God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

Christus Victor. For those of us who don’t speak Latin, that means “Christ is victorious.”

On the cross, Jesus defeated Satan, his pantheon of wild and dangerous beings, and even death itself.

in the universe God has chosen to actualize, love is the highest value, and love demands a choice, and a choice demands freedom.

Put simply, God is incredibly good, but the world is a terrifyingly free, dangerous, beautiful place to call home.

to the degree that we ignore Satan and his friends’ power and authority in the world, we end up attributing his evil to God.

when our worldview became shaped more by secularism than by Scripture, we created a philosophical problem with no good solution.

“If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol . . . The human heart is indeed a factory that mass-produces idols.”55

An idol isn’t a “good thing that becomes ultimate”; it’s a statue that represents some kind of real spiritual being. It serves as a go-between, a conduit, a place for the worshiper to meet with his or her “god.”

the danger of idolatry isn’t that your priorities are out of whack; it’s that you end up in relationship with a demon.

behind these nonspiritual, secular non-gods, there is often lurking a real spiritual being. Like with an idol, behind that hunk of wood or rock or metal is often a creature with a scary amount of power.

When you worship an idol, whatever it is, you abdicate something of your own proper human authority over the world and give it instead to that thing, whatever it is.”

I wonder if it’s the nonspiritual things in our secular world that are the most spiritually lethal.

We just can’t stop worshiping, any more than we can stop breathing.

He is the only source of life and peace and meaning and significance that will last past death and into forever.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, order matters. Order is a clue as to what’s most important.

As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD [Yahweh] has compassion on those who fear him.

So, rahum, or “compassion,” is a feeling word.

In contrast, “gracious” is an action word. In Hebrew, it’s hanun. It means “to show grace” or “to show favor.” It’s something you do. It has this idea of help. To hanun somebody is to help them out in a time of need.

So, to recap: “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.

“God, you are compassionate—you care about me. And you’re gracious—you help. And God, you don’t owe me a thing, and there’s a ton of other people who have it way worse than I do, but based on your mercy, I ask for you to ____.”

A great template for prayer

In the middle of all the blood and gore, Yahweh—the compassionate and gracious God—is constantly at work to rescue and save.

Because God, by nature, “relents from sending calamity”—he nahams; he responds to all sorts of people.

He goes around blessing all sorts of people who don’t deserve it. And I’m living proof of that. The odds are, so are you.

For now, know that his baseline emotion toward you is mercy.

For Jesus, the primary way we relate to God is

as sons and daughters in Daddy’s lap—in trust, in vulnerability and intimacy, in relationship and love.

who God is has staggering implications for who we are.

Release them from your thirst for justice.

Even though you want to pray for justice, pray for mercy. For blessing. And get ready for God to answer it.

they are usually the people who annoy you the most . . .

Marriage only works when nobody is keeping score. When nobody “wins” or “loses.” When every day is a chance to give and receive mercy.

By the way, we don’t get to self-evaluate. This is the kind of question you ask your spouse.

There’s an allusion to Exodus 34 in the New Testament

book of Hebrews: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

Confidence. That’s how we are to come to God. So where do you need mercy?

Where do you need grace to help in time of need?

Appeal to his compassion. Ask for his grace.

If you’re slow to anger, it’s not that you don’t have

feelings of frustration; it’s that you don’t lose it and explode when you get worked up emotionally; you have control over your feelings of frustration and anger and even rage.

God is “patient, the One who makes anger distant and brings compassion near.”

God has a sword? A bow? A weapons depot? Maybe that’s why the prophet Habakkuk prays, “In wrath remember mercy.”

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

Notice that God’s anger is very different from our anger.

Our anger is almost always from a wounded ego—somebody

We say we want justice, but usually we want revenge.

Whereas Yahweh’s anger is on tempo. Patiently waiting. It builds up to the right time and place.

Polish poet Czesław Miłosz argued that “the true opium for the people is belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”17

If you’re the righteous—the man or woman in right relationships, with God, humanity, and the earth itself—then you can’t wait for judgment. Especially if you’re the oppressed.

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.

Active wrath is the exception to the rule. Most of the time, it’s passive wrath.