Encountering the Great I Am

Chapter 2
God’s Divine Name

So now that we know how important names are to God, you might ask yourself, Why doesn’t God have a name? I had never thought of it before, but imagine my surprise when in February 2011, I stumbled on the fact that the God I worship does indeed have a divine name. Who knew? For my entire life, my prayers had always started with “Dear God” or “Dear Lord.”
It’s interesting how I even came upon God’s name. One day in February I was on a biblical prophecy website, and the preacher kept referring to God as Yahweh. In fact, he never referred to him as God or Lord. I became very intrigued by this, so of course I had to find out why. After a little research throughout my Bible, here is what I found out. In Genesis 32:29, after Jacob wrestled with God throughout the night, we see Jacob asking God, “Tell me, I pray, your name.” God replied, “Why is it that you ask my name?” In other words, Jacob was asking the God he worshiped, “Who are you?”
It’s not an uncommon question. In fact, the question, “What is your name?” is one that humans ask each other quite often. When we become interested in the person we have just been talking to, we have a desire to know who he or she is. In Jacob’s case, after wrestling with God for an entire night, his question was normal, especially since God had just given Jacob his new name—Israel. Placing a name with a person’s face helps us to start identifying the character of that individual. Once we have a name, then we can start asking other questions about that person, and a relationship begins to develop. It’s almost as if our individual names are how we categorize in our brain the specifics about all the people we know in our lives. I can’t imagine relationships ever developing if we just addressed people as, “Hey you,” every time we saw them. If we didn’t have names to file away important details about individuals, I would think our relationships would become very confusing.
Because names are so important, Moses asked God the very same question that Jacob asked him. After God appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush, God instructed Moses to lead the Jewish people out of Egypt. It was at that time that Moses and God had the following conversation: Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them” (Exodus 3:13)? Keep in mind that Moses had been living in the desert, raising sheep and a family, for the entire forty years since he left Egypt. So the day that God spoke out of a burning bush to Moses was far from an ordinary day. Nothing like this had ever happened to Moses. If I were Moses, I would also want to know who was speaking to me, considering he was probably having a hard time believing what he was seeing in the first place. So God, who also knows the importance of names, replied to Moses.

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exodus 3:14–15)

You see, God does have a name! It is a divine name, given to Moses by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His divine name is YHWH, and per his instructions to Moses, he wanted to be known by this name for all generations. The fact that God has a divine name was news to me, even though I grew up in a Christian home, went to a Christian school until sixth grade, and completed both First Communion and Confirmation. Over the most recent ten years of my life I had also been going to church regularly and had participated in in-depth Bible studies. And yet, no one had ever told me that God has a divine name. I began wondering if any of my friends knew this important piece of information. Apparently, God’s name was not being passed down from generation to generation as commanded, or surely I would have learned of it before now. Upon asking other Christians over the next year if they knew God had a divine name, the overwhelming response was, “No, what is it?” So my next question was, “What went wrong?” and then, “Why don’t we call God by his given name?” I thought to myself that God wouldn’t have given his name to Moses if he didn’t want us to know it and furthermore address him by his given name.
When I first looked at these Scripture verses, I discovered that my version of the Bible didn’t say, “YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” My version says, “The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” The word “LORD” was in all capital letters and next to it was the number of a footnote that referred me to the bottom of the page. The footnote read, “The word LORD, when spelled with capital letters, stands for the divine name YHWH.” To say the least, I was very confused at this point …