whatever your darkness is, to do the following: “Let him trust in the name of the Lord.”  Well now, that’s a pretty simple statement.  Let me elaborate.  “Let him trust”—ibeteh is the word in the Hebrew.  Really the root is beteh.  It means ‘to throw oneself upon’—to get helpless in giving up of yourself to the degree that it is sometimes used to paint a picture of throwing yourself face down before someone.  It is one of the most colorful Hebrew words to describe the attitude before God in your time of need.  “Let him cast himself face down,” if you will, “onto God.”  This is so simple I feel like I’m insulting your intelligence.  But it’s the simple things we miss.  “Oh, I’m in darkness!”  Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.  “Where’s my…where’s this damn lighter?”  Darkness comes.  Cast yourself in solicitous searching, prayerful helpless thrusting of the self on what?  “In the name of the Lord.”  Crowding everything else out of focus, crowding the darkness itself out of focus, I with total abject commitment fling myself on what?  “The name of the Lord.”

Now here’s where I get theological and heavy, but the sentence ceases to be meaningless:  “Names of the Lord.”  Why so many names?  We start out in the beginning.  “In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth.”  The root—that marvelous word said in reverse as the Hebrew reads from right to left but turned around in the English—El, ‘Most High.’  The first expression of God’s name—“Most High,” above everything and in the plural in the opening of Genesis.  “In the beginning Elohim,” the Most High Ones; Gods—“created the heavens and the earth.”  But then you come to God’s choice of a people, Abraham.  And then God begins to add to the word El other words.  You have El plus.  Elolam—Elolam meaning ‘Utmost High,’ God Most High—if the High One isn’t enough, the ‘Most High Above All.’  El Shaddai—I preach on this on
 

Mother’s Day; literally, ‘the breasted one.’  It’s the picture of a mother nourishing a child at her breast and providing all that the child needs.  And these names keep coming forth as God reveals Himself to the one man who trusted Him, Abraham—and God chose him out of all people of the earth to be the foci of His revelation of Himself. 

And then comes that great revelation of the people led out by Moses—Israel, and ultimately receiving all the revelations on Mount Sinai.  But God then says, “I’ve been known by my name El”—‘The High One’—“but now I’m going to reveal myself as Yahweh, as Jehovah,” another name for God so prominent in the change that some Bible scholars try to have two different writers recording this early section of the Bible, the Pentateuch, because one worships El and one worships Jehovah or Yahweh.  No, same God who’s expanding His revelation of Himself to the people and He does it by names.  Names mean something, not just random appellations.  As He reveals a trait, He then describes the trait by adding a permanent name to Himself.  And along comes the tetragrammaton, Yahweh, this great four-letter-consonant word—yaha-wah, Y-H-W-H—and because the Germans couldn’t pronounce a ‘w’ and it becomes a ‘v,’ it matriculated into the English from Yahweh to Jehovah but the original is the four-consonant tetragrammaton, Yod-He-Vav- (or Wav) and He—Yahweh, Jehovah. 

              Now I’ve told you that always the Hebrew is a picture language.  What’s the picture of Jehovah?  From the ‘Most High One’ that you look up to and you get a sense of His qualities He says, “I’m gonna reveal myself as Jehovah.”  The picture word is best illustrated, though they didn’t have it when the word came, but it’s a nice modern illustration of what is carried in the meaning of Jehovah.  Stay with me on the theology—and grab your brain and imagine holding a hose.