Why Does the Bible Stress the Power of Jesus’s Name?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Well, why does the Bible stress the power of Jesus' name?
00:00:07.000 | The question comes from a listener named Jared.
00:00:09.480 | Hello, Pastor John, a question for you
00:00:11.000 | that my wife and I have wondered about for a while now.
00:00:13.540 | Why the biblical emphasis on praising the name of Jesus
00:00:18.040 | and praying in the name of Jesus?
00:00:20.600 | Of course, we want to, and it's a pattern we see
00:00:22.400 | all over the New Testament, especially in the book of Acts.
00:00:25.160 | And here he cites Acts 2, chapter 3, chapter 4,
00:00:28.120 | chapter 5, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10,
00:00:30.680 | chapter 16, 19, 26, and in Paul,
00:00:33.880 | in 1 Corinthians 1, 2, Philippians 2, 10,
00:00:36.000 | it's all over the place.
00:00:37.520 | To ask it another way, why is there power in Christ's name
00:00:41.200 | rather than saying there's power in Christ's person?
00:00:44.400 | What would you say to Jared and his wife?
00:00:46.200 | - Well, the answer to that last question is easy.
00:00:49.320 | There isn't.
00:00:51.160 | There isn't power in Christ's name
00:00:54.400 | rather than saying there's power in Christ's person.
00:00:59.400 | There is power in Christ's name
00:01:05.040 | because there is power in Christ's person.
00:01:10.040 | But Jared knows that.
00:01:11.920 | That was just a freak of wording.
00:01:15.240 | He knows that.
00:01:16.080 | What he really wants to know, I think,
00:01:18.720 | is what he said at the beginning.
00:01:21.440 | Why do we see such an emphasis on praising
00:01:26.440 | the name of Jesus and praying in the name of Jesus,
00:01:31.560 | doing all these things in the name of Jesus?
00:01:34.400 | What does the focus on name imply in the New Testament?
00:01:39.400 | So let me try to answer that in maybe three steps.
00:01:44.840 | One, the fact that in the Old Testament,
00:01:50.360 | God went out of His way to make a connection
00:01:54.520 | between someone's God-given name
00:01:58.440 | and the essentially important thing
00:02:03.320 | about that person is significant.
00:02:06.040 | For example, Genesis 17, five.
00:02:09.120 | Abram changed to Abraham.
00:02:12.760 | No longer shall your name be called Abram,
00:02:16.180 | but your name shall be Abraham,
00:02:18.840 | for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.
00:02:22.840 | Or Sarai changed to Sarah.
00:02:26.780 | As for Sarai, your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai,
00:02:33.060 | but Sarah shall be her name.
00:02:37.920 | I will bless her, and moreover,
00:02:40.260 | I will give you a son by her, and I will bless her,
00:02:44.120 | and she shall become nations.
00:02:48.160 | And then Jacob changed to Israel.
00:02:52.160 | God says your name shall no longer be called Jacob,
00:02:54.760 | but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men
00:02:59.520 | and have prevailed.
00:03:01.320 | And most importantly is God's own name.
00:03:05.400 | He names Himself.
00:03:06.520 | This is one of the most important passages in the Bible,
00:03:10.040 | I think, Exodus 3, 13 to 14, where Moses says to the,
00:03:14.680 | "The people are gonna ask me when I go down there
00:03:17.240 | "to deliver them in Egypt, what is God's name?
00:03:20.960 | "What shall I tell them?"
00:03:22.920 | God says to Moses, "I am who I am."
00:03:27.120 | And He said, "Say this to the people.
00:03:29.940 | "I am sent me to you."
00:03:34.840 | So Yahweh, the name that's used over 600 times
00:03:39.720 | for God in the Old Testament,
00:03:42.000 | it's usually capitalized L-O-R-D in our English versions,
00:03:45.120 | Yahweh is built on that phrase, I am, I am who I am.
00:03:50.120 | In other words, every time we read the name of God,
00:03:54.800 | it's a proper name, Yahweh,
00:03:56.880 | every time we read the name of God,
00:03:58.720 | He wants us to remember His essence.
00:04:01.200 | That's the point.
00:04:02.280 | When you say my name, remember my essence.
00:04:04.960 | I absolutely am.
00:04:07.920 | That's why I gave myself a name with a meaning,
00:04:10.420 | a name with a meaning, no beginning, no ending,
00:04:13.440 | no becoming, no changing, I absolutely am.
00:04:16.800 | I am true, I am reliable.
00:04:18.800 | Every time you say L-O-R-D, all caps, Yahweh,
00:04:23.180 | remember that.
00:04:24.440 | So that's the first observation.
00:04:25.760 | Second, when the Son of God came into the world
00:04:29.880 | as the very presence of God Himself,
00:04:32.160 | He was given a name, Jesus.
00:04:34.220 | You shall call His name Jesus
00:04:36.440 | because He will save His people from their sins.
00:04:39.800 | Jesus means Savior.
00:04:42.080 | He's more, but He's not less.
00:04:44.520 | You should call His name Emmanuel
00:04:46.920 | for it means God with us.
00:04:50.440 | Call His name Christ
00:04:52.440 | because He's the Son of the living God, Matthew 16, 16.
00:04:55.600 | You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
00:04:59.520 | Philippians 2.10, Jesus replaces the very name of Yahweh
00:05:04.520 | from Isaiah 45.23.
00:05:08.640 | When He quotes that text,
00:05:11.460 | Paul puts Jesus' name in there,
00:05:13.940 | that every knee will bow to Jesus,
00:05:15.980 | where the Old Testament says
00:05:17.600 | every knee's gonna bow to Yahweh.
00:05:19.760 | So boldly, Jesus is saying,
00:05:22.080 | I mean, Paul is saying that Jesus is Yahweh
00:05:26.700 | and that whatever was true of that name
00:05:29.760 | is now true of the name Jesus.
00:05:33.060 | So just as Jared said in his question at the beginning,
00:05:38.140 | the name refers to the essence,
00:05:40.160 | the defining reality of the person.
00:05:43.880 | And you see it repeatedly
00:05:45.840 | that the word stands in the place of some defining aspect
00:05:50.760 | of the person.
00:05:52.680 | You see it again and again
00:05:54.600 | where the name and the person are interchangeable.
00:05:57.360 | For example, in Colossians 3.17, it says,
00:06:00.240 | whatever you do in word or deed,
00:06:02.640 | do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus,
00:06:06.680 | and then continues like this,
00:06:08.580 | giving thanks to the Father through,
00:06:11.700 | and instead of saying the name of Jesus again,
00:06:14.900 | which could have said, he said through Him.
00:06:17.840 | So do everything in the name of Jesus,
00:06:20.060 | giving thanks to the Father through Him,
00:06:22.820 | because Him and the name of the Lord Jesus
00:06:25.540 | are interchangeable in that verse.
00:06:28.740 | So that's observation number two.
00:06:31.900 | Number three, Jared's real question,
00:06:34.900 | my real question is why?
00:06:38.680 | We can all see this in the Bible,
00:06:42.280 | that the name really matters,
00:06:44.320 | and the name really stands for the essence.
00:06:47.600 | And we've adapted our language to that.
00:06:50.520 | We don't even blink when we pray in Jesus' name
00:06:53.920 | or do something in Jesus' name.
00:06:56.140 | But why this remarkably frequent reference to the name?
00:07:03.720 | And here's my effort at an answer,
00:07:06.740 | since the Bible doesn't come right out
00:07:08.780 | in a theological, systematic way and say,
00:07:11.620 | here's the explanation why I use name so many times.
00:07:14.860 | Try to imagine what would happen if there were no names,
00:07:19.860 | if nobody had any names, there's no designations,
00:07:24.660 | not even numbers, you don't have a number,
00:07:26.660 | you're not like seven, two, three, eight, nine.
00:07:29.260 | What would we miss if nobody had a name,
00:07:33.340 | nobody had a number, nobody had any personal designation?
00:07:37.600 | What would we miss?
00:07:39.420 | Well, it seems to me we would miss the ease
00:07:42.660 | of talking to someone personally.
00:07:45.520 | How would you get their attention?
00:07:48.020 | It's not very personal to say, hey you,
00:07:50.100 | and it's hard to say, hey you, so many times.
00:07:53.500 | And you couldn't endear yourself to anybody in conversation
00:07:56.680 | by constantly saying, hey you,
00:07:59.060 | and never, never using any personal designation
00:08:02.680 | for who they are individually.
00:08:04.340 | So that's number one, we'd miss that personal way of talking.
00:08:07.360 | Number two, we would have a hard time talking about someone
00:08:11.740 | if we wanted to say, discuss them in hiring.
00:08:15.000 | I don't mean talking about them in any kind of gossipy way,
00:08:17.040 | I just mean normally talking in a positive way
00:08:20.020 | about somebody, we couldn't even name them.
00:08:22.000 | How would we even know who we're talking about
00:08:24.940 | if we couldn't name somebody?
00:08:26.540 | So talking about them, say even to praise them,
00:08:29.900 | which is number three, we would have a hard time
00:08:32.880 | singing anybody's praises if we couldn't ever name them.
00:08:36.700 | So without names, all of this collapses,
00:08:40.780 | all this relational communication collapses,
00:08:44.120 | and God knew that, and he began the world by naming things.
00:08:48.700 | Then after God named things, Adam named things.
00:08:53.180 | He named all the animals, he gave his wife a name,
00:08:57.420 | and that makes communication possible.
00:09:01.060 | And early on, God gave names that corresponded
00:09:05.660 | to something important that a person had or would have,
00:09:10.140 | which, by the way, just a little passing comment here,
00:09:13.360 | I would just encourage parents to think hard
00:09:17.540 | when they name their children to give them names
00:09:21.460 | that have meaning that they can grow into.
00:09:23.900 | Don't just think, oh, that's a cool sound.
00:09:27.180 | Surely life is more than a cool sound.
00:09:31.060 | Okay, close that parenthesis.
00:09:32.260 | That's another APJ, another time.
00:09:34.820 | So here's the implication.
00:09:36.860 | Referring to the name of Jesus so often is a way of saying
00:09:41.860 | this person is not to be dealt with in private.
00:09:48.740 | He is not to be hidden, a hidden essence in your heart
00:09:53.820 | or in your closet.
00:09:55.500 | He is to be public, globally known,
00:10:00.140 | acknowledged as a person with an identity
00:10:03.740 | that people talk to and people talk about,
00:10:07.340 | that people praise and sing about.
00:10:09.860 | The emphasis on his name goes with an emphasis
00:10:13.980 | on his public, outward, global claim on people's attention.
00:10:18.980 | Romans 1:5, "We have apostleship to bring about
00:10:23.820 | "the obedience of faith for the sake of his name
00:10:27.500 | "among all the nations."
00:10:29.380 | Romans 9:17, "That my name might be proclaimed
00:10:33.980 | "in all the earth."
00:10:35.300 | Romans 15, 19, "Therefore I will praise you
00:10:38.620 | "among the Gentiles and sing to your name."
00:10:42.340 | Romans 10, 13, "For everyone who calls upon
00:10:45.000 | "the name of the Lord will be saved."
00:10:48.600 | So one way to think about it is that the name of Jesus
00:10:53.020 | goes hand in hand with the fame of Jesus.
00:10:56.820 | I think that might be the shorthand way
00:10:58.460 | to remember what I'm trying to say,
00:11:00.060 | that the name of Jesus goes hand in hand
00:11:02.260 | with the fame of Jesus.
00:11:03.820 | A name is a way of communicating with
00:11:08.700 | and a way of communicating about all over the world
00:11:12.520 | who you're talking about.
00:11:13.700 | And Jesus exists to be known.
00:11:16.220 | He exists to be addressed and praised all over the world.
00:11:21.460 | The word name calls attention repeatedly
00:11:25.460 | to the public verbal goal of his fame.
00:11:30.460 | - That's really good.
00:11:31.820 | So the name of Christ has no magical power in itself
00:11:35.320 | like some incantation.
00:11:37.180 | - I don't think so.
00:11:38.000 | I don't think there's anything magical about it.
00:11:41.300 | - Yeah, and I think the seven sons of Sceva
00:11:43.220 | found that out the hard way.
00:11:44.300 | - Yeah, that would be a good illustration.
00:11:47.100 | I know Paul, I know Jesus, who are you?
00:11:50.020 | - Oh, yeah, don't wheel that name around
00:11:52.300 | if you don't know what it means.
00:11:54.340 | And thank you for listening along
00:11:56.260 | and for subscribing to Ask Pastor John
00:11:58.100 | in your favorite podcast app or in YouTube.
00:12:00.900 | Next time we will look at asexuality
00:12:03.500 | of people who experience no general
00:12:05.100 | sexual attraction to others.
00:12:06.600 | Is this a sure sign of the permanent gift
00:12:08.620 | of singleness or not?
00:12:10.700 | Could this change?
00:12:11.900 | It's a really good question.
00:12:12.820 | Up next on the other side of the weekend,
00:12:14.340 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:12:15.620 | We'll see you on Monday.
00:12:16.820 | (upbeat music)
00:12:19.400 | (upbeat music)
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