Isaiah: Striving Less and Trusting God Sample

Power in the Name

Many different names and descriptions for God appear in Scripture because His greatness can’t be embodied in just one. Today we’re going to focus on the names of God found in Isaiah 45.

Read Isaiah 45.

Let’s take a moment to focus on four names we discovered in Isaiah 45 and see how they can help us know and trust God more.

YAHWEH

Yahweh is translated using capital letters—LORD—to distinguish it from Adonai which most Bibles render “Lord” in lowercase. Yahweh is the personal name God used when talking to Moses at the burning bush, and God described it as “my eternal name, my name to remember for all generations” (Ex. 3:15).

ELOHIM

Elohim is used more than two thousand times in the Old Testament, making it the word used to identify God most often in Scripture.4

Scripture tells us that our God is transcendent, creative, and powerful. At times I try to reduce God to something I can understand and define, but we can’t put Elohim in a box. He exists outside of time. He made the beginning and already knows the end.

CREATOR

Isaiah 45:9 referenced God as Maker or Creator. The Hebrew word is Yatsar, which means “to form, fashion, frame.”5

When we see God as our Maker, we learn to trust Him even through painful processes of shaping, cutting away, and then firing to solidify us according to His design. As we consider God as former, fashioner, and framer in our lives, we can loosen our grip on our illusion of control and concentrate on being clay that is moldable in His hands.

SAVIOR

May we never lose sight that God is also Savior, the One who longs to save us. Just after He declared that God loved the world and gave His Son so that those who believe in Him “will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16), Jesus said this: “God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17).

Both Isaiah’s name in Hebrew and Jesus’s name in Greek mean “Yahweh is salvation.”
We never want to forget God’s power and authority, but we also don’t want to lose sight
of His goodness to deliver us from sin.

We just scratched the surface with four names found in Isaiah today.

I’m so thankful that we serve a God who invites us to draw near (Jas. 4:8). Just as it takes time to develop trust in human relationships, our trust in the Lord grows as we pursue a deeper walk with Him.