Clearing God’s Name
By John Blanchard
When we first meet each other, introductions always include our names. From that moment on, your name will take on the qualities and characteristics that are part of your personality. You become “your name” to that person. It is interesting that when we think of a name, we think of all the qualities that go along with that name. In a historical sense, just the mention of a certain name brings an image to our mind. “Abraham Lincoln” causes us to think of an honest statesman who endured many trials and held fast. “Mother Theresa” brings thoughts of a kind, compassionate and gentle woman who was a fine example for the human race. There are other names that would cause us to recoil and shudder because of the character behind that name.
That’s what happens over a lifetime. We get a name that represents us and reflects our character. Those who care work hard on their character for as long as they live, realizing that their name, representing their character, is the legacy they leave behind. They also realize that the only thing taken with you in death is your name – the character that you built up. That’s why it is important to maintain good character and not to ruin other people’s character with slander or libel. There are laws against that because most of us really do care about the name that we’ve developed.
If we feel that way, and we are made in the image and likeness of God, we can just imagine how much God cares about his Name. Let’s turn to the Ten Commandments in Exodus twenty, and read the fourth one in verse 7: “You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.” We must not casually or loosely use the Name of God. Today, most of us have reduced this commandment to the use of simple epithets. Perhaps cursing someone and using God’s Name, or being angry and using God’s name, or using God’s name when we’re hurt, for instance when you hit your thumb with a hammer. It’s common to hear people use God’s name in vain, and sometimes people reduce that commandment to simply using God’s name in situations like these. But that merely scratches the surface of what is meant. We need to understand what is meant by “vain” in the Hebrew.
The word used here in Exodus 20 is shav which means to destroy to the point of desolation; evil, as destructive; literally, ruin; and, figuratively, uselessly deceptive. When we apply that definition to the word “vain,” it takes on a lot more meaning than just using God’s name in anger. You see, God’s name reflects his many good qualities.
Starting in Isaiah chapter nine and verse six, we are told some of the names of God. Speaking of Jesus Christ in prophecy: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” There are many names associated with God in the Bible and many descriptive terms. I want to look at just a few: El Shaddai, meaning God Almighty; Almighty blessed; Father of lights, which means to shine and make manifest; Yahwah Rappha, meaning the God of healings; Immanuel, meaning God with us. He is also referred to as our Savior, our Redeemer, the Rock, and Yahway, meaning I AM and will continue to be that which I AM. There are many other descriptive names of God in the Bible, all of them beautiful, powerful and meaningful. That is because God’s character encompasses all of the meaning behind all of these names and adjectives; He is all of those things. God’s name stands behind all that He does.
I want to look at some of the aspects in which God says his name is embedded. In Romans, chapter one and verse twenty. All of creation has God’s fingerprints on it. “For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” The things that God made help us to see into his mind and his thoughts. It’s like He wrote something of himself into everything that He created. John, chapter one tells us that Jesus Christ was the active Creator, following the wishes of God, the Father. He created everything that we see.
John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were created through him and without him nothing was made that was made. In him was Life, and that life was the Light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.” People didn’t realize at the time, except for the twelve, and then a few more on the first Pentecost, just what was meant by the life of Christ. Indeed, He was the Living Word. We have the written word, the Bible, now. Literally, all things were made by the Word.
If we go back to Genesis two and verse seven, we can look at the apex of this creation. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” We are literally composed of dirt. If you take us apart and analyze us, we are minerals and water; that’s what we are.
Back to chapter one of Genesis, reading verse twenty-seven and verse thirty-one: “so God created man in His own image; in the image of God he created him, male and female He created them. . . . Then God saw everything He had made and indeed it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” So God saw everything He had made, including mankind, and He said it was very good. All creation was very good. All creation carries something of his thoughts, his character, and his name stands behind it. He said it was good, so it must be good. He said so.
Now, here in Genesis, He is not really creating everything; he was fixing it. He was re-creating it. He wanted to make creation, specifically the earth and mankind to reflect his thoughts. So He made mankind in his image and likeness, and that means mankind had to have a free will. He had to be able to choose to love God, to choose right over wrong, he would not be forced to do so. This caused quite a conundrum of difficulty that only God could overcome. He had to make goodness available, but he had to allow man to choose something else if he so desired.
Genesis, chapter two tells us what God did to start fixing the earth. Verse 8: “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man he had formed. And out of the ground He made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of Life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
So God made this beautiful place on earth, the Garden of Eden, where He literally pushed back the darkness and made a place for Adam and Eve to learn about him and to grow in character and understand his plan. To allow them free will, He had to allow access in that beautiful place to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, there was a bit of evil in that garden, but it was overwhelmingly a beautiful place for man to flourish. You see, God’s plan as for man to expand good and reduce evil. Outside of the garden was tremendous evil, but inside was very little, boxed up in the form of a tree, so it wouldn’t be unleashed unless man wanted it, unless he took of that tree.
God wanted to fix the earth so that countless billions of beings would willingly develop character like his and become part of an ever-growing family. His image and likeness is so beautiful and his character is so perfect that God had to come up with a plan that could not fail. Anything that God does has to succeed. Turning to Titus, chapter one, we will read a scripture that actually precedes time itself.
Titus 1:1. “Paul, a bondservant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of God’s elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness, in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began.” God made promises to mankind before mankind even existed, before time itself existed. Verse three: “In due time He has manifested his word through preaching which was committed to me according to the commandment of our God and Savior.” So God has a plan that was instituted before time began, which was turned over to people who would preach from it to teach mankind about God and what God is doing for mankind. It is a beautiful plan and it is unfolding perfectly since well before Genesis. It’s up to us to determine how well it’s working, and God gives us lots of clues.
Going back to Genesis chapter one again, we will go to the very beginning to see what God is working on and how He will achieve his beautiful goals. Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Between verse one and verse two we have no idea how much time had elapsed. Scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth is billions of years old. They seem to think the earth is four and a half billion years old. This means the sun and the solar system are at least that old as well. But we see that the earth was without form and void and God’s spirit was hovering over the dark earth. So, earth was here when creation week started, but there was a problem with earth.
The New King James says his spirit “hovered” over, and the old King James says it “moved” over the water. The word each of these is translated from is “racca,” and that means to “brood.” So the spirit of God was contemplating what He was looking at. So what was He looking at? What needed to be fixed? The word “form” is “tohu,” which means to lie waste, a desolation of the surface, a worthless thing. And the word “void” is “bohu,” meaning to be empty of anything good, an undistinguishable ruin. For something to get ruined, it had to have been good in the first place, so when God did create it (whenever that was) it was good, and now, somehow it had been turned into “a wasted thing,” a desolation.
Something had ruined the earth because it was no longer capable of producing anything of value to God. We need to find out why and how it was ruined, and why and how God is going to fix it. The source of that evil is also spoken about in Genesis. In chapter three we see the source of the evil power that ruined the earth and made it a desolation in the eyes of God. Genesis 3:1, now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Has God indeed said ‘you shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit if the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, “you shall not eat it nor shall you touch it lest you die.” ‘ “
Adam and Eve understood that they were not to eat from that tree or even touch it. Everything else in the garden was good for them. Don’t forget, they had never experienced evil in their life. They had no idea how bad evil could really get. And, Satan, of course, was extremely cunning. He is an arch deceiver, a liar and very, very tricky. Satan had become this way over the course of time. If we look back to the time Satan was created, he had a beginning, and he was made perfect like all things that God had made. Turn to Ezekiel, chapter twenty-eight and verse one. “Now the word of the Lord came to me again saying, ‘Say to the prince of Tyre, “Thus says the Lord.”‘“ Now Tyre was a city-state in ancient times about three thousand years after the Garden of Eden and the city-state was very corrupt in the sight of God. Continuing: “Because your heart is lifted up and you say ‘I am a god and sit in the seat of god in the midst of the seas,’ yet you are a man and not a god; though you think you are as wise as a god. Are you wiser than Daniel? Is no secret hidden from you?” You see there is a man talked about here, the prince of Tyre. But there is some evil force behind this man. The king of Tyre was emulating some power behind him, and he thought of himself as a god. If we continue in this chapter, we will find that God is talking to the “prince” of Tyre. Verse eleven says, “Take up a lamentation for the king of Tyre and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “you were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God.”’”
Now who was in Eden, the garden of God? We saw that there was Adam and Eve, but there was also Satan. You see, the king of Tyre lived three thousand years after that as a physical man, but the evil force that was inspiring him and his people was none other than Satan who deceived Adam and Eve as well. Continuing in verse thirteen: “You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was your covering, the sardius, topaz and diamond, beryl, onyx and jasper, sapphire, turquoise and emerald with gold. The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes was prepared for you on the day that you were created. You were the anointed cherub that covers.” Without a doubt, we are talking about an angel here. This is Satan who was made perfect originally. “I established you. You were on the holy mountain of God, and you walked back and forth in the midst of the fiery stones. You had access to my throne. You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created until iniquity was found in you. By the abundance of your trading you became filled with violence within and you sinned. Therefore I cast you as a profane thing out of the mountain of God and I will destroy you from the midst of the fiery stones.”
God destroyed his position and said he could not serve him any longer because he had become evil, violent and destructive. Verse seventeen: “your heart was lifted up because of your beauty and you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I will cast you to the ground and lay you before kings that they may gaze at you.” Someday in the future we will be able to look at him and say “Is this the man who caused so much suffering on the earth?” We will see more of that in a minute, but let’s go on: “You have defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your sins, therefore I will bring fire from the midst of you and it shall devour you and I will bring you to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all.” Someday he will be locked away and will have no more power forever.
We can read about Lucifer, Satan’s original name, in Isaiah fourteen. Lucifer means Light-Bringer or Morning Star, because originally that was his job: to bring light to the earth. When God created the earth originally, it was a beautiful place and God used Lucifer to bring light – understanding – to the people of the earth. But by Genesis one, the earth had been ruined, Satan had ruined the whole earth by influencing everyone to follow his evil way of life. All the people of the earth have imbibed of Satan’s evil influence.
Isaiah 14:3. On the day the Lord gives you relief from the suffering and turmoil and cruel bondage, take up this proverb against the king of Babylon and say, “How the oppressor has come to an end, the golden city ceased. The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked and the scepter of the ruler.” We see that Babylon represents the evil systems of the world. This is not the actual ancient city of Babylon, but a symbol of opposition to God. It wasn’t the people who wanted it that way, it was the evil influence behind them. We can see this in verse twelve, “How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning. How you are cut down to the ground you who weakened the nations.” So now we are talking about Lucifer who was the power behind the throne, and his own kingdom, the spiritual system that he rules over is called Babylon. The physical empire and that city merely reflected his life. And he weakened the nations through that system. “You have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.” This means above the other angels. Just like the king of Tyre, we see this evil being. Satan wants to be a god. He wants to rule. “I will also sit upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will be like the most high.” Satan wants to be like God.
Satan worked within ancient Israel because he knew that was where God was working, and eventually he brought about their demise. Today, we could say he wants to destroy the church of God, the church that continues to try to bring the light of God’s truth to the world. That’s how evil this being is. He wants to be on a par with God the Father and Jesus Christ.
“Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the pit. Those who see you will gaze at you.” [Someday we will be able to see this person for what he is.] “and consider you saying ‘is this the man who made the earth tremble? Who shook kingdoms, who made the world as a wilderness and destroyed its cities, who did not open the house of its prisoners.’” We see the source of the evil that originally turned the world into a wilderness, a desolate place, a ruin. It was Satan. God was trying to fix it by pushing back that darkness and making a beautiful place in the Garden of Eden. He said “Let there be Light.” He didn’t create the sun at that point, He brought the truth that the light stands for. Light and Truth go together in the Bible. Here God told Satan that someday he would be exposed for the man that he is. Angels are the first type of men, but they are spirit, not physical like we are today. They certainly have influence and power to cause people to do evil things like the king of Tyre and the king of Babylon and others who follow their suggestions.
By and large the human race wants to do the right thing, but it’s very confusing when you have imbibed of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How do we sort that out? What’s good? What’s evil? It’s hard for human beings to come up with definitive answers without God’s help and inspiration.
Satan started out with the name “Lucifer” and he became Satan, the devil. In Hebrew Satan means opponent, arch enemy of good, adversary, to attack or to accuse. In the Greek Satan means the accuser, devil, slanderer and false accuser. Another word, Belial, means deceiver, liar and worthlessness, destruction and wickedness.
Now we can contrast Satan’s names which reflect his character with God’s beautiful names which reflect his character. These two beings are in diametric opposition to one another. They are opposing forces with opposing and opposite character traits. That’s where we have to keep it straight and know who is who. It’s difficult when we are imbibing of the tree of good and evil. Everything gets mixed up. Laws and nations are confused. Satan is the one who weakened the nations. Someday he will be exposed for what he is. We can help God fix the planet by choosing right over wrong and using our free will to make the earth a better place.
We want to be associated with God’s name. Remember Exodus twenty and the Fourth Commandment “Do not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?” Well, we don’t want to take his name in vain by saying He is coming to destroy the earth and destroy people’s lives. You don’t fix things by destroying them. God’s purpose is to make things grow and help his plan come to fruition. Satan is the one who by his very names shows us that he wants to destroy and have mankind kill each other. He would like to make this earth a worthless thing again. With him in charge of pain and suffering forever and ever. God is not going to allow that or participate in it. He has been preparing to liberate mankind step by step for the last six thousand years. That is his goal. He will accomplish it. We must understand that God will win. His names stand behind him and what He does.
We must go back to Genesis chapter three to put all this together. God promised early on that he is not going to abandon the human race. Genesis 3:13: And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you’ve done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed above all the cattle and all the beasts of the field. You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and hers. He will crush your head and you will strike his heel.” This is speaking of Jesus Christ who would eventually come from the seed of Eve and bring Satan and his evil empire down. Until that time, Satan was forced to “crawl on his belly” – in other words, to live among mankind – and to “eat the dust” – to devour every human being by causing them to sin. That was the curse. He literally had to make everyone sin and incur the wages of sin, which is death. He was doing a marvelous job until he ran up against Jesus Christ.
God said if he couldn’t beat every human being, he would be destined to fail. So Jesus Christ defeated Satan by living a perfect life. From that point onward Satan’s system was doomed to utter failure and collapse.
But Adam and Eve unfortunately had to be cast out of the Garden. God did not want them at that point to have access to eternal life in that state. So Adam and Eve were forced out into the world where Satan’s rulership gave him lots of influence. But God’s plan was moving forward. He promised Adam and Eve that He would not abandon them and through their seed He would defeat this horrible being.
We want to turn to II Peter to discover what was happening between the Garden of Eden and the Flood. People point to the flood and say that if God destroyed the earth once before because the people were wicked, won’t He do it again? II Peter 2:4: “But if God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into hell, reserved in chains of darkness until the day of judgment, and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others.” Noah preached the gospel of the Kingdom of God, of hope and redemption. But in his day there was still so much evil in the world outside of that Garden, and so much carryover of wickedness that God allowed this destruction and started over with a righteous man and his family to begin to save the earth. God’s plan is moving forward in perfect order, step by step.
So God made some promises to Noah and to the generations that would follow him. Turn back to Genesis chapter eight and verse twenty-two: The Lord said “Never again will I curse the ground for man’s sake though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood, and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night will never cease.” God put a rainbow in the sky as a sign of his promise that He would never again destroy the earth by a flood or any other disaster as long as the earth remains. And, how long will the earth remain?
Revelation chapter twenty verse one offers scriptural proof that the earth will stand for at least a thousand years after Christ returns. We will have a peaceful setting like the Garden of Eden to enjoy throughout the Millennium and far beyond that. Isaiah chapter nine gives us another hint about how much time mankind has to enjoy. Verse seven says “Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
The earth will become the center of the universe simply because God’s throne will be here and He will be ruling forever over an ever increasing government. This is the awesome future for mankind. Even more than we can grasp. We cannot understand how this will happen, but his Word will not be broken.
I Corinthians chapter two and verse seven speaks of how awesome it is. “We speak of God’s secret wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it or they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. As it is written: ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man what God has prepared for those who love him, but God has revealed it to us by his spirit.’ The spirit searches all things even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit with in him?”
We can’t even imagine how wonderful it will be. We are learning more now at the end of the age, but we need to know a lot more. God is revealing it to us. Isaiah chapter 45 and verse eighteen has this to say, “He who created the heavens, He is God, He who fashioned and made the earth, He founded it. He did not create it to be empty; He formed it to be inhabited.” God doesn’t make mistakes. God did not create it in vain, to be a worthless thing; He created it to be a beautiful place for us. “I am the Lord and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a dark place. I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I am the Lord. I speak the truth; I declare what is right.” Noah knew God’s promises, Abraham knew there were promises, Moses knew there were promises, right on down the line. We know we have promises from God, and one of them is that He is not going to destroy this earth ever again. We can count on his Word.
God takes his name very seriously. He is a loving Creator and a sustainer of everything. Today even science is proving that there are more and more galaxies, more stars, more seemingly inhabitable planets. God knew what He was doing. In order to have an ever increasing government, we need space. There will always be enough room for a population that will ever grow and increase.
But keep in mind that Satan is the arch enemy. He is the one who wants to stop God’s plan; he wants to destroy. Revelation twelve nine says, “The great dragon was hurled down – that ancient serpent called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world.” Satan has done a very good job of deceiving people and leading them astray. People live in dread of the end time. He has caused people to believe that God wants to destroy the world in some sort of end-time calamity; and almost every generation thinks that they’re living at the time of the end.
Now we feel that we know so much and because of technology we are certain that this is the end of the line. We have the power to destroy ourselves and we just can’t seem to stop evil people from making weapons of mass destruction, so how will we ever stop them from using them? We feel that God must be behind it and He wants us all dead. GOD DID NOT SAY THAT! Satan is behind that thought; it’s what he desires. God wants a beautiful future, and He says “Have confidence in me. I put my name on this plan. There is no better promise that you can have than my Word. Believe it! Get rid of the anxiety.” Step by step, He is building the Kingdom of God to get rid of and replace Satan’s government. God’s government is full of beautiful influences where people learn that choosing good over evil makes the world a beautiful place.
God did it step by step by pushing back the darkness at the Garden of Eden, by creating a small safe place where He could teach them, by choosing Ancient Israel to be an example of his government. He used them to show how people could have their sins forgiven. The wages of sin is death, but the shedding of blood shows the way to forgiveness. It was always looking forward to the time when we would do battle spiritually; to a time when we would stop the four horsemen of the apocalypse from running any longer. The effort had to start physically, which allowed the prophets to explain and bring the prophecies of Jesus Christ into black and white for us to see them. And the seed working through Eve brought about Jesus Christ who bruised Satan’s head and brought about the countdown to the end of his system. God has now brought us to the place where we can now, physically, do spiritual battle on Satan’s turf.
Back to Revelation twelve, we can see what’s happened. With Jesus Christ coming the first time and dying and shedding his blood, we now have the power to wage a battle against Satan. Verse seven says, “There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. So that great dragon was cast out – that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan who deceives the whole world was hurled to earth and his angels with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ, for the accuser of our brothers who accuses them before God day and night has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”
We can have our sins forgiven by the blood of Christ. We don’t have to kill an animal as they did in ancient Israel. Satan can cause us to sin, but we keep getting up. He eats the dust of the ground, but we keep getting up. Can you imagine being in a boxing match, and every time you knocked your opponent down, he got right back up. This is the situation Christians find themselves in. Because our Champion, Jesus Christ, has been resurrected to eternal life and has shared his shed blood with us to forgive our sins, we can keep getting up and getting up until the day we die. As long as we repent and are in the right attitude, he makes us undefeatable to Satan. Stick with the plan. We cannot be defeated because of Jesus Christ.
In Ephesians six we can see how this works. Our weapons are not physical and our enemies are not physical. Verse ten tells us, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you may stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of darkness and against the spiritual forces of evil in the high places. Therefore put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand your ground in the evil day. Stand, therefore, with the belt of truth around your waist, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, with your feet shod with readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. Above all, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit which is the Word of God. And pray always with all kinds of supplications and requests with perseverance and prayers for the saints. These are all kinds of spiritual weapons with which we can fight Satan. We can get rid of his corrupt influences in our mind that want us to lose our temper, that want us to believe that God’s name is vain, that He is about to destroy this earth. Instead, we can replace that with the confidence that Jesus Christ is going to save us, to preserve us, to bring us the Garden of Eden that will cover the whole earth. We have a beautiful Millennium to look forward to in the not too distant future. This is the same faith that Noah, Moses, Abraham and the others all had. But they died without seeing it, just knowing that God would accomplish it.
We can help hasten the day by adopting this approach now, by forgiving our enemies, taking care of our friends and families, by being good citizens, and by no longer scaring each other with the false witness of God and Jesus Christ the Savior by attaching the wrong attributes. It is Satan who is the destroyer, the deceiver, the liar. He wants to make the earth a wasteland again, a ruination, a desolation. Jesus Christ wants to make it a Garden of Eden, a beautiful place of peace where He will be Wonderful, Counsellor, Prince of Peace.
We’ve got to keep those two beings totally separate. Don’t start mixing qualities; God hates that. That’s what the Third Commandment was all about. Don’t take the name of the Lord your God in vain. It’s much deeper than we originally thought. It means so much more. We are standing for God’s character traits. We are standing for who He really is.
It’s important for all of us at this time to clear God’s name, because too many people think He is a harsh, vengeful God about ready to wreak havoc on the earth, when it is just the opposite. Satan has done a masterful job of deceiving the whole human race into thinking God is so harsh, when really He is so loving and kind. He has been working since before time began to get us to this point; where the Garden can start sprouting all over the earth. For by his name he promises to accomplish his awesome goals for all of mankind. His name is so powerful, so sure, so solid, we should have absolutely no doubts.
Our last scripture is from Hebrews, Chapter six and verse thirteen. “For when God made a promise to Abraham, since He could swear by no one greater, He swore by himself, saying ‘surely I will bless you and I will multiply your descendants.’ So, after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised. Men swear by someone greater than themselves and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all arguments. Thus God determined to make the unchanging nature of his promise abundantly clear to the heirs, He confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two immutable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we can take hold of the hope offered to us and be greatly encouraged. This hope is an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.”
The two unchangeable things He swore by were his names. God, the Father, and Jesus Christ, the Word, his Son. All things are created and will be good. We will succeed. We will destroy Satan’s kingdom and his power and they will be no more. Mankind will have the peace and the blessings that we always intended, but which were hindered for a short time by this accuser, our arch enemy, Satan, the devil. We will win. Have this peace and assurance, and make it the anchor of your soul. By these words we know that we can clear God’s name with confidence, that he is a kind, compassionate, loving God and that He has promised a future for us that is more than we can imagine. But it is certainly beautiful and precious and wonderful to look forward to.