Names, everyone has at least one. My last name is Rivera, it says something about my ethnic background (Puerto Rican on my father’s side). We use it to connect the whole family to the RBC. My first name is Ralph but since that was my father’s name, I was called by my middle name: Andrew. But then some people like to give you a nickname. I was given many over the years: Andy, Peach Fuzz, Hudson, River, “A”, and Big “A” just to name a few (let’s not ask why). I really didn’t like the first one so I gave myself one—Drew—hoping it would end the nickname craze but no, someone decided I needed to be called Drewberry! Go figure!
Today we tend to name people mostly because we like the sound of the name or sometimes because we want to honor a person in our lives or our past. We gave our kids names we liked yet we also used my wife’s middle name for my daughter’s middle name, one son his grandfather’s name as a middle name, and the other son we gave a middle name of Graham in honor of Billy Graham. Some will use biblical names in the hope a love for the LORD and spiritual matters will follow. Most times it is a combination of things which lead to a name including a compromise between mom and dad.
Yet in biblical times, especially in the OT days, a name carried a meaning and importance. It may be a character the parents wished the child to emulate, or it may have been related to the circumstances of their birth, such the first birth: Cain. Cain sounds like the Hebrew word for “gotten”. Eve upon Cain’s birth said, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD” (Gen 4:1).
When God reveals a name for Himself, it is more than a label, more than a nice sounding moniker. God is seeking to tell us something about Himself. Why are there so many names for God? Because our God is great and expansive, just one name would not work to give us an adequate understanding of His nature, a 1,000 names only begin to inform us of His glory.
In a continuing series of posts, we will seek to look at the names God uses to describe Himself in the Bible. Remember the Bible is God’s Word so even when it is someone else using a particular name for God, it is God Himself speaking it into His Word.
We hope to cover all the names of all three persons of the Trinity. So, this will take some time, but we are in no hurry. We will cover one at a time (yet in some cases we may look at a group of related names such as EL and Elohim) giving the name, its meaning, and the biblical references where it is used. Most importantly, we will seek to understand what a particular name adds to our understanding of God.
While we will gain insight and knowledge, the goal is the deepen our understanding of God and to glorify Him more fully.
We will be covering this periodically between the other posts and series of posts we publish. We hope to keep the blog of interest to all who follow us; thus, we don’t want to get tied down to one topic for too long. We will seek to mix the diverse topics we cover to meet the needs of all.
Until the next time we see you here at CultivatingFaith.org, God Bless! #CultivatingFaithOrg