Throughout Genesis, God is referred to by the names of El, Yahweh, and Elohim. And for roughly the first 2000 years of Earth’s history, men are referred to as “calling upon the name of Yahweh.”

Genesis 4:26 And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD [Yahweh].

So we are understandably extremely confused when God tells Moses – the man, it will be remembered, who WROTE Genesis – that his ancestors did not know the name of the Lord!

Exodus 6:3 and I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty; but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them.

So why would Moses record Abraham addressing Yahweh by name, then record God telling Moses himself that Abraham had done no such thing? Thus contradicting his own story? Let that sink in.

God told Moses that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had known Him by the name translated “God Almighty,” in Hebrew “El Shaddai,” but not by His name Yahweh. Only… here’s the problem. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are explicitly recorded, BY MOSES, as having used the name of Yahweh!

Genesis 15:7-8 He said to him, “I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give you this land to inherit it.” He said, “Lord Yahweh, how will I know that I will inherit it?”

How do we solve this blatant contradiction? It begins when you realize that the name Exodus 6:3 tells us they did know, El Shaddai, isn’t really a name at all…

In northwest Semitic use, “ʼĒl” was a generic word for any god as well as the special name or title of a particular god who was distinguished from other gods as being “the god” (Wikipedia, “El”).

In English we use the same word “God” to refer to Zeus as we do to address the one true God of the Christians. Just as the Canaanites and Hebrews used “El” to refer to their own personal chief God, and also to refer to deities in general.

So then when God claimed that Abraham knew Him by the name of El, Abraham knew no more about the name of the true God than did your average Canaanite. But by addressing God as the Shaddai, the mightiest, Abraham directed his prayer to the most powerful of all the El’s.

And yet this was not a name, as such, it was a descriptor. Imagine for a moment that you didn’t know the name Zeus; if you needed to get a message through to him, you might pray to “the chief god of the Greeks,” or “the father of Hercules,” or “he who rules the gods on Olympus.”

None of these are names… and yet, if a letter were addressed to this fellow, there would be no problem delivering it to the right address. Thus you can pray to God, and get your prayer to the correct God, without knowing His actual name.

Because when Abraham sent a message – a prayer – to “the most powerful God,” well, there’s no doubt in any angel’s mind who that is. And thus, without naming Him, Abraham communicates with Him, and serves Him.

A GOD WITH NO BACKSTORY

But this was quite strange for the ancient cultures, all of whose gods had names, and origin stories, and various mythologies attached to them. But the Almighty God of Abraham had no origin story; He just… always was.

I mean think about it; what do we know about God, as a person, from the Old Testament? What did He do in the beforetime? He didn’t have a wife, or battles with monsters to brag about, He didn’t even have a son at that time.

When you think about it, the mythology of the Hebrew God is the most boring of any God. I mean, even the creation in Genesis 1 ranks as the most boring of all creation myths. God spoke and it… was. No primordial turtles or dragons, just… talking? Try to make a movie out of that!

And when it gets to the thornier question that every God gets asked eventually, “where did you come from?,” it gets even more dull. God… Well, He just… was. And had always been. And that’s a tough concept to wrap a mortal mind around.

Psalms 90:2 Before the mountains were brought forth, before you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

Psalms 93:2 Your throne is established from long ago. You are from everlasting.

This is awesome, and taken at face value solves a lot of origin problems; no big bang needed, God made the universe. Who made God? No one, He just… is. And was. For always. If you can accept this admittedly large premise, the rest of the universe makes sense.

And yet, in all fairness, this story is a lot less exciting than, say, Marduk killing his mother the dragon Tiamat and using her bones to build a tent which we call the heavens. The idea of an absolute ruler of the universe, unchallenged by anyone or anything, is far less of a nail-biter than the daily battle of Ra against the serpent Apophis intent on devouring the world.

Against the backdrop of these exciting stories, the Hebrew God is simply… there. And so how do you define Him, describe Him, limit Him to a name? What picture can do justice to such a being – for that matter, what would you even draw? He has no major life events to depict; He never killed a dragon, nor loved a wife, nor flew on a giant bird. So what is He?

Isaiah 42:8 (WEB) I am Yahweh. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to engraved images.

See, images aren’t wrong, per se. If you miss your girlfriend while you’re off to war, having her picture in your pocket is comforting reminder of her. God gets this. And if there were an image which could do justice, even in a child’s crayon drawing sort of way, God might permit them.

But God hates images because no image can help but limit His glory, and thus make you think less of Him than He truly is. No image made of matter can help but leave you with a misunderstanding of His true spiritual self. And so it’s better for you to leave God invisible, as He prefers to be until we’re ready to see Him in the flesh (Matthew 5:8).

For the same reason, God resists names; because almost any name, however glorious it might seem to you, cannot help but diminish His identity.

Which is why He much prefers to interact with people through titles; the God of Abraham, for example, is not limited because it utterly lacks any restrictive content. Is he the God of Abraham but not of anyone else? What about Noah, Balaam, or Enoch? So obviously, saying He is one person’s God doesn’t exclude Him from also being other people’s God.

Likewise the Most High God is an open-ended title. How powerful is He? More. But when you give Him a name – like, say, the God of thunder – that limits Him to that role, as Baal Hadad is limited. When you call Him Jupiter, a name which derives from words meaning “bright father” that slots Him into a role. While true, He is vastly more than that… so He finds any name limiting.

Calling Him Buddha, a name which literally means “the enlightened one, the knowing” is true… and yet He is vastly more than that. Powerful, creator, father – all of these things are left unsaid, and thus limiting to His power if that is considered to be His NAME, a description of His essence.

THE NEW NAME

When God introduced Himself to Moses out of the burning bush, He didn’t bother with a name because He knew it would be meaningless to Moses. Instead, He identified himself through His relationship with his ancestors:

Exodus 3:6 Moreover he said, “I am the God of your father [Amram], the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.…”

So first God goes with His old standby – I’m the God who talked to so-and-so. This is safe because it doesn’t limit Him to anything, as it’s a purely referential name. But Moses knew Israel was going to want more than that.

Verses 13-14 Moses said to God, “Behold, when I come to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you;’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What should I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM,” and he said, “You shall tell the children of Israel this: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

And in spite of Moses’ direct question, God still was evasive. Rather than giving a proper name, He describes Himself again in more detail, this time saying His is the “I AM WHO I AM,” which could be translated into English more freely as “I am the Being that always Is/Was/Will Be.”

John 8:58 Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

This is grammatically incorrect, but faithfully translated from the original. Because the Greek language has no word for Was/Am/Will Be. Thus Jesus rendered His existence in the present tense because in ALL presents, Jesus is.

And so God suggested to Moses that, instead of calling Him the most powerful El, he instead call Him the ever-existing El. This is a more narrow descriptor, because it eliminates more confusion between the true God and false gods like Ra.

Let’s say you were an Egyptian, and some Hebrew tells you “I worship the most powerful God.” He might respond “Oh yeah? Me too! I love Ra.” Ra, the king of the Egyptian Gods (at least in some tellings – Egyptians fiddled with their gods a lot) – was the almighty.

And so that could conceivably be confusing. But if you were to go to that same Egyptian and say “I worship the ever-existing God” he would be confused; because no other religion has a God that has always existed!

All of the idolatrous gods, regardless of the culture, came from somewhere. Even Khnum and Ptah, and Ra, Egyptian creator gods from different regions, were said to have first created themselves – however that works – and then went on to create the universe. But they all admitted to having had a beginning. Abraham’s God did not.

Hebrews 7: 1-3 (WEB) For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of God Most High, … (being first, by interpretation, king of righteousness, and then also king of Salem, which is king of peace; without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God), remains a priest continually.

In all truth, the most powerful God was a good enough descriptor at the end of the day. Even the angels and devils know Who this is (James 2:19), and prayers sent to that address are going to wind up in the right place. But because some of the Egyptian gods were full of themselves and claimed to be all powerful, it might not be clear enough.

So God gave Moses a second one, that no other deity even pretended to have – life from everlasting to everlasting, past eternity to future eternity. And this one was definitely good enough to avoid confusion with other gods.

Still, knowing Moses wasn’t going to let this go, God finally gave Moses a proper name based on His former answer – Yahweh. This name is derived from the Hebrew word meaning Hayah “to be.”

Thus, if God were speaking today in our language, Exodus 3:14 might have read something like “I have always existed and will always exist; tell them the existent being has sent you,” and then to provide a proper name, went on to say “Go ahead and call me Existos; this now my name forever.”

This name is one of the only, if not the only, names that does not limit God. For one who has existed for an infinite amount of time has room in His story to have done infinite things, a person whose very name is based on the verb “To Be” can, by definition, be literally anything and everything.

Thus within that name He can BE a father, BE a savior, BE a creator, BE literally anything, for He IS all-powerful because He IS. Thus this name is one which does not risk confining Him to a role too small for Him.

Verse 15 God said moreover to Moses, “You shall tell the children of Israel this, ‘Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations.”

MY NAME IS SECRET

And this name is holy, too holy to let just anyone use. Which is why He was so cagey about giving it out earlier, even to people He liked; because the name of God in the hands of the unclean, would make the name itself cheapened by association.

Ezekiel 36:20-21 When they came to the nations, where they went, they profaned my holy name; in that men said of them, These are the people of Yahweh, and are gone forth out of his land. But I had respect for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations, where they went.

There are people who do not have my phone number because I don’t want them bothering me. If they want to get ahold of me, they can contact me by email or tell a mutual friend and if he deems it important, he’ll pass it along.

So likewise the name of a divine being gives you the power to get their attention; and it’s a lot easier to not give someone your number than to block it once they have it. This intuitive fact is something that more primitive cultures understood, which is why they asked… and why God didn’t share it.

Genesis 32:29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” The man answered, “Why do you ask for my name?” Then he blessed Jacob there.

Judges 13:18 The angel of Yahweh said to him, “Why do you ask about my name, since it is wonderful?”

The name of a divine being can be a very personal thing to share with mortals. Which is why celebrities don’t post their cell phone number on Twitter. And so God, by sharing His name with Moses, was giving Israel His own private line; a sign of a personal relationship with them like no other.

And when you read the story carefully, the progression from “Tell them the God of Abraham… tell them the I AM…” to finally “tell them Yahweh (the existing one),” it almost reads like God names Himself in response to Moses’ question.

I admit that might be a stretch, He may have been sitting on this name for eternity waiting for the right time to share it; He may have already shared it with Noah and the pre-flood world. But we know for a fact that Abraham did not know it, nor did Isaac and Jacob.

Why then, does Moses record them interacting, by name, with a Yahweh they didn’t know?

RETCONNING GENESIS

For those of you who aren’t nerds, retconning is the practice in sci-fi and fantasy franchises of RETroactively giving CONtinuity to events across storylines that seem to contradict, in order to make the entire history of a franchise make sense.

It’s like in Star Wars, Obi-wan at first tells Luke that his father Anakin Skywalker was murdered by a pupil of Obi-wan’s called Darth Vader. At that time, George Lucas intended for Vader to simply be a bad guy, and murdering Luke’s father provided motive for revenge.

Two movies later, after plot decisions had been made to make the story be that Anakin became Vader after falling for the dark side, this contradiction needed explained. Thus, Obi-wan’s force ghost explains that this was true “from a certain point of view,” thus admitting that Obi-wan lied, resolving the contradiction and making the plot of the movies make sense.

This is a classic example of retcon, although like all nerdy things, it is hotly debated. Not unlike the Bible, actually. So then, when Moses wrote Genesis he was telling God’s honest truth… but retroactively adding information not contained in the stories he, Moses, had been told by his own ancestors, in order to provide continuity with the newly revealed knowledge about the name of the God of Abraham!

Genesis 15:7-8 He said to him, “I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give you this land to inherit it.” He said, “Lord Yahweh, how will I know that I will inherit it?”

Moses told us that Abraham did not know the name of Yahweh; then proceeded to quote Abraham as addressing Yahweh by name! This is a blatant contradiction, and leads critical scholars to contrive explanations involving later copyists, scribal errors, Babylonian-era revisions, and so on.

But it’s far easier to conclude that Moses added the name to his story so that the Israelites, reading it, would know exactly to whom Moses’ story referred! Rather than blindly repeating the story he had heard from his father, Moses retold the story with new character information that his ancestors had not known!

And so when Moses records Abraham built “…an altar to Yahweh and called on the name of Yahweh” (Genesis 12:8), if we trust that Moses knew Abraham could not have used that name, it means that the story as Moses originally heard it must have used the only name Yahweh Himself said Abraham knew at that time – El Shaddai (Exodus 6:3).

Interestingly, Moses inserted the name of Yahweh into the story of the patriarchs regularly, but he didn’t do it every time. In quite a few places Abraham addressed a being He knew to be God in the first person as Adonai (Genesis 15:2, Genesis 18:27), which is literally “Master,” whether human or divine, just as Moses himself did even after knowing the name (Exodus 4:10).

[It is unfortunate that the KJV translates Adonai as “Lord” (lowercase) and translates Yahweh as “LORD” (uppercase). This is confusing since Yahweh is based on the verb “to be,” and has no actual connection with mastery or lordship whatsoever, except in that a being who IS, by definition, IS also a Lord and Master of all.]

Which means that had Abraham himself told you the story Moses relayed in Genesis 12:8, he likely would have said something like “I built an altar to my Master [Adonai] the almighty God [El Shaddai] [whomever that might be], and there I called upon the name of the most high God” [He knows who He is].

And yet Moses’ additions to the story are absolutely true; Abraham WAS calling upon Yahweh without knowing who He was. And while this is a bit confusing for us, these additions were hugely helpful for the Hebrews, because it helped them to understand that the God Moses was teaching them to serve was the same God Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been serving without the knowledge of His name that the Israelites now had.

So every time you see the name Yahweh inserted into the text before Exodus 3, you know this is Moses clarifying for us that this is the God of Abraham, by the name he now knew Him. And this explains a lot of odd stories, like why Hagar felt an urge to name Yahweh:

Genesis 16:13 She called the name of Yahweh who spoke to her, “You are a God who sees,” for she said, “Have I even stayed alive after seeing him?”

Moses knew that this was Yahweh; Hagar did not. Which is why she felt a need to name Him! So she called Him El Roi, the God that sees. Which is true enough; but not a proper name. Just one more (correct) way to describe Yahweh.

And we know for a fact that Moses made this exact addition to the stories as he told them, because in the very chapter where he first received the name, before Moses would have known the name, he already identifies the speaker as Yahweh before being introduced to Him!

Exodus 3:4 And when the LORD [Yahweh] saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

Moses correctly identified the speaker to us, even though at the time this happened Moses had no idea who it was. Just as he correctly identified the speaker to Abraham, even though Abraham at that time had no idea who was speaking to him – only that it was the most powerful God.

A LIMITED GOD

Many times we have expressed God as infinite and unlimited. But there is one thing that Yahweh was not; one limit He seems to have had: He wasn’t God of the dead.

Matthew 22:32 I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is NOT the God of the dead, but of the living.

This was a single restriction He had; as the God who could not lie (Hebrews 6:18), Yahweh was restricted to being the God of the living. Jesus – Yahweh – said so. Then He proceeded to remove that restriction:

Romans 14:9 For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living.

As a God who has died and lives again, He now has the keys of death and hell; and thus, has one more descriptor to use. And yet His name “Yahweh” no longer really fits, for it is, by definition, the ever existing one. For three days and nights, He didn’t exist. Therefore He is no longer Yahweh!

Isaiah 62:2 The nations shall see your righteousness, and all kings your glory, and you shall be called by a new name, which the mouth of Yahweh shall name.

Which means… all the sacred-namer’s out there praying to Yahweh are praying to a dead God! Because calling Jesus the ever existing one is false! And not only is it false, but now even THAT name is limiting!

Which is why, before losing His old name, He, Yahweh, sent an angel to give Himself a new name…

Matthew 1:21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

It is this name that will be named on all the people in His body – not Yahweh Elohim, but Jesus Elohim – the El who saves. This is why the name of Yahweh is not found in the NT, nor is it translated as the “Existing one” or the “I AM,” because those names stopped being true after Jesus died!

Philippians 2:9-11 Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Besides, “The one who always existed” is not nearly as cool as “the one who saves… everything.” But it is just as unique, as Yahweh ever was; for no one else… saves. The living and the dead, the Jew and the Gentile, the flesh and the spirit, the human and the angel. There are no limits on this name, for He has the power to save… anything.

A SEARCH FOR GOD

Josephus tells us, and I have established a fair amount of support for his claim in my article “Abraham in Egypt,” that Abraham had, by studying the motions of the gods of Mesopotamia – in other words, charting the motions of the planets – realized that the so-called gods moved in a very predictable fashion, as if they were bound by laws.

He reasoned from this that they could not be truly Gods, else they would be free to move around at will. And thus that if they did have power at all, it was because it was delegated to them by a higher, more powerful, invisible God who alone deserved worship (paraphrased from Antiquities of the Jews, 1.7.154).

And so it was that Abraham abandoned the worship of the god of his hometown of Ur, a lunar deity named Sin who simply could not be the creator of all for the moon itself was obviously bound by rules, and thus was limited and the greatest God, logically, could not be.

The true God must be worshipped in spirit and in truth, Jesus told us (John 4:23-24). And having determined this to be true, Abraham quickly realized that no one in ancient Sumer had any idea of such a God; they all being focused on worshipping the created things – the moon, sun, planets – rather than the being who had so obviously been necessary to create them.

But reason didn’t supply Abraham with a name! Only a list of descriptors; he reasoned He must be the invisible God, the most powerful God, the creator of all things, and so on. But these aren’t names.

And Abraham would have naturally wondered if somewhere in the world, there was someone else who had come to this same realization… And, just as naturally, began to look for knowledge; and if you can’t find it in Babylonia, the only other great civilization at that time was Egypt.

And so it’s not surprising that Josephus tells us this was one of the reasons why he went into Egypt:

Now, after this, when a famine had invaded the land of Canaan, and Abram had discovered that the Egyptians were in a flourishing condition, he was disposed to go down to them, both to partake of the plenty they enjoyed, and to become an auditor of their priests, and to know what they said concerning the gods; designing either to follow them, if they had better notions than he, or to convert them into a better way, if his own notions proved the truest… [then after the truth about Sarah came out, Pharaoh] … gave him leave to enter into conversation with the most learned among the Egyptians; from which conversation his virtue and his reputation became more conspicuous than they had been before. (Josephus, Antiquities, 1.161-7)

We know he went to Egypt. And if he did, indeed, debate their priests which is likely, even without Josephus’s testimony, then we know what they would have told him. He would have asked what they knew about the most high El; and what would they have said?

…in the ancient Near East, one could identify one’s own gods and religious practices with those of other nations. For example, the Egyptians could adopt Canaanite gods and their mythology into the Egyptian religious system simply by equating them with native gods (Baal = Seth, El = Ptah, etc.) (Hendel 2005, 4–5).

Their name for the Mightiest God, father and creator of all, was Ptah; who has often been compared in antiquity to the Canaanite El. In the south of Egypt, the equivalent deity was Khnum with many of the same attributes.

These would certainly have been considered candidates by Abraham for the “true” God. And just as certainly, upon questioning the priests he would have found their narratives lacking. For one thing, Ptah was worshipped as a bull and Khnum had ram’s head.

Nonetheless, though worshipped foolishly, the basic descriptors of these Gods were correct. Ptah was the creator of all the gods and the universe. He had no apparent conflicts with other gods, being somewhat aloof from the endless war of Ra and Apophis, and far above the bickering of the Osiris-Seth narrative, his great-grandchildren in some stories.

Ptah’s descriptors were a fairly good match for Abraham’s conception of El; he was known as “Ptah lord of truth, Ptah lord of eternity, Ptah the begetter of the first beginning, Ptah who listens to prayers, Ptah master of justice” and so on; epithets that Yahweh Himself would not be ashamed to wear.

I’m sure there were many other things about Ptah’s worship that were lacking. And yet it was no doubt as close as Abraham could come in Egypt to the most high El; and so it’s very intriguing that Ptah was known as the Father of the sage Imhotep who built the first pyramid of Djoser!

IMHOTEP, SON OF GOD

If you’ve read my article on Abraham in Egypt, you’ll know that I made a strong case that Abraham was, in fact, Imhotep, a name which means “He who comes in peace,” as in, comes from somewhere else – a stranger.

Imhotep was married to his sister – as was Abraham. Imhotep sparked a revolution in construction techniques which would have been known to Abraham with his background in the pyramids of Mesopotamia. This, in turn, required Imhotep to share with the Egyptians a vast knowledge of geometry, astronomy, and sciences that would have been known to Abraham.

His lifetime also corresponded directly to a massive cultural influence in Egypt from Ur-specific customs such as the refusal to eat pork among the priests and elite classes, the measuring units that were specific to Ur such as their cubit and acre, and so on.

And finally, Imhotep was present at a time in Egypt when the religion radically changed, with the introduction of mummification and many new beliefs about the afterlife and the gods. Precisely what you would expect if a wise man were to…

“become an auditor of their priests, and to know what they said concerning the gods; designing either to follow them, if they had better notions than he, or to convert them into a better way, if his own notions proved the truest” (Josephus again)

For Abraham would have pointed out the flaws in their philosophies to the Egyptians, and evidently did so with such wisdom that it actually made an impact on their customs; for they learned of the resurrection from him, at the very least.

Which is why they began to practice mummification in the time of Imhotep, to preserve the physical body until the resurrection (although that’s not what Abraham said at all, it’s easy to see how they got there).

“He [Ptah] was also regarded as the father of the sage Imhotep” (Wikipedia, Ptah)

All this was in that earlier article; but now we are finally able to see that Imhotep was the son of Ptah – son of the Egyptian equivalent of El. Which, as far as I can tell, makes him the only mortal to ever be a direct son of Ptah, creator of angels and father of gods!

Just as Abraham’s inheritance, promised already before he came to Egypt, was to become a son of God (see the appendix for proof). Thus Abraham was the son of the most high El, just as Imhotep was son of the most high Ptah!

Remember further that southern Egyptian equivalent of El is Khnum; so it’s interesting that at Aswan, there is to this day a rock which describes a famine of seven years in the days of Djoser, and records that Imhotep prayed to Khnum and, some dreams and offering and temple building later, the famine ends.

Separating fact from fiction here is impossible, but it’s worth noting that Abraham went to Egypt because of an extreme famine; and that while there he debated the priests and was highly promoted to a position of honor by pharaoh.

It therefore follows that during such an extreme famine, it is likely he would be tasked with solving the famine by appealing to the God who so clearly blessed him – whom the Egyptians would have certainly identified with either Khnum or Ptah, depending on their region!

And Abraham would have had no real reason to object to this, because despite searching for most of his life, he still didn’t know the name of the true God. After all, do you object when someone says you worship the God of the Catholics, or the Allah of the Muslims – even though you disagree with how they worship Him, the basic idea of their God is right enough.

Likewise, Ptah wasn’t the right God, and His worship with idols and so on was all wrong, but He was as close a list of descriptors as one could do in Egypt. And so Almighty El, Ptah, and Khnum, Sin and many other heads of divine pantheons would have been understood by Abraham as different faces and imperfect descriptions of the God who called him out of Ur – for whom he, as yet, had no name.

THE NAME OF GOD

If true, this goes a long way towards humanizing Abraham. We tend to read the Bible and walk away thinking Abraham had everything figured out. He had, after all, talked to God, who considered him a friend. But God made it just as challenging for him to find the truth as He does any of us.

And we know from the gospels that God can be incredibly cryptic when He wants to be. To the point where the disciples were shocked when Jesus wasn’t cryptic for once! (John 16:29). And so when Abraham realized God must be an invisible spirit, he had no one to teach him what He was like; no one to give him a name, or a backstory, or a list of do’s and don’ts. (Don’t’s? Don’t’s’s?).

And just as you probably once did, when you learned about this new God, you sought others who knew more than you did – since they must exist, right? To learn from them. And so he went to Egypt, hoping to learn something… and wound up teaching them. But the one thing he couldn’t teach them was the thing he didn’t know… the name of God.

Because the fact is, Abraham wasn’t sure who He was. He, like us, was a human on a journey of discovery in a world full of deception and confusion, surrounded by people who thought they had the answers but who, upon investigation, were full of… ideas.

Hebrews 11:8-10 By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to the place which he was to receive for an inheritance. He went out, not knowing where he went. By faith, he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for the city which has the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

Abraham was looking for the city; his life was a journey of discovery, much as ours – much harder than ours, actually, since we have his experiences and the Bible written by his heirs to help guide us towards that city.

And we can now follow along on much more of his journey, as he discovered more about the true God by wandering through the Middle East; studying the visible things to understand the invisible, the things that were created to understand the creator, and thus learning about the nature of the Godhead (Romans 1:20) even though he was never able to put a name to the face.

Romans 1:20-25 For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse. … they became fools, and traded the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed animals, and creeping things. … who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Abraham was the first after the flood to reverse this trend, and seek the Creator instead of the created. He grew up in Ur, where the mightiest God, Father of all, was Sin – the moon God. And at some point, Abraham correctly realized that the moon wasn’t really God, and that Sin wasn’t really His name.

And so rather than worship something he knew was imperfect, Abraham worshipped Paul’s unknown God; for although in Sin, Ptah, and El Abraham found some good things, none come close to the glory the true God must have. And it was that unshakeable belief in His limitless nature, his refusal to settle for less than perfection, that made him the friend of God.

For it is better to worship a perfect God you don’t know, but who must exist… than to worship a being you can name but who, despite your best efforts, can only ever be a poor shadow of the truth. For sooner or later, such an imperfect ideal will lead you to harm others.

Something the Existing one would never do.

APPENDIX: THE FIRST HEIR

Calling Abraham “the son of God” deserves proof since Abraham never explicitly called God “Father,” nor did God call Abraham “son” in the Bible. Yet we can be absolutely certain that Abraham’s children are sons of God:

Galatians 3:26, 29 …For you are all children of God, through faith in Christ Jesus.… If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to promise.

Now if our promise is to become the sons of God, and we share in the same promise, then Abraham must likewise be destined to be the son of God. Which is why God called it Abraham’s inheritance that HE would receive from God.

Hebrews 11:8-9 By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to the place which he was to receive for an inheritance… dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.

Inheritances pass from fathers to children; and the original promise God gave to Abraham was…

Genesis 15:7 And he said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.

Furthermore, we know that Abraham had the spirit of God:

Galatians 3:14 that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Christ Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

The blessing of Abraham is that we might receive the spirit through faith. Therefore it’s impossible Abraham did not have it. And that alone makes him a son of God, and joint-heir with Christ of the promises of Abraham:

Romans 8:14-17For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

And therefore, we know that the promise Abraham received was to be a son of God, even though he is never explicitly called that, nor recorded as calling the most high God his Father.