They say that nothing is forever.  Everything has to come to an end.  But … what if that’s not true?  What if there are some things that are forever?  How does that change your perspective on life, here and now?

You know as I look back on my life there was a very important constant right from my earliest memories. It was my dad, my father. I used to call him papa since we grew up in a German speaking home. Now my dad, he wasn’t perfect, just as you’re not perfect and I’m not perfect. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses, it’s a package deal right.

Well my dad was no different. He passed away quite a long time ago now but in a sense he still remains a constant in my life. In fact perhaps even more so now that I’m in my 50’s. This is perhaps the time more than any other time in my life that I’d value the opportunity to get to know him better. Of course that’s not possible but in a very real sense I know that I’m very much like him and that I get to carry on his name in this world.

Having a dad, albeit dad’s that our dads are never perfect, is like having a bedrock beneath your feet. It’s something that never ever goes away. Funny how we’re programmed like that. But my hunch is that most people would know what I’m talking about here. Who we are. Our family. Our parents. Our grandparents.

There’s something comforting about that and I suspect, I suspect that this sense of constancy and place and meaning to do with our parents, in particular with our fathers, I suspect that comes from God.

These days in many parts of the world the sense of community and family has broken down. Let me give you an example. We live in a 19th century terrace house or a row house. You know, they were built in rows each one butting up right next to the next one. We’ve met our neighbours on both sides but everybody lives busy lives.

Our back fences are 11 foot brick walls and so we never see much of one another. The couple to one side had a baby about 18 months ago. We’ve never seen the baby. That’s pretty incredible isn’t it? But it’s the way that society is headed. The more affluent a society becomes the more disconnected we seem to become from one another.

Of course there are parts of the world where that’s just not the case. The Philippines, now there’s a country where the sense of community and connectedness is a profound part of the psyche. Go to places in Africa and parts of Asia, you find the same thing. But in many of those places poverty is an issue. Political instability, even wars, natural disasters. And do you know what I’ve noticed, in those times, times we’re going through difficult things we feel incredibly disconnected from other people, isolated.

Even though we may well have people, families and community around us, I guess the point is, the point I’m trying to make is that with all that life throws at us one of the things that we need, I mean really need, is a safe anchor point. Something or someone who’s constant, who never fails, who’s always there, who’s absolutely rock solid.

Last week and again this week on the program we’re looking at some of the names used for God throughout His word, the Bible. There are over twenty of them and we’ll only be going through ten, exploring them because through them God is in the business of telling us who He is.

The different names given to Him in the Bible, we’ll spend some time and unpack them a little bit, they reveal the nature of God to us. And I for one, I want to discover Him and know Him more and more deeper and deeper.

Today we’re going to have a look at the name Jehovah which comes from the original Hebrew word Yahweh. And this name quite simply means “I am” or perhaps “I am who I am”. One of the places it’s used is when Moses is being told by God to go to Pharaoh in Egypt and tell Pharaoh “let God’s people go”.

It’s scary. Pharaoh had the power of life and death over people and so Moses came up with a series of excuses to kind of explain to God why God should really pick someone else for this job. I love the fact that Moses was so human. He was scared and why wouldn’t he be? I would be, you would be. Have a listen to this little conversation between God and Moses. It starts in Exodus chapter 3 beginning at verse 9:

‘The cry of the Israelites has now come to me’, says God. ‘I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ But Moses said to God, ‘who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’

He said, ‘I will be with you and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you. When you have brought your people out of Egypt you shall worship God on this mountain.’ But Moses said to God, ‘if I come to the Israelites and I say to them, ‘the God of our ancestors has sent me’ and they ask me, ‘what is His name?’ What shall I say to them?

God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am’. He said, ‘further, thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’

There it is. Tell them, “I am who I am has sent you.” Sounds kind of weird when you read it the first few times. “I am who I am.” It’s the name ‘Yahweh’. Transliterated into the English language ‘Jehovah’. A name so holy that the Israelites wouldn’t utter it. They wouldn’t let it pass their lips.

So let me ask you something, what’s God trying to say to Moses here? What’s God trying to say to the Israelites here? What’s God trying to say to you and to me here through this “I am who I am?” Well it’s the name that speaks of the constancy of God. God just is.

Everything else around us changes, falls apart, fails us, dies, gets sick but not God. He is who He is from everlasting to everlasting. He never changes. His promises never fail. When we fail Him He never fails us. Have a listen to how the Psalmist put it. Psalm 90, verse 2:

Before the mountains were brought forth or ever had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

It doesn’t matter what’s going on, God always was, He is and He always will be. He’s like the bedrock beneath our feet. Rock solid. Full of promise. Full of future. 2 Chronicles chapter 20, verse 21:

Give thanks to the Lord, (to Yahweh, to Jehovah) for His steadfast love endures forever.

I wonder whether there aren’t more than a few of us who need to hear this message today. God is who He is. He always has been. He always will be. And what’s going on around us, our circumstances – however confronting, however disappointing, however impossible they may appear from time to time – our circumstances never change the fact that God is who He is. Faithful, steadfast in His love, the Lord over the whole universe.

Can I tell you something? I face challenges and disappointments in my life just the way you do. We all do and anybody who says any different is kidding themselves. And I know just as you know how easy it is to do a Moses. You know, go to God and say, “But God, you don’t understand, look how hard this is, how am I possibly going to get through this? Go on, send someone else.”

And into that sense of inadequacy in the face of what we’re confronting, into that sense of being this little cork bopping up and down in some dark and dangerous and angry ocean of life, God would speak these profound words. These powerfully encouraging words into your heart and mine. “I am who I am and my steadfast love for you endures forever.”

I don’t think that there’s a one of us who hasn’t needed healing at some time in our lives.  Physical, emotional, spiritual … healing.  So – does God still heal people today?  Does He?  What if God is a God who heals?

A little while ago a pair of 3 year old conjoined twins were brought to Australia for a delicate operation of separating them. Now, they were joined at the head with their skulls, brains and blood vessels all intermingled. Surgeons performed a 25 hour operation. To be frank, the chances of success were very low, very low indeed. We’re talking their brains here, right.

But to everyone’s surprise and absolute delight the operation was a complete success. Truly amazing. The whole nation was overjoyed and yet every 3 seconds a child dies of poverty, disease, malnutrition. For every miraculous cure there are thousands, tens of thousands of people who just die.

I was speaking with a good friend of our ministry by phone the other day. He’s 94 years old. And he was telling me how he was the oldest of four children and yet the last one to have survived. The other day my wife travelled to see a beautiful friend of hers who’s in her late 50’s who was dying of cancer. A beautiful Christian woman.

You look at all that and you look at it and sometimes you ask God, “What are you doing? Why is it that you heal some and not others? Why is it that some die young and others live to be 94 or 100? Why is it that sometimes it’s the nicest people on the planet that end up with cancer and die young? Why is it that you let a friend of mine’s teenage son hang himself through depression?”

They’re not easy questions to answer are they? One of the things we discover about God is that He is a God who heals. Psalm 103:

Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul and do not forget all His benefits. Who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit. Who crowns you in steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

See, there it is. The God who heals quote, “All our diseases”. Unquote. And in fact one of the 20 different names used for God throughout the Bible is Jehovah Rapha which means “the God who heals”. But He doesn’t heal everyone all the time.

There was a time when Jesus wandered into a place. It was the pool by the sheep gate in Jerusalem where there were lots and lots of sick people waiting for healing. You can read about the story for yourself in the New Testament, Johns Gospel chapter 5.

There were many invalids there, blind, lame, paralysed, you name it they were there. Now in those days in that place to be an invalid meant not just being sick, it meant poverty, it meant an early grave, it meant being an outcast, it meant being socially isolated from the community.

So there were lots and lots of people in this place and the Son of Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, wanders into this place and heals just this one guy. Just one. And when pressed as to why that might have been the case Jesus answers, John chapter 5, verse 19, Jesus said to them:

Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing on His own but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does the Son does likewise.

God doesn’t heal all of the people all of the time from all of their diseases. In fact as I heard someone say once, a funny guy called Mark Lowry, he said, “Last time I checked the statistics were these. 1 out of every 1 of us ends up dying. It’s kind of 100%. Eventually our bodies give way whether we’re 94, 58 or 26 or just a few months old.”

Let me ask you something, given the fact that we all die sometime, what’s God trying to tell us through this name of His Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals? What was He trying to say to His people way back in the Old Testament and the New Testament times thousands of years ago? What was He trying to say to you and me here and now?

Well, back during the time when God sent 10 plagues on Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let His chosen people go, He said this to His people Israel in Exodus chapter 15, beginning at verse 26. He said:

If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight and give heed to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians for I am the Lord who heals you. I am Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals you.

And He protected His people from the diseases that reigned down upon the Egyptians. He set His people apart and protected them for their release. And so they crossed through the Red Sea and spent 40 years in the desert where all of those original chosen people who left Egypt, bar two, perished. It was their children and grand children who inherited the Promised Land, not the ones who left Egypt.

What does healing mean when you’re going to die eventually anyway? Well, here’s what I think. Gods healing only means something if it takes the death away. It only means something if there’s an eternal life without sickness or disease or fears or tears. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, beginning at verse 50:

What I’m saying brothers and sisters is this. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I’ll tell you a mystery. We will not all die but we will all be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we will be changed.

For this perishable body must put on imperishability and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality then the saying that is written will be fulfilled. ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?

The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law but thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord, Jesus Christ.

In other words, God is the God who gives His people healing through Jesus. A healing that goes on for an eternity my friend, an eternal life. Now have I seen people healed of their physical diseases in this world? Yes I have and I believe that God does heal some people when it suits His sovereign purpose to do so.

He does it through health professionals. He does it miraculously. But He doesn’t always do it and I don’t know why but this I do know. He will bring eternal healing to any man or woman or child who’ll put their faith in the death and the resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. Through His wounds we have been healed. 1 Peter chapter 2, verse 24:

He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed.

And the way that healing has worked it’s way in my life so far is that I’ve been given a completely new life, a new start, the slate wiped clean and I am living today the most wondrous, the most fantastic life even though I face all the challenges and the stuff in life that you face too.

One day, sooner or later, life here on this earth, my life your life, is going to come to an end and then I know, I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, will play that healing out in my life for all eternity.

There’s something beautiful about the picture of a shepherd. The man who cares for his flock –feeds them, waters them, guides them, protects them. Funny – but that’s a picture used over and over and over again God’s Word the Bible – of God Himself. What’s He trying to tell us I wonder?

Quite a few years ago now when I was an officer in the Australian army I was stationed at a remote facility where we stored lots and lots of ammunition. I mean lots of ammunition. If one of those warehouses had blown up it would have been an unbelievably huge bang.

And being in Australia I’d often be driving on one of those dirt tracks from one of the warehouses to the other. I mean they were a fair way apart just in case, you know. And you’d often have kangaroos bounding alongside the Landrover that I was driving. They’d effortlessly keep up and then accelerate and take off.

They never once were stupid enough to jump out onto the road in front of the vehicle, they were too smart for that. So I never worried too much about kangaroos as I was driving along. But we also had sheep on this ammunition depot. Farmers grazed their livestock on the depot because there was grass there. Helped keep the grass down and brought in a bit of revenue for the government.

Sheep were an entirely different story. Back then I thought of them as stupid animals. They’d be running along beside the vehicle and without warning they’d dart straight in front of you. Now I learned pretty quickly when there were sheep anywhere nearby you had to slow down otherwise it would be lamb chops for dinner. Sheep appeared to me to be stupid animals but as it turns out they’re anything but. So why would they run in front of a vehicle?

It turns out that sheep aren’t so much stupid as they are short sighted. They can’t see much more than 15 feet ahead of them. And the other thing that they’re not very good at is navigating. They don’t have a sense of direction. So whilst on the one hand if you take them back to the paddock where they were born they’ll know exactly where in that paddock they were born.

On the other hand if you take them out of that paddock, down the road, around the corner, over the hill, they simply can’t find their way back. Add that lack of sense of direction to their short sightedness and you can kind of understand why these otherwise quite clever animals would, without explanation, run straight in front of my vehicle on that ammunition depot.

Over the last week and a half we’ve been exploring the names of God. There are over 20 different names used throughout the Bible for Him which seems a little bit odd. After all you and I, well we’re perfectly happy with just the one name. But the different names of God are there for a purpose because they reveal God to us. They tell us who He is.

So far we’ve looked at:

Adonai – The Lord Almighty.
Elohim – The all powerful creator.
El Roi – The God who sees us.
El Shaddai – The all sufficient one.
Immanuel – God who is with us.
Jehovah – I am. The God who is forever and ever and ever.
Jehovah Rapha – The God who heals.

Today on the program we’re going to explore another name that God uses – Jehovah Rohi – the Lord who is my shepherd. Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures, He leads me by still waters. He restores my soul and He leads me in right paths for His name’s sake.

When the Old Testament and the New Testament talk about sheep and shepherds, the people of God it was talking to way back then, well they knew a whole bunch more about sheep and shepherding than perhaps you and I do these days. So it made a lot more sense to them.

But to be a shepherd was a calling. To be a shepherd was like, well you laid down your life for your sheep to protect them from the wild animals and the thieves. A shepherd back then knew his sheep. Mostly he had names for each of them like pets. Where they all looked the same to you and me, he could pick them apart.

And he knew that as well as it being his job to find them grazing lands and water, he had to protect them. Most often he’d walk ahead of his sheep and they’d follow behind him in a line. That way no-one, being short sighted, would get lost. But every now and then a sheep would go astray. Isaiah chapter 53, verse 6:

All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have all turned to our own way.

So what does a shepherd do when one of the sheep went astray? Did he ignore it? Did he find it and punish it? What happened? Have a listen to Jesus telling a story about Jehovah Rohi, the Lord who is my shepherd and yours. Luke chapter 15, beginning at verse 4:

Which one of you having 100 sheep and losing one of them does not leave the 99 in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices and when he comes home he calls together his friends and neighbours saying, ‘rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost.

Just so I tell you there’ll be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over the 99 righteous people who need no repentance.

Isn’t that fabulous? The heart of the shepherd is to go out there and to find the sheep. Because, wait for this, this is the really important bit that you and I can easily miss, because the shepherd knows that once the sheep is lost it has no way, no way at all to find it’s way back because it’s short sighted and because it lacks any sense of direction.

So the shepherd goes out to find the lost sheep. And he rejoices so greatly when he finds it. You see, what Jesus is saying is, this is what God is like. The Lord is my shepherd, He’s your shepherd. When Gods people, Israel, were labouring under the yoke of Babylonian oppression and slavery He said this to them through the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah chapter 40, beginning at verse 10:

See, the Lord God comes with might and His arm rules for Him, His reward is with Him and His recompense is before Him. He will feed His flock like a shepherd. He will gather the lambs in His arms and carry them in His bosom and gently lead the mother sheep.

See this beautiful picture of God. Do you see what God is saying to you and to me about who He is for us here and now? Not some distant despot. Not some God like a grumpy old man with a big stick. A God with a heart like a shepherd. A God who comes after us because we have no way of getting back to Him. It was for this reason that Jesus said in John chapter 10, beginning at verse 11. He said:

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. The hired hand who is not the shepherd, he doesn’t own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away because he’s a hired hand and he doesn’t care for the sheep. But I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me.

Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father and I lay my life down for my sheep.

And He did. He was and is the true shepherd. There are times in life when we wake up and feel a bit, well like we know we’ve gone astray. And in that feeling of panic, “How do I get back to God?” The answer is through Jesus. The answer is, Jesus is coming after you just as any shepherd would.

And perhaps He’s doing that right now in your life as you hear His word. “I am the good shepherd, the true shepherd for I lay down my life for my sheep”. My friend, we all, like sheep, have strayed. We all have fallen short of the glory of God but God is Jehovah Rohi, the Lord who is my shepherd and yours.

And right now He’s gathering those stray sheep to Him. He will feed His flock like a shepherd. He will gather the lambs into His arms and carry them in His bosom. Why? Because that’s who God is, He just is.

For a long time I used to wonder what this word righteous that Christians seem to bandy around all the time actually means. The Righteousness of God. And what, what could it possibly have to do with the lives we lead here and now. Today, tomorrow – real life stuff. The Righteousness of God!  Really?!

You know, the word “righteousness” isn’t one that’s used so much today. You may hear Christians banding it around. To tell you the truth, a decade and a half ago when I first became a Christian, I heard people use this word “righteousness” without ever really understanding it. So I started using it too but I still didn’t understand it.

Righteousness I guess, kind of intuitively, it means someone who’s good, someone who’s righteous. Is that it? And then they talked about the righteousness of God and that has a whole bunch of different meanings too. Funny how words get used and misused without us ever really understanding them.

So what is it and why does it matter and what, if anything, does it have to do with you and me, here and now? Is this righteousness thing at all relevant in today’s age? I mean most of us think to ourselves, “yeah, I’m not perfect but then I’m no axe murderer either, I’m no rapist either. Deep down I’m not such a bad person and so I must be pretty righteous. It’s kind of a reasonable word to use for me isn’t it?”

Who does it belong to? What does it mean? Who cares anyway? But what if I said that righteousness, righteousness has everything to do with you and me, here and now and how you and I will spend the rest of eternity? And what if this word ‘righteousness’ doesn’t quite mean what we might think it means?

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at different names used of God throughout the Bible. And today we’re going to take a look at yet another one because these different names that God uses for Himself in the Bible, they tell us a huge amount about who He is and who He wants to be to you and me in our day to day lives.

Today we’re looking at the name Jehovah Tsidkenu which is not such a commonly used name for God. Most people have never even heard of it but what it means is the Lord, our righteousness. Now, straight off the bat this one seems pretty obscure and irrelevant, doesn’t it?

Immanuel – God is with us.
Jehovah Rapha – The God who heals.
Jehovah Rohi – The Lord is my shepherd.

Yeah, they make a lot of sense, we can do something with those names. But this name, Tsidkenu, the Lord our righteousness, what’s that got to do with today? Why should I even listen to these eight minutes or so on the radio? I mean how more obscure and irrelevant can this guy get?

If those were the thought running through your mind then I want to ask you to hold fire before you pass judgement because this name of God, the Lord our righteousness, is perhaps one of the most important ones of all.

Righteousness means this, someone who is morally right or justifiable. Someone who is virtuous and perfect and fine and genuine. So intuitively we can kind of figure out that, well it’s an attribute of God. That’s who God is. He is righteous. Righteousness is an attribute of God.

In part that’s good news but in a large part that’s kind of bad news. And it’s bad news because you and I have fallen well and truly short in so many ways of Gods perfect righteousness and that’s what He calls sin. You have it in your life, I have it in my life. We know that. So Gods righteous and we’re not.

What does that mean? What are the consequences of our sin, our rebellion against God? Or our falling short of Gods glory? Romans chapter 6, verse 23:

The wages of sin is death.

That’s an eternal death, an eternal separation from God, that place called hell. God’s righteousness to you and me who fall short of His standard of perfection is actually bad news. So, let’s go back to this name of God, Jehovah Tsidkenu, the Lord our righteousness.

Do you see that this name isn’t bad news? In a huge sense it’s fantastic news. The Lord is our righteousness. The first time this Hebrew name for God is used in the Old Testament is in Jeremiah chapter 23, beginning at verse 5:

The days are surely coming’, says the Lord, ‘when I will raise up for David a righteous branch and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live safely and this is the name by which he will be called, the Lord is our righteousness, Jehovah Tsidkenu.

Of course this is a prophecy about the coming of Jesus centuries before Jesus was ever born and it talks about God sending a saviour into the world and they will call Him the Lord is our righteousness. So Gods righteousness becomes our righteousness through Jesus.

Things are seriously looking up now because if Gods righteousness becomes my righteousness, well I no longer fall short. Let me read you that ‘wages of sin is death’ verse again, this time the whole verse if you please. Romans chapter 6, verse 23:

For the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

See through Jesus Gods righteousness becomes our righteousness. But how do we acquire the righteousness of God for ourselves, the right standing with God? Romans chapter 3, verse 22:

The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

So simply by believing in Jesus, believing that He is who He is, the Son of God, that He died on that cross to pay for my sin and yours, that He rose again to give us new life. By trusting our very lives into that truth, into His hands, we receive the righteousness of God. The Lord is our righteousness, Jehovah Tsidkenu.

We now have a right standing with God. That’s why they call Jesus “our Saviour” because He saves us from an eternity, an absolute eternity without God. Now all that may seem a little bit dry but can I tell you, I’d been a Christian for years before anyone ever really explained that to me so that I could understand it.

I still make mistakes today. I still get angry or cranky sometimes. I still do things that fall short of the righteousness of God. Things that should land me in hell for eternity but here’s the thing. I know that through Jesus, His Son, the Lord my God has become my righteousness.

And when I go to Him and I ask Him for His forgiveness I receive it. Not because I’m a great guy but because I’ve trusted my whole life, my whole eternity in Jesus and that’s what He’s done for me. 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 21:

For our sake He made Him sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

In other words, when He was nailed on that cross, in Gods eyes, Jesus took on Himself my sin and yours. He never ever sinned but He took on our sins through this brutal punishment, He paid for our sin so that you and I could become the righteousness of God.

My friend, when you put your faith and trust and your life into Jesus hands you can stand before the throne of God as clean and pure as Jesus Himself because His righteousness has become our righteousness. That’s the good news of Jesus Christ. There it is. An eternity with God because of who God is and what He did. Awesome!

Jesus Christ. For a long time I thought that Jesus was His first name and Christ was His last name. Truly. I was so embarrassed when I discovered that I was wrong. So – what do those two names mean together – Jesus Christ – and what if anything does that have to do with my life and yours, here and now?

Can you believe it’s Friday again? Friday again, unbelievable. Here we are at the end of another week and at the end of our two weeks looking at the different names for God used in the Bible. There are over twenty of them. And we’ve just had a chance over the last 9 days to check out 9 so far. And the one we’re going to look at today that will make it 10.

10 different names telling us about 10 different aspects of who God is. And that’s the point, this isn’t some kind of intellectual exercise, it’s about knowing God better in our lives today. In the midst of the things that we go through day by day.

I don’t know about you but if God is God, if He’s loving and powerful and if He indeed wants to have a powerful impact in my life for the better. If, as Jesus said, He came so that we can have a life in all its abundance, then you know something, I want to know who this God is. Not about Him as nice as that might be, I want to know Him first hand.

And He reveals Himself to us in all sorts of different ways, He does. By showing up, by comforting us, by helping us, by opening doors that should have been closed and He reveals Himself to us through His word, the Bible. Now not some dry theological text but real stories about a real God in the lives of real people.

And when those two come together, what we discover about God in His word and what we experience of Him in our lives, that’s how we get to know Him deeper and deeper. And today, today we’re going to explore the finest name, the most wonderful name used of God in His word. It’s the name that we just can’t skip over and that name is Jesus Christ.

Now to tell you the truth there was a time when I thought, well Jesus must be His first name and Christ must be His surname or His last name. Truly, I mean you might laugh at me but hey, that’s what I thought. And it wasn’t until I was in Bible College studying for my Bachelor of Ministry degree that I discovered, somewhat to my embarrassment, that that just wasn’t true.

So let’s have a look at the two parts of that name and what we’re going to discover, as we do that over the next few minutes, is how wonderful God is, how utterly wonderful He is. First Jesus, you know, when Jesus was a boy growing up, working in His dads carpenter shop out the back in Nazareth in Galilee, His mother Mary didn’t call out to Him, “Jesus, Jesus, come inside for lunch.”

Because Jesus is the English translation of His original Hebrew name which was Joshua or as we’d say Joshua. That was His name, Joshua. And that name literally means “God saves” or “Gods salvation”. Now, as it turned out in the 1st century Israel that was really quite a common name. There was nothing unique about it. Most of us in our cultures don’t know anyone else called Jesus although I do believe it’s still quite common today in some Hispanic cultures.

So, back then He was just another Jesus and the reason that the name was so common is that it belonged to another man who had lived many centuries before, a man called Joshua who started out as Moses assistant. But when Moses died, rather inconveniently for Israel, just as they were about to step across the Jordan into the Promised Land after 40 years in the wilderness.

Joshua was appointed by God to take over from Moses and lead God’s people into the Promised Land. Remember Abraham was the first man in this Israel nation that God spoke to, although the nation didn’t exist then, he had a son called Isaac who had a son called Jacob who had 12 sons, one of whom was Joseph the Prime Minister of Egypt.

These 12 sons became the father’s of the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel and Israel grew up in slavery in Egypt and then God sent Moses to go tell Pharaoh, “let my people go” and God sent 10 plagues on Egypt. Finally Israel passed through the Red Sea, they spent 40 years in the wilderness on the exodus with Moses in charge. And then finally they came to the threshold of the Promised Land. That land we know today as Israel.

Moses sinned and died and it was Joshua who led Gods people over into the Promised Land and took the land from the people who were already there, the Canaanites and others, battle by battle. So it was really Joshua who led God’s people into the Promised Land, hence the name “God’s salvation”.

That’s where Jesus gets His name. He is “God’s salvation”. Because, as we saw yesterday on the program, He saves us from our sins and leads us into the Promised Land of an eternal relationship with God. God sends His Son to become a man and to save us, to save us from an eternity without God. What a fantastic name for the Son of God. Jesus, the Son of God who saves us from eternal punishment and brings us from darkness into light.

That’s exactly what the angel said to Joseph, Mary’s husband, when to his horror he found that his fiancé was pregnant. Matthew chapter 1, verse 21:

She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus for he will save his people from their sins.

And what about the “Christ” bit? Well … Christ is the English word for the Greek word Christos. And the Greek word Christos is the translation of the original Hebrew word that we would pronounce Messiah. It literally means “God’s anointed one”, anointed, appointed by God.

See, in 1st century Israel the nation was again under severe oppression through foreign occupation. This time it was the Romans. And through what the prophets had said and written in the Hebrew Bible, the thing that we Christians now call the Old Testament, Israel was believing God for a new king. The kings of Israel were known as ‘Messiahs’ because they were Gods anointed kings.

Many were waiting on a warrior king like David to come and to rise up and pull up an army and wop the Romans and drive them out of the land. But that wasn’t what God had in mind. What He had in mind was to send a king not to establish a worldly kingdom, as people understood a kingdom to be, God sent His Son to establish the kingdom of God here on this earth. And so when the wise men from the east came for this child they said, Matthew chapter 2, verse 2:

Where is the child who has been born the King of the Jews? For we observed His star at it’s rising and have come to pay homage to Him.

And when He was on trial by Pontius Pilate He was asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And they mocked Him. “If you’re the King of the Jews then save yourself.” They never got it. Jesus wasn’t an anointed earthly king, Jesus was the Christ. Jesus the Christ was and is Gods anointed saviour. That’s what those two words together mean. Jesus Christ, God’s anointed saviour, comes to save you and me from our sins.

Now, I don’t know where you are in your life but you know something, that’s so much better than earthly king. My sins, my failures, my weaknesses, my rebellion against God have caused me so much grief in my life. They’ve caused so many other people so much grief.

I needed saving and not just to live a much better and more fulfilling and more joyful and more peaceful life here on this earth. But so that I can be forgiven by God through the price that Jesus the Christ, God’s anointed saviour, paid for me on that cross.

That’s what this name means. Jesus the Christ, God’s anointed saviour who came for you and for me to die for our sins, to rise again to give us eternal life. No wonder, no wonder that it is the name that is above every other name. That is good news, isn’t it?