God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

What has God promised you? When you get quiet before God, what rumbles deep down in your soul? What longing, what ache, what sense of destiny that you just can’t shake? God will be faithful to his promise. No matter what. No matter how many times you trip over your feet, no matter what other “wills” get in the way, God is greater. And he’s loving, and faithful.

Faithfulness is long obedience in the same direction in an age of instant gratification.

You can’t do what you love until you’re good at what you do. But sociologists argue that to become really good at your craft takes most people about ten thousand hours—that’s at least a decade of hard work. What would it look like to seize upon a dream for your life and run after it? Not at a sprint, but at a slow, steady pace, ready to wait for a very long time to see God’s calling on your life materialize and bloom to life?

Yahweh might not look exactly how we want him to look, at least not at first. But as we begin to see his character, as his beauty starts to come into focus, we realize that who he is, is so much better than who we wanted him to be.

By now, all the Exodus language should pop out to you—mercy, love, faithfulness. The poet is praying for Yahweh’s character to ntsr him, to watch over him and keep him from evil, specifically evil people.

Now, these three words join together to cover the full breadth of human pollution. But the point here isn’t to lay on a guilt trip; it’s that Yahweh is forgiving of sins of all shapes and sizes.

Notice, it’s not just that he forgives. It’s that he is forgiving.

Exodus 34, the prophet Micah speaks to the forgiving nature of Yahweh: Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy. You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.4

“Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished . . .” This is a slippery phrase to translate into English. Another translation gets us a little closer to the original Hebrew: “but who will by no means clear the guilty.”6 The idea here is that Yahweh is forgiving by nature, but at the same time, he’s also just. He doesn’t let the guilty off the hook.

Forgiveness is like a gift—you have to reach out, take it, and open the box; you have to say yes to it.

One day, it will. Right now, Yahweh’s justice is a trickle. But one day it will turn into a river, and from there into an ocean blanketing the world. When Jesus comes again, he will cripple sin for good and bring evil to its knees forever.

Because Yahweh is forgiving, we don’t have to cower in fear and dread Jesus’ return. We can take our “wickedness, rebellion and sin” straight to the cross and let it die on Jesus’ shoulders.

The imagery here is of a scale that’s weighted to the side of mercy. He punishes to the third and fourth, yes, but he’s “maintaining love to thousands.”

“Mercy triumphs over judgment.”12

Yahweh is forgiving, but sin is not. Sin is unforgiving—merciless, petty, and cruel. Our sin has consequences. We can miss out on blessing irretrievably. We can end up like Israel—forgiven, yes, but lost in the trackless desert waste.

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. 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.

Paul writes, “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

With a clever play on words, Paul is saying that Jesus’ death is the solution to the ancient dilemma of God’s mercy and justice.28 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.” He’s just . . . and he’s the justifier.

In this moment we see—more clearly than ever before—what Yahweh is like. The reconciliation of God’s mercy and justice in the death of Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s character.

The cross was the Father and the Son working together, in tandem, to bring mercy and justice together—to absorb all the world’s sin, and the evil it creates, in Jesus’ death and release all God’s life in the resurrection.30

Yahweh will deal with sin in our lives, one way or another. We might not take sin all that seriously, but he does. To the point of death—literally.

Sin is dehumanizing. There’s no better word for it. When we sin, we become less than human; we miss the mark of all that our Creator intended for our lives. That’s why God usually doesn’t have to lift a finger to punish our sin. Because it is its own punishment.

And when we keep on sinning, over and over, in spite of God’s mercy, eventually, we risk the hand of God against us. Trust me, you don’t want God as your enemy.

Every good father does. If you’re Yahweh’s child, you can expect his discipline in your life. After all, you’re loved. Deeply loved.

Bring your sin straight to Jesus. Don’t hide it or lie about it or make excuses for it. Just bring it right to him, and let him take it away. Absorb it on the cross. Break its hold over you in the resurrection. Set you free.

Joel has a message from Yahweh: “Even now,” declares the LORD [Yahweh], “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning” . . . Return to the LORD [Yahweh] your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. Who knows? He may turn and relent and leave behind a blessing.

It’s true that sin is incredibly cruel. And it’s true that when we sin, we often lose blessing irretrievably. But it’s even more true that Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, and forgiving of every sin imaginable.

In the aftermath of your sin, when the locusts have left and you’re standing in the wreckage of what used to be your life, you could find your hands full of seeds for a new crop, the soil under your toes dark and rich, and maybe even feel a drop of rain on your cheek . . .

After God tells Moses his name—Yahweh, the God who is compassionate and gracious and on down the list—we read this: “Moses bowed to the ground at once and worshiped.”

All worship is response to who Yahweh is. And by “worship,” I don’t just mean singing a handful of songs at church on Sunday. Worship is an entire life oriented around wonder and awe at the nature of God.

“whose name is Jealous” or “who is jealous for his name.”

Yahweh is jealous for his reputation. In fact, people coming to see him for who he really is, is one of the central themes of the Bible. That’s where we come in. Because Yahweh is locked in relationship with us, there is a symbiotic relationship between Yahweh’s name—his reputation—and how we, the people of God, live. Because Yahweh’s name is also our name. Throughout the Scriptures, we read that Israel is called by the name of Yahweh.3 The idea here is we have an intimate, family-like relationship with the Creator—like a spouse or a child.

Are you getting the idea? As God’s people, we are called by his name. But with this incredible marriage-like, family-like relationship we have with Yahweh comes a staggering responsibility to mirror and mimic what God is like to the world.

What Yahweh wants is a living, breathing people to put his name on display. To show the world what he is like, not only by what we say, but by how we live. That’s what Yahweh is after: a people who are “godly,” who are like the God they worship. A people who are compassionate . . . A people who are gracious . . . A people who are slow to anger . . . A people who are abounding in love and faithfulness . . . And a people who live in the tension of mercy and justice.

Here’s my closing word: don’t be afraid to climb the mountain. Step into the smoke and fire. Devote your life to the pursuit of this terrifyingly good God. If you fall along the way, scrape up your knees, lose ground, that’s okay. Give it another go. And remember—everywhere you set your foot, you carry the name.