Four-Letter Word

This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture that rejects fear and champions faith. It discusses the name of God as "I Am" and how Jesus identifies himself with this name. It explores the multidimensional nature of God and the different aspects of his character. It emphasizes that God is objective and exists regardless of human theology or desires. It also highlights the importance of conforming to God's righteous standards and the choice we have to follow him or not. It concludes by emphasizing God's mercy and the transformative power of Jesus in our lives. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of His word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to His perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Matthew 14.26-27 When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It's a ghost! And they cried out for fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, Cheer up! I am! Don't be afraid. What a statement! This verse, and others like it, are fast becoming one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's so full of meaning. First of all, Jesus walking on the water was a fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy testimony of who God was. Job 9.8 says of who God is, He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea. This is something none of them had seen before. They'd lived and worked on this lake for years. And in the midst of a storm, in which they believed their lives were in danger, they may not have recalled the book of Job. Many lives had been lost on this water. There were even legends of sea monsters living in its depths. Think like the Loch Ness monster or Ogopogo. They had no idea what was happening and had thoroughly embraced fear. Jesus calls out to them as they're fearful and yelling and announces who He is in the clearest way He could. He refers to Himself by the special name of God. Now, the four-letter capital YHWH is the name of God. In English, we translate it directly as I AM. It appears over 300 times in the English Bible, usually mentioning an aspect of the Lord. I AM your shield, your exceedingly great reward. Genesis 15-7. I AM God Almighty. Genesis 17-1. The God of Abraham, your father. Genesis 26-24. With you. Also Genesis 26-24. With you and will keep you wherever you go. Genesis 28-15. The God of Bethel. Genesis 31-13. And I AM who that I AM. Exodus 3-14. And so on and so on and so on. That's the English-speaking Bible. Now, in the Hebrew, however, that's where it gets interesting. In Hebrew, the name is most often printed as YHWH. It is in the Old Testament 6,828 times. It is frequently translated to English as Adonai. But the four-letter YHWH is the true name. YHWH. Now, the phonetic pronunciation of that is where the English Bible gets the word Jehovah. You'll notice it's all consonants with the vowel markings left out. Now, they did that so that those who were not true Israelites couldn't profane the Holy Name, which they did after the Babylonian exile, I think, in the 6th century BCE, or at least definitely by the 3rd. Now, these four letters form the root meaning to be. Now, some translate the name as He who is or He who brings being into being. I like that one. Both of which are appropriate and confirmed multiple times through Scripture. Now, with the root to be, in that root, there's also a future tense to it. So, it's a He who will be. Now, two other translation attempts I have seen are He who is present to act usually but not only in salvation. And I, and no other God, am. Now, none of these English translations quite capture the full essence of who God is. But I think I am serves the best. Because God is an objective God. He has a reality completely independent of the human mind. He exists in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers. There are a million different ways that He is perceivable to humans. If we will only come toward Him with belief. Hebrews 11, 6. God is not subjective. He's not modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background. He is not conditioned by our personal mental characteristics or states. He does not depend on a human mind to be. What we feel or think does not affect what and who He is or what He requires. We may think God is many things, faces, or names. But God is what He is because He is. Regardless of human theology or desire for a different religion or path. Religions are of humankind. In that the great minds of humanity are correct. Religion is man-made. But God isn't religion. Religion is subjective. God is objective. He exists. Period. God is a living God. The Lord God Almighty is also a multidimensional God. He's a multidimensional being. The Trinity is three people in one person, which is beyond our understanding. Everything we use to explain or understand it is weak and incomplete. They are distinct personalities, able to think their own thoughts, unknown to each other. But they're also the same person and united completely and absolutely. To our minds, it is completely possible while being totally impossible at the same time. In recent years, though, fiction writers have come across the best understanding of God that I've seen thus far. You'll find it in science fiction and comic books. How often in the last 20 years have we been entertained by the concept of multiple universes crossing into each other? By having four or more different versions of the same individual having to work together to save everything. John Smith from this universe is a truck driver. In that one, he's an opera singer. In that one, he's a student of martial arts. And in that other one, he's a linguist of ancient cultures. God's kind of like that. Different facets existing independent of each other, but connected together at the same time. With what happens to one affecting what happens to the other. Granted, this is a very weak shadow of the truth, but it's about as close to something the human mind can grasp that I've ever come across. That's why we have faith. That's why God gave us faith, so we can just believe. Now, God has many names. Each one embracing a different aspect of who he is. A different facet. A different dimension of the nature of God. Jehovah Rapha, the Lord that heals. Jehovah Yaira, the Lord will provide. Elohim, judge and creator, etc., etc., etc. While those are aspects or offices of God and not really proper names, they show us that God is a complex individual. That he can meet us where we are, wherever we are. No matter what you're going through as a human being, there's an aspect of God who's right there ready to meet you. An individual who's three individuals, but also one. As I said, the human mind is limited here. And I look forward to a fully renewed and resurrected body whose mind is more capable of understanding the nature of God as it gets revealed over eternity to us. And all these aspects of God, all these offices of the Lord God Almighty that he inhabits in three people that are one, as he interacts with his creation, are what are wrapped into and around the name, I Am. Jesus identifying himself with this name while walking on water in the midst of the storm that was threatening to kill these men is a powerful image. And must have startled these men in ways we can barely comprehend. There is little in our experience like that. Yet, we get to have experiences like that. Holy Spirit lives inside us. Jesus has promised to never leave or forsake us. We get I Am in and around us every day. I mean, sure, he's not striding across our bathwater. But in a more real way, we have him presenting himself to us open-handed, open-armed. Speaking, teaching, correcting, and abiding in us and for us and with us. It's a wonderful, awe-inspiring thing that should well up within all of us a reverence that defies description. God with us. The Lord God Almighty exists. He never changes. He has everything in himself and created all things through himself. Most importantly, we must conform to him and not him to us. Always. We don't have to agree or understand. Righteousness is righteous whether we participate in it or not. It exists because God is righteous. His standards are his standards because they're the requirement. No judgment. No vicious condemnation. No beating us over the head. It simply is. We can seek to follow him or not. It's our choice. But our choice won't change the truth that his righteous standards are the standards of existence. We can say we don't agree, that we don't feel like that, that we weren't made according to that, that we think this and that other thing, that all paths lead to God. We can say, think, and believe all of that. We can be wrong. We would be wrong. His truth doesn't change as our society changes. His truth doesn't change as our feelings change. His truth doesn't change as we reap as a species what we've sown as a species. We can get in his yard or we can choose to stay in darkness. We can accept his hand and enter into his kingdom or we can choose to walk away into hell. It's our choice. Not his. Ours. Not his doing, wanting, or will. Ours. Yours and mine. The truly great thing is that God is merciful. He gives us the grace and faith for us to believe in him. He gave us Jesus so that we could be saved, so that we could be transformed into a new creature, to leave the kingdom of ignorance and enter the kingdom of knowledge with Jesus' righteous spirit as our own. He has solved all of the problems that we make. Jesus tells him himself as he walks on the water because God can stride on the waters and because of what Jesus declares, I am. Never forget it. Jesus is. Our daily affirmation of God's love is Colossians 2, 6-15. Jesus is fully God. He cut off our sins as a circumcision and threw them away and raised us to life in him. He made us alive in him. After removing our sins so that they no longer exist. More than that, so that it is like they never existed in the first place. Jesus is our all. Praise and thank him today for all that he has done for us and to us out of love for us. What amazing love he has for us. As we close, remember that you have birth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today, God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love There is no end to the things about you that he loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4, 9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us that God has sent his only born son into the world so that we might live through him. And this is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin. And it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because he first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.