Jehovah - The Covenant Name of God - Part 2

JEHOVAH

The Covenant Name of God

Part 2

“This Name Jehovah is God’s memorial, God’s “forget-Me-not.  Let our faith treasure it and hold it fast against all the world’s attempts to filch it from us.  He is the God of the blank check.  We shall never be confronted by a claim that He cannot meet.  Through all life’s years, with all our needs, His wealth is open to our demands if only these are made within the terms of His will.  Eternity itself will furnish us with ever-new discoveries of His sufficiency.” (Herbert Lockyer, All the Divine Names and Titles in the Bible)

God Himself revealed to Moses, not only in Exodus 3 in His initial encounter with him, but again in Exodus 6 and yet again in Exodus 33 and 34, the beauty of His Name, “Jehovah”!   He tells Moses that this is the Name that He wants to be known by--that although Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew Him as “El Shaddai”, they did not know Him by Jehovah, and this was to become the Name by which all of His people knew Him!  

We know that the Name Jehovah was known about during the days of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but only intellectually--not personally and intimately.  That was going to change!  And then, in Exodus 33 and 34, those incredible chapters that describe an up-close and personal encounter that Moses had with this Jehovah, God shows Moses face to face Who He is!  He causes His goodness to pass in front of him!  

It is believed that it was this Name that was mentioned only by the High Priest within the Holy of Holies once a year!  The Name speaks of absoluteness of Being, Independence, Self-existence.  

Revelation 1:8 says, “I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending”, saith the Lord-Jehovah, “which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.” 

Which is--the ever-existing One--His relation to the Present

Which was--the One Who always was--His relation to the Past

Which is to come--Who always will be--His relation to the Future

The Name Jehovah is God’s Covenant Name.  It was as “LORD GOD” that He spoke those words to the serpent in Genesis 3:  the covenant He is bound to keep against the enemy of our souls:

“I will put enmity between your seed and the seed of the woman.  

He will bruise your head, and you will bruise His heel.”

You can believe it that the enemy knew all the power that was behind that promise - that covenant!  The power of the Covenant name of God:  JEHOVAH! And to combine it with ELOHIM!  JEHOVAH-ELOHIM - awesome!  

The enemy knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is a defeated enemy:  he is just counting on us not knowing it, and worse, not really believing it!  But he believes it!  

Then we read what is called the Noahic Covenant in Genesis 9.  But something stood out to me as I read those words:  “GOD SAID IN HIS HEART:  Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.”  God’s covenant with Noah had absolutely nothing to do with Noah or mankind after Noah!  God made the Covenant with Himself, and swore by Himself!  It was the same when He called Abram.  Abram was a nobody out of a world of nobodies!  God made His covenant with Abram not because of Abram but because of Himself!  

Therefore, if the covenant was made with Himself, then the 

fulfillment of the covenant was dependent only on Himself!

Yes, there would come a time when God would require from His people an agreement.  When they left Egypt and arrived at Mt. Sinai, God required that they sign their name, Israel, alongside His on the Covenant.  They had to agree to do whatever God commanded them to do.  But in the Noahic and the Abrahamic Covenants, there were no second or third parties:  God made the Covenant with Himself and signed it Himself!  That is so significant!  God said after the flood that He would never again destroy mankind from the face of the earth with a flood, even though He knew that the imaginations of man’s heart was evil from his youth.  And that has not changed:  but God has kept that promise, utterly independent on the behaviour of mankind!  And His Covenant with Abraham was totally independent of anything Abraham could do.  

If you remember, Abraham was 75 when God first appeared to him and made the promise.  Abraham’s wife Sarai was 65, and barren.  They waited 10 years for God to come through with His promise of a son, and when Abram was 85 and Sarai 75, they came up with the plan to help God out with His promise, and Ishmael was born.  Then a period of 13 years passed during which time there was no word at all from God.  Finally, when Abram was 99 and Sarai was 89, God came again and repeated His Covenant, as well as changed their names, and Sarai conceived and bore Abram a son when he was 100 years old!  God’s words to Abraham were, “Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”  God could have given up on Abraham and Sarah, but His Covenant with them was totally independent of them!  This is the Covenant that made them His possession, His responsibility!  

“You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you”

“I have loved you with an everlasting love”

Just as He did with Israel--God signed and sealed His Covenant with them before they even knew that He existed--called them out from among all the nations of the earth to be His--so He has done with each of us!  Before I even knew Him, He called me to Himself.  While I was still in my sin, Jesus Christ died for me on Calvary, and even before I was in my mother’s womb, He was drawing me to Himself.  

There came a point in Abraham’s relationship with His God that God did hand him a pen and had him sign the contract:  in Genesis 17 when God told Abraham that circumcision of all males would be a sign of the covenant between God and him.  But the Covenant had already been signed by God in Genesis 15 when Abraham had the vision of the flaming torch passing between the sacrifice:  an ancient ritual showing the signing of a covenant, and Abraham was not the one who passed between the sacrifice:  it was Jehovah Himself!  As a matter of fact, Abram was sound asleep when all of this happened!  I love that detail!

Do you see the significance?  As a child of God, there is absolutely nothing that I can ever do to change, alter or break the Covenant that God Himself has made with me!  I can grieve Him, I can quench His Spirit, I can force Him to have to discipline me, but I cannot break His Covenant with me!  

Romans 8:26-39 (JB Phillips)

The Spirit of God not only maintains this hope within us, but helps us in our present limitations. For example, we do not know how to pray worthily as sons of God, but his Spirit within us is actually praying for us in those agonising longings which never find words. And God who knows the heart’s secrets understands, of course, the Spirit’s intention as he prays for those who love God.  Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good. God, in his foreknowledge, chose them to bear the family likeness of his Son, that he might be the eldest of a family of many brothers. He chose them long ago; when the time came he called them, he made them righteous in his sight, and then lifted them to the splendour of life as his own sons.   In face of all this, what is there left to say? If God is for us, who can be against us?   He that did not hesitate to spare his own Son but gave him up for us all — can we not trust such a God to give us, with him, everything else that we can need?  Who would dare to accuse us, whom God has chosen? The judge himself has declared us free from sin. Who is in a position to condemn?   Only Christ, and Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns  in power for us, Christ prays for us!  Can anything separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble, pain or persecution? Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, the threat of force of arms? Indeed some of us know the truth of the ancient text: ‘For your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter’.  No, in all these things we win an overwhelming victory through him who has proved his love for us.  I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord!”

No matter how disobedient Abraham was, Jehovah kept His Covenant with him, because it had nothing to do with Abraham or what Abraham did!  And when Abraham exercised faith, and chose to believe God, it was credited to his account for righteousness!  But Jehovah did not stop what He was doing until Abraham chose to believe!  And no matter how disobedient Israel was and is, Jehovah will keep His Covenant with her!  He is not finished with Israel!  And no matter how obstinate I am as His Child, no matter how perverse or wayward, He does not give up on me.

“Being confident of this very thing, that He Who began 

a good work in you will complete it!” 

“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever!”

“He is able to keep to the end what I have committed to Him!”

Can you declare a promise that you are standing on in your life today?  I have stood on this promise for 43 years now:  

“For I know the thoughts I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts 

of peace and not of evil, to bring you to that expected end.”

I believe this is the Name that is above every Name!  For you see, JESUS is the equivalent of the Hebrew JEHOSHUA, which is translated 

JEHOVAH IS MY SALVATION

I do not have a special revelation from God on this:  this is just my personal opinion.  I have often wondered what that “Name above every Name” is:  “that at the Name of Jesus every knee shall bow”...Jesus is a very common name, has always been a very common name.  So I believe it goes beyond the common name Jesus, although that is a very beautiful Name.  I believe, somehow, that it has something to do with this Name:  a Name that God told Moses was to be His Memorial!