God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

Names were way more than labels to pick up your coffee at the end of the bar. Names were your autobiography in one word.

It sounds like two friends talking. Almost as if Moses and God are on equal footing. Of course, they aren’t on equal footing, and that’s what makes it so striking.

The idea isn’t that God was off base, at all; it’s that God was moved emotionally; he regretted his decision to judge Israel so harshly, and so he changed his approach.

God is far more interactive and interesting.

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

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.

But secondly, and more importantly, to pray in Jesus’ name means that whenever we pray, we have the same access to God that Jesus does.

It claims there is one true Creator God who made everything. And the world was born, not out of conflict or war or jealous infighting, but out of the overflow of his creativity and love.

So when evil comes to smash in your door, don’t have a crisis of faith, as if Yahweh is to blame. The odds are, he’s not. Instead, grieve and lament and meet God in the place of pain.

But here’s what we need to remember: behind these nonspiritual, secular non-gods, there is often lurking a real spiritual being.

The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright says it this way: “When we humans commit idolatry—worshiping that which is not God as if it were—we thereby give to other creatures and beings in the cosmos a power, a prestige, an authority over us which we, under God, were supposed to have over them. 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.

When we come before God—in morning prayer or in worship at church or on our afternoon run or in the middle of a crisis at work—we come before a God who feels, who cares about us. And a God who acts, who wants to help, to do something about our situation.

Next up on the list is “slow to anger.” This is a fun one. In Hebrew, it’s erek apayim, and it literally means “long of nostrils.” True story. Not making this up. God’s nostrils are loooong, believe you me.

So here’s the basic idea: you can make God mad, but you really have to work at it.

God is “patient, the One who makes anger distant and brings compassion near.”4

He has feelings. And he feels anger over evil in the world.

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

The LORD [Yahweh] is slow to anger but great in power; the LORD [Yahweh] will not leave the guilty unpunished.13

means that the defeat of Nineveh by a pagan army is an example of Yahweh’s “wrath.”

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.

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.

Active wrath is the exception to the rule.

Passive wrath is when God does not act, and that is the judgment.

If your heart is stubborn, cold, or in open rebellion against Yahweh, then the worst thing God can do is give you what you want and let all your desires come true.21

They are far more frustrated with God’s mercy than his wrath.

He’s facing nauseating injustice. And he is livid. How else is Jesus supposed to feel?

Anger is the mature, emotionally healthy response to this kind of corruption and gross defamation of Yahweh’s name.

Wrath, or anger, is Yahweh’s response to evil in the world.

Meaning, this is one of the truest things there is about Yahweh: he’s abounding—spilling over, way past capacity—in hesed.

God’s love is his faithfulness. God’s faithfulness is his love.

The guts of the promise is that Abraham’s family will function as a conduit, a medium, for Yahweh to spread his life-giving, regenerative blessing over every square inch of the earth.

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.

Yes, sometimes things go horribly wrong. But the resurrection is a megaphone turned up to 11, screaming, God is bigger than evil! And stronger than death!

In Exodus 34v7, the Hebrew word translated as “forgiving” is nasa, and it literally means “to lift up,” “to carry,” or “to take away.” Talk about a signpost pointing forward to Jesus. Not to get ahead of myself, but that’s exactly what he does on the cross. He lifts sin onto his shoulders and then takes it away—straight into the maw of hell itself.

God’s end goal is a world with no evil. Yahweh’s justice isn’t about retribution or payback or some kind of God-size vendetta—it’s about the healing and renewal of the world.

When parents sin, the children are collateral damage.

And when his justice and mercy bump up against each other—when they conflict and bang heads and square off—mercy wins every time.

Sin, at its root, is not trusting God. We want to make it about temptation and a lack of self-control, and it is. But really, under the facade, it’s about not trusting Yahweh’s character.

The point of this story is this: Yahweh is forgiving, but sin is not.

Does God forgive? Constantly. Does he wipe the slate clean and help people start over? All the time. Is there healing in Jesus? Yes. But we still need to grapple with the weight of sin, because we don’t want to miss out on blessing! We don’t want to stare over the waters of Jordan, right on the cusp of the life God has for us, only to throw it all away and spend years of our life in regret.

The cross is an expression of Yahweh’s mercy—it’s his way of “forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” But it’s also an expression of God’s justice—“he does not leave the guilty unpunished.”

In spite of all the talk in the Bible about Yahweh’s wrath, nobody should ever accuse Yahweh of being mean. Yes, he gets angry, but he takes that anger on himself. He doesn’t make you and me pay for our sin—he pays for it. With the currency of his own blood. We sin. Jesus dies. Jesus dies. We live on in relationship with the Father.

Yahweh will deal with sin in our lives, one way or another.

Worship is an entire life oriented around wonder and awe at the nature of God.