I’ve been thinking about names lately. Names and their significance, their importance. Obviously Erin and I are expecting a child soon; also, I’ve been thinking about my interactions with Gordon, a man who believes the name of Jehovah has been deliberately removed from many places of the Bible. Names matter.

I find choosing baby names to be an incredibly difficult, even frustrating, thing. Erin and I have been discussing options for our impending arrival, and it has been hard. A name is a huge thing, after all. That child will (probably) carry that name for the rest of his or her life. That name will represent and, to an extent, define the child. And so much goes into the decision – the meaning of the potential names, family and personal history and experience with that name, pronunciation, spelling, even how kids on the schoolyard might twist the name.

Of course, history is full of – shall we say – “unusual” names. God once told Hosea to name his daughter Lo-ruhami, which meant “she had not received mercy”; his son was called Lo-ammi, or “not my people.” Perhaps the most unusual name God ever commanded for a child is found in Isaiah 8, where Isaiah’s son is called Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Besides being a mouthful, the name referred to the impending judgment on the nations of Israel and Syria. It means, “The spoil speeds, the prey hastens.”

No matter how “cool” the meaning of that name sounds, I don’t think I’ll be able to talk Erin into it. Pity.

In Puritan times, baby names took a more unfortunate turn. Parents overcome by piety and seeking to honor the Bible actually named their children after Bible verses, hymn lyrics, and theological statements. One immortal example cited by Charles Bombaugh in 1890 is that of “A Puritan maiden, who… asked for her baptismal name, replied, ‘Through-Much-Tribulation-We-Enter-The-Kingdom-Of-Heaven, but for short they call me Tribby.’” (insert gratuitous Left-Behind-series-related joke here)

And so it was that one prominent Baptist preacher was named “Praise-God Barebone,” raised alongside brothers and family members like “Fear-God Barebone,” and “Jesus-Christ-Came-Into-The-World-To-Save Barebone,” who then in turn afflicted his son with an even better name. I wonder what his wife thought, after all that work – I can just picture the conversation:

“Sweet wife, he is beautiful. Thou hast done excellently. A treasure from the Lord, indeed.”

“’Tis true, dear husband. What shall our son be named?”

“Dearest, he shall be called ‘Hath-Christ-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Wouldst-Be-Damned Barebone.’ What dost thou think?”

And I thought I had it bad, having not been given a middle name!

All the levity aside, these examples underline the fact that names not only matter, but they have meaning. God has many names in Scripture. El-Shaddai (God Almighty), Yahweh Sabaoth (Yahweh of Hosts), Adonai (Master or Lord), Yahweh Tsidkenu (Yahweh our Righteousness), El-Elyon (God Most High), and so on. Each name describes a different attribute or characteristic of God. It seems appropriate that a God whose perfections are infinite and unbounded cannot be encapsulated in any one name.

But the one name that stands above them all is the covenant, even personal, name of God: Yahweh (sometimes spelled Jehovah, from German influence). Yahweh derives from a Hebrew root meaning “I am,” or “I exist”. It states perhaps the most fundamental truth about God: He exists absolutely. He alone exists of himself, for himself, without any origin or dependence on anything.

The name YAHWEH reminds us of God’s permanence and eternity. It proclaims that he is the same now and forever, that his will is his own and depends on none other, that this is his universe and his existence is what defines everything else.

And so it’s important as we look to Christ that we realize that Christ is, indeed, the I AM. Jesus is Yahweh in the flesh. In John 8:58, Jesus declared to a group of Jews, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” The text then tells us, “SO (because, therefore) they picked up stones” and tried to kill him. Jesus claimed to be Yahweh, and the Jews understood him crystal clear.

When you think of Jesus, do you really think of him as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, standing there? It’s so easy, even for Bible-believing Christians, to compartmentalize Jesus in the flesh from Yahweh – as if, perhaps, Yahweh is the Father but not the Son. Jesus is popularly seen as different from the God of the Old Testament, and this worldly opinion has influence in the church. Have you consciously, deliberately, sought to see Jesus as Yahweh?

And more than just a proof of Jesus’ divinity, this matters because we believe upon Christ for our salvation. Our faith is in the person and work of Jesus. What that means, again, is that the object of our faith is God, Yahweh, the eternal and unchanging God of the universe. He IS your salvation. Your salvation is as sure and secure as the I AM who stands before all time. It is unchangeable and immovable. Because Christ is the I AM, because Jesus is Yahweh, you are secure.

And finally: we who bear the name of Christ, by implication, bear the name of Yahweh. We are the true witnesses of Jehovah, not the deceived followers of the Watchtower society. But that has terrifying responsibilities. God condemns those who take his name in vain – he will not hold them guiltless (Exodus 20:7). This includes flippant swearing using the name of God, but it goes far further than that. It includes those who dare to tell others “thus saith the Lord” when he has done no such thing – the very essence of legalism, the crime of those who would forbid food or drink or marriage to believers, the folly of those who too easily claim to come to the church with “words from the Lord.” And – it includes living in a manner that acts as if the reputation, the glory, the name of God doesn’t matter or is not impacted by your behavior.

That’s the challenge I want us to think about. Are you bearing the name of Christ, the name of Yahweh, in a way that exalts him? Is what you are doing at work honoring that name? Do the topics of conversation you choose lift up the glory of that name? Are you exalting that name in the way you honor your husband, care for your wife? Is your choice of leisure activity consistent with a life that seeks to see the name of Yahweh made famous in the world? Are you teaching your children to fear that name and treat it with the respect it deserves? Are you consciously seeking to see the honor and glory of God that is represented by his name made the reference point and goal and passion of your life?

Yes, names matter. But THIS name matters most.

1 Josiah kept a Passover to the Lord in Jerusalem. And they slaughtered the Passover lamb on the fourteenth day of the first month. 2 He appointed the priests to their offices and encouraged them in the service of the house of the Lord. 3 And he said to the Levites who taught all Israel and who were holy to the Lord, “Put the holy ark in the house that Solomon the son of David, king of Israel, built. You need not carry it on your shoulders. Now serve the Lord your God and his people Israel. 4 Prepare yourselves according to your fathers' houses by your divisions, as prescribed in the writing of David king of Israel and the document of Solomon his son. 5 And stand in the Holy Place according to the groupings of the fathers' houses of your brothers the lay people, and according to the division of the Levites by fathers' household. 6 And slaughter the Passover lamb, and consecrate yourselves, and prepare for your brothers, to do according to the word of the Lord by Moses.”…

10 When the service had been prepared for, the priests stood in their place, and the Levites in their divisions according to the king's command.…14 And afterward they prepared for themselves and for the priests, because the priests, the sons of Aaron, were offering the burnt offerings and the fat parts until night; so the Levites prepared for themselves and for the priests, the sons of Aaron. 15 The singers, the sons of Asaph, were in their place according to the command of David, and Asaph, and Heman, and Jeduthun the king's seer; and the gatekeepers were at each gate. They did not need to depart from their service, for their brothers the Levites prepared for them.

16 So all the service of the Lord was prepared that day, to keep the Passover and to offer burnt offerings on the altar of the Lord, according to the command of King Josiah. 17 And the people of Israel who were present kept the Passover at that time, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days. 18 No Passover like it had been kept in Israel since the days of Samuel the prophet. None of the kings of Israel had kept such a Passover as was kept by Josiah, and the priests and the Levites, and all Judah and Israel who were present, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 19 In the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah this Passover was kept. (2 Chronicles 35:1-6, 10, 14-19)

The purpose of life is worship. God made us for his glory; he has written the story of history to exalt himself. The highest calling any of us have is to see the name of the Lord magnified in the earth.

And so worship is a vitally important thing. It is the most valuable service we can offer; the most important thing we do. And not just as individuals, in our daily lives; we do this as a body as well. Corporate worship is the most important moment in the life of the church.

What attitude, then, should we have toward worship? I think what I’ve highlighted in the passage above says volumes. Whenever we do something important, we prepare for it. As a manager, I was never particularly impressed by a job candidate who I interviewed who had not taken the time to prepare for the occasion, whose appearance or organization left the impression that they had just rolled out of bed for it. In the business world, people like that tend not to get jobs. When we have other important events, like weddings or graduations or impending childbirths, we get ready for weeks, even months. Jesus himself commented on the importance of preparation for matters of great importance: “Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” (Luke 14:31)

But since we worship every Sunday, week in and week out, it’s tempting to see it as less important or less valuable. Economics, I suppose – we’re taught that something becomes more valuable the more scarce it is, and vice versa. The law of scarcity, however, is not a principle of “doxological economics.” Worship, because it is so important, will one day fill heaven and earth, and on that day it will not be cheap or worthless. And when we assemble as a body, it is a foretaste of that day when worship will be everywhere. Indeed, our whole work on this earth of proclaiming the Gospel and evangelizing the nations is preparation for that glorious day!

Even a brief look over the Old Testament shows, in the amazing details of the ritual and the multitude of regulations and rules that governed the Hebrew religion, how highly preparation was valued in worship. Just the passage I quoted above demonstrates the incredible work that went into preparing the Passover in Josiah’s day. Should we really do less?

The Old Testament pointed to the New; the types and shadows, the “smells and bells,” gave way to the spiritual realities they signified. And so this preparation has to be more than surface level. Some in the church today might take the passage above as warrant for professional preparation of worship services, concert-quality music, teams of sermon writers supporting the pastor, in order to “prepare” perfect “worship.” Not so. Israel had the ritual down to a science in the days of the prophets and were excoriated for missing the point: God wanted a heart change. Jesus ripped the Pharisees for their hypocrisy; they had the “preparation down pat but failed to really prepare what mattered. They were “whitewashed tombs.”

And so, as we prepare for worship this Sunday, let’s not forget the call to consecrate ourselves. Prepare your hearts. Examine yourselves and test yourselves; soften your hearts with the Word, your minds with the Truth, read the passage in advance and ask for wisdom and discernment. Pray in preparation for the service; ask God’s blessing on Clint and Paul as they teach, and on yourselves to have open and willing spirits.

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy (Jude 1:24)

I had the privilege of being able to meet with Gordon, a senior Jehovah’s Witness this week and to share the Gospel with him. This was our third meeting; our previous encounter had been before the summer, and I had wondered if he had given up. Any opportunity to share the good news of the true gospel is occasion for praise, and so I’m thankful for it.

Something that struck me in our conversation, and which I spent considerable time drilling into Gordon was the fact that he has no basis for the hope he thinks he has. During our discussion, the question of free will had come up repeatedly. I had pointed out that in his system, the essential and critical difference between those who have eternal life and those who do not is located in the man himself; that God might do 99.999% of the work of salvation, but that he does this same thing for every human being in JW theology, and so even though man does only 0.001%, that tiny “work” of submitting to and choosing God is the critical and essential difference. And so, I stressed, the most important difference between the saved and the lost in Gordon’s thinking is something in the man and not in God’s work. That, I said, is grounds for boasting. It’s not all of God; God doesn’t deserve glory for that because he can’t have any credit for it; after all, the same things he did for the believer, he did for the lost, right? JW theology robs God of his glory.

See, he was relying, like so many evangelical Christians, on the concept of free will, especially as the explanation why the angels and Adam and Eve had sinned. I pressed him on this point hard; I pointed out that the “free will argument” actually doesn’t solve the problem of evil, because given that God knows the future, God would have known that Satan and humanity would rebel. After all, I said, knowing the future assumes that the future is fixed and that what he knows will happen, will actually happen; he knows it won’t go another way and take God by surprise, right?

So bottom line, I knew, the only way a “free will argument” works is if God doesn’t actually know the future. I pressed him on this to demonstrate that God’s knowledge of the future, because it requires that our actions are fixed and will certainly happen a certain way, proves that history is fixed and that something has “fixed” or ordained it. It couldn’t not be fixed, otherwise it could happen in a different way than God expected and so God wouldn’t actually know it. I said that God created this universe knowing all these things would happen; I pointed out that he could have created a different universe in which everyone freely chose him, but he didn’t. So free will didn’t solve his problem.

Unlike Arminian Christians, however, Gordon was honest on this point. His attempt to escape this problem was consistent and logically coherent, sad as it was. He said, “I don’t think God knew Satan would fall.” He thought Satan’s rebellion took God by surprise. God, he said, chooses not to know certain things. In other words, Gordon, whether he represents all JWs on this or not, is an “open theist.” He tried to protect free will in the only way that it can work, and that’s by denying the omniscience of God. I only wish that most true Christians who hold to a “free will theology” would be so honest and see where their theology actually leads – perhaps then they would see the truth of God’s sovereignty over creation and in election and predestination.

Because, you see, Gordon, because he believes these things, actually has no hope. When he left, I stressed to him that he believes in eternal life, believes in a future of hope and security and safety. But he has no reason to do so! If God could not foresee and prevent the fall of Satan and Adam and Eve, in a perfect world, what’s to prevent the same thing from happening in the age to come?

So I would like to draw two lessons from this experience for us all:

1) Our hope for salvation and eternal life is founded on the total sovereignty of God. We know that we will be saved, because we know that God knows all things. He knows all things because he ordained them and decreed them; they could not be otherwise. And so when God says that none shall be lost from his Son’s hand, he means it. Because he controls everything in the universe, even the will of man, even we can’t screw that up. Poor Gordon, and every person who holds to free will, can’t have that assurance. If God will not touch your free will, if God will not cause you to act and decide certain things, your salvation will eternally be insecure. But the Bible says God is able to keep us from stumbling!

Praise God for his sovereignty over our souls, brothers and sisters.

2) And so the second lesson I have for us all is: don’t be afraid of the doctrines of grace in evangelism. Some think that things like predestination and election are intramural issues and shouldn’t be part of a Gospel outreach. I disagree; Wednesday night was one of the clearest demonstrations in the hours I’ve spent with Gordon of how incoherent and contradictory his theology truly is, and I was only able to show his worldview to be impossible simply because I went into the issues of God’s sovereignty over all things, including the human heart. Calvinism is simply a consistent proclamation of the true Gospel. And so don’t be afraid to proclaim the sovereignty of God, brothers and sisters, because this sovereignty underpins the very hope you proclaim.

“The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:5-7)

It’s been interesting, and more than a little sad, watching the issue of the H1N1 pandemic play out recently in our city and province. The disease itself, of course, is dangerous and has killed many people; it would be unwise and imprudent not to recognize the danger it does pose to the community. However, reading and watching the media coverage, it would be equally wise to remember that “the Black Plague it ain’t.”

What’s been interesting and sad about it has been the reaction of an unbelieving community to the crisis. Yet it affords an opportunity for instruction and meditation upon God’s Word and his promises.

We confess that God has freely and unalterably ordained everything that comes to pass. So we need to remember that this crisis, however serious it turns out to be in the end, was brought about by his decrees. It’s part of his plan, though we cannot know why or how. But an application and biblical reminder we can draw is seen in the fact that this flu, unlike most, seems to be taking otherwise healthy young people. That may be part of what terrifies so many about this – it doesn’t seem to matter how healthy you are. And in an age of health clubs and designer diets, an age where we are told to take control of our health and ownership of our bodies, the prospect of a killer disease that strikes regardless of our efforts to stay healthy is quite frightening.

We would do well to remember that “in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me” (Psalm 139:16) that, in God’s own words, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand” (Deuteronomy 32:39). God has the power of life and death, despite what an unbelieving culture desperately wants to ignore. So while we cannot know why God has appointed this crisis for this time, we can take the opportunity to remember humility before him.

But there is more. God’s power over life and death is not supposed to be something that brings us fear – at least those of us who are His. It should be our comfort! God’s sovereignty over the earth and over all that happens is a foundation of hope and the basis of prayer. Jesus pointed this out when he said, in telling his disciples not to fear, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” (Matthew 10:29) So when Paul reminds us, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” (Romans 8:28), this assurance is based upon the fact that God is sovereign and can, in fact, work all things together as he says. And so Paul can say, facing the possibility of death, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Bottom line: there’s nothing wrong with prudent and wise concern. Taking steps to protect yourselves and your families is only sensible. However, the panic and anxiety we see around us, the heightened tempers in clinic line-ups, the outrage that others get to go first, the cries of doom and gloom – all these should not mark us if we believe. God is still on his throne, brothers and sisters. He is watching over you. So don’t be anxious.