Blessings friends,
In this blog post I
will address a couple of questions I received from friends and blog
followers. If you have spiritual
questions you would like answered in a blog post, contact me at
revdangeorge@gmail.com Make the subject
line of the e-mail "blog questions," and let me know if it's alright
to use your first name. You may also
post your questions to my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/authordangeorge
I'm leaving names
out of this first reader questions post, as I did not ask for permission to use
names.
Question 1: Why does
God care who we say he is? Does he need
job references or something?
Follow-up
question (by another person building off of the first, as this was asked via
Facebook.) If God is infinite, why does
he care about names?
The simplest
answer to the first question is that God doesn't "need" us to call
him anything or say anything about him, except that he greatly desires us to
grow. Knowing God is how we grow. So, it's not so much that God needs us to,
it's that God wants us to because we need to.
However, the
follow-up question, while like the first, opens a different door. Why does God care about names?
Cultures
throughout the world have believed in the power of knowing a spirit's true
name, and exponentially so for Divine names.
Egyptians have countless stories about people learning the true name of
a god, such as one where a sorceress learns the true name of Re (the sun god)
and ultimately forces him to turn her into a goddess equal to him. (1) Even some Christian exorcism rites involve
learning the demon's true name in order to banish it. (2)
Christianity
originates from Judaism, and in Judaism the Name of God, which is represented
by the tetragrammaton is particularly powerful.
It is the Name meant when the commandment says to not take the Lord's
name in vain! It doesn't mean the word
"God" nor even the word "Lord." Those are titles. His name is represented by the tetragrammaton
YHVH (commonly rendered Yahweh or Jehovah in English.) Our modern Bibles
actually do us a disservice by removing the Holy Name and replacing it with
Adonai (Lord.) In the original
manuscripts, the Name was used for a reason.
Baruch Ha'Shem YHVH. (Blessed is The Name YHVH.)
In modern
Judaism, and actually for a few thousand years now, Ha'Shem, the name, was/is
almost never spoken. It was used once a
year by the High Priest during the Temple periods, and I don't know if it is
ever spoken these days. I do know that
the tefillin and mezuzah (scrolls with the Sh'mah blessing) use the actual name
of God, but if we say the passage (from Deuteronomy 6:4) out loud we say
"Lord" in place of YHVH.
"Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." is how
it begins as we say it, but it was written differently; more like, "Hear
oh Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one. (3)
Then we have the
curious case of Abram/Abraham; the patriarch of Israel. He called God by many different names. (4)
The two prevailing theories as to why he used different names are as follows.
Some believe that
Abraham used different names because he was praying to different gods (or Gods,
if you prefer.) They point out
Melchizedek who was a priest of El Elyon (God Most High,) and to whom Abraham
offered a tithe.(5) Mel wasn't of
Abram's people, but was actually a foreign king. In addition, they point out how the offerings
made in different places to different names of God are very different in
nature. The proponents of this theory say that it proves that Abraham was
making offerings to different gods/Gods, and that's why different names were
used. They also have on their side that
some of these names were also used by other cultures in the region for their
gods.
The other theory,
and the one more important to this question, is that Abraham was using
different names for God, because each of those names evoked different Divine
qualities. The offerings were different,
because they were asking for different blessings. Melchizedek, they say, was a High Priest of
God before most of the world turned away from God, as Abraham was only a few
generations after the Flood.
There are flaws
in both theories, but the point is that different names for the Divine can
evoke different qualities. Similar to
the example of Abraham I could digress and talk about Hinduism, and how each of
their gods are actually just aspects of Brahman, but for the sake of time and
clarity, I'll leave it as it is.
To summarize, and
draw the two answers together, I don't think God cares which name you call God,
so long as you draw closer to God. That
said, it is beneficial to learn the traditional names for God, because there is
power in them. The very fact that others
revere those names gives them another kind of power as well. I also don't think God is limited to
"Him" or "Her," but that's another blog post.
Question 2: Why do children die? What is the reason for a 17 year old to die
forever in this life?
Follow-up question,
from me (because it's relevant to the question and to things happening in
society right now.) How can God let so
many people be murdered in a church, including a pastor and another pastor's
young daughter?
To a grieving
mother, father, sibling, aunt or even close friend, there is no good answer to
the first question. Death is one of the
hardest things to face in this life, and it's harder when it's someone close to
us. For some people, it's even harder
when it's a young person who seemed to have their whole lives ahead of
them.
The only real
answer is that we are mortal, and no one is guaranteed an amount of time. Now, I don't buy that "God called them
home" line which is used so often to comfort the bereaved. God didn't make the person die, except
perhaps in a very few, extremely rare instances which get recorded in
scripture. We tend to put blame on God
for everything which happens, but God's job isn't to micromanage our lives.
That doesn't mean
God isn't involved in our lives, as He very much is. He works for our good in all things. (1) However, God doesn't always protect us from
the experiences of life, and sometimes things go wrong. (2) Whether it's
illness, genetic, or human activity which ends another person's life, there are
only rare circumstances where God intervenes to stop it. Most often, God nudges other humans to help,
or tries to nudge the person out of danger, but it's up to us to listen and up
to other humans to intervene. Then, of
course, sometimes the death is inevitable, and God weeps with us.
This world is
fallen and full of evil and hardship, and many religions, especially
Christianity and some forms of Judaism, talk about the next world. In the next world, there is no pain and
suffering, only the peace and joy. (3) Whether you think of it in terms of
Heaven, the Elysian fields, the Summerlands, Nirvana, or any of the myriad
other ideas on the afterlife, the core idea is the same.
Of course, the
follow-up question is already answered in the answering of the first; that is,
evil happens in this world and God doesn't always stop it. What we can be assured of is that angels were
there to protect as many as possible, and bring the rest home with love. Could God have stopped the church shooting?
(4) Sure, God can do anything. He
probably did try to nudge several people to put a stop to it, and we don't know
who tried and didn't. Ultimately, God most
often works through other people.
My dad used to
say, in more colorful language, "life is full of feces because feces makes
good fertilizer and makes things grow."
It's probably the best answer I've ever heard as to why God allows any
hardship for us, but I understand that the answer isn't always great
comfort.
We don't always
understand why God doesn't stop all of the evil and hardship in the world, and
even infants die. What we do know is
that God takes any evil which happens and makes good from it, even when we
can't see how any good can come from it, so long as we stay close to God.
I hope these answers helped, and I look forward to your
future questions.
References
below. Sorry, they don't link by
clicking the numbers above.
References for Question 1
1 http://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/isisra.html (note this
page spells "Re" as "Ra," which is more common but
considered less accurate.)
2
https://aleteia.org/2017/04/05/why-do-exorcists-ask-demons-to-reveal-their-names/2/
3 http://biblehub.com/interlinear/deuteronomy/6.htm (start at verse 4, read right to left, as
Hebrew is written reverse from English.)
4 http://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/21.htm (look at
verse 33. Note, this interlinear version
replaces every instance of "Lord," in Hebrew "Adonai," with
"Yahweh." It is not agreed
among scholars whether this is always correct, especially before the time of
Moses, to whom that Name was given.)
5 http://biblehub.com/nasb/genesis/14.htm (verses 17-20)
References for Question 2
1 http://biblehub.com/nasb77/romans/8.htm (see verses 26-30,
esp vs 28)
2 http://biblehub.com/nasb/ecclesiastes/3.htm (especially chapter 1 verses 1-8, but the
whole book is a good read.)
3 http://biblehub.com/nasb/revelation/21.htm (verses 1-8)
4 http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/us/texas-church-shooting-pastors-daughter/index.html
(many other relevant stories linked with this story as well.)
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