Lord, I Want to Know You A 5-Day Reading Plan from Kay ArthurSýnishorn
God Our Provider
Yet God is more than Jehovah. He is Jehovah- jireh, Jehovah-tsidkenu, Jehovah-nissi, Jehovah-raah, Jehovah-rapha, Jehovah- shalom, Jehovah-sabaoth, Jehovah-shammah, Jehovah-mekoddishkem. What do these names mean? By being compounded with Jehovah, each one of them shows us that the very essence of God’s Being is to love, to give, to be more than self-constrained.
As the self-existent one, God desires to meet the needs of those He created in His own image. Thus, He becomes Jehovah our provider, Jehovah our shepherd, Jehovah that sanctifies us, and so on. He reaches beyond Himself because it is part of His character to do so. As you and I take on His character more and more, we will reach out beyond ourselves to manifest to others what He is to us.
The first of these compound names we will look at is Jehovah-jireh, “the Lord will provide.” The word for provide, jireh, in the Old Testament literally means “to see.” But how do Hebrew scholars get “provide” out of it? Since He is God, when He sees, He foresees. Our all-knowing, ever-present, eternal Father knows the end from the beginning and, thus, in His omniscience, He provides.
Not only has Jehovah foreseen your need for salvation and made provision through the death and resurrection of His Son, but He also sees your day-by-day needs, as we read in Matthew 6:7-8.
O Beloved, Jehovah-jireh is bidding us to come. We are coming to the One who is for us! “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). At Calvary, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).
He is a God who is for you, not against you. You can worship Jehovah-jireh in obedience and know that whatever you need, the Lord will provide it.
Recall a time in your walk with Jehovah-jireh when He met your need because He saw you.
About this Plan
So much of our confusion and pain comes from not knowing God. We may know about Him without fully knowing what He says about Himself. One way to get to know God personally is to spend time studying His biblical names. For the next five days, we are going to study five names of the Lord so that we might draw closer to the One who knows us completely!
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