Gift of YHWH
The Recorder Whose Name Declared He Was the Gift Before He Wrote a Word
Part 9 of 10
The Name
His name was Mattityahu (Matthew).
It means: gift of YHWH.
Matthew carries nothing. It is a sound in English that traces back through the Latin Matthaeus and the Greek Matthaios to the Hebrew Mattityahu, but at every step of translation the meaning was left behind. The name that arrived in English after the journey through Greek and Latin is a sound that declares nothing about the God who gave it, nothing about the nature of the one who bore it, nothing about the work for which the vessel was prepared.
Gift of YHWH declares everything.
The one through whom YHWH chose to record the first canonical account of the full appearing, the life, the teaching, the death, and the resurrection of Yeshua (Jesus), bore in his own name the declaration that he himself was a gift from the God whose story he was being commissioned to record. Before he sat at his tax collector’s table. Before Yeshua walked past and said follow me. Before he wrote the first word of the account that would shape Christian understanding for two thousand years. His name had already said what he was. A gift of YHWH for the purpose YHWH had already determined.
Gift of YHWH. The recorder of the full appearing was himself declared a gift before he wrote a single word of the account that would carry that appearing to the world.
The Tax Collector at the Table
The call of Mattityahu is one of the most economical accounts in the gospels. Yeshua was walking and he saw a man called Mattityahu sitting at the tax collector’s booth.
He said to him: Follow me.
And he rose and followed him.
No hesitation recorded. No negotiation. No asking what it would involve. No counting the cost. He rose and followed him.
The tax collectors of first century Judea were among the most despised members of Jewish society. They worked for the Roman occupation. They collected what Rome required and often collected more for themselves. They were regarded as traitors to their own people, collaborators with the foreign power that had reduced the covenant nation to a subject state. The religious establishment considered them ritually unclean and socially untouchable. They sat with sinners. They were sinners. They were, by the standards of the religious framework of their day, among the last people who would be chosen as vessels for anything of divine significance.
This is precisely who the presence chose. Not a scribe. Not a Pharisee. Not a priest or a Levite or a member of the established religious authority. A tax collector. A collaborator. A man whose daily work placed him outside the acceptable boundaries of the covenant community.
Gift of YHWH. Not gift of the religious establishment. Not gift of the covenant community’s approved candidates. YHWH’s gift, chosen according to the same divine initiative that had chosen Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) before the womb and appointed Yechezkel (Ezekiel) among the exiles and sent the voice to cry in the wilderness. The presence does not consult human categories of worthiness when it selects its vessels.
The Feast
Grace Demonstrated Before It Was Fully Proclaimed
After Mattityahu rose and followed, he gave a great feast at his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and sinners reclining at the table with Yeshua and his disciples.
The Pharisees saw this and said to the disciples: Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?
Yeshua heard it and answered: Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.
He quoted Hoshea (Hosea) 6:6. I desire mercy, the Hebrew word is hesed, covenant faithfulness, steadfast love, not sacrifice. The entire apparatus of the sacrificial system, the religious framework maintained by those who were objecting to his table companions, was secondary to the mercy that the presence had always been about.
The feast at Mattityahu’s house was the gospel demonstrated before the gospel was fully articulated. The presence of YHWH, full, complete, in human form, sitting at a table with the people the religious establishment had declared unworthy of the covenant. Grace. Not conditioned on their repentance. Not contingent on their cleaning themselves up first. Not offered pending their agreement to the terms. Simply present. Sitting at their table. Eating their food. In their house.
Gift of YHWH provided the table. The one whose name means YHWH saves sat at it. The name of the host and the nature of the guest were a single declaration.
The gift of YHWH provided the table. YHWH saves sat at it. The name of the host and the nature of the guest declared the same thing, grace without condition, presence without prerequisite.
The Account
What He Wrote and Why the Name Matters
The gospel of Mattityahu (Matthew) is the most quoted gospel in the history of Christianity. It is the first in the canonical order. It is the account that contains the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, the parables of the kingdom, the commissioning of the twelve, and the great commission at the end. It shaped the church’s understanding of Yeshua more than any other single document for the first fifteen centuries of Christian history.
And it was written by a man whose name declared he was a gift of YHWH.
This is not incidental. In the Hebrew framework, the name declares the nature and purpose of the vessel. Mattityahu was not a gifted writer who happened to follow Yeshua and happened to record what he saw. He was a vessel prepared for a specific work, the work of receiving and transmitting the account of the full appearing, and his name declared that preparation before his life enacted it.
Gift of YHWH. YHWH gave the full appearing. YHWH gave the vessel whose work would carry that appearing to the nations. The giving was in both directions, the one who arrived as the gift of divine grace, and the one whose written record would be the gift of divine provision for those who would never see the full appearing with their own eyes.
The Genealogy
He Begins Where the Reign Begins
Mattityahu’s account opens with a genealogy. The book of the genealogy of Yeshua the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Every other gospel begins differently. Yochanan (John) begins before creation, in the beginning was the Word. Loukas (Luke) begins with the careful historian’s preface. Markos (Mark) begins with the public ministry of Yochanan the Immerser. Only Mattityahu begins with the genealogy.
The genealogy is not filler. It is the theological foundation of the entire account. Mattityahu is establishing that the full appearing is not a new story breaking into history from outside. It is the continuation and completion of a story already deeply in progress. The son of David, through whom the covenant of the eternal throne was promised. The son of Abraham — through whom the blessing of all nations was promised. Both promises converging in the one whose name means YHWH saves.
The genealogy runs through forty-two generations. It includes women who should not be in a Jewish genealogy by conventional standards, Tamar, Rachav (Rahab), Ruth, Bat-Sheva (Bathsheba). It includes kings and exiles, the faithful and the unfaithful, the covenant-keeping and the covenant-breaking. The entire complex, compromised, persistent history of YHWH working through imperfect human vessels across the full span of the covenant story.
Gift of YHWH opened his account with that history because the presence that had been in every named vessel across that history was now fully present in the one the genealogy culminated in. The gift of the account began where the gift of the presence had always been working, at the beginning of the story that the full appearing completed.
The Sermon on the Mount
The Presence Teaching Its Own Nature
The fifth through seventh chapters of Mattityahu’s account contain the most concentrated body of teaching attributed to Yeshua in any single location in the gospels. The Sermon on the Mount. It begins with the beatitudes, declarations of blessing that invert every human category of worthiness and unworthiness.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted.
Every beatitude declares that the kingdom of heaven belongs to people the religious establishment of the day had placed outside it. The poor in spirit. The mourning. The meek. The persecuted. Not the learned, the righteous by the law’s standard, the religiously accomplished, the ritually pure. The ones who had nothing, who came with nothing, who could offer nothing, who were, by every human measure, the least qualified.
This is the nature of the presence whose name Mattityahu carried. Gift of YHWH. Not gift of the worthy. Not gift earned by qualification. Gift given according to YHWH’s own initiative to those YHWH chooses to give it to, which, the beatitudes declare, is those who are most clearly incapable of earning it.
The Sermon on the Mount is the presence teaching its own character. The same character that had been embedded in Mattityahu’s name before he sat at the tax collector’s table. Gift of YHWH. Grace before the religious gatekeepers had finished sorting the worthy from the unworthy.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom. The presence whose gift Mattityahu’s name declared was teaching that the kingdom belongs to those who come with nothing. The name and the teaching were one declaration.
The Resurrection
The Account Reaches Its Completion
Mattityahu’s account culminates at the resurrection. The women came to the tomb at dawn. There was a great earthquake. An angel of the Lord descended and rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. The guards trembled and became like dead men.
The angel said to the women: Do not be afraid. I know that you seek Yeshua who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said.
He is not here. He has risen. The account that began with the genealogy, tracing the presence of YHWH through forty-two generations of the covenant story — ends at the empty tomb. The story that gift of YHWH was given to record was never the story of a life and a death. It was the story of a life, a death, and a resurrection that defeated the last enemy and completed the reign that Psalm 110 had declared and 1 Corinthians 15 would confirm.
The presence that had manifested through every named vessel across the entire thousand year reign, through Yehoshua (Joshua) at the Jordan, through Eliyahu (Elijah) at Carmel, through Yeshayahu (Isaiah) in the throne room, through Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) in the cistern, through Tzekaryahu (Zechariah) recording the shepherd struck, through Yechezkel (Ezekiel) in the valley of dry bones, through Yochanan (John) at the river, had now done what all those manifestations had been declaring in advance. The last enemy was defeated. The graves were opened. The breath had come. YHWH strengthens. YHWH remembers. YHWH saves.
Gift of YHWH recorded it all. The name was the declaration before the work began. The work was the fulfillment of what the name declared. And what was accomplished at the empty tomb was not the beginning of a new religious system requiring human cooperation and observance. It was the completion of everything the Hebrew scriptures had been announcing since the first name bearing YHWH was given to the first vessel who carried it.
The gift was never conditional. The gift was never partial. The gift was never revocable. YHWH saves, accomplished, finished, universal, recorded by the one whose name declared he himself was given as a gift for exactly this purpose.
He is not here. He has risen. The account gift of YHWH was given to record ends at an empty tomb, and everything the Hebrew scriptures had been announcing since the first YHWH-bearing name was given finds its completion in that emptiness.
Mattityahu (Matthew). Gift of YHWH. A tax collector, despised, excluded, considered outside the boundaries of acceptable covenant standing, chosen by the presence whose gift he was to rise from his table and record the full appearing for all of humanity.
He began his account with the genealogy because the presence whose story he was recording had been present throughout that genealogy. He recorded the Sermon on the Mount because the presence was teaching its own character, grace before qualification, blessing before worthiness, the kingdom belonging to those who came with nothing. He recorded the empty tomb because the presence that had been manifesting through named vessels across the entire reign had now accomplished what every one of those names had been declaring.
YHWH saves. Not will save. Not offers salvation to those who qualify. Saves, accomplished, complete, universal, written into the name before the account existed, fulfilled at the tomb that had nothing in it.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams