God's Name

It's God's story; we are all but characters written by His divine pen. 

Remember in the Exodus when God got angry with His people? Moses pled with Him not to destroy them in the wilderness. Not because they were somehow worthy of the mercy, but because of what it would do to God's name for the nation of Israel to vanish. The whole world, Moses told the Lord, would be talking about 1) how God brought His people into the wilderness just to destroy them and 2) how He was wholly incapable of redeeming them from their wickedness. 

If God were to act the way that human behavior seems to demand, His name would not be great among the nations. It's that simple. 

So what we have is a story in which God is building His own name and reputation. A story in which He is using human beings to magnify His glory. A story in which He is using us to reveal Him so that all the world will see and hear and know the goodness of the Lord. 

How's that going? 

This is where it gets good. 

Because when you read God's story, one of the things you notice real quick is that His story is our stories. He names us by name. He tells, in depth, the stories of sinners (and a few saints), priests and prophets, kings and servants, a ragtag band of brothers. Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Simon, Andrew, James, John, Judas, Paul. Timothy has a couple of books of his own. Obscure folks like Titus and Philemon. Elijah and Elisha. Naaman. 

We could go on forever naming the names from the Bible, telling their stories. Jephthah. Gideon. Deborah. Need we go on? Even the non-religious, non-believing world knows many of these names and stories. 

And yet, the world isn't talking about Moses. The world isn't talking about Peter. The world isn't talking about John. As much as the world owes its faith to Paul's missionary journeys, the world isn't even talking about Paul. 

The world is talking about God. 

He spends His story naming names and talking about us and demonstrating His goodness through our names, and it's doing exactly what He intended it to do - making His name great (Psalm 138:2). He's given us all of these human characters to relate to, to identify with, so that through them, we might relate to and identify with Him. 

How's that going? It's going great. 

We're talking about Him, aren't we? Of all the names in all the stories in all the Bible and all the world, we're talking about exactly three: Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. 

Nailed it.