“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”

Isaiah 55: 6-7

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Chuma Obodoeze is an Ambassador for Yahweh

Chuma Obodoeze has been a Facebook friend for quite some time. He has become an ambassador for Yahweh. His Facebook posts have encouraged and strengthened me.

A couple of days ago, Chuma posted pictures of my book His Name is Yahweh: Revised Edition on FB and encouraged his FB friends to get it and read it. Reading the book must have impacted his life as much as writing it impacted mine.

I have never met Chuma personally, but I have developed a fondness for him because of his boldness and his energy. He is doing what all of us should be doing. He is telling everyone he can about Yahweh, and he is speaking from the heart.

Today, Chuma lives in Turin, Italy, but I don’t know where he is from. It’s clear that Italian is not his native tongue. Chuma is on a missionary journey, and I am proud to call him my friend and my fellow worker. I wish more seminary trained preachers were like him. So does Yahweh.

Quoting the Messiah, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” (Matthew 9: 37) Too few preachers in the United States have as much courage and conviction as Chuma. Many of them don’t know the truth. Most of those who know the truth don’t tell it. I believe that anyone who claims to have studied the Bible has a duty to declare Yahweh’s Name as He commanded. It’s an act of obedience.

Bible translators have edited Yahweh’s Name out of the Scriptures, so His command to declare His Name has been hidden. Even worse, that error has obscured the Messiah’s true identity.

Seminary professors must know about this problem, but they ignore it completely. Preachers should know these things, too, but most of them are probably afraid that they would lose their jobs if they told the truth. Delivering accurate information about Yahweh in most churches today would be problematic, because the message would sound so foreign to most churchgoers.

Over the years, many churchgoers have told me, “That can’t be true, because if it were true, I would have heard it a long time ago in church.”

Well, they should have heard it in church, but they didn’t. Because they never heard a preacher deliver this message from the pulpit, they reject it, even though it is central to the Scriptures.

Yahweh is not a god. He is the Elohim. And the Messiah is not just a good Person. He is Yahweh.

The Messiah’s true identity is crucial. You can’t understand salvation unless you realize that the Creator, Yahweh, manifested Himself in human form to die on the cross. He paid the price for our sins Himself. He is our Redeemer and our Savior.

“Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the booty with the strong; because He poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors.” (Isaiah 53: 12)

Almost all the preachers I know personally seem to be so caught up in Christian tradition that they don’t want to take chances by telling the truth. Some of them are beginning to get it and break away, but it’s a very slow process.

So Yeshua was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word [the Scriptures], then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8: 31-32)

I have a hard time imaging what it must be like to fear telling the truth because it might cost you your job. As a professor at the University of Virginia, my job was to examine facts, draw conclusions, and explain results. My first dean at UVA, Bill Shenkir, used to say, “Professors profess.” Those two words hit the nail on the head. Even though we didn’t always agree, Bill never attempted to silence me. In fact, he encouraged me to continue “professing”. He was a first-rate dean. I needed to experience two more deans to appreciate how good he was.

That’s what preachers are supposed to do, too. Why do so few of them veer off the beaten path when they must know that it’s the wrong path? That leads me to ask these questions:

Is preaching a calling?
If preaching is a calling, who did the calling, and what did He tell preachers to say?

Below are a few Bible verses that tell us who the Messiah is. I have inserted Yahweh’s Name where it belongs, i.e., where it actually appears in the original languages of the Scriptures:

Then Moses said to Elohim, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The Elohim of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His Name?’ What shall I say to them?” Elohim said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Elohim, furthermore, said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘Yahweh, the Elohim of your fathers, the Elohim of Abraham, the Elohim of Isaac, and the Elohim of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This [Yahweh] is My Name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.” (Exodus 3: 13-15)

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “When I will raise up for David a righteous Branch [the Messiah]. He will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land. In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. This is His Name by which He will be called: ‘Yahweh our righteousness.’” (Jeremiah 23: 5-6)

“I, even I, am Yahweh. There is no savior besides Me.” (Isaiah 43: 11)

“And it will come about that whoever calls on the Name of Yahweh will be delivered/saved.” (Joel 2: 32)

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. For behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people. For today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Yahweh the Messiah.” (Luke 2: 10-11)

“And everyone who calls on the Name of Yahweh will be saved.” (Acts 2: 21)

“For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. There is one Yahweh over them all, who is abundantly generous toward everyone who calls on Him. For everyone who calls on the Name of Yahweh will be saved.” (Romans 10: 12-13)

“There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4: 12)

“Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason, also, Elohim highly exalted Him [the Messiah], and bestowed on Him the Name which is above every name [Yahweh], so that at the Name of Yeshua [Yahweh] every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Yeshua the Messiah is Yahweh, to the glory of Elohim the Father.” (Philippians 2: 8-11)

Yeshua said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham existed, I AM.” (John 8: 58)

Preachers like to say that they preach the Word, i.e., the Bible. Well, those verses come straight from the Bible, but the accurate message about Yahweh is rarely delivered in churches in the United States. I had never heard that message in any church until I delivered it myself.

Many years ago, I presented this message in a church that claimed to be a “King James Bible Believing Church”. They think the King James Bible is the only inerrant and inspired version of the Scriptures. I didn’t ask them which version of the King James Bible they believed, but I doubt that any of them had ever seen the original 1611 AD version. If they had seen the original, they would have discovered that it is markedly different from the one they used. For example, the Messiah’s name in the 1611 King James Bible is Iésous, not Jesus.

Neither of those names is correct. The Messiah’s name at birth was Yeshua.

When I told them that the King James version of the Old Testament has 6,823 errors associated with the removal of Yahweh’s Name from the text of the Scriptures, they were stunned. Most of them were not interested in hearing anything else I had to say, because I told them one simple, verifiable fact. I didn’t tell them how many errors there are in the King James New Testament, but there are many of them. Those people had faith in the King James Bible, not Yahweh.

Below are a few SnyderTalk editorials that explain why this problem is so serious:

More than a decade ago, a group of preachers from Nigeria emailed me and asked for permission to copy and share His Name is Yahweh. They had read the book, and Yahweh’s Spirit showed them that it was the truth. I gave the preachers permission and told them that I would also post the manuscript for the book on the internet in PDF format so that anyone could read it for free. They used the book to teach in their churches. Some of the people in their Nigerian congregations were musicians. Below is a song that they wrote and sang.

His Name is Yahweh has been downloaded more than a million times in countries like Nigeria, China, Indonesia, and Iran. I can only guess how many times it has been copied and shared. So far, no country has blocked access to the manuscript. Yahweh is getting the message out all over the world, but preachers in the United States are incredibly slow about getting onboard. Lately, I have been wondering, “What is wrong with them?”

Shortly after I retired in 2004, Katie’s parents asked me to present the message in His Name is Yahweh to their Sunday School class in Keystone Heights, Florida. No one told me that one of the people in their class had been their preacher. He was about 80-years-old at the time, and he had retired. At the end of my presentation, he said, “I used to wonder about that when I was in seminary.”

I said, “Were you a preacher?”

“All of my life.”

“What were you wondering?” I asked.

“I knew that Bible translators had substituted LORD and GOD for His Name, and I wondered why. Back then, I thought His name was Jehovah, but now I know that His Name is Yahweh.”

I could tell from his expression that the light had come on for him. It was obvious to me and to everyone else in the room.

Over the years, I have thought about that man many times. He was not ashamed to admit that he had made a mistake in front of people who used to be in his congregation. He spent his professional life telling people that we have salvation in the name Jesus, but in an instant he knew that Yahweh is the correct Name.

That man is the only preacher I have ever witnessed accepting the truth. When most of the preachers I have talked with hear this message, they give it lip service at best. In October 2004, I was with a group in Jerusalem. One night, we were sitting in a hotel room talking about my book. At that time, it was just a manuscript, but it contained all of the essential information. Everyone in the room got the message except the seminary trained preacher who was with us. He had a deer in the headlights look on his face.

Again, I wonder what is wrong with most preachers in the United States. Lately, I have heard a lot of them say, “We need revival.” I agree with them, but the revival we need should start with people who occupy space behind pulpits in churches across America.

Most preachers could learn a lesson from the cartoon character Pogo. He said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

A few days ago, I was talking with a neighbor about a SnyderTalk editorial I had written, and he said, “Most of our churches are heading in the wrong direction.”

I nodded my head and said, “When you look at the people in the pulpits, it’s easy to understand why.”

This is the editorial we were talking about: “Elohim created man in His own image, in the image of Elohim He created him; male and female He created them“.

I think Yahweh needs to initiate a wholesale housecleaning in the church. It won’t surprise me if it happens. In fact, I expect it to happen. Playing church isn’t good enough. That’s true for preachers and churchgoers.

Then Yahweh said, “Because this people draw near with their words and honor Me with their lip service, but they remove their hearts far from Me, and their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote, therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; and the wisdom of their wise men will perish, and the discernment of their discerning men will be concealed.” (Isaiah 29: 13-14)

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Will His Remnant Call Him YAHWEH rev from Rowan Smith on Vimeo.

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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”

John 10: 14-18