The Name of God with Nehemia Gordon (Open Door Series – Part 3)

The Name of God with Nehemia Gordon (Open Door Series - Part 3)

You are listening to the Open Door Series with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: All right, thank you very much. It’s great to be here in Texas, and I'm gonna continue talking to you a little bit about the Hebrew origins of the Lord's Prayer. I really only touched on a very small part of it, and even after this presentation, it will be a very small part of it. There's so much deepness and richness once you get into the Hebrew.

Over here, I have a picture of another manuscript of Hebrew Matthew. Before, we saw one from the British Library; this one is from Florence, Italy. And here, we can see the second line of the prayer. It starts, “Our Father in heaven,” and then it says in Hebrew, “Yitkadesh shimkha. Say, “Yitkadesh.”

Crowd: Yitkadesh.

Nehemia: Shimkha.

Crowd: Shimkha.

Nehemia: And that's really a powerful statement, because in English, we usually translate that, “Hallowed be Thy name.” What does that really mean, “Hallowed be Thy name?” It's kind of like this vague statement, “Your name is holy.” But when you look at it in Hebrew, and in Greek, the Hebrew and Greek here are identical, it means literally, “May Your name be sanctified,” which grammatically is a call to action. And Keith is gonna talk more about that, I won't steal his thunder. But “May Your name be sanctified” is a call to action. It begs the question, if we're sanctifying the name of our heavenly Father, what is His name? What is the name of our heavenly Father? And that's what the prayer is, too, our Father in Heaven.

About a year ago, I was speaking to this group of charismatic prayer warriors. And some of them were praying in tongues, and they were all over the place. And one lady was praying with Hebrew names; she was calling upon the Father using various Hebrew names. And when I was presenting on this, I said, “Okay, I'm going to pick on her and ask her, ‘What, ma'am, is the name of our Father in Heaven?’” And she said, “Well, is it El Shaday? Is it El Elyon?” And she threw out a whole bunch of titles; those are beautiful, wonderful titles of the King of Creation, but He only has one name. And that is a name that He gave and revealed to Moses when Moses asked the exact same question, “What is the name that I should tell the Israelites? You've appeared to me in the burning bush, said, ‘Go to the Israelites,’ and I'm gonna say, ‘The God of our forefathers has appeared to me.’ I need to be more specific.”

And why is that? Because their forefathers worshipped lots of gods. It says that when Terakh and Nakhor, the fathers of Abraham, were across the river, they had many, many gods. And in Egypt there were many, many gods. There was Ra and there was Ba'al from Canaan. There were more gods than we could possibly count.