Weird Ideas: Jesus Christနမူနာ

“I believe in Jesus Christ...” It’s the first thing the Apostles’ Creed says about Jesus. Yesterday we touched on “Christ,” but even Jesus’s very name has significance.

Today we tend to pick names for our children because we like the sound of it, have a good association with the name, feel there’s a good personality about it, or to honor someone we love. In ancient Israel, names carried a greater weight. Sometimes they indicated some feature about the person or the circumstances under which they were born. So imagine being named Esau, which means “hairy,” because at birth you had a lot of hair (Gen 25:25). But when God gave a name, it indicated purpose of destiny. So God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, because this childless man would become the father of many (Gen 17:5).

God gave Jesus his name too. We’ll read the story today in Matthew 1, but suffice it to say, God appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to name his fiancé’s son, Jesus. Why? Because it spoke to this child’s purpose and destiny. Jesus means “Yahweh saves.” In Hebrew it would have been pronounced Yehoshua. It’s where we get the more familiar, Joshua. In Aramaic, it would sound more like Yeshua.

Like the great Jewish leader, Joshua, from the Exodus story who brought Israel out of the desert and into the Promised Land, this boy was destined by God to be God’s great leader bringing us out of a greater desert towards a greater promised land. As God told Joseph, he shall be called Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus’s destiny and purpose was to be the savior of the world.