Faithbase

Welcome to Thinking About the Bible. Today we're thinking about the name Yahweh, and it's common to use the name Jehovah in place of Yahweh, or at least it used to be. The reason for that is that the Jewish scholars, the Hebrew scholars, were loathe to use the name of God Yahweh, and so they would often use Adonai in place of Yahweh, so that his name would not be pronounced. It was too sacred to pronounce. It's kind of a superstition, frankly, but when the vowel pointing was added to the Hebrew text around 300 BC, the vowel pointing from Adonai was used for Yahweh, and it was therefore rendered Jehovah. Now there's the, in the original language, the Hebrew has no vowels, and so this this pointing was a pronunciation aid, I guess is really what you would say, and so when that custom was carried over, the vowel pointing was used from another word, and so Yahweh is rendered Jehovah. Now I should also say we don't really know how that name was pronounced originally, thousands of years ago, just like we mentioned when we talked about the name of Jesus, but we don't really know. We just know that in the original Hebrew there were these letters without the vowels, these consonants, Yahweh, and in seminary that's how they always wanted to say it, Yahweh. But it's also interesting to note that when the Septuagint was, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that happened about 200 BC, that translation was was put together, and that custom of avoiding the name of Yahweh was carried over, and in this place was the Greek term for Lord, which further, in an interesting aspect of that, is the fact that in the New Testament, the New Testament writers, I think very consciously applied the term Lord that had been used in place of Yahweh in the in the translation of the Scriptures into the Greek. They applied the term Lord to Jesus, and we'll talk about that a little later. We're actually going to talk about the term Lord later in this series, so we'll see how that ties into Jesus. So Yahweh, what does it mean? That's the real question here that we want to discuss. What does Yahweh mean? And the linguistic scholars, the theologians, they have their views, but the truth is no one really has a sound, apart from what the Scripture tells us, which we're going to talk about in just a second. They don't really have a good understanding of what Yahweh means, and some of the theories are kind of kooky, if you ask me, but I think the best way to understand the meaning of Yahweh is to look to the Scripture, obviously, and in Exodus 3.14, this is from the literal standard version, and God says to Moses, I am that which I am. He also says, thus you say to the sons of Israel, I am has sent me to you. And then later in Exodus 6, God says to Moses that, you know, the patriarchs knew me by one name, but now I want to affirm Yahweh as the name that you should refer to me as, God says this. And so God is self-existent, and I think that's exactly what Yahweh means, the self-existent one. I am that I am. I am who I am, and God is the self-existent one. He was not created. Nothing brought him into being, but he brought everything into being. And so when we think about the name Yahweh, that's what I hope we can think about today, is that he is the self-existent one. This is the all- powerful being, God, Yahweh, whom we worship, whom we have relationship with in Jesus Christ. And this is an amazing and absolutely mind-blowing that we would have relationship with this self-existent God who has been here from all eternity, and will be here for all eternity. And yet we have relationship with that mighty and amazing, incredible being, Yahweh, the self-existent one. So think about that today, that you and I in Jesus Christ have that relationship with Yahweh, the self-existent one. God bless you. We'll see you again tomorrow.