17th Sunday after Pentecost: Owen #5.

You shall not take

   the name of Yahweh

   your God in vain. (Exodus 20:7)

 Dear Owen,

That is the third commandment—that we might misuse the gift of God’s Name; that we would drag it into our own agenda; that we might think we have some magic power at the utterance of the Divine Name; etc. Because of this, the old people of God, held the name in such awe that they couldn’t even speak the Name. Instead, they simply said “Lord” which is how we tend to translate it to this day: “Lord.”

In deference to our Jewish cousins in the Faith, and partially because I think they may have a point, I try to be careful about speaking the Divine Name. “Jesus” is our Divine Name. The very name, Greek for Joshua; means, “YAH is salvation;” or “Yahweh is our Salvation.” That works:

If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. …The same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. (Romans 10:9–12)

Love, Papa

Ordinary Days: Owen #4

I am Yahweh,

   and I will set you free…

   (Exodus 6:6)

Dear Owen,

How do we get the name “Yahweh” from “I AM WHO I WILL BE”—the Divine Name given to Moses at the burning bush (Ex 3:14). Comer, our author, knows that this will be tough going:

Okay, stay with me, this is a little technical. Okay, it’s really technical. But strap in tight, because there’s a huge payoff if you can survive the next page or two…” (pp 048-049).

I’ll let Comer do the dense stuff. The sum of it is, we can’t say “I AM” because we are not God; but we can say, “God is who he chooses to be.” That is the meaning of the Divine Name. God has revealed himself to us as the God who IS and who DOES—Y-H-W-H.

So, the Divine Name, Yahweh, means something like “God is who he will be.” The God who makes himself known to us is the God who IS and who DOES. He is known by his “mighty acts, …wonderous works, …awesome deeds, …and abundant goodness” (Ps 85:4-7). The God who IS, is about to DO:

I am Yahweh, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will set you free from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with mighty acts: and I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God; and ye shall know that I am Yahweh, who will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians and I will bring you in to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it to you for a heritage: I am Yahweh. (Ex 6:6-8)

It is the name that is ever present, yet ever new—always up to something big. Hang on, God is saying, watch this. We come to know God by his action. The rest of the Bible will fill us in on his “mighty acts, …wonderous works, …awesome deeds, …and abundant goodness” (Ps 85:4-7). The God who IS “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and bounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex 34:6); is the God who, out of his absolute freedom, is about to act—to make things happen.

Love, Papa

Ordinary Days: Owen #3

 

 I am Jehovah,

   that is my name.

   (Isaiah 42:8 ASV)

Dear Owen,

Still in chapter one of God has a Name. I am wondering if the author, John Mark Comer. has a point about how we should translate the tetragrammaton Y-H-W-H as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” rather than “Lord.” Should we?

The 1901 American Standard Version of the Bible did that by translating the Divine Name as “Jehovah” in all 6,800 occurrences of Y-H-W-H. Yet, seventy years later, when the New American Standard translation was first published in 1971, the translation of the Divine Name was changed back to the 1611 King James Version as “Lord”.  You don’t mess with King James.

I don’t recall why the change—what was their reasoning? I’m guessing it has to do with the relentless effort of the 1901 ASV to provide a consistently literal translation. Which it did. However, such a literal translation turned out to be unusable in public life and worship. The church stuck with its venerable 400-year-old King James Version and left the ASV for scholars. The NASV was an attempt to make the old ASV readable. So, they went back to “Lord.” That’s my guess.

As for our author’s argument that “we need to get back to calling God by his name” (p 053); let me save that for another blog. This wares me out.

Love, Papa

 

Ordinary Days: Owen #2

 What is your name?

   “I-AM-WHO-I-AM”

     (Exodus 3:13-14)

Dear Owen,

I couldn’t help myself… I went ahead and read the first chapter of Comer’s “God has a Name.” The chapter tells the story of how it is that God reveals to Moses his name. I’ll stay here and wait for you to prompt me for chapter two. Meanwhile, maybe you will find the following summation of chapter one helpful.

God gives us, reveals to us, his name; but in the revelation, he remains hidden—a mystery: “I-AM-WHO-I-AM.” What kind of name is that? God tells us something about himself; yet we are not sure what. As Augustine puts it, God remains “hidden yet intimately present, steadfast yet elusive.” (Confessions Bk1,4,4)

 After trying to explain how it is that “I-AM-WHO-I-AM” gets turned into the “tetragrammaton” Y-H-W-H and how this tetragrammaton gets turned into “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” and why this is translated in our English Bibles as “LORD;” the writer pauses: “Whew…” Comer sighs, then asks us, his readers, “You still out there?” (p059) What do you think, Owen? Are you still out there?

At Corban University you get to read some theology. No matter how breezily Comer attempts to tell the story, it remains theologically demanding, doesn’t it? And yet, rewarding. So, let us stick with it and see where we end up, okay?

Love, Papa

Ordinary Days: Owen #1.

 

 Tell your children

    what happened that Day;

when you stood

    at the mountain. (Exodus 4:10)

Dear Owen, 

Hey… I got your golf team book: “God has a Name” by Mark Comer. This morning I read the Prologue (pp 1-37). It looks like a great read.

Which means, I owe you an apology. When you asked me if I knew the book, I said something flippant like, “Never heard of it.” Which was true. But in my heart, I was thinking: “I never heard of Mark Comer—can’t be that good.” I take it all back. It’s a great book. Comer gets us to the right mountain and from there only good things can flow. His breezy style of writing is a bit much for me, but so what, his breeziness gets us to the right place.

Let me know your plans for reading and I will follow along, okay? We will both learn something special about our God who gives us His name. Otherwise, how could we know?

Much love, Papa

Eastertide: Anna #28.

There is nothing new

    under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) 

Dear Anna,

I did my non-biblical devotions this morning from The Portable Renaissance Reader. It’s a collection of short reads from various Renaissance writers and troubadours. So, this morning’s short read came from Niccolô Machiavelli written in 1517—couldn’t help but think of you. It’s called “The Circle of Governments.” Let me send it your way. Maybe we can discuss around the morning fire when you get home, okay?

Machiavelli describes three possible forms of government (I suppose you know all this):

1.     Monarchical         becomes                      tyranny

2.     Aristocratic           degenerates into          oligarchy

3.     Democratic           lapses into                   licentiousness.

Then Machiavelli concludes: “I say, then, that all kinds of governments are defective; those three which we have qualified as good because they are too short-lived, and the three bad ones because of their inherent viciousness. Thus sagacious legislators, knowing the vices of each of these systems of government by themselves, have chosen one that should partake of all of them, judging that to be the most stable and solid. In fact, when there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check.”

So that’s where we got our notion of checks and balances—written some 270 years before our nation’s Constitution. Now I’m finding out that Machiavelli was merely commenting on Aristotle’s Politics some 2,200 years before our Constitution. Maybe there really isn’t anything new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes keeps telling us. Our nation’s founders must have been classicists like you.

Love you, Papa

Eastertide: Anna #27

 

The Lord has

    made himself known. (Psalm 9:16)

Dear Anna,

Our next big Sunday is Pentecost—seven Sundays from Easter Sunday. Between Easter Sunday and Pentecost, our resurrected Lord, “showed himself alive”.  It is not as if Mary caught him walking down Main Street. It came at God’s choosing: “God raised him up on the third day and allowed him to appear…to us who were chosen by God as witnesses…” (Ac 10:40-41). Mary was the first “chosen by God as a witness.”

Between now and then, Jesus “showed himself alive” to Mary Magdalene first, then to the other women, then sporting with that couple walking home to Emmaus, then a few different times to his disciples while in Jerusalem, then later along the shore of Galilee where he fixed breakfast.  Maybe last, before he ascended, to his doubting brother James (1Cor 15:7). As our resurrected Lord ascends, the Holy Spirit descends making Jesus present for us though he can no longer be seen going before us. That is Pentecost—when the Holy Spirit descends making Jesus known to us.

Our knowing Jesus always comes from God’s side. It is not something we figured out; but rather, something given to us—the gift of faith.

Love,

PAPA