God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

Tozer went on to write, “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God . . . Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘What comes to mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.”3

The ISIS terrorist beheading the infidel, the prosperity gospel celebrity preacher getting out of his Hummer after late-night drinks with Kanye West, the Westborough Baptist picketer outside a military funeral screaming “God hates f—s!”, the Hindu sacrificing a goat to Shiva, the African witch doctor sacrificing a little boy, the U.S. Army sniper praying to God before he takes the shot, the peace activist risking her neck to stop another war because she believes in Jesus’ teachings on enemy love, the gay singer who stands up at the Grammys and says thank you to God for his song about a one-night stand, the Catholic nun giving up a “normal life” to live in poverty and work for social change—all of these men and women do what they do because of what they believe about God.

Here’s the problem: we usually end up with a God who looks an awful lot like us.

As the saying goes, “God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”

Here’s how you know if you’ve created God in your own image: he agrees with you on everything. He hates all the people you hate. He voted for the person you voted for. If you’re a Republican, so is he. If you’re a Democrat, she is too. If you’re passionate about ____, then God is passionate about ____. If you’re open and elastic about sexuality, so is he. And above all, he’s tame. You never get mad at him or blown away by him or scared of him. Because he’s controllable.

Maybe the truth is that we want a God who is controllable because we want to be God. We want to be the authority on who God is or isn’t and what’s right or wrong, but we want the mask of religion or spirituality to cover up the I-wanna-be-God reality.

“In the world of the Hebrew Scriptures a personal name was often thought to indicate something essential about the bearer’s identity, origin, birth circumstances, or the divine purpose that the bearer was intended to fulfill.”

But more importantly, for Jews, this was the Greek word that was used to translated the Hebrew word Yahweh. So in saying that Jesus is Lord, the first Christians—most of whom were Jewish—were saying that Jesus was Yahweh in flesh and blood.

Jesus is the long-awaited human coming of Yahweh, the God on top of Sinai.

Morality + religious stuff − sin = God’s blessing. So, for example . . . Bible reading + church − having sex with my girlfriend = God’s blessing.

Yahweh isn’t the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle; he’s the relational, dynamic God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The philosopher Dallas Willard wrote, “God’s ‘response’ to our prayers is not a charade. He does not pretend that he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he was going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best. And of course God does not respond to this. You wouldn’t either.”34

“compassionate” is a feeling word. Yahweh is like a father, or even a mother, and we’re like his children. And “gracious” is an action word. It means, like a parent, God comes to the rescue when his kids need help.

Exodus 34 isn’t just ground zero for a theology of God; it’s also a manifesto for how God’s people are to live.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your children is to raise them so that they have as little unlearning to do as possible when they grow up. Especially about God.

you can make God mad, but you really have to work at it.

There are times when the healthy, emotionally mature response to evil is anger.

Here’s my favorite definition of God’s wrath: “his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations.”9

you can plot Yahweh’s wrath along four axis points—present, future, active, and passive.

Yahweh’s present wrath is when he deals with evil now, on this side of judgment day, like he did with Nineveh. It’s when he doesn’t wait for a postmortem day of reckoning—he steps in now and stops evil dead in its tracks. It’s when living, breathing people or even entire nations come under Yahweh’s discipline and punishment. But it’s rare. It doesn’t happen very often.

Yahweh’s future wrath is when he deals with evil later, in what the Hebrew writers call the day of Yahweh, the day on the horizon when finally, after millennia of waiting, all the wrongs of human history will be undone.

Active wrath is when God acts—directly—to put a stop to evil. It’s like an invisible-but-real hand of God sweeps down in judgment.

Passive wrath is when God does not act, and that is the judgment. And this is how Yahweh usually deals with evil.

It turns out that sin is its own punishment, and obedience its own reward.

Our world is secularized to the core; most people are totally oblivious to the spiritual dimension of the universe. But Exodus 34 was written into a world teeming with “gods” and “goddesses,” and as I said earlier, most of them were mean-spirited. To say they had anger management issues would be a gross understatement. Many of them were openly hostile and malignant, lurking in the shadows, just waiting for a chance to pounce. It’s in this kind of a world that Moses learns that Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, and slow to anger. This would have been an incredibly novel view of deity.

Keep in mind that there are two versions of tolerance. Classic tolerance is the idea that we can agree to disagree rather than kill each other or go to war over some petty thing. This was a revolutionary leap forward in social evolution. I’m all for it. But modern tolerance is the much newer idea that right and wrong are elastic. In this view, to call out somebody’s action as sin is to “judge” them. To disagree with somebody is to hate them.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”24 At some point, tolerance starts to slide dangerously close to apathy.

That’s why Yahweh’s love is an attribute, but his wrath isn’t. The Scriptures teach that “God is love,”31 but we never read “God is wrath.” Wrath, or anger, is Yahweh’s response to evil in the world. The story about Jesus in the temple, clearing out the corrupt bureaucrats with a homemade whip, is a preview of what’s to come, a glimpse over the horizon. There is coming a day when Jesus puts evil six feet under the ground. When the world is finally free. And it’s because of Jesus’ love, and because of his wrath, his passionate antagonism against evil in all its forms, that we can look forward to this glorious future.

To the Scripture writers, hope is the absolute expectation of coming good based on the character of God.

God is more concerned with your long-term character than your short-term happiness. And he’s more than willing to sacrifice the one to get to the other.