The Knowledge of God — Art Katz

Boasts in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord. I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord. So God delights in those that understand and know him.

The Knowledge of God as God’s Revelation to Mankind

And our subject this morning, for as many days as the world will give us, is God. The knowledge of God. And I'm going to run up half the night looking at some very rich material. At least of the effect of which is to realize that God's revelation to Israel is God's revelation to mankind.

That the only way that God in fact could communicate himself is by picking a particular people and investing in them the revelation of himself. And that they would in turn be the witness to that revelation.

And that's not unlike the role of the church, even as a continuation of the ministry that was given to Israel as a nation. I remember once we talked about coming back to the New York area and establishing some kind of a ministry of witness to Jews.

I was talking about myself coming back, but the wife of a brother who had been with us for years said, no Archie, if there's a witness to the Jews, there needs to be a corporate expression. It's not just one man that will need some way to bring a whole band of souls to present the witness to the Lord.

And that's touching the principle of God's employment of an entire nation. So how God chose to reveal himself to Israel is a remarkable instruction about God himself. What he says of himself in the words that he gave to that nation through Moses, through the prophets, through the psalmists, is the statement about himself that he wanted communicated.

God wants to be understood and wants to be known. And it's interesting that in the messianic age, one of the descriptions is that the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

And if we are hurting for any single one thing in the church today, it's the want of a true knowledge of God. Because if that is one thing, if that is deformed, if that is inadequate, everything else will be affected by it.

Everything will be askew. So I can't think of a better investment, and evidently that's the Lord's thought, but that we should look to this. So I want to pray again here over the table for that. What a topic.

I just talked to the Lord this morning already. I said, Lord, if no man has the right to preach the cross or to teach the cross, but him who was impaled on it, who then shall speak about the knowledge of God but God?

So Lord, we ask that again. We desire what you desire. We want to be instructed in the knowledge of God. And we admit that we share with the church at large everywhere in the world an inadequate knowledge.

We do not know as we ought to know, and it shows. And we're asking, my God, that you would help us and bring us to a better perception of yourself, far more complete and intensive. And only you can perform this, Lord, by the grace of your Spirit.

So I thank you for those men who have sought you out in this regard, two of whose books are before us this morning, and that you would draw freely from those things that you have richly given them. Bless us, my God, as we embark on this great subject, and we thank you even for the privilege of it.

It would be a privilege to fail at it, and we should succeed in something less or other than this great subject, God, as he in fact is, and not as men or we have thought him to be. So bless this, Lord, we pray, and bless those who will receive benefit from these tapes, and we thank you again for the subject that you've put before us.

In Jesus' name, amen. I pray to the Lord for my birthday gifts, a complete set of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, 14 volumes, and this one is entitled The Doctrine of God. I knew it was there, and the Lord promptly prompted me to pick it up early this morning.

And then another book that I'll be quoting from perhaps more extensively, Theology of the Old Testament, by another German, Walter Eichrot. So as I've mentioned before over this table, it's a remarkable thing, even an anomaly, strange kind of contradiction, that the most superb Old Testament study is performed by Germans, and we Jews are indebted to them.

I don't think that we know what our own treasure is. And the Church has suffered from a kind of separation from all the New Testament that God never intended. There's kind of a rupture, and for too long many Christians have come to their church services with the New Testament and Psalms, as if the rest of the Old Testament has very little cogency or relevance and don't know what they're missing.

So part of our burden is to restore an appreciation for what God has given in the Old Testament scriptures, and what he has made manifest through that revelation of Jesus as a fulfillment of what has been hinted and known and understood and sought for by the Old Testament saints.

I just started looking at Barth on this subject, and I just want to share a few things out of it. I didn't realize I'd turned up many pages.

I was just sitting there going, wow, it just started. That was a week's worth of turning pages.

Well, I read until my eyes closed up on me. I went to bed about 6 a .m. knowing that I had to be up within a short time, but desperately needing a little rest. I'm wondering, I'll fall into a state of stupefaction.

I'll sleep right through the 7 o 'clock break time. But also, I just, my eyes blinked and opened at about a quarter, 20 to 7. Another miracle from the Lord. So it gave me a bit of rest, but enough to be prompt and untimely.

I'm looking for a footnote. He makes reference to another very famous book on God. I'm trying to remember the author's name, who wrote of God as a mystery, a kind of a spiritual phenomenon communicated in a kind of a hazy way.

Oh Lord, turn me to that. That had made quite a stir in its time, but he shot it down. Here it is. About the Holiness of God, a book by Rudolf Otto, where this other German theologian talked about the numinous, N-U-M-I-N-O-U-S.

It's like a word that describes what is indescribable. The vague sense of God's mysterious spirit and that this was supposed to be the communication of God and the sense of the divine. But Barth says that the Holy God of Scripture is the Holy One of Israel.

He was not impressed with this man's work, that God, the knowledge of God is not some kind of a numinous mystery that is going to be promoted by referring to some vagary about a sense of God as mystery, but that God is going to be revealed by his relationship with Israel.

That's where the action is. That's the payoff. The God who made a covenant with Israel, the God who made promises, the God who spoke to the patriarchs, the God who revealed himself to Moses, that this is the foundation of revelation for the knowledge of God and not some speculative consideration about God in the sense of a mystery.

There are mysteries as things that are withheld until the time when God will reveal them, but the foundational knowledge of God is not going to come as some kind of a vapor and that you have to somehow intuit.

It's really interesting that the man who wrote that book did not have Barth's grasp of the revelation that had come to the Old Testament saints. It may be something in the spirit of men that balks at acknowledging the centrality of Israel in the purposes of God that leads them off into other by-paths trying to find some key to the revelation of God, which would have been revealed had they understood the centrality of the people that God had chosen to make the knowledge of himself known.

So, Barth says, it's not this numinous thing of which this man writes, but the Holy God of Scripture is the Holy One of Israel. That is the primary and fundamental thing to be said about him. That one quotation is worth everything.

The primary and fundamental thing about God is his relationship to Israel and what he has revealed to Israel. The descendants of present Israel, modern day Jewry, know little or nothing about it and to some extent are even offended by the history of God with Israel.

Don't even believe it. Look upon the Bible as their own accomplishment, that somehow it's our Jewish contribution to the world in giving the world a book that's made up of fanciful things that are not intended as some factual account, but are imaginative or picturesque or historic or mythological and brings the concept of the Jewish people a monotheistic God, which is an advance over pagan views of multiple gods.

That's the way most modern Jews would look at the Bible, which they themselves do not read, or if they read it, they read it as a kind of an antiquity, just something of a cultural interest that happens to be our contribution.

They cannot bring themselves to understanding that the Bible itself is a piece of supernatural reality given of God by the Spirit, that the 66 books I'm including, the New Testament, are a statement of God through the ages, over a millennium through almost as many authors, and so Barth is that kind of a man who looks at the scripture and particularly the Old Testament as the primary and fundamental thing to be said about God, is what was said and established with Israel with that people.

So this does not mean first of all and decisively the God who is exalted over Israel, separated from it and confronting it, to be feared by it as the one to whom it has obligations. The holiness of God does mean all this too, because it means primarily and decisively that God has adopted and chosen Israel as his child and given it his promise and has already conferred upon it his gracious help.

And that's why Israel can say, who is like unto thee, O Lord, and speaks about the holiness of God, the mercy of God, the grace of God, because this is Israel's experience of God. So God makes his entry into the world with the nation and with the people, and the record of that relationship is our basis for the knowledge of God.

So we need to go back again and to maybe come to it in a fresh way. I myself have been guilty of just kind of gliding over or looking at those statements about who is like unto thee among the gods, fearful in praises, doing wonders, as kind of a poetry.

But these are the statements of the people to whom the wonders have been performed. And for them it was very real. They had a real knowledge of God based on his acts. And what distinguishes the faith we call Christianity is that God has made an entry into the world and before men.

There's a historic testimony. This is not something imaginative or speculative like other world religions, but that this is predicated and based on history, on God's actual entry and involvement with a nation.

And that is the foundation of our knowledge of God. Because God knows how men love speculative, fanciful things that sound very spiritual, and yet like this book by Rudolf Otto on the mystery of holiness.

But it's not a statement of God as he in fact is. It's a statement of a man's speculative thought on what he would think the holiness of God is when it's considered outside of and separate from the actual acts of God, what God has actually spoken and done with the nation Israel.

So, the great events of Israel like the parting of the Red Sea, the exodus out of Egypt, the judgments that came to Egypt are the foundation of God's revelation. God is in judgment, God in mercy, God in faithfulness, the provision in the wilderness, all of that are the foundational elements of Israel's faith about God who has revealed himself through those provisions and through those acts.

There's a whole number of things here about the grace of God and the mercy of God. As it was revealed to Israel that God's grace is revealed even in the opposition of the people for whom the grace is intended.

That it's not a grace given to those who agree or even willingly receive it, but that the grace is all the more grace when it's expressed to a people who resist it. So that the love of God does not require even agreement, but it's all the more demonstrated when it has to be brought to a people who even oppose it as has been the history of Israel and even to this day with many.

Only in this opposition is God known in his being as love and grace, for only in this relationship of opposition does he actually create and maintain fellowship between himself and us and turns toward us.

Only in this tension as we experience and recognize it and are subject ourselves to it do we truly believe in him and yield to him the right which he has against us and over us. The right in which we can then place our confidence.

So how is God's grace revealed? All the more when it's not welcomed, all the more when it's opposed, God persists and he has no condition that makes his grace acceptable. The fact that he's willing to contend and strive with men and to make his grace and mercy known even in their opposition is the very demonstration of that grace and mercy.

So Israel's stubbornness is God's foil. He couldn't ask for a better platform to communicate himself in what he is in grace and mercy than in the stubbornness and opposition of a people who have bucked against it.

Isn't that a remarkable statement about God? And that's why Israel was selected. Not because it was most conducive to the grace of God but most opposed. Not because they were the most spiritual but because they were the most carnal.

Not because they were the greatest but because they were the least. In everything that was adverse toward God and that the whole history of the nation is shot through with terrible apostasy, the grace of God and the mercy of God is made more apparent.

And that's Israel's purpose is to reveal God as God. And in that revelation God revealed himself in a personal way. The tendency of men to think about God would have been even to prefer God as being abstract.

I can remember occasions when I was a missionary to the Jews and came in contact with rabbis in Kansas City. They would ridicule my faith and the reference of believers to God as being known personally as Lord.

I realized that they actually preferred a God who is abstract and distant than a God who is personal, real and immediate. Why would that be? That there would be a tendency in men to prefer God abstractly than God personally.

But the genius of God's revelation to Israel is God at a personal level. Immediate, intimate, real and as a personality himself. Having attributes just like men. He sees, he feels, he aggrieves, he hurts.

Why would men prefer not that God but a God who is abstract and distant and speculative? You can't even say that an abstract God has spoken but the God who is intimate, personal and real and at hand has spoken.

And requires with that speaking. God has not only revealed himself in a personal way but he has given Israel names for himself. These names El Shaddai and Adonai Shabbatot, the Lord of Hosts or the Almighty God are like progressive revelations.

They have come at different times in Israel's history. I can't remember where it was I think with Moses that I have not given you this name till now but now I want you to understand me as the Almighty God.

Or to Abraham, I think it's Genesis 15, Abraham walk thou before me, I am the Almighty God, walk thou before me and be blameless. It's the first time that God uses the name Almighty at a point in Abraham's personal history with him because Abraham is now being called to a more exacting walk that will require the Almightiness of God to perform.

I am the Almighty God, I am speaking to you now with this name that I have not given to you before, walk thou before me and be thou blameless. So the name brings not only revelation but a requirement and so this is characteristic of God's dealing with Israel and it's a way in which we in our generation can come to an understanding and a knowledge of God by looking back on the kind of relationship that they had and what God intended by giving himself in a personal way and by the use of his name.

That's why he was so insistent that his name not be taken in vain, that there was a power in the name, that the name was not just an appellation, a designation, but communicated something and even to invoke the name with that kind of an understanding had a meaning and a consequence that would not have been Israel's privilege except the name was given.

Now this is completely lost to modern people. We think the name, I spoofed my mother for calling me Arthur, my birth certificate says baby, she couldn't think of a name and then it was crossed out and she finally called me Arthur of all names.

She said that she leaned over the crib and she said Abraham and I went wah, so she scratched that. So we call our kids Fawn and Bruce and Dawn and all kinds of lovely poetic sounding names, but they're just designations.

A name to us does not mean in our generation what it meant biblically to an Old Testament people because the name was the identification and even became the thing in itself. That the first privilege given to Adam as a son of God was to name the other animals that God had created that were nameless until Adam himself gave them names.

When he gave them the names that he did, it was not just a label that was conferred, but an identity. You can almost say that the giving of the name was a creative act that established the distinctness of those different pieces of God's creation.

So the bestowing of a name has a remarkable significance and Israel's privilege was that God had bestowed his name upon that people and given to Israel various aspects of himself in the names that he would employ at different times in their history.

The Divine Name, Covenant, and Blessing

Even the blessing that God ordained, the Aaronic blessing in Numbers chapter 6, anybody can turn to that? Telling Aaron how to pray, that this prayer would not just be a mumbo-jumbo kind of a religious exercise, but the conferring of something.

In verse 22, the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to Aaron and his son saying, thus you shall bless the Israelites, you shall say to them. Here's the remarkable significance of words and of speaking that was pagan nations in their mythologies and their ways of speaking occultic and other forms of religion had some significant sense of words, but not the kind of sense that the Israelites had, that words were almost like a sacred trust, particularly a word that would come from God, because they knew God as creator who created by his word.

He brought all things into being by his word. So Israelite religion, the faith of the nation Israel has to do with God as a creator and the account of creation given in Genesis is the key to understanding God as creator by his word.

This is one of the profoundest foundations of Israel's whole understanding about its own God. No other nation had this kind of grasp of God that Israel had, because this was the revelation given it about its own God.

And that revelation is given to Israel, but it's intended for all generations, for the people of faith of all generations and for all nations. And we'll come into this in the Psalms and in other places where Israel is made conscious that it has an obligation to the nations to communicate their knowledge of God to the nations or else the nations will be walking into walls and continuing in their primitive mythologies and other kinds of occultic practices for the want of the knowledge of God, who alone is God.

It's a strange conundrum and thing to consider. How do you keep yourself from a kind of nationalistic self-exaltation when you have been singled out for the privilege of the revelation of the one God who is God?

How do you communicate that to other nations without exhibiting some kind of a superiority over them was a contradiction that Israel had to find its way through. The problem for God is how do I communicate what I am to a nation without their getting puffed up over that communication and being corrupted by the very thing that I intend for their sanctification.

It's a strange kind of paradox. It's a remarkable question. We're not through with it yet. The church itself can well do to consider what it does with this revelation and Paul, what did he say? That for the measure of the revelation given him, he was given a goat, a thorn in his side, lest he be exalted beyond measure.

So even the great apostles had to receive something from God as a countermeasure because of the revelation given him. Remember Exodus 3, the revelation to Moses of God in the burning bush. Who shall I tell them is sending me?

God's answer is for all generations. You shall tell them this, I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But moreover, this is how you shall be known of me, that I am that I am.

So when Jesus in John chapter 8, when they said, who do you think you are? Are you greater than the prophets who were sent to us? Are you greater than our father Abraham whose remains are with us? Jesus said, well, verily I say unto you, from the Latin word veritas, verily, truly I say unto you, that before Abraham was, I am.

And they picked up stones to kill him. They knew exactly what that meant. That was uttermost blasphemy because they knew that they knew as Israelites that God had given the name I am as his eternal designation.

How dare this upstart and carpenter's son employ that language? So their meaning and their revelation is a unique provision of God to Israel. No other nation can boast of it. And the God who is giving this is the one who is God in fact.

And so this is through this nation, that knowledge and revelation is to be communicated to others, not in a prideful and a boastful way, but in a humbled way, maybe in keeping that with the thought to whom much is given, much is required.

We're privileged, but we also have the greater responsibility. Well, getting back to the blessing that God gave Aaron to say, you shall say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Remarkable statement. And I love it when we will from time to time conclude a service or someone will pray the Aaronic blessing on God's people now.

And then it says, so they shall put my name on the Israelites and I will bless them. What a strange statement. By speaking these words, so will my name come on the people who have heard this benediction.

Benediction, bena means good, like beneficial, and diction means speaking. It's a good speaking. Why? Because something is conferred with that speaking that is tangible and palpable that is an actual blessing.

So God is instructing the nation, even in the efficacy of words, that words have a value, a content, a meaning, a power, particularly the words that are given. You shall say this to them. I'm calling you to say this to them.

And when you do that, my name will be upon them. What does that mean? What is in my name, what's intrinsic to my name, the meaning of that name, what I am as God in that name will also be conferred. This is, I don't think that this has been appreciated sufficiently, but this is radical.

This is unknown and unheralded in the history of mankind. And this is only a few thousand years old, but it's God breaking in. This is the grace of God, the mercy of God. And the very choice of a nation for this revelation is itself a revelation of a God who chooses.

I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. So everything that God does with Israel, for Israel, making a covenant with Israel, a covenant making and a covenant keeping God is a statement about God himself.

The God who makes promises, the God who puts great emphasis on his word is God. So by his act of bestowing a name on himself, God chooses to be described as the definable, the distinctive, the individual.

In this way, the faith of Israel sets its face both against an abstract concept of deity and a nameless ground of being. What are the alternatives to have a God who is not named? You're either going to fish around and speculate and have some abstract notion that is not God, it's your own abstraction, or you're going to use a phrase like the ground of being.

He's actually quoting, I think, another German Tillich used that phrase. Well, it sounds very poetic, but what in fact does that mean? To call God a ground of being. Can you pray to a ground of being?

Can you have a hope and a confidence in a ground of being? Does a ground of being give promises to which you can remind him and anticipate by faith that can give you hope when every kind of thing is set against you?

A ground of being is not, or an abstraction, is not capable of any of those things. So from the beginning, God is explicit, personal, and gives his name and reveals himself, takes the risk of allowing the people to get puffed up in their knowledge or to misuse it, so that he himself has got to caution them, don't take my name in vain.

I'm giving you a sacred trust. I've not done this for any other people. I'm doing it for you, but be careful with it. It's an extreme privilege. Don't misuse it. He talks about this a little bit later on as actually being a falling away, not a statement of an increase of intimacy and knowledge of God, but a falling away from it, because the Orthodox Jews today think that they are honoring God by saying Hashem, the name.

What they're actually doing is pronouncing an abstraction. They have lost the intimate sense of God that their forefathers once had, and this is since the destruction that came upon the temple and the dispersal of the priesthood.

This is the rabbinical Judaism that came out of the crisis of Israel's judgment, and so they've lost the sense of intimacy, the knowledge of God that Israel had before that judgment, and so what they have now is a kind of abstraction that they speak in the sense that they think that they are honoring God, but what it really indicates is they don't know him beyond that abstraction.

Hashem, the name, but what name? Both deceived, thinking that they're doing service to God and that somehow this is honoring to God, when actually it's a statement of a falling away, because God desires to be known, and he wants to be known intimately.

You can't have that kind of relationship without communicating yourself in your name. So to be reduced to a Hashem, the name, without saying what that name is, and having no greater meaning for the name, and unable to bring yourself to the place where you can say Yahweh or Jehovah or Yeshua shows how destitute they are, and their religion is like unto that abstraction.

It's an abstract legalism, and it has lost the intimate sense of God. And maybe the end of that is the statement of Jesus of those who say Lord, Lord, and he says depart from me you workers of iniquity, I never knew you.

You've been reduced to such a state that you're just invoking a little syllable, but there's no comprehension, no knowledge of myself. And you've never had that, but you think that by invoking that you do have it.

So it's an astonishing coming up short in our final moment of great mortification. I never knew you. Just to come back into an Old Testament, I think, Hebraic mindset, just to appreciate the meaning of names, the meaning of words, the communication of why it was given, the personal sense, the intimacy, this is what I'm trying to touch now.

Not so much, although it's interesting to examine the different names that were given, but what underlies the God who reveals himself by giving his name. He desires to be known intimately. He's giving people the privilege of the name as an insight into his makeup as God.

It makes him very personal. He's taking the chance of the familiarity that breeds contempt. He would be much wiser, so to speak, and safer to keep those people at a distance, terrify the dickens out of them, and let them have an abstract fear of God.

But that's not, that would not be his nature. He's not in business to terrify or to keep his people at a distance. The kind of God that he is, and the grace that he exhibits, which is the expression of his love, is the desire to be known and to be in intimate relationship with his own people, and it's the love that's willing to take the risk of being abused.

I think probably to use it like a kind of genie lamp, to think that by invoking it, we can use the name magically. And this is the characteristic of all pagan religions, is that its use of God as they knew it was magical.

Things were invoked and intoned to obtain a certain effect or result. What it is, is man in the saddle, man using and manipulating that which is holy. This is the taking of the name in vain, that Israel would come down to the level of its pagan neighbors and take the holy names of God and seek to manipulate them for their own advantage, as a means to their own ends.

It's not given for that. It's given for intimacy, not for manipulation. So religion that becomes a manipulation, which is even Christianity today in many ways, is an offense to God. But he opens the door for it, that possibility, by giving his name.

Here's the point. The God who is willing to take that risk is showing us what he is as God. I'm a God who so desires intimate relationship and the knowledge of myself as a person of what I am, that I'm willing to take the risk that you might abuse this.

I'm warning you not to, but the fact that I'm warning you shows that it is a possibility, but I'm willing to take that risk. You'll be sorry if you do. You'll be chastised. There'll be unhappy consequence.

But what is love? We're learning what love is. Love is the willingness to take risks by making itself vulnerable. And this is the Most High God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth and all that in them is.

We would not have known that except that God had done that historically with this nation. And that's why Barth in the other book said, I'm not impressed with this Rudolph Otto and the numinous mystery of God as a kind of a sense or vapor.

The true knowledge comes in God's relationship with Israel and what he has both spoken and done for that nation. And that's what we're seeing here. This is so good. So God doesn't desire to be abstract or just a nameless ground of being.

That's rejected. So the proclamation of the divine name was treasured as an act whereby God himself came forth from his secret place and offered himself in fellowship. Isn't that a beautiful picture, a beautiful statement?

It's a picture of not only the love of God, but the humility of God to come down and come to send, to be in fellowship with his own creation, with his own creatures. Even a people who are going to be his heartache through many generations, this is a God who comes down.

So even before the advent of Jesus, where we see the literal physical fulfillment of that aspect of God, it's already indicated in the history of God from the beginning with that nation. That's why they should all the more recognize Jesus because Jesus was the fulfillment of all that God had all along been conveying in the one way or another, and here he is now in all fullness before you.

It's a God who comes down. So by revealing his name, God has, as it were, made himself over to them. He has opened to them a part of his very being and given them a means of access to himself. I don't know that I'm that willing myself to be that open and available to others, but God is.

Isn't that a remarkable revelation of God? I think I share Karl Barth's feeling. I'm not impressed with this mystical stuff, but I love this. I love the reality of that could only have been communicated in the tangible way that God did by being in relationship with this people and giving them his name.

He has opened to them a part of his very being and given them a means of access to himself. He wants to be accessible. Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord, there's only a final statement of what was all along God's way with men.

He wants to be called upon, and what do we see in the psalmists? A generation of men who are continually calling upon God with real intimacy and holding him to his promises. Didn't you say and didn't you show us in the past?

Weren't you faithful in the past? Didn't you open the Red Sea? How come now we're faced with these enemies and where are you? Are you sleeping? It's amazing the kind of directness. It almost borders on impoliteness in the address of some of the psalmists to God in their crisis times.

But never once is there an indication that God reproves them for that kind of talk. He actually loves it. He loves to be addressed. He wants to be reminded of what he had promised and that men are believing for that and expect God to act on the basis of what he has said because that's what he is as God.

And we'll only learn that in one way by investing ourselves in the history of Israel. And the great irony is that we for the most part who are Gentiles are being nourished by this whereas Jews who are the descendants of Israel have little or no notion or even interest in the kind of thing that blesses us.

So that part of our calling is to make known to them their own God. And what could be more powerful than it should come to them through Gentiles who are more enamored and taken up with the truth of the God of Israel than is Israel itself.

And even in that mystery is a revelation of God. So the knowledge of his name is more than an external means of distinguishing one person from another. It is a relation with the person's being. Isn't that a beautiful statement?

God has made himself accessible by giving his name. It's like saying here's an aspect of myself. I'm not just giving you a little key word to invoke in a magical way but I'm inviting you to a relationship with me and my being and what I am in myself as God.