You ever held a hose and backed the water up by pinching your hand—and you feel the pressure build up, and you release it, and out comes the pressure?  That’s as close as I can come to giving you an abstract mental picture of the name Jehovah.  It’s as though God’s nature is pressuring like the water on a pinched-up hose to get out and spray forth or pour forth its benefit.  That’s the name Jehovah—God pressuring to come forth in revelation.  And to a people that He selected as His Oracle designed by God to be the voice that would tell the whole world about God, He says “I’m now gonna reveal myself not just as El, ‘Most High’” and up there, “but as Jehovah, seeking to come forth and reveal myself to you. 

What a tragedy that Satan moves in and the exact opposite of God’s intention occurred among the Oracle people themselves because the scholars came up with the hair-brained idea suggested by heathenism that Jehovah should be a name so far above mankind it was not even to be pronounced.  So when they read the Scripture, in your King James when you have ‘Lord’ in capital letters you know that it’s translating Yahweh, Jehovah, but in the old Hebrew patterns of worship when they read the Scripture they come to Jehovah, they substitute Adonai or another word for ‘Lord.’  They will not pronounce ‘Jehovah.’  They flung it back into mystery land.  When God intended His names to reveal what He wanted to be to Himself and to and through Jehovah, as with El adding Shaddai, Jehovah coming forth like the water in that pinched-up hose revealed Himself to these people with specific expressions aimed to specific needs. 

And now I’m at the subject matter of cure.  I don’t know what your darkness is but the name Jehovah throughout Scripture has appended to it Jehovah-some specific.  In your darkness and in mine we find the name expression which is a revelation of what God wants

to be for us and Faith grabs it and says that fits my need.  James Dunn once said God’s like a great tree; there’s a branch for everybody.  I don’t like generalized preaching that doesn’t hit where we live and through some heavy theology and Biblical linguistics we’ve come to the point of what the solution to darkness is.  In my darkness where there is no light, I’m not to doubt in the dark what God said in the light and I in my darkness, instead of creating my own light as my first act, I better go down the names of God and see is there one that fits my situation. 

Well, you say yours is economic disaster—Jehovah-jireh.  I started out by saying I’m preaching to people of Faith, believers that obey the voice of His servant that are in darkness.  Is your darkness financial—your darkness, you don’t see any way out?  Well before you go and find some criminal juice-man that’s gonna charge you 33% a day—maybe before you light that match, abject on your face, opening your mouth, humbling yourself asking God’s help, you might specifically reach through your darkness—though you can’t see, God can see you—and say, “Hey, wait a minute!  ‘The Lord will provide’: Jehovah-jireh.”  That’s what the word means. 

We’ve got a painting back there in the foyer.  The greatest gift that God has given Abraham, God said “I’m taking him back.  Take him to this hill and offer him as a burnt offering.”  The bottom of the hill, Isaac says “I see the fire, I see everything else, where’s the sacrifice?” not knowing that he was gonna be the sacrifice.  Abraham says, as they leave the servants at the bottom of the hill and he and Isaac set up the hill, a little phrase that most people miss: “We shall return,” not “I will return.”  That’s why Abraham gets his greatest promise from God at that stage and that’s why it’s an icon in our foyer.  Abram had finally come to the point that he could trust God to the