God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

What if God and religion are just an endless source of violence and hatred and bigotry and hypocrisy and really bad music?

What was shocking to me was the bizarre twist of logic. I couldn’t believe in a God who _____? As if what we think and feel about God is an accurate barometer for what he is actually like.

The Scripture writers come at it the other way around. From Moses to Matthew, they just assume we have no idea what God is like.

It’s one of the few places in the entire Bible where God describes himself. Where he essentially says, “This is what I’m like.” Think of it as God’s self-disclosure statement, his press release to the world.14 Because of that, it’s quite possibly the most quoted passage in the Bible, by the Bible.15

This is ground zero for a theology of God.

When God describes himself, he starts with his name. Then he talks about what we call character.

I think the gradual shift from calling God “Yahweh” to using the title “the LORD” says something about the human condition.

It leads to a twisted caricature, as if the Father is the grumpy old warmonger in the Old Testament, and Jesus is the son who went off to Berkeley and came home with all sorts of radical ideas about grace and love and tolerance and basically said, “Come on, Dad, let’s not kill everybody. How about I die for them instead?”

The theologian Gerry Breshears says, “This is God processing his feelings with a human partner.”27

God is more of a friend than a formula.

Usually the formula looks something like this: Morality + religious stuff − sin = God’s blessing.

It’s when you talk to God with the edit button in the off position and you feel safe and heard and loved.

Blaise Pascal’s line, “God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon His creatures the dignity of being causes”

So Yahweh’s relationship with these other pretender “gods” is hostile. It’s not an exaggeration to say he’s at war with them.

for more than a millennium and a half, the dominant metaphor wasn’t substitutionary atonement; it was another one, called Christus Victor.

We live between D-Day and VE-Day. Between Jesus’ first coming to land the decisive blow and his second to end evil for good.

And there’s no path up his mountain.

It’s not so much that “Jesus is the only way to God.” I mean, he is, but a better way to say it is: Jesus is God come to us.

nature’s will.

i don't know about that...

evil is the by-product of that freedom that God built into the fabric of the universe.

none of it comes even close to the love of a parent for their kids.

wait until you have grandkids!

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.

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.

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Yahweh is forgiving, but sin is not.

At best, my marriage would suffer a catastrophic breach of trust; at worst, it could easily come to a swift and terrible end. It would take me years to re-earn my children’s respect, if ever. I’m a pastor, so I would immediately lose my job. Between my lack of marketable skills and my duty to pay alimony, I would quickly devolve into poverty. I’m sure my community would come around me, but my reputation would now carry a stigma with it.

It would take me decades to rebuild a cheap copy of the life I once had.

What I’m saying is that we need to take sin way. more. seriously. If your heart is heavy and you feel sick to your stomach right now, good—that’s the healthy, emotionally mature response to the gravity of sin.

The reconciliation of God’s mercy and justice in the death of Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s character.

Remember Artemis and King Agamemnon? The goddess was so angry that she made the king sacrifice his own daughter. But this God—the one true Creator God—he doesn’t demand we give up our children for human sacrifice. Instead, he gives up his Son.

Yahweh is terrifyingly good.

Yahweh’s name is also our name. Throughout the Scriptures, we read that Israel is called by the name of Yahweh.3