy: And God said to Abram, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. 14 But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve; and afterward they will come out with many possessions. 15 And as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age. 16 Then in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.” (Genesis 15:13-16).

Along with those promises, God had involved Himself in an elaborate covenant ritual, binding Himself to Abraham with a legal contract. This involved an ancient ceremony in which several animals were killed and their carcasses cut in two and placed in a long row. The parties involved in the covenant would then walk down the center aisle between the dead carcasses while reciting the terms of the covenant. The idea was that if either party broke the terms of the covenant, he would suffer a similar fate to those animals who had been killed and cut asunder. This is the kind of covenant into which God had bound Himself to Abraham. He had instructed Abraham to cut the animals in two and arrange them into two groups. Then the presence of the Lord moved down the row between the pieces of the animals as He recited the terms of the covenant. And it came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates: 19 the Kenite and the Kenizzite and the Kadmonite 20 and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Rephaim 21 and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Girgashite and the Jebusite.” (Genesis 15:17-21).

Now God tells Moses that He is the same God who made the covenant with Abraham. He is the same God who repeated the same promises to Isaac and to Jacob. He is the God of Israel, even though they have become enslaved in Egypt. He is known as the God who promises. He has not forgotten His promises. He is now going to bring them to fulfillment. Notice what He says to Moses. And 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. 8 So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. (Exodus 3:7-8). Do you see it? These are the same words that the Lord had spoken to Abraham. He now says that He is going to keep the promise that He had made to Abraham. The terms of that covenant will be fulfilled. What God had promised so many hundreds of years earlier would now come to pass.

God is going to deliver the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt. He is going to lead them through the wilderness. He is going to bring them to the land of promise.

Moses is called to return to Egypt with this message. Up to this point, Moses has been nodding his head and thinking to himself, “This is quite a good thing.” But now he has an objection:

Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I shall 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?” And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.'” And God, furthermore, said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘The LORD, 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.” (Exodus 3:13-15). This was a significant question. In the ancient world, the name of a person or a city or a deity was not without meaning. The name of a person would often describe an attribute of that person. Likewise, the name of a deity would usually indicate some specific attribute of that deity. For example, the name “Jesus” is a Greek rendition of the Hebrew name “Joshua” and means “Yahweh saves.” Thus, to believe in the name of Jesus is to believe in the saving work which His name implies (John 1:12; Acts 3:16). As Moses confronts God, he asks for a name. There are two answers given. hy

Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I shall say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.'” (Exodus 3:13)|
|Now they may say to me, “What is His name?”|
|What shall I say to them?|
|And God said to Moses|
|“I AM WHO I AM”|
|and He said,|
|Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel,|
|“I AM has sent me to you.”|
And God, furthermore, said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you'” (Exodus 3:15)| When you see a chiasm, you are supposed to look at the center to see if there is a pivotal statement. Everything in this paragraph is designed to focus our attention upon this central statement about God: “I am who I am.” hwhy (“THE LORD” or “YAHWEH”).

It appears that the y is preformative to the root word hwh, the older form and rare synonym of hwh (“to be”) which would make this a 3rd masculine singular Qal imperfect (“HE WILL BE”). This would be a reference to the previous phrase “I AM WHO I AM.” Only five examples of the older form of hwh are found in the Old Testament Hebrew (Genesis 27:29; Nehemiah 6:6; Ecclesiastes 2:22; Ecclesiastes 11:3; Isaiah 16:4), although hwh is regularly used in the Aramaic portions of the Bible. Dr. Barton Payne suggests that this is to be taken as a paranomasia, a play on words rather than an etymology. A problem arises in that hwhy is said to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, even though in Exodus 6:3 the Lord says that He was not known to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by the name hwhy.

God spake further to Moses, and said to him, “I am the LORD; 3 and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name, LORD, I did not make Myself known to them.” (Exodus 6:2-3). As early as Genesis 4:26 we read that “men began to call upon the name of hwhy.” There also seem to be references where the name hwhy was spoken to Abraham (Genesis 18:14; Genesis 22:14). We can surmise one of two possibilities: This statement indicates that the Patriarchs had an incomplete understanding of the name and its relation to the verb hyhy which had just recently been revealed in Exodus 3:14. The name was not emphasized in the days of the Patriarchs. In favor of this latter premise, it is noted that, although hwhy is used often in Genesis, it usually appears in the midst of a narrative rather than in a place where one of the Patriarchs is either speaking or is being addressed. On the other hand, Laban is pictured as using the term hwhy as he enters into a covenant with Jacob (Genesis 31:49). Indeed, even the mother of Moses has a name which consists of a compound with hwhy in its abbreviated form hy" (Jokhebed). The name hwhy is further described in Exodus 3:14-15 as the name of the Lord “forever” and as His “memorial name to all generations” (Exodus 3:15). The Hebrew text presents this as more of a parallel: This is My name...| And|This way I am to be remembered...|
Forever.||To generation after generation.|

More than a thousand years after Moses, a Galilean rabbi stood in the temple in Jerusalem and boldly proclaimed, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58), echoing the same evgw, eivmi of the Septuagint (the LXX reads evgw, eivmi o` w;n, adding the present participle to eivmi to say in effect, “I am the Existing One”). The use of the Greek present tense accords with the Hebrew imperfect of Exodus 3:14, both indicating a continuing state of existence.

OTHER YAHWEHIST NAMES FOR GOD
Name|Meaning|Passage|
Jehovah MeKaddesh|The Lord who sanctifies|And you shall keep My statutes and practice them; I am the LORD who sanctifies you. (Leviticus 20:8).|
Jehovah Tsidkenu|The Lord our righteousness|“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the LORD, “When I shall raise up for David a righteous Branch; And He will reign as king and act wisely And do justice and righteousness in the land. 6 In His days Judah will be saved, And Israel will dwell securely; And this is His name by which He will be called, ‘The LORD our righteousness.'” (Jeremiah 23:5-6).|
Jehovah Jireh|The Lord shall Provide|Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son. 14 And Abraham called the name of that place The LORD Will Provide, as it is said to this day, “In the mount of the LORD it will be provided.” (Genesis 22:13-14).|
Jehovah Rapha|The Lord Your Healer|Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness and found no water. 23 And when they came to Marah, they could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter; therefore it was named Marah. 24 So the people grumbled at Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?”

Then he cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a tree; and he threw it into the waters, and the waters became sweet. There He made for them a statute and regulation, and there He tested them. 26 And He said, “If you will give earnest heed to the voice of the LORD your God, and do what is right in His sight, and give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I, the LORD, am your healer.” (Exodus 15:22-26).|
Jehovah Ra'ah|The Lord is my Shepherd|The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want (Psalms 23:1).|
Jehovah Shalom|The Lord is Peace|When Gideon saw that he was the angel of the LORD, he said, “Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face.” 23 And the LORD said to him, “Peace to you, do not fear; you shall not die.”

Then Gideon built an altar there to the LORD and named it The LORD is Peace. (Judges 6:22-24 a).|
Jehovah Shammah|The Lord is There|The city shall be 18,000 cubits round about; and the name of the city from that day shall be, “The LORD is there.” (Ezekiel 48:35).|
Jehovah Nissi|The Lord is my Banner|And Moses built an altar, and named it The LORD is My Banner (Exodus 17:15).|
Jehovah Sabaoth|The Lord of Hosts|Then David said to the Philistine, "You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have taunted (1 Samuel 17:45). And David arose and went with all the people who were with him to Baale-judah, to bring up from there the ark of God which is called by the Name, the very name of the LORD of hosts who is enthroned above the cherubim (2 Samuel 6:2). Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory (Psalms 24:10).|

ELOHISTIC NAMES FOR GOD
El Elyon|God Most High|I will cry to God Most High, To God who accomplishes all things for me. (Psalms 57:2). See also Genesis 14:18-22.|
El Shaddai|God Almighty|Now when Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1).|
El Olam|Everlasting God|And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree at Beersheba, and there he called on the name of the LORD, the Everlasting God (Genesis 21:23).|