Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Now I am really excited about these studies that we're going to get into. I'm excited because it's excited me just preparing. We're going to be talking about the names of God in the Old Testament. Those of you that have been brought up in a church where you've had to learn catechism will be very familiar with the question that perhaps you had to answer when you were a young person: What is the chief end of man?

You know the answer if you learned your catechism well. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I heard about a little boy that was learning his catechism, and when he came to that question, he answered on a piece of paper, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and endure him forever."

Sometimes, even if we have a religious background and we've been through catechism class, we come out the end of all that religious learning with that belief. To know God is to endure God, to have him part of our lives, but oh, how tiresome he is. The idea of enjoying God is nowhere in our experience.

That is a shame. I remember before I ever became a Christian, I really believed that to become a believer would mean I would never smile again. I don't know where that thought comes from, but it certainly doesn't come from God. It certainly doesn't come from the revealed word of God. Joy is Jesus, God in Galilean cloth, making my heart smile.

We will only glorify and enjoy him in proportion as we know him. The knowledge of God is the most important thing in life. Everybody's looking for happiness, and they're looking in all sorts of places. But if what the Bible says is true and that catechism was trying to teach us, that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, then we will have to get to know him.

Is the knowledge of God the most important thing in life? What are people looking for, and where are they looking for it? Is the most important thing in my life that my kid makes the team, or that I survive my 50th birthday, or that I buy a bigger boat? It's amazing what things are the most important things in people's lives.

Those of us that are around a lot of people will often be amazed at those things. Sometimes I stand at the checkout counter and, for my illustration book, write down on a tiny pad of paper the headlines to those extraordinary papers that are at the checkout counter. They're the ones my daughter always reads but never buys just for fun if she's bored, and I'm always embarrassed if I'm with her.

The headlines are incredible, and those things are always sold out. People are buying them and reading them because the sort of things they're writing about are important to them. Just from this week: "Baby hatches from giant UFO egg," "Starving dieters break into store and eat it empty." I have this marvelous picture in my mind of them chewing through the cans and everything.

"Baby born with 10-inch ears, mom chewed carrots when pregnant." Is this important? Whether it's important or not, people are eating it up. You have no idea what things are important in people's lives. It never ceases to amaze me. Yet Jesus said, "Why don't we get our focus on things that are really important?"

I believe, as a believing Christian, that the most important thing in life is to know God, to glorify him, and to enjoy him forever. Jesus himself said, "This is life eternal: that they should know thee, the only true God and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ."

There are many ways to study God in order to know him. How are we going to get to know him? Well, first of all, you can get to know God through studying the gospels and seeing him walk around this earth in a Jewish body, Jesus Christ, the express image of his person. The express image means the stamp.

In the olden days when they used to stamp things with a seal, you'd have the seal in your hand with an image on it, and you'd stamp it out, and that's the express image. It's been expressed out of the stamp. The Bible uses that picture to tell us in Hebrews 1:3 that Jesus Christ is the stamped-out image of God's person.

If you want to get to know God, one way to do it is to follow Christ through the gospels. Buy a good Bible that you can read with ease, with a lot of good reference notes in it, maybe the NIV Study Bible, and you start and read the Gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You can start wherever you like; it doesn't really matter.

As you begin to see Jesus and follow him through, you are watching the stamped-out image of God walking around this earth. Jesus said to his disciples one day, "He that seen me has seen the father." The second way you can get to know God is to look at his works. Take a walk, smell the flowers.

My mom used to have a terrible job believing that God was interested in her. She had a concept of God that was very true and very right. But because she had such a high view of God as creator, she couldn't imagine him being interested in her. She was far too small and far too insignificant.

My mom lived in a little tiny house. She lived in a castle for one part of her life, and then she lived in a little tiny cottage at the end of her life. Beautiful little cottage. The house was very small, but the garden was very large, and it was full of roses. I have never seen one area of this world so full of roses as my mom's garden.

I was looking through the big book that I inherited when she went to glory, and it's all about plants and flowers. In fact, I've got four or five of them, and she was an expert. She used to stay up all night reading these flower books. When I'd visit her, she'd take me around the garden and tell me every single thing about the roses.

Then she'd show me all the little flowers underneath the rose beds. She knew every name; she knew what they needed. I remember her picking up these little tiny flowers once with little tiny petals, and she told me all the intricate things and how clever these plants were.

I said to her, "Mom, I can't understand why you don't believe God is interested in you." She said, "Why do you say that?" I said, "Because he is so big, he makes the big sunflowers, but he makes the little tiny flowers as well. If he can be so interested in the little tiny flowers, and you know how wonderfully they are made, can't you believe he's interested in little tiny us as well as the great big universe that he looks after?"

For the very first time in her life, my mom in her old age began to grasp the fact that she wasn't too little to be noticed by God, who was so great. As we look at his creation, we can learn lessons like that and like other things. It was sitting on a hillside at the age of 14 that I first got a glimpse of God and began to want to know him.

I was looking at the Swiss Alps and the sunrise where I was on a trip with my father, and I was absolutely overawed with the sense of God's majesty through his creation. For the first time in my 14 years, I began to have a yearning to know him. The thing that overwhelmed me was the fact that the sunrise happened, and the beauty of it had made me feel very diminished for the first time in my arrogant young life.

I ran back to the car and I wrote a bit of poetry, probably the first poetry I ever wrote. "The day dawns softly filling me with awe, it seems the other side of heaven's door. That God forgives my sins to me is plain, today spite of my sin, the sun doth rise again." I read that in the skies.

If you want to know God, make a little goal that you follow Christ through the gospels and you take a walk and smell the flowers. But the problem is the creation is spoiled, and even the creatures in the creation cannot show us a true picture of God. "Ye are living epistles, known and read of all men," Paul said to some converts.

That's another way you can get to know God. Get involved with people who are carrying him around in their person. See Jesus smiling at you through a sister in Christ or a brother in Christ. Get to know a small group of believers because you will see Jesus in a very special way through other people's lives.

I remember a tall German young man in our youth work getting up to give his testimony. As he stood there, he was very tall and he had little tiny lederhosen on, the little leather pants that Germans wear. Adult Germans wear them as well as small Germans. He stood there with these long lanky legs and said, "I want to be the Bible on two legs."

We were all looking at these two legs and thinking, "Wow, that's some Bible." But I know what he meant. I want people to read me. Perhaps you're married to an unbeliever and you are the only Bible your husband will read at this point. That's a way that your husband can get to know God, by seeing him lived out in your life.

But the problem is we're fallen creatures, and the image is not perfect there. We have to turn perhaps to the revealed word of God. Hebrews says in many ways and divers ways, God spoke in times past through the prophets, but now in these last days he's spoken to us through his son. God has been busy revealing himself through the Bible.

There's another way, and that's the way that we are going to study God and get to know him better, and that's through his names. Hebrews laid great store by the names because they showed character. The names of God are a medium of revelation. God has many ways of revealing himself through the word, through people, through his creation, through the living word Jesus Christ.

His names, particularly in the Old Testament, continue the revelation or the unveiling of God as man begins to know him better and better. Jesus said in John 17:6, "I have manifested thy name to men which thou gavest me out of the world. I have declared unto them thy name and I will declare it."

By explaining the names of God to the people he was teaching, they could understand what God was like and they could come to know him better. The names explain who he is, and of course, to know him is to love him. No one name fully or adequately expresses his fullness. How could one name do it all?

When you say David, that's one name of one mere man, but you could say about David: shepherd, warrior, king, prophet, poet, musician. The names describe the man. How much more then do the names of the Lord describe the Lord? If God is going to reveal himself, he must use many names, each of which tells something of his glory.

One would not be enough. To run around saying "God" is really not enough. What I'm hoping will happen through these studies is each week we'll have time to discover one aspect of God, and this way we'll get to know him better. Today we're going to start with Elohim. Elohim is the name for God.

Every time you read "God" in the Bible, I want you to do a little bit of Hebrew translation yourself and say, "Elohim, my Elohim," instead of "my God." One of the most widely distributed terms for deity known to the human race is El. It did not originally belong just to the Hebrews. People that worshipped other gods called them El.

Of course, there are things that we add to that to make that particularly the Hebrew God-name. But El was talked about all over the place. If somebody worshipped the most weird god, he would say that was his Elohim. In Hebrew, the word occurs 2,250 times in the Old Testament. In Genesis chapter one, it's the only name of God.

Many other chapters in the Bible contain different names of God showing different aspects of his working and his character. But Genesis one is the creation chapter. If that is the only way God revealed himself there, saying, "I am Elohim," it says to us that means he is the creator. The whole chapter is God made, God made, God made.

God spoke and things that weren't came into existence. There are many ways to study the Bible, and one of the ways that can show us different aspects of the truth is to look at the language itself. El is a plural noun. It's not singular. Right from the beginning of our Bible, we're prepared for the mystery of a plurality in God, in other words, the Trinity.

You see this in Genesis 1:26: "Let us make man in our own image." Trinity's a very difficult concept for us: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. "What is this strange three-headed God?" I remember asking before I ever became a Christian. "What is this strange three-headed God you Christians worship? Why can't we just worship God? Why do we need the Holy Spirit and Jesus?"

The idea of God in one is a mystery. I understand the Father because I have a father. I understand a little bit of the Son because I have a son. But the Spirit I don't know; I don't have one in my house. I can't see it or touch it. Even one aspect of the Trinity is difficult, never mind putting three equal persons in one in unity.

I don't know anything in my world that I can relate to that makes sense out of that. There is a mystery of the divine substance hidden in this name, but it is there. Genesis 3:22 says, "The man has now become like one of us to know good or evil." In other places, it's a singular noun.

Though Elohim is plural, it is used in a singular sense, telling us that there is but one God. Sometimes in one verse, both are used. For example, when Isaiah saw Elohim, the creator, almighty, omnipotent God sitting on the throne, this is what he heard: "Whom shall I send and who will go for us?"

So we have the mystery of the Trinity, a revelation of who God is, right at the beginning of our Bible in the book of Genesis. We have to accept a lot of that by faith because we cannot understand it. With that goes the unity of this divine substance. It certainly is a mystery, but it also gives us a sense of unity, total unity and harmony within the Trinity.

How does the name do that? When anything big happened—creation, incarnation, baptism, crucifixion—you see the unity of the Trinity in action. Creation: in the beginning, God created. The Spirit brooded over the face of the deep. John 1: "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God."

"All things were made by him, without him was not anything made that was made. In him was light and the life was the light of men." God said, "Let there be light." Who's working? The Son. So here you have this picture of this total unity and harmony and purpose and plan. Elohim, my Elohim.

Incarnation: what happened? Gabriel comes from whom? Elohim, God. Who does he come to? Mary. What does he say? "The Spirit will come upon you and impart Christ to your womb." What do we see? The Trinity working together in unity. Baptism is a beautiful picture. Jesus coming up out of the waters.

They saw the symbol of the Holy Spirit, a dove descending upon him. Then a voice from heaven, Elohim's voice, said, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Here again you have a beautiful picture of this God three-in-one working together in unity and harmony. The Trinity is busy and has a purposeful plan.

The Trinity has agreed to put into effect and finish an eternal decision that has been made somewhere before the foundation of the world. In the language of his name, we can get other clues to who he is. El means to swear in the good sense. There is blasphemous swearing, and there is the taking of an oath.

In this name is hidden the idea of one who stands in a promised covenant relationship ratified by an oath. Have you ever seen on television where somebody's in a law court and they come in and they put their hand on the Bible and they take an oath? They say, "I swear by God to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

The Bible says that when God takes an oath like that, he has no one to swear by that's bigger than him. "I swear by Almighty God," we say, because God is bigger than us and you need somebody bigger than yourself to make a promise like that. God swears by himself, the Bible says. He makes a very solemn promise ratified by an oath.

God saying, "I swear by myself such and such a thing." That's all caught up in the name Elohim. The character of the divine substance therefore is going to be explained to us. He is sworn to be faithful to what he swears to. You can trust his word. This oath that the Trinity made together was prior to creation.

"The Lord swore and will not repent or change his mind," the Bible says. His is the word of a gentleman, and you can rely on it. Both the serpent and the woman knew Jehovah by his name Elohim. They did not understand him fully by the name Jehovah, which was his personal name, but before the fall, they knew the creator omnipotent God by this name.

That says that there is a relationship within God himself. He is one, but as his name declares, there is a plurality. He has certain relationships in and with himself which, because he is God, can never be dissolved or broken. We can know that the Trinity will never get a divorce, and that should bring our hearts great comfort.

He is in covenant union with himself. He has sworn within himself he will ever be faithful to himself and to his character. God will never become Satan. God will never become other than he is. He will never become fed up with us because of who he is. There is this relationship within God ratified by an oath of commitment to each other within that Godhead.

To see this most clearly, you can listen to Jesus' words in John 17, verse 22: "I have given man the glory you gave me that they may be one as we are one. I in them, you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you've sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."

In 17:5, Jesus says, "Now Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began." In verse 24 he says, "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world."

Jesus is explaining this love relationship of the Trinity that they have within themselves. Saint Augustine said, "If God is love, then in God there must be a lover, a beloved, and the spirit of love. For there can be no love without a lover and a beloved." What did God say at Jesus' baptism? "This is my beloved Son."

What did Jesus say in John 17? "I want everybody to be with me where I am in me so that they can enjoy the unity and the love and the commitment that I enjoy within the Trinity itself." That's going to be heaven for us. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be one person of the Trinity?

Just imagine if you were the Holy Spirit, or if you were the Son, or if you were the Father God. You have this incredible relationship within the three of you: total commitment sworn to by divinity to be faithful and to love each other. In Christ, we are part of that, and all of that is wrapped up in the name Elohim.

The relationship in God and with himself is one in which there can be no breach. From the beginning, God is Elohim in covenant union with himself. El also means strong or almighty. It also means faithfulness and commitment. God is totally committed to himself in divine eternal unity and faithfulness, and he's sworn unity and faithfulness forever.

In relationship with his creation, Elohim is the creator. It implies sovereignty; only the creator can create. In Genesis 1:1-24, 35 times Elohim is used as he creates. He has sworn in the bygone ages before anything existed that he would restore what he knew would break down. He has sworn to do that.

Because of their foreknowledge, they knew about the fall of man and what would be necessary. Within the Trinity, a plan and a promise was worked out to each other to bring about a restoration of things that were broken. Elohim can never leave his creation fallen as it is until it is all again made better and made very good.

In Genesis 1:1 and 2, we read that part of creation is shown as fallen. Everything was chaotic. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, without form and void. Elohim did not forsake it. He didn't say, "Well, let's finish with this world. I'll just make another one." Wouldn't it have been easier to start again with a man that did do what he was told?

He is totally committed because of who he is and because he's sworn to himself to restore that which is fallen. The whole of the Old Testament talks of that covenant promise. Covenant is that oath he's promised himself to redeem and to restore. When nothing else moves, the Spirit does. Darkness is upon the face of the deep.

God speaks and works until all is very good indeed. God cannot rest until fallen creation is restored and recreated. Some believe that the debris that you read about right at the beginning of your Bible in Genesis 1 was the once bright spiritual kingdom of Satan when he was Lucifer, when he was God's brightest and best angel.

Some believe that he and his angels destroyed this planet and self-consumed everything within it, and that's why it was chaotic. They believe this because in Isaiah 44:18, God distinctly says he did not create the earth without form. So suddenly as you open your Bible, you see that the earth was without form and void.

Many theologians believe that this was a result of sin. God didn't forsake it and start all over again because he'd sworn in bygone eternity to restore. He'd made a promise, a covenant promise within the Trinity before anything ever was made that when it went wrong, he would put it right.

He's our Elohim, faithful to the promises he has made within himself in the Godhead. The covenant-keeping God is committed to perfect his creation till, with the same oath he promises his creation a new heavens and a new earth as he promises himself.

God has promised his material creation that went wrong with the entrance of sin into the universe that he would restore it. The covenant-keeping God will do it. You really need to read the story of Noah in Genesis 9, where God says, "I will never again destroy the creatures and I will never again destroy the land."

"Seedtime and harvest will not cease. Day and night will not cease. Never again by flood. Next time by fire, but not by flood." There is a rainbow of redemption and promise over every storm cloud from then on in. Think of the colors: the green that speaks of where we live on this earth, the red of redemption, and the blue of heaven.

We're promised with this incredible inclusion into this love relationship within the Trinity himself. That's what's going to be heaven. Some of us that find it hard to receive love are going to be perfect, so we'll be able to receive that love and enjoy him forever.

To distinguish the God of Israel as supreme from the other class of Elohim around Israel, certain qualifying appellations are often added. A word is added to El. Remember other people were using it, other people that didn't have the revelation of God because they weren't in touch with God and they worshipped wrong gods.

To distinguish the Hebrew God from all the other gods that were being worshipped around, another name was added to El. It designated the God of Israel in a special aspect of his character. As we look at these little bits, then we get another glimpse of God and what he's like.

The first one is El Elyon, and this means God Most High. The word that's used is interesting. It's often used of the highest basket of a tier of baskets, or of a nation above all other nations, or of a king higher than all other kings. El Elyon, our Elohim, his name is El Elyon.

El was the highest, the God Most High. It doesn't mean Most High in the sense of sitting up in heaven on a throne above everybody, but it means Most High of any other god on earth or in people's imaginations. It also has a connotation of being sovereign over the land.

This was very important in the early primitive days. The boundary lines of people's property were very important because that was their life and their livelihood. The Hebrew believed that El Elyon marked out the boundaries where they lived and moved and had their being. As they handed that inheritance down to their children, it was God being God Most High.

He cared for his people and was committed to care for them. He marked out the boundary lines around this little tribe and that little family. In this name, the people began to understand that God was really even interested in where they lived. If you can understand that to know God is to know a God who is interested in where you live, you begin to understand what a personal God he is.

Even though he is high, he can possibly notice me. He's El Elyon. The second little appellation is El Olam, Everlasting God. This contains the idea of a secret being hidden, the power to conceal or to hide but to begin to reveal. God begins to paint the big picture of who he is and what he's doing in this world.

It really means the Age God or the God of the Ages. The ages are periods in which God is gradually working out a purpose which was ordained in Christ before the fall and before these urgent times in which we live. And then El Roi, the God who found Hagar crying by a well.

Frightened and pregnant, she called him El Roi. God revealed himself to that frightened girl in a terrible situation and said, "I am your El, yes, I am your God, but I am El Roi." "This well," said Hagar, "I'm going to name after the God who has revealed himself to me."

He revealed himself to her as the God who saw her and the God who lives. Thou God seest me. He is the one that sees us when we stand in our desert even as a little misused person. In all these ways, God began to tell us who he was.

The last one which I think means most to me is El Shaddai, God Almighty. It was a special name to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because it's the one who brings life out of deadness. He usually said to Abraham, "I am El Shaddai," when he was talking about Abraham having kids.

Abraham and Sarah couldn't have children, and every time God would come back and say, "It's going to happen, I'll move in your deadness," he would use this name El Shaddai. It has the connotation of fruitfulness and seed-bearing. Actually, it can be translated "the breast."

"Not only will I give you children and give you life in your deadness, Abraham and Sarah, but I will sucker you as you sucker them. I will be the one who nourishes you." The heathen had many-breasted idols, Diana was one of them that they worshipped, so this idea was very prevalent.

El Shaddai means that I will bless you in that very practical regard of children and spiritual children. It's the God who is enough and sufficient. I think it was my El Shaddai that kept me sane in all those years when Stuart was on the road and I was alone.

I came back to that aspect of his character over and over again. He was my El Shaddai, the God who is enough. I discovered I didn't need more than an enough God. If God's enough, he's enough. What more do I need? If he is my El Shaddai, he's the God who is enough.

He is committed to me just as surely as he's committed to himself, putting out my boundary lines, making me live within that beautiful inheritance, looking after me, and providing for me. As we come to the end of our first name, Elohim, I want a moment of quietness as we pray.

Take one aspect of something that has come to you through this study and decide to take it with you into the week. Think of a picture I've given you or a name or an aspect of God. Perhaps you'd like to say, "This week God is going to be my El Elyon." Make your heart response to God.