My God Is YHWH

The Confession in a Name

Part 5 of 8

 

The Prophet Who Was Expected to Return

Among all the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, one was singled out by the tradition as the one who would return before the great and terrible day of YHWH. His return was anticipated, watched for, set as a place at the Passover table. His name was Eliyahu.

Eliyahu means: my God is YHWH.

That is not merely a description. It is a confession. A declaration of exclusive allegiance. In a world of competing deities, Baal, Asherah, the gods of the surrounding nations, the name Eliyahu planted a flag. My God is YHWH. Not the storm god. Not the fertility cult. Not the divine council of the nations. YHWH. The specific, covenantal, personal God of Israel.

My God is YHWH. That was his name. That was his entire ministry compressed into a single word.

 

Elijah

A Name That Surrenders the Confession

The English name Elijah carries the sound of the Hebrew imperfectly and the meaning not at all. A reader encountering Elijah encounters a prophet from the past. A reader encountering Eliyahu encounters a living confession, a man whose very name declared, in the face of the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, exactly whose God was real and whose was not.

The confrontation on Mount Carmel is one of the defining moments of the Hebrew scriptures. The prophets of Baal call on their god. No answer. Eliyahu calls on YHWH. Fire falls.

And the people fall on their faces and cry: YHWH, he is God. YHWH, he is God.

What they were crying was Eliyahu’s name. They were crying his name back at him. My God is YHWH. He had been saying it his entire life. At Carmel, the nation finally said it with him.

 

Eliyahu and Yochanan

Yeshua identified Yochanan the Immerser as the Eliyahu who was to come. The one whose return was anticipated. The one who would prepare the way before the great day.

Now set the names together.

Eliyahu: my God is YHWH.

Yochanan: YHWH is gracious.

The prophet who declared the exclusive identity of God, and the prophet who declared the gracious character of that same God, identified by Yeshua as one continuous prophetic voice pointing to his own arrival.

In Hebrew, the names speak to each other. In English, Elijah and John are two separate sounds from two separate eras, carrying no conversation between them.

 

The Covenant Declaration

The name Eliyahu carries something that none of the other YHWH-bearing names carry in quite the same way: it is explicitly possessive. My God is YHWH. It is personal. It is a first-person declaration of identity and allegiance.

That possessive, my, is part of the theological weight.

Not merely: YHWH is God.

But: YHWH is my God.

The prophet’s name was itself an act of worship. Every time someone called his name, they were, in the Hebrew hearing of it, participating in a confession.

The name Elijah participates in nothing. It is simply a sound that carries a man’s identity across the centuries without carrying his declaration.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams