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January 9, 2005 "What's in a Name." Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson January 9, 2005
We pray that Your spirit would touch each heart and mind. May we would hear what You want us to hear applied to each life and each situation. We do pray, in Your presence and Holy name. Amen.
The great Oliver Wendell Holmes went walking one day from his summer home. As he walked, a little girl joined him. They walked along for awhile and finally the little girl said, “I have to go home now.” And Oliver Wendell Holmes looked at the little girl and said, “Well, when your momma asks you where you’ve been, tell her you have been with Oliver Wendell Holmes.” The little girl, without blinking an eye, looked at him and said, “And when you go home, tell your mother that you’ve been with Mary Susanna Brown.”
What is in a name? Much. What’s the first thing we ask when we meet someone? What’s your name? Because so often our name means something. It certainly meant something to this little girl, she didn’t know who Oliver Wendell Holmes was, but she knew who she was. Sometimes names have a meaning. In Biblical times we see how names were given to people. Abram meant “father” and he was given the name of Abraham, “father of many” which was sort of funny since he only had a couple of sons, but God does have a sense of humor. Or Peter in the Hebrew or Aramaic – Cephus – which means “rock” but his first name was Simon. My name is Christopher, it means “bearer of Christ.” I have to admit I’m kind of glad about that. I may not have been a pastor or Christian at all; but I’m glad it turned out that way. And my name means something for me. Names do mean something. Especially with God.
As I said, I am starting a series of sermons and I am going to talk about God and the names, or descriptions a little more appropriately I guess, that He has in the Scriptures. I want to be careful about this; I’m not talking about all of the names of God we have all over the world. I’m talking about particularly in the Bible. In our time we are kind of confused because we have used the generic term for God and think that’s His name – God. But in Jesus’ time and before, everybody wanted to know which god because every god had a name. And we lose the richness of finding out who God is because He had a very specific name and we are going to talk about the most basic name next week – the name of Yahweh or the “God who is.” But what’s interesting in the Bible is that we find that God reveals Himself at times according to the need of the people. When Haggar was kicked out of Abraham’s camp, she wandered around and was starving and she discovered the God who sees her. Abraham himself and Sarai knew God as El-Shaddai, the Almighty One, who provided a son. Later He would be the God who provides and we are going to talk about that, the God of profitus. We’re going to talk about God as El-Shaddai as well, the Almighty One. And by the way, where was He when this big wave hit and other things in the world. Is He really almighty? Well yes. What does that mean? We’re going to be talking about the God who is a shepherd to David and to us as well. And of course the God who saves, Jesus himself. Many names of God. But again, I want to be careful. Maybe as a teaser, we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the controversy of that. Is, after all, the God of the Muslims the same God as the God of the Bible? Well on one level yeah – the generic one. The generic name for God in the Bible, and there is nothing wrong with this, it’s used all through the Scripture, is El or in the Greek, Theos. But the Aramaic for El is A – and we have Allah. So on one level, yes, the same God. But the specifics, no. We’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about that.
You see, in our time, we’ve gotten all messed up. We’ve come to believe as the anthropologists talk about it, that because human beings are religious creatures, human beings all across the world have created thousands of religions, if you will – thousands of faiths. And since the search for God is man-upward, obviously all of them can’t be altogether true. So what’s the best answer? Well, for some people it’s taking this piece and this piece and this piece and this piece and putting them together somehow as though God’s “who He is” is a democracy. But it’s not a democracy and I want to tell you something very serious here. It may sound a little bit harsh and I don’t mean it to be that, but on one level it doesn’t matter what you believe about God. It doesn’t matter what I believe about God. You see what I believe about God and what you believe about God has no effect on God whatsoever. God is who He is. We don’t have to exist and God will still be around. It doesn’t matter. This idea of going bottom-up to find out who God is leads to a dead-end. What matters is what God says about Himself. What has He revealed? Now, it is true that we have to decide which revelation is correct. We have to look at the evidence. That’s another sermon, that’s another story. But yes, that’s part of it, it’s true, no doubt about it. But it’s from the top down; God showing.
I would argue that the Bible is almost unique in presenting a God who actually has conversations with human beings on a regular basis, who reveals Himself as a God who sees. Do you have trouble? Do you think no one knows what’s going on in your life? God sees you. Do you need something? God is the one that provides. Do you need a friend? God is your shepherd. Do you need to be saved? I’d like to introduce you to Jesus – He is the God who saves. And on and on it goes. God telling us who He is – through the prophets, through the Scriptures, through history. It’s more than just the world itself. Yes, there is what theologians call general revelation. And the Bible talks about that; a general revelation being the stars, the Earth. All the things around us proclaim that something made this. Things don’t make themselves, contrary to some science books. Things don’t make themselves, it’s not possible. So we learn a lot about God just by looking at creation, it’s wonderful. At the same time, if you pay attention to the news, if we only had creation, we might think that this God is a little bit on the capricious side, if not on the mean side, if not on the evil side. After all, what do we do with 30,000 children and 200,000 people – maybe more, who knows what the numbers are, I don’t know, it’s amazing, incredible. But you know that’s a drop in the bucket, it seems like every 5 years we have a genocide incident in which a million are killed in a much worse way. Where is this God, what’s He doing? If we just looked at the world as itself it wouldn’t be enough, we need special revelation. And that’s what we have in the Scripture, telling us specifically who God is and what He does about evil and what He’s doing about evil, what He is going to do. Specific revelation, special revelation in Jesus Christ. We need that to tell us more. We need to know His name. So, yes, we’re going to talk about the names of God over the next few weeks. And talk about the real God who has a name, not just God. That’s okay, but we need more. More than just this generic piece.
There’s a few things that I want you to get out of this; I want you to understand at its most basic level that God has a passion for you, that God has a passion for you and me and all of us to know Him personally, to know Him intimately. Now how do I know that? Well, 101, the Bible tells me so. Just read the first three, few pages of Genesis. Now a lot of us look at that account and say, “That’s just mythology, we don’t need to pay attention to that.” You’ve got to pay attention to it, there’s just so much there. And you know what’s there? A lot of interesting little things that are confusing, at least at first, like “God was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” That’s kind of hard for me to imagine, the God of the universe walking in a garden in the cool of the day. Does He really feel temperature? I’m not sure about that, but the picture is something else altogether. It’s like a man or person coming home from work at the end of the day and going for a walk in the evening seeking to go to his neighbor’s porch and have a chat. And who are the neighbors? Adam and Eve – a very personal view. Now, yes, of course a little later we read the bad news. Adam and Eve sin and they are driven out of the presence of God. And so ever since then we do not have a face-to-face experience with God, do we? After all, God is holy and we are not. God can’t change His character or His being, but the whole story of the Bible is God trying to restore this relationship and we read, in the end, that we don’t know what God looks like but we will see Him face to face. I don’t know about you but I look forward to that; but part of me doesn’t, the simple part which will be gone, I hope, because I want to see God face to face because it’s like “Oh my”. But the deepest part of me really wants that badly, to see my God. Wow. And that’s the promise, the restoration from that and in the meantime we have a personal relationship with God. We don’t see God and sometimes it’s hard but it’s something that develops and something that grows. I want you to see that more as we go through this.
I also want to help you and help me deal with some of the weasels in our lives. We have weasels of doubt, doubt, we all have doubts. Every one of us looks at things like this tsunami and the things that happen and we wonder what God is up to. Every one of us has doubts, is it really true? Is God going to be there after I die? Is the Lord going to be there meeting me, we have doubts sometimes. I hope we can deal with those doubts, a little bit. I hope we can also deal with the sense of guilt that we have. I know that some of you sit out there, I know that you do, when I say that God loves you and wants to know you, you’re sitting there going “I don’t believe that because you don’t know me. You don’t know that God can’t love me because you don’t know how bad I am.” Well, it’s true, I don’t know your particular situation but God does. After all, God is the God who sees everything. God is the God who hears everything. God is the God who knows everything. And there’s a name for that. And God is the God who forgives and saves everyone who asks. I don’t know what’s in your heart, I know what’s in mine and it’s not pretty. It’s getting prettier after 25 years of being a Christian. It’s never going to get there, the way I’d like it to be, but I hope it gets a little better. But that’s why I trust God, so I don’t have to trust in me. We need to deal with the weasel of self-sufficiency too. Because on the other hand there are people who know they don’t deserve it but other people just think they can handle most of life themselves. I think the modern world breeds that kind of person, you know we go about, we’re successful in our business, we do that and we think – we believe in God, but God is there sort of as an appendage. He’s there when we need Him from time to time but I can take care of myself, thank you very much. For those of us like that we need to learn that the Lord is Adonai, the Lord, the King, the Almighty one. We need to get rid of some of the weasels…after all it is Lent, almost. It’s a good time to examine ourselves, a good time to repent, come to the God who loves us, who wants us to know Him so much. That I encourage you to do, learn about God, learn about yourself, grow closer to Him. Let us pray.
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