“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”

Isaiah 55: 6-7

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What’s in a Name? Salvation for one thing.

I joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in August 1979. When Katie and I moved to Charlottesville, Melanie was 3 years old, and Katie was pregnant with Rebekah.

The first thing we did after settling in was to look for a good church. As it turned out, there was a church near where we lived at that time. It was Trinity Presbyterian Church. It held services in Jack Jouett Middle School each Sunday. Skip Ryan was the pastor, and if I remember correctly, his wife-to-be, Barbara, was a first-year law student at UVA. Both were very intelligent, and Skip was an engaging preacher. I didn’t know either of them well, but I knew them and respected them.

I never told Skip what I am about to tell you, and I don’t remember every detail. One evening, we were gathered for some reason. I don’t know why, but Skip called on me to say something or lead a prayer. I do remember this much: Yahweh put His hand on me at that moment and made clear to me that I had nothing to say.

That was a strange feeling. I had felt it before, and I knew what it was. I wanted to be accommodating, but at the same time, I knew that Yahweh didn’t want me to say anything. I stumbled through some short, innocuous something, and stopped. I interpreted that experience as an indication that I was in the wrong place.

Less than a year later, Katie and I moved to Crozet, Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we joined Crozet Baptist Church. Eventually, I became a Sunday school teacher and a deacon at Crozet Baptist. Both Melanie and Rebekah were baptized at Crozet Baptist, but in the mid-1980s, Yahweh took me out of institutional religion. Roy Thomas was the pastor. I never talked with him about it. I just stopped attending church.

At that time, Katie and I bought a house on Smith Mountain Lake between Roanoke, Virginia and Lynchburg, Virginia. We went there almost every weekend. On Sunday mornings, we held church services in our home, and I was the preacher. Sometimes, we would take the boat out on Sunday mornings as a family, find a secluded cove nearby, anchor the boat, and hold services there. I told my family the things Yahweh was telling me. Everything I was telling them came straight from the Bible, but they were not the kinds of things that you typically hear in any Christian church I have been a part of.

I was learning to follow Yahweh, not leaders in institutional churches. Later, I would understand why that was important.

On Sunday’s when we were not at the lake, we attended Trinity Presbyterian in Charlottesville. By then, a man named Ed Clowney had been appointed theologian-in-residence. Skip Ryan knew him well and spoke very highly of him. Later, I learned that Dr. Clowney had a great reputation among theologians all over the country. I’ll say more about Dr. Clowney in a moment.

During the early-1990s to mid-1990s, I was transitioning from being a business professor to becoming a person with a message to deliver from Yahweh. I did all the things that were expected of me as a chaired professor, but I also devoted a lot of attention to the Scriptures. By the late-1990s, I was well on my way to fleshing out the message Yahweh wanted me to deliver.

In 2000, Yahweh told me that it was time for me to leave UVA. I tendered my resignation and told the dean that I planned to leave in May 2004. Read “Yahweh’s Precision Timing: He’s Never Late and He’s Never Early” for details. It’s an interesting story.

During the 4 years that I had before I planned to retire, I wrote the early drafts of His Name is Yahweh, developed PowerPoint presentations to deliver the message in the book, and started giving presentations to groups ranging in size from a few people to hundreds of people. In early-2004, I made an appointment to talk with Dr. Clowney. I wanted to present the message to him and get his reaction to it.

“For from the rising of the sun even to its setting, My Name will be great among the nations [the Gentiles], and in every place incense is going to be offered to My Name, and a grain offering that is pure; for My Name will be great among the nations [the Gentiles],” says Yahweh Sabaoth. (Malachi 1:11)

By the time I met with Dr. Clowney, I knew that what I had to say was rock-solid scripturally. I laid it out in my PowerPoint presentation to him so systematically that I expected anyone to be able to see it. When I finished, Dr. Clowney was very polite, but for all practical purposes, he dismissed my message. To him, it was not important.

“I bow down toward Your holy temple and give thanks to Your Name for Your steadfast love and Your faithfulness, for You have exalted above all things Your Name and Your Word.” (Psalm 138:2)

That taught me an important lesson. Yahweh’s Spirit must open people’s eyes to the truth, or they will miss it completely. They have eyes, but they can’t see it. They have ears, but they can’t hear it.

My experience over the last two decades has taught me that people who have devoted their careers to the institutional church, preachers in particular, are especially difficult to reach. They have been too well indoctrinated in Christian traditions and liturgy, and they have developed a spin on those things that is unique to them.

I think of it as their signature on Christian traditions and liturgy. They repeat the things they have been indoctrinated to say with their unique spin. To me, it looks like an act that they have rehearsed and performed repeatedly for years. When someone like me, a business professor no less, comes to them and shows them something that they have missed completely, they are almost offended. It’s as if they are saying to me something like this: “Who do you think you are? How dare you think that you can tell me something I don’t know already. Do you know who I am?”

The Messiah had the same problem when He presented the gospel to the religious leaders of His day. They saw Him as an uneducated man who was able to attract a crowd. Yeshua did not have the religious training that they required to make Him a credible voice for Yahweh, and He mocked the Oral Law (a.k.a., Halacha and the traditions of the Jews) that was made up by rabbis over the centuries. You see evidence of the disdain they had for Him and Him for them throughout the gospels, especially when He challenged the religious leaders’ Sabbath Day observance laws.

In Matthew and John, the Messiah’s attitude toward the religious leaders of His day and the Oral Law that they had made up and elevated above Yahweh’s Law is clearly on display. In Matthew 15, He called the Oral Law “the commandments of men”. In John 8, He called the religious leaders children of the devil. In Matthew 23, He said that the religious leaders were doomed.

Check out the Messiah’s “woe to you” statements in Matthew 23:13-36 to see what I mean. It doesn’t get any clearer than that. He made those statements shortly before He was crucified and told the religious leaders what to expect:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the Name of Yahweh!’” (Matthew 23:37-39)

It puzzles me that this message is presented so clearly in the Scriptures, and yet, very few preachers get it. As I said, I am forced to conclude that they are not paying enough attention to Yahweh’s Spirit. They are too busy honing their own messages.

I have seen notable exceptions. I gave a presentation to a group in Florida several years ago, and a member of the group was a retired preacher. I didn’t know anything about him, and he remained silent throughout my presentation.

When I finished, he said, “I used to wonder about that when I was in seminary. I knew that the Name of God had been edited out of the Bible, and I didn’t know why. At that time, I thought His name was Jehovah, but now I know it’s Yahweh.”

“You were a preacher?” I asked.

“All of my life,” he said.

He was more than 80 years old, and I could tell that the light had finally come on for him. To this day, that man remains one of the few preachers that I have seen embrace this message. As I said, most of the ones I have talked with brush it aside like it was dust on a shelf.

That’s regrettable. This is a message that Yahweh is determined to deliver to the world so that everyone knows who He is by Name. For details, see “Yahweh is the Name that is Above Every Name” and the website His Name is Yahweh.

“Therefore behold, I am going to make them know, this time I will make them know My power and My might, and they shall know that My Name is Yahweh.” (Jeremiah 16:21)

To most preachers, Yahweh’s Name is irrelevant. To Yahweh, His Name is critically important. Who are we to believe?

I know who I believe. I believe Yahweh.

Look at the verses below, and think about what they mean:

“I, even I, am Yahweh. There is no savior besides Me!” (Isaiah 43: 11)
“And it will come about that whoever calls on the Name of Yahweh will be delivered/saved.” (Joel 2: 32)
“For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only the third hour of the day; but this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel:….‘And it shall be that everyone who calls on the Name of Yahweh will be saved.’” (Acts 2: 15 and 21)
“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4: 12)
“As Scripture says, ‘Anyone who believes in Him will never be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile; for there is one Yahweh over all who is abundantly generous toward everyone who calls on Him; for ‘whoever calls on the Name of Yahweh will be saved.’” (Romans 10: 11-13)
“Elohim highly exalted Him [the Messiah], and bestowed on Him [the Messiah] the Name which is above every name [Yahweh], so that at the name of Yeshua [Yahweh] every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Yeshua the Messiah is Yahweh, to the glory of Elohim the Father.” (Philippians 2: 9-11)

It’s disgraceful that believers must insert Yahweh’s Name in the Scriptures where it belongs, because it has been edited out. The fact most preachers either don’t know that or they don’t care is even more disgraceful.

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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”

John 10: 14-18