Who Is GOD? What Is His Name? YHWH

Common Sense Commentary:

TIME only has three tenses, past, present and future.  We are living at exactly the infinitesimally tiny center-point between past and future. The present is not even one second long before it is the past and we are constantly moving out of the past and into the future. The past and future are as infinite as outer space.  I don't know that time and space are "created" things.  As God is infinite (immeasurable, inexhaustible, limitless and even inconceivable in His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and omniholiness, so must there be also an eternal, immeasurable past and future in which He has always existed and will always exist.  And if time is infinite, so must space be infinite ... where God IS.  Omnipresence means that God IS everywhere present in the universe and IS always, eternally present there .... for ever. "If I ascend up into heaven, thou are there: if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there." Psm.139:8. 

SPACE seems to be a parallel thing with time.  In God's infinite space (universe and beyond), every direction is up to infinity. We, in America, look up at the blue sky in the day-time while those on the other side of earth are looking up at the stars, at night, in the opposite direction of us.  The only place, in our human understanding which is down is under our feet toward the center of the earth ... which is the exact same  direction wherever one might be on earth.  But even so, when your mind looks down to the heart of the earth and passes it by, you are then going up again but in the opposite direction.  Directions seem to apply only to the surface of earth and maybe some other planets but not to outer space.

The human mind can no more comprehend infinite time and infinite space than it can comprehend our infinite God of time and space.  Maybe that is why God's Word says, "Without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that He IS ...." Heb.11:6.   God is not subject to time or space.
He lives in the eternal present ... "I AM".  Nearly 100 times in the Bible God or Jesus said, "I am".  When Moses asked God ... When I get back to your people in Egypt and say, "The God of your fathers sent me" to be your leader, "And they shall say to me, 'What is his name?'  What shall I say ...? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel,
I AM hath sent me unto you."  Ex.3:13-14.  When God says, "I AM", he is summing up all of eternity in time and space within himself. The verb "am" here means "to be" in the first person singular. When we say, "LORD you are", we are praying  to the second person singular.  Then when we witness to others, we testify, "HE IS".  That is exactly what God's name, JEHOVAH, means ....... "THE ETERNAL EXISTING ONE"...  YAHVAH.  After God revealed to Moses His "first person" way of saying his name "I AM", in the next verse (Ex.3:15), "God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, 'The LORD God of your fathers  .... hath sent me unto you: this is my name forever ...."    Every use, in the Bible, of "LORD", in all caps, is the Hebrew word
"YHWH" which is unpronounceable.  To this tetragamaton the Jewish scholars added two vowels, A and E to make it pronounceable as "YAHWEH" or in English,
JEHOVAH.  The added "A" is the first letter of Adonai which is translated Lord 500 times in the O.T.  and the added "E" they took from the Hebrew "Elohim" which is translated "God" over 2,300 times in the O.T.   Elohim is in plural form but is used with singular verbs.  This fact, again, points to the Holy Trinity as did Gen.1:26-27 "Let us make man in our image... So God created man in his own image..."  and, "There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, and  the Word and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."  1Jn.5:7.  YHVH  is translated in all caps, "LORD", "GOD" and "JEHOVAH" over 7000 times in the O.T. scriptures.

In 1869, a Jewish Scholar, I.M. Wise, wrote in his book, Outlines of Judaism, "An English word expressing at once, 'He Is, He Was, and He Will Be' would be an equivalent of YHVH or JEHOVAH but it would have to convey the meaning ... also of causation.  There is no such word in any language except Hebrew, YHVH."

"And God spake unto Moses ... I am the LORD (YAHWEH/ JEHOVAH): I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them." Ex.6:2-3

"I am the LORD (YHVH/ YAHWEH/ JEHOVAH) that is my name...." Isa.42:8

Pass it on. RB