My message today is about one of God’s names: Yahweh-Yireh, also known more commonly as Jehovah-Jireh. Ancient Hebrew didn't have vowels, only consonants, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation on how to pronounce this ancient word. Yahweh is spelled YHWH. The letter Y can be pronounced as John or Yan. Also, the letter W can be pronounced as What or Vat. Therefore, Yahweh could be Jahvey. Added to this confusion is that in the middle ages, Jews wanting to avoid saying or writing God's name would add the vowels for the Hebrew word Adonai in with the consonants of YHWH to render YaHoWaiH or JaHoVaiH, which is where we may get the word, Jehovah. Most scholars believe the ancient pronunciation was closer to Yahweh.
1 Some time later, God tested Abraham’s faith. “Abraham!” God called.
“Yes,” he replied. “Here I am.”
2 “Take
your son, your only son—yes, Isaac, whom you love so much—and go to the land of
Moriah. Go and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which
I will show you.”
3 The next
morning Abraham got up early. He saddled his donkey and took two of his
servants with him, along with his son, Isaac. Then he chopped wood for a fire
for a burnt offering and set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day of their journey, Abraham
looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 “Stay
here with the donkey,” Abraham told the servants. “The boy and I will travel a
little farther. We will worship there, and then we will come right back.”
6 So
Abraham placed the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac’s shoulders, while he
himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them walked on together, 7 Isaac turned to Abraham and said, “Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“We have the fire and the
wood,” the boy said, “but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”
8 “God will
provide a sheep for the burnt offering, my son,” Abraham answered. And they
both walked on together.
9 When they
arrived at the place where God had told him to go, Abraham built an altar and
arranged the wood on it. Then he tied his son, Isaac, and laid him on the altar
on top of the wood. 10 And
Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son as a sacrifice. 11 At
that moment the angel of the Lord called
to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Yes,” Abraham replied. “Here I
am!”
12 “Don’t
lay a hand on the boy!” the angel said. “Do not hurt him in any way, for now I
know that you truly fear God. You have not withheld from me even your son, your
only son.”
13 Then
Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he took
the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering in place of his son. 14 Abraham named the place Yahweh-Yireh (which
means “the Lord will provide”). To this day, people still use that name as a
proverb: “On the mountain of the Lord it
will be provided.”
This is a strange and disturbing passage with which we should never become completely comfortable. Anytime religious texts that promotes a loving and holy God commanding a person to sacrifice another human being, it should give us pause. However, the passage reveals God’s name: Yahweh-Yireh (or Jehovah-Jireh).
Yahweh means "I Am" or "I Am Who I Am". In other words, God is who He is and we don't get to determine what He is like. He created us in His image. We don't get to create Him in ours. God is the Great I Am.
Yireh means “see to it". Vanilla Ice once rapped: "If there's a problem, yo, I'll save it." God sees the problem and then sees to it and provides the solution.
People like there needs met. In a world of uncertainty, it’s good to know we will have food to eat, shelter for warmth, companionship, etc. Unfortunately, we always want more.
I had an experience that illustrates this. When my son was 2 years old, we were riding alone in the car and I had a really big bag of potato chips. I decided we were going to eat as many of those chips as we wanted. So I started eating and gave a chip to my son. He loved it and wanted more. SO I stated handing him chips one by one. He would eat one and ask for another. I decided I would give him as many as he wanted, but I wasn't going to give him the bag and let him stick his grimy two-year-old hands in the bag. After repeatedly giving Gavin chip after chip, he started asking for the bag. I told him, he could have as many as he wanted, but only one chip at a time. He couldn't have the bag. He didn't like that. He started to get upset and throw a fit. He wanted the whole bag to himself. He didn't want to have to depend upon me to give him each chip.
This is the human condition. We don't want to depend on God or anyone else. We want what we want and we want it independently. We want things our way and leads to sin. We see this from almost the very beginning of humanity. In Genesis, we read how Adam and Eve in the Garden f Eden. It was the very definition of paradise. They had every thing they could ever want and it was perfect. God said they could eat anything in the Garden except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This alone would be a test to prove their loving obedience to God. But then a Satan slithers up to them as a snake and convinces them "God is withholding something good from you." And they wanted it and they believed a snake instead of God.
I see this in the church sometimes.
People have everything they need—people in the church that care about them, people
that sacrifice for them and love them unconditionally while overlooking their faults, and so many good
things. And maybe for a time, they will
tell you “This church has been such a blessing…” They will be fine for a time, but unfortunately it often happens that these same families start to want something more they feel the church isn’t providing—better music, better
kids programs, whatever—and they go looking somewhere else or they just get bored with the church and stop
coming. For them, God and His Church are
just something to use to get what they want or need. They consume the church as a product or a fruit; and when they are finished with it or what more, they will move on and consume something or someone else. This is the human heart and it is incredibly wicked. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The human heart is the
most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad
it is?”
And so humanity finds itself
broken and corrupt, with no way to be healed.
But God is Jehovah-Jireh, the God who sees the problem and the God who provides the solution.
It is passages like this Abraham/Isaac story that convince me the Bible was inspired by God. Yes, God used people to write and compile the stories, but their work was guided by God. If it had only been a human effort, the editors would have gotten rid of passages like Genesis 22 a long time ago. The editing committee would have sat together and said, "Come on guys. This passage makes God look really bad. We need to get rid of it." But God is not trying to make us like Him. He is Yahweh. He is who He is.
This story has an important purpose. One purpose is to disabuse us of our entitlement mentality. Lest we ever begin to
think of God as our personal Sugar Daddy in the Sky who only exists to give us
stuff and make us happy, the story of Abraham and Isaac serves to shake us from
our selfishness. In the image of Isaac
on the altar, we see the agonizing cost of our broken relationship with
God. We see the agony of a father (Abraham)
poised to sacrifice his only son (Isaac) and we are appalled.
Many religions throughout
the millennia have advocated human sacrifice (and even child sacrifice) as a
method to appease or manipulate the gods.
Yahweh actually forbids and abhors human sacrifice in the Bible (Deut. 18:10). Yahweh cannot be controlled—He is who He
is and He is sovereign.
The story of Abraham and Isaac foreshadows what God has done for us. While other so-called “gods” (which are really idols and false gods or demons parading as god) entice people to sacrifice their children in order to get something, the One True God—Jehovah-Jireh/Yahweh-Yireh, the God who provides—gave up His own Son for us. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because we desperately needed it.
Many scholars believe (and I agree) that Mount Moriah, where Abraham laid his son on the altar, is the same location where thousands of years later Jesus, the Son of God, was crucified on the cross. God wanted Abraham and us to know the agony He would go through to provide for our deepest need and the cost of our atonement.
Notice what Genesis 22:14
says, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.” These words were spoken 2,000 years before
Christ was even born and died on top of Mount Moriah (what the Christians call Mount Calvary). No one could have
known that one day a Messiah would be born that John 3:16 tells us is God’s “only
Son”. No one could have known he would be called "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world". No one could have known that God’s
Son would be bound and nailed to a cross for our sin. No one could know this accept Yahweh-Yireh, who
is the God who sees and provides what we really need.
Closing
What do you need today? What do you really need?
You may not know. You may have some
idea. You may think you know.
But maybe God has something to show you.
It could be a solution you haven’t seen before.
It could be that you’ve been looking at the problem all wrong.
God wants to give you new insight.
Ultimately, God has already seen to everything you really need for eternity.
On the mountain of the Lord it was provided in Jesus Christ on the cross.
Maybe you just need to accept it.
Well, I invite you to spend a moment talking to Yahweh-Yireh, the God Who Provides now.
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