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Here’s a truth that cuts across the whole of the universe: we become like what we worship.
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.”
what you think about God will shape your destiny in life.
Often what we believe about God says more about us than it does about God. Our theology is like a mirror to the soul. It shows us what’s deep inside.
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.
we don’t know what God is like, but we can learn. But to learn, we have to go to the source. And that means we need revelation. Otherwise we end up with all sorts of erroneous and goofy and untrue and maybe even toxic ideas about God.
I am a follower of Jesus, not a Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or Jedi Knight (sadly). So everything I think about God is through the lens of the Scriptures and then Jesus himself.
In ancient Hebrew literature like Exodus, to speak of God’s glory was to speak of his presence and beauty.10 Moses is asking to see God for who he really is. To see God in person. For Moses, head knowledge isn’t enough. He wants to experience God.
God graciously tells Moses that he can’t see his face or he will die, “for no one may see me and live.”11 But he’ll do him one better. God tells him, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD [Yahweh], in your presence.”
When God describes himself, he starts with his name. Then he talks about what we call character. He’s compassionate and gracious; he’s slow to anger; he’s abounding in love and faithfulness, and on down the list.
Most of the time, this is how we talk about God—we rattle off a bunch of stuff about God that is true; it’s just not the stuff that makes him, him.
It’s one thing to read a book about God; it’s another thing to scale a mountain in the middle of the desert and plunge headfirst into the darkness. To abandon yourself to a life of dangerous, risky, I-won’t-stop-for-anything pursuit of God. Hopefully this book will give you the courage to climb the mountain, no matter what you find at the top.
Your name was your identity, your destiny, the truth hidden in the marrow of your bones. It was a one-word moniker for the truest thing about you—your inner essence. Your inner Tom-ness or Ruth-ness.
Abram means “exalted father.” Abraham means “father of many nations.” It’s more than a new label. It’s a new identity, a new destiny.
Isaac’s son Jacob. Jacob means “heel grabber,” a euphemism for a liar and a cheat. And his biography is exactly that—one con after another. Until an odd story where he wrestles with God and says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”3 Then God renames him, from Jacob to Israel, which means “he struggles with God.” From then on, he’s a changed man.
So when Moses is on Mount Sinai, asking to see God’s glory and instead Yahweh says, “I will proclaim my name, the LORD [Yahweh], in your presence,”4 it’s an incredibly weighty and significant moment. God is saying that he’ll reveal his identity to Moses. He’ll let Moses in on his inner God-ness, the deepest reality of his being.
Moses asks. He asks, “Mah shemo?” And as we all know, the difference between a miy shimka? and a mah shemo? is legendary. Mah shemo? is more like, “What is the meaning of your name?” Or, “What is the significance of your name?” Or, “What makes you . . . you?”
Moses isn’t just asking for a label like Bob or Hank or Lazer. (I actually know a kid named Lazer. How cool is that?) He’s asking the Creator God, “Who are you? What are you like? Tell me about your character.”
One of the ways to translate this Hebrew phrase is “whatever I am, I will be.” Meaning, whatever this God is like, he’s that way consistently. He’s unshifting, stable, 24/7.
Yahweh says to Moses: “I am the LORD [Yahweh]. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name the LORD [Yahweh] I did not make myself fully known to them.”
In other words, Yahweh only showed part of himself to Abraham and his sons. 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.
In his biography of Jesus, the New Testament writer John makes a profound statement: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
“Glory”? That’s a reference to the cloud at the top of Mount Sinai. And “grace and truth” is actually an odd reading of the Hebrew phrase translated as “love and faithfulness.” (We’ll talk about why later.) Usually people read “grace and truth” and talk about how Jesus was the perfect balance of grace and niceness and love mixed with truth and backbone and the courage to say what needed to be said. That’s totally true. It’s just not remotely the point that John is making. John is ripping all this language out of Exodus—“tabernacle” and “glory” and “love and faithfulness”—as a way of retelling
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Eugene Peterson translates the verse this way: “I have spelled out your character in detail.”
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.
we see this kind of blatant, provocative language all over the writings of the New Testament. The first Christians were adamant that Jesus is the bedrock for everything we believe to be true about God.
Jesus is the long-awaited human coming of Yahweh, the God on top of Sinai.
God is a person. By person, I don’t mean he’s male or female or human.23 By person, I mean he’s a relational being. Not an impersonal energy force or a chapter in a systematic theology textbook or a world religion. He’s a relational being who wants to, well, relate. To people like you and me. He wants to know and be known.
God isn’t a doctrine. He isn’t a question on a multiple-choice exam that you study to get right so you can “go to heaven when you die.”24 He’s a person who wants to be in a relationship with you.
As you can imagine, the God who is slow to anger finally gets angry and tells Moses that he’s going to destroy Israel and start over with Moses, take it back to square one, reboot the entire franchise. God is clearly upset. The theologian Gerry Breshears says, “This is God processing his feelings with a human partner.”
Yahweh nahamed? He changed his mind? He repented? That’s what it says. Now, that doesn’t mean God was in sin or doing anything wrong. The word naham carries this idea of regret or remorse over a decision. 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.
“If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.”
We speak, and God speaks. We act, and God acts. We pray, and God answers, but not always in the way we want. We ask God to show mercy, and he nahams.
Yahweh isn’t the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle; he’s the relational, dynamic God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who responds. Who can be moved, influenced, who can change his mind at a moment’s notice. And this isn’t a lower view of God; it’s a much higher view. The theologian Karl Barth called it the “holy mutability of God.”30 He would be less of a God if he couldn’t change his intentions when he wants to, or be open to new ideas from intelligent, creative beings he’s in relationship with.
There are prayers in the Scriptures—in the books Moses wrote and especially in Psalms—where I cringe, half expecting lightning to strike the person dead. But it doesn’t. In fact, God seems to love that kind of raw, uncut prayer, skirting the line between blasphemy and desperate faith. He’s not nearly as scared of honesty as we are.
We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but I deeply believe this way of thinking about God’s involvement in our life is so far from what the Scriptures teach. The future is not set in stone. The prayers we pray and the decisions we make in the here and now have a direct, line-of-sight effect on what does—or does not—happen down the line. Because God responds.
But God...
Jesus came and lived and died and rose from the grave to make the kind of relationship he and Moses had with Yahweh available to everybody. Right before his death, Jesus prayed to the Father, “I have made your name known to them, and will continue to make your name known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”33 This is Jesus’ agenda for his followers—that you and I will know Yahweh like he did. And to join Moses and the characters of the Bible in friendship with God.
Prayer is what Moses did with God in the tent. What Jesus did with the Father in Gethsemane. 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. It’s when you talk to God with the edit button in the off position and you feel safe and heard and loved. It’s the kind of relational exchange you can’t get enough of. And our prayers make a difference. Most of us don’t actually believe that prayer changes reality. But it does.
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.”
Prayer can move the hand of God. Prayer can get God to change his mind—think about the gravity of that. 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.
James put it, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”35
“God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon His creatures the dignity of being causes” and interprets it like this: “We are not merely passive set pieces in a prearranged cosmic drama, but we are active participants with God in the writing, directing, design, and action that unfolds. Prayer, therefore, is much more than asking God for this or that outcome. 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.”36
From the beginning of human history, God, the Creator of everything, has been looking for friends, for free, intelligent, creative partners to collaborate with on running the world. That’s prayer.
One New Testament scholar said it this way: “To pray in Jesus’ name . . . means that we enter into Jesus’ status in God’s favor, and invoke Jesus’ standing with God.”37 So for those of you thinking, I can’t interact with God in this kind of a back-and-forth way, like a friend or a coworker helping God build out his world. I’m no Moses, and I’m definitely not Jesus!—true, that makes two of us. But if you’re a follower of Jesus, then when you come before God, you come in Jesus’ name. You invoke his status with God. You come, not as a beggar off the street, but as a royal daughter or son of the
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Wow!
When Israel is finally out from under Egypt’s whip, we read that Yahweh “had brought judgment on their gods.”13 As one firsthand observer put it, “Now I know that the LORD [Yahweh] is greater than all other gods, for he did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly.”
Psalm 82: God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgments among the “gods.”
Yahweh, speaking to the “gods” . . . “How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked? Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
By the time we get to Isaiah—one of the last writings before the time of Jesus—we read almost contradictory statements like, “I am the LORD [Yahweh], and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.”34 Now, in context this is hyperbole, and poetry at that—not an academic essay on the difference between Yahweh and all the other spiritual beings. The prophet’s point is that the gap between Yahweh and the other “gods” is so chasmic, so uncrossable, that these other beings aren’t really even worthy of the title “gods.”
What is clear is that we live in a spiritually dense world, jammed with both human and nonhuman beings beyond measure. It’s also clear that these spiritual beings, just like humans, have a measure of free will and autonomy. They can obey and serve Yahweh, or they can rebel and war against him, just like us.
Psalm 82 is a prayer for God to do something about it. To end the tyranny of these evil, wicked powers. To drive them out. Put a stop to their havoc. And set the world free.
