Why do We not Say His Name?
I was reading today and I think I may have found an answer to that age old question.
It Is Too Sacred
Many say that we would never want to say the name because it is too sacred to be uttered. The Jews mostly say that in temple. They replace the name of the Creator with Adonai when they see the letters YHVH written plainly in Hebrew.
There is history on a time when owning a Torah was punishable by death as well as the mention of God's name. I wonder who is behind that prohibition of speaking The Name?
In Christianity the name can be spoken but they do not say it much. Why bother? They quote the bibles that have been uniformly written to replace The Name with the words The Lord but it's all good because it is capitalized. We know to whom who we are referring.
This Post
I am not going to argue any of the above nor whether it is right or wrong to pronounce The Name. Things are the way they are today and there are too many opinions to deal with. Everything in this post has been a nagging question and a matter of research for me with no resolution.
Something happened to me as I read The Name over and over in the bible today. I asked myself as I always do, "Why do people fail to call on the name YHVH when the bible clearly says, 'those who call on the name YHVH will be saved.' among countless other passages that seem to urge us to know and use the name of God (which is clearly not "God")
Here's My Morning Today
As I said, I was reading this morning and the question in the title of this post came up. The answer can only be found by looking at what YHVH says and what he does, in other words, we must find out what God would or would not do related to this issue. Isn't that the eternal question? What would God do? Everyone wants to know that. Years ago people were wearing wrist bands and t-shirts that said, "What would Yeshua do?" or "WWJD".
I also believe it is only right to call the man who died for humanity by his real name. Nobody changed Moses' name to Mack or Adam's name to Andy, right?
Moving on. If you know a person, then you would know what they would do. You learn what God would or would not do by what he has or has not done. That is what I was reading about today. I am going to lay out what I was thinking, the title of this post, and how he answered me by what occurred in my reading. I did not choose the reading. It was chosen for me on the day that I started from the beginning. I read cover to cover and today's reading was just the next one to read. Let's take a look at it.
Y'rmiahu 44 - Jeramiah to the name changers.
In the beginning of the chapter the Creator declares bad things to happen to the people and he says why. Then in verse 24, he tells the Jews ( all the people of Judah ), You and your wives have declared with your own mouths and you have fulfilled it with your own hands saying, "we will surely perform our vows that we have made to make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out drink offerings to her.
Then God says, and I'm paraphrasing, then go ahead and do that! I think there might be consequences when God says you can do something that you know you shouldn't do? Read on...
The Creator then swears by his own name that his name will never be spoken or invoked by any Jew. Think about that for a minute.
The chapter goes on, he talks about all the disasters he will bring upon them and how many will die because of them. That he will punish the place, followed by a pronouncement of examples of what he has done to kings and places along with what he will do to the current king, people, and place where the people are. His point is that he is telling them what will happen and what it will b like so that people will see whose word will stand as true! But that is not the topic of this discussion for today. What is important is that he states he is doing all of that so that people everywhere will look and see who's word, or prophecy, stands - the false god's or the Creator's.
If you read the whole chapter you will see a few caveats which limit the disasters and the proclamation to people living in that area at the time. It would seem that it's limited to those who chose to fulfill their promises to another god that doesn't exist rather than to The God that does exist, the God they know.
Many might say, "That doesn't apply to us in this time or to the Jews of this time either!".
Those people might be right and that it did only apply to those people long ago, but what I'm saying in this post is that God's character does show an example where people have lost the right the will or even the ability to speak the name of God -his name is YHVH.
If he said it once, he may say it again or he might have said it again saying, "No Jew will say my name." The point is they don't say The Name. It has been replaced. With God, he need only say things one time and they are true from that point on. He does not need to command things again as do parents whose children do not come when they are called.
Timing was what prompted me to write this post. As I said, I was doing my reading, which is cover to cover through the scriptures and this chapter was next for me to read. While reading it, in Hebrew, and I am seeing the name of God every 15th word or so. I was curious why people don't speakThe Name, especially in the synagogues and in the country which is called by his name. Then I come upon the proclamation that - no Jew will speak his name - and I said to myself "This could be why."
A lot of what God says in a certain time or place is true for that time or place and sometimes even for eternity, but what he says may also be true in a symbolic way or a permanent way or a spiritual way.
Take for example the proclamation by God, to Adam, that in the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die.
One would it expect that the fruit was poisonous and that they would drop dead as anyone would also drop dead today if they ate poisonous fruit. But they didn't drop dead immediately. The meaning was that the choice they made that day would cause them to die, which implies that they never would have died had they not eaten it. The change was permanent as well as applying to the innocence that died the day they ate it (knowing afterwards that they were naked).
What we didn't understand and what they could not have understood is that man was not supposed to die ever. Another thing that they didn't understand was that their children and their children's children would also die. The proclamation had a much more extensive meaning than was realized at the time. It seems like he was just speaking to Adam and Eve, but he was speaking of an eternal beginning of death as a new thing that was started or initiated by their choice.
Could it be that The Name limitation was started in Chapter 44 of Jeremiah?
As to whether this proclamation was just for the people to whom he was speaking or not is irrelevant to this focused question. God exists outside of time. What if the proclamation that the people of Judah, the Jews, now have a limit as to whether they can or cannot speak the name of God. Prior to this time there was no one who ever thought, "Should I speak the name of God?" Everyone just called him by name, and The Name commanded respect and authority.
And Moses asked "Who should I say has sent me?" God answered with his name.
It is quite possible that the people's choice to tell God, "Wait over there, we have to keep the promises that we made to the non-existent queen of heaven!" The king of the universe did not take kindly to those words. And the name controversy started that day.
The ramifications of Adam's choice to disobey echoes on through eternity in that now people die! I have an inkling that the choice to do something for an imagined God and the results thereof also echo on into the future even to the present day, causing all Jewish believers to shy away from speaking the name of God.
The question I always had while reading and seeing YHVH everywhere, then pulling my nose out of the Bible and seeing that no one speaks The Name is, "Why?"
The Name is always replaced with "Lord" or "Adonai" (depending on which religion you are). "When did this become a thing?"
Due to the timing of my question and the answer being predestined to be found moments later while I was reading, I think I found the answer.
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