The name, “Jehovah,” is a name meaning God Other possible meanings are “the Coming One”, “the I am.” , “The Eternal” or “The Self-existent One.”
There is merit in all of these interpretations. God is eternal because He is Self-existent. He is the One who in Himself embodies essential life, permanent existence, derived from no source outside Himself, and absolutely dependent upon no other person, thing, or circumstance for continuance. He is Self-existent and eternal The One who always has been, who now is, and who always will be. The One who is always coming, always at hand.
(Rev. 1:4 ISV).”Him Who is, and Who was, and Who is coming”,
(Rev. 4:8 ISV). “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was, and Who now being, and Who is the coming one”
(Rev 1:4 NRSV) John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne,
(Rev 4:8 NRSV) And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
The Lord God Almighty is not someone to come sometime in the distant future. He is the one who was coming, who is coming, and who will continue to come, manifesting Himself to His people in blessing and judgment and redemption until every eye has beheld Him and every heart has acknowledged Him as Lord of all.
(Isa 45:21 NRSV) Who declared it of old? Was it not I, the LORD? There is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is no one besides me.
(Isa 45:23 NRSV) By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.”
In the Hebrew Scriptures salvation is of Jehovah. No other name is given which His chosen people could invoke for help. Even when the Messiah came in flesh in order to be the Savior there was no real change, in Hebrew he is Jehovah-savior, the meaning of the name Jesus. Peter could assure the Jews that: “there is salvation in no other: for there is no other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Does this deny that there is salvation in Jehovah? Quite the opposite! It insists that Jesus is the Jehovah in whom salvation is found. The name Jehovah occurs every time we find the personal name of Lord Jesus. Salvation is united with the Name in a compound. It is no longer Jehovah, but Jehovah-Saviour Jesus.
Most who saw Him in the flesh saw only the One who is. Of His past glory with the Father they knew nothing. Of His future exaltation they did not dream. Anyone who really knew His Name realized what He had been, and what He would be, as well as what He was. He is a Saviour who plans and performs and perfects, in the past, in the present, and in the future. The one who has come to you and has begun a good work in you is the same One who will come and continue to come in your today and in all of your tomorrows to perfect that good work, bringing it to completion, and present you faultless in the image of God. It is an on-going process, an ever-unfolding restoration.
Jehovah is the ever-coming One. The Coming One is our Lord and our God. Many Jehovah combinations or compound names are used in the scriptures, each indicating how He comes to us:
JEHOVAH-TSIDKENU, the Coming One, our Righteousness.
JEHOVAH-JIREH, the Coming One, our Provider.
JEHOVAH-ROPHI, the Coming One, our Healer.
JEHOVAH-NISSI, the Coming One, our Banner.
JEHOVAH-MEKADDISHKEN, the Coming One, our Sanctifier.
JEHOVAH-SHALOM, the Coming One, our Peace.
JEHOVAH-SABAOTH, the Coming One, our Warrior.
JEHOVAH-SHAMMAH, the Coming One, Present with us.
JEHOVAH-ELYON, the Coming One, Most High.
JEHOVAH-RA-AH, the Coming One, our Shepherd.
The Lord Jesus wants to be King NOW. He wants to come to today into the foundations of our spirit and life and reign within the temple of our being. Christ is coming constantly. It is possible to feel Him near. He manifests Himself to consciousness in close communion. He transforms the mind and heart and life and flows from the innermost being. He does not come to us in all the fullness of Himself but His coming in God’s tomorrow is not a single, once for all, event – it will be the consummation of the glory of His appearing to us, in us, and through us in our today.
Now is always the best time to live. Today is always the best time to walk with God. God is now. JESUS HAS COME
(2 Cor 6:2 NIV) For he says, “In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.”
I tell you, now is the time of God’s favour, now is the day of salvation.
Missing his coming
Like the Jews many of the churches of today look forward with similar intensity watching for a “rapture” or a kingdom that will deliver them from the world’s bondage and establish temporal thrones of political power and authority in the earth. When the sons of God are manifested, when God’s King-Priest company arises in power and authority, when the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, when all nations and kindred serve Him, when all things in heaven and in earth are subject to God; the work will not be the result of worldly religious, political or military might – but by spiritual power.
(Zec 4:6 NIV) So he said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.
Christ will come to bring the triumph of His Kingdom into new and greater dimensions on the earth through the ministry of a body of sons formed under His hand. Christians may well continue to be locked into denominational religion, singing, clapping, preaching, prophesying and waiting for a second coming that will meet their demands and fulfil their expectations as the Jewish nation who were not ignorant of the teaching of scripture concerning His coming. The Jews were good fundamentalists; anxiously expecting His arrival but they also had drifted so far from the Holy Spirit of God, that when the day arrived they did not know it. Only the Holy Spirit could reveal it. A sleeping church today can also fail to recognize the signs and events which herald a new manifestation of Jesus Christ as the Lord God reveals it.
When Jesus walked in flesh upon this earth there were very few who recognized Him. Peter among the disciple was given a revelation of the Son.
“And Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. And Jesus answered and said to him, Blessed are you, Simon Barjonah: for flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but My Father which is in heaven” (Mat. 16:16-17).
The few who did recognize Him at His birth, during His ministry, and after His resurrection were those who walked with God and whose spirits were open to the light of heaven.
The conditions of “spiritual blindness” that prevailed then is still with us.
Jehovah
This pronounceable form of YHWH was introduced in 1520 by Galatinus but immediately strongly contested because the Hebrew script only has consonants. The vowels had to be inserted as/when the text was read aloud. When the oral language declined the Masoretes devised an ingenious vowel notation system to preserve the pronunciation. However the name YHWH was considered so holy that such change was not to be so pronounced. Instead a reader would say Ädonai” meaning My Lord (From the root ädon”). In an act contrary to accepted belief the Masorites superimposed their vowel system upon YHWH and the word Jehovah was created.
YHWH (Yahweh, Jahweh)
YHWH is the second creation name of God. God’s name changes from Elohim to YHWH in Genesis 2:4.
The Hebrews were the first to incorporate vowels in their written text and by doing this the previously esoteric art of writing and reading became available to the masses. The seemingly casual command to ‘write’ something on doors or foreheads included the invention of a writing system that could be learned by everybody.. Hebrew theology is by far the most influential ever, and this is in part due to the Hebrew invention of vowel notation.
These letters became markers for both the Hebrew identity and the Hebrew religion, including the various names for God. One of these names is the famous TetragrammatonYHWH (YHWH) which actually consists only of vowels, and is utterly exceptional in many ways, including the fact that it can not be pronounced.
The word (El) was the name of the prominent Canaanite god, whose name was either derived from or became the common word for god in general. The plural of this word is gods. With the addition of a letter creating the word Elohim the Hebrews not only stated essential monotheism (by naming a single God after the plural word “gods”) but also marked their God as theirs: Elohim is the singular pantheon of the “vowel-people”.
Something similar occured when the name of patriarch Abram was expanded with the “heh” into Abraham and the name of matriarch Sarai was expanded with the heh to Sarah .
The meaning of the name YHWH is not very clear, and therefore subject to much debate. The key scene in this respect seems to be Ex 3:13-15, where God names Himself first: (I Am Who I Am), then (I Am), and finally YHWH and states that this is his name forever and a memorial name to all generations. It has been long supposed that YHWH is derived from the verb that is used to make I Am, namely (haya ) to be, to become, to happen, or rather from an older form and rare synonym of haya, namely hawa, hence y-hawa or yahweh, the proper imperfect of the verb, thus rendering the name either Being or He Is. (But note that the Hebrew language is far more dynamic than our modern languages. The verb to be indicates an action that intimately reveals the nature of the one who is doing the acting.
Two separate verb forms.
(hawa) is the aforementioned older form of (haya), to be or become.
(hawa) means to fall, with derivatives calamity, wickedness, evil desire, disaster. Perhaps this curious double meaning is in some ways comparable to our word happen, as the words happening and happenstance are often used as euphemisms for typically unfortunate events.
There is a problem with the pronunciation Yahweh. It is a strange combination of old and late elements. In view of these problems it may be best simply to say that YWHW does not come from the verb hawa at all. We may well hold that YHWH is an old word of unknown origin which sounded something like the verb hawa sounded in Moses’ day. However, if the word were spelled with four letters in Moses’ day, we would have expected it to have had more than two syllables, for at that period all the letters were sounded.”
In other words, the name YHWH is likely to be a hybrid of times, as if it can not be localized but spans centuries of evolving grammar. It may be derived from a verb that means to be, which is spelled differently from the regular verb to be, and similar to a verb that means something very bad. Perhaps all this confusion or rather, this wide pallet of negotiations is what this Name most essentially conveys: existence in its broadest sense, yet unlike any regular human perspective; a blessing to the wise, but the undoing of the wicked.
On the other hand, perhaps the name YHWH means Tom, Dick or Harry in a language that has slipped out of the collective human consciousness and we are left with the echoes of a revelation that was as sincere and intimate as the word abba: daddy.