“Therefore behold, I am going to make them know—this time I will make them know My power and My might; and they shall know that My Name is Yahweh.” (Jeremiah 16: 21)
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Katie and I are traveling in Israel and gathering information for SnyderTalk. While we are there, I am posting excerpts from His Name is Yahweh in SnyderTalk.
The message in the book is important. Please take the time to read it.
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Yahweh Honors His Desires
Although God’s love for us is unconditional, He is holy, and He cannot abide sin. We should be thankful that God does not require us to earn salvation by doing “good works” because if He did no one would be saved, ever. Why? Because God’s standard for righteousness is not like ours.
We need to keep this fact in mind at all times. His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. His standard for righteousness is beyond our reach. Yahweh requires perfect holiness, flawless purity, and absolute sinlessness. In other words, He will accept no blemishes at all, and we are incapable of attaining His standard for righteousness no matter how good we are. What we call “good” simply does not pass Yahweh’s test.
In His infinite mercy, God planned things so that we do not have to earn righteousness. All He requires from us is faith in Him—faith that He will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He is our Redeemer. He willingly and lovingly died in our place and paid the price demanded by His Law for our sins so we would not have to die. Yahweh, the Almighty God, is our absolutely perfect, unblemished, Sacrificial Lamb.
Does this sound farfetched to you? If it does, then ask yourself this question. Would good parents take a deadly disease on themselves if it threatened the life of their child? Of course they would, if they could, but they could not do it even if they wanted to. Thankfully, nothing is impossible for God. He could take our sins on Himself, and He gladly did. If good parents would die for their children, why would anyone believe that Yahweh, who is a perfect Parent, would not die for His? The only difference is that He can actually do it, and He did it. Do we really believe we are better parents than God is? I certainly hope not.
If we believe Yahweh died to atone for our sins, we are forgiven. Faith in Him alone leads to righteousness and salvation. It is a gift from God, and all we have to do is decide if we want to accept His gift because it cannot be earned. However, if we stubbornly refuse to obey God, we are demonstrating that we do not have saving faith. As the apostle James said, and I am paraphrasing, “Without faith we are dead, but faith without works, or obedience, is dead as well.”[i] Just as a good tree produces good fruit, so must saving faith produce works that Yahweh calls “good.” In a nutshell, obedience that flows from faith in Yahweh pleases Him, and obedience without faith cannot save us.
You may still be thinking that all of this sounds fantastic, but it does not make any sense from a human perspective. No one would do that for me, and it cannot be that easy. Surely God expects me to do more than simply accept His gift. Well, if you apply only human logic, it is impossible to understand what God is doing. So do not use human logic. Read God’s Word and apply His logic.
Yahweh does expect us to do good works, but the good works He wants from us have absolutely nothing to do with our redemption and salvation. These issues have to be settled before we can even think about doing works that God calls “good.” He gives us His righteousness and salvation freely, and all we need to do to secure them is have faith in Him. When we have faith in Yahweh, He does something else for us that is very special. It is discussed in Psalm 37: 4-5:
“Delight yourself in Yahweh; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to Yahweh, trust also in Him, and He will do it.”[ii]
Yahweh gives us the desires of our heart because we have faith in Him. He actually gives us His desires so that our works become works that He calls “good.” Clearly, this is a very special gift from Him.
When we have faith in Yahweh and He gives us the desires of our hearts, we will actually want to obey Him and do good things for Him because we love Him, truly love Him. For example, He loves us, and He wants us to love others the way He loves us. He forgives us, and He wants us to forgive others the way He forgives us. He shares with us, and he wants us to share with others the way he shares with us.
These are the good works Yahweh wants and expects from us, but they are not sufficient to earn our redemption and salvation, and they cannot make us righteous before Him. Only faith in Him does that. Psalm 49: 7-8 and 15 make this point clearly:
“No man can by any means redeem his brother or give to God a ransom for him—for the redemption of his soul is costly, and he should cease trying forever[iii]….But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for He will receive me.”[iv]
As the psalm says, our redemption is costly. The price for our redemption is the blood of Yahweh. Only He could pay the price for our sins, and He gladly did. Now think for a moment about how God feels when we decide to reject His gift, and we strive instead to earn righteousness as if His sacrifice were meaningless. He suffered and died for us, and if we reject His gift, then He will reject us. It is just that simple. As the psalm says, we should “cease trying forever.” Simply accept His gift. Yahweh has done His part already, and our response must be to have faith in Him and to obey His Word.
If we insist on believing that our good works can earn our redemption and salvation and make us righteous before Yahweh, then we have stumbled over the stumbling stone. That’s exactly what Isaiah was talking about when he said,
“Then He (the Messiah) shall become a sanctuary; but to both the houses of Israel, a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over, and a snare and a trap for the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Many will stumble over them, then they will fall and be broken; they will even be snared and caught.”[v]
A little later Isaiah said,
“Therefore thus says Adonai Yahweh, behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone, a costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed. He who believes in it will not be disturbed.”[vi]
A literal translation of the Hebrew in this verse reads as follows:
“Thus says Adonai Yahweh, ‘See! I am laying a stone in Zion, a stone of testing, a precious cornerstone for a strong foundation. The one who trusts in it will never be dismayed.’”
Finally, Isaiah laid it on the line so everyone could understand, or at least he thought everyone could understand:
“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, who seek Yahweh: Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who gave birth to you in pain.”[vii]
Isaiah was telling them, and he is telling us, to have faith in Yahweh and to look to Him for salvation the way Abraham did. And look to Sarah who believed God when He told her she would have a child after she had passed the normal childbearing years. Look to their faith in Yahweh.
His Name is Yahweh: It explains why God’s Name is so important. It’s available in eBook format and in paperback. It’s also available for free in PDF format.
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His Name is Yahweh, the website, is a companion of the book His Name is Yahweh.
To see videos that explain the importance of God’s Name, click here.
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“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17: 22-24)
See “His Name is Yahweh”.
[i] James 2: 17-26.
[ii] Psalm 37: 4-5.
[iii] Psalm 49: 7-8.
[iv] Psalm 49: 15. The parentheses are mine.
[v] Isaiah 8: 14-15. The parentheses are mine.
[vi] Isaiah 28: 16.
[vii] Isaiah 51: 1-2.
