God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

Here’s a truth that cuts across the whole of the universe: we become like what we worship.

“We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God

we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.”

Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life.

all of these men and women do what they do because of what they believe about God.

Who God is has profound implications for who we are.

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

Here’s how you know if you’ve created God in your own image: he agrees with you on everything.

Our theology is like a mirror to the soul. It shows us what’s deep inside.

From Moses to Matthew, they just assume we have no idea what God is like.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that the majority are often wrong.

Jesus spent the bulk of his time helping religious people see that a lot of what they thought about God was wrong too.

For Jesus and all the writers of Scripture, the starting point for all theology is the realization that: we don’t know what God is like, but we can learn. But to learn, we have to go to the source.

But here’s the thing: revelation, by definition, is usually a surprise. A twist in the story. A break from the status quo. So when God reveals himself, it’s almost always different from what we expect.

If you strip the Bible down to the core, it’s

a story about God, and about how we as people relate to God.

Moses is asking to see God for who he really is. To see God in person.

This is one of those watershed moments when everything changes. 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

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.

to reshape our lives from the ground up, unlocking the weights that hold us back from the full, deep, wide, boundless, difficult, invigorating, I-can’t-believe-this-is-my-life kind of existence that God made us for and Jesus put on display.

There is a mystery to God that we never quite figure out. After all, we’re dealing with a being who is totally unlike any other in the universe.

Names were your autobiography in one word.

As one poet so eloquently said, God

“waits to be wanted.”16 He’s aching for a relationship with you.

This is God’s modus operandi in the Scriptures. He doesn’t give revelation all at once, but in bits and pieces, giving his

people time to absorb and grapple with who God is.18

And “grace and truth” is actually an odd reading of the Hebrew phrase translated as “love and faithfulness.”

He’s making the point that in Jesus, we see the Creator God’s glory—his presence and beauty—like never before. In Jesus, Yahweh becomes a human being.

Eugene Peterson translates the verse this way: “I have spelled out your character in detail.”

In Jesus, we get a new, evocative, crystal-clear glimpse of what God is actually like.

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

He’s not nearly as scared of honesty as we are.

some secret script we live out, and we don’t dare ask God to deviate from it.32

Prayer

It’s brutally honest, naked, and vulnerable. It’s when your deepest desires and fears and hopes and dreams leak out of your mouth with no inhibition.

“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.

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

Prayer is when your life trajectory is going in the wrong direction, so you dialogue with God and he responds and your life goes another way.

“God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon His creatures the dignity of being causes”

It is drawing into communion with him and there taking up our privileged role as his people. In prayer, we are invited to join him in directing the course of his world.”

“In prayer, we are invited to join him in directing the course of his world.”

To pray in Jesus’ name means two things. First, it means to pray in line with his character, to pray for the kind of stuff he wants to see happen in the world.

to pray in Jesus’ name means that whenever we pray, we have the same access to God that Jesus does.

And what you find waiting for you is Yahweh, the person, who wants to relate to you. And you don’t even have to climb a mountain. All you have to do is open your lips.

Idolatry and injustice populate page after page of the Hebrew Scriptures. But the temptation was never to worship Yahweh or ____. It was always, Yahweh and ____. For Israel to live in a polyamorous relationship with the “gods” rather than stay faithful to her true husband. And the by-product of this illicit affair is injustice—it tears apart the social fabric of the world.

But three days later, the tomb is empty, and Jesus is alive. His resurrection breaks the spine of death itself, not through violence, but through sacrificial love.

“Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”