Chapter 4
Name
Have you ever noticed how it seems like in the Old Testament, people’s names mean something? It has occurrence after occurrence that the person’s name is almost entirely a direct link to their character. One of my personal favorites is when David is fleeing from Saul; he seeks food from Nabal. Nabal tells David no, with more impolite words. Nabal is the Hebrew word for stupid. His wife Abigail then goes to David and asks forgiveness, and says, “Surely his name is perfect for him.” Abigail just said that Nabal is stupid, just like his name says.
Time and again we find stories of this. God changes Abrams name to Abraham, Jacob gets blamed for his name being his reputation, Daniel means God is my judge; the list goes on endlessly. Why does this happen over and over again?
The Hebrew word for name is shem (pronounced shame). It certainly means name. “The shem of Naomi’s husband was Abimelech.” The translation is obvious. But shem also carries other interpretations with it. Noah named his three sons, “Shem, Good-looks, and Warm-hearted.” Shem here doesn’t mean name, but means fame. God told David, “I’ll give you shem (fame), like the greatest kings of history.”
The way that you translate shem is that it is someone’s name, and their name is derived from their legend. What do people think of you as? Gideon was called a mighty warrior by the angel. That is his “fame” or stature in heaven. In Isaiah, the Messiah is given the names wonderful, counselor, the Mighty God, the Eternal Father, and the Ruler of Shalom. Shem here doesn’t mean name, and it doesn’t mean fame. Here it is talking about character.
When we talk about someone’s name in the Old Testament, we talk about who they are at their core. This is the deepest revelation of who this person is. The shem of someone is best translated as their character. It is what makes you unique from everyone else. What is it about you that is different from the person next to you? Strangely enough, in the New Testament, Barnabas wasn’t the original name for the guy. This was a nickname given by the apostles.
The apostles saw something in this man that they would name him after the parakletos. The parakletos (or paraklete) is used in reference to the Holy Spirit in the book of John. Barnabas displayed a certain character that so resembled the Holy Spirit’s way of leading and guiding and standing up for someone that they nicknamed him after it. My personal opinion is that they saw the way he seemed to teach and lead and stand up for Saul when no one else would (at least at the beginning of Saul’s conversion).
So lets again take a visit to the most famous place where we see the word kavod show up.
Mount Sinai
There is this story in Exodus about Moses being on top of Mount Sinai meeting with God. God is frustrated. I can understand why. After delivering Israel and performing miracle after miracle, Israel just doesn’t seem to be interested in God. The story starts with the 10 commandments. I remind you once again, the Bible employs wedding language in the context of the 10 commandments.
When we turn to Exodus, and God is on the mountain as a cloud of smoke and flame, we have the symbolism of the chuppah. This is God setting the stage for a wedding. He then gives the 10 commandments to Israel. He speaks with His own audible voice. The 10 commandments basically are God saying, “Don’t cheat on me, and do to each other what you want to have done to you.” After giving His side of expectations, God waits to see what happens next…
Israel trembles and says, “Moses! You go talk to Him!” They completely reject God under the chuppah. Could you imagine the way that God feels? He was basically just left at the altar. It isn’t any wonder why when Moses goes to talk to God that God says, “I’m going to kill them all, and then I’ll make you into a nation.” It’s a bit drastic, sure. But it isn’t any worse than all of those country songs on the radio.
Moses talks to God and settles Him down. Basically, Moses says, “What will the world say if you were able to deliver your people out of Egypt, and then couldn’t even deliver them into the Promised Land?” God’s name was at stake. His reputation was on the line. What kind of a God is He if He can’t go through with it?
So God basically tells Moses, “I’ll deliver them. But I won’t go with them. I’ll have an angel lead them.” Once again, Moses requests otherwise. God then says, “I will go with you, Moses, because I know your name.” What is God saying? Is God saying that He knows Moses’ name is Moses? Or is God saying that He knows Moses’ fame and stature? It seems much more likely that they are both thrown into the third category of a deeper sense of the word.
God says, “I know your shem. I know that you reverence me. I know that you have a heart for me. I know that your character is right. You aren’t going to try and trick me.” God essentially says, “Moses… you’re a good guy. I trust you, and so I’ll go with you.” Can you imagine the implications of this? Moses has God’s trust. (!)
There is this verse in Exodus 25 that God tells Moses He will meet with Him in the Holiest Place, between the cherubim, “to give you instructions for the sons of Israel.” But the emphasis isn’t that it is only there; the emphasis is that God will meet with Moses face to face. This is a deep soul searching.
What did God tell Moses when he was first instructed to go up onto Mount Sinai? “Come up the mount and be there.” It sounds kind of redundant, right? But it isn’t. God is getting at something here that is lost when we don’t have the right Hebraic understanding of the text. Moses spends time with God simply because He enjoys spending time with God. This isn’t a formula to get the Commandments or the Law. This isn’t a ploy to see God’s glory. This isn’t something that Moses searches for his own intentions. God says come up the mount and be there.
Bring your shem with you. That core of who you are. Bring that uniqueness. Open yourself in your depths. Speak from your very foundations and fibers, not from the religious rhetoric that you’ve learned in Bible School.
This is a time where we are very intimate with God. Nothing is hidden. We don’t try to make excuses. We don’t try to hide. We don’t try to muscle something up. We don’t try to gain something. We don’t try to sound intelligent. We don’t try to look cute. We don’t dress up. We simply come as we are. We come into God’s presence to commune with God. If He speaks, we speak. If He is silent, we are silent too. It is about being with Him, not dumping our hopes and thoughts on Him.
And so for God to then say on that mount, “I will go with you because I know your name…” This is God saying, “You’re honest with me.” This isn’t an honesty like speaking truthful words. This honesty goes deeper than mere truth and truths. Moses is real. He is thoroughly Moses. He isn’t anything or anyone else. Moses comes and is authentically who he is, and not hiding or trying to make God think he is something else (whether greater or lesser) than he really is.
How many ministers and pulpiteers and Bible School students and laypeople are taught differently and act according to how they are taught? It is quite staggering to think that God really does just want to be with us and know us for who we are. Yet the most common reaction is that we need to dress up. The words that Jesus uses about such people is, “Depart from me; I never knew you.”
Moses then says, “Show me your glory.” What is Moses asking to see? Moses is asking to see the weight, the kavod, the very tangible and experiential God. Moses is asking God for a very real and a very tangible experience that will change him. Kavod is the word for glory. Remember that kavod means heavy.
God’s kavod is wrapped up in having our senses titillated and our spirits stirred within us. God’s kavod being revealed to us goes hand-in-hand with those moments that we realize the importance of every situation. Moses is essentially saying that he wants to walk in the reality of eternity. Show me your kavod is like Moses and God being married and God gives Himself to Moses and Moses gives himself to God.
This is spirit and flesh becoming one. This is Christ in us – the hope of glory. What does God say? He doesn’t say no. He tells Moses that it is impossible for Moses to truly receive what he is asking for and live. God tells Moses that He’ll hide Moses away in the cleft of a rock, and after He has passed by, reveal Himself.
Remember that Hebrew is poetic. This doesn’t mean that Moses saw God’s back. When I stand next to someone, I stand to the hand of someone. To see God’s back is to see where God just was (or to be behind Him). The deepest realm of seeing God’s glory was to see where God just was.
If you know the verse in 2 Corinthians 3, then I hope you instantly think of it. If you don’t know it off hand, try to imagine this: Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!
Did you get it? It says in Joel that at the end of the age, the spirit will be poured out on all flesh. But here with Moses, God can’t do that. What has changed? It isn’t the condition of man, because sin is still present. What has changed is that God has finally been able to be one with His people? He isn’t on the mount hoping that His people will say yes to Him. He is now in the midst of His people.
Through Jesus Christ, God now has the ability to dwell in us. This is where the doctrine of salvation gets sticky. Salvation isn’t about a condition of justice. If it were only that, then we have missed so much. Salvation dictates that we are resurrected. Resurrection isn’t about Jesus died and rose again. If it were only that, then we have missed so much. As Paul said in Romans 6, we have been buried with Christ in His death so that we, also, could be raised again by the same glory of the Father.
We have been raised. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. It is in the new creation that God is able to give the spirit generously. It is the generosity of His pouring out His Spirit that we are able to experience this higher glory.
The face of Moses shone. It exerted light. But the light would eventually fade. We have light inside of us that never fades. Though our faces may not shine with brightness, our eyes and our souls and our spirits and our consciences and our minds and our hearts exert such light that cannot be put out. We have the greater glory because we are able to experience what Moses couldn’t. Moses wanted God in intimacy. He was only able to have so much. We can experience Christ in ways Moses couldn’t.
Our relationship to Christ and the depth of it is to the exact degree that we are humble and naked before Him. Humility doesn’t mean that we degrade ourselves and say, “I’m just a worm who is worthless without you…” Humility in this sense is the ability to accept and embrace who we are (faults and merits). This is to be truly human. Our humanity is based out of how much we’re willing to be who we are. We discover our own personalities and unique characteristics the deeper we open up in Christ.
We both discover our shem and live from it when we are disposed to Christ in ultimate degrees. The further we distance ourselves from this openness and nakedness, the less we know ourselves and the less we believe God. Think of Peter. Peter stepped out of the boat and walked on water. He looked at the waves and the entire storm around him and started to sink. He then cried out for help. Jesus asks him, “Why did you doubt?” Who did Peter doubt? Jesus wasn’t sinking. Peter doubted himself. Jesus never doubted him, but Peter couldn’t believe God’s opinion of who Peter is. Thus he sank.
Burning Bush
Lets back up to Exodus 3. There is this story where Moses meets God for the first time. This bush is burning, but the bush is not consumed. What happens at the burning bush is incredible.
God tells Moses that the ground he is standing on is holy ground. Why? Is it that God is there? Yes. Is it that the ground was not holy (in other words common) before? No. The realization is that God is present, and the place suddenly is a holy thing. It is suddenly a sacred moment. Jacob had a similar instance. He has this dream of a ladder that angels are ascending and descending. When he wakes up, he says, “God has been here, and I didn’t even know it.” It wasn’t so much that God is now here, and so it is holy. It is the realization that God has always been there all along, and now this is a sacred moment.
Moses takes his shoes off. God then talks to Moses about how He is going to send Moses to Pharaoh. God is going to deliver His people because “He has heard the cry.” There are all of these little insights to God’s character and His personal thoughts and opinions. Moses, after hearing all of this, and after having that moment that he doesn’t believe that he can actually do this, he asks God a profound question.
“What if the Israelites don’t believe me? What can I tell them that they would believe me?” Actually, that isn’t the question, though it is most commonly translated as this. Moses asks, “What is your name, that I may tell the Israelites who sent me?” What is it that Moses just asked? With the information you now know, what did Moses just ask?
God? What is your character? If we were to take away all of the flesh, meat, and tendons, then what would be the bare bones core of who you are? Let me tell R.C. Sproul: God did not say “holy, holy, holy.” God did not give a list. He didn’t say, “I am infinite; I am omnipotent; I am omnipresent; I am love; I am light; I am the creator; I am King of kings; I am Lord of lords; I am righteous; I am merciful; I am gracious.”
What is it that God says when He is asked about the very core of who He was? God replies with “yohd hey waw hey…” There are a few ways this is taken. One way is that this is the Hiphil third-person masculine form of the verb HWH, which means to be. The Hiphil conjugation is a causative conjugation. The way it would be translated as is, “He who causes to be.” He who creates – the Creator.
This is an obvious reference to the creator and life giver. But there is another idea. I’ve heard the idea that the yohd, the hey, and the waw are actually breathing letters in Hebrew. When we breathe, our breathing sounds like (inhale) yohd (exhale) hey (inhale) waw (exhale) hey. This is a direct link to ruach. This divine breath or spirit or energy at the center of the fabric of the universe is emanating within us through our very breathing.
What would it mean that when Moses asks God about His name that God then points back to the beginning? He points to the ancient force that is within the universe. He points to the energy that gives life and order and light and beauty. (Can you imagine the irony of all the atheists who in every breath they speak that there is no God, but in every breath they breathe that God is their every breathe?) But that isn’t all He points to. There is another way of viewing this name.
The Hebrew language is made up of symbols. The symbols evolved. Before we see our Modern Hebrew letters in history, we saw pictographs. Archaeologists have discovered that ancient Hebrew letters (which Moses would have used) were pictures, and then it adopted the Aramaic script sometime after Jesus. The yohd is actually the picture of a hand (the forearm with hand attached). The hey is a picture of a man with his hands raised. The waw is the picture of a peg or a nail. Together we have hand/forearm, man, hand/forearm, nail.
This takes on a deeper meaning (and maybe a more translatable meaning) when we see what the pictograph letters mean. The definition of the yohd is “to work, throw, worship, hand, or arm.” The definition of the hey is “to look, reveal, or breathe.” The definition of the waw is “to add, secure, hook, peg, or nail.” And finally, the final hey also means “to look, reveal, or breathe.”
What we have here is a sentence in the letters. What does the sentence say? (Should I ask for a drum roll?) Behold (hey) the hand (yohd); behold (hey) the nail (waw).
Behold the hand; behold the nail…
Behold the hand; behold the nail. Did God really just say that at His core, when you strip away all of the other stuff that comes from His core, He is Jesus Christ dying on the cross? Did Moses even catch that one?