Thousands of years ago, at the foot of a mountain in a desert land, God revealed his forever name.

Appearing to Moses in a bush that would not burn up, God announced:

I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Ex. 3:7-8)

Then God said:

So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt. (Ex. 3:10)

Stunned, Moses raised many objections and questions. Among them was this:

Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” Then what shall I tell them? (Ex. 3:13)

Moses asked for a name. God gave him two. But we can easily miss that in our English translations.

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘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.’

“This is my name forever,
    the name you shall call me
    from generation to generation.” (Ex. 3:14-15)

I AM. How simple. How profound. HE IS. Eternally, he exists. He lives. Uncreated, he had no beginning. Indestructible, he will have no end. Unchanging, he will always be as he has always been.

The LORD. This name – that we don’t even see as a name – appears more than 6,000 times in the Bible. We’ll spend the rest of this post exploring it.

I am the LORD. God did not say this phrase in this passage. But he did say it more than 150 times in the Old Testament. You’ll see it several times in the Scriptures below.

When the God named “I AM” and “the LORD” says, “I am the LORD,” it’s especially emphatic. As if he’s signing his full name – or speaking from a burning bush. He’s signaling us to stop and pay special attention, to see what he wants to reveal.

And he does want to reveal himself to his people. Repeatedly he makes statements like these:

By this you will know that I am the LORD. (Ex. 7:17)
Then you will know that I am the LORD your God. (Ex. 16:12)

When God uses his inscrutable name

Say to the Israelites, “The LORD … has sent me to you.” This is my name.

Where we read an impersonal title, “the LORD,” God revealed his personal Name – the Name no one today knows how to pronounce.

The Jews considered that Name so sacred they would write only the consonants, transliterated YHVH.¹

Instead of speaking the Name aloud, they would say Adonai (the Lord) or HaShem (the Name), or sometimes they would say the four consonants as we might say a person’s initials: Yud Heh Vav Heh (pronounced yude heh vahv heh).

Today, this inscrutable Name is sometimes rendered Jehovah or Yahweh. In most English Bible translations, it’s rendered “the LORD” (all caps). But it is not a title. It is the Name by which God most emphatically seeks to be known. It is the Name that most profoundly reveals who he is.

Our Lord never does anything randomly. Whenever he uses a particular name for himself in his Word, he has a reason.

All of his names reveal something of who he is. Most identify a specific aspect of his nature and his ways.

But this Name is unique in its ability to reveal whatever aspects of himself God wants to make known in a certain context, at a certain time. When it appears in Scripture, it’s like a beacon, signaling us to notice what we see in the text that surrounds the Name. It draws us to open the eyes of our heart, and to seek and encounter HIM.

For YHVH is the Name God has linked in the strongest way possible to his covenant relationship with his people.

When God says his “full name”

Moses went to Pharaoh, and announced:

“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Let my people go …’”

Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go.” (Ex. 5:1-2)

Pharaoh did not want to know the LORD. And he was not about to free a whole nation of slave labor. To keep the people too downtrodden to flee, he made their work crushingly hard; and their abuse, even more brutal.

Moses returned to the LORD and said … “Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble on this people, and you have not rescued your people at all.” (Ex. 5:22, 23)

In answer, God repeatedly reminded Moses of his “full name,” his forever, covenant Name. In his words to his people long ago, what does he reveal about himself?

I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself fully known to them. I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they resided as foreigners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant.

Therefore, say to the Israelites: “I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.

“Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.”

How does the unchanging One, YHVH, relate to his covenant people?

• He hears our cries, and he cares deeply about our bondage and distress.
• He comes to free us from what has enslaved us.
• He works to bring us into genuine, lasting relationship with him.
• He remembers his good promises, and keeps them.
• He gives us good gifts, including an inheritance he has stored up for us.

And that’s just skimming the surface of five mentions of YHVH, out of more than 6,000.

Later, God said to Moses more than once:

The Egyptians will know that I am the LORD. (Ex. 7:5; 14:4, 18)

God can and does reveal himself to people who are not his. He shows them that he alone is God. He shows them his faithfulness to his people. And he makes the way for those who aren’t his people to be his people.²

When he must, YHVH reveals himself as the God who judges and calls to account. He judges those who are his people, as well as those who are not. As we press in to know him, we see how slow to anger he is. Only after appealing to his rebellious people for generations did God cry:

I will not look on you with pity; I will not spare you. I will surely repay you for your conduct and for the detestable practices among you. Then you will know that I am the LORD. (Ezek. 7:4)

When he does impose severe consequences, his anger is righteous; his grief, great; his judgments, just. And still, he shows people who he is. And still, he calls to anyone whose heart has not totally hardened to (re)turn to him.

Always, his joy and delight lie in making his goodness known to and through those who delight in him, those who are faithfully his:

The trees will yield their fruit and the ground will yield its crops; the people will be secure in their land. They will know that I am the Lord, when I break the bars of their yoke and rescue them from the hands of those who enslaved them. (Ezek. 34:27)

Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes. (Ezek. 36:23)

Since God revealed his new name

In the first chapter of the New Testament, God introduces a new personal name that reveals and fulfills the old.

Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matt. 1:20-21)

The name we know as Jesus transliterates the Hebrew term, Yehoshua. It means “YHVH is salvation” or “YHVH saves.” The LORD of the Old Testament has made himself known even more fully in the New. He has worked in an even more dramatic way, to free people from every tribe and tongue and nation and to bring us to himself.

As an adult, Jesus affirmed his other name from Exodus 3, when he told the Pharisees:

You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I AM, you will indeed die in your sins.

When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I AM and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me.

Very truly I tell you, … before Abraham was born, I AM!” (John 8:23-24, 28, 58).

As we press in to know the LORD Jesus, he shows us how Father, Son and Spirit relate to us individually, and to all who have entered the new covenant in his blood.

How do we know his name?

With our minds, we can only guess at how to pronounce the intimate, covenant Name by which God identified himself to Moses. On the flip side, we may be very familiar with the name of Jesus, but not know him or his ways at all.

Knowing our Lord by name has nothing to do with calling him by a certain word. It has everything to do with knowing in our inmost being the One to whom that word points.

This Lord, who has called himself YHVH in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New, has determined to present himself so clearly that anyone from any nation can know the truth of who he is:³

And so I will show my greatness and my holiness, and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations. Then they will know that I am the LORD. (Ezek. 38:23)

Yet always, there is so very much more that he wants us to see.

Therefore My people shall know what My name is and what it means; therefore they shall know in that day that I am He who speaks; behold, I AM! (Isa. 52:6 AMPC)

As our lips and our lives declare, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” we his people come to know our God.

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The original version of this post was published October 10, 2011. It quoted verbatim a portion of chapter 6 from We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church. Ten years later, I’ve revised and expanded “God of the covenant Name” into the current post.

See also

• God who loves fiercely
• One who stands in the gap
• I AM the one you seek
• The blessing of the Lord
• The LORD is with you, mighty warrior
• Praying for God
• Recovering and treasuring the forgotten prayer

Footnotes

1. Or JHVH, or YHWH. In most English versions of the Old Testament, the word Lord (not in all caps) translates a different Hebrew word, Adonai, a title for God that does mean “Lord.” ↩︎
2. Indeed, Isaiah 19:19-25 promises a day when the Egyptians will know and worship the LORD. What’s more, all of us “were God’s enemies” before “we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:10). ↩︎
3. See also the flip side of this truth in Romans 1:18-22. ↩︎