Honoring God’s Name
I stood in front of the traveling Vietnam Memorial. Several dozen other people moved quietly along the granite columns filled with names.
Sam Harrell, Doug Johnson, and Paul Martindale—they were all names of young men who had been in helicopter flight school with my first husband, Jack, and all three had been killed in Vietnam.
How fitting to remember these war dead in this simple but pro¬found way. The name of each man who gave his life in Vietnam is etched in stone for all to see.
The mere mention of a person’s name can evoke a lifetime of memories in the hearts of those who knew that person. We can see the person in our mind’s eye and feel his or her presence.
If our human names carry this much weight, how much more so the name of the Lord? His name not only identifies who he is, but it carries his power in it.
That power transcends the limitations of time and space and moves in supernatural ways on our behalf.
In Psalm 20:7 David compared the power of the name of the Lord with the power the military usually relied upon in times of war.
In this text, an army would have been in sorry shape without chariots and horses, and yet the name of the Lord was even more powerful than those human means.
It is challenging to communicate the importance of God’s name in Scripture, but one of God’s most declarative statements appears.
The verb here comes from the Hebrew word kayak, which may imply “I am he who is,” or “I am he who exists.”
The original Hebrew combination of letters that signified the name of God was YHWH. The Israelites considered this word too sacred even to pronounce.
When reading God’s name, they combined the vowels in the Hebrew word for “My Lord” and the consonants YHWH to form the word Jekovak.
In Hebrew names carried great significance and were not mere labels. So the words used for God’s name conveyed his divinity and the great importance of who he was.
His name is so powerful for us that the mention of it calls God himself to our aid.
Father, we cannot even comprehend the power your name implies. Thank you that we have full access to it to you.